by Carol Anshaw
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For Joy Harris and in memory of Shirley Hazzard
For my next trick, I’ll need a volunteer.
—Warren Zevon
desk
On the fourth floor of a warehouse under the long stretch of the Green Line as it heads west out of the Loop, Cate prowls across a vast plain of old office desks. A walk through the decades of the previous century. She travels from linoleum to fake wood to real wood to scarred metal. She is looking for a particular desk. The play—At Ease—for which she is designing the sets, takes place in the late 1950s, on a military base in Georgia. She needs a metal desk, olive drab if possible. She has found two possibilities, but one is too small and one is tan. This will be the desk of the closeted drill sergeant. She decides to go with the larger one and spray-paint it at her shop. She snaps a couple of pictures, measures it with her tape, then pencils these dimensions into sketches of the play’s two sets. In the second set, the desk will be covered with a mattress and used as a bed.
Her cell makes the sound of a coin dropping into an old pay phone, a notification sound Maureen put on Cate’s phone so she’d know it was Maureen calling. Maureen’s photo appears on the screen, to the side of a text dialog box. The picture was taken on one of their early dates, a couple of months back now. Maureen is in a theater seat, leaning sideways to fit in the frame. Looking terrific in an effervescent way.
what’s up?
Cate never knows how to reply to this vague sort of question.
looking for a desk
can I see you tonight?
going to neale’s yoga class
ok. so, tomorrow then. already excited.
Advances in communication technology have made Cate’s life so much smoother. She is bad at phone calls, especially bad at making them, possibly interrupting someone in the middle of something more important. She hates hearing that small adjustment in someone’s voice. Now she almost never has to hear it. Probably the best phone calls of her life were the vintage ones, the hours she and Neale spent on the phone late at night as teenagers, luxurious conversations, artifacts of an earlier civilization. Also artifacts of who she and Neale used to be when they were trying to assemble the universe.
Now her phone is mostly a tool for semaphoring whereabouts and plans, for taking pictures of stage sets and furniture, interesting colors, appliances of the past.
Maureen’s phone, on the other hand, is her best friend. Everything in her life is filtered through it—information received, confirmed, replied to, shared. Not to mention recorded with the phone’s camera. One night when the two of them were hanging out on Maureen’s giant sectional sofa, Maureen startled herself.
“Wow. I almost forgot. It’s Jill’s birthday.” Which prompted her to send a small burst of texted good wishes punctuated with a selfie of her waving. “I know they’re stupid,” she said, but kept on tapping in emojis of firecrackers and a cake. Jill is not a person, she’s a decrepit barn cat who belongs to one of Maureen’s stable of once lovers/now friends.
The dinner Maureen is already excited about is her treat at a ridiculously expensive restaurant. Cate hopes her pair of dressy pants is clean and pressed. As soon as she slips the phone back into her pocket, it starts ringing, an actual call. She looks at the screen. It’s Raymond. The guy doing the lights; she has to answer.
“What I’m thinking,” she tells him, “is big lights for the drill scene, big Georgia daylight. Then a creepy sort of pale, late-afternoon darkness for the sex scene in the barracks.”
“I can definitely do creepy,” Raymond says. “Make it double creepy if you like.”
Cate lies down, stretching out across three desks. “We need to pump up the visuals on account—”
“On account of the play sucks?”
“We can help, though.” No one wants to write or direct or act in a bad play, but bad plays do happen. And when they do, everyone concerned, Cate believes, needs to do their best to save the play from itself. When it was written, At Ease was a story with a gay subtext in a time when queerness was too naked to present directly; it needed to be discreetly dressed. It needed underwear and an overcoat. The drill sergeant’s murder of a corporal in the second act is ostensibly military discipline gone too far, but beneath it bubbles jealousy and self-loathing. The drill sergeant seethes at a crummy affair the corporal is having with an unhappily married nurse at the base hospital. Sometime in the 1950s this was put up on Broadway or near Broadway with not Ava Gardner, but someone sort of famous—like Carroll Baker or Shirley Knight—playing the nurse. And so the company is putting this relic up to honor its place in gay history rather than for its watchability.
She slides the phone back into her pocket and lies very still. The damp autumn day outside gets filtered in here through groaning radiators, the light sifted by grimy, wire-meshed windows, then carried down on the dust that occupies the air in this sealed-away space. An el train hurtles past, sucking every other piece of noise out of the air, leaving behind a brief wake of silence.
From here, she enters a mental space she gets to by way of a deep tunnel. Once inside, she can realize a set to its smallest detail. She can see the actors bring the set to life. Sometimes she casts the play with perfect actors. Oliviers and Branaghs and Redgraves. Inside her imagination no flubbed lines trip up the dialog, no tape mark is overshot, no doorbell rings randomly, off-cue. Even a play as bad as the one she’s working on now can at least get bathed in a glow of respectability.
She rolls over and idly tugs open the drawers of the very old wooden desk on which she’s lying. One contains a short stack of yellow dog, the cheap, porous paper reporters used for typing copy back in the day. Somebody else’s day, before her day, but she knows what it is. She has become a historian of small visual details. These pages are still yellow at the center, faded to gray at their edges. In the top drawer she hits pay dirt—two ornate fountain pens, Esterbrooks, their casings marbleized Bakelite, one deep red, the other brown—the sort of small detail that subtly lends a period play authenticity. She slips them into a jacket pocket. She will ask downstairs if she can have them. She’ll give them the number of the desk. They’ll get it out somehow. She’s never asked how they perform the extraction. The desks are impossibly cheap.
warrior two
“Your right knee should be directly over your ankle.” Neale walks among the students, tracing a winding path between their mats. They are in warrior two, an easy lunge with one arm stretched out in front, the other behind. Neale puts her hands on Cate’s shoulders and gently presses them down, a little longer than necessary. An adjustment, but also a tiny piece of connection in their long friendship.
Taking classes at the studio, Cate can observe Neale in her floral movements, folding this way, then that, bending in a nonexistent breeze. Neale doesn’t look like anybody else. She doesn’t even look like her parents, who are short and nondescript and careworn. She appears to be composed entirely of recessive genes. Movie-star threads in her DNA. This doesn’t make her vain, but she definitely operates out of a keen awareness of her body. This is where her confidence lies. She walks into a room and can calibrate how much of it she occupies.
She’s careless with her beauty. She often gives herself (terrible) haircuts. Wears a couple of pairs o
f jeans she’s had from when they were called flared, through a long period when they were so out of style they weren’t called anything, to the current moment, in which they are called modern boot-cut. She broke her nose twice playing volleyball in college, and never bothered to get it reset. Now it just (beautifully, of course) detours a little at the bridge. She carried herself with assurance even when the two of them were teenagers. Neale never went through an awkward phase. She’s always been physically arrogant. Riding her bike through storms, dodging falling tree branches, exploring construction sites. Cate, her hand already damaged, was hesitant about making wrong moves.
Cate is not a natural yogi. She goes to classes because it’s a way to hang out with Neale.
“If you find your attention drifting,” Neale is saying now in her tranquil yoga voice, “return your focus to your breath.”
Cate tries to follow this suggestion, but it’s not easy. Although she is glad she has breath, keeping track of it is never interesting enough, and so, almost immediately, her focus loosens and she drifts off into a thicket of random thoughts. Paint she has to buy for the desk. A nearly due credit card statement on which she at least has to pay the box. Otherwise they will tack on their 270 percent or whatever interest fee.
“Bring your right foot onto your left leg.” First Cate wonders how this will be possible, since she is in a lunge. Then she sees that Neale and the class, in her absence, have moved on to tree pose, standing balanced on one foot. She repositions herself awkwardly and is able to pull her attention way over to her breath for maybe a second, before it once again gets yanked off, this time into replaying something really stupid she said to Hugh Prendergast, the director of At Ease. From there, Mick Jagger and Jack White jump in front of a microphone, their mouths as close as lovers’, singing Gimme little drink. From your loving cup.
When the class is over, Neale asks if Cate can come home with her to fix a blocked drain.
“This is why I hang out with you. For the social life.”
Then she loiters in the lobby while Neale hugs prodigal students newly returned to the fold, offers workarounds to young women with shin splints or ankle sprains. A lot of the reason people come to yoga, Neale says, is to get a pastel sort of attention from the instructor, encouragement and understanding that’s not about the rest of their complicated lives.
When the two of them are finally in the car, Cate says, “Do you think Joe is trolling social media, asking girls at school to send him nude selfies?”
“Oh God, no!”
“I read this article—”
“You know what? I’m just going to stop this speculation in its tracks. NO. Joe is a complicated kid navigating a difficult landscape. And he is just hitting puberty. But he is also one of the most decent humans on the planet. He is not asking girls for nude photos of themselves.”
“You’re right, of course you’re right.”
“I’m sorry I clipped you. I just so totally believe in him. Even if I wind up being interviewed. I mean, when he turns out to be the Fox River Killer. And I’ll be saying he was such a good, quiet boy.”
* * *
“Joe!?” Neale goes in the back door first and shouts up the staircase.
“In my room.” A muffled shout. “Kiera’s here.”
“Are they doing homework?” Cate lies next to Neale on the kitchen floor, at the ready with a wrench, a plumber’s snake, a plastic tub, a rag that was recently a T-shirt.
“They don’t really give homework anymore. The kids are too busy with their after-school activities. Joe has band practice until five, three times a week. And then they’re too exhausted. Their parents are exhausted, too. Everyone goes around in a stupor.” Neale’s voice is deadened by resignation, also by coming from inside a small cabinet. She comes out with a fairly large smear of troublingly colorful plumbing gunk across her forehead, in her hair.
Cate says, “Maybe you should be doing something to give yourself a little quality time. I’m thinking crystal meth.”
“Can you hand me the rag?”
“I saw this documentary and there was this toothless mother in front of a farmhouse and she was saying, ‘I get the kids off on the school bus and then I put the baby down for her nap and then it’s my me time, when I do my meth.’ ”
Joe moves into the kitchen stealthily, startling them both when he says, “Good thing I was upstairs when you needed help with that. Hey, Cate.” He says this without making eye contact. He and Cate both hate eye contact. Also hugging. They stick with fist bumps. They are close in their own way. She was there when he was born. Not having gotten it together to have a kid of her own, she mooches a little of him off Neale. She’s tried to occupy a place somewhere between parent and friend and aunt. Nondisciplinary like a friend. Older, with good advice at the ready, but not the aunt whose crepey, powdered cheek he’s required to kiss. And after Neale’s marriage was over and Joe’s father was off to India, Cate tried to be around even more. But as he heads into adolescence he has started building in a little distance.
“What’s up?” Neale asks him.
“Just listening to some, you know, music or whatever.” Which, of course, means noise music. He and Kiera and their friend Theo listen to this deconstructed sound on their headphones. To Cate it sounds nihilistic: well, of course—that’s the point of it. The kids go to noise concerts together. They follow a local duo, Japanese sisters called the Mexican Porno Nuns. When it’s Neale’s turn to take them to this or that venue, she wears earplugs and covers her head with a hoodie and stands in the back so she’s not an embarrassment to them. Joe would like to make noise music himself, but does not have an acoustically insulated studio where he could practice. He is second percussion chair in the school band. His noise music demonstration for the band director—opening pre-shaken pop bottles to a tape of a woodpecker—got him a respectful hearing, but he is still confined to triangle, tambourine, and maracas. To be played in sync with the rest of the band. “But really, do you need help down there?”
Cate watches him scrabble around in the cupboards like a raccoon.
Neale has her head back inside the cabinet. “No, I’ve got this little situation under control. You do your share. You catch bugs and take them outside without killing them. You handle the recycling. You keep your room not a total mess.”
He nods at the justice of this assessment, then takes a carton of milk and a box of doughnuts and heads back upstairs. Watching Joe come into himself makes Cate envy Neale. But Cate has never had the money or a partner willing to shoulder the burdens of parenthood. Her one husband, so far back now, was not interested. And now, at forty-two, she’d probably have to get fertility treatments or in vitro and wind up still single and fairly broke, but now with triplets. Or she could adopt, which would have the element of good deed to it, taking on someone who might need a break. But this would have the downside of responsibility for a complete unknown. The nature part would already be in place; her input would only be the nurture. Which seems more than she might be able to handle on her own; a solid partner in place would help, and she doesn’t have one of those. None of this keeps her from wishing now and then that she was having the experience of raising someone, the million small moments of guiding and being surprised by a child.
And she sees it as an inequity between her and Neale, a badge of maturity and wholehearted engagement with life that Cate lacks. She does have Joe in a peripheral way. She gets to enjoy the issues and problems and solutions around him, second-guessing Neale. Now she says, “Doughnuts? I thought you were going to stop buying those.”
“I know, but he loves them. They probably won’t do much damage now. I mean you never hear about teenagers having clogged arteries, or being on statins. I have to pick my battles.”
“If he and Kiera are up there listening to music on their headphones, isn’t that sort of lonely?”
“No, they’re probably texting each other.”
“Oh.”
“I know. It’s wei
rd, isn’t it? How talking isn’t so big anymore. But in the new way, they’re super-close. Some of what they’re about is making themselves look bigger together than they would be alone. I hate how scary school is now. Maybe the scariest place outside of those warlord areas in Africa. You have to have a buddy. Being alone attracts trouble.” A longish pause, then Neale says, “Euwww. Very bad under here. Can you hand me that tuppery thing? I’ve got a real mess going.”
Cate shoves the plastic container into Neale’s fluttering, gunk-covered hand. She knows she will likely receive this same container, rinsed out and filled with cookies, at Christmas. Neale’s housekeeping tempts the fates, all of them. From the outside, which is even worse than the inside, the house looks like the house in Psycho. It’s an artifact of Neale’s marriage. She and Claude were going to be urban pioneers in their dicey neighborhood. They were going to rehab this crumbling monstrosity. And then the marriage was over and Claude was off to India, leaving Neale in a perpetual state of disillusionment. Also only a block over from a sketchy patch of halfway houses and vacant lots with their own furniture, home to a vibrant drug marketplace staffed by serious guys in enormous jackets. But she’s staying. Partly a political statement, partly out of stubbornness. She’s the guy who makes them build the new freeway around his shack.
She emerges with the leftover container, now half-filled with what looks like shoe tongues boiled in sludge. “Where does this even come from? It’s like someone is running a workshop down here while we’re asleep.”
She’s the soul of do-it-yourself, a continuing student at YouTube University. She has taught herself to rewire lamps, fix the toilet when it runs on, glaze windows. She does her own oil changes. This is a stare-down of small challenges. Of course, it’s also about the financial pit, staying a ways shy of it. She has small savings and a going business with her yoga studio. And now with the new healthcare, she and Joe have decent insurance. The policy she had before only covered catastrophes, and even those had catches and loopholes. Because she’d had fibroids in her twenties, they’d only insure her from the waist up.