by Carol Anshaw
“Maureen’s taking me to some foodie restaurant tomorrow night. It’s trending, apparently, whatever that means. I haven’t even heard of the place. She had to get the reservation a month ago.”
“She’s plighting her troth.” Neale dumps the sludge into the trash, washes her hands in the sink.
“Maybe.”
“Doesn’t it feel like she’s on a mission? Isn’t that a little scary?”
“No, no. I’m grateful she’s after me. I think she’s my best shot at making something more than another pile of tinder. Something to live in, not set fire to. All that wastable time I had? I used that up. I have to get down to business now. It’s not old age I worry about—I haven’t even gotten to that worry yet—it’s middle age. I don’t want to be in my fifties and in some lesbian sinkhole. Alone, obsessed with gluten. Accumulating cats. Old cats with health issues that keep me housebound with their medication schedules. Maureen is part of my new plan to keep that from happening.”
To herself, she calls this new plan Plan C. She didn’t really have a Plan A. Plan B was using her MFA to get a tenure-track teaching job. But by then she was doing sets for Adam Pryor and thought settling into academe would pull her off the artistic path. Now Adam is gone and Cate is broke. Drifting, but now into the reeds.
For a long time, her circumstances didn’t seem reduced in comparison to anyone else’s. Cate had a cohort of theater friends who were staying alive on a week-to-week basis. Everyone had fifty dollars in the bank. They made ten-dollar withdrawals from the ATM. At first she didn’t notice that their ranks were thinning. Somebody got married, then had twins. Somebody moved to L.A. for a movie and is now in a lot of movies. Her friend Brooke now heads up the theater department at a private school in Oak Park. Two guys who did excellent sets struck out on their own to become decorators, filling houses for wealthy clients on the North Shore—a more lucrative end of their trade. The friends came and went all along, but as time went on, more of them went than came. And many of the replacements were from a further subgeneration assembling their own cohort. By then Cate had spent the postdivorce remnant of her twenties pushing furniture around darkened stages, sleeping with the girls in backstage black, smoking dope, reading Victorian novels. Now even her thirties are behind her, a third of them spent on Dana in an underside life—freezer burn on her elbows, sleepless from 4 a.m. phone calls that might only last a few minutes but kept her awake through the rest of the night. All of which has landed her exactly here, in her early forties, standing on a hard patch of bare ground and clear horizons, trying to set off in some better direction.
Plan C attempts to find this direction via four main points:
Firm up employment (steady job at design house, maybe full-time gig at some school).
Unlatch from Dana and get a real girlfriend.
Don’t take money from parents.
Brush teeth two minutes two times a day (get timer).
Neale pulls a bag of taco chips out of a cabinet. “Your problem is how hard it’s going to be to find someone to follow Dana. To match that ferocity.”
“Yes. That’s the bitch of it, right?”
palate cleanser
She’s mortified by her appetizer. On the menu it sounded fanciful. Now it just seems decadent, and decadent is always embarrassing. Like Roman orgies in movies where servants are peeling grapes for the reclining emperor, where the guests are eating off human tables—naked women on all fours.
“I feel a little weird eating, you know—I guess I didn’t think it was going to really be gold. What’s it doing? Being a little metallic glaze on whatever this tiny egg is? Whatever bird it came from. I hope not a parakeet from some Thai forced-hatching factory.” She pokes through the thin skin of gold leaf and they watch the yolk seep up. Neither of them says anything when Cate lifts off the gold film and sets it on the rim of the plate. They sit across from each other at a table much larger than necessary for two people eating dinner. It’s a size more appropriate to spreading out maps, plotting a voyage or a war.
“I know, I know. It does seem like what they were probably eating in the dining room of the Titanic. I didn’t know it would be this fancy, hardly anything is anymore. Except this place, I guess.” Maureen’s sympathy has a hollow ring to it. She actually seems quite comfortable spearing a forkful of foie gras (for Christ’s sake), nestled in a pillow of salted cotton candy. Cate has brought up issues of animal cruelty before, and Maureen always seems sensitive in the moment, deeply nodding her support, saying annoying stuff like, “Poor things, they can’t speak for themselves so we have to help them.” But then she will turn around and tuck into something like this.
Cate scans her from across the table. As a costume designer, Maureen of course costumes herself. Her clothes make tiny statements without calling attention to themselves. Odd collars, the occasional hat. She has an extremely articulated tattoo on one shoulder—a Japanese fan. She wears a lot of pale green, also navy, to set off her hair, which is dark red, Botticelli crinkles, both bunched up and falling down.
Tonight would probably be a good time for Cate to reveal her discomfort about over-the-top restaurants like this one. But she can’t find her way to that conversation. Maureen loves expensive dining, and can afford it. She has spent the past decade dressing actors, for plays, musicals, sometimes operas. Operas, Maureen says, are the costume designer’s diamond mine.
In the end, Maureen might be too different from Cate, but they are only at their beginning, and Cate is not ready to give in to that notion just yet. The thing is, Maureen fits perfectly into the future Cate hopes to have. She’s totally adult. She has investments. There’s a financial advisor in the wings. She is funny and large-hearted, ardent in bed, and beautiful in a recovered way that stirs Cate. As though she has sprung back from something difficult, but is made of denser material because of it. Cate still thinks there’s a chance that with her she might make a respectable partnership. Important in a real-life way, as opposed to the elaborately fantastic scenario she spooled out with Dana, who nonetheless remained firmly attached to her partner. Remains still.
“Sometimes I think you might be too good-looking for me.” Maureen reaches across the table to pluck a hair from the cuff of Cate’s jacket. This is a kind of thing she says. Romantic prompts. What would be a good response to this? Cate, by her own standards, isn’t all that attractive. She’s awkward, gangly with her height, as though she’s still adjusting to it. Maybe she has something small going for her, a serious expression, like that of a reporter in a war zone, or a doctor about to give bad news. A face that is flat planes and abrupt angles. She also got her father’s ice-blue eyes, which adds another element to the chill. She does know this severity holds value in particular situations, incipient romance being one.
But now she has to get serious instead of just looking serious. Living casually in the moment seemed so vibrant, but has left her looking over her shoulder at a pile of used-up hours and days, hearing the scratchy sound of frittering. If Graham hadn’t bought the condo for her, she’d still be living in her rental apartment with seventy-two coats of paint, cabinet doors that stuck even when they weren’t shut. Silver-painted radiators that lay dormant for hours, then banged to life in a mechanical riot that would blast heat through the place in such an overwhelming way that she could leave the windows wide-open for those cool February breezes. She has come to understand that room temperature in the demographic she aspires to is a more personally controlled business.
Maureen inhabits this thermostatted demographic. She owns a co-op on Marine Drive, has an Infiniti that still smells new. She’s on the board of something that puts disadvantaged kids into musicals on nights when the theaters are otherwise dark. She has won three Jeff Awards to Cate’s one—Maureen’s for equity productions, Cate’s for one of the sets she did for Adam Pryor. Like all his work, this was a small play with large ideas.
For a long stretch, her career strategy was simply attaching herself to Adam Pryor. They h
ad interlocking artistic views. The plays he directed got serious attention, which brought her sets the same sort of respect. And then he was walking on Wabash one day a year ago, at three in the afternoon, when an elderly woman mistakenly wearing her reading instead of her distance glasses, jumped the curb and killed him instantly. This was devastating to Cate personally; they had an intricate friendship, a matched sense of what was important, what was ridiculous. More prosaically, in terms of work, she was suddenly unemployed. Doing the sets for a play as dismal as At Ease is the kind of thing she thought she was beyond. And yet here she is.
Maureen is saying, “My sister is coming for a visit. I’d like you to meet her.”
“Sure, great. I always envy people who have sisters. Especially when they’re close.”
Maureen hesitates, then says, “Yes. We are close.” She suddenly looks uncomfortable. Probably from the goose liver. She pushes her fingers into her big hair, not in a coy way, more maniacal. Like Mr. Hyde rousing himself from sleep in Dr. Jekyll’s laboratory. “What I’m trying to say is, there was a time when we were even closer.”
“When you were kids.”
“No. After we were both out of school and on our own. For a while then we were, you know, involved.”
“Oh.” Something slippery and cold flushes through Cate, the eel-like sensation that accompanies unwelcome information. As she searches for a response, she focuses on the remains of her egg as it is taken away by a silent waitperson, replaced by a teaspoon’s worth of pale green shavings of something frozen and glistening. The server explains the palate cleanser. Cate can’t listen.
Once the server has walked away, Maureen says, “I just don’t want there to be any secrets between us.” At exactly this instant Cate is thinking everyone should really hold on to their secrets, edit the worst lines from their personal résumés. This piece about Maureen and her sister, for example, would have been an excellent edit. Now, though, the cat’s out of the bag. Now the cat is hopping all over the place, demanding attention.
“How did that happen anyway?” Cate tries for a neutral tone, as though she’s asking about a tour of the French countryside on which Maureen and her sister took the optional side trip to see the cave paintings.
“Oh, she was coming off a divorce and she was needy. And of course, this was California. Also the nineties. You know.”
Clinginess or historical period or seaside locale don’t really seem extenuating enough circumstances.
“Were you in love? Was it that sort of thing?” She doesn’t even know why she’s asking. Would it be better or worse if they were or weren’t?
“It was more a way we had of being together. You’ll see when you meet her, Frances is just an intensely charismatic person.”
Cate looks around, suddenly awkward at having this conversation in a public place, but then she notices the hanging glass panels, some elaborate baffling system. The other customers exist somewhere else on the dining matrix, all of them in parallel, convivial but hushed universes.
“This is kind of—well, you know—unusual.”
“I didn’t mean to shock you. By now I see it as something small and far behind me. A tiny part of someone I was for a little while.”
In some precisely measured time frame, the vessel (something between a bowl and a plate) that held the sorbet or granita or whatever is taken away, replaced by a nubbly deck-of-cards rectangle. Sesame-crusted tofu striped with two sauces, pale pink and yellow. The server extends white-gloved hands toward Cate. The hands, palms up, hold a napkin, which in turn surrounds a heavy silver eating utensil with which Cate is completely unfamiliar. As Cate takes this narrow, flat, shovel-like implement, she sees the waitress look for a couple of nearly invisible but definitely extra clicks of time at Cate’s hand, her left. By now, she has a full repertoire of deft moves to replicate the functionality of a complete hand. But having only the first two fingers and a thumb to work with makes this particular gesture look like the claw in a game machine, picking out a toy. This doesn’t bother her. One thing Cate is not self-conscious about is her hand.
* * *
The esoteric sauce shovel makes a surprise second appearance after dinner when they’re in the car and Maureen pulls it from her coat pocket. Cate can’t help looking appalled at it; she can feel her eyes bulging.
“What—?” she says.
“Shh shh,” Maureen says, placing it in Cate’s lap. “Just a little souvenir. Now, should I turn left or right? Say you’ll come home with me. I don’t think we can go back to your place.”
“I think I need to go back, though. Graham’s been so down. Sometimes he forgets to walk Sailor.” Graham is living with her in a temporary way after getting tossed out by his latest wife. Cate was his first wife, a million years ago.
“Is that situation starting to bug you?”
“He’s so depressed. I can’t just show him the door. And he’s really no trouble. He mostly stays in his room. He hired a cleaning person. He orders in for us from Dean and DeLuca. I eat more Italian artisanal cheese than anyone outside Umbria.”
“It just seems like a peculiar arrangement is all.”
Like the arrangement where your head was between your sister’s legs? Cate thinks, but doesn’t say.
“Then maybe we could just drive downtown, then back up to my place. It’s a beautiful night.” Maureen rests her hand on Cate’s thigh in a proprietary way. In the close, leather-upholstered, Bose-speakered interior of the Infiniti, things heat up a little. Cate notices how great Maureen smells. The car heat ramps up some spring-forest cologne she’s wearing. Vetiver and woody smoke and desire cloud the air, obscuring the giant chunk of unfortunate information now bumping around in the too-little space between them. Maybe it’s not so important, this thing with her sister. Maybe Cate’s being prudish, old-fashioned. Maybe it’s really less important than the silverware thievery. She needs time to think about all of this.
base camp
It’s a little before 2 a.m. Tonight they blocked At Ease. Her first chance to watch the actors negotiating her sets. A gloomy evening. Her sets are fine, but everyone knows the play stinks. Still, tickets have already been sold, ads placed. The show must go on. Cate took the job to pay respect to gay history, but she has an argument going with herself about whether even the better plays from earlier, benighted eras—plays like The Children’s Hour and Suddenly Last Summer—are too worn-out and anachronistic to put on for twenty-first-century audiences except as history lessons.
As she comes into the alley behind her apartment, Cate looks up and sees a wavy blue-green light in the room Graham is using. As soon as she is through the door, she’s in the new sort of quiet she has grown accustomed to: refrigerator hum overlaid with an intermittent narration coming off the internet as it bleeds out of her spare bedroom. Cate enjoys Graham’s company and is kind of crazy in love with his dog, Sailor. She has never had a dog, didn’t know how great it would be. Now she wonders how she got along without one. Graham and Sailor moving in with her was supposed to be a temporary situation, just until he got back on his feet after his most recent marital breakup (he is now two wives farther along from Cate), but man and dog have been here three months now and Graham is still off his feet. All that seems to have happened is that he has become increasingly nocturnal, interactive with the web. Watching someone from somewhere talking into his—in fewer instances, her—webcam. Different voices come in on different nights, but all with the same dark, knowing tone, a tone that has a sideways delivery, a hand in front of it.
When he sees her in the doorway to his room, Graham puts up a Metallica playlist on Spotify. For masking purposes.
“How’s it going?” She looks in. The desktop computer’s screensaver is luminous with the pale aquarium colors of the Zapruder film clip. JFK’s motorcade coming through Dealey Plaza in a repeated gif, a mood enhancer, the way lava lamps used to smooth out the vibe for seductions, only in Graham’s room the mood is paranoia.
Her arrival sti
rs Sailor. He must’ve been totally sacked out; usually his nose is at the door when she comes home. He unfolds and frees himself from the nest of cords and cables under Graham’s worktable. Standing on his hind legs, his front paws on her shoulders, giving off a dry, delicious warm-dog aroma, he’s tall enough to be a dancing partner. She acknowledges this by doing a quick mambo step, then gets him down on the floor and sits next to him; then she flips him over like a pancake and scratches his stomach. He appears to be a mix of something red—Irish setter maybe?—and Lab. And whatever else. He’s a glorious mutt.
Cate doesn’t pay as close attention as Graham does to the machinery of government. She reads the Times online every morning, political pieces in The New Yorker. She does get-out-the-vote work for Democratic candidates around elections, and is grateful to have had, at least for the last eight years, someone smart and well-intentioned in the White House. Maybe she’s been on cruise control because of that. But she understands Graham’s suspicions, and knows what he believes—about lobby-purchased legislators, gerrymandered congressional districts, suppressed votes, backroom deals, enforced inequities, suppressed science, dark money shuffled and laundered endlessly, the planet poisoned, vats of chemical sludge dumped into rivers at night—is true. Where there used to be a few things to seriously worry about, now there are way too many. He is fixated on the death of privacy, the amount of personal information available to whomever is interested in obtaining it, and the really bad uses it might be put to. And how unaware of this exposure most people are. He believes the world is in the golden age of internet naiveté. Philosophically, he’s a disciple of Edward Snowden.