The Quality of Life Report

by Meghan Daum

  Hence Mason. And every thing about him. He was like a piece of driftwood, carved and contorted by the river that carried him along, worn down by the natural elements, fractured by responsibility. He’d made a mess of his life. Either that or life had made a mess of him. Still, a lesser man wouldn’t have carried it off as well as he did. He made fatherhood look like nothing more than the benevolent supervision of Huck Finnhood, grown manhood look like a chance to play hooky without getting caught. From certain angles he was stunning. Paddling a canoe, there was never someone so dazzling. Explaining the mating patterns of the sandhill cranes, the digestive system of a wild boar, the religious practices of the Pawnee Indians, he was as good as any lantern-jawed naturalist on the Discovery Channel. Like the river itself, he could take your breath away if the sun caught him just right.

  But when it came to living in the actual world, to having a bank account and paying taxes and going to the doctor and having any idea what his kids were studying in school, Mason’s attention wandered. As a boy, he explained to me, he’d prepared himself for a life as a full-time outdoorsman. Even as a teenager he’d had no plans to be anything other than a woodsman who made clothing from buckskin and ate deer meat he had cured in a smokehouse behind his log cabin. He had eschewed schoolwork in favor of multiple readings of every single nature book ever written and repeatedly run away from home to see how long he could last in the woods with nothing more than a Swiss Army knife and a sleeping bag. As he grew older, the woodsman fetish expanded to include a hippie fetish, which quickly grew to include hallucinogenic drugs as an extension of environmental awareness. Though he was born too late to experience the sixties as a communal movement that would eventually push its adherents toward a more staid form of capitalist expression—as had been the case for Sue and her friends—Mason held on to the peace and love aesthetic for as long as he could. He was a person who, as late as the early 1980s, drove a Volkswagen van with flowers painted on the side. He spent an entire summer in his early twenties (he couldn’t remember the exact year) living in a school bus by the river and dropping acid every day for three months straight.

  So how was it that Lucinda Trout, the girl who had once declared (admittedly under the influence of her mother) that she wouldn’t date anyone not in possession of a master’s degree and a subscription to The Nation (at age twenty-five, this requirement was loosened to The New Yorker), had become romantically involved with a guy who had never been in possession of a checkbook? To be sure, part of it was novelty. My life had taken an off-the-record quality since I’d left New York. Despite my protestations to the contrary, I harbored a sense that, like an affair with a cabana boy during a vacation, nothing I did in Prairie City quite counted. Like everyone else there, Mason was so out of my usual context, such an anomaly to my senses, that I felt a freedom—maybe even a mandate—to explore him without fear of repercussions. There were no Masons where I came from. In my former life, a person like him would have been homeless long ago. But in Prairie City, Mason resided in an error margin that was so wide and so accepted by the unblinking, laid-back community that it was hard to tell where the margin ended and the legitimate space began.

  And at that stage in the game, I was convinced I lived, irrevocably, in the legitimate space.

  “GOOD MORNING, NEW YORK! For all of you sitting in your cramped apartments catching a few minutes of Up Early before fighting the traffic and crowded subways to get to work, let me invite you to spend those minutes in a place far away from all that. I’m coming to you from my front porch on a quaint little street in a heartland town called Prairie City. For all of you who’ve ever toyed with the idea of trading the rat race for a quieter, simpler life—and don’t pretend you haven’t—I hope you’ll tune in throughout the year as I share with you my thoughts, hopes, and revelations about my new life on the prairie. For starters, I have an actual porch swing!”

  “We’re having some sound problems,” said Jeb the cameraman, a doughy guy in a pink polo shirt who Joel had assured me was “the best in the business.” He was the head camera operator for Parent Talk with Loni Heibel-Budicek. “I’m gonna need you to do that again.”

  The first installment of “The Quality of Life Report” was taped on the swing Mason had swiped from an abandoned farmhouse and set up on my porch, though he warned me not to sit down on it all the way since it was unclear whether the ceiling could support it. We didn’t have a TelePrompTer, so Mason had been enlisted to hold up pieces of paper on which I had printed out my script in twenty-four-point font. It was 6:45 A.M. Jeb had wanted to shoot early because the light was better, plus he had to be at work at the station at 8:00.

  Mason, shirtless and wearing a torn pair of shorts with his flip-flops, lost his grip on the pages and they blew into the yard, which was mostly dirt with a few patches of dead grass. A couple of kids on bikes had stopped on the sidewalk and were staring at us.

  “I can try to just wing it,” I said as Jeb reached inside my shirt and adjusted the mike wire that ran up to my collar. Mason saw this and registered a proprietary little wince.

  “Try it again,” Jeb said.

  “Good morning, New York! If you’re wondering why I haven’t been reporting from the familiar streets of Manhattan over the last month or so it’s because I’ve embarked on an exciting new journey. Just a few weeks ago, I took a step so many of us talk about but never seem to go through with. I traded the rat race for the quiet life. I packed up my apartment and moved more than a thousand miles away to a town called Prairie City. Maybe you’ve never heard of Prairie City. But all that’s going to change because over the next year I’m going to share with you my hopes, thoughts, and revelations about my new life on the prairie. To begin with, I have an actual porch swing! And as I sit here drinking my coffee and watching the sun come up, I think about how the sun rises over the prairie like a silent alarm clock, much like the alarm that woke me to new possibilities, new frontiers, new ways of thinking about myself—”

  A huge, ancient Oldsmobile with a bad muffler pulled up to the curb in front of the house, forcing Jeb to stop filming. A large woman in a waitress uniform got out, her purse dangling from her arm. She charged toward us while fumbling to light a cigarette.

  “What the hell is going on here?” she yelled. “Who the hell are you?”

  Jeb turned toward her, the camera still on his shoulder. The woman slammed her hand against the lens.

  “I live here,” I said. “We’re just shooting a segment for a New York morning show—”

  “I live here,” the woman said.

  “Well, actually I live here,” I said.

  “I live in the downstairs apartment,” she said. “Are you the new girl?”

  “Oh!” I exclaimed. “Yes, I’ve been hoping to meet you!”

  “We make the six o’clock news or something?” she asked, pulling on her cigarette. Her name tag was on her uniform. It said dawn. Below it were the words “If I don’t offer you dessert, it’s on the house.”

  “Oh no!” I said. “No no! I’m a producer. I work for a show in New York. That’s where I’m from. My name’s Lucinda.”

  “You’re from New York?”

  “Yeah!” I said. “I know it seems weird. But, yes, I am.”

  “I gotta take off,” Mason said. He handed me the script pages he’d picked out of the yard. He leaned toward me as if to kiss me. I flinched slightly and he patted me on the shoulder and walked toward his truck. I noticed Dawn looking at a script page. In huge block letters it said “Stay with me throughout the year as I discover the charms and challenges of—” There wasn’t room for anything else on the page.

  “Man,” said Dawn. “I thought you were from Cops or something. I’m like, ‘I don’t need that shit.’”

  “Oh God, no,” I said. “It’s nothing like that. In fact, if you have any interesting stories about living here I’d love to hear them.”

  Dawn looked like she weighed about 250. Faye would never want her on camera.
r />   “I mean, for research purposes,” I added.

  “’Cause if you were from Cops, I’d tell you to get the hell out of here,” Dawn said. “I don’t need any more of that.”

  I made a mental note to spend some time later thinking about Cops. Was it the primary liaison between ordinary people and the entertainment world? The Candid Camera of the millennium? I’d have to get more information from my neighbor.

  I’d hoped that Jeb could shoot some B-roll footage of grain silos, windmills, and cornfields for the Up Early segment, but he said he was only budgeted for the porch shoot and that I could find stock footage at the KPCR station.

  Later, when I called Faye, she said they’d pull some outtakes from the meth story.

  “You’ve seen one farmhouse, you’ve seen them all,” said Faye. “Anyway, we need you to work on the bad boy story. Do you have a boyfriend yet?”

  “Well, kind of,” I said. “Sort of.”

  “Is he a cowboy?” she asked. “A ranch hand?”

  “This isn’t really ranch country. It’s farm country.”

  “Is he a farmer?”

  “He works in a grain elevator,” I said.

  “He’s an elevator operator?” Faye gasped.

  “He’s in the agricultural business,” I said. “He’s kind of an artist, too.”

  “Does he show at a gallery?”

  “He has his work up at his cabin,” I said.

  “He has a cabin?”

  “He lives in a cabin,” I said. “He bathes in the river.”

  “What?” Faye snorted. “Isn’t that unsanitary?”

  “He’s fairly unconventional,” I said. “He’s sort of a woodsman.”

  “That’s good, that’s good,” Faye said. I could hear the clicking of her keyboard as she hit random keys that she erroneously believed fit together to form words.

  “Why don’t you do a story on him?” she continued. “It’ll tie in to the Good Girl’s Guide to Bad Boys. It’ll be a Little Red Riding Hood kind of thing. He lives in the woods, he’s kind of scary. But deep down a sex god.”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Hold on, I have another call,” Faye said. She attempted to put me on hold but hung up instead. Later in the afternoon, she sent me an e-mail.

  To: Lucinda Trout

  From: Faye Figaro

  Re: bad boy

  do bad boy sex dog sotry asap. Focus on animal mangetism of him. Get footage of batheing in river.

  I put off asking Mason about the story because we had big weekend plans. I was meeting his children. And their mothers. It was to be a three-part event, followed by a trip to the cabin for hiking, fishing, marshmallow roasting, and video watching.

  “They are going to be traumatized,” I said to Mason the night before we went. We had just finished the chicken I had roasted in the Hotpoint stove and served in the dining room. The table now had an antique lace runner Mason had given me and a constant supply of fresh flowers he picked from the pasture near the grain elevator. As we did most nights, we were watching Antiques Roadshow and eating bridge mix.

  “They’re going to see me as a threat,” I continued. “They’ll think I’m taking you away from them.”

  “I don’t know where you get these ideas,” he said. He was completely naked and drinking a beer. His skin was so tan it nearly matched my camel-colored Pier One sofa. On the television, an appraiser valued a Civil War-era sword at eighteen thousand dollars. The owner almost fainted.

  “Whoa!” Mason said. “I used to have one like that. Can’t remember what the hell I did with it.”

  “It just seems to me that introducing a new romantic partner into your children’s lives is a delicate matter that would require a serious conversation with them,” I said. “They need to know they’re still the most important things in your life. They need to know they’re your priority.”

  “They know that,” he said. I was surprised by how the words stung.

  The credits rolled on Antiques Roadshow. It was 9:00.

  “Time to hit the hay,” Mason said. He climbed out of the couch, his lanky body looking especially Brad Pittish except for the unruly beard and the way he clutched his hip and limped slightly—the result of falling down a grain shaft many years earlier. It occurred to me that I hadn’t told Faye his age. But perhaps we could get around that. If thirty-seven was the new twenty-six, didn’t that make forty the new twenty-nine?

  To: Lucinda Trout

  From: Samantha Frank

  Re: Bad Boys

  I’m thrilled to hear that you’ll be doing a story on your new significant other. Since I’ll be the one who’s interviewing Courtney Rosenzweig, author of The Good Girl’s Guide to Bad Boys, I want to suggest a few details you might want to touch on in your piece. As always, these are just suggestions. I don’t want to impede your vision.

  1. Talk about how he’s so much different from the men you’ve dated before. (I don’t really know your dating history, but, just guessing: actors, lawyers, Web designers?) How did you feel about dating someone a bit “outside the box”? Do you make more money than he does? Does that cause tensions?

  2. What do your friends think of him?

  3. Is the sex better (than with normal guys)?

  Mason kept Erin’s diaper bag in his truck. It was decorated with Winnie the Pooh characters and wedged behind the seat between a circular saw and an electric drill. On the day I was to meet the kids, Mason put the diaper bag in the Sunbird, which we would be taking to the cabin since we couldn’t all fit in the truck.

  With Mason behind the wheel, we retrieved the kids like a school bus on its route—Sebastian first, Peter second, and Erin third—a routine Mason obviously followed at least every other weekend and, from what I could see, must have appeared to him like the portrait of personal demise. It was clear he’d been off to a good start with Susannah, who, now remarried with stepchildren, lived in a huge Victorian house on the outskirts of Prairie City. Her hair hung down her back in a long braid and she wore turquoise earrings, a hand-knit sweater, jeans, and Birkenstocks with purple socks. She sipped coffee from a handmade pottery mug.

  “Lucinda,” she said, “welcome to the tribe. Coffee?”

  “We can’t stay,” Mason said.

  Her house was astonishing. So large it had required two furnaces, Susannah explained that she had bought it after selling the farm she’d had with Mason. She’d begun fixing it up herself, eventually hired a contractor, and then married him.

  “It was a pit,” Susannah said, taking me inside, where a giant staircase presided over a giant foyer. All the wood was restored and gleaming. Sunlight cascaded through the windows and ricocheted off the spotless pine floors. Early American antiques, handmade quilts, and plants in terra-cotta pots were every where. The kitchen had a pine floor, a butcher block table, and a Sierra Club calendar overflowing with scribbled notes like “Steve, dentist 2:45,” “Sebastian, soccer practice,” and “Susannah, eco-lit symposium presentation.”

  “We completely redid this place,” Susannah continued. “I did the floors myself.”

  A patchwork quilt had been tossed over the sofa, where it curled around copies of The New Yorker and Art in America.

  “This is beautiful,” I said, touching the quilt. “Is it a family heirloom?”

  “I made it, actually,” Susannah said.

  Sebastian came down the stairs with a sleeping bag and a roll of comic books. Tall and gangly and unassuming, he was the opposite of Leonard’s son. In fact, he was a carbon copy of Mason. Mason tousled Sebastian’s hair and pretended to box with him. The boy was at least a foot taller than me.

  “The other two look just like Mason, too,” Susannah said. “We wonder if he’s just cloning himself.”

  She was right. Minus several inches, Peter was indistinguishable from Sebastian. When we pulled up to Jill’s house, a good-sized bungalow with a pillared porch decorated for Halloween, Peter was raking leaves in the small front yard. Not recognizing the Sunbird
, he didn’t look up until we got out of the car, and Sebastian tackled him and wrestled him into a pile of leaves. Jill came out of the house carrying Peter’s duffel bag. She was a nearly translucent redhead with closely cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Like Susannah, she was small and pretty, though in a kind of icy way. Without really greeting us, she handed the duffel bag to Mason.

  “You’re going out to the cabin?” she asked.

  “Yup,” Mason said. “Just gotta get Erin and then stop at Hinky Dinky for some grub and we’re outta here.”

  “It’s supposed to rain,” Jill said.

  “It won’t,” Mason said.

  “And we need to talk at some point about a few issues,” Jill said. “Like?”

  “Like, for instance, his diet,” Jill said. “He could use a little more nutrition than chips and hot dogs.”

  “You’re the nurse,” Mason said.

  Jill smirked at him, then looked at me as though I were wearing a Playboy bunny outfit.

  “I’m a nurse practitioner,” she said to me. “And, I’m sorry. I’m not usually like this.”

  According to Mason, Jill usually was precisely like that, though I soon saw that Jill’s way of being was preferable to Julie’s way of being.

  For the entire time that we were in her house, a prefab ranch with imitation brick face and a mailbox shaped like a dachshund, Julie talked on the phone. She had the kind of perm that leaves large ringlets of hair dangling like corkscrews. She also had extremely long fingernails, which she tapped on the kitchen counter while she talked. Though the 1980s were nearly twenty years past, she wore leggings with ankle boots. The house was teeming with knickknacks, mostly related to dachshunds, and framed portrait studio photos of Erin in ruffled dresses posing with various dolls and stuffed animals. A real dachshund waddled into the living room and Mason pretended to kick it. Glancing up only momentarily, Julie waved us toward Erin’s room, where a Pocahontas overnight bag was sitting by the door. Inside, a little blond girl, a four-year-old female version of Mason, was playing on the floor amid a mountain of toys. Every imaginable manifestation of consumerized girlhood sprawled out of drawers and toy bins. Most were Barbie-related. The Barbie Grand Hotel, a giant My Size Sugar Plum Fairy Barbie, a Barbie Jam ’N Glam Tour Bus, a Shop with Me Barbie cash register. There was a canopy bed with a pink comforter, a dressing table with a tiny Spice Girls hand mirror, a play makeup set, and something called the Polly Pocket Barbie Stylin’ Mall.