The Quality of Life Report

by Meghan Daum

  October, full moon, listening to Billie Holiday:

  C___ just left, said he couldn’t handle it anymore, said I was too much, said I demanded too much. Funny how he didn’t say that when he saw me that first night at Dragon Bar, that night when the music poured like honey over both of us as we talked at the bar, talked like there was no one else in the room, talked like we’d been at a monastery all our lives and had never talked, never said a word, never fucked made love until the moment we saw each other and knew that from then on every thing we did would be like the first time we ever did it. Fuck him. He says I’m too much, too much like Simone de Beauvoir, too much of a daily reminder of his inadequacies, too much . . . I don’t know. Well he is no Jean-Paul Sartre. That much is clear. And I will not rest until I find my Sartre, my brilliant lover who can fuck my mind instead of just fucking with my mind.

  Though I desperately had to pee, I was so mesmerized by the book—less for its content than for the way it caused my mind to reel as to how much money she’d received for it—that I flipped to another page. The entry was accompanied by a drawing of Haley sitting on a mountaintop wearing a loose blouse and dangling earrings.

  Thursday, rereading M___’s old letters, listening to Joni:

  Can I just say I so relate to that song where she’s talking about all these guys who are totally in love with her but she’s not really into them because she’s made such a big point of “being free”? At the end of the song you realize that being free makes her totally unhappy. That could completely be me.

  Thoroughly repulsed, I threw the book down on the table and bolted up the escalator to the rest room, where several women and children with enormous shopping-bag-laden strollers were waiting in line. How had Haley Bopp managed this, I wondered. How had she conspired to turn her college-girl musings, her mundane and largely lonely (albeit sluttish and loft-dwelling) existence into a book that, I noticed on the back jacket, New York Magazine had deemed “smut for smart people” and US Weekly had called “a razor-sharp glimpse into the millennial heart.” How was it that Haley Bopp was actually getting rich and famous by sleeping (or not sleeping) with dozens of hip New York guys who bought her martinis and I was getting poorer and increasingly obscure living in a drafty house on a wheat patch with a drug addict, a four-year-old, and a doll that said Today’s word is glamoricious?

  But that would change, I thought as I finally got in and out of the bathroom and fled the bookstore before I had a chance to stumble upon another reminder of my professional failure. Haley Bopp, I reasoned, might be enjoying the thirteenth minute of her soon-to-expire fame but I, Lucinda Trout, modern pioneer and deep-thinking appreciator of subtle landscapes and authentic living in general, would be the next “it girl.” Upon the publication of Inspirations from the Heartland, I, too, would appear on the staff recommendation table. And I would prove myself more worthy of adulation and money than Haley because, instead of posing nude, I would appear on the jacket of my book in a 1940s-style floral print dress, my hair blowing in the prairie wind, my mind calm and contemplative, my soul clean and pure and good. And the book would be such a hit that I would become the host of my own Charles Kuralt kind of television show—not a local show, like Up Early, but a national show, maybe even a show on PBS—and I would make so much money (not from public television but from the book, which would inspire a line of gift cards and journals and coffee mugs) that I would be able to buy not only an extra furnace for the house but maybe also the house itself, wherein Mason, relieved of the financial pressures that drove him to drug abuse, would clean up his act or, if not, move away so that Sam Shepard (the man) could come live with me and Sam Shepard the dog.

  Galvanized, I strode the remaining blocks to Up Early’s building and took the elevator to the office. I breezed past the receptionist and into Faye’s office, where she was talking on her phone headset and smoking a cigarette. She gave me a once-over as I entered and it was only then, as I removed my coat that had no accompanying scarf, that I realized I was wearing a baggy pair of Levis, a ski sweater, and snow boots. In the precoffee haze of Daphne’s steamy bathroom, I had forgotten that I was no longer in Prairie City.

  Faye hung up the phone and, with the enthusiasm of a child being made to eat peas, climbed slowly out of her chair and kissed me on both cheeks.

  “You’re looking . . . comfortable,” she said.

  “Just thought I’d stop by,” I said. I was mortified by my appearance. Had I been aware of its effect even two blocks before reaching the office, I would have stopped at a Banana Republic and bought an entire outfit.

  “The barn dance segment got a high rating,” said Faye. “God knows why.”

  “You should have been there,” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “So I have some new ideas,” I said.

  “Let’s not go into them right now,” said Faye. “You’re gonna do the book club, right? You have some fat housewives who read books. Since you contributed nothing to the holiday package.”

  “They’re reading Clip My Wings and I’ll Grow a New Pair.”

  “Holy fucking Jesus,” said Faye. “That’s perfect, though. I want to shoot that in a few weeks. Will they have read it by then or do they have to take it a page a day?”

  I had not actually broached the subject of taping the book discussion with the Coalition of Women. Though I had no doubt they’d be thrilled (hadn’t Brenda even suggested this long ago?), I also knew that they considered themselves a political action group as well. They would surely try to use the occasion to express their views on women’s issues. There was also a potential problem in the fact that many of them—in fact all of them other than M.J. and Dee Dee—had already appeared in the barn dance segment, although most of them, including Sue, had been edited out of the final version under orders of the stylist. As it was, I could not imagine that M.J. and Dee Dee—barring major liposuction and total makeovers—would make it into the final edit of the book club story, either. That left Brenda Schwan and her house as the major figures. Though there was always me.

  “Have you gained weight?” Faye asked.

  “No!” I yelped.

  “It must be the clothes then.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, crossing and uncrossing my legs in an effort to hide the bagginess of the jeans. “You wouldn’t believe it. The airline lost my luggage. I still don’t have my suitcase. I wore this on the plane. Believe me, this is not what I usually look like. I mean, I haven’t gone that downhill.”

  “The fake tan isn’t helping, Lucinda,” Faye said.

  “What tan?” I said. “Oh, I don’t go to a tanning salon. I was just pitching a story on it!”

  “You look like you work at a Dairy King,” she said.

  “You mean Dairy Queen?”

  “This is really getting boring, Lucinda.”

  * * *

  DAPHNE, A VISION IN LEATHER PANTS, a hand-knit sweater, and a very whorish-looking pair of high-heel leather boots she would later tell me she charged to Visa for four hundred dollars, greeted me at the door when I returned to her apartment that evening.

  “You’re so tan!” she said.

  We decided to take the subway downtown to Bar Barella. Though Daphne was my favorite friend, though her almost mystical ability to live lightly—with just a handful of boxes, with more watercolors than oils, with no urge to forward her mail even if she was gone for months—gave me hope that I, too, could one day have a life that didn’t press down so hard on me, we had only spoken a few times since I’d left the city. She had drifted to Cape Cod, then to Seattle, then, hearing of a sublet, back to New York, where she’d lived in the Village until she was again uprooted to the midtown high-rise. Though I’d seen her once amid our usual gaggle of friends on a previous trip back, we hadn’t sat down together since the last time we’d gone to Bar Barella, the night I’d returned from the methamphetamine story.

  We pushed past the crowd at the bar, settled on the Victorian sofa in the
back, and ordered vodka and tonics. She drew out a cigarette—“off the wagon,” she said—and, in solidarity, in intimacy, I took one, too. I’d changed into a black leather miniskirt and a lace camisole under a vintage beaded cardigan. We sat with our legs crossed blowing smoke into the air.

  “So,” she said, “I have a story for you.”

  “Tell.”

  “I spent a couple months playing for the other team,” she said.

  Daphne smiled and cocked her head to the side as if she were confessing to an embarrassing high school incident.

  “A woman?” I asked, though there was no need for clarification. She hadn’t been cryptic, merely coy.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “When?”

  “Until just recently,” she said, exhaling a ring of smoke. “Until I moved to that crazy apartment. Lesbians don’t do midtown. Which kind of made me glad.”

  Daphne began, as all women do, telling the story in unnecessarily minute detail. She had been temping at a small publishing company specializing in art books; the woman (slightly older, dyed-in-the-wool but not butch) worked there as a designer; they began eating lunch together at the sandwich shop down the block; at first they talked about painting, then relationships (after that they never discussed art again); interoffice e-mails compensated for that which they could not bring themselves to talk about face-to-face; the woman invited Daphne over for dinner; Daphne, knowing the deal but not admitting to herself that she knew the deal, came for dinner (in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, naturally); the woman made a pass; Daphne was bored with her life in general and drunk at that specific moment and the woman had put on a very old Joan Armatrading album that made Daphne think of her prep school days (even back then it had been an old album); comforted by thoughts of Choate Rosemary Hall, where she had done so many things (cocaine, for instance) without repercussion, Daphne had let the woman kiss her, though, she hastened to add to me now, that was all they did that night.

  “And then?” I asked.

  “And then,” said Daphne, “she decided she wanted to marry me. So at least I can say someone once wanted to marry me.”

  We sat for a minute, lighting more cigarettes and ordering more drinks.

  “So how was it?” I asked.

  “Good,” she said. “But . . . too much.”

  “How long did it last?”

  “Two months,” she said. “Four if you count the breaking up.”

  “There was never any point when you thought you really had it in you?” I asked. “Because sometimes, you know, it’s easy to think it might be easier that way. Easier being a lesbian. Than dealing with men over and over again.”

  “She never would have left me, that’s for sure,” Daphne said. “Although she always said it wasn’t true what people say, about lesbians bringing a moving van to their second date. But that’s not really what I mean.”

  The waitress brought our second round of vodka and tonics. She appeared to have overheard the last bit of conversation and smirked a little, as if she’d heard it a hundred times, probably on that very Victorian sofa.

  “It was so crowded,” Daphne continued. “I don’t mean the sex. The sex was fine, interesting at the beginning, then less so, like with anyone. But then, it just seemed, I don’t know, redundant.”

  “No space,” I suggested.

  “Totally,” she said, which was one of the many nice things about Daphne. She gave you credit for summing up the point, even if you were off. But in this case I didn’t think I was off.

  “It’s a crowded thing, being with another woman,” I said.

  “Because you did it, didn’t you?”

  “In the most cursory way,” I said.

  The five nights I had spent, during my sophomore year at Smith, sharing the bed (actually the mattress; it was customary among the more sophisticated students to remove the frames and box springs and sleep on the floor) of a senior international studies major were little more than a blur of intermittent kissing and lengthy discussions about the latest Suzanne Vega record. Upon the sixth day, the senior, choking back tears, had told me that she “couldn’t handle the idea that I was just experimenting.” A year after graduation she married a medical student named Rob Piscorelli and moved to the D.C. suburbs.

  “I kept somehow thinking,” Daphne said, “that there would be more dignity in it.”

  I recalled her encounter, more than a year ago, involving the Smurf sheets.

  “I thought about what it would be like,” Daphne continued, “to not have to wait for her to call. Because she always called. And I thought that maybe if I could just get rid of the variable—get rid of the man factor—I could be happy or at least satisfied and not have to go through the constant humiliation of competing. Because even if you’re not trying to compete you always are. You’re competing for the same handful of losers with women who are clearly so much smarter, so much prettier, so much more talented than those fuckers we have to choose from. And so I tried to convince myself that, since I already knew women were better, I could just be with a woman and call it a day. Because it was pleasant. I wasn’t faking it. It was just—”

  “Too much?”

  “And not enough,” she said. “There was no edge. Not that she, personally, didn’t have any edge. Together we had no edge.”

  “Were you operating as a couple?” I asked. “Were you going out to places together?”

  “Some, but mostly all we did was talk. Because I liked talking to her. But after a while I didn’t feel like talking anymore. You know how with a guy someone can ask what you have in common and you can say ‘Gee, I don’t know’? That would never have been the case. We had every thing in common, including a goddamned pussy!”

  “That was always my argument,” I said, “when people asked why I was going out with Dave, the pilot. We had zero in common, which made our being together sort of . . . original. I always thought, on some level, that that was the essence of heterosexuality. You mate with someone who’s truly the opposite of you. Not a male version of yourself.”

  “Totally,” she said.

  “There’s something sort of annoying about lesbians,” I said. “They think that people—especially straight people—who go out with someone who seems ‘inappropriate’ are limiting themselves. But it seems obvious to me that going out with that kind of person—like Mason, for instance—is an unlimited experience. Because you have so much room to breathe. The person doesn’t crowd you by always saying what you were just about to say.”

  Daphne looked slightly perplexed. “Hmm,” she said.

  I took a drag off my cigarette and looked around the bar. A scrawny guy in a TV Guide T-shirt was holding court with three sleekly dressed women at the next table. Daphne stubbed out her cigarette and immediately lit another one.

  “So how’s that going?” she asked. “With Mason.”

  “Up and down,” I said.

  “I know I kind of gave you a hard time when you were dating the pilot guy,” she said. “I shouldn’t have.”

  “Everyone gave me a hard time about that,” I said.

  And then, because Daphne had never admitted that she had perhaps been too hard on Dave Davenport, who, the one time he’d met her, had referred to girls as “gals” and worn a yellow polo shirt tucked into a pair of khakis, I decided to do something I had not, at that point, done in even the smallest way. I decided I would tell Daphne about Mason’s drug problem, the money he’d blown, the weekly onslaught of kids, the thrice-weekly visitations of Erin, who had turned the den into little more than a toy closet that happened to house my desk. I thought, given Daphne’s yarn about the lesbian affair, that she would find it, at the very least, interesting on a sociological level.

  I had to begin, of course, by explaining the situation with the three mothers. Like my other friends, Daphne knew Mason had three kids but presumed they were the result of the same woman. And because explaining the number of mothers required telling not only the story of the marriage to Susann
ah and the “long relationship” with Jill but also the details of Mason’s inebriated Halloween encounter with Julie and the cat costume and, subsequently, Mason’s endearing but ultimately pathetic offer to be her Lamaze coach, it took a good ten minutes to get to the part about the ten thousand dollars spent on meth.

  Daphne sat there with her mouth open, her cigarette ash an inch long. Despite my talents as a storyteller, she appeared confused.

  “So wait,” she said. “You only found out about the different mothers after you’d moved in with him?”

  “No, I already knew about them.”

  “And when did he tell you about them?”

  “On our first date.”

  “And have you, like, met the kids?”

  “They’re at our house all the time,” I said. “Especially the girl.”

  “And you had no idea he’d become a drug addict?”

  “None,” I lied.

  Daphne looked at me as if I’d told her I’d been raped. In the silence, her ash finally dropped. Then she used a quintessential Daphne word, though I’d never heard this particular one before.

  “My mind,” she said, “is reeling with . . . incredibilization.”

  “The thing is, though,” I said, “he’s kicked it. I think there’s a good chance this was a one-time thing.”

  “He hasn’t done it again?”

  “I don’t think so,” I lied again. “I’ve seen no evidence of it.”