The Quality of Life Report

by Meghan Daum

  “Just doing my job,” said Faye. “I like to be very hands-on. Lucinda, we’ll meet tomorrow at your house to discuss editing.”

  I sat on the sofa, blowing my nose and watching them incredulously. The Coalition of Women seemed too impressed with Faye and Christine to bother being offended by what I’d said about Idabelle Sugar, a speech I’d rehearsed many times while driving alone in the Sunbird, never imagining it would ever find an audience. Now that it had found an audience, it seemed ridiculous and I wanted to take it all back. I noticed that Sue was glaring at Faye.

  “I guess that’s show biz, huh Faye,” said Sue.

  “It’s times like these that I remember why I got into this business,” said Faye.

  I grabbed my coat and bag and ran for the door. Sue held it open for me and followed me outside, where I saw that Faye had kept a taxi waiting.

  “I can see why you left New York,” Sue said gently.

  I turned to her, my face swollen and my nose still running, and suddenly I felt more affection for Sue than I’d felt for anyone in months. I wanted to hug her, and before I could make a move she reached out her arms and hugged me.

  “I’m sorry for what I said about Christine,” I said.

  “Leonard said the same thing about her,” Sue said. “But you have to remember, Lucinda, that being interesting isn’t the most important thing in the world. And not everybody can be as interesting as you.”

  I had never in my life felt less interesting. Still, this was one of the nicer things I’d heard in a long time, even if she hadn’t exactly meant it as a compliment. I vowed to never be angry with Sue again. She had, after all, been loyal to me. She could have stayed in the house with the others but instead she’d come outside with me. She’d seen through Faye and subsequently understood what I had fled from, what had informed my decision making, what kind of depraved moral context had shaped my frail psyche. Maybe she now saw that Mason wasn’t so bad. At least compared to Faye. Maybe now she was on my side. Maybe she’d even start inviting him to her parties.

  “You are going to leave Mason, aren’t you?” Sue said. “Or at least take some kind of action step?”

  And then the only thing I could think of was how much I wanted to reach out and strangle Sue with her beaded African necklace.

  * * *

  IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT when I got back to the farm. Mason was sleeping and by the time he woke in the morning Faye had already called and said she was stopping by the farm on her way to the airport.

  “Randy would like to get a quote from you for his article,” she said. “He would have asked you last night but he didn’t want to intrude.”

  Remarkably, Mason was hardly nonplussed when I explained that Faye was on her way out to the farm. We had woken to a winter morning that felt on the verge of giving way to spring. For the first time in months, the water in the horse troughs had not frozen during the night. The snow was melting in patches, lending to the farm a sense of muddy optimism, a promise of warmth in the not too distant future, a traction in the driveway that I’d all but forgotten about.

  “So how did the filming go?” Mason asked over breakfast. He’d decided not to go to work (it was soap opera season at the grain elevator anyway) and made scrambled eggs and sausage.

  “They staged an intervention,” I said bluntly. “They accused me of being a meth addict and I had to explain that you were the meth addict.”

  “What?”

  “Does that upset you?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “How could it not?” I asked.

  “Because I’m not a meth addict anymore,” he said.

  It was always so simple for him. He hadn’t done meth yesterday or the day before and was therefore no longer an addict. It made me sad to think that he didn’t even care if the whole world knew. I remembered what he’d said long ago about having a reputation as a good father. It’s better than being known as a drunk or a pervert. Was being a drug addict better than that, too?

  “How did your boss think it went?” Mason asked.

  “She loved it.”

  “Well, I guess it worked out,” Mason said.

  A taxicab crunched up the driveway outside. Through the window I saw Faye, still in the leather coat and head scarf, climb out with Randy Abrams. Sam Shepard sprinted toward them and tried to chew Faye’s coat. She kicked him out of the way.

  Mason got up and opened the back door. Faye stumbled into the mudroom, tripping on the shoes and boots piled on the floor.

  “You’re the guy who bathes in the river!” Faye said.

  Seeing Faye in my house brought me back to the gravity of the situation, as if she’d pinched me. It was the reverse of waking from a nightmare and having to tell yourself it was just a dream.

  “You’re not going to air that segment, are you?” I asked Faye. I realized I was still in my bathrobe. Mason was wearing his long underwear.

  “That’s up to Upstairs,” she said. “Personally, I thought it was your best one yet.”

  “I assume that was your way of firing me.”

  Faye started to say something but then glanced at Randy Abrams and stopped herself.

  “You know I care about you deeply, Lucinda,” she said finally. “I truly did come out here because I was concerned about you. It’s just lucky that we could combine my concern with a really powerful and groundbreaking segment.”

  “Faye really has impressed me,” said Randy Abrams. “In fact, this article is turning into more of a profile of her. So I’d love a quote from you about what it’s like working with Faye.”

  “After all that you need a quote?” I asked.

  “Coffee?” Mason asked them.

  “No, thanks,” said Faye. She lit up a cigarette and Mason made a face.

  “Do you feel she saved your life?” Randy Abrams asked.

  “Faye saves lives every day,” I said facetiously. “That’s what being a television producer is all about.”

  Faye was characteristically revolted by the disarray of the house—“It suits you,” she said within earshot of Randy Abrams—though, like any New Yorker would be, she was impressed with its size.

  “There’s an upstairs, too,” I said.

  “Really?” said Faye. Apparently she hadn’t noticed from the outside.

  “I’ll show you the barn, if you want,” Mason said.

  My stomach tightened. Showing the barn and especially Mason’s paintings to Randy Abrams and especially Faye struck me as a very, very bad idea.

  “Let’s see the barn,” Randy Abrams said.

  “It better not be gross,” Faye said.

  We tracked through the melting snow to the barn. Randy Abrams tried to engage Mason in a discussion about the architecture of the house and the septic system and the types of pesticides used in the area—he claimed to know a lot about these subjects. Mason opened the sliding door to the barn and we gathered around the stall that housed the pig. She was lying in the straw inches away from her own shit.

  “That’s Diva Starz,” I said.

  “That is absolutely disgusting,” said Faye, stamping out her cigarette.

  “Is that a peccary pig or a North American sow?” asked Randy Abrams.

  Lucky the horse grunted in his stall and kicked his hooves. Mason steered us in the other direction.

  “And you can see the tack room if you’d like,” he said. “This is where I paint.”

  No no no no no, I thought.

  Mason opened the door of the tack room. The air was musty, but it also smelled like paint. Light from the small windows cast narrow beams onto his canvases. The figures, misshapen and contorted and screaming like feral asylum inmates, seemed to leap off the walls and into the room. The horse painting—the one Mason had started to redo the night of the barn dance—had been restored somewhat; now the horse head was dabbed with vague images of feathers and bones. Polka dots appeared only faintly in one corner. I shifted my feet and held my breath, waiting for Faye to say something obnox
ious.

  Instead, Faye got up close to one of the paintings and studied the brush strokes.

  “Are these yours?” she asked.

  “Yupper,” said Mason.

  “These are quite conceptually aware. Where do you show?”

  “Show what?”

  “The paintings!” said Faye. “Where is your gallery?

  “Here, I guess.”

  “Where did you study?”

  “Oh, I took some classes at P.C. State College for a while,” Mason said. “But I was never much for school.”

  Faye stood back as far as she could without hitting the opposite wall, which was covered with horse harnesses and circle saws.

  “These are fucking brilliant,” said Faye. “Don’t you think so, Randy?”

  “They remind me of de Kooning,” Randy Abrams said.

  “They’re a bit like Cecily Brown, minus the scatological exhibitionism,” Faye said. “The social construction is contextualized, yet not overly so.”

  Mason looked at the floor, shuffling his feet.

  “Do you have a catalog?” Randy Abrams asked.

  “Oh fuck,” said Faye. “The only catalog this guy has is an L. L. Bean catalog. Lucinda, take some photos of these and send them to me.”

  “Really?” I asked. I was so stunned I couldn’t even look at Mason.

  “Our cab is waiting,” said Faye. “God knows how long it’s going to take to get home from this shit hole. Lucinda, I’ll call you about the segment. And get me the number of that black girl. Upstairs would slobber all the way into the basement if they saw her.”

  We marched back through the yard, where the taxi, with the meter running, was still in the driveway. The driver was leaning against the car smoking a cigarette. Mason, who knew him from Effie’s, slapped him on the back.

  “Not bad for a meth addict,” Randy Abrams mumbled as Faye kissed me on both cheeks.

  “Grow up,” Faye said. “All artists are drug addicts.”

  The Margin Widens

  I knew I needed to take an action step. The problem was that no actions I could think of seemed particularly appealing. As much as the Coalition of Women had been right about Mason, they did not seem to understand the love I felt for the farm. And since Mason was as much a part of the farm as the house and barn themselves, since in fact he was, despite his troubles, more or less the very foundation of the farm (as I was certain I couldn’t have lasted longer than a week there by myself) I continued to love him almost as if by association.

  Besides, the prolonged crisis of winter had finally lifted. If the intervention had failed to affect me the way the Coalition of Women would have liked, it did manage to break the cold spell. As though a warm front had come through and kicked Faye out of town, the land began to thaw as soon as she left. Mason and I moved the beds back up to the second floor. We unpeeled the duct tape from the doorways and I reassembled my office and, one by one, Erin’s toys were retrieved from the sofa cushions and the mudroom and the dusty corners where they had rolled and put back in her bedroom upstairs. It was as if the house had exhaled, as if our lives, which had become constricted and mangled and even delirious from the cold, sprawled into our reacquired space and finally gave us room to walk around. For the first time in nearly half a year, it was now possible for Mason to read a book in the living room while I talked on the phone in my office. Erin’s cartoons, while still audible from the upstairs bedroom, no longer saturated our dinner conversation. Even her loathsome Diva Starz Nikki doll could be heard only faintly behind the closed door of Erin’s room. I had insisted she confine the doll to her room lest the dog eat it. Alarmed, she kept it in her bed, where she’d roll on it in her sleep and be awakened by Today’s word is “bodalicious.”

  Mason did not make as many trips to the barn. Now that the frost was gone, I could easily observe him through the windows. From Sebastian and Peter’s room I could see his every move in the yard. I watched him mow the lawn and plant more flowers. I watched him brush the horse and trim his hooves. Mason’s leg no longer jerked at night and the tack room, which I inspected weekly, then monthly, contained not even a single lighter. Instead, the place was lined with canvases. Spurred by Faye’s enthusiasm, although reluctant to send her photos of his work, Mason had begun to paint with a fervor I had never once applied to the writing of television scripts or even the ill-fated Inspirations from the Heartland (Sarah Vanderhorn had never called). Though he would not, as I suggested, attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings, he seemed to have replaced his addiction with the creation of increasingly disciplined works of “conceptual awareness.” The faces were no less demonic, but they were rendered with a confidence I hadn’t before seen in either Mason or his work. It was as if he had recognized the barrier between the artist and the art; as the faces became scarier, he became less so.

  Even Lucky the horse seemed more benign. Though I was still afraid to ride, Mason showed me how to snap a rope onto Lucky’s bridle and walk him to the prairie grass west of the house. There I could tie him to a tree so he could eat the grass. This cut down on his hay consumption and, Mason said, gave the animal a much-needed change of scene. “How would you like to be confined to a corral all day?” Mason asked. “You’d whack off on people at a party, too.” Indeed, Lucky’s face seemed to have retained a hazy smirk since the barn dance. Now, everytime he brought out his staggering organ he did so with the brazen showmanship of a porn star. Not even the bitter winter had compromised his virility and now that it was spring, his masculinity was sprouting with the plants. He greeted me pendulously when he saw me walk toward the corral, stomping his feet as I opened the gate and swallowing my apples in one bite. Because one stud on a farm was more than enough, Mason finally got a vasectomy. The regulars at Effie’s threatened to throw him a retirement party.

  The Coalition of Women, ever respectful of the female voice, begrudgingly accepted, if not my opinion on Idabelle Sugar, my right to have one. Though they did not accept my insistence that Mason’s bout with addiction had run its course—twice, Sue had sent me notes on the EMBRACE, EMPATHIZE, EMPOWER stationery saying “We always have a spare room,” and “Your options are limited only by your fears”—Christine, who had repeatedly had to tell Faye on the phone that she had no interest in a television career, finally got us back to the business of the NOW versus COW softball game. I agreed to play shortstop. Sue offered to bring wine coolers.

  Though I didn’t catch on at first, Faye had done more than relieve Mason’s self-esteem problems. She had indeed relieved me of my job. I learned of my dismissal a few weeks later in Randy Abrams’s New York Magazine article.

  “Faye saves lives every day,” says Trout, whose ‘Quality of Life’ series was recently kiboshed when Up Early signed a generous deal with best-selling author Haley Bopp. “That’s what being a television producer is all about.”

  Though I gasped when I read that line, my shock had less to do with “kiboshed” than with Haley Bopp’s being a “best-selling author” and, moreover, the idea that Randy Abrams could have witnessed my intervention from such excruciating proximity and yet omit it from his article. Since I no longer subscribed to New York Magazine, I read the article standing by the rack at the bookstore in the Homestead Mall. And since New York Magazine arrived at the bookstore at least a week late, if at all, the article would have already been on the stands in New York for several days, making me roughly the three millionth person to learn that I’d been fired.

  I did not, however, throw the magazine down in disgust. Nor did I run to the nearest pay phone to call Faye or Daphne or Elena or even Mason at the grain elevator. Instead, relief rushed through me. Even though I had run through my savings, even though I had spent more on rent and heating bills in six months than Mason had spent on meth during the entire period of his addiction, the idea of never again having to do another “Quality of Life Report” filled me with such bliss that I strode through the mall to the food court, where I bought myself an Orange Julius and, though
I’d never in my adult life actually sat down in a food court, found a table and took a seat to enjoy my drink.

  In groups of twos and threes, mostly young women with their babies and their mothers, the Prairie Cityites ambled through the mall. They carried shopping bags and diaper bags. They wore sweatpants with sandals and appeared so unhurried, so serene, so unbothered by what I still believed to be an ungodly distance between Dillard’s and Sears, that I suddenly realized that quality of life was not about barn dances or bathing in the river or even sipping coffee in the prairie grass, but simply about being able to go to the mall. It was about being able to not only buy something at the mall but also buy several things—shoes and accessories and maybe even an egg roll at Egg Roll Express—without having a complete crisis of purpose and identity, without worrying that everyone else was buying the same things, without thinking endlessly about what it meant to be a person—one of many people, one of millions of people all over the damn United States—who bought those things. That was where I had failed. I had thought much too much about being or not being one of those people. And in the end I was as much one of them as I’d always been. I was in a food court drinking an Orange Julius. I was astonished at how good it tasted.

  In the silver glow of the mall corridor I spotted Joel Lipinsky walking past the Sunglass Hut stand. He was in his customary black suit but he wore running shoes and carried an Eddie Bauer shopping bag in one hand and a plastic Barnes and Noble bag in the other. My first inclination was to hide from him, but then, as if the mall had broken down the last vestiges of my resistance to common pleasantries, I eyeballed Joel until he noticed me in the food court. A look of embarrassment crossed his face as he approached me.

  “I never come here,” he said.

  “Have a seat,” I said, as it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps I could convince him to give me a job on Parent Talk with Loni Heibel-Budicek. “I only come here for the Orange Juliuses.”

  “I make those at home,” he said. “With vodka.”

  Joel sat down, but it seemed more out of a desire to put down his shopping bag, which was so full it had started to rip, than to actually converse with me.