“They acted like it was a big insult to them! You know what I think? They’re not used to artists who have courage.”
Then came a long stiff silence before Tim wound him up again with “You know what makes me mad? What makes me really mad is that the Cheesecake Factory would not let you transfer to the New York restaurant when you wanted to move.”
Vinnie nodded and appeared to be sucking on something. “I should have made them fire me and taken unemployment. That would have been smart, but I told them, ‘Ninety percent of your customers ask for me when they walk in the door. I upsell a hundred and fifty grand worth of avocado eggrolls a year, and you are gonna give that up? In New York?’ It’s uncanny how stupid people are.”
“They’re ash-breasted tit-tyrants,” Miles said.
“Excuse me?” Mona said.
“Ha! It’s a real bird! It’s not a cuss.”
“Miles, buddy,” Vinnie said, turning his chair, “how’s school?”
“Fine.” Miles’s black hair swung into his cheese and stuck.
“Good! You’re starting high school? Bottom of the pecking order? Don’t forget, we’ve all been there. But it gets better,” Vinnie said, snailing out a bottom lip. “When I was a kid”—he looked up to watch the past—“I was only friends with the girls. The boys were threatened by me. ‘Course I didn’t know that then! You don’t really know the truth until much, much later.”
“Miles isn’t gay,” Tim said.
Vinnie shrugged. “I’m not saying he is—”
“We don’t care if he is!” Mona sat up and looked around the table as though someone had disappeared but she didn’t know who.
“All I ask, Miles, is, don’t ever use the word gay as a slang for something bad,” Vinnie said.
“No.” Miles gave little head shakes, his hair still attached to the food.
Vinnie eyed the newly reloaded plates of Tim and Miles.
“We’ve got other things to eat in this house.” Mona looked both ways to indicate that food was all around them.
“I had a late lunch.” He rubbed his tight stomach. “Tim, how’s your work going?”
“If I tell you, will you promise me it gets better?”
“He’s on six days a week,” Mona said.
“All right, then! They can’t do without you! That’s good!”
“They can do without me. You know what I did today, on a Saturday, Vinnie? I drove twenty-six miles to that shithole, and I walked into my office and picked up the light bulb my boss had left on my desk, as she does every Friday night, and I screwed it into the desk lamp so she can know I was there. On a Saturday. That’s what I did, and I’ve done it for twelve years.”
Vinnie looked surprised.
Tim continued, “Then I rewrote a perfectly good set of product shorts—and by the way, who gives a shit about marching-band helmets? Nobody—but I rewrote them because they had some words in them that she objects to on grounds that no other human can understand.”
“The Publisher,” Mona explained.
“Well,” Vinnie started.
“Streamlined—what’s wrong with that word, Vinnie? Streamlined. How about gleam? You got a big problem with gleam? Too shiny for you?”
“You know what, Tim?” Vinnie waited for Tim to look up from his plate. “No one thinks they’re in charge of their own life anymore. But you are.”
“No, Tim is taking charge,” Mona said. “He’s learning to tune pianos.”
“Okay, then! Good!”
“I can make a hundred and fifty bucks a tuning, and a tuning takes an hour and a half, so that’s a hundred dollars an hour.”
“Lawyer’s pay!” Vinnie slapped the table. “Yeah!”
Tim leaned back to reach the fridge handle and yanked the door open just enough to grab another watery beer with the blue mountains on the label. “You know how you figure an annual salary?” He pulled the top and continued, “I know this now. You double the hourly rate and take that times a thousand. So a hundred an hour is equal to two hundred thousand dollars—if you could tune all day, which you can’t, but that’s the kind of money we’re talking about.”
Miles said, “No shit?” with his mouth full.
“I’m just saying that Vinnie’s right; hourly, it’s the same as a lawyer. It’s skilled work.”
Vinnie conducted with his fork. “The dream’s gotta come before the reality. Okay? And this is what you’re doing! It’s all in that book. You know that book? The Secret? Oh, am I gonna buy it for you. It’s about the laws of attraction! Hey, let’s get a piece of paper. You have paper handy?” he asked Mona.
“Just sheets of paper?” She started up.
“I have some,” Miles stood, and since he’d been leaning it against the wall, his chair toppled as he loped out of the kitchen.
“He’s a good kid,” Vinnie announced before Miles returned, ripping pages out of a spiral notebook.
“Everyone gets a sheet,” Vinnie said. “Now, what you do is you write on that paper who you wanna be. Visualize your ideal self. Don’t show it to anyone. You know, are you a rich man? Are you an opera star? Are you a handsome kid? Some people who are sick write that they’re cancer free. You can write anything! But put in as much detail as you can think of. And you can add to this whenever, so just get something down real quick right now. Then you carry it with you, and you look at it. You look at it and, like, believe you already are this person with this certain life. If you believe, ba boom! you will receive.”
Mona had written straight through Vinnie’s directions as though she were taking dictation. Her ideal self had a page full of qualities. Miles was staring blankly at the overhead light, his poised pen never touching the paper. Tim scrawled three short lines in a corner of the page and tore it off:
Rusty Turner
Marine Sniper
21, 6′ 2″, 9″
# # #
After dinner, Tim sank into the couch to watch the Sox game, which Mona muted when she and Vinnie joined him. She lit on the wingback, while Vinnie sat beside him.
Without looking up from the set, Tim said, “I’ll draw you a map to your car.”
“I don’t have to go right away.”
Tim nodded, watching the ump beckon the Yankee’s pitcher over and feel his neck, which had a discolored mark on it that the pitcher had been swiping his hand over. “You staying over?”
“Dunno yet.”
The ump pulled his hand from a viscous patch on the pitcher’s neck and immediately ejected him.
Tim pointed at the set. “Guy’s a rotten cheat. Everybody knows it.”
“Stay here!” Mona demanded of Vinnie.
“Can I?”
“Of course, you can!”
“I’d be very much obliged,” said Knight One.
Tim had a sinking feeling, and he sorted all of the things he wanted to say into cubbyholes of varying appropriateness. He finally came out with “New York’s crazy expensive, huh? What do you pay in rent down there?”
“You don’t wanna know, believe me.”
“You behind on the rent?” That one fell out of its cubby.
Vinnie shrugged. “I’ll make it up.”
“If you are behind, you are behind! These things happen!” Mona karate-chopped the last three words into existence.
Tim turned his whole torso to Vinnie. “You’re not planning on living here again.” The man had once spent five months in tears on their couch.
“No! God, no. I happen to have an audition here, for a movie.”
“What? What is it?” Mona asked dramatically, as if he’d just said he had cancer.
“I didn’t want to say anything, but it’s a big audition, and you know what? I will get the part.”
Then that creepy Dr. Harmon appeared on television in his commercial for testosterone replacement therapy.
“Of course, you’ll get the part. That’s decided. But what’s the movie?”
“…gently reverses the aging process,” Harmon sai
d from behind a desk in his white lab coat.
“They don’t want people to know about it yet, so I can’t say anything, but word is that Damon is coming for the auditions. And I will read opposite.”
“Matt Damon? Is that who you’re saying? Matt Damon?” she asked.
Text of the symptoms of low testosterone popped up on the screen beside the doctor, and Tim counted off on his fingers all of the ones he recognized.
# # #
As soon as Tim got into bed that night—his wife still in the living room making discoveries into the lives of the Temptation’s Fate stars—his phone buzzed, a Words with Friends prompt. The Publisher had played her word. He pictured her wrapped in a blanket, lying in a lounge chair on the deck of her beach house, looking up at the Milky Way, sloshing a zinfandel down her chin. The Publisher had insisted that Tim get the app. She told him that playing WWF would expand his vocabulary. Shellac was her new word, which he had thought had a k at the end, so he was already expanded.
Tim played his word, cops, which didn’t begin to compete with The Publisher’s seven-letter triumph, and then he slid the square of torn paper off his nightstand. His ideal self:
Rusty Turner
Marine Sniper
21, 6′ 2″, 9″
To reinforce this ideal persona, Tim changed his WWF name on the spot to RustySniper21. Then he selected Random Opponent. Instantly the game board appeared with his new name next to TallBlondBabe18 in the scoring section.
TallBlondBabe18 played cranium for 22 points, including a triple-letter score.
Tall, blond, and smart? he typed into the message box and sent it over.
He played rough for 20 points with a double-word score. Then he wrote another message: How tall are you?
World’s tallest woman, she messaged.
She played vine for nine, then wrote, So lame.
He couldn’t figure a word to play and was about to resign from the game, when she messaged, What U looking @ right now?
Tim set the phone on his nightstand and picked up the sniper book. He heard Mona and Vinnie howl in unison over something funny. There was a section of photos in the middle of the book: shots of members of the sniper’s fire team eating MREs off the hood of their Humvee, talking with white-capped Afghans; a few of the ruinous, brown, terraced slopes of Ganjgal; and some of the men at the outpost, snowy mountain peaks behind them.
Tim took up his phone again and messaged her: Hescos & barbed wire.
Then he added, Hescos = big burlap bags filled with dirt. Big as a man. Bullet/shrapnel shields.
Then another bit: Marine outpost in Afghanistan.
And then he thought to add, What U looking at?
She didn’t reply right away or play a word. Tim put the phone down on the nightstand and looked again at the now-dead young men grinning.
Then the message came: A one-armed Sasquatch.
Then a follow-up: Envy UR adventure.
Sounds like UR having one, too! What’s your name, Blondie?
Megan, she typed. Blondie’s better.
DAVIS
Davis Beardsley entered his house to find a great, hairy arm lying in wait upon the floor. To the right of the door, as always, stood Sasquatch, a now-disabled eight-foot taxidermist’s creation covered in grizzly fur but looking like a fully upright gorilla with a too-large head and an enormous, humanoid nose. Davis gaped at the woolly appendage and then hoisted the great arm over his shoulder, clasped the leathery hand in his, and carried it to the kitchen counter, where he set it down and stroked it like a sick kitten. His daughter, Megan, had done this, of course, though she would deny it. She had dismembered his most cherished possession in retaliation.
In addition to having a PhD in zoology, Davis was a renowned cryptozoologist, someone who studies animals unknown to science or animals thought to be extinct. He’d led several Sasquatch-hunting expeditions over in Washington state and had purchased the replica from the owner of a truck stop there. The behemoth was the crown jewel of Davis’s collection. Now, even if the arm was reattached, it could not be a seamless fix. He would see the repair, a constant reminder that the whole thing was a fake.
That this had happened on the day Davis’s new boss was to come see the collection was no coincidence, he was sure. The new department chair, Eric Lindstrom, had asked for a viewing, and what could Davis do but invite him to stay for dinner? His worries about this dinner were lessened by the fact that Lindstrom had already met Megan. She was taking a college-credit course he offered to high school seniors on Maine flora and fauna. It was one of the ways Lindstrom hoped to boost enrollment in the biology department in coming years. Megan had only wanted in because it got her out of high school two mornings a week.
Davis weighed the downsides of (a) confronting Megan now and possibly sending her into a tailspin or (b) waiting until after Lindstrom’s visit. Everything had downsides with Megan. Would he rather she be hateful or flirtatious, as she typically was when adult males came into the house? Megan often put herself right on their laps or, if they were standing, hung from their shoulders or kept an arm around their waist. Megan had been told that if she did this tonight, she would lose her phone forever. Davis was thinking that perhaps it was a mistake not to have given Lindstrom the letter that her other teachers had received, explaining Megan’s disorder, but his wife, Jenny, had been afraid it would affect Davis’s ability to gain tenure, and she thought she could make Megan understand the importance of keeping her distance. The letter had not changed over the years:
Dear [Teacher’s Name],
I am writing this email at the beginning of what will be, unfortunately for you, a long year. Our daughter, Megan, will be in your class this year. Megan has reactive attachment disorder (RAD), not uncommon for Romanian orphans. It helps to understand that the underlying drive for children with RAD is to maintain control over their lives. They never learned that they can trust another person to take good care of them. They have never enjoyed the pleasures of giving themselves up for comfort and protection. They learned manipulation—what they need to do in order to get something from “caregivers” who don’t care.
Megan has a form of the disorder that is called disinhibited RAD. As the name implies, she has few natural inhibitions. For instance, she has always been indiscriminately affectionate with strangers. She will come into your classroom as an eager, bright, fun-loving hugger. She will have much to say about your lovely room and your jewelry and the amazing things you know. Then, after a month or two, Megan will become moody and will occasionally be hysterical when she has trouble with some task. She will mumble or slur her words—all of this to draw you away from the others and toward her. At some point she will begin to openly defy you. And if you are missing something, she has taken it…
This letter had grown longer over the years and was now, in its final iteration, up to seven pages, with endless suggestions on how to handle Megan’s various attempts at deception.
While Davis pawed through the junk drawer for large safety pins, he pictured Megan letting a finger trail down Lindstrom’s cheek, laughing wildly at his jokes, and then he imagined the bachelor Lindstrom blushing and appraising his pursuer, because she was an extremely attractive young woman: a tall, strong Romanian warrior-princess, blond and fair-skinned, with a slight bump on her nose and generous lips. Many found it hard to keep their perspective when she turned on the charm and affection. Imagining her doing to Lindstrom what he’d watched her do to neighbor Tom made Davis’s hands shake inside the drawer. He reminded himself to breathe in through the mouth and out through the nose. In through the mouth and out through the nose.
“Megan,” Davis called up the stairs, “I have something for you.” He’d decided to present Lindstrom with an angry Megan.
She barreled down the stairs like a kid promised a present and came around the corner, where she saw the arm on the counter. “I didn’t do it!” Already the screaming.
“What happened, Megan?” he asked calmly.<
br />
“Mom did it! I swear! I swear!”
“Mom did it,” he repeated.
“God! I knew you wouldn’t believe me! Ask her! Go on, ask her!”
“It’s another crazy lie, Megan. She won’t cover for you.”
“Mom!” Megan called as she thundered across the kitchen, her fury weighing a ton. She tore open the back door. “Mom!”
When Jenny appeared, leaves sticking to her pants, she put it together quickly. “Yes, sorry, Davis, I knocked that off.” She was red-faced and a little out of breath from raking. “I’ll have it fixed. Professionally.”
Megan gave him a self-satisfied look. “See, that’s—”
“You may return to your room,” he told her.
“Don’t you want to apologize?”
“I’d go up to your room right now if I were you.”
When the stair-stomping ended, Davis guided Jenny back outside and to a far corner of the yard, where he dropped her arm. “This is the biggest mistake of your life. You cannot cover for her. This erases all of our work.”
“I’m not covering!”
“That arm was ripped off of him! It’s in retaliation for my retrieving her at the fair yesterday. She must have practically hung from the arm to get it off.”
“No, it’s old, and it fell off. I didn’t even bump into it very hard.”
“You’re going to continue with this?” He reared back. “Knowing the consequences?” Then he flipped one finger out to start the counting. One: “She’ll never take ownership of her actions again. Her MO will be to beg someone else to cop to whatever she’s done.” Two, three, and four: “She’ll be fired from jobs, evicted from apartments, living in our house forever.”
“I can’t believe you think I’d lie.” She turned to fetch her rake.
“We need to talk to Peggy about this and also about the phone. I am still against the phone!” He pulled his suit coat tight against the cool wind and marched back across the lawn.
# # #
Sadly, Eric Lindstrom declined an alcoholic drink, and this meant that Jenny, who had salivated for days over the possibility of knocking back a few strong ones in jovial company, was somewhat bitter during the dinner. Davis sat at the other head of the oval table, where he watched her steal sidelong looks at the little bar on wheels she had set up and that held the newly purchased gin and vodka, the sliced limes, the garlic-stuffed olives. Their party life had been over for many years now and would evidently stay that way for some time to come. Davis should have guessed that Lindstrom was too much of a health nut to partake. Late thirties, he was, but still with boyish good looks, fit and trim, and with a crisp wardrobe. Davis’s new boss was sitting across from Megan, listing in detail for her the pros and cons, the reasons for and against his making the move up here to “the middle of nowhere” (for God’s sake!) and taking on this challenging job “to revive the department,” as Lindstrom described it—which task Davis felt he had already accomplished with his infectious interests.
The Futility Experts Page 2