Joyland Trio Deal

by Jim Hanas

  Kent suspected that Todd didn’t want to figure it out, that he enjoyed letting indecision weigh on him like damp clothing.

  Closing time approached and the restaurant’s terrace evaporated around them. The Mexican busboys hauled away the potted plants and the tables, and they retracted the oilcloth awning with a crank.

  “But how are you?” Todd asked, as though he had been feigning interest before and it was now time to be serious. “What’s it like having a family?”

  “Great,” Kent said, laughing. “What’s it like not having one?”

  “I don’t know,” Todd said. “It’s not like anything.”

  They swallowed the last of their drinks in silence at a lone table in the middle of the sidewalk, then returned to the apartment and lugged Todd’s bags up the back steps and into the spare room.

  And then he was gone. It was now Tuesday, and neither Kent nor Deana had seen any more evidence of their guest.

  Like his wife, Kent was not sure what to make of this, although he didn’t admit this to Deana as she finished preparing dinner and set out plates for them on the porch. He decided, instead, to act as though it made perfect sense. He would be the go-between, the peacemaker, even if he did think it was strange and, as Deana suspected, a statement.

  Kent walked down the hall to the spare room. He raised his hand to knock, but could not. The moment had passed. It was like failing to introduce yourself around early enough at a party. To do so now would be awkward.

  He walked back through the kitchen to the porch. He gulped some wine.

  “We’re going to a baseball game,” he said.

  “Really?” Deana said.

  “Tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Great,” she said, forcing a smile as they both eased into plates of cabbage and curried chicken. “You’re taking the day off?”

  “I’m all caught up,” Kent said. “How was your day?”

  “Okay,” Deana said, staring out past the corner store and the gas station to the fog rolling over the hills. “I think Kiki picked something up at the playground.”

  “Something like what?”

  “She’s been sneezing.”

  “Have you been sneezing?” Kent asked the baby, who sat in her car seat on the table between them.

  Kiki babbled.

  “How was work?” Kent asked.

  “Alright,” Deana said. “It was hard going back, but they got along.”

  “I had a hell of a day,” Kent began.

  “Kent,” Deana said.

  “But it’s funny to watch everyone scramble. With the new guy, I mean.”

  “Kent.”

  “Especially Rich. Follows the guy around like a damned duck.”

  “Sweetie.”

  “What?”

  “Do you think he’s alright?”

  “Rich?”

  Deana rolled her eyes. “Todd,” she said.

  “I told you. We’re going to the game.”

  “But you think he’s alright?”

  “I think so,” Kent said, chasing a scrap of cabbage across his plate with a fork.

  After dinner, Kent gave Kiki a bath. She burbled on and on, insisting — telegraphically, as always — that her father join her in the tub. He complied, and the two sat babbling to each other in a tiny sea of suds and plastic fishes. Deana stood on the back porch and smoked cigarettes from the pack she kept hidden in one of her flower boxes, an indulgence she never allowed herself while in charge of the baby.

  When Kent and Kiki dried off, the three reconvened in the bedroom to put the baby to bed. Deana slowly rocked Kiki in her arms while Kent read out loud. It was the easiest way. It didn’t matter what he read. He read from trade magazines, junk mail, and books he randomly pulled from the shelf above the bed. Tonight he read from a copy of Of Grammatology that Deana had acquired in college.

  “You can’t read that to the baby,” Deana whispered as she rocked from foot to foot and patted Kiki’s bald head.

  “What?” Kent said. “She can’t understand it. I can’t understand it.”

  After her first day back at work — a day spent contemplating what statements were or were not being made against her — Deana didn’t have the energy to fight. Kiki was asleep before Kent was through the footnotes on the first page.

  Deana lay down on the bed and put the baby on her back beside her.

  “Are you coming?” she asked.

  “In a minute,” Kent said, kissing both of them on their cheeks. “I’ve got a little work to do.”

  Kent went back through the kitchen to the porch. He retrieved the cigarettes from where Deana had hidden them and lit one off a candle that still burned on the table. He stood by the rail, looking out over the lights that dotted the hills. When he’d finished smoking, he ran water over the dishes in the sink and made sure the stove was off. On his way to bed, he saw that the light in the spare room was on. He pressed his ear to the door. He felt it with his hands, the way you’re supposed to in a fire. He got on his knees and stared at the sliver of light that appeared under the door. He whispered Todd’s name and and the sliver went dark. Kent got up, crawled into bed beside his wife and his daughter, and immediately fell asleep.

  Kent slept late. He watched as Deana got herself ready and passed Kiki off to Ginn, who arrived at eight, just like yesterday, now that Deana was back to work. Ginn was a bubbly student from the art school and too sweet to be believed. He didn’t know where Deana had found her. There were ways women met women that he didn’t know anything about.

  After Deana left, he listened as Ginn prepared to take the baby for a walk. It was a big production. Ginn, who projected a childishness that Kent found painful, knew many more games than Agree with the Baby. She knew Sing to the Baby, Dance with the Baby, Dance for the Baby, Try to Explain Drum and Bass to the Baby, and the popular Confide in the Baby About Your Love Life, a round of which he happened to overhear this morning.

  “You’re lucky,” Ginn was telling Kiki. “You’re a lucky baby because babies don’t deal with boys.”

  Kent felt a little guilty about not liking Ginn, in part because he knew that he didn’t really dislike her. There was not a piece of furniture in the house that he had not imagined screwing her on top of or against. Her body, covered by shapeless sweaters and paint-stained peasant skirts, was made all the more lust-inspiring by this concealment. He constantly imagined how her breasts might dangle like enormous raindrops as he took her from behind. As a precaution against such thoughts, he waited for Ginn and the baby to leave before getting out of bed.

  After taking a shower, Kent got dressed in fan gear — jeans, a baseball cap, and a golf pullover — and approached the door of the guest room. He stood and listened, straining to detect signs of Todd. He heard the wind blowing through the drapes in the window on the other side of the door. He raised his hand and knocked lightly. He thought he heard the sound of someone rolling over in the room’s large feather bed — the only piece of furniture in the room, which was otherwise used for storing abandoned projects and broken appliances — but he could not be sure. He knocked louder, which made the room seem quieter still.

  “Todd,” he said. “Todd. You want to go to a game?”

  The game was a massacre. A waste of an afternoon.

  Kent bought a single ticket in the lower deck. He sat amid a bachelor party being held in honor of a pimply-faced transit worker whose elders spat volumes of tobacco juice that flowed down the park’s concrete risers, slowly and gruesomely, like a catastrophic mudslide. The sharp wind was made worse by the half gallon of beer that a melon-shaped toll booth attendant spilled across the entirety of Kent’s row. The man bought everyone a round, by way of apology, but the cold beer only deepened the chill.

  Kent returned home in a foul mood. He stalked through the living room, past Ginn and the baby, without even
bothering to mentally contort the nanny into the usual series of positions. He went into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. Deana would not be home for an hour. He pulled his beer-soaked sweater over his head and stretched out.

  “How was the game?”

  Kent woke up to find Deana standing over him.

  “Is that beer? Wow, you really smell like beer.”

  “It was a spill,” Kent said.

  “Well, how was it? How was the game?”

  “Good,” Kent said. “Fun. We lost, but fun.”

  “Where’s Todd?” she asked. She expected everything to be fixed.

  “I don’t know. In his room?”

  Deana waited.

  “Did he say anything about me?”

  “About you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, you know, about why he’s avoiding me and the baby.”

  “He didn’t mention it.”

  “Is he at least coming out for dinner?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Kent rose and paid Ginn for the day while Deana started on dinner. She was brutal with the preparations. Chipped Fiestaware clinked in the sink and the wok she had bought at a Chinatown bazaar sang like a gong as she bounced it off the stovetop.

  “Honey,” Kent said after Ginn had left. “Honey, listen.”

  “What!” Deana looked up from the cutting board where she was dissecting carrots with the concentration of a thrill killer.

  “Todd didn’t come out today,” he said. “He didn’t come to the game.”

  “What?”

  “I went by myself. I haven’t seen him or talked to him all day. If he’s making a statement against you, it’s a statement against me, too.”

  Deana fell into an exasperated pose and almost cut her thigh with the knife. A wave of tension broke across her brow, then crested again.

  “Is he fucking crazy?”

  “I would say he is distressed.”

  Deana took a whack at the carrots.

  “He’s leaving tomorrow,” Kent said. “I’ll drive him to the airport. You don’t have to worry. He’ll be gone.”

  Kent and Deana began their dinner silently, except for Kiki’s incessant burbling.

  Finally, Deana spoke.

  “He must be depressed,” she said. She had been thinking about it all this time. This was her considered opinion.

  “He has had a hard time,” Kent agreed. “With the job and with Elaine — how that turned out. It’s been tough.”

  “Maybe it’s been tough because he’s depressed,” Deana suggested, sticking to her diagnosis.

  “We used to have fun.”

  “We did, didn’t we?” Deana brightened at the thought.

  “Sure we did,” Kent said.

  “When we first started dating and you two were in law school and he was staying on your couch? We used to drink coffee all night and laugh.”

  “He was funny.”

  “He was funny,” Deana squealed. This realization made her happier than Kent had seen her in days. “He was so funny.”

  “He’s not dead,” Kent said. “He might still be funny.”

  “Are we sure? He could be dead. We don’t know.”

  Kent laughed.

  “I saw the light go off last night,” he said.

  “Could be a short. Maybe he’s not in there at all. Maybe he’s been abducted.”

  “By aliens?”

  “No, by gangbangers. Gangbangers have abducted our friend!”

  “I’ll call the police.”

  Deana laughed and gestured flamboyantly.

  “Well, we can’t pay the ransom,” she said. “We’ve got an extra mouth to feed.” She tickled the baby’s nose. “At least Kiki would tell someone if we were abducted by gangbangers, wouldn’t you?” she said.

  “They wouldn’t understand her, but she’d try. Wouldn’t you?” Kent said, grabbing one of the child’s tiny toes.

  Kent and Deana had so much fun, they stayed on the porch past bath time. They laughed about their memories of Todd and finished the bottle of wine. They put the baby to bed and Deana retrieved the cigarettes from the flower box and blew smoke toward the hills. Kent pretended to be surprised but smoked a few himself before they stumbled into the living room and had sex between the couch and the coffee table.

  They had forgotten all about Todd, wherever he was. As they lay beneath an afghan on the floor, Deana reminded Kent that he had to get up early to drive to the airport.

  “I’m sure the gangbangers will drop him off,” he laughed.

  Suddenly, the baby monitor in the kitchen crackled.

  “Yeees,” it said. “Yeees.”

  Kent jumped from the floor, wrapped the afghan around his waist, and stumbled awkwardly down the hall. He entered the bedroom to find Todd standing over Kiki’s crib.

  His beard was overgrown and he was wearing the same clothes he’d worn at the airport. “Yeees,” he was saying. “Yeees.” Deana appeared behind Kent in a towel.

  “She’s beautiful, you guys,” Todd said, looking up at them glassy-eyed. “She looks just like you both. I see you both in there.”

  Deana entered the room and took Kiki in her arms. She rocked from foot to foot and turned so Todd could see the baby’s face. They smiled at one another, Todd and the baby.

  “Mind if I take a shower?” Todd asked.

  “Go right ahead,” Kent said.

  Todd disappeared down the hallway and Kent fumbled with the alarm clock. Deana and Kiki lay down in the bed. Kent lay down beside them, and the entire family was asleep by the time Todd returned to the spare room and lay his damp body down on the cool sheets.

  Why They Cried

  Ted

  Cause: Unexpectedly moved by costume drama

  Ted did not understand turn-of-the-century costume dramas, and because he didn’t understand them, he often referred to them as “chick flicks” or “English crap.” Even when the principals were not British. Even when the principals were Winona Ryder.

  While watching such films, Ted often silently compared them unfavorably to gangster movies. Not just because the latter featured vicious slow-motion beat downs where the former had none, and not only because the latter included great pop music from the sixties and seventies while the former did not. Rather it was because when the wiseguy turned his back on the mob and found himself in the ticklish position of not being able to go to the cops, but also not being able to go to the mob, Ted understood. He felt the fear and claustrophobia. He knew there was nothing the wiseguy could do.

  On the other hand, when the bourgeois comer found herself compromised — because of talking, and whispering, and happening to be in the same room at the same time as husbands of various established socialites — and ultimately had to decide between honor and the disdain of these same socialites, Ted didn’t get it. These socialites were not so tough. They weren’t going to beat anyone to death or apply car battery terminals to anyone’s testicles.

  So it was indeed unexpected, when, as one particular turn-of-the-century costume drama neared its climax, Ted felt a small lump growing in his throat. Ted had not picked this movie. His girlfriend, Betsy, had decided it would be good, having read several reviews declaring it “masterful.” Ted had issued protests and grumblings. The words “chick flick” and “British” had been deployed. But, as the bourgeois comer descended into ether addiction, even though she had the means to free herself from her ruined reputation if she would simply use these means to cast a scandal on another socialite, Ted’s eyes became dewy. He suddenly understood the honor that kept her from this course, realizing that, yes, there were subtle, turn-of-the-century ways of administering slow-motion beat downs and applying psychic car batteries to emotional testicles.

  He felt t
he comer’s fear and claustrophobia as he sat there in the dark next to his girlfriend, to whom he had so earnestly grumbled about the whole idea. And as his eyes gushed and the credits ran over a still photograph of the comer — perished on her deathbed, cradled by the bachelor gentleman who understood — he was disturbed to look over at Betsy and discover that she was laughing at him very hard.

  Deano

  Cause: Ad agency sold to holding company at low multiple

  Financial advisors — and he had many — had advised Deano that the market for small, hip advertising boutiques — like the one he owned and was now selling — had been at an all-time peak six months ago, selling at mad cash prices, sometimes at eight or twelve times after-tax profit, but he had not listened. Not that he didn’t think they were right. He knew that agencies were selling at a heretofore all-time high. What he did not believe was that this all-time high was a forever and permanent all-time high. He thought it would go higher and then again higher — to twelve, maybe even twenty times after-tax profit — in a dizzying succession of all new all-time highs. That is what he thought, but he was wrong.

  When it came time to sell the agency — when the papers came for him to sign — it was a very bad deal. But he did not cry. This was business. He had gambled and he had lost. He signed the papers without a hint of regret and even pried open a case of champagne for his staff and offered a toast to the future.

  It was not until much later, at a bar where he had stopped for a nightcap, that he was surprised by a mirror above a urinal and, catching a glimpse of himself and recognizing himself as a man who had just sold an ad agency at a really very poor multiple, that he choked back the first of many tears.

  Jisette

  Cause: News of actor’s nuptials

  While many women (and some men) cried at the news of the actor’s nuptials, none cried more than Jisette, a beautiful and famous actress. But then she had enjoyed opportunities not available to the non-beautiful, non-famous members of the actor’s constituency. There was that long weekend spent lazing around a suite at the Beverly Wilshire between the Golden Globes and the Oscars with the suddenly now married actor, and then there was Cabo. This was before the current thing, and before the thing before the current thing.