Kay’s footsteps disappeared down the stairs. Deb would talk to her daughter now, finally. She would hear all she had to say. But first she tried Jack once more, this time getting nothing, not even the rings.
Jolie gave Jack a grand tour that afternoon, safe within the confines of her arctic SUV, cold air pouring from every vent and blowing motes into his mouth and up his nose. She drove him in circles around the empty square where his piece would be, not even stopping to get out and walk around. Then up to the school’s prize building, an auditorium that had been one of the last designs of a Very Famous Architect. He felt like he was on the plane again, anytime his arm drifted toward the ledge of the rolled-up window, Jolie looking at him like she was afraid of getting sucked out.
“Okay!” She parked, and only from the gutted square on the other side of the curb, a dirt hole where there should have been a palm tree, could Jack tell they were in a different lot from before. Jolie was between the seats, twisted as far around as her seat belt would allow, grabbing a large patent leather purse with one hand and stirring everything around in it with the other.
“What’s next?” Jack drummed his fingers on the computer in his lap (no babies, dogs, or electronics were to be left in the heat). Did he sound genial? Genial was what he was aiming for.
“Next…” Her voice trailed off and she forgot to answer. “Shoot. Ah! Herewego.” She wriggled back the other way, holding forth one of the five or six worst things Jack could imagine, outside of, you know, a shiv. A digital camera, lime green. “Next we’ll go up and talk to some of the grad students real quick.” She licked her finger and scraped dirt off the screen with her nail.
“You know, this visit, it was just to see the space. I haven’t prepared anything.”
“You just be yourself.” The camera bugled on. “You don’t have to say a thing.”
Fathers have a way with daughters that mothers never do. Deb had never known Kay to stay mad at Jack, or to deny him anything. And Deb couldn’t hold it against her; things had been the same way with her own dad. If her mother dressed Deb’s wounds, her father was the one who kissed them to make them better. It was Ruth who’d scratched the satin from Deb’s first pair of pointe shoes, who’d singed the ribbons to keep them from fraying and knelt with her daughter on the driveway, pounding the toe boxes against the asphalt while Norman sat in the living room with his tray dinner and TV. “Who won?” he’d say when they came in after.
Women were the real workers of the family; men got to be allies to their children. It was Ruth who’d scheduled Deb’s audition at the school in New York, who waited among the other nervous mothers in the room outside, hands folded with mysterious calm over her handbag that always had gum and Band-Aids and tissues in it. And when the call came, when Deb was accepted, it was Ruth who drove the hour each way into the city, four, five, then six days a week, for classes after school and all day Saturday. Deb still didn’t really know what her mother had done those Saturdays. Maybe took herself to eat, took herself shopping, window-shopping.
Norman came to this and that performance. He said, You’ll be great. You were great. You were the prettiest. You had the nicest what-do-you-call-it. Your shape was the nicest of any of them, all those bunheads. Best legs in the group. My girl. And she’d loved him for it.
—
On their walks Deb and Kay went no particular where. This time Deb asked the clerk at the souvenir shop down the road about a piney old pub where she and Jack used to drink red ale, marooned on a residential street that the town had since grown away from. Through the shop window he pointed and she traced a line from his finger with imaginary string, across the water, where the coast curved and ebbed out again.
They set out on the broken road, inching along at first, trying to keep pebbles out of their open shoes. When that grew tiresome they let the outside in to mingle with their feet. A grassy field, tall and thick with ticks, thrived beside a dead meadow, as though the two lived in different atmospheres.
Deb stopped every so often to point out a flower she couldn’t name or the way light changed the color of the leaves. “Look at that. Isn’t that beautiful?” She’d always wanted to be a person who felt close to nature. Such a practical bond to have; nature was free and it was everywhere.
Kay answered, “Uh-huh,” or nodded vaguely. She didn’t suspect that she’d ever wish to grow such interests.
“You remind me of what you used to say, about where you wanted to grow up. Do you remember what you’d say?”
“That was stupid.”
“Why? I don’t think so.”
“Mom, because. Nobody lives in Times Square.” But Kay had wanted to, to live where the lights were always on and there were always people and so you were never lonely.
“Well. I understood,” Deb said, thinking the city had done that to her daughter: safety in other people, safety in strangers. “I thought it made a lot of sense.”
Forest green siding, BAR & GRILL neon never turned on—Central Bay Pub had not changed a day, apart from having reversed itself completely. Deb was sure it had been on the other side of the road.
Inside, the different wood tones bounced off the shuttered windows and brass, turning the day into night. Deb led the way to the bar, where they had their pick of where to sit, and watched her daughter struggle onto a high stool. A faded Orangina poster hung on a wall through the kitchen. They ordered two of those.
“Honey,” Deb started. “I’m sorry. I’m going to bring this up again, and I don’t want you to get mad at me.”
“I know what you’re going to say already.”
“Well, okay, but it’s not about that. Sweetie? It’s about what you have to say. And, I just want to listen. And, any questions you might have—about anything, all this stuff, sex stuff— Don’t roll your eyes at me. I mean it.” She squeezed her daughter’s knee. “Anything that you have questions about or, because, believe me, you aren’t going to shock me, all right?”
Kay was quiet. Then to her glass she said, “I just don’t get what’s the big deal.”
“About what?”
“Like, if this is just what happens. I don’t get why we have to be so upset.”
“You don’t have to be upset—I’m glad if you’re not.”
“No, but I am. I just don’t get why.” Kay covered her face and breathed out her nose. “It’s so stupid.”
“I know. It’s strange. You want to think that what someone does with someone else has nothing to do with you. And yet it does. That’s why we have these rules, to protect us from getting hurt.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Am I hurt? Um, hm…Would yes be too scary an answer?”
Kay swished her hair, no.
“Then yes. I was hurt. Yes, what your father did was very hurtful to me.” Maybe it wasn’t right to let Kay see her angry, letting her know that this was a thing to be angry about, but Deb, sorry, wasn’t a saint, and did, maybe, in bursts, want her daughter to be a little bit angry too. It hurt to see Kay, after everything, reach for that telephone, want Jack anyway, want to love him. It was where her daughter looked most like herself. She thought of her own mother, how she’d overheard Ruth once telling a friend, Well, you know Deborah. She was the child who learned to walk by never letting go of anything.
Kay began scrunching the paper wrapper down her straw. “So why do they do it, if it’s going to hurt us? Because it feels good? That’s it?” She wet the wrapper with a few soda drops and watched it unfurl like a snake.
“There are a lot of reasons,” Deb said, though her daughter’s had bottom-lined them all.
—
On the walk back, the telephone poles began to look like stripped, alien trees, without the armor of bark. They could see the coves of Newport across the bay, the roads that wound around them, in perfect miniature, cars with their high beams curving in and out of sight and new ones replacing them, as if on a loop.
“We don’t have to call him,” Kay said. “Dad.”
Deb stopped. “Why not? It’s perfectly normal if—I mean, we still can. We totally, totally can.”
“I just don’t want to anymore.”
Jack thought they were going to a studio, but Jolie was passing the studios, also a sign for metal shop and another for neon, and when they got to the third floor, he understood they were going to a reception. Always there was a reception—everywhere he was being received, couldn’t anymore just arrive. And then never a very elaborate reception—nothing like what the Very Famous Architect would get if he came, if he were alive with nothing better to do outside Tempe. A reception was an evaluation he hadn’t wanted, his career laid out in rows of weak, sweet supermarket wine, prepoured a third of the way, his worth measured in cheapie plastic cups on a tablecloth made of hospital gown.
Here the four or five faculty members also wore name tags, and the students, not that there were many of them, not more than twelve, they wore tags too. The only one aside from Jack without a label was Jolie, who had him wrapped up in her little arm now, taking him in turns around the room like a show pony. And it wasn’t that the nearer she got to him the more he wanted to run. On the contrary—paradoxically! the inverse!—he found the more he wanted to run, the nearer he let himself be. He tuned out the room, drank wine when he was led to it, let Jolie answer his questions and brush his tail. He neighed every time, on cue.
—
A long hour later, they were at a dark bar across the road from the Super 8, brass-stemmed lampshades reaching down from the ceiling. Jolie had announced, in the elevator down from the reception, “I don’t know about you, but I could use a stiff one.” By which it turned out she meant a Sex on the Beach, ordered loudly. Jack drank Scotch and together they split a basket of fries.
“So I’m sorry to hear about your show,” she said. Jack looked at her and swallowed loosely, letting some spirit linger on his tongue, sink into the space where his gums met the soft slippery insides of his cheeks. “The explosion and all that.”
“Yes, I knew what you meant.”
“We still want the piece, if that’s what you were worried about.” She sucked in her cheeks as she drank. A smidge of lipstick kissed off on the straw. “If that’s why you came all this way.”
“I told you, I wanted—”
“To see the space. I know.” She broke a fry in two—they were the thick kind, wedge cut—and held the halves to her lips. “Just saying.”
Jolie ate more fries and Jack drank more Scotch. She said no to another drink, and Jack pushed back his stool and walked over to the bar.
He ordered two, took one like a shot right there. Jolie had her head down, her phone to one ear, and a finger in the other.
“My son,” she said, hanging up as he came back with his third.
“You could’ve stayed on.”
“No, it’s fine. It was a message. I was leaving a message.” She looked around the room. “You think it’s quiet enough that he heard?”
A jukebox in the corner looked like it was just for show, with at best a radio inside it, and there was no one at the pool table either. “I’d say there’s very little noise.”
She nodded. “He’s—you know, he’s wanting to join the army. Or, the navy, he’s wanting to join. They say that’s supposed to be safer. He says.”
“You don’t look old enough for an eighteen-year-old.”
She laughed. “You don’t look old enough for a line like that.” Most of the fries were gone, and there was still some peach schnapps pooled at the candied-cherry bottom of her glass, but he thought Jolie was a little drunk too.
—
He was aware of her crossing the street with him while he booked the room, and he was aware of her following him up and down the hall, of her shouting “Bingo” when she found the room number before he did. Probably she said something about getting him settled in or wanting to freshen up; he didn’t listen.
The room was wall-to-wall green carpet and two huge beds of depressing floral, quilted and sheeny like the insides of caskets. He sat at the foot of one while Jolie ran the bathroom faucet. He was tired all of a sudden. Everything in the world was conspiring to make him tired. Sleep made him tired. Coffee made him tired. Scotch. Receptions. Handshakes. Two Melissas. The price of things, that all things had a price.
Brown Bear. Brown Bear made him tired, plus old. Also? When the woman you’ve lived with fifteen years decides she won’t understand you anymore. When you know she could, only she doesn’t want to.
And Jolie, at the bar, that moment with her son. When she had seemed to him sad, and a bit pretty—even then she made him tired. That she was losing her son, that Jack was losing, well, everyone, that everyone loses everyone, eventually. How can anything make you more tired than that.
So Jolie came out of the bathroom with her hands still wet, and she put one of those hands on his hip, and she rocked a minute where she stood, or the vodka rocked her, and the rocking was like a blip in the system that told him this too was not real. They both were tired from so much lost, and nothing was real, to either of them.
Jack moved her thumb out from inside his belt loop and said good night.
—
He could lie down knowing he’d done the right thing, sending her home, making himself alone. He arranged his weight on one of the beds and from his pocket pulled a yellow-wrapped piece of taffy. He’d taken some the second time it was offered, with Jolie waving the bowl at him—“Now & Later?”—and without Kevin around he’d only varied the joke: “Maybe a Later.”
He gnawed at the wrapper with his bottom teeth and was hit right away with that banana smell that no actual banana ever had. His cell was dead, so he used the room phone to dial out, dial Deb, but he got only her voice mail and everything sticky. “Hey. It’s Jack. I mean, it’s me.” Even drunk he could hear how drunk he sounded. He told her where he was staying, and he could not find any extension on the base of the phone, not even the room number, “but if you give my name at the desk, I’m sure they’ll patch you through. Seems like we keep missing each other.” No good, this missing each other. Different pages.
He didn’t have the car. It was still in the parking lot outside the art museum. He flopped back on the bed and dragged his laptop onto his stomach to rise and fall with his breathing. The hotel Wi-Fi, big surprise, wasn’t working.
Different pages. Another taffy. Only yellow, these taffies? He realized he’d done the wrong thing with Jolie, letting her drive when she was that way.
You know you’ve hit bottom when you want for solitaire, for Minesweeper. What can you do without Internet, and not even any music on the machine, which had been for email almost exclusively. Email and also a few audio files, here. He’d never played them, but right away he knew what they were, and right away he knew that he would.
Double-clicking the earliest, he heard their first clear error, by no means the biggest of mistakes they would make. They’d used the recording software that came free with his machine (but no games?), and neither he nor the girl had known about the metronome that had to be toggled off. So it had stayed on, ticking like a clock or a sterile heart, keeping time with them, with how much time they had.
Okay. I think it’s recording. Is this okay?
Doesn’t bother me.
Um. So I’m just going to start. I have this list of questions, but we can deviate from them.
Sounds fine.
Do you think it’s an artist’s obligation to address current events?
Current events?
Like September eleventh.
So really we’re just talking about one event.
For the purposes of this conversation. Yes.
Okay. Obligation? Do I think the artist is obligated? No.
I think, good luck to her if she thinks she can avoid addressing what you call current events. What’s so fucked up in the world.
So nine-eleven was something you couldn’t avoid addressing?
I had to get it out of my system, I gu
ess. I guess you could say that. At the time, you have to understand, I was working only a few blocks from the World Trade Center. I was there that morning.
I wanted to ask you about that. You’ve since moved uptown. This interview is taking place at your studio in Hell’s Kitchen.
I’m sorry, is that a question?
What motivated your move?
To Hell’s Kitchen? I liked the sound of it. We’re above a methadone clinic, I don’t know if you noticed. So there’s the atmosphere. And it’s cheaper. They say prices downtown fell after nine-eleven, but no one told my landlord.
So safety had nothing to do with it?
I don’t believe lightning would strike twice. Grand Central Station, Madison Square Garden. Maybe there.
Really they should watch the Empire State Building. The Chrysler. That would be harder, for people. No one loved the Twin Towers, the structures themselves, like they do those buildings. The terrorists would know that
if they watched a couple of New York movies.
You say a lot of inflammatory things I think without realizing they’re inflammatory.
I realize.
You don’t care about upsetting people then.
I care. The bullshit is that after nine-eleven everyone felt like a real New Yorker? Fuck that. You can’t wait for tragedy.
You’re from Texas, aren’t you? Texas originally?
Houston, that’s right. My parents are there still.
I’m sorry, I thought your father—I thought he passed away?
Yes. I’m sorry, yes, that’s correct.
Talk a little bit about what you saw that Tuesday. How did you find out? Were you on the street?
I went out. I listen to the radio while I work. Can’t hear it half the time, when I’m cutting or welding, but that’s how I learned something happened. I saw, you know, what everyone saw. The stuff on television. The stuff that ran once on television and got pulled. People running. People tired from running. I remember I’d been walking a while in a loop when someone offered me a bottle of water. They thought I’d been, somehow, a victim. Maybe one of the ones who got out. I get dirty when I work.
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