by Noah Hawley
She inhaled, chewed off some of her lipstick, then blew smoke from her nose.
“Taste,” she says, “is in the eye of the beholder.”
Monty and the client came out of the bar, arm in arm. They were laughing about something. Joy dropped her cigarette, ground it out with her heel.
“Okay,” she said. “Ready for round one?”
A town car was waiting at the curb. They climbed inside and set out for the first hot spot. Everywhere they went, David was amazed at the way they just slipped right in, past doormen and security, the velvet rope coming up the minute they arrived. It turned out everybody knew Joy, all the bouncers from the outer boroughs, all the party planners with the tight blond ponytails and baseball caps. She carried with her an expanding bubble of coolness. It was a holographic projection. If you were with her, no matter how poorly dressed you were, how hangdog your face, you were somebody. Of course, David realized there was money involved. That it wasn’t just her atmosphere that got them in, but by nine o’clock he was convinced that she could have whisked him into a presidential inaugural after-party with nothing but a smile. Two hours later they were in a retro basement disco in Queens. Monty and the client were on the dance floor, ties off, shirts unbuttoned, getting down with two thick-hipped women of questionable beauty who worked in advertising. David sat in a corner booth, sipping a vodka cranberry and checking his watch. He felt like a sponge, a cloud, an alien sent down from another planet to research the strange mating rituals of humans. But then he had always been detached; of a thing, but also somehow outside it. Even at his most Zen, his most immersed, there was some part of his brain that remained absent, disengaged. Joy came off the dance floor and sat down next to him.
“Not much of a dancer, are you?” she said.
“I prefer traditional folk dances,” he told her. “The polka, the tarantella, and that Russian thing where you squat and kick your legs out.”
She ordered a drink from the waitress. He watched her. She seemed so cool and self-assured, and yet just under the surface he could see the part of her that still couldn’t believe she was a grown-up, that she could stay out as late as she wanted. Right there behind her glowing, perfect skin was that awkward adolescent whose body had grown up overnight and suddenly seemed foreign, clumsy. The lanky kid with braces who suddenly realizes she’s got breasts.
“So how does a person get into this line of work?” he said. “What do you do?”
She brushed the hair from her face. To be heard she had to put her face near his and yell. He could smell her perfume, her sweat.
“I like to go out,” she said, “have fun. I never thought it was something I could make money doing, but then my friend saw this ad in the Voice.”
Her drink arrived. She raised her glass.
“To the tarantella,” she said and smiled, and in that moment he knew he would do whatever it took to make this woman love him.
They talked for an hour, sharing stories, background information. David told her about being a sales rep for a major pharmaceutical company, the bottomless expense accounts and private skyboxes at sports arenas.
“I could go to Saks right now,” he said, “and buy you a mink coat, tell my boss you were a senator’s daughter, and no one would question it.”
“I need a new stereo,” she told him.
“Give me your address,” he said. “I’ll have one shipped.”
She took a cocktail napkin, wrote down an address in Brooklyn. Watching her, he felt a thrill he had forgotten existed. To meet someone new, make a connection, to have her write in her own hand an address or phone number, penning the digits in the personal, cursive scrawl she has practiced since childhood, with its sloppy B’s and heart-shaped O’s. It seemed, at that moment, like the most tremendous intimacy. The address, the street name, all embodied an actual place, an apartment with a doorbell, a bathroom—sink covered with makeup kits and moisturizers, shower with loofah sponge hanging, curtain still beaded with the dew of this morning’s shower. The address was a place and the place had a bed and the act of writing it down was an invitation. It was a promise: You will come over. We will drink wine from water glasses and undress to music. You will see the dresser I keep my underwear in, will piss in my toilet and brush your teeth using my paste and your finger. You will taste my darkest places on the base of your tongue. The address might as well have been written on a condom wrapper. Phone numbers were suggestive, certainly, but not definite. A phone number could be fudged, the promise of sex undelivered. Six digits instead of seven, messages left but unreturned. An address was the greatest intimacy. It was a flash of nipple, a tongue in your ear. David felt himself harden as Joy wrote the address down and handed the napkin over.
“I have a lot of books,” she said. “So maybe bookshelf speakers.”
“I’ll make a note of it,” he said, and slipped the napkin into his jacket pocket. Yes, he’d had a few drinks, but he felt clear. He felt that crisp, winter clarity—the focus of a crystalline day after it’s snowed, where the sky is so blue and your breath forms clouds in front of you. A hunter’s clarity, crouched in a forest, bowstring pulled taut, your prey grazing innocently on a patch of grass that juts up from the frozen earth. These are the moments in life when you realize that everything happens for a reason. Moments of prognostication, when you can feel the thing happening before it does. Looking at Joy, seeing the slight flush in her cheeks, the arch of her eyebrows, the telltale signs of her interest, he could see before it happened the first touch—hands across a restaurant table—could picture the first kiss, a stolen hit-and-run in the back of a taxicab, before she leapt out and ran off into the night, a kiss he would feel rather than taste, a heady collision that would leave him tracing his lips with his fingertip as the cab rocketed uptown. He could already hear her voice on the phone, could half remember her murmured endearments as if she had already spoken them. Seeing her turn her head to the dance floor, the impossible grace of her long neck, the thrilling foreignness of her thick blonde hair, he knew before he knew it that this woman would be his.
Doris and Scott show up at five, descending from the main airport concourse to the baggage-claim area in an elevator. Scott is pushing a wheelchair, Doris seated before him in a black turtleneck, her clunky red purse clutched firmly to her lap. David watches them emerge from the elevator, and is seized by a sudden panic. They haven’t seen him yet, and for a moment he has the urge to hide, to duck down behind a stack of oversized bags and let them wander past. But he doesn’t, because he’s a grown-up. Hiding is something Scott would do. It is the act of a single man, a man with no responsibilities other than to himself. David is a father, and thus reliable, steady. A man who does the right thing. And besides, Christopher is next to him, holding his hand, and how would it look to his son if David bolted from his own family, took off in a desperate crouch, weaving serpentine, racing for the parking lot? He looks down, sees his son still flushed from his victory at the dojo, lost in some private daydream. If he were being honest, David would admit that he brought the boy as a kind of human shield, a conversation piece that will keep the focus of this family reunion off the box of ashes that Scott and Doris are hauling around in their carry-on, ashes that have now crossed state lines, ashes that represent the final remains of his recently deceased father. Having Christopher here will keep things light, he hopes. In this way, the boy is an offering, a sacrifice.
He steps forward, waving.
“Well, well,” he says. “How was the flight?”
He leans down and kisses his mother on one fuzzy cheek. He and Scott eye each other for a moment before hugging. There is still, in those initial moments, the memory of childhood, a memory that makes the hug feel artificial, the way you feel when you’re a kid and a grown-up offers to shake your hand. Children hit the people they love. They hold hands. They don’t shake them. He feels Scott’s body against his, at once familiar and foreign.
“Have you been working out?” he asks when they separate.
“I started running,” Scott tells him, and the phrase itself is symbolic on so many levels.
“Christopher,” says David, “say hi to your grandmother.”
Christopher steps forward awkwardly. He has seen Doris only a few times in his life. She pats him on the head.
“Nice to see you, ma’am,” he says. Ma’am? thinks David. Where did he get “ma’am”? First the praying, now the down-home politeness. Christopher might as well be a preacher’s son, for all the recognition David feels in these moments.
Scott scoops the boy up, hugs him like a life preserver.
“I broke a board,” Christopher tells him excitedly. “I broke it with my fist.”
“Wow,” says Scott, “really?”
Christopher squirms and struggles, dropping to the ground. He reenacts the pivotal moment.
“Hai,” he yells, thrusting his arm forward. David can see the confusion on his mother’s face. She is not comfortable around children. They are too reckless, too loud. There is always the danger that they will break you somehow, with their roughhousing and crazy, pell-mell running.
“He’s so big,” she says.
David nods, though to him his son is tiny, a runt. They have talked about steroids, he and Tracey, about growth hormones, but she says have faith. He’ll grow. They head over to the conveyor and stand waiting for their luggage. The Land Rover is parked in short-term parking. Tracey, Chloe, and Sam are at home making last-minute preparations, Doris-proofing the house.
“Did you bring the…” he asks Scott in a quiet voice. Ashes, he means ashes.
“They’re in your mother’s suitcase,” Scott says.
“You checked them? Dad’s ashes?”
“Apparently you have to,” says Scott. “They don’t want them in the passenger compartment, like maybe you would use them as a weapon or something. It’s beyond me, but you can’t argue with these people—airport security—they’ll just take you to some fluorescent room and stick their hand up your ass.”
“How was the flight, Mom?” David asks. His son is fascinated by Doris’s wheelchair. He’s hanging off it, his butt inches above the floor, kicking his legs.
“I had to use the oxygen,” she says, the chair jerking from Christopher’s weight. “Does he have to do that?”
“Chris,” says David, “can you go look for Grandma’s luggage?”
“Black,” she says, “with a red scarf around the handle.”
Chris runs to the mouth of the conveyor, watches as the bags are disgorged.
“I got you a room at the Bel-Air,” David tells her. “They have beautiful grounds.”
“As long as there’s someone there who can bring me a bottle of wine,” she says. “I need a drink.”
David and Scott exchange a look. The look embodies in seconds the following conversation:
David: She looks terrible. Has she been like this the whole time?
Scott: You have no idea.
David: Should we say something? The last thing I want is to confront her. It’s easier to just let it go, muscle through the next week. I mean, it’s not like she’s going to change.
Scott: So, what? We just continue to look the other way, continue to open the bottles, to flush the cigarette butts, and say nothing, do nothing?
David: I’ll say something if you do. If you go first.
Scott: It’s exhausting. The whole thing. I’m exhausted.
David: We’re in this together now, though, right? You’re not going to ditch me.
Scott: You mean the way you ditched me years ago to deal with them all by myself, to fly around the country, to spend nights in the emergency room, to help him off the toilet, help him wipe his ass?
David: Don’t lecture me about emergency rooms. I’ve been just as involved as you. Maybe not recently, but I have a family, responsibilities.
Scott: If you say that word again I’m going to punch you. I have responsibilities, too. I wish we could just go back to being kids. I wish we could have our parents back. I wish, I wish, I wish.
David: Don’t get emotional. I hate when you get emotional.
Scott: God forbid you should be uncomfortable or emotional after your dad died. God forbid you should fall apart a little. Show some kind of grief. Lose control. For fuck sake, go to pieces.
David: Do you really want to do this now? Here? Because if we’re judging, I’ve got some things I could say about how you live your life.
Scott: (staring, reconsidering)—
David: (staring, backing down)—
“That one’s mine,” says Doris, pointing. Christopher grabs the suitcase, tries to muscle it from the conveyor, but it’s too heavy. David goes over to help him.
They ride home from the Burbank airport in the silver Land Rover, climbing Coldwater Canyon, turning onto Mulholland Drive. It is a low-smog day and from the hills they can see the swimming pools of the valley stretching out below them. There is a box in Doris’s luggage filled with ashes. It is traveling at thirty-one miles per hour, just like the car. It remains at a resting temperature of seventy-two degrees, having been super-cooled earlier by the luggage compartment of the 737. How strange it is to imagine your body traveling without you after death, the physical remains of what you once were now reduced to a smaller, more portable size. David can sense the ashes with them in the car, can feel their import, their weight. He drives carefully on the windy roads, not wanting to imagine the contents shifting like the inside of an hourglass.
They pull into the driveway of David’s home, a large four-bedroom in Beverly Hills. It is the house of a successful man, a vice president. A house with a green lawn watered and mowed by Mexicans. A house with hedges and a swimming pool. He helps carry their bags inside, Christopher running ahead, yelling we’re here. We’re here.
Tracey comes out to greet them, smiling, laughter in her voice. She is wearing jeans and a knit top. Her hair is up, face fresh and welcoming. She greets Scott and Doris warmly, offers them something to drink. Seeing her, feeling her expansive, welcoming energy, David thinks, I can do this. We can, together. Thank God I’m not alone. I have my family to protect me from my family. Watching Tracey move between him and his mother and brother, like an offensive lineman throwing blocks for a running back, David loves his wife more than anything. She will save him. The kids swarm around, lit up by the novelty, wanting to show off, to be noticed, appreciated. He can see discomfort on his mother’s face. It’s too much for her. She likes quiet, calm. She wants a glass of wine, a comfortable chair. The crazy thing is, he remembers her being fun when he was a kid, playful. He remembers her as a woman who wasn’t afraid to get down on the floor and get dirty, a mother who liked to prompt her kids’ imagination, a woman who had fun. How did she turn into this frightened, joyless shell? But, of course, he knows how. Two decades of booze, a decade of sickness and struggle, all leading to this moment: isolation, widowhood. His mother has become the kind of person who feels alone even when she’s surrounded by others, because her filter is gone. She doesn’t live in this world, remember. She lives on the moon, on an asteroid orbiting high above Earth, and now that her husband is dead, she is alone up there, spinning around on a cold, lifeless rock, stuck on the dark side of the planet.
They settle into the living room. Scott and Doris sit on the sofa. David and Tracey are on chairs, like it’s an interview, like Scott and Doris have applied for some domestic position—butler, maid. Tracey has Sam on her lap and he’s fumbling with her breast, trying to free it from her shirt. The older kids have been dispatched to the yard to give the grown-ups a chance to talk. Promises have been made to get them to go. Scott is on the hook for a ball game and to read some books and see Chloe’s dollhouse and whatever else the kids can think of.
“So,” says Tracey, after the final decibel of kiddie chaos recedes.
Nobody speaks.
“How was the flight?” she continues.
Doris shrugs.
“It’s only two hours. I though
t it would be longer.”
“No,” says David, “just two.”
“Which surprised me, really,” says Doris, “because I thought, two hours, I can’t understand why you don’t come up more.”
Ah, thinks David, a trap.
Tracey, the offensive lineman, steps forward, intercepting the rush.
“We would love to,” she says, “but with the new baby…Three kids are so much harder than two.”
Doris sips her wine. Her eyes tell the story, that look of wounded judgment.
Scott takes over, moving to block the next blitz, shifting focus.
“How’s business?” he asks David.
David sits back. He is wearing his standard uniform, khakis and a button-down shirt. His hair is trimmed every week. He shaves religiously each morning, admiring the smooth planes of his face in the mirror.
“Sales are up,” he says. “We made a huge foray into China last year. It’s such an untapped market. I mean, they’re still using powdered monkey butts to treat their headaches, for God’s sake.”
“Well,” says Scott, “powdered monkey butts…” But he loses the joke and spends a moment chewing his tongue, trying to get it back. They wait for him to recover, but he doesn’t.
“The company asked me to help open the Beijing office,” says David. “It’s a great opportunity, but I couldn’t do that to the kids. Going to New York every week is hard enough.”
“I know,” says Tracey. “We hate having him gone so much.”
The kids run through the living room, circle the couch twice, then tear back out into the yard. Doris watches them, squinting.
“Does the girl…,” she says.
“Chloe,” says Scott.
“Does Chloe have breasts? How old is she?”
Tracey and David exchange a look.
“She’s developing a little early,” Tracey admits. “But it’s perfectly normal. The doctor says kids are doing that more and more these days.”
“Normal? She’s what, six?”