The Smash-Up

by Ali Benjamin

  “I guess it’s sort of a…bluish gray?” he offers. But he can tell that this answer, too, is incorrect.

  The automated voice returns. We are experiencing an unusually high call volume. Please stay on the line enjoying our specially curated musical selection until the next available representative can take your call.

  “Well, if you’d have seen the fabric swatch, you’d have expected it to be blue too.” Zo tells him.

  “So let’s return it.”

  “We can’t. It was custom-made.”

  Behind his wife, on the wall, there’s a framed print, something Zo had gotten for him on his fortieth birthday. A silk-screen, block-letters, all-caps: GUESS THIS IS YOUR LIFE NOW.

  “You had a sofa custom-made?” he asks.

  “Online. One of those sites that cuts out the middleman, so it’s less expensive.”

  It’s less expensive, he supposes, unless it happens to be your third sofa in two years, a gray sofa ordered to replace a different gray sofa, which had replaced the perfectly fine, nothing-wrong-with-it-other-than-some-wine-stains-and-a-whole-lot-of-dog-hair olive sofa.

  Zo pulls a yellow throw pillow from a nearby chair, sets it on top. “Does that help?”

  In the great gray room, there’s a yellow square, and an angry wife, and a print on the wall, GUESS THIS IS YOUR LIFE NOW.

  “Sure, yeah.” He gestures vaguely toward the furniture pile, the carpets. “Zo, can we return any of this?”

  “The carpet?” she says, a little vaguely.

  “Which carpet?”

  “Maybe that one?” she says, pointing to the largest, fattest one, still in plastic. “I hadn’t really made up my mind, but I don’t love it.”

  We are experiencing an unusually high call volume. Please stay on the line enjoying our specially curated musical selection until the next available representative can take your call.

  Ethan resolves to return the carpet. Maybe Zo hasn’t made up her mind, but he sure has.

  * * *

  —

  Five minutes later, the same specially curated musical selection fills their master bath. Zo opens a jar of cream as Ethan unspools a line of dental floss. “So Randy finally called me back,” he says.

  “ ’Bout time.” She scoops out some white glop, begins rubbing it onto her chin.

  Ethan leans into the mirror. “So, it turns out, Bränd’s in a bit of a…transition. Randy says it’s been challenging.”

  “Not your problem, Ethan.” Zo’s fingers move in tiny circles up to her cheeks.

  “Well…” He wonders how much of the conversation he should share. “It kind of is.”

  “Don’t let Randy turn his problems into your problem. He’ll try to, you know he will. That’s his thing.”

  “That’s not his ‘thing,’ Zo.”

  “It’s totally his thing. It’s always been his thing. Randy’s whole life, other people have had to bend over backward to fix problems that he created, and for which he takes zero responsibility.” Zo leans into the mirror, lifts up the skin on her forehead with her palm, making her fine lines disappear. She lets go, lifts again. In the mirror, Ethan takes in his own swelling gut, the gray of his beard, those white chest hairs.

  Jesus, when did this happen to them?

  And is it wrong? Is it so wrong if part of him is still outside, with the stars and the whispering leaves? If the walk home with Maddy still lingers in his senses, the way a whiff of perfume might persist, or a particularly good dream?

  We are experiencing an unusually high call volume. Please stay on the line enjoying our specially curated musical selection until the next available representative can take your call.

  Ethan changes the subject. “Zo, you probably shouldn’t play songs like that in front of Alex.”

  “Songs like what?”

  “Like…the one you listened to tonight. At the end of your meeting.” The one where you wore ski-masks and danced like insane terrorists while our child mouthed words about her you-know-what being sweet just like a cookie.

  “It’s that band, Ethan. The feminist punk rockers who were thrown in prison in Russia a few years ago.”

  He doesn’t know that band. “Well, regardless. It’s not appropriate. Not for Alex.”

  “Hmm. And why’s that?” She says this vaguely, but Ethan can’t help feeling like Zo’s just laid some sort of trap.

  “Because she’s eleven,” he says. “What happens when she goes into school and says…that word?”

  “What word?”

  Yes. It’s a trap. Obviously he means the P-word, the sorta like another way to call a cat a kitten word. Zo knows better than anyone that Alex lacks an internal filter, an Edit button. So Zo can treat him like he’s ridiculous if she wants, but no: Alex isn’t ready for any words she wouldn’t be allowed to use in school.

  Ethan tosses the floss in the wastebasket, which is filled to overflowing with crumpled pages, all covered in Zo’s writing. Notes, it looks like. That’s a good sign, actually. Maybe she’s finally making some progress on that ESPN documentary.

  He moves toward the toilet, lifts the lid. “Come on, Zo, Alex is struggling enough in school, you know that. Can you even imagine how those administrators would respond if she interrupted their kumbaya singalongs by blurting out the P-word?”

  “Oh! Actually, that reminds me, Ethan. We’ve got that conference at school tomorrow—”

  But then the music on her phone breaks, and finally there’s an actual human voice, not an automated one, on the other end. Male, vaguely British-sounding, impeccably polite: “Good evening, this is Roger, how may I assist you tonight?”

  Zo takes the phone off speaker, presumably because Roger in customer service doesn’t need to hear the sound of Ethan’s piss hitting the bowl. “Hi, Roger,” Zo says coolly. “My name is Zenobia Frome. I’ve been a loyal customer for many years….”

  She walks into the living room, leaving Ethan in peace.

  That poor bastard, Roger. Some late-shift customer support worker having the worst night of his life, his politeness his only defense against an army of pissed-off liberals yelling at him as if there’s anything he can personally do about whatever the mega-corporation he works for happens to have done wrong.

  Ethan flushes, washes, brushes, spits. Drops his jeans in the laundry basket. Heading into the bedroom, he hears Zo say, “I know they gave you that statement to read, Roger. You’ve done your job well. Now, I’d like you to tell your superiors that their statement has failed to convince me. This is a deal-breaker for me. I’ll never again…”

  Ethan crawls into bed, listens to Hypatia snore. On his phone, there are, like, a million messages from Randy:

  Randy: E, u there?

  Randy: Don’t worry. I’ve got a plan

  Randy: It’s a simple plan, the right word at the right time, remember?

  That had been their original tagline at Bränd: the right word at the right time, back before Randy declared that the world was post-words, that people didn’t want to read, words are dead, long live words.

  Randy: Maybe ur thinking you’ll ignore your old pal Randy and eventually Randy will move onto something else and life will return to normal

  It was never good when Randy started talking in the third person.

  Randy: except ur wrong

  Randy: there’s no more normal, this is do or die, my friend

  Randy: you do, or we all die

  * * *

  —

  When Zo joins Ethan in bed, they lie back-to-back, each scrolling through their separate phones. “Hey, listen to this,” Ethan says. “Great Britain has appointed a Minister of Loneliness.”

  “Huh,” says Zo. Hard to tell if she’s listening.

  Ethan turns the phrase over in his head. Minister of Loneliness. It would
make a great title for something. A novel, maybe. Sci-fi, maybe, about the last man alive at the end of the world. Maybe the protagonist has deluded himself into believing there’s a whole society surrounding him, and that he’s been appointed to find a cure for their despair, which turns out to be his own. Actually, maybe it would be better as a screenplay, a high-concept one.

  “There should be other jobs like that,” Ethan muses. “Minister of Despair. Minister of Disgust. Minister of Shame.”

  “Minister of Rage,” Zo quips, not looking up.

  He laughs. “You could do that job, actually.”

  She says nothing in response, and Ethan wonders if he’s gone too far. “So it looks like you got some good work done today?” he asks.

  Zo’s new film is about Lionel Trilling. Not, as Ethan had assumed at first, the Columbia University writer and critic, the darling of the New York Intellectuals. It was only weeks into the project—weeks of Ethan wondering why his wife, who had never before shown the foggiest interest in sports, kept watching old NCAA basketball clips on YouTube—that he discovered this Lionel Trilling was a nineteen-year-old basketball star. Some up-and-coming kid, the #3 draft pick last year, which is something Ethan would know if he still paid attention to basketball. But that part of him—the one that hung out with Randy in sports bars, drinking beers and shouting at the television only to return to the office for a few more hours when the game ended—was, after a decade and a half of living in Starkfield, buried, gone.

  A few long moments pass before Zo says, simply, “I guess.”

  The Trilling project has been a bit of a disaster, frankly. Soon after Zo signed the contract, Trilling hit some sort of career slump. The kid started missing free throws, committing egregious fouls. Around that time, he fired his agent; his new agent came in, guns blazing, and began hollering at Zo. The documentary needs a whole new approach! We need less childhood, more locker-room gossip! Zo reached out repeatedly to Trilling for his opinion on the matter, but her calls went unreturned. Sometimes his assistant got in touch, filled with excuses—Lionel is under the weather, looks like the flu. He feels really terrible. Then the next day, Zo would see his image on some gossip-tainment site, strolling into a wine bar with a model on his arm.

  Point is, the air date’s been pushed back four times now, and with it the next installment of Zo’s payment. Which would be okay, if Ethan’s Bränd checks weren’t so late, but…

  Ethan rolls over. “I was kidding, Zo,” he offers to the back of her head. “About the Minister of Rage thing.”

  “Okay.” She says this absently, as if he’s said, I bought some new kitchen garbage bags, Zo. I reorganized my sock drawer, Zo.

  Ethan leans down and kisses his wife’s shoulder, smells the lotion on her skin. Other than a single muscle twitch in her arm—she’s scrolling again—Zo doesn’t respond at all. He inches a little closer, presses his torso, his hip, to hers. Still nothing. When she finally turns to face him, it’s just to say, “But you do plan to be there tomorrow, right? For the nine o’clock conference?”

  “What conference?”

  “With Mr. McCuttle and horrible Shreya Greer-Williams? Did I not tell you about this?”

  “What conference? Who’s Shreya? I have a phone call with Dr. Ash in the morning.”

  “You know, Shreya,” Zo says. She props herself up on her elbow. “She drives the Range Rover with the Be kind, go vegan bumper sticker on the back? We went to her potluck a few years ago? Her entire house is filled with Ojibwe dreamcatchers. Remember?”

  Ethan shakes his head. He doesn’t remember the potluck. He doesn’t know the car, or the dreamcatchers, or anyone named Shreya.

  “Tristan’s mom,” Zo says.

  “Oh, okay.” Then: “Wait. Tristan’s mom is named Shreya?” Tristan’s mom, like Tristan, is blond and fair-skinned, real Connecticut country-club look to her.

  “Well, that’s what she calls herself,” Zo says. “But I guarantee that she was born Sandy or Shelly or something. Stacy maybe.”

  “And what are we meeting about?”

  “Well, you know how every single year Shreya has it out for a different kid in the class?”

  “She does?”

  “In third grade it was Digby. In fourth grade it was Zeppelin. In fifth grade it was Heidegger. Every year, there’s a new one. Shreya decides that this one kid is to blame for everything that goes wrong that year, then she turns all the other parents against that kid.”

  “How do you turn parents against a child?”

  “You talk trash about the kid, point out their flaws, tell all the other moms what the kid does wrong. Shreya always does it with an air of concern, like she’s really looking out for the poor child. But really, it’s just her way of whipping everyone into a frenzy.”

  “Okay, and so?”

  “So this year, she’s got Alex in her crosshairs.”

  “Wait. Are Digby and Zeppelin and Heidegger even at the school anymore?” Every year, it’s a thing at the Rainbow Seed School: Which kids are returning for the next year? Which kids are transferring to the public school? Which families are leaving the area altogether so they can go full-on Waldorf, or whatever?

  “No, Ethan, they’re not. That’s the point. Because Shreya pushed them out. And she’s had it in for Alex ever since that sticker debacle, first week of school.”

  “Sticker debacle?”

  Zo reminds him: the kids had been doing some sort of project involving stickers. One of the stickers featured a carton lemur holding out a heart that read Kiss Me. Alex had stuck it on Tristan’s shirt, teasing him that he wanted to give it to a girl in the class, someone he was rumored to have a crush on. “It wasn’t a great thing for Alex to do,” Zo admits. “But it was pretty typical sixth-grade stuff. Except Tristan ran crying into the coat closet and refused to come out.”

  “He cried over a sticker?”

  “Honestly, Ethan, did I not tell you this? Then the teachers told Alex not to apologize, because Tristan wasn’t ‘ready’ for the apology yet, and apparently being apologized to at some point other than the exact-right moment would have contributed to his trauma? Except of course nobody ever told Alex when the right time actually was, so she didn’t apologize, and then Shreya was mad about that?” Zo stares at him. “Does none of this sound familiar?”

  “Why are they doing sticker projects in sixth grade?” Ethan’s seriously starting to wonder what kind of education Alex is getting at the Rainbow Seed School.

  “That’s not the point, Ethan. The point is, ever since that day, Shreya Greer-Williams has been after Alex like a new-age Ahab stalking her white whale. And by the way, those dreamcatchers in her house? That’s cultural appropriation. Where was Shreya Greer-Williams when Standing Rock protesters were getting blasted with firehoses in subzero temperatures? That’s what I’d like to know.”

  Ethan figures it’s a rhetorical question. It’s not as if Zo was out there with the Standing Rock protesters either.

  “She was busy trying to get other people’s children kicked out of school,” Zo answers herself. “That’s where she was.”

  “So…you’re saying I should cancel my call with Dr. Ash?”

  “Yes, Ethan. Obviously, you should.”

  Truth is, he’s relieved. He can’t stand this project. The work is tedious, first of all, requiring that he sort through years’ worth of chat room discussions, blog posts, and e-commerce data. But he also doesn’t care for Fake Doctor Ash. When Ethan was first bidding on the job, she’d declared proudly that every product she sold, every recommendation she made, was backed up by scientific studies. She cited them, right there on the site. But as Ethan delved into the content, he began to understand: Ashleigh Skelfoil is mighty selective about which studies she posts. She seems interested only in those studies that support her business model, even if they have tiny sample sizes, even if
they haven’t been peer-reviewed, even when their data are undermined by voluminous meta-analyses.

  Not that her fans seem to care—they adore Dr. Ash with an almost religious fervor. Her fan base grows by the day, and the Dr. Ash brand seems poised to explode. She told Ethan recently that he needs to work faster; apparently she’s in talks to go on the Dr. Oz show.

  Zo returns to her side, her back again to Ethan. She’s silent for a few moments, no doubt scrolling again through the latest outrage. It’s all outrage these days, an infinite loop of outrages, like some sort of existential hell.

  Ethan tries again: kisses her shoulder, lets his lips rest there, on her freckled skin. He places his hand on her hip, moves it down the outside of her thigh, then up again. He waits a beat before curving his hand beneath her T-shirt.

  “Jesus,” Zo hisses at her screen, as if Ethan’s palm isn’t cupping the soft curve of her belly. “These assholes.”

  Ethan nuzzles his nose into her neck. “Well, you can’t do anything about that tonight.” Her hair tickles his skin. “Tomorrow is another day, Zo.”

  He inches toward her a little more, and she scoots away from him—as far away as she can get without falling off the bed. “Tomorrow will be worse.”

  He sighs, rolls over onto his back. Lies there on the pillow scratching his beard.

  * * *

  —

  It was sex, his longing for it, that made him grow the beard in the first place. He’d always been clean-shaven, even on weekends—Zo hated stubble scratch, and he himself never much cared for the itchy feel. Then last winter a bad stomach bug left him weakened and dizzy, barely able to stand, let alone shave. After three days—newly bewhiskered and filled with the ardor of the healthy—he’d stood in the bathroom, razor in hand, examining the rugged shadow on his face. Maybe, he decided, he wouldn’t shave just yet. He could make a joke of it, kissing Zo in bed that night. She’d laugh, say “ew,” and make a no-kissing rule for that night’s action. Or who knows, maybe she’d get a kick out of experimenting with the feel of stubble on her nether region. It’d be a joke they could share. Then the following morning, he’d shave the whole thing off.