by Fiona Maazel
“It’s amazing,” she said. “The passion is there. Everyone seems so excited about the Helix.”
“Are you seriously wondering why?”
He knew she was staring at the family photos ordered atop the piano—her, Max, Ned, year after year—because when she said, “No, not really,” it was plangent for all the ways those photos betokened what had been lost to them as a family.
“I gotta go, Mom,” he said. And even though she had not said bye, he hung up.
Esme turned off the TV. She was peeling a clementine. The rind was clotted under her nails and tinting them orange. She was not surprised news of ARDOR had gotten out. Security leaks were a D.C. special, ever since that megalomaniac sprung the Pentagon Papers. These days you couldn’t piss on a toilet seat without someone telling the Washington Post. Still, it pained her to imagine the project name on someone else’s lips and contextualized poorly. It wasn’t even her idea, this name, just some guy at the Joint Chiefs tapping the JANAP 299 for a suitable word, the irony being that these words traditionally hewed to projects that did not bear out their meaning (Manhattan Project, anyone?). And yet there it was, ARDOR, which classified Jim Bach’s stint to dismantle the Helix and its guru.
Esme heard a phone ring, but since it was not her phone—cell, inhouse, or the secure line—she looked up at screen two just as Anne-Janet considered the name on her caller ID—Do I answer? Do I have the stamina? Can I alchemize my mood from depressed to effervescent?—and then listened to the dial tone on the machine. Ned had hung up. Damn. Double damn, since now she couldn’t call him back. If she called him back, he’d know she was screening. What sort of a woman screens? A reclusive, awkward woman who doesn’t know how to wear makeup or to feather the underside of a man’s penis with her tongue.
Anne-Janet pressed her feet into Lyndon / Lady Bird slippers. They looked like cots wrapped in the American flag, and at the head of each, on a pillow, a rubber face that couldn’t sleep; the future of the country was on their minds.
She plunked on the couch and flipped on the TV, except that the TV was broken, what the fuck? She was big on visualization and tried, immediately, to picture herself at the bottom of the ocean among fish and kelp. It was placid there, and all was well. All was well except for the part where her TV was broken, and OH MY GOD, her TV was broken! Maybe the RCA cable had gotten loose. It was not loose. She checked her Internet connection and this, too, was out. So the cable was out in the building. Fixed tomorrow. Or the day after. An inconvenience for some; a fiasco for Anne-Janet. She did not even have a radio. So the question posed by this cable outage was: How will I ever fall asleep tonight and, more alarming, if I cannot sleep, how will I bear the solitude? Anne-Janet could not stand solitude. If left to her own thoughts, she would think of her dad, at which point she’d retreat so far into herself, no one would be able to get her out. And how can you expect to be loved when you can’t even be reached? Five nights out of six she slept on the couch so as to be with the TV. Other nights she listened to podcasts on her computer. The more boring the show, the better. She had taken to listening to a man share negotiating tips—how to haggle a raise—which knocked her out in eight to nine minutes. If the speaker was British, she would not last five. Academic men who touted God were her favorite—three minutes—followed closely by men who tracked wildlife in Africa. The whispering was key: Here we are looking at an African aoudad nursing her young.
Anne-Janet looked for a cassette player, a CD player, an iPod, knowing she did not own these conveniences. She picked up the phone. Maybe she could call a disconnected number and put the response on speakerphone. If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again. Would that put her to sleep? She began to panic.
Esme logged the scene. She knew how to condense. 2315 hrs: Anne Janet Tabetha Riggs bursts into tears for fear of silent night.
After, she got in bed and thought it over. Ned would be happy to go to Cincinnati—plenty of cloud cover in the Midwest. And Anne-Janet, she’d be cake, too, Esme’s logic being that people who were dead inside would do most anything. This was true of Esme, and while there was a degree of faulty generalization in her estimate of the world, she’d never been wrong yet.
Two recruits down, two to go: Olgo and Bruce. Both men were planked across the ruin of their private lives—how hard could it be to entice them elsewhere?
She called Martin to schedule his magic. First thing tomorrow, 6 a.m.
Olgo Panjabi: Wresting accord from the teeth of hostility.
DOB 2.2.45 SS# 035-33-4932
Sunday! Day of rest for some, for others a carnival at a high school gym, where couples were wrecking and rebuilding each other’s lives with every toss of the bean.
Olgo was by the launch site. “I still wish you’d been there,” he said.
His wife dropped her mallet. She’d launched fifty frogs, though none at the pad of her aiming. “We celebrated before,” she said. “Who needs two birthday parties?”
“The Helix was there, which was interesting, I guess.”
“Really? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You would have come for the Helix and not me?”
“Don’t be silly. Did you see Thurlow Dan?”
He sighed. Scanned the gym for his granddaughter, who was just making her way back to them. Tennessee Panjabi Bach. She could stay at this carnival for hours; Olgo might not last another minute.
“The lunatic? No, I imagine he was at home, voodooing the president.”
She frowned. “Like you’d understand. That man is giving us purpose. Now stand back,” she said. “Here we go.”
She shimmied her rear and made to spit on her palms before gripping the mallet.
Tennessee laughed. Olgo turned away. Thurlow Dan was giving them purpose? He hated talk like that. Talk like that nicked the shared ethos of his marriage, which had been his pride to consolidate every day.
“Where’s my mom?” Tennessee said. “When’s she coming?”
He took her hand. They had been through this nine times. “She’s with your father. She’ll be here soon. Now, watch this.” He asked for a drumroll. Quiet, please. Kay uprose the mallet and whacked. She whacked and missed.
“I wanna try,” said Tennessee.
“In a sec,” Kay said. She hoisted the mallet and whacked. This time the resulting thwump meant contact between the mallet and her shin.
“Crap!” she said, and she covered her mouth.
“I wanna try!”
Kay’s T-shirt was gamy with sweat from the day’s play—bean toss, spill-the-milk, Skee-ball, down-a-clown—but still wearable so long as Tenn let go. And then, “In a sec. One more try for Grandma. One or two. Frog hop is my specialty.”
Whack. Whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, whack.
Kay dropped the mallet and bent forward, hand to knee, panting. “I’m done,” she said, and she stood upright. Her lips were dry and notably chapped, given the dew that overspread her face. Ventilation here was poor. And the smell of laps and burpies rose up from the floorboards, no matter the Lysol charged to suppress it.
Olgo looked for the exits. As part of the school’s talent for child endangerment, it had blocked one door with a basketball net. The other door was near the bleachers. He tried to take Kay’s hand. In recent weeks, she had been cranky in ways too minor to dwell on but that, in sum, had come to seem alarming, and maybe indicative of bad health. He’d heard people could get testy apropos bad health. Like if her eyesight were shot and she couldn’t see the frog, wouldn’t she pound on it in denial? Or if her ears were wrecked and she couldn’t hear the phone? Last week it had rung twenty times before she picked up, Olgo calling from work to say he missed her—they still did this kind of thing—and Kay saying, “Well, maybe if you bought a better phone I could hear it; this phone is pitched for bats,” followed by a slamming of the phone into its cradle and the cradle into the fridge. Apparently, his wife had something she needed to work out.
Kay gave Tennesse
e the mallet and leaned against the wall, which was padded in blue mats. “Basta,” she said, “Grandma’s moving on.”
Only the child had other ideas. She ran to where the frog had landed, east of the bull’s-eye, tossed it in the air, and swung. Frog baseball.
Olgo looked away. Last week, he’d tried to call Kay back. No answer. After that, he’d scanned his office, because you somehow expect the upheaval of your life to attract notice and are often disappointed to find otherwise. He was caboosed with problems he needed to unload. There was anxiety about his new job because he thought the Department of the Interior had hired him to mediate the Indian land claims, except no one had told him anything about them since. There was anxiety about his age—maybe sixty was not the new forty—and a sense that his daughter’s divorce imbroglio would bleed his pension dry. And finally, a growing fear that no one wanted to drink from the fount of wisdom that was, in the town square of his mind, its centerpiece.
He could not discuss these things with Kay—she was his wife, not his therapist—but he thought it best to talk to someone. So he’d cruised his office building, looking to offload. Except just having to walk the hallways, which were girthed for a bus, maybe two, and traverse the floors—caramelized rock, cream and liver diamonds—to pass eyes across the framed photos on every wall (nature is beautiful!) and the pastorals of farmers harvesting the land: this safari through Interior was to trade the humdrum of nine-to-five for a venture in self-pity.
“So were there lots of Helix there?” Kay said.
“I don’t know. I only have eyes for you,” and he kissed her on the cheek.
She swatted him away but smiled.
“And another thing,” he said. “I am doing something at work. I’m setting a big meeting up now. With the Cayuga Nation. We need to bring everyone back to the table, else one of these days there are actually going to be mini sovereign states all over the country. Wouldn’t that be insane? And wouldn’t that mean something if I could help?”
“I guess,” she said. “Though you’ve been saying that about the home front, too.”
“Hey, I offered. I told Erin she didn’t need a lawyer.”
And with this he stood up tall. Lawyers were adversarial by design—they did not know how to compromise—and so what his daughter’s divorce needed was the smooth handling of a man with skill.
“Must be some lawyer, though,” Kay said. “They’re meeting on a Sunday. Maybe Jim’s having an affair with her, too.”
“Kay!” He spit a little by accident. “I hope this mess doesn’t affect Tenn badly. Divorce is awful. Just look at her.” Though he was still looking at Kay, pleased to have fired a killer word of his own—divorce—which no happily married woman could hear without it reaffirming her vows in silence.
They looked. Tennessee was whaling on the frog and attracting other kids to the game.
Kay said, “I wish Erin weren’t coming with Jim. That guy is such a creep. All those Defense Department guys are creeps.”
“He’s not coming to socialize. I guess he has Tennessee for the rest of the weekend.”
“He’s a creep.”
“You liked him when they got married.”
“I liked you when we got married. What’s your point?”
Olgo blinked.
“I’m kidding,” she said. “But don’t look now—here they come.”
He turned. His daughter’s hair was cantaloupe and often gathered in a high ponytail, so that in a crowd you tended to spot it well before she spotted you. This had its benefits—for instance, the chance to wrest Tennessee from the execution of Mr. Parker (she’d given the frog a name because, she explained, every frog has a name) and to present her in fine form, shaped by an hour’s exposure to her grandparents, their bonhomie and warmth.
Erin kissed him on the cheek.
“How did it go?” Kay said.
Olgo surveilled his wife’s face. Was she thinking about the lawyer bills, too? Because they were funding this thing until the judge took from Jim everything he owned.
“It might have gone fine,” Erin said, “if Jim hadn’t shown up with his new sugar-mommy girlfriend. At least, she’d better be a sugar mommy, because otherwise he’s lost it. You ought to see this woman. She’s older than him, and she looks like someone beat her face in from both sides.”
Olgo looked down at his shoe. Female jealousy, awful. Probably Jim’s girlfriend was Brigitte Bardot.
Kay said, “It’s okay, honey. So she’s a troll. You get what you deserve. What did the lawyers say?”
“Standard stuff. They couldn’t agree on anything. We’re going to court.”
“What do you know,” Olgo said.
Erin closed her eyes. “Like you could have done better? I get the bed, he gets the sheets?”
“See,” he said, “that off-the-cuff thing you do, that’s exactly why you need a mediator. A compassionate, trained mediator.”
“Dad, try to think of something besides how useful you are to the world. I’m getting a divorce, remember?”
Kay said, “So where is Prince Charming?”
Erin pointed. Good God. Jim and lady friend were in a clearing of children by feed-the-monkey, the children giving berth to the lady because, while she was only slightly taller than the tallest, she was clearly not of their kind.
“Wow,” said Olgo.
“Wasn’t kidding, was I? Sugar mommy.”
“Let’s be cordial,” said Olgo.
“No way,” Kay said.
“I disagree. We should set an example for Tenn. Divorce is not the end of family.”
He said this and shuddered, while Kay made for Jim and Sugar Mommy.
Olgo regarded his daughter, who looked tired. At work, on his corkboard, among the push pins, list of log-in names and passwords, phone numbers and extensions, was a photo of Erin with Tennessee. And next to it, a JFK quote—Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate—because it was smart and also a tribute to the syntactical conceit known as the polyptoton, a redeploying of the same word in different form, fear as noun and verb. It was JFK’s genius to use the polyptoton as much as possible, and Olgo had tried to use it to rear his child as she grew from adolescent to teenager to woman. They’d be sitting at breakfast over Cheerios. She might have gotten a bad grade in algebra. He’d say: Erin, when you’re upset, it upsets everything you do. And she’d say: What are you talking about? They’d be on the porch swing. She might have broken up with Jake, high school lothario. He’d say: You don’t need to love a love like that. And she’d say: Oh, Dad, enough.
He touched her sleeve. “Are you sure you don’t want to give me a chance?”
“Yes, Dad. This isn’t your fight. Jim’s been cheating on me with that troll. And he’s at work the rest of the time, anyway. Thing is, I know he’s up to no good at the department. I should just use that shit against him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Helix? Earth to Dad? Jim’s up to something. And you know what? Toasters will fly before it’s legal.”
“You shouldn’t get involved.”
“I am involved. God. I gotta say, this head-in-the-sand attitude of yours isn’t doing you any favors.”
“Just because I don’t care about the Helix means I don’t live in the world? Five seconds ago you were railing at me for being too involved.”
“I think you missed the point on that one.”
“I always do, right?”
She snorted. “It’s just so perfect you work for the Department of the Interior.”
“Did you really just make that joke? What has happened to all the women in this family?”
“Just be glad you’re not related to her”—which made Olgo smile despite it all. Jim’s new girlfriend—she could probably pop balloons with that dagger of a face.
Enough. He walked over to Jim. Inroads would be made.
“Jim!” he said. “So nice to see you. Lost a little weight, I see. No one to cook for
ya, huh? Har har.”
Jim was in jeans that were cinched below the waist and bunched favorably at the groin; a V-neck cashmere sweater; crisp white T; and leather boots. His affect was self-conscious casual, which typified the way he belittled Erin—the offhand remark hatched in his head hours or years before.
A nod, not hostile but distanced. “This is Lynne,” Jim said, and he motioned to his woman, who produced a hand gloved in tweed. The shake took longer than Olgo intended, and throughout, she gazed on him with an ill will whose aura was unwholesome. Smutty, even. He withdrew his hand.
Jim went off with Kay, which left Olgo alone with Lynne.
“Well then,” he said. “Nice carnival. Have you ever been here before? This is my first time.”
“Of course,” she said. “I have a daughter,” and she retrieved from her purse a dusting cloth, which she passed across the face of her personal digital assistant. Olgo took this as a good sign. She was going to show him pictures of her daughter. In the literature of negotiating theory, this move harked back to the now-famous and seminal gesture of solicitude in which Jimmy Carter personalized photos for Begin’s eight grandkids at Camp David. Meirav, Michal, Avital, Naama, Avina, Avinadav, Jonathan, Ayellet. Whole thing might have collapsed if he hadn’t done that. What a winner.
Olgo waited as she fussed with the device, except when she was done, she just put it away.
“So,” she said, and nearly yawned. “Jim tells me you work for the Department of the Interior.”
She took three steps for his every one; he had trouble keeping pace. How odd that Jim mentioned him.
“It’s a new appointment for me, but I’m working a few of the Indian land claims. Interesting stuff.”
“Really? Jim made it sound dull as bones.”
Ah, so he mentioned it for the purpose of trashing the appointment. Typical Jim.
“Not all of us get to big-shot around the Defense Department, that is true. But it’s still fascinating work. We’re keeping things together.”
“Together,” Lynne said. “You’re sixty?”
He nodded. “Just the other day, in fact.”