by Fiona Maazel
“I see. Happy birthday, Olgo Panjabi.”
“You see what?”
“Nothing. Just—nothing.”
“What?”
“Oh, just that it must be hard, getting to your age and knowing you never quite made it past the first rung. That probably they’ll force you to retire with no fanfare. I guess that’s just the way, though. I mean, what does any federal employee do with his time? Wander around the building looking for someone to talk to? Fight with his wife? Read the Indian Reorganization Act and prod it for holes?”
“Are you always this rude?” he said. “Because I think it’d take some real effort always to be this rude.”
He looked away and tried to compose himself. She had, after all, struck a nerve. Ever since he was a young man, he’d felt like he was hurtling through life without a plan. Other people had talent; what did he have? Ambition. To be great, to be famous, to hallow the immigrant story of his father’s life. Problem was, the pressure of having to succeed had left him without anything he wanted to succeed at. His parents thought he was just dreamy and clung to the idea that their boy was a work in progress whose afflatus would yield something great in time. It never had, though maybe his time was now. The Indian land claims were a mess, but there was real opportunity in this strife to abate solipsism and ill will.
“Maybe we should just join the others,” he said.
“Not yet. I think your wife and Jim have a lot to talk about.”
“I doubt that,” he said.
“No, really. The Helix brings people together. Which should interest you, no? Because of your work?”
“Right, the Helix. My wife’s not a member. Since when is Jim?”
She laughed. “He’s not. No chance of that. And yet just look at them go.”
He watched them by the water fountain. Kay and Jim were, it was true, talking animatedly.
“I gather your wife’s found a new passion.”
He turned Lynne’s way but was stopped by the hatred that seemed to cement in his blood; he suddenly hated this woman beyond reason.
He looked again at his wife. When was the last she had spoken to him with such presence? Weeks? Years? He could probably trawl their history together and come up short.
They would be married for thirty-five years next month. The first thing he’d noticed about her when they started dating was the ferocity of her independence. He had wanted to open doors; she refused. He’d try to walk nearest to the road; she’d balk. She did not want to be taken care of. And yet she’d flirted with him desperately. So forget what she said; she needed him. Or someone. Her mother had left her family without warning—what does that do to a girl? He had an idea. And the idea saved his life. A girl whose mother splits looks for a man whose best accomplishment is loving her.
Lynne said, “Thirty-five years is a long time, Olgo. Way to keep the love alive.”
He stopped their progress to the booth. These barbs Lynne was tossing his way—enough! “Do you have something to say to me?” he said. “I can’t for the life of me understand what your problem is, but I’m willing to have a go at solving it. I don’t know what Jim told you about us, but the way you’re acting, my guess is that it was pretty bad.”
“On the contrary, Jim said you were all very nice. Kind and decent people.”
His eyes popped. He didn’t know how to handle this woman. If he’d met her at the negotiating table, he’d have wept.
Luckily, Kay returned with Jim in tow.
“Nice chat?” Olgo said.
“Very. Look, the line for the pedestal joust is the shortest it’s been all day.”
“You want to do that?”
“What, are you too old for the joust? Come on, Gramps,” and Kay took his sleeve, pulling him through the crowd. The arena was inflated—like a giant kiddie pool—and home to sponge blocks on which the players tried to maintain balance while fighting. He thought she just wanted to squirrel him away for debriefing post-Jim. But no, she actually wanted to joust. They got in line.
“So what happened?” he said.
“We didn’t really talk about the divorce.”
“Let me guess: The Helix? Thurlow Dan? Kay, am I missing out on something here? I feel like I’m being left out. ”
Kay seemed about to tell him what was on her mind, but then reared as if the wind had blown her back from the edge and she’d never come that close again.
“We’re up,” she said.
A student gave him the required helmet, and when he couldn’t fit it over his head, the student yelled to a classmate behind the arena, “Get the stretch machine, we got a big one.”
“This is humiliating,” Olgo said. “I don’t want to do this. Why is my head so much bigger than yours? Than anyone here’s?”
“Ego,” she said.
He flushed. “Are you mad at me? Did I do something?”
She squeezed his shoulder. “Here, watch. Jim and I will have a go.” She gave him her purse to hold. He was tempted to upturn its contents and discover a clue—a report from the lab: prognosis dire; an arrest warrant; IRS audit—anything to explain this hostility.
Kay and Jim mounted the pedestals. They wore hockey gloves and visors. Kay held her jousting pole like a spear, like she might just hurl it at Jim and hope for the best. Jim stood with pole upright. He was waiting for her to make the first move. She squared the pole and swiped at his bread box.
“What’s this?” Erin said. She had Tennessee in hand.
“I have no idea,” Olgo said. “But, sweetheart?”—and here he took a deep breath. “Have you noticed anything different about your mother? Anything at all?”
He did not look at Erin as he asked. He was almost trembling. You did not invite your child into the travails of your marriage.
“She’s dyeing her hair. I noticed that first thing.”
Olgo looked in Kay’s direction, but she was, of course, wearing a helmet.
“A new color?” he said.
Erin cocked her head. “Maybe it’s you we should be worried about. No, not a new color. Just to strip the gray.”
The joust was over. Neither fighter had lost touch with the pedestal, which left a panel of three kids to decide the bout based on number of swats landed and which adult they liked best.
Kay wrestled with her headgear. Easier to get on than off. She looked like one of those domestic animals caught with its snout in a paper bag. Finally the helmet popped off, and her hair came down in rowdy strips. Bark, cocoa, black cherry—the flaunting of colors was hard to miss, only since Kay wore her hair pinned up, even to bed, how was Olgo to know?
She won the decision. Two to one.
Erin said, “Tough break, Jim.”
Kay drank from a water bottle, letting the excess dribble down her chin. She’d yet to corral her hair and was flush with victory. She lapped the group with arms high, saying: “Kay Denny-Panjabi takes the gold! What an upset! Anything is possible for her now!”
Olgo shook his head. He didn’t need to use the bathroom, but he went anyway. He was so confused. Tears were likely. Lynne, Erin, Kay—it was as though they were teamed up to kill the motor that kept him going. He pushed his way through the crowd, slowing down once he got clear of the others. An arm linked up with his.
“Cheer up, Olgo Panjabi. It’s not so bad.” Lynne smiled up at him. “Tomorrow is a new day. Things could get interesting for you, and maybe that’s just what you need. There’re other fences to mend besides the Indians’.”
“Who the hell are you?” he said. “And what do you want with me?”
“Tomorrow is a new day, Olgo. You heard it here first.”
He kept walking. Stopped at the door to the bathroom, afraid she would follow him in. But she was gone. So was Jim. Erin and Tennessee. He scanned the room for Kay, fearing she had left, too. But no. She was at the zeppole stand, licking powdered sugar from the tip of a finger cleaved to a hand cleaved to an arm, a torso, a body, and finally to a man—a stranger—whose life was not consecrated to
Kay’s happiness, her needs and care, but to something else altogether, chiefly to the ruin of her marriage to Olgo Panjabi.
He retreated to the bathroom. Looked at himself in the mirror. Said: “There are other fences to mend. Tomorrow is a new day. I did not see what I just saw.”
Bruce Bollinger: Whose features do not impress on their own but which, in the aggregate, give the impression of a man who’s verged on disillusion with everything that matters; he’s calling it quits any day. Henceforth: Verge Face.
DOB 9.4.62 SS# 202-64-1592
Bruce picked at a gristle of cheese welded to an oven mitt. He thought: Okay, Crystal, where are you? It’s Sunday, and I want to leave this house. I cannot babysit my wife. I love my wife, but today I can’t do it. How long before she starts crying? Has there ever been a wife who cries more than mine? If Crystal ever gets here, there will be no crying.
He put his ear to the bedroom door. Rita was crying. And calling his name. He tiptoed to the kitchen and crouched behind the fridge. She called again. In doing so, she dwelled on the ew of Bruce so that his name toured the house until it found him. During their early courtship, this had been hot, the melody of the call a G–E progression that generally meant Come here, lover boy. Now, the progression reversed, it meant simply Come here, shithead.
Why? Because she was pregnant and it was not going well. Her uterus was loose, the upshot being four months in bed. One hundred twenty days. She’d only just started, and it was torture. As much for him as her. Just now, she’d dropped the TV remote. What did bed rest mean, exactly? Would she actually lose the baby from picking the remote off the floor? The baby would fall out? Why was it okay to walk to the bathroom? Here was an idea: maybe she could grab the remote on her way.
“Bruce!”
He checked his watch. He’d never taken interest in Rita’s friends until now. Now they marched in one after the other, bearing casseroles and pie. He and Rita were putting on weight at the same pace. Only Rita was not experiencing the same gastrointestinal distress. He wondered at her resilience. A hormonal thing? To mention it seemed ill advised, but since Bruce frequently departed from his better sense, he let it be known he envied her. To which: You envy me? Get out. And close the door behind you.
He’d been sleeping on the couch. Pregnancy can strain a marriage. A bad pregnancy can test your vows. Crystal was the day’s rescue. She was half an hour late.
He turned on the video camera and stormed the bedroom.
“Turn that thing off,” Rita said. “You know I hate that thing. I look awful.”
“You’ll be glad for it later. Trust me.”
She pulled the covers over her head. He deposited the camera on the floor. He’d been filming her pregnancy in snatches—when she wasn’t looking, as she slept—because his son’s ratcheting to life was too precious to ignore. Also, the tedium and stress of her venture were moving. Humane. An easy pregnancy would have been great, preferable to be sure, but without emotional content. At least not the kind Bruce was always wanting to capture on film. Normal people drafting their lives, and getting it wrong each time. Reality TV moved him to tears.
He picked up the remote and got in bed. Hand on her belly, he imagined the life inside. A little boy, ready to stretch and grow and case the joint.
She blew at her bangs. He loved that she still wore bangs. Blond and wispy.
“Just look at my fingers,” she said, and she began to cry.
They were swollen. At this rate, her wedding ring would have to be cut off. No way was it sliding over her knuckle. Look at that knuckle!
“It’s okay, baby. You get skinny fingers from changing diapers. I read that somewhere.”
She thwumped him in the chest with a felt sack of herbs, because she had opinions about karma, chief among them that good karma could be bought for the price of a sack of herbs.
“That stuff reeks,” he said. “Junior’s probably getting high and loving it. No, no, wait, I was just kidding, don’t cry again. I was just kidding! I’m sure the herbs and candles and quilt and rock fountain are all doing their job. Come on, honey, let’s see what’s on TV.”
“I’m trying to read,” she said. “You took so long for the remote, I decided to read instead. It relaxes me.”
He laughed. In the last few months, his wife had taken an interest in political philosophy. She was, perhaps, having an identity crisis hastened by the onslaught of progeny who tend to ask questions like: Do I have a penis? Does God exist? What is a libertarian? Rita did not know her leanings because she did not know what any of the parties stood for.
Today’s text was Carl Oglesby and his speech at the March on Washington in ’65.
“This is relaxing?” Bruce said. He skimmed the flap copy to see who the hell Carl Oglesby was.
“It’s edifying,” she said. “I want to know things for when the baby comes.”
“I hardly think he’ll be asking you about Carl Oglesby. At least not before age two.”
She closed the book. He tried to free the remote from her hand, but she resisted. This was her kingdom, the bedroom TV; no way was she ceding control to him. She began with channel 2 and went from there.
“Seen it,” he said of the vampire drama in syndication on three channels.
“How do you know? It’s a commercial.”
“I’ve seen them all.”
“Where do you find the time?”
“Such is the burden of the unemployed. What do you think I did all day while you were at work?”
“I don’t know, look for a job?”
This was not a pleasant topic. He was on thin ice. Before the Department of the Interior, he’d been unemployed for six months. The only career he wanted was one, if his track record was any kind of litmus, he had zero chance of getting. Errol Morris. Ken Burns. Michael Moore. They sucked. You know who didn’t suck? Or who might not suck if given the chance? Or who, if he sucked, would kill himself? Bruce. Bruce Bollinger, who sounded just imperious enough on the phone to get through to some producer who would shut him down immediately. Something like: Oh, Bruce Bollinger who wants production money, funding, yes, yes, a very important film, life changing, I see, sounds great. No.
Bruce kept a notebook in his bag at all times. In it were sayings of spiritual value. A documentarian walks among the living, though he himself is dead.
He used to refer to that one a lot; it helped with his day jobs. Working on set for TV shows imported from abroad and dubbed to fit. His last: chess-playing families who enacted their moves on a battlefield. His job? Cue the rooks!
After that, he seemed to catch sight, wherever he went, of a new television show on which contestants ate worms for money. Worms, millipedes, ants. In general, he tried to restrict his TV intake to offerings that did not question God’s wisdom in peopling the world with such as us, but sometimes stuff happens. The show had been on at the gym, on a screen right above the only elliptical trainer left. It was on at Best Buy, where he’d gone to peruse gadgets he could not afford. So there he was, eyeing the cameras, just him and the bug show that grossed millions. Where was the human side of this show? The intrigue? Every competition needed intrigue.
Thus: an idea. A show in which there were, okay, trials of fortitude, though these would hardly be the point. Say the show was called Trial by Liar. Say you had one person who knew what the trial was but could lie about it, and another person who had to guess. Lying or not? The show would be about people having to figure each other out. They might live together for a week to this end. It could be moving. It could be a documentary series in the guise of something just stupid enough to sell. The Helix was out there doing basically the same thing, so why not Bruce?
He spent three days drafting the proposal and first few episodes. Meetings were set. He flew to L.A. the next day. Chop, chop, Bruce. And when Rita said: What’s the rush? he went: Chop, chop, Rita. He had five minutes before the networks lost interest or stole the project.
She said, “But you’ve been down th
is road before. Fly out there like a slave, get feted for a day, and then six months later no one has gotten back to you, yea or nay.”
He was throwing socks in a duffel. “You need faith, Rita. This business is not for quitters.”
She rolled her eyes. “Okay, but don’t cry on my shoulder when it falls to pieces.”
He stood with boxers in hand. Said, “And the Oscar for best supporting wife goes to . . .”
“I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”
He got to L.A., had his meetings, and it was exactly as Rita had said. Two months waiting by the phone and then an email from his agent: Sorry, but no.
A documentarian drinks to excess.
Bruce managed to keep the information to himself for two days before Rita broke him down. To her credit, she did not say I told you so, just held his hand and said there would be other opportunities.
A month later, watching a movie about boarding-school kids and their nasty parents, he heard tell of the carpe diem spirit, which he took to mean: for the sake of Trial by Liar, you should collateral your house and take out a loan. He’d already promised Rita that, no matter what, he would not gamble to finance his projects. She thought he had a gambling problem, which he didn’t, though if he did, she got the idea from that one time at Atlantic City. On their honeymoon. She’d gone from slot to slot, betting nickels and dimes. He had nibbled her ear. They had pulled the handles together. He had just started prep on a film about people who fake their own deaths to escape the law. She’d thought it was a great idea. He’d needed to raise about $30 K. He had 2. They’d talked and laughed and she’d leaned over his shoulder at blackjack and it was romantic and it was fun. Fun until it wasn’t. By night’s end, he was out nine thousand dollars, and she was online, ordering books that promised to attenuate addiction. It was impossible to pair these words—attenuate, addiction—but the books said otherwise. They said his problem, though he did not have a problem, was surmountable. But what did they know? His problem, if you could call it that, was that he just wasn’t very lucky. He never gambled without a project that needed funding in mind. That he always had a project was beside the point.