by Fiona Maazel
Deborah went to the bathroom to change clothes. Wayne enticed Tyrone back into his cage. Then everyone returned to the living room.
“Son,” Wayne said, “the reason I was calling you is because Deborah and I, well, maybe it’s obvious, but we’re not getting along too well these days.”
Aha.
“What your father means is that we are ready for counseling. You’ve given us a wonderful life here, but it’s also a little strange and it’s put a strain on things and we think we need to talk to an outsider.”
Thurlow began to shake his head even as he tried to seem amenable. “Are you sure? Because I don’t think counseling is a proven science.”
Wayne snorted and stubbed his index finger on the table. He was about to slay Thurlow with evidence of how little he knew about marriage. “Maybe if you and what’s-her-name had tried counseling—”
Deborah cut him off, but she looked pleased. She lit up a Virginia extra-slim cigarette and brought it within inches of her lips. She had quit smoking years ago, and this was how.
Thurlow swatted the air to clear a path. “Okay, okay,” he said. “But leave it to me. I’ll find Ohio’s best,” which meant he would hire from within and they would never know.
04:25:32:08: A marriage counselor? Now? The universe laughs at me, but I can’t take a joke. Especially since my dad is right: I understand so little of love. Love and marriage. It’s as though all my experience ramped up to these days has taught me nothing. My first billow of desire? Fifth grade, improper fractions with Mr. Coombs, and to my left one Esme Haas in striped tee, navy-blue short shorts with white piping, and Tretorns, which she’d had the foresight to wear years before they were a fad. She’d been assigned to buddy me through class. She was older and adept in the augmenting of her self-esteem via charity; I was stupid and courting a one-and-seven-fourths chance of failing fifth grade. We sat at adjacent desks. In the tradition of another famous love capsized on food, I had an apple in class the day she showed. Every time Mr. Coombs wrote on the board, we’d pass this apple between us, our fingers mating in the relay of this fruit. I took to offering her an apple a day. But she stopped being interested. She had always been good at tiring of a thing the moment I realized it pleased her. Also, my grades were better; her work was done.
The years went by. We’d see each other in the halls. The summer before eighth grade, the rumor was that Esme had free passes to Disneyland because her dad understudied for Pecos Bill in The Golden Horseshoe Revue. She gave the passes out, and on my day, because I got winded quick and was not much for walking, I headed for the skyway funicular. There I found her on the floor, on a blanket, reading Steinbeck. We spanned the park, then walked for a while, but still, I never touched the ground.
Fast-forward to sophomore year of high school, Sunday in the market. Esme in a sleeveless denim vest and carmine mini. Bangles around her wrists, ankles, neck. Hair in a high ponytail, strafed green. Me beholding the cereals the way some people look at art. I was sixteen, and two years shy of a myocardial infarction because of my bad diet and weak heart. I listened to soft rock, had never kissed a girl; I did not know the president’s name. I was, essentially, an archetypal American boy growing up in the wealthiest, most enlightened country on earth, staring at Esme Haas, who had stalled in front of the cereals, too.
I got within a couple feet of her when she turned my way. And it was too late to be normal. I had no basket and no cart. I was backed up against the gondola shelves; a bracket spiked my neck. My palms were flat against the Special K. I looked like a jumper. I felt like a jumper. The tumult of my feelings had struck me dumb. Esme with her box of Kashi was leaving my aisle—Esme, whom I barely knew but who continued to rouse from me the urge to know her more.
She went to an East Coast university and then overseas, while I tooled around Anaheim. I still thought about her, of course, but figured she was lost to me and that in lieu of this fabled thing called happiness, I’d try something else. I started up a few meetings here and there. The idea? Show up. Talk. Share something of yourself. Get to know your neighbors. What I did not know then is that there are politics in numbers, and that when you bring the isolates together, sometimes they want to discuss the state of our union, to say that our lawmakers are charlatans who should be deposed and that only a sundering of this menace can return us to values touted in the Bill of Rights. And that sometimes, for saying this and joining up, they want sex. It’s the strandeds’ approach to intercourse: Let’s rend ourselves from humanity so we can find ourselves in each other. Still, these people were here and there, hardly a notable constituency among those for whom the Helix—though we didn’t have a name yet—was a way out of isolation.
The meetings got bigger. And more frequent. I began to think there was real purpose in this, which was when Esme reappeared. On my block. She was visiting her parents, driving a new car, and wanting to head into L.A. to a new restaurant she’d heard about, and did I know the way? I was twenty-four and enrolled at a local college but starting to be Helix full-time. I just happened to be home, looking for a Hamburger Helper Halloween costume I’d made with Norman many years before. In ’83, when I was thirteen, the semiotics of the white glove were incandescent in the sequined accessory of one Michael Jackson, though for me, it was all about the four-fingered Helping Hand, with red cuff and smiley face. That Halloween, the last I’d ever celebrate, Norman and I sported the Hand’s likeness through a gauntlet of evidence that said: Already, you are different.
So I’d come back for the glove, but really for providence, which explains itself post hoc, if ever.
I couldn’t tell if Esme remembered me, but I decided our history was so dull, it would compromise our future if I brought it up. She was wearing a baby-blue cardigan buttoned to the neck, and sunglasses she took off when I gave her directions, botched the directions, and then insisted I didn’t know the directions by name, only sight. She would simply have to take me along. I stood with my head braced against my arms, which were folded atop the driver’s side door. She got out of the car. She was a foot shorter than me. I’d seen her kind of hair on a billboard for a revolutionary shampoo product—bright, blond, emulsive. Her fingernails were pastel. Creamy pink for the virgin bride. She wore white leather Keds bound tight. She was a fortress, a turret, and in those embrasure eyes were the guns of Navarone.
“Hop in,” she said, and we were off.
A slop of Vaseline, the occasional sock, hole in the pillow—my victories in the ejaculate of love had been circumscribed by diffidence and, before the infarction and weight loss, the more apparent problem of repelling women in my age bracket because women under thirty do not yet realize they can’t be this picky.
So you can imagine how it was with Esme. I was awkward in bed. Angles of penetration that were obtuse and painful. Slippage. The indiscriminate lapping of skin between her legs until she told me to stop, just stop it. She said good-bye with tenderness and relief. And in the instant that followed her leaving, it was clear: I would be with her again or kill myself.
That night I went to bed a wreck. The resolve of but a few hours ago had given way to anxieties about why I would never see her again. I turned off the light, keen on pursuing my thoughts. I needed to understand which failure had driven her away. I was a young man. I couldn’t know then I’d be asking these questions for the rest of my life.
I mooned away the hours. I floundered at Cypress College. Esme had vanished. Her parents had vanished. I had no way to find her; it made me nuts. I started to lose even more weight. To think about food as the thing denied, the thing indulged, and to see in both a mortification of the body that I deserved. The closeness I had felt with Esme set my other relationships in relief. I would never be comfortable with my peers. I did not have any friends. I worked the Helix all the time.
Three months later, the phone rang. And just like that, she was at my place.
I made her some chocolate milk. We talked.
I said, “It’s okay. We ca
n handle this. I’m just so happy you called. That you’re here.”
“Handle? What’s to handle? There will be no handling. None whatsoever. No way.”
“What do you mean ‘no way’?”
I wanted to crawl under the table, hasp my fingers around her waist, and stay there for the next six months.
“I can’t believe you,” she said. “You’re supposed to flip out when I tell you, split the cost, and disappear.”
I was appalled. “Disappear? What do you mean? We’re a family now. We’re in love.”
“Good God,” she said, and she stood up. Three months in, and it was terrible already. She had mistaken the spotting of early pregnancy for a normal, if light, cycle. She menstruated irregularly; how could she have known? But now that she did, it had to be done. Any longer and the procedure could get dangerous.
I tried to listen, but I was too happy. She had called. She was in distress, so she called. That would have been enough, but now this. A baby together. Surely we had to marry. Only we were not marrying. She was going to a motel.
I stammered. “But you called me. You came all the way to campus.”
She reached over and put a hand on mine. I guess my incapacity to understand what was going on moved her.
“If you can just help me with the money, everything will be fine.”
“Can you stay the night? Maybe if you stay the night, we can talk more about this tomorrow.”
“No,” she said. “You send me a check. You get on with your life. Do something useful. Forget the Helix.”
I shook my head. If I couldn’t have her, I obviously needed the Helix.
“I can’t afford this on my own,” she said. Her voice seemed to point itself at me. “You have to help.”
“Then stay the night.”
“On the couch.”
“No. With me.”
“But your roommates.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t need them.”
That night I crawled into bed with Esme. She wore one of my T-shirts. She did not want me to touch her, but I curled up behind her in spoon formation. She didn’t resist. I put my hand on her stomach and tried to tell the baby I was there. We stayed like that for hours.
“I could babysit,” I said.
She laughed. “You could darn socks.”
“I could! What, you think I can’t learn to knit? I could.” I sat up and showed her my hands. “Look at these. They can do anything.”
“Shhh. Your roommates. Let’s go to sleep—I’m tired. Then I can go home and make an appointment.”
I refit myself behind her and pressed my lips to a tendon at the base of her neck. She seemed interested in talk of my parenting skills. I would convince her yet.
“We’re going to stay together,” I said. And I believed this. Child or no child, we were bound.
She turned to face me. “Let me put this as best I can: I am not keeping this baby. Tomorrow I will go home, and you will not hear from me again. Ever. I know it sounds cruel. You’re very sweet to understand. I have a life of my own. It doesn’t include you.”
She turned away and moved to the edge of the bed.
I blinked. Stunned. I could not lose her again. I could not return to my life without her. I tried to calm down and sync my breath with hers, and when I could not accomplish even this measure of intimacy, I went for the keys in my pocket. Locked her in my bedroom. Made for a spot under a desk in the common area, drew up my legs, and rocked myself to sleep.
The next morning, I ran to the store. Bagels, cream cheese, orange juice, raspberries, an egg-white omelet in case she was the type, a jelly donut in case she wasn’t. Got home and prepared a tray. Coffee and tea, plus an origami flower, because I knew how to make exactly one origami gift, and it was this.
A breeze lilted across my room. I found Esme dressed and framed in the window, which was open. She bent the morning light. And as I watched her jump the sill and tear down the road, I was returned to the work that has been my life’s thrill and challenge ever since.
Thurlow’s cell phone rang; it was Norman. He’d been in touch with the FBI negotiator, who said it was now or never for the ransom tape. Seriously. Now or never. Dean had found a new chair that pleased him well enough, so they were all set.
“Any calls come in that weren’t FBI?” Thurlow’s ear sweat into the phone.
“The press.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
“I’ll be there in a minute.”
He went to the kitchen. Put a saucepan on the range. Added sugar, water, gelatin, lemon juice, grenadine, coconut. Heated it up, let it sit. Coated the result with silver luster dust, wrapped it in edible foil, and voilà: pink-lemonade coconut jellies for the playing of his last card.
It was almost four. He walked the central artery of the residence but was in no hurry. The house was quiet, though he bet the TV networks were in a tizzy. They awaited the ransom tape and were ready to preempt whatever was on air the second they got it, never mind that if you were watching Oprah at the very moment she disclosed the secret to painless and permanent weight loss, the last thing you cared about was some guy who just wanted everyone to get along.
He lumbered, dawdled, dragged ass. Heavy is the crown of self-disgust. It was true what Norman had said: Everyone would see the tape. And they would be appalled. To be sold out by the man in charge? Just so he could have a family of his own? Wasn’t the Helix family enough? Wasn’t it?
Outside the commissary door, he stood with an ear pressed to the wood. His plan was not to listen but to rest, only he heard what he heard, which added a new dread to the one already fixed in his mind. He swung the door open. No Dean, no film crew or even Norman. Just the four hostages on the floor—cuffed but unguarded and each staring up at him with the cow faces of kids in freshman comp, day one—and Vicki plus former TC Charlotte, screaming at each other.
The women verged on physical contact, so Thurlow took Charlotte by the arm.
She wanted to be on the ransom video. He said, Okay, just go get changed, because she was wearing boy shorts and a tank top. She debated whether it was wise to abandon the room, knowing he might lock her out. He swore up and down that he would not lock her out. She left, and he locked her out.
Meanwhile, Vicki was reapplying lip liner and Bare Escentuals foundation, which she had bought with the gift certificate he had given her. She was adamant he understand this was his gift, and began to tout the boons of mineral makeup and how well it looked on-screen.
He cleared his throat and said, “Vicki, you are not getting on TV, and you don’t belong here, so get out.”
She looked at him through the mirror. He had demoted TCs for less, and she knew it. He sat on the chair from which he would be making his demands, and stood her between his legs. He said, “Okay, Vick, tell me something: how did you even know we were filming today?”
She swiveled between his thighs. “Everyone knows.”
“I see. And what is it you hope to accomplish by imposing yourself on proceedings that do not concern you?”
“Exposure.” And then, because she had rehearsed this part, “So that everyone can see we’re happy and that our way is good.”
He didn’t want to demote Vicki, but she was not leaving him much choice. She doffed her newsboy cap, which was black leather, and smiled, so that whatever was in her mouth reflected light from the overhead. It took him a second to register that it was not a filling or a crown and that she’d been slurring a little, lisping a little, because there were ears in her teeth. A little mic. That traitor.
He sprang off the chair and backed away. Reached for the blanket Dean had folded on a shelf—“Think fireside chat,” he’d said—and threw it over his head.
“Spit it out!” he said, and he thrust his hand from under the blanket.
“What?” she said. “Spit what out?”
“Do it, Vicki. Hand it over.”
“The jelly? You’re mad because of the jelly?
They were in the kitchen; I thought they were for everyone!”
“Get out, get out, GET OUT!” he said, and he used his wingspan—helped by the blanket—to corral her out the door, which he then barricaded with the desk. And the chair. And a five-gallon bottle of water he had to roll across the room on its side. Two five-gallon bottles. Three.
He was exhausted. But his labors were rewarded because neither Vicki nor Charlotte, nor both together, could force the door. He heard fists on the wood and a few body slams and then Vicki say, “This is some bullshit,” and Charlotte say, “I left home for this?” though what was noticeable in their remarks was not an upswell of disillusion but the torpor with which it was expressed.
The blanket had fallen to the floor. In lieu of parquet, they had dusted the concrete with wood shavings, which cleaved to the wool. Never mind. Thurlow just wanted to sit and regroup. He took note of the hostages, who had watched the foregoing play out in silence.
These people had names. Their lives were sui generis.
Outside, it had started to snow, maybe to hail. The feds had just cut electricity to the house. It took a minute for the generator to kick on, and in this minute, Thurlow heard ice pelt the roof. Also a voice, one of the hostages, saying, “Mr. Dan? We’re sorry to bother you, but is there any chance we can talk this over?”
He buzzed for Norman, and when he got Norman’s voicemail—where was everyone?—he told him to reinstate the hoods and find a few dishrags, bandannas, whatever, because apparently the hostages had things they wanted to say. Also, he was afraid to leave the commissary without escort. Then again, he hated to be there with them. How bad was it when your only companionship was the four people you’d kidnapped? Bride of Frankenstein came to mind.
He left the commissary through a back door. Slipped through a walk-in closet and into a guest room with a trundle bed and tinted glass doors that overlooked a lawn tombed in snow. Dust congested in the monocle of a surveillance lens overhead. He swiped it with a Kleenex. Cleared his throat. Sat on the carpet, looked at the camera, and emptied his face of anything that was not love.