by Lydia Millet
But Snow White had her own face, clumsily oversized for comic effect, Photoshopped on top of the cartoon body.
There was a caption underneath: “But where’s my Prince Charming?” “Sorry Snow White, he ran away with his secretary.”
She stood stock-still.
She must have mentioned the men, when they were drinking that night. Had she? She’d drunk too much of Cheryl’s shitty wine. She must have let something slip.
She looked at the From line. The assistant.
Then at the recipients. There was a long list of them.
So fired. That assistant was gone.
“Oh.” Now Cheryl was standing there. Triangulation. The image on the screen, Cheryl, and her.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” said Cheryl. Half-grimace, kind of trembling. Nervous. She should be. Guilt by association.
At least. Look at her face. Guilty as hell. Probably laughed her ass off.
“Why? It’s hilarious,” she told Cheryl. And smiled. As real as she could make it. “Love the Prince Charming line!”
She handed over the form. “Needs to be notarized,” she said.
She walked away from Cheryl’s carrel. A couple others glanced up from their desks as she passed—probably on the cc list. She smiled at them too. Like she was in on the joke. Always had been.
In her office she was agitated. Felt like high school again. Or middle school. Girls making fun of you behind your back. Huddled together. Their sidelong looks. Maybe you were wearing the wrong jeans. Maybe your zits weren’t covered up. Or there was toilet paper on your shoe. Her face felt hot.
Brought up the assistant’s personnel file. Eighteen egregious tardies in the past six months. Four screwups on shoots. It wouldn’t be hard to justify. She’d wait, of course. Till more infractions were chalked up. It had to look justified.
Divorce was hard, people said. Yeah? Try desertion.
That night she found the kitchen half-gutted. They seemed to be remodeling it and had already retired for the night. Her stove was pulled out from the wall, refrigerator unplugged. Food had been neatly stored in coolers stacked against the wall—she was relieved it hadn’t been left to rot—but it was hell finding what she’d wanted to eat for dinner beneath two pounds of cheddar, a tub of grapes and a milk jug.
Half the Marmoleum had been pulled up, too.
Obviously it couldn’t stand. It had just gone too far.
She set her alarm for 5:30 so that the men, typically early risers, wouldn’t have time to start before she woke up; she dressed and went down to the kitchen, made herself a cup of instant coffee in the microwave and planned what she would say. She had to be firm but polite—before this wrong turn they’d done so much for her—so she wrote a brief script for herself on her laptop in case she got nervous, drinking her coffee as she typed.
She was sitting in her living room with the mug in her hand and the laptop still open when the men came in. Through the front door, without knocking this time. (When was the last time they’d knocked?) But no. Impossible.
They were full-size.
She found she was speechless.
They filed by, seven of them; she counted as they headed down her hallway. Men of quite standard height—a mix of sizes, but all within the average range. The spokesman nodded at her and one or two made brief hand gestures too slight to interpret, but they passed by in no time, carrying tools and extension cords, businesslike. One of them struggled under the weight of a large box of ceramic tiles.
She felt rooted to her couch cushion.
She couldn’t make the speech now, with the men so large. It was a shock. When they were small she’d had no trouble with any of it, but now . . . no. She couldn’t tell them it was over, couldn’t say she didn’t want them to do any of this. Hadn’t wanted a remodel. It wasn’t—let’s face it, it was like she didn’t even own the place. It was like she wasn’t even here.
She wasn’t afraid—more like intimidated. She was reluctant, that was all she knew. She couldn’t broach the subject.
Why should she, finally? She shouldn’t have to.
But if she just went away she wouldn’t have to deal with them; if she went away she could get a new place. She could finally sell this house. It was where she and Dan had lived. Another place, at least, would be her own. New start. There was a real-estate agent the paralegal had talked about: she could sell a house in no time, the paralegal said.
From the kitchen came the high whine of a drill.
She picked up her bag, slid the laptop in and went out the front door without looking back. Maybe a buyer would appreciate the kitchen remodel. She’d picked out the Marmoleum herself, back when she and Dan bought the place—well, maybe it wasn’t for everyone. Same with the dull gray paint on the façade: a buyer might like the renovations, even if she didn’t.
The men, now that she thought of it—possibly they were helping. Facilitating her transition. Maybe somehow they’d known the best course. She’d needed a nudge to help her move on, hadn’t she? Too long in this house, too long in limbo. Dan was gone, but she lingered. She was the ghost, not him.
No doubt at all: they were intuitive. They had instincts. At the beginning, at least, they’d closely anticipated so many of her needs . . . lately they’d taken too much initiative, true. Lately they’d seemed to veer off course. But now she was thinking it hadn’t been a wrong turn after all. Maybe the men knew what they were doing.
She knew she was coming back tonight—of course she was, she had to pick up some clothes—but it felt like she was running away. Sometimes running away was the best. The best! Beneath her feet was cool, cool grass.
The neighbor man who’d reprimanded her was getting in his car, no briefcase but a suit. Leon/Tony. She caught his eye and waved at him as she ran—no wave back, of course—before she realized she’d passed her own car and had no clear destination. Only then did she also realize she’d left her ring of keys on the table in the front hall. What was the plan, anyway?
She ground to a halt lamely and watched the neighbor’s car pull out, drive to the corner and turn.
She’d get a hotel room for tonight, then find a short-term rental. That was all. Not rocket science. She’d built her own company, for Chrissake. She could do it.
She looked back at her front door. It seemed darker and heavier now, almost to pulsate. Maybe the men had sensed that she was making her escape. Maybe it angered them.
Still, she needed the car key. But wait: she used to keep the spare in her laptop bag. Was it still there?
She rummaged.
No.
So she went to the door, opened it quietly. She could hear them in the kitchen, sawing or drilling. She saw the keys splayed on the hall table, with her sunglasses. Approached stealthily, grabbed them both.
As she turned to go, she caught sight of the spokesman in the living room. He sat on her couch, exactly where she’d been sitting. The leather was probably still warm from her ass. The TV was on—some morning show. He held the universal remote in one hand, and with the other hand was eating a burrito. Cramming it into his mouth like he was ravenous. The wrapper lay unfolded on the couch arm beside him.
He swiveled his head toward her. That was how it seemed: he was an ancient beast, a beast of prey. He’d spotted his quarry, and his head swung round to fix on it. He chewed.
Then he swallowed. And nodded.
“Hey,” he said.
His voice was low.
Her arm was trembling, so she raised the hand with the keys. Did she smile, or was it a grimace? She jangled the keys in a kind of hasty response.
And fled.
FIGHT NO MORE
The mornings had been bitter in recent weeks. They had a faint, chemical bitter ness, he couldn’t say whether it was taste or smell. Like the lemons that grew on those public trees they watered with sewage. He’d seen them in desert cities on tour—Tucson, maybe Phoenix. They looked like lemons, but they weren’t for eating. Could the birds tell? D
on’t peck those lemons, friend. But maybe birds didn’t like lemons anyway. Or maybe some birds were shit-eating birds.
He’d woken up into that bitterness every morning, at once vague and sharp. This was its culmination, like he’d known of the coming death and his mood had been soured by the foreknowledge. Come autumn maybe he’d get free of the city for a weekend, drive up into the trees in the Sierras—maybe that would do it. Or down into the oak scrublands in the hill country east of San Diego. He’d go there to mourn, and a chill would sweep in and clean out the ill taint.
He didn’t know anyone at the service well. Lordy hadn’t come, no surprise. Probably sitting at home in an unlit room, singing. That was Lordy’s ritual when he was threatened by chaos of mind: he’d sit singing into the dimness for hours on end. Ry’d heard the dark singing one time and it sounded high and eerie as a boy soprano—a warbling falsetto sung by a baritone, the keening of a hurt beast. After he sang himself out, his voice was rough and scratchy for days. You’d suspect he was deeply disturbed unless you knew him, in which case you were sure he was deeply disturbed. But you also reckoned there were coping strategies behind it. Lordy was a lunatic who came bearing gifts. High-functioning.
When you brought that level of value, a label executive had said of Lordy’s music, there was no sane and no insane. There was nothing but product.
That was the story of the market, the guy from the label had bloviated. And the story of the market was the greatest story ever told.
He’d pronounced that sanctimonious shit and all Ry could think of was how he himself was only a neurotic, he had a minor-league anxiety compared to Lordy’s full-fledged bipolarity and a minor-league talent to go with it. For genius, either ruthlessness or real insanity was needed. It was both a stupid myth and a stupid truth. The sane, in the end, were only the workhorses of music.
It saddened him to contemplate his relative mental stability. Not a damn thing he could do about it, either.
Distraction. He didn’t want to be here. From his seat at the end of the pew he scanned other pews for a familiar face, but the rows were dark-clothed bodies and goose-fleshed skin in the artificial chill, the faces pale half-moons. Most of the crowd was young, Lynn’s students from the high school—clearly he’d been popular. He’d kept teaching even once they started recording, took his sick days when he was needed in the studio.
No one knew Ry and he knew no one. No one he could see, anyway. Only the solidity of grief saved him from panic at being hemmed in—at any other time, when he wasn’t weighed down, the crowds would have been his cue for a fast exit. Onstage and in the studio he’d learned to deal, but outside those spaces, with people around and no instrument to shield him, it wasn’t always clear where he should put his body. He often felt extra, unneeded in a scene. He had no lines. He had no role. How did you hold yourself so as to not feel spare?
He kept getting mental pictures of the accident, though he hadn’t seen it. The cops said a jacked-up truck had clipped the Fat Boy, passing illegally on the right and crossing into the lane at 90 or 95, and bumped it into the air—a bump he couldn’t stop his brain from trying to frame. The bike crashed into a concrete barrier, they said. Lynn’s neck had snapped.
He’d been on his way to a session so they’d been waiting for him when it happened. He didn’t show up and didn’t show up, and didn’t answer any calls or texts, and it was so out of character that finally Ry drove Lordy to his house and used the key he kept under an empty plant pot to get in. They’d only been there a couple of minutes when the cops came to the door, two cops, a young one who talked and an older one who stood behind him. Lordy’d nodded slowly during their rigid announce ment—the young policeman had delivered the news nervously, like maybe he’d never done that duty before. But after the cops left he started shaking so rapidly and mechanically it looked like some kind of seizure. Ry’d just stood there repeating: “Why did he take the freeway? Why did he take the freeway? He always took surface streets. Why did he take the freeway?”
After a bit Lordy had stopped shaking and left. He’d stumbled out of the house while Ry was in shock, just wandering around the rooms thinking Lynn won’t be here again.
No word since.
He blinked, lashes wet feathers on his cheeks. Wiped the back of his sleeve over them. Up at the front some guy was talking, a mass of words, forgotten almost as soon as they were said.
Ry’d always liked words but they were flat without music. Dry.
The Fat Boy never had loud pipes. It ran quiet, not obnoxious. Lynn’s father had rebuilt it with his own hands, before he lost the use of them. Parkinson’s. Lynn was attached to it for that reason. And for the feel of movement, he’d told Ry and Lordy, not just through space but time. Lynn was about rhythm, not speed—had never sped when he rode. Never sped when he drummed, either. Everything at the right tempo.
The driver of the jacked-up truck just kept going. Kept right on moving down the 10. Never looked back. All the way to the Mojave Desert, likely. Over the Colorado into Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. The Eastern Seaboard. Who knew. They had a partial plate from a witness: two digits, California. That was it.
Unfair. Unfair. Fucking unfair. But to cling to it was so useless it was borderline stupid. Unfair was what kids whined when they didn’t get what they wanted. When they made that complaint—his six-year-old niece said it constantly—you told them some lazy shit like, Well, life isn’t always fair. Lazy shit sure, but true as dirt. You also taught them to believe it should be fair, so they could grow up and be confused forever by the tension between what was and what should be. He wasn’t a father, small mercies. Hoped never to be. He’d seen firsthand how raw it made you. Might as well strip your clothes off and run naked down High Street in a hail of gunfire.
That was being a parent.
The truck driver kept on driving. People who drove too fast for the hell of it were the worst kind of bastards, the kind who believed the world belonged to them.
And they were right. It did.
Someone wept raggedly in the front pew—one of Lynn’s sisters, he thought, peering over while trying to seem like he wasn’t. She began to hyperventilate, or that was how it looked to him—trouble breathing, shaking her head—and was led out through a door near the altar. Was the girlfriend here? Nina? She must be, lost in the gathering. From the outside Nina and Lynn had seemed like an odd couple, since he was a six-foot-five black man and she was a five-foot-four white woman, but soon after they met they’d been together whenever they could.
He’d only been to services for old people before, solemn but still within the natural order—his grandfather, grandmother, a great-aunt. Oh, except for one: when he was a junior in high school, soon after the move from Brisbane to L.A., a senior had died in the middle of a baseball game. Hit hard in the chest by a ball and fell down dead—a massive coronary. Ry remembered thinking: Is this what happens in America? Back in Australia, no kid in his small world had died. The senior’s parents said he’d had a heart condition since birth. “He always knew it was a risk. He wanted to play the sports he enjoyed.” The whole school had attended the memorial, standing room only. The dead boy, though a sporty type, had also been a fan of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. They all were back then—at least, most of the kids he knew. It was back in the early eighties, when fans dressed up and went to the midnight shows. He remembered clearly because at the memorial they played the theme song, “Science Fiction, Double Feature.”
Back then they went to watch a film about transvestite aliens, humanoid scientists in drag who made beautiful Frankenstein monsters in silver Speedos and ate the body of Meatloaf out of a coffin. They dressed in drag and wore towering black wigs with white stripes in them; they sang along to songs about unbridled lust and the joys of heroin. Later they turned into claims adjusters and bank tellers, gas station attendants and divorce lawyers.
He hadn’t known the dead boy. Everyone went so he went—it would be more remarkable to avoid the service than
attend it—but once there he felt like an impostor.
But how much better to feel that way than this.
Now he hung back as they all filed out. He stayed sitting for so long that everyone had to leave from the other end of the pew. He couldn’t mobilize. The crowds disappeared through the tall double doors at the back and he was left alone with the portrait at the front. Got up finally and walked over.
Closed casket; the photograph on its brass stand was all there was to see. And the picture was formal, Lynn posed in a jacket and tie. It looked like Lynn had posed for a shot he didn’t have much interest in. But you could still make out the modesty of the smile, its humility.
The address for the reception was on his phone. Near Lynn’s place at Lordy’s uncle’s house, though Lordy was almost certain to be absent. Ry hadn’t wanted to drive, had called up an Uber—now another, and he didn’t register much as they floated along. The streets were a scene from other people’s lives. Today more than most days. Ugly city, except where the rich lived. Los Angeles was stark like that. Ugly where money wasn’t, beautiful where it was. Well, not always. Along the beach even the rich lived in ugly buildings.
You did what you knew how to do. Was there anything else?
He’d been here a couple of times before, once for a quinceañera, once for a Super Bowl party, both times as Lordy’s chaperone. And driver: Lordy was afraid of driving, had an actual phobia and no license, so he’d bought the biggest and thickest-walled car on the market and made Ry or sometimes Lynn drive it. Ry had a stipend from Lordy to be his chauffeur. Lordy’s idea, but he’d said yes. Gratefully. Bass player/chauffeur, his job description. Sometimes he feared the chauffeur job was his real one. Shit, he had more income from it. Far more.
The house wasn’t big, just a ranch-style on a working-class street, but the backyard was surprisingly vast, green as a jungle, and that was where the fiestas were held. There were avocado trees, grapefruit, magnolia, all with delicate lights strung through them; there was one of those concrete triple-decker fountains that looked like a cake stand in a bakery. Moving beneath the trees, he flicked his eyes around for someone to give his condolences to: once that was done, he would be free. He could go.