Oh, that was good. I had to remember that line, in case I needed to zing it at her later. All writers are propagandists, I would tell her. All of you are trying to convince us of what to think or do. It’s just in advertising we’re not as sneaky about it as you.
When we got to the entrance of the People’s Republic building, I started toward the door, expecting Ben would follow me inside to sign the paperwork, but he stopped me. He was meeting a friend, he said, and had to run. I felt a jealous ache. I didn’t know if I was jealous of the friend—was it just a friend?—or jealous that the world he moved through was so much bigger than mine, full of midafternoon coffees and time uncolonized by the marching armies of commerce. Perhaps he looked down on me for my position. A true intellectual he was, I thought, and here I was not even knowing what neoliberalism meant. Probably, I thought, he was attracted to women who were more like him: serious, ambitious, capital-a Artists who had not given up on their true aspirations and did not spend what little free time they had on frivolous home decoration and trending exercise regimens. He did not say this, but I believed I could see it in his eyes. Never mind that he was wearing sunglasses and that, when I looked at him, I saw only my tiny reflection tinted in amber.
With my earlier confidence sputtering out like air from a leaky balloon, I pulled out the dossier from my bag and handed him his contract, telling him in a voice far less lively than the one I’d used at the restaurant that I’d appreciate if he wouldn’t mind signing it before he took off. Sad, I think, how quickly anxiety severs connection. How often we got in our own way.
Ben very courteously said, of course, he’d forgotten all about the contract, he’d sign it right away. He used the wall of the building as a hard surface to scribble his name on the final page.
“Someone should teach you to read the fine print,” I said, watching him.
“I trust you,” he said.
It was the second time someone had said that to me in one day. It startled me, coming from him, whom I’d already begun to say goodbye to, to dismiss as a onetime flirtation. I said lightly, “Careful, that’s gotten a whole bunch of boys like you into a whole bunch of trouble.”
“There are no boys just like me,” he said, capping his pen with his teeth.
“Is that so.” When I took the papers back from him our fingers brushed.
“Sure was nice to meet you, Casey Pendergast.”
“Sure was nice to meet you, Ben Dickinson.”
“See you again, I’m sure,” he said. He stood there, considering me, and then he leaned forward and brushed his lips to my cheek. Hot breath. The soft skin of my earlobe. The fullness of his mouth. The way it pressed up against my ear’s crevasse, tickling the invisible hairs inside.
All at once I was having trouble staying upright. I put a hand on the wall of the building and watched him saunter down the busy avenue, hands in his pockets: an unmistakable figure, so different-looking from the scores of barrel-chested businessmen hurrying about in their pale blue button-downs. I exhaled, looked down at the contract. Next to his name he’d written a note in tiny cramped block letters: I’ll call you. Then he’d drawn an arrow and written Cross this out. I put my other hand over my heart, and then I did.
Walking to my car after work I texted Susan to see what she was up to. My drunken afternoon giddiness had faded to a headachy malaise, and I was dying to go somewhere quiet with her and eat salads and talk about our feelings. Or rather, talk about my feelings. Talk about my feelings about Ben. I had a lot of feelings that I needed to feel! Process. Share. Feel, process, share. Rinse with wine and repeat.
Susan texted back and said she was on her way to a reading. Wanna come?
Where is it? I texted back.
Present Moment
I groaned. Present Moment was one of those bookstores that had a resident cat and catered toward men and women who wore socks with Birkenstocks, used the word lover instead of partner, and believed the path to liberation was through astrological readings. But so much had happened that day—a new work project, a new man—that I was dying to fill her in on, I was willing to subject myself to this hairy semblance of a bookstore, whose self-described “radical progressivism” seemed mostly to mean they radically only cleaned the bathroom once a year.
I knew, of course, that what I had to say to her would go over poorly. I could imagine it already: she’d press her intense, Susan-specific rhetoric upon me about the ruled and ruling classes, Celeste’s so-called internalized misogyny, the doomed nature of so-called heteronormative relationships, white men and their so-called acolytes standing on a three-legged stool of racism, sexism, and capitalism, et cetera, until I capitulated not from agreement but exhaustion. But Susan was my family, and that’s what family is for: you exhaust them, they exhaust you, but underneath all that lies a watchful and ferocious loyalty.
I texted back. Ok fine. Who’s reading?
My friend Gina and some other ppl. You’ll like her. She’s a slam poet ;)
Omg stopppppppppp
All these years later, Susan wouldn’t let me live down the three months my junior year when I’d convinced myself I was a slam poet. As part of the English major we were required to take a creative writing class: I’d chosen poetry, because it seemed easiest. The professor, who insisted the class call him J, commuted in from New York City and spoke with a lot of pregnant pauses. A few years before he’d had a part in Def Poetry Jam, which he mentioned several times on the first day of class while wearing a T-shirt that said EAT THE RICH. That same day he’d made us write and perform our first poem. Mine, inspired by his T-shirt, was about rich people not picking up dog poop. J seemed to like it. He snapped his fingers, which I later learned was called a “poet’s snap.” He said, “Man, I dig it.”
Pretty soon I was saying I dug stuff, and had harnessed the power of my own poet’s snap. College was an impressionable time for me, what can I say. Or was I always this prone to suggestion? In any case, I bought a pair of Chuck Taylors and developed what I believed to be a socialist aspect. I wrote poems about my father and the effect of media on body image. I believed they were very good. Then I saw the video one of my classmates had uploaded to the college intraweb of our end-of-semester jam.
It was, how can I put this. Horrifying. Like watching a toddler dance recital, minus the chubby-kneed charm. “What the hell is this,” I’d said to Susan once I showed it to her. I was furious, I guess because what had happened in my head did not seem to be reflected accurately by reality. “Amateur hour?”
“Um,” Susan had said delicately. “Yes?”
I’d sent a furious instant message to the videographer, demanding he take the video down, and thrown out my newsboy cap. Six years later I considered myself a “recovering slam poet” more than a “former slam poet,” though if it weren’t for slam poetry I might never have gotten my job. A year later, I’d had my senior exit interview with a college career counselor, and when asked about my favorite classes I’d mentioned J’s. The counselor had smiled at me the way you smile at that lady in Thursday night Zumba who practices moves in the mirror after class. “Hard to make a living from poetry,” she’d said from across her cluttered administrator’s desk, while behind her a wall of books, all variations of What Color Is Your Parachute?, loomed menacingly down at me. “But if you enjoy it, it’s certainly something you can do on the side.” Then she’d asked if I’d ever considered advertising. I had not. Then I did. Perhaps it is not an overstatement that this woman, with her Talbots blazer, had changed the course of my life.
Plus, Susan wrote, free food!
Sometimes it made me sad that Susan had to think about things like free food. I was making six figures, I owned my condo, I could afford to eat whatever and whenever I felt like. But I knew there were things about my life that made Susan sad, too. We both refrained from saying these things out loud because sometimes the sadness we feel
when we look at the lives of our friends just shouldn’t be articulated.
Anyway, I told Susan I was on my way, and before I could think better of it, typed Btw what do you know about Ben Dickinson? With my heart in my throat I pressed Send, for once grateful that texting by its very nature forced language to become extremely casual and not, say, lovestruck and obsessive.
Her response came immediately. Not much. Liked his book, know people in town who know him. Why?
Wheeeeee! I thought. Tell you in person, I wrote, and chucked my phone in my bag before opening the car door.
* * *
—
What Susan had neglected to mention was that the reading was a celebration of something called the Duende, which in my initial understanding, thanks to the sandwich board positioned outside the bookstore, was a magical goblin who breathed words out of his mouth in an olde English cursive: Meet your duende tonight!
The crowd inside, maybe twenty people, was about what you’d expect: hippies and vegans and freegans and folks who looked like they had yet to return from their last acid trip. An island of misfit toys who were perfectly happy living outside the traditional confines of society, while still remaining reasonably middle-class. I spotted the bookstore’s owners, two older women, Pat and Patty, who lived together and worked together but weren’t, as Susan had once explained, together-together. Both were wearing Wiccan pentacles tied around their necks with leather cord and sack dresses of earnest hemp fabric. With the help of a few volunteers, they were clearing space in the back of the store, unfolding metal folding chairs, and assembling a makeshift stage. The store’s black long-haired cat, Whiskers, swished, augural, around their feet. Gregorian chants thrummed through the speakers.
I spotted Susan talking to someone who I assumed was her friend Gina. Susan was wearing a long black vest, slim black pants, block heels that made her even taller than she already was. It had taken her a while to shed the band T-shirts and ripped, ill-fitting jeans of her adolescence, but when she finally settled on a monochrome wardrobe it was for her, I think, a great relief. Her outer trappings finally reflected her inner life: imperious blacks and whites. In contrast, Gina wore a pale blue T-shirt and thick black glasses, had a pageboy haircut and assumed the retiring posture of a true introvert: shoulders slumped, chest concave, prepared at any moment to crumple to the ground in social surrender.
I interrupted their conversation with the tact of a gale force hurricane.
“Hi!” I said to both of them. And to Susan: “I need to talk to you and I’m STARVING.”
Susan and Gina exchanged a glance. I linked my arm through Susan’s. “Nice to meet you,” I said to Gina in the same fakey tone of voice I used with Simone. Then I dragged Susan by the arm toward the food table.
“Be right back,” Susan called over her shoulder.
“Casey,” she said as we walked. “Rude.”
“I just really wanted to talk to you. Alone.” Around us the bookshelves contained volumes as obscure as they were dusty. “Also, why didn’t you tell me this was a magical reading? You know I don’t like magic.”
“Duende isn’t magic. It’s an energy.”
“Oh. Well then. Pardonnez-moi and namaste—”
Susan frowned. “You wanted to come. Stop making fun.”
“I’m not!” I said. “Okay, fine, I am.”
At the food table a Hawaiian-shirted, cargo-shorted bald guy cut in front of us and started slopping food on his plate with big metal spoons. He had the spread-out-wide air of entitlement that a lot of old white guys have, even if they’ve never amounted to anything. The food on offer fit the night’s theme: half devilish (devil’s food cake, deviled eggs) and half angelic (angel food cake, angel hair pasta). Even the coffee in an old-fashioned silver percolator came out of a large can that was branded DEVIANT DEVIL COFFEE with a picture of old Satan with his pitchfork and horns.
While we waited I told Susan that I had some good news and some bad news and which did she want first.
“Well, I only have bad,” Susan said, and laughed a little. “A clusterfuck of story rejections. Yippee.”
“Oh, muffin.” I reached over and squeezed her arm. “But you tried. That’s huge. I mean, even a year ago you wouldn’t have sent out anything.”
“Yeah, because there’s no point.” She laughed again. It was the cynical laugh she used when trying to cover up anguish. The metallic sound made me wince.
I squeezed her arm again. “Yes there is. All artists get rejected. It’s part of the process. Look at—I dunno—the Impressionists.” Susan rolled her eyes, but I continued. “They weren’t always hanging in waiting rooms, you know. The establishment hated them. It takes a while for people to catch on if you’re trying something new. You have to be patient.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one getting filleted by strangers on the daily.”
“Because I can’t. I don’t have it in me. You do.”
“It’s so stupid,” she said. She cast her eyes sideways, down toward the floor. “Even if they accepted something, it’s not like anyone reads these magazines. They read their Facebook feed and like, clickbait listsicles about celebrity weight loss. I’m spending months on these stupid short stories for what? Fifty bucks and ten people in a grad program?”
“No, because you’re a writer. It’s what you have to do. It’s what you’re meant to do.”
“Ugh. Only rich white people say that sort of shit.”
“Hate to break it to you, but we are rich white people.”
“You are.”
Here we go, I thought. I held my tongue, though there was a lot I wanted to say back to her. About how you can’t abdicate privilege, for one thing, any more than you can refashion your own reputation. About how childish she seemed, after my long actual-work day, with her insistence on seeing people and culture as toxic absolutes.
Finally Susan asked, “Anyway, what’s your bad news?”
Well, the timing wasn’t great, but the conversational ball was already rolling downhill, and at the end of the day what can you do about gravity? I told her the bad news wasn’t, per se, bad, only that Celeste had put me on a new project in which corporations would provide patronage to talented authors in exchange for a small piece of the authors’ creative capital. I used this exact language because I wanted to practice my pitch with a straight and undilemmaed face. “I mean, I don’t think it’s bad,” I said again for good measure. “I think it’s a great opportunity for writers to make a little more money, you know? Pay off the mortgage, pay off the car. Send the kids to private school. The only reason I said it was bad was because, I mean, I knew you’d think it was bad.” I picked up a paper plate, handed it to Susan, picked up another for myself. I feared the sloppiness of this buffet, but it was time to summon my courage for the sake of interpersonal harmony. “But you don’t think it’s that bad, do you?”
Susan didn’t respond right away, which didn’t surprise me. It took her a long time to match the right words to feelings. In college, before I understood this, I would constantly harass her in the quiet. Now I kept talking because gravity is unforgiving. “I just wanted to tell you because you know I don’t keep secrets from you. Celeste said I’m not supposed to talk about it, but I mean, how can I not talk to you about it, specially since you’re a writer too?”
Susan still wasn’t saying anything, so I tapped her on the shoulder. “Hello? Hello, hello?” I twisted up my voice so I sounded like an old-timey radio announcer, which normally she loved. “We’re standing by for a report from the field from one Miss Susan—”
“Casey, stop,” Susan interrupted. She picked up a deviled egg. Susan and I had both dabbled in eating disorders back in the day—in our socioeconomic bracket, what girl hadn’t—but had mostly set them aside once we’d discovered all the million things that were more fun. Deviled eggs, for one thing; sex, f
or another. “Don’t song-and-dance me like I’m one of your clients. Why do you even care what I think?”
“Fine, no song and dance.” I looked warily at the table and all the food it held. If history had proven anything, it was that no good could come from buffets. “I just don’t want you to be mad at me.”
“Why would I be mad?” Susan scooped a spoonful of deviled ham with a plastic spork.
“The usual reasons. You hate advertising. And now advertising is, like, creeping into your industry.”
She turned toward me, spork in hand. The ground-up ham looked like cat food. “You know what the definition of insanity is?”
“Umm—” I thought for a second, then snapped my fingers. “Easy. Sophomore year. Wearing miniskirts when it was like negative twenty degrees.”
“Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
“Okay, sure,” I said. “But do you know what the other definition of insanity is?”
“Oh my God, stop with the joke line already.”
“Okay, okay.” I was put off by her exasperation. I took on a piece of angel food cake. “I just thought you’d at least want to talk about it more. You know, like we used to. You say stuff about assembly-line creativity, I talk about creative capital, you say plutocracy, I say Pluto the dog—?”
“No, thanks.”
“Why?” I sounded whiny. A long time before I’d realized I needed Susan to be my sounding board, the opposing force off of which my best thoughts ricocheted. She didn’t let me evade difficult questions with clever jokes or allow me to change the subject; she pushed me. Harder than I wanted sometimes but, I also thought, exactly as hard as I needed. I thought that if she and I could have a serious conversation, I could make peace with my own position. I couldn’t get there without her, so I baited her: “It’s not so simple, you know. Ben Dickinson’s going to use the money to get his mother—”
A Lady's Guide to Selling Out Page 9