by Dana Cann
The bartender delivered his drink, and he touched the celery that curled from the red juice and the floating ice. He raised his eyebrows.
“You owe me a french fry,” she said.
Time had evened things out, leveled the playing field and all that. She was still attractive—out of his league, really. But she was a trader, a taker of orders. Someone smarter had written a program, an algorithm, that dictated her actions day after day. Commodities? Mined in Russia or Angola, some such country that denuded its land, sacrificed its resources for the efficiency of the market? She placed bets; her bets set prices. It was perverse, almost immoral.
He dunked her celery stalk in his drink and ate the rest of it. “What do you trade,” he asked, “when you’re not trading celery for french fries?”
“Aluminum.” She sipped her drink, and bugged her eyes. “Isn’t that ridiculous?”
“I guess.”
“I’d rather trade celery for fries, or volcanoes for operas.” She raised her glass. “Cheers.”
“Aluminum wasn’t what you aspired to in high school?”
“I said, cheers.”
“I can look it up.” He touched her glass with the base of his.
“Where? In the yearbook? We were children. Drink!”
He did so. It was strong, with pepper and vodka. He had no meetings the rest of the afternoon. Some guys had the attitude that Friday afternoons were optional. Ferko didn’t think he’d be missed.
“I would be a singer,” she said, “but I can’t sing. I would play piano or guitar, but I have these short, stubby fingers.” She held them up, all ten, splayed in the air between them. They were short and stubby, the nails clipped straight.
“What would you sing? If you could sing, that is.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s the hours. Nine at night until two in the morning. Hey, that’s what I worked today—nine to two. Where’s Fletcher?”
Ferko looked around, out to the street, where the traffic—both pedestrian and automotive—blurred. He checked his watch (2:13) and shrugged.
“I’m better at night,” she said.
“You seem okay now.”
“And I’m not touring. Too tedious. The only place I travel to is New Jersey. I could work in a mall.”
“Playing piano?”
“Mannequin.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure they’re manufactured. Cheaply in China, I’d wager.”
“They’re a commodity,” she said.
“You could trade them.”
“Don’t be patronizing. No one shops at Nordstrom or Macy’s because of their mannequins. But a live one,” she said, “would be a draw. Everyone would gather round to see if she blinks.”
“Mannequins don’t have short, stubby fingers.”
“Shut up! I’ve known you for what, like, four minutes?”
“Not counting thirteen years of Edgefield schools.”
“Did we know each other?”
“You told me once to walk briskly across the room.”
“What! And why?”
“We were in English class in eighth grade, with Mr. Beiler—”
“Who was so gay.”
“Not really the point of the story.”
“But he was,” she said.
“I accept that.”
“Anyhoo.” She waved Ferko on.
“He called you and some of your smart, popular friends to the front of the class. To demonstrate adverbs.”
“Which end in l-y. Usually,” she said, drawing out the l-y.
“They do. So you turned to me. I didn’t think you even knew who I was.”
“I knew who you were.”
You said, ‘Gil, walk across the room.’ And I did. And when I got to the other side, you said, ‘Now, walk briskly across the room.’ And I did that, too, and everyone laughed at how I walked briskly across the room. I closed my fists and pumped my arms.” Ferko closed his fists and pumped his arms to demonstrate, and now she laughed.
He said, “And that was the only time we spoke, I think, until just now, when you told me you aspire to be a mannequin.”
Ferko awaited the return volley. There was something desperate to her. She wanted to be liked. Maybe that was what happened to the popular kids. They peaked early. He’d grown used to the rhythm of their conversation, the bounce back and forth. But now there was no response, and he saw why. She’d struck a pose, back arched, arm extended, like a mannequin. She didn’t move. She didn’t blink.
“Wow,” he said. “You’re good at that.”
She stayed frozen, longer than he thought necessary. The point was a good one, but it had been made. He was left with nothing to do but laugh nervously, sip his drink, and glance at the TV, where the Cubs were playing the Phillies. Still she froze, and he decided to stare at her instead. It was what she wanted. She was looking off toward the street, her expression confident, knowing, like a real mannequin, or a fake one—manufactured. He was getting confused himself. She was in command. He tried to remember if she’d been in the drama club. Popular girls didn’t act in plays. He couldn’t picture her onstage. Only on the floor of the gym, in her white cheerleader uniform, and on the track that ran around the football field. Now her expression remained cool and distant. Her head wavered, maybe. Her arms. It could have been his eyes playing tricks. The seconds stretched. She was good at keeping still.
A phone rang. She pressed her lips together, then reached for her bag. “I wouldn’t take this if I were being paid.” She glanced at the phone. “Fletcher. Hey!” she said into it. “Of course. How come? You’re an asshole. Okay.” She handed the phone to Ferko.
“Greg?”
“Gaylord. How’s it going? Did you recognize her?”
“No. Where are you?”
“Triage. You won’t believe this. Roy Grove’s car blew up. He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
Jen studied a menu she’d found on the bar.
“As in not breathing, dead.”
“He was just here.”
“And now he’s not. I’m reading it on the Internet.”
“His car blew up?”
“In downtown Tampa. Police are investigating.”
“Damn.”
“I’m flying down tomorrow. To give my condolences to the family and try to figure out who owns his stock. Any idea?”
“The estate of Roy Grove?”
“I’m serious.”
“Check with that attorney, Horowitz.”
“Too obvious. Too soon.”
“It might be too soon for deal salvaging.”
“Well, I’m going. I guess the poor dead dude won’t be buying us lunch.”
Ferko closed Jen’s phone.
“Or a detective,” she said.
“What?” He handed her the phone.
“A detective. What I want to be when I grow up. Mannequin, detective. In that order.”
“I need to make a call.”
“Your client’s dead,” she said.
“Greg’s client.”
“Whatever.”
He walked toward the street.
“I’ll be here,” she called after him.
He fluttered his fingers. Then he called Prauer.
There was a premium, in deal making, placed on news. News was information, and information was power.
“Bill,” Ferko said, when Prauer picked up, “it’s—”
“Gil,” Prauer interrupted. The background hummed, and Ferko pictured Prauer, headset on, behind the wheel on some wide highway, accelerating, changing lanes, weaving through traffic, an endless quest to the front of the pack.
“Roy Grove—”
“—is dead.”
“That’s why I’m calling,” Ferko said.
“Retail was a bad idea. I’m thankful we didn’t waste the time. We drive on.”
“We’re done?”
“It’s Friday afternoon. The sun is out. Grove’s dead. We’re alive.”
Through the w
indow, he saw Jen at the bar, stock-still. The mannequin act, he thought. Then she brought her straw to her lips.
“There were no other Groves at that meeting,” Prauer said, “because Roy was the only one who wanted to sell. Maybe they killed him. Maybe they didn’t. Who knows? It’ll take months, years to sort through. It doesn’t matter. We’re out.”
“Okay.”
“Have a good weekend.”
“You too.”
They hung up.
A cab stopped to settle a fare next to a double-parked truck. The cars and cabs and trucks behind them queued up along Fiftieth and unleashed their horns. He left them to it. And the people on the sidewalk, with phones pressed to their ears (and now hands cupped to ward off the complaining horns). He threaded his way through them, and back inside, where the horns faded, replaced by a song he remembered from a certain summer years ago, when he and Mary Beth had rented a house at the shore in Manasquan with friends. There was a bar called The Room that sold steamed shrimp, ten bucks a pound, and beer in twenty-four-ounce bottles that sat in tubs of ice until some thirsty soul plucked one out and slapped a five on the bar and twisted off the cap and left it in the ice. And later, at night, when the sun had set, they turned up the music, brought in a DJ who played songs about parties and sex and this one, pure and simple, about dancing. There was no partner other than the music. He remembered dancing with Mary Beth, but he remembered dancing with the rest as well, in a big, loose circle. Friends and friends of friends, and probably a few strangers who’d happened in. They’d conquered the bar. Now some had moved on, to San Francisco and Chicago, to London and Hong Kong. Some had had children, and could be found, Ferko supposed, if one wished to find them. Ferko and Mary Beth had merely vanished; visited by tragedy, then gone.
Ferko moved his hands, his phone in his fist, in a serpentine, the way he had the summer he’d danced at The Room to this very song. His gait matched the beat.
Jen watched him coolly as he approached. He was hungry. He wanted his drink.
“A detective,” he said, wrapping his fingers around his glass.
“A mannequin.”
“But not a trader.”
“No,” she said. “Definitely not.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Of course, what Jennifer Yoder really wished to be was an actor. Then she could have been a detective or a mannequin or an astronaut or a mother of six. Whatever the part called for. In New York you were defined by what you did. An actor would have been okay. Or a rock musician. There were plenty around.
She’d gotten a return call from the woman who’d posted the audition flyer in Chelsea. Her name was Queenie. That was it. No last name, which made Jen suspicious that Queenie was a poseur. But Jen looked up Queenie online and was surprised to find that she was legit. She wrote and directed short plays and videos. The plays were performed in Chelsea spaces and galleries, and the videos were screened in these same galleries and others, in cities as far away as Los Angeles. Queenie said she was collecting names, getting funding, and would be holding auditions soon, though she couldn’t say when. Maybe this summer but more likely fall. It was open-ended, squishy, and the lack of structure confirmed for Jen that her aspirations, if that wasn’t too strong a word, were in the formative stages.
Jen watched one of Queenie’s videos—called Cul-de-Sac—online. A woman wakes alone in the center of a circle of grass. She wears a mid-twentieth-century dress, hemmed below her knee. Royal blue. The colors—the blue of the dress, the green of the grass—are too bright, preternatural. The woman’s hair is red, shoulder-length, styled with a wave. Her makeup is bold. The woman sits up, then stands. The streetscape is suburban. Kids walk to school. A man walks a dog. A late-model car—yellow, so bright it seems to glow—coasts past. The houses that encircle the cul-de-sac are large, the way new houses are now, but with bright siding—turquoise, lime, and vermilion—garish colors, like the grass in the middle of the cul-de-sac, where the woman is now standing. A soundtrack plays, woodwinds and strings. The camera begins a slow arc, clockwise, around the woman, along the curb of the circle. The sky is blue, cloudless. The woman’s face is filled with wonder. It’s as though she’d been plunked there by a time machine, or had fallen through a wormhole. Perhaps she’s dreaming. Then she begins to turn slowly, counterclockwise, opposite the direction the camera is turning, faster now, or maybe speed is an illusion. Her expression loses its wonder, flattens to indifference. The strings go cacophonous. The camera’s pace quickens. Fear, now, on the face of the woman in the center of the cul-de-sac, who’s whirling like a child playing the game where she makes herself so dizzy she’ll fall. And the camera, too, continues to accelerate; the outsize houses behind the woman blur, multihued, flickering lights, until the woman collapses in the grass and closes her eyes and the music stops and a white car drives past.
Like the woman in the video, like the character Gail in Tri, Jen too often felt out of place. She swigged her second Bloody Mary—she’d dispensed with the straw—and crushed an ice cube in her teeth. “Do you mind if I call you Ferko?” she asked.
He shrugged, and shoveled a forkful of omelet into his mouth. Had she ever known him?
“It’s more fun to say,” she said.
He shrugged again. “It beats Gaylord.”
“Tell Greg to fuck off.”
“Next time I speak with him.” Ferko’s lips formed a smile. “You’re not what I thought you’d be.”
“Compliment taken.”
“At all,” he said.
She decided not to tell him about wanting to act, about Queenie and the flyer and the auditions. Instead she said, “I was in a band once.”
“A band,” Ferko said, without inflection, as though the band in question might have been a marching band, in matching polyester uniforms with gold stripes.
“A punk band,” she said. “The Mannequins.”
“You’re kidding.”
“You’ve heard of them?”
“Absolutely not. What did you play?”
“I didn’t.”
“You sang?”
“I posed.” She lifted her chin and arched her back, one arm forward, elbow crooked just so, two fingers out, as though reaching for a cigarette to bum. It was the best she could do in a restaurant booth. Sometimes on stage, when she’d strike such a pose, Ross, the lead guitarist, would wedge a cigarette between her fingers. When the song was over, he’d pluck it from her and smoke again. She was a prop. She bought skimpy outfits, dressed like Barbie. Now she blinked, dropped her arm. “You can Google it.”
“Okay.”
“Mannequin with a q, not a k.”
“You’re really out there.”
“You owe me a fry.”
He framed his plate with his open palms, and she grabbed a few fries and dipped them in ketchup.
Her aspirations might have been formative, but she was convinced that it meant something, that it was fate that had snarled traffic on Fifth Avenue and led her westbound to the approximate spot where Felix had fallen to his death and where now a flyer advertising auditions had been stapled to a utility pole by an artist named Queenie. Jen pictured herself in that moment of discovery like a character in one of Queenie’s videos. Of course, Queenie might never call again, might never get funding, might move on to a different project, might lose Jen’s number. Or maybe Queenie would call, but Jen would be too sick or too fucked up that day to make it. Maybe Jen wasn’t what Queenie was looking for. Maybe Jen wasn’t good enough for Queenie.
The conversation lulled for the first time. Ferko awaited the next serve, the volley thumped across the net. But there was none. Jen blinked and held her half-empty glass. Every interaction he had now was colored by what people knew and didn’t know about him. It was true at work—with allies and adversaries—and at home, with Mary Beth. It had been nearly two years. He needed to find a different way forward.
“There’s something you should know,” he said before he had a chance to change his mind.
It was abrupt, awkward, but there was nothing he could do now but clean it up and complete the thought: “There’s something I want you to know.”
She looked at him and waited.
“We lost a child. My wife and I.”
Jen blinked, a subtle flinch.
“She was a girl,” Ferko said. “I never talk about it.”
His voice was stronger than he might have thought possible. This was what experience earned you. He’d negotiated with billionaires. He’d pretended enough times he was bigger than he was. He’d puffed his chest out, and grown men had stood down. It had surprised him at first. It surprised him still. The afternoon had been building to this, first at the bar with the Bloody Marys, where the notion of revelation had assembled, unseen, but perceived, yes, on some subconscious level, and then grew, its presence felt in his gut—no, in his heart—when he’d ordered lunch and a second Bloody Mary. It was still nebulous, the outlines indistinct. But then they formed, like in a Polaroid. The grays took on shapes, then colors, and materialized as an image discernible only in the last few minutes.
“A hit-and-run,” he said. “She was a baby in a stroller.”
And there it was. That part of it. The beginning. An ending, too, but that wasn’t how Ferko thought of it. In that instant everything had changed, even as he was sitting on a plane, flying home from Chicago, oblivious to the event. Often, since then, he’d imagined himself aloft, buckled, gazing out the window, despite the sameness of the fields below, the clouds like rocks you leap, in a stream, one to the other. Commodities, all of it—the land and the clouds, the earth and its atmosphere. Such was the view from ten thousand feet. There were people, invisible in the fields and the rights-of-way that separated the fields, and in the towns, in huddled shelters. There was death and dying, birth and sex, commerce and crime, indifferent strangers. There was the hum of voices, of media, of engines, the persistent gain in volume. But the sky, from inside a plane, with the drone of engines, the flips of pages, the taps of keys, the occasional murmur, was peaceful, soothing.
There were witnesses, though no one got the plates of the blue car. They didn’t get the make, either. Someone said it was an Audi. Another said it was an Acura. Mary Beth said nothing, though she, too, was a witness. She didn’t have a scratch, but she couldn’t remember, either. Emotional trauma, the policeman had told Ferko when she was out of earshot. She was in a fragile state. Of course she was. So was he. You probably didn’t need a PhD or MD to make such a diagnosis, if it was a diagnosis. Emotional trauma. Two words. Adjective and noun. But he didn’t need the vehicle’s make. He didn’t need the plates. He needed to know why she was on the street, beside the curb, on Lyttondale Avenue—a busy road with a double yellow line—when there was a perfectly good sidewalk up the curb, just beyond the ribbon of grass that buffered it from the traffic.