Early Work_A Novel

by Andrew Martin

  When we were finished, we lay on our backs on the rough rug.

  “Well, okay,” Leslie said. “Fine.”

  Part IV

  Leslie met Brian in the middle of her second year in Missoula. She’d gotten through a master’s in art history without learning very much, but she’d enjoyed the classes, and despite some predictable instances of backsliding, she was sober significantly more frequently than not. She was surprised at how good she felt about this.

  Kim, her closest friend in town, had been a graduate student in the writing program years before and decided to stay on in Missoula, working in the bookstore and writing her endlessly proliferating memoir. Kim didn’t necessarily believe that she ever had to finish her book. She was interested, conceptually, in the notion of an infinitely expanding text, one that continued to accrue material. She recognized that this was not a new concept; it was, she said, a distinctly modernist impulse. Modernism, Kim said, still hadn’t quite found its way to the Mountain West, and it was better that it arrive late than never. Leslie wasn’t entirely convinced that modernism needed to land in the West at all. What would it do there? Like, for fun?

  Kim had introduced Leslie to her people, former writing students and artists and beer connoisseurs of varying degrees of talent and ambition. The only keeper from Leslie’s art history program was a married sometime-cowboy in his early thirties named Mason who was getting his degree as research for his “purely mercenary” Da Vinci Code rip-off. This was proving harder to write than he’d initially imagined it would be. Mason drank a lot. “It’s the principle!” he would say, often without a clear referent.

  One night, Leslie went to the Steel Pony, the terrible, overpriced sports bar, to keep Kim spiritual company for an hour or two of her shift. It was not a place in which she, or any of her friends, willingly spent time, though one sometimes ended up there at the end of a night, always with, or at the behest of, men.

  Leslie was sitting at the bar alone reading Annie Dillard while sports and replays of sports screamed all around her. She didn’t understand why people would choose to drink here when Missoula had so many grimier, cheaper bars in which to get drunk. It hadn’t yet occurred to her that people might grow tired of spending their time in cheap, grimy bars.

  “Oh, what do you think of that?”

  It came from a guy two stools over from her. His question was better than the usual—“Is that a book?” or “Reading in a bar!” or, once, in this very place, simply “Boooooo!” She checked him out. A little scruffy, a little pudgy, baseball cap, green zip-up hoodie.

  “It’s great,” she said. “Have you read her?”

  “I’m a big fan of Tinker at Pilgrim Creek or whatever it’s called, but it’s the only one I’ve read. Is that an essay collection?”

  “Yeah. She makes a big deal about how it’s not just an essay collection, though. I mean, I love a random-shit assemblage, but I guess she wants to make sure we know it’s seriously considered.”

  “Huh,” the guy said. “Cool. I’m Brian, by the way. Sorry for interrupting. I know how annoying it is, but I couldn’t resist.”

  “No worries,” Leslie said, words she hated to hear coming out of anyone’s mouth, especially her own. “Leslie. I’m just keeping my friend who works here company.”

  “Not your scene?” Brian said lightly.

  “I’m not judging,” Leslie said. “I wish I cared about sports, honestly. It’d make the twenty-first century a little more comfortable.”

  “They hook us young,” Brian said. “This is the only place with enough TVs to waste one on my terrible baseball team.” He gestured to one of the eight televisions over the bar.

  “You’re a fan of … LAD?”

  “Twins,” he said.

  “That’s a good one,” Leslie said. “That’s, like, even less threatening than any of the bird ones.”

  “Well, they could be really tough twins. Or twin dragons or something.”

  “Word, good point. Are you here by yourself?”

  “Waiting on a friend.”

  “Ah. Girl.”

  “Friend. Friend girl. Work friend girl.”

  “Get that distance, boy.”

  “Yeah, I just like to be clear.”

  “What do you and friend girl do? For work?”

  “We’re part of this organic food nonprofit. Green Apple? We’re trying to get good food to underserved communities. Low-income people, reservations. You’d think it’d be an easy sell out here, but once you get out of Missoula, it gets harder.”

  “Hostile?” Leslie said.

  “More indifferent. I do get it. I’m not somebody who thinks everyone needs to be eating all organic food. We’re just trying to make sure people have access if they want it.”

  “No need to be defensive,” Leslie said. There was a carefulness to his demeanor that had the potential to be interesting, if it wasn’t just cowardice.

  His eyes went over her head to the door, where a squat woman with bangs was waving in his direction.

  “Leslie, this is Mariah,” Brian said. “We literally just met,” he said to Mariah.

  “That’s cool,” Mariah said, her tone implying the opposite. “How’re your boys doing?”

  “Ummmmmm…” He looked up at the screen. “Losing! Not a surprise.”

  Leslie could feel the psychic tremors of barely concealed annoyance radiating from Mariah. Brian had come here to watch the game, not flirt with some large-handed slut. She either was more than a work friend or hoped to be.

  “Brian was telling me about what you guys do,” Leslie said. “It sounds like really important stuff.”

  “It is and it isn’t,” Mariah said, her voice a sigh. “There’s always some more significant thing you could be doing, right?”

  “Mariah’s a native,” Brian said. “Hellgate High, UM, the whole package.”

  “I fucking love Hellgate,” Leslie said. “I don’t think the kids appreciate how badass it is that that’s the name of their high school.”

  “I mean, it’s kind of like, who are you going to tell?” Mariah said. “Wherever you go to high school is going to suck.”

  “Yeah, I guess I went to prep school,” Leslie said, and stopped. “Anyway, I don’t want to interrupt your guys’ thing here. It was nice to meet y’all.”

  “Oh!” Brian said. “I mean, you don’t have to go.”

  Leslie smiled, self-consciously turning on the charm.

  “I know I don’t have to,” she said.

  “Stick around for one more drink,” Brian said. “I never meet anybody.”

  “Let me buy you guys a round, at least,” Leslie said. “What do you want, Mariah?”

  “Whatever you’re having,” she said.

  So the night at the Steel Pony continued, Mariah’s intransigence no match for Brian’s interest. She and Brian finally ditched her when they declared their interest in migrating to the Rose—big surprise, Mariah couldn’t stand the place, probably because it was awful. But Leslie felt safe there, in the irradiated light, among the scruffy drunks and the not-scruffy-enough students. It was carpeted, attached to a casino, too dark in the front and too bright by the bar. The décor was not random chic, just ill-considered: an amateur painting of a mountain landscape, a taxidermied antelope head, a poster of the painting of Kramer from Seinfeld, a framed photograph of the Ali-Frazier knockout. Even the TVs didn’t know what to do—they were usually tuned to whatever movie was on TNT, or the news. At six o’clock, she’d learned from drinking through some windy weekday afternoon, the regulars played along with Jeopardy!

  She sipped her whiskey at the table in the front window, the one that glowed seriously pink, knowing that there was no way she looked sexy in this light and happy about it. She’d gotten into a mood of debasement, despite the earlier awakening of something like her higher self. She knew it was mostly the booze, and that it would be good not to go janky on this guy.

  “You,” Brian said. He paused and took a pull of his
beer. “You know, there are not many awesome people.”

  “Aw,” Leslie said. “Come now. Look around you.” The bar was amusingly bereft of even potentially awesome people. “But I mean. I try.”

  “I think I try too hard, maybe,” Brian said. “I feel like every time I find out about something it’s kind of lost its glow. I don’t know how you get ahead of the curve, rather than just on it.”

  “You gotta forget about the curve,” Leslie said. “Giving up is the only path. Like Buddhism.”

  “Oh, are you into Buddhism?”

  “Naw,” she said. “Just talkin’.”

  He nodded with unnecessary seriousness.

  “I meditate pretty frequently, I guess,” he said. “It really helped with stress, which helped with the migraines. It’s obvious, but so much stuff really is mental, if not, you know, spiritual or whatever. People get super goofy about it, but just, like, acknowledging the benefit of mindfulness, or whatever you want to call it, has done good things for me. It’s like, if it works it works. As William James didn’t quite say.”

  “Did not expect to hear that name,” Leslie said.

  “Yeah, I’m kind of a whore for the history of psychology. That was what I did in undergrad. Really interesting, if fairly useless.”

  “I’m sold,” Leslie said.

  “What do you mean?” Brian said.

  She nudged his hand across the table. He turned his palm over, thinking she wanted to hold his hand, but she instead kept pushing it toward his pint of beer.

  “Finish your drink,” she said.

  * * *

  Brian was slightly better in bed than she’d expected him to be, more assertive, considerate but not overly deferential, as she’d worried he might be. And this small exceeding of expectations proved to be a pattern. He knew about science and economics and politics, and he’d traveled around the world, especially in Asia, where Leslie had never been, or even seriously considered going.

  They went to an Iranian film at the Wilma. It was in the tiny side theater while a concert was going on in the main hall, and they were the only ones in the audience. Leslie had been dying to see the movie—it had come out three months earlier in New York and was the favorite to win Best Foreign Film. Of course, it was dull as rocks. One of the child protagonists actually collected rocks. She usually loved boring movies, loved to sit and stare at people’s big faces as they stared at other things, even when there was a second-tier jam band making supposedly joyful noise through the wall. But she was nervous about how Brian was taking it, and tried to read his expression obliquely, so as not to seem overly solicitous and draw a reassuring smile, or, worse, a grimace. But every time she glanced at him, his eyes were engaged, seemingly without affect, by what was happening on the screen, his mouth set in a slight frown of concentration. So maybe the movie wasn’t boring. She decided to test him by putting her hand on his thigh and slowly pressing her fingers against his dick through his pants. He remained focused on the screen.

  “Do you like that?” she whispered.

  He smiled and jutted his chin at the screen.

  “Arian’s goldfish might not make it,” he whispered.

  She settled back into her seat.

  When the movie was over, they walked up Higgins in the direction of the Union.

  “Did you really like it?” Leslie said.

  “I thought it was interesting,” Brian said. “I wouldn’t have thought to see it, you know?”

  “But you’re glad you did.”

  “I’m … yeah. You could say that.”

  “I thought it was kind of boring, honestly,” Leslie said. “His other stuff is better.”

  “Oh!” Brian said, considering this. “Well. I guess I was trying not to think about it in terms of boring or not boring. It was like, this is the kind of thing this is, and it’s definitely unfolding at, like, its own pace. I didn’t really consider whether I was bored or not.”

  “Huh,” Leslie said. She didn’t know whether this was admirably open-minded or just kind of dumb. But over the next few months, she found herself drifting into something like happiness with Brian. She drank less—mostly beer, which wasn’t great on a caloric level, obviously, but whatever—and cut down to two cigarettes a day, in large part because Brian couldn’t stand the smell of them. He did, thank god, like weed, though, and they spent many sunny evenings on the deck of the new brewery, nursing a couple of beers for hours, reading and chatting and playing cards. They hiked in the Rattlesnake and cooked Indian food with Kim and watched the multipart television versions of Fanny and Alexander and, somewhat less wisely in a new relationship, Scenes from a Marriage. It was quite nice.

  So she tried to destroy it. She went to a barbecue in her friend Sam’s backyard on a Friday night, got blackout drunk, and, she was told later, made out with someone’s girlfriend. She spent the night on Sam’s couch, awoke too hungover to leave, took mushrooms with Sam, watched eight hours of a violent fantasy television series, had elaborate, cerebral sex with Sam inspired by the feelings evoked by said fantasy series, then slept until noon the next day, all the while ignoring calls, texts, and emails from Brian. Sam, to his credit, didn’t inquire about her relationship status, and did not seem to take it amiss that she might spend a weekend doing his drugs and having sex with him without expecting anything further in the way of future romantic involvement. And this was good, because she woke to a Mumford & Sons station streaming tinnily from Pandora through his laptop speakers.

  On Sunday evening she texted Brian, writing that she’d been out of town camping with no cell service (this despite the fact that she’d refused to go camping with him on numerous occasions because she “hated tents”), and asking if he wanted to hang out. She received no response. The silence persisted through the first half of the week. On Wednesday, she went to Bernice’s, their usual café, in an attempt to stake him out.

  The place was busy for a Wednesday afternoon. She ordered a large coffee and a cookie shaped like the state of Montana. She managed to snag a table right as an insane local artist was leaving it. Next to her, a child—maybe three years old?—with a gloriously untamed mop of dark hair bashed an action figure against the corner of an unvarnished wood table while his minders sat across from one another staring into their laptops.

  She recognized the toy—it was a replica of a professional wrestler circa 1992. The Ultimate Warrior. Her older brother, Steven, had owned that one and dozens more, spending his mid–single digits smashing them into each other in the course of hermetic, byzantine narratives. She’d joined in occasionally—as older brothers went, he’d been on the sensitive side—but it was clear that it required great effort on his part to make the sharing of his private world comprehensible and fun. More frequently, they played with their gender-mandated human simulacra across the room from each other, she freely mixing Barbies and life-size baby dolls and miniature horses in swirling psychodramas with no clear narrative thrust. Whereas Steven’s wrestlers seemed to follow a more or less filmic pattern of violent antagonism followed by grudging acceptance of one another to defeat some larger evil (often represented by faceless vehicles that dwarfed them in size, hence the teamwork), her women, babies, and animals simply bickered continually, never achieving resolution. The sources of their complaints were mostly lost to her now—surely a bricolage of overheard and misunderstood adult phrases coupled with vague rehashings of concerns gleaned from television—but she remembered her engrossment in them, the dreamy endlessness of the afternoons spent deep in her own mind.

  The child perched his Ultimate Warrior on the rim of his father’s giant coffee mug, then plunged him in, sending coffee spilling down the sides of it and onto the table.

  “Hey, hey!” the father said, as if surprised to find a child there at all. “That is not what we do!”

  He fished the action figure out of his cup, set it down on the table, and went back to his computer.

  Leslie stayed until closing time, waiting, thinking. Bria
n did not appear.

  After a full week—he was apparently avoiding all of the town’s bars and cafés, not an easy feat—her resolve broke and she called him. She left him a voicemail, straining to sound casual.

  She went to his house on Saturday afternoon, the least aggressive time, she thought, to confront your pseudo-boyfriend unannounced. He answered the door warily, like he knew exactly who it would be. He was wearing a Griz sweatshirt and mesh shorts.

  “Hey, Les,” he said.

  “Oh, ‘hey,’” she said. She thought the quotation marks were clear. There were very few good language options available.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  “Look, can we just get right to it?” she said. “I understand if you don’t want to see me anymore, I guess, but I’d prefer to, like, take it on the chin.”

  “I’m not going to punch you,” he said.

  “Right, what a shame,” she said. “Can I come in? Is what’s-her-name hiding in there?”

  He smirked in a way that twisted his usually placid face. It made him a little ugly.

  “You’re interrupting the grand orgy finale,” he said. “The climax, if you will.”

  “Well shit, dude. You know I’m into strangers. Where’s my invite?”

  “Thought you might be camping again. Thought that was your new weekend hobby.”

  “Aw, man,” she said. “I had an adventure, okay? I learned my lesson.”

  “I wasn’t trying to teach you anything,” Brian said. “I was just mad at you. Still am, actually.”

  “Okay,” Leslie said. “So, what? You’re some jealous dude and you don’t want to see me anymore? That’s it?”

  “Yeah, that’s the entirety of my character.”

  “Well, say what you fucking mean, man. If you want to be, whatever, exclusive, I’ll reluctantly consider it. For you.”

  “I actually have to meet someone, like, now,” he said. “Not your beloved Mariah. But, you know, someone. Let’s figure something out soon.”

  He was trying to walk a hard line here, but Leslie saw the quiver in his mouth. He was not a hard person, which was one of the things that Leslie liked about him.