Early Work_A Novel

by Andrew Martin

  “It’s all the future applause,” I said.

  “The crickets, maybe,” Leslie said. “There are like twenty good readers left in America; I’m not nuts. But maybe they’d actually read my shit if I keep fucking with it.”

  “It’ll be cool when you’re famous,” I said. “I’m looking forward to being a kept man. More of one, I mean.”

  Leslie let her head sink under the water, stayed under for a solid ten seconds, and then rose slowly, water pouring off of her like a creature from the deep.

  “I was trying to think of the funniest writer couple for us to be, where one is really good and the other just whines all the time, but I couldn’t get to it quickly enough.”

  “Huh,” I said. “That wasn’t nice.”

  “You should send me what you’ve got,” she said. “We’ll talk it out.”

  “Imagine me going underwater but never coming back up,” I said.

  “It’s your early work, man. It’s allowed to be terrible. I promise I’ll still like you even if it’s garbage. Maybe I’ll like you even more! Some chicks dig bad writers. That’s a statistical fact.”

  This did not make me more eager to show her my writing.

  We hauled ourselves onto the dock and tossed the tennis ball into the pond for Scruggs, who persisted in kamikaze dives and slow, furious dog paddles with the ball jammed between his tiny jaws, hacking up pond water, until we refused to throw it again for fear of his drowning in exhaustion. Leslie had her notebook out there and scrawled and dripped into it at irregular intervals. I stared at the sky, hoping talent was, contrary to available medical evidence, sexually transmittable.

  Back in the house we ate leftover soup from Kenny’s restaurant. I usually took mine cold, given the conditions inside, but Leslie heated hers on the stove.

  “In Turkey, they drink hot tea even when it’s hot, right?” she said. “It’s good for you. It maintains equilibrium.”

  I thought it probably had more to do with a historical lack of ice. Out of respect for her people, I didn’t bring up the genocide.

  In the afternoons, I wrote emails to my family and to my friends in New York from the one corner of the house that had Internet service—cooler, just, than my upstairs hell-box—narrating my eventful summer. The shortest and least detailed email I sent received the longest response, and it was the only one that objected strongly to my choices. It was from my father, from whom, in my adult life, I had probably received no more than a couple hundred total words of text across all possible formats (emails, birthday cards, text messages). He wrote that he was worried for me, that I had “shown a potential for a very good future” with Julia, but now he did not know “what my life journey would consist of.” There was something both touching and upsetting in the apparent intensity of his feelings and the bluntness with which he expressed them. “You know I love you very much and will do anything to help you. You are a good man and I am proud of you but a good man also needs a wife who will be strong and is a good person both as a wife and in her own passions and skills. I know you must have serious differences for you to end the relationship and I trust you to make good choices. Julia is a very good and smart person and maybe you will be able to reconcile with her after some time apart. I’m sure this new person is interesting to you, and what is important is that you are happy.”

  It went on like this for quite a while, repeating the same ideas in similar, stark language without much variation. I didn’t trust my father’s judgment on this matter, really, but it was sobering, nonetheless, to be its recipient. He’d always been unusually attached to Julia, and it seemed clear to me now that he’d been using my relationship with her as a proxy for my well-being and potential for future happiness. Julia, for all of her minor flaws, was a successful person. I was not going to be a doctor or a lawyer; nor, apparently, was I going to marry one. I was, basically, a squalling baby, though I didn’t even squall that much. I was a needy yet eerily quiet baby.

  And, anyway, Julia had not gotten in touch.

  On the Friday night of my second week in the country, Molly Chang came over with her heavily bearded new boyfriend, or whatever he was. He introduced himself, in a thick Virginia accent, as Robert, but Molly called him Blob. Kenny and I—Kenny, mostly—had built a bonfire, and we all stood around it smoking a pack of Parliaments that Blob, bless his heart, was generous enough to share with us.

  “But you guys aren’t, like, committed to anything long-term, right?” Molly said to Leslie and me. “Why restrain yourselves? You just got out of these mega relationships. Have some fun.”

  “Well, we kind of got out of them for each other,” I said.

  “The provisional life is easily unmade,” Molly said. “That sounds like it’s been translated. But I don’t know. In the poly community—which I am not a part of even though many of the people I’ve fucked recently are—they’re very into setting boundaries. You can’t have freedom without rules, because it’s human nature to try to dominate the lives of others. So you make all of these stipulations in order to avoid falling under the tyranny of despotic individuals. Like America, before neoliberalism.”

  “Some people like falling under tyranny,” I said.

  “Most people, by the numbers,” said Molly. She threw her cigarette into the fire. “I guess I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find ways to be exceptional.”

  “And let me tell you, Molly girl, you’ve succeeded,” Kenny said. He put his arm around her and she leaned back against him comfortably. Kenny’d just met her, but he’d been going out of his way to flatter her at every opportunity since she’d arrived. Blob seemed to lack the will, or maybe just the inclination, to intervene.

  “What do you do, Robert?” Leslie said.

  “Kindergarten teacher,” he said. “Love those little fuckers.”

  “That must be hard,” I said. “I have enough trouble keeping college students in line.”

  “Eh, their brains are still just malleable enough that you can distract ’em with songs and games and shit,” he said. “They don’t even know they’re learning most of the time.”

  “I guess that’s good,” Leslie said.

  Blob shrugged and lit a new cigarette.

  “Kids think they hate school,” he said with resignation. “It’s the cartoons, I guess.”

  “I always loved school,” I said. “I wanted it to last all night.”

  “Hey, I’m gonna stay forever if they’ll let me,” said Blob. “You guys like drugs?”

  He passed around a baggie of dried mushrooms and we each took a respectable taste, “just enough to make the fire burn a little brighter,” in Kenny’s formulation. Molly declined; someone had to drive the car home, she said, though I thought the chances of their leaving the property that night were low and getting lower.

  “You want to go to Missoula, right?” Leslie said to me some time later. “If I get the job?”

  We were sitting off to ourselves in lawn chairs, staring at the fire. I had that sense, often triggered by hallucinogens, of the importance of being exactly where I was, the quiet certainty that this one particular patch of ground was crucial to my well-being.

  “Missoula is very, very far away,” I said. “I literally cannot imagine it right now.”

  “Right, I know,” Leslie said. “But remove the, um, physical question. The question of what the physical experience will consist of. Do you want, in, um, not theory I guess, but, like, principle—principle to be acted on, though—do you want to do what I do? Which is go to Missoula?”

  Trying to contemplate all of that set me trembling with anxiety, but the unaffected, lizard part of my brain understood quite firmly that it was important I get my answer right.

  “I don’t care about my life,” I said. I paused, meaning to say more, then decided to stick with that.

  “Huh,” she said. “Okay.”

  We stared at the fire for a while. Molly wandered over and flopped down at our feet. She leaned her head back into Leslie’s l
ap, and Leslie started absently petting her long hair.

  “Everyone’s too nice to me,” Molly said. “I think I need to be stood up to more.”

  “Kenny’s good at standing,” I said. “Seen him stand for hours.”

  “He is an actual puppy,” Molly said. “Like, I could put him in my backpack and he’d be fine with that.”

  “Where is he?” Leslie said. “Are he and Robert getting along?”

  “Yeah, they’re bonding over, like, who has the more desiccated liver and who gets my mouth,” Molly said. “Hint: not Blob.”

  “What about meeeeeee?” Leslie said.

  “You crazy kids,” Molly said. “You don’t even know what dedication is.”

  I tried using my powers from the mushrooms to make Molly and Leslie merge into a single ectoplasmic being, a spider of limbs and hair. It was surprisingly difficult. They remained two separate, overlapping humans. But at least I would not have to meet my God without having tried.

  “I do find it frustrating how prone men are to hysteria,” Leslie was saying to Molly. “My father, he’s got it bad. Start him on, I don’t know, ‘family’ or ‘America’ and you’re looking at a broken man.”

  “Definitely,” Molly said. “My father’s dead.”

  I wandered over to Ken and Blob. Kenny was drinking directly from a bottle of Old Grand-Dad, gratuitously swishing the whiskey around in his mouth and gargling before swallowing it. He handed the bottle to me and I took a small sip, just enough to burn my lips.

  “You doing okay?” he said.

  “I think so,” I said. “Hard to tell these days.”

  “You’ve got that old northern defect,” he said. “Can’t drink away the foreknowledge of death.”

  “I guess I didn’t realize it was regional,” I said.

  “All grievances are local,” said Blob. He stared searchingly into the fire. “Couple years ago, I would’ve jumped over this motherfucker. That’s not me right now. I’ve lost a lot of shoulder mobility. Starts to catch up with you. Now it’s like, no matter how much you may want to ride somebody’s motorcycle when you’re drunk or whatever, just, like, fucking, don’t.”

  “That makes a lot of sense,” I said.

  “Pete here’s gonna move off to Montana, leave us all behind,” Kenny said. “Forget about all of his old hometown buddies on the football team slash assembly line.”

  “No shit?” Blob said.

  “We’re talking about it,” I said.

  “Long way,” Kenny said. “Long, long way.”

  “I’ll be back, man,” I said. “It’s not like I’m going to prison, you know?”

  “Might as well be,” Kenny said. “Leaving me all alone here, nobody to talk to. Liable to take to drink.”

  “The whole point is love,” I said, unhinged with whatever was moving around in my body. “All of these things are as nothing if you do not have love. You know my great-uncle was a priest? When he died there was a priest parade. Drank himself to death. Maybe that was unclear. I liked him, anyway.”

  “I do admire your definitude,” said Blob. “With regard to your feelings, I mean. I was quite nearly married. Man, were we nonfunctional. We did not. Function. It was like, oh, we’ve found the still, dead center of things. This is the quiet middle place where nothing can be done. I’ve never had that experience otherwise. She was a very dark person. It really infected my worldview. It’s something that you shouldn’t have to live with, if it isn’t yours. Your own darkness. It needed to become a choice. I haven’t loved a lot of people. But I wanted to live. I’m a lifer, I guess.”

  “What about Molly?” I said. I glanced over toward the women.

  “I would say that she, too, has chosen life,” Blob said. “I think we’re just two random atoms, though. Not, like, chemically bonded. Is that what atoms do? God, I used to teach chemistry. Oh well. You and Molly seem awfully, um, complementary,” he said to Kenny.

  “Aw, I’m just being friendly,” Kenny said. “I try not to get between things.”

  “For all of my flaws, I am not a jealous man,” Blob said. “The affections of women are instruments of infinite complexity. I will not presume to measure them by the dogged dreams of man.”

  “Bob, I don’t know who dropped you off,” Kenny said. “But you’re all right with me.” He handed him the whiskey bottle and I realized that what had momentarily seemed to me a generous gesture on Kenny’s part was in fact intended primarily to incapacitate his rival. In Kenny’s eyes, Blob had demonstrated his inadequacy to be Molly’s lover by failing to competently challenge Kenny’s encroachments. Having established this, he was now free to seduce Molly, the most humane path to which involved putting the other guy out of his misery. The mechanics of getting and keeping, of being loved or rejected for reasons within or beyond one’s control, were prominent in my mind. I was thinking a lot about whether there were universal principles at play in such things. It was hard to say. Most of the people I associated with considered themselves exceptional.

  Leslie and Molly wandered over and joined us. I stood behind Leslie, hugged her back tightly to my chest, breathed deeply of her greasy hair. I tried hard to believe I knew and understood her, that I hadn’t, mostly, projected my desires onto her and, as a result, had them projected right back at me. I did not have a definite sense of what time it was or where we were physically in space. I looked to my left and saw Kenny making out quite fervently with Molly. Bob was sitting cross-legged a small distance from them, staring into the fire. Oh, and Leslie was making out with me! And, what felt like hours later, we were sitting with Bob, who was passed out, watching Kenny, fully nude, languidly fuck Molly on the ground. At some point Leslie was scraping her palm over my zipper. It shouldn’t have felt good, and it didn’t really, but I was pleased by the activity anyway. She was not, I found shortly, wearing any underwear beneath her sundress. Was it the one she’d been wearing the night I met her? Had that dress been yellow with little blue flowers on it? Was it all right to make it so, retroactively, to make this moment more freighted with significance?

  “I love that dress,” I said.

  “I found it in the house,” she said. “It’s way too small for me. You can see I’m like busting out of it.”

  I became convinced, with no actual memory or knowledge to back it up, that it was Julia’s dress that she’d left at the house some night. It was far from impossible, since we’d stayed over together a dozen times, though it was so on the nose that it was much more likely to be a product of my misfiring brain than reality. Nevertheless, it retained an allure, the notion that Leslie’s parts had been rubbing up against whatever of Julia’s corporeal presence remained in the fabric. There was also a maybe dubious excitement bound up in the revelation of constraint, of Leslie, this gloriously proportioned woman, trapped in the garment of a more politely circumscribed one, like Alice after she drinks from the bottle that makes her big.

  “Is it uncomfortable?” I said.

  “Little bit,” she said. “Thought it was cute, though. You didn’t notice until just now.”

  “It required a certain moment,” I said. “Just one particular second when I could appreciate and articulate how good you looked in some other girl’s dress.”

  Leslie’s eyes shaded skeptical; she was trying to measure how serious, or how far gone, I was. I was both, both. I felt a surging desire for the world that might have been directly connected to the knowledge that we would all smell like woodsmoke for the rest of the weekend.

  The next morning, we found Molly and Kenny eating black beans and scrambled eggs at the kitchen table. Molly was wearing purple boy shorts and a T-shirt that said “Kieslowski” in glitter; Kenny was shirtless in blue jeans.

  “Hey there, kids!” he called. “Breakfast on the stove. Don’t eat too much. We’re trying to put some meat on old Molly-bones here.”

  “That is not what we are doing,” Molly said. “I don’t even eat breakfast.”

  “You do in this house, missy
,” Kenny said. “Take a bite.”

  “Why don’t you make me?” she said.

  “You want me to feed you like a baby?”

  They stared each other down until Molly started laughing, a deep, raspy “huh huh huh” I’d never heard from her before. She scooped some eggs into her mouth and beamed at us.

  “Yo L,” she said. “I hit.”

  I looked out the front window and saw that Bob’s car was still parked in the driveway. I wondered if he would remain as magnanimous in the morning as he had been last night.

  “Do you love me like Molly loves Kenny?” I said in the kitchen.

  “Big gap teeth and all,” Leslie said. “Do you wish I had a big gap like Molly does?”

  Bob wandered in through the front door while we were finishing breakfast. He had, it transpired, slept in his car.

  “How you feeling?” Leslie said. “You need some aspirin?”

  “Took too much,” Bob said, shaking his head in a failed approximation of wry bemusement. “I … I took a lot of things. The car was very heavy in the crabs department. I knew somewhat it wasn’t real. I’m not a spring chicken in that regard. Even the patently nonexistent can be quite alarming. That’s something we talk about at school. God, it’s definitely not a school day, right?”

  “I think it’s Saturday,” Molly said.

  There was a pause as we all checked this hypothesis against our tattered mental calendars.

  “That’s right,” I said finally. “I got the email from the Times Book Review yesterday, and it always comes on Friday. So it must be Saturday.”

  This was silently accepted as a reasonable way to measure the passage of time.

  “There should be some beans and eggs left,” Kenny said. “Lemme make you a plate, brother.”

  “Don’t be friendsy with me, dude,” Bob said. “All’s fair, you know, no one’s denying that. But let’s just skip friendsy time.”

  Kenny held his gaze, something I don’t believe I’d have been able to do.