They were stuck.
DAY 4:
Lise was on the kitchen side of her Corners efficiency, a paperback novel in hand, dressed in her work clothes. She had read two hundred pages of the novel and could not have named one of the characters or even come up with the name of the planet on which the characters connoitered. It had three moons, she remembered that much, and the main source of protein for the inhabitants was a vine that had the properties of water, bubbling up from underground wells, but who was the main character and what was at stake? How was it possible to read without paying attention?
James Candler was her lover. This thought interjected itself between the sentences and wrecked the narrative’s continuity. James Candler was her lover. She had to leave in ten minutes for Whispers and Lies, giving herself half an hour to make the drive, which always took forty minutes, but she had to wait that long in case he actually called as he said he would. She hadn’t insisted, hadn’t made him promise. James Candler was her lover. She hadn’t trusted herself to give him her cell number, imagining the phone vibrating in her lap as she negotiated traffic. No, she needed to be still, in this single room, which still smelled new, and in which she and he had made love—on the bed, on the couch, bent over the kitchen counter, on the carpet by the door to the bathroom. James Candler was her lover. The kitchen counter had been uncomfortable for both of them, its edge made of particle board that pressed sharply against her abdomen and at her ribs, and she had knocked over the sugar bowl, and sugar had gotten on her hands and her arms to the elbow and her chest and then her lips and cheeks and the tip of her nose, and he’d had to put one foot on a kitchen chair to keep balanced and thrusting, his messy breath damp on her back, and why, if they both were uncomfortable, did they feel obliged to continue their awkward humping when her bed was less than four feet away, not even a wall separating them from it, its quilted cover still on the floor from their last go-round?
The phone’s ring interrupted her thoughts. “Call me tomorrow,” she had said, “during lunch, if you think of it, and tell me a secret.” She let it ring twice.
“Good morning.” A man’s voice, mechanical in tone, someone taught to sound like a robot. “I’m looking for . . .” A brief pause while the robot read the next name on his list. “Elizabeth Ray. Am I fortunate enough to have found her this fine morning?”
“I’m not buying anything or willing to participate in a survey,” she said, “and I’m expecting an important call. Please remove my name from your list.” She hung up, staring at the phone as if it had betrayed her.
He had licked the sugar from her arms. His tongue was wider than most tongues, it seemed to her, and if it had hurt, that fucking on the counter, it had nonetheless been necessary, an act of exertion to prove a point—having to do with desire, or with not yet being too old to fuck wherever, or maybe, possibly, conceivably, with love. James Candler was her lover. They had fucked all weekend, even when it hurt them to fuck, when every bit of every portion of every involved genitalia was red and raw and shrieking, and yet they managed to reach orgasm, or come close, and the hell of it was: she didn’t even care about the sex, particularly, but she cared terribly about the effort, the coming together, the urgency, the nerve and verve of it. James Candler was her lover. For two weeks, they would be teenagers again, but also not teenagers. They were separate from the constraints of time, all ages at once. It sounded like the plot to one of her sci-fi novels: Two-Week Time Machine.
Not that he was much like the man she had imagined. Or like the man who, in his clean office nestled in that decrepit building, had altered, redirected, and revived her life. That man, too, she had more imagined than encountered, his imperfect excellence the product of her need. If he had been waiting for her when she returned to that old building for her second session, the real him might have spoiled it. Oh, he could be crass, going right for the buttons on her blouse when he walked through the door, handling her ass with what he imagined was discretion while they waited for a table in Ristorante Arrivederci, and he could be insensitive, relaying the details of his trip to London, how he had expected grief and the uneasy requirements of its expression, but found instead a mindless ecstasy in Miss Cute-em’s bendy body. But his insensitivity meant that he was not careful around Lise as he had to be around his patients, and that was paramount: he must not think of her as one of his patients. Even though she had been exactly that. He must not see her as she had been in that cheap plastic chair, her hair the color of taffy, and sometimes, in her memory, it seems that she was wearing nothing but Saran wrap. Not true, she knew, but not inaccurate.
The phone rang. She let it ring three times.
“Hey,” he said. His voice was nothing special and she liked it.
“I thought that might be you,” she told him. “How was your morning?”
“The usual—clients, work gossip, reports to write, and now pastrami on rye. Yours?”
“I put new sheets on my bed. That’s an invitation, if you’re slow on the uptake.”
“You want my secret?”
“Should I sit down?”
“I lived with a woman for six years. I guess that’s not a secret, exactly, but I don’t usually talk about it.”
“Hmm,” she said.
“Everyone expected us to marry, including me, but I cut it off. She wasn’t right for me, and I found the . . . the . . . the courage to cut it off.”
“I guess that’s a good talent to have,” she said. “Heartlessness.”
“Not how I’d put it.” He laughed. “It was more that I’d painted myself into a corner, but when I realized it was not right for me, I managed to get out of it. Maybe it was severe, I don’t know, but . . . Your turn.”
She had invented several secrets in anticipation of his call, but she chose to tell him something real. “I used to—this is humiliating. I used to pay to have my pubic hair trimmed, cut in the shape of a heart.” It had been her signature when she was a stripper, that bleached-blond heart. “The guy I was seeing at the time liked surprises. It cost me a hundred bucks every trim.”
“Where do you find that kind of professional in the grooming business?”
“I thought about it because I just took a shower.” She wanted him to picture her naked body. She understood that this was the old her, this was Beth Wray using the most familiar of manipulations. But he was a man, wasn’t he? Out there just waiting to be manipulated?
“You’re saying you’ve right now stepped out of the shower?”
“And I’m shaving.”
“Shaving your . . .”
“It was dumb to spend a hundred bucks on such a thing, such a trim. Not as dumb as the eighty grand you spent for that silly car, but still dumb.”
“It was only sixty grand. I got a deal. Don’t shave it all off.”
“You don’t like the bare look?”
“It’s all right, I guess, for some married couple in their twentieth year, and they need to shake up the routine. But it doesn’t turn me on. It doesn’t look womanly to me.”
“We don’t have twenty years or even twenty days. I’ve already started though. I’ll just do a landing strip.”
“You’re shaving right now?”
“Are you jerking off during your lunch break? What kind of counselor are you?”
“You want to see me tonight?”
“Every night for two weeks. Even if we start hating each other, it’s every night until your lady arrives.”
“Why? Why do you want to?”
“Another of Lise’s experiments in human behavior. Don’t think it has anything to do with you. You’re just a volunteer, a human subject. I’ll debrief you after it’s all over.”
In the telephonic silence that followed, she could hear her heart beating in its sugar-coated cage, and on his side, a rustling of paper, a squeezing sound—he had taken a bite of his pastrami sandwich. Let him eat, she thought. How long coul
d she happily sit here in silence, knowing he was on the other side, the phone to his ear, listening to the hush of her life?
Finally, he said, “You like Thai food?”
“Mmm-hmm. There, just a rectangular strip. Ninety-degree angles. I may get some tiny runway lights.”
“Your secret was better than mine.”
“Yours was a pretend secret,” she said, and as she spoke the words she understood that she believed them. He was still protecting himself, padding the space between them. Why, if he wasn’t the person she had imagined, not the person she had fallen for, why did she still want him? Why did she still thrill to his voice or even his semi attentive silence? “It means you must have a real secret that you won’t talk about.”
No pause. Not even a beat. “A dark secret. Every romantic hero should have one.”
I was a stripper, she thought. I went to hotel rooms with strange men. I did two guys at once for three hundred dollars cash. I snorted cocaine off the erection of a real estate broker who did not bother to remove his socks or wristwatch to screw me. How romantic is that? What kind of hero am I?
“I don’t know about dark secret,” she said, “but there’s something back there.”
He took a breath. He seemed to be thinking. He said, “I have no idea.”
In the next silence, she felt the urge—a sliding shudder that resembled panic—to extricate herself, to hang up and let him go. What was he selling, really? Why should she want to remain on his call list? He was fucking around on his fiancée, and she was having a fling with a fantasy. To choke back these thoughts, she said aloud, “James Candler is my lover.”
Following another pause, he said, “For now.”
Only after they had ended the call and she was sitting in the kitchen chair alone, happy and unhappy simultaneously, a bell just rung that cannot hear its tone only register the vibrations, did she recall it: Tristan. The name of the planet with three moons. She looked for the paperback but could not find it. Hadn’t she held it in her hands? How could it have disappeared?
She glanced at the kitchen clock, grabbed her keys and purse, and hurried for the door. The paperback lay on the floor, beneath her chair. It had been invisible to her because it had landed on its spine and leaned against the chair’s legs. The characters on the cover—a man with desperate hair and a shiny V-neck shirt and a woman in what appeared to be space age underwear—watched Lise leave her apartment, disappointed not to be found, wondering what in this tepid world of hers could be so important that she would leave them and Tristan and Tristan’s moons on the carpeted floor.
DAY 5:
Candler left the evaluation floor and hurried to his desk, holding the words in his head. Some years ago, while he was at the clinic in L.A., he began transcribing certain lines spoken by clients. The kid who got him started was homeless and undiagnosed—a recent college dropout—who tried to explain how it felt to sleep under the freeway: “The loud beneath the image sketches, but also there’s the buttoned-up absence we don’t need to distill.” Candler transcribed the words later, from a tape of the session, into a fresh notebook, which he labeled Cabbage, a title he’d stolen from one of his father’s paintings. Now he had thirty pages of quotations. During his first week at Onyx Rehab an elderly client asked, “Why do you keep shooting me veiled looks?” A stroke victim, brought to the Center by his teenage son, told the boy, “I know your name, I just don’t know the word for it.” And there was the tiny woman who seated herself across from Candler just as he spilled coffee, and said, “I disorder you.” He might go a month without adding anything, and then he’d hear a sentence that would get him started, and he might add a dozen new lines over the course of a week.
He was working with Lowell Darringer, a long-term resident initially diagnosed as schizophrenic and later revised to borderline personality. Candler thought the first verdict was closer to capturing the enigma of Lowell Darringer. There might be no adequate label for what was wrong with him. In his mid fifties now, Darringer was essentially cargo at the Center. His intake evaluation, done seventeen years earlier by a psychologist named Bucheole, included a scribble in the margin: He’s like a sturgeon on the subway. From the day he arrived at the Center, Lowell Darringer was deemed hopeless. These days his treatment was handled almost completely by techs. Even this evaluation of work skills was a farce, merely a requisite entry in the man’s file. He was an anachronism, the vestigial tail of an evolving giant.
Candler transcribed the man’s utterance in the notebook: “Eve was the apple peddler, but men got twice the sin in one ball as women’s got in box and brain combined.” Many of the pages of Cabbage belonged to a single, madly voluble schizophrenic named Jack Cartwright.
Because there’s so little in our lives we actually get to choose, we become violent over crunchy versus creamy and wax eloquent about the girl up the street instead of the one down the street while a biologist with a lot of time on his hands couldn’t find a molecule of difference between them.
Cartwright was a constant talker, always in complete sentences, often fascinating, rarely incoherent. With a tiny bit of self-control, he could have been a writer, an analyst, or something, if he could only close his mouth long enough to write down his thoughts. There was no topic he could not talk about with amazing fluency, but he couldn’t turn it off. His IQ was the highest Candler had ever measured, but intelligence was no help. He was one of Candler’s most disturbing failures. After a two-week evaluation, Candler knew only that Cartwright could not shut up.
Beneath Cabbage lay the unfinished report for Guillermo Mendez. For the first time in his professional career, Candler could not finish an evaluation. The Jack Cartwright report had been weak, but at least he’d written the damn thing. The Mendez eval was a different matter. Admitting defeat would put the kid back in combat, and yet what could he legitimately do about it? He had to write something. Tomorrow, maybe. He left his desk. This weekend at the latest.
On the evaluation floor, Kat McIntyre observed Lowell Darringer on the station called full body range of motion, a tall platform with three differently angled planes. Each plane held a pattern of bolts and the client had to move plastic templates from one plane to the next, screwing them off and on. The exercise was meant to measure the ability to work in different physical positions—squatting, hands above head, and so on. The eval hub held twelve workstations, spaced evenly about the room like trees with great root systems. Kat casually showed Candler her stopwatch: forty-five minutes and counting. The task usually took no more than fifteen minutes. Some clients could do it in eight.
Clay Hao joined them. He asked Kat about another of the clients, a bone-thin man across the room who called himself Vex.
Candler answered for her. “One of Bob’s clients.”
Hao smiled. “A floater.”
Bob Whitman had a few months yet before his retirement, but in most ways it seemed that he had already vacated the premises. His client worked at a furious pace, as if the floor beneath his feet were electrified.
“Mr. Vex is focused, but a wee bit combative,” Kat said. “That’s the term I’m going to suggest to Bob.” She put her hand on Candler’s arm to ask if he agreed. She smiled, displaying her braces. He’d never had the nerve to ask about them. She’d had them the whole time of their acquaintance, more than two years. Could they be merely decorative? Jewelry for the teeth? How out of touch was he?
“Vex is wound a little tight,” he agreed.
“When does your lady get here?” Kat asked. A playful, nervy light animated her eyes.
“A week from Saturday.”
“Last few nights of freedom,” she said. “Soon you’ll be an old married man.”
It sounded like an invitation. He pretended to miss it. If he weren’t already cheating on Lolly with Lise, would he find himself over at Kat’s house again? She seemed to want a final fling with him before Lolly arrived for the same reason that he
had wanted to sleep with Lise—the wicked thrill of it. Half-remembered lyrics to a song played in his head: Kicks just keep gettin’ harder to find . . .
“You’ll meet her,” Candler said. “Egri is throwing a party.”
“I heard.” She displayed that decorative smile again. “The Calamari Cowboys ride again—for the first time.”
“Hee-haw,” Hao said and swung an imaginary lariat.
Darringer laboriously checked and double-checked the templates. He inevitably turned the nuts the wrong way and offered a semi-continuous rumbling commentary: “Think you can stop me, widget?” Across the room, the one called Vex banged on the table that held the mechanical aptitude workstation—either in frustration or excitement, Candler could not say which. The tech observing him took a tiny step back. Kat’s body brushed against Candler’s, and he understood how easily he would have tumbled. Only the fact of Lise kept him from a good-bye fuck with Kat. What kind of man did that make him? Certainly not one belonging to any of the first several ranks.
At long last, Darringer finished his task. Candler listened while Kat asked him the standard series of questions. He answered with affirmative or negative grunts, and then Candler stepped in. “That looked like a tough one.”
“Not so bad,” Darringer said, “but I want to know something.”
“What would that be, Lowell?” Candler made a point of using clients’ names, establishing rapport, encouraging intimacy. He had to decide what recommendation he could write for this unfortunate man.
“Not sure it’s proper protocol to ask publicly,” Darringer said, eyeing Kat and Hao with suspicion.
Hao took the cue. “I’d better get back to my reports.”
“I’ve got to run, too,” Kat said.
“All right, Lowell,” Candler said after they were gone, “what do you think of this workstation?”
“It was tolerable in terms of the physical body,” he said and leaned in close, putting his mouth to the back of Candler’s head. He spoke softly. “But why do you have me working on this spaceship?”
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