She had been making good money for about seven years now, though it may have been longer. Lengths of time deceived him these days. Awhile back, he had started automatically adding three years to any casual estimate of elapsed time. Thus, if it felt like something happened two years ago, it was probably five. If it seemed like six years ago, it was definitely nine. And these days, he had noticed that three years wasn't quite enough. He'd started adding five just to be on the safe side.
Which meant that Ana has probably been making good money for close to twelve years. Lucky thing too, because by now, he would probably be living beneath the 8 Mile Road overpass, cadging rumpled singles from passing cars, like the guys he would encounter coming home late from seeing bands at the bars in Hamtramck. Two thirty in the morning, and there they were, with their six coats and three hats, their overstuffed shopping carts, and their greasy, creased-soft, cardboard GOD BLESS signs, staring blankly at you at the traffic light. These days, Joe had been giving them the stray dollars that he'd find wadded in his bar pockets. He'd look them in their eyes, all rheumy and broken, so as not to seem like one of those people who didn't think of them as humans. He didn't like it, though, the time that one of them wanted to shake his hand. Joe did it, but couldn't get the little bottle of hand sanitizer out of his glove box quickly enough once he was down the street.
Which was another thing—when did he become one of those geezers with hand sanitizer in his glove compartment?
6
The Daughter She'll Never Have
If Ana had met Adrienne Kaminski at a party, she would have run fast and far. She would have thought the woman was completely obnoxious. It was true that Adrienne made a big impression. She was loud, especially when she laughed, she wore clothes that were too tight, showed too much, and were possibly too young for her, and maybe even her hair was a shade too red, but the fact was, Adrienne pulled it all off. Mostly because the woman just didn't give a fuck. Adrienne had attitude for days. Maybe it helped that she was 6'1", but that didn't always add up to feminine confidence. Other tall women Ana had known had leaned toward the slouchy, as if ashamed of their height. But Adrienne rocked hers like a plus-size supermodel. (When she got off an elevator, guys would invariably look down at her feet to see if she was wearing high heels, as if that could be the only explanation.)
Luckily, Ana never got the opportunity to run away from Adrienne at that imaginary party. They were pushed together as an art director/copywriter team at the agency five years ago when Ana started. Aside from copywriting, Adrienne was the half of the team that was happy to do the talking in presentations (Ana talked, but wasn't all that happy about it), and the selling, and the pushing, and the calling of bullshit, if need be. And often, the need did be. "They force me to be this way," Adrienne would say. "They can call me a bitch, but I do not care." Sometimes they did, but not to her face. They knew better. Adrienne Kaminski was not afraid to throw down against man or woman.
After working together for a few weeks, Ana found that she and Adrienne had a lot in common—seventies folk-rock girl singers, screwball comedies of the thirties, a love of midcentury graphic design, and even some of the same secret shameful reality TV shows. And certainly they shared a taste for wine. Yet Ana especially liked how she could tell Adrienne something and the woman would keep her mouth shut. This was a rare and wondrous thing in people, and even rarer for people in advertising. Adrienne gave her partner credit for ideas even when Ana wasn't in the room. And the woman believed in good work, which was something that got a lot of lip service in advertising, but the desire to do it was the first thing to die with most creatives. If they ever had it in the first place.
Ana had known they would be friends the first time they went out to lunch together, when Adrienne grabbed the chromed handle of the glass door leading to the parking lot, stopped, made a face, then slowly lifted her hand to her nose. She spit out the word "Fuck!" She then pushed through the doors and started wiping her hand in grass near the flower beds that lined the parking lot.
Stunned, Ana walked up to her and asked, "Uh, Adrienne, what are you doing?"
"Some nasty motherfucker just spritzed a gallon of Paco Rabanne or some such shit on himself," she said. "Now my hand stinks of account executive!"
The sight of Adrienne, tall as she was, on her knees in a pencil skirt running her hand in the grass to get the stench of AE off was all it took. Ana pulled a wet wipe from a packet in her purse, handed it to Adrienne, and they were off. This also set the tone for their relationship in many ways as well. Ana was often taking care of Adrienne, mothering her, making sure she was eating right, not drinking too much, and using condoms. (She did not wish for a repeat of the time that she was Adrienne's ride and waiting room plus-one at the women's clinic in Southfield.) Adrienne usually had a crush of the moment, often geeky cute musicians or willowy art boys who were initially stunned by the attention of a woman like her, only to be later shattered by their abrupt dismissal. Adrienne was attracted to artistic talent, but she also tended to lose interest when those same men displayed what could be called an artistic temperament (i.e., moody, neurotic, and insecure). She had no stomach for prima donnas. Still, Ana enjoyed hearing about her escapades, although Adrienne had a tendency to offer up a tad too much graphic detail.
"You're like the daughter I'll never have," Ana was fond of saying.
Which was another thing that bound them together at work—their respective childfree existences. The creative department, while never as fecund as the rest of the company, had just recently gone through a spate of pregnancies like Ana had never experienced. It seemed like all the women were getting pregnant—married, unmarried, early twenties, middle-aged, it didn't matter.
It got to the point where Ana was getting the look. The forlorn, swollen-bellied, cocked-headed Shouldn't you be doing this too? look, when she'd run into a couple of the knocked-up women in the coffee room where they were refilling a hand-thrown cup with kukicha or sipping a decaf soy chai latte, talking about how special it was being pregnant. To be fair, she had heard them bitch about the discomfort and hormonal mania too, but even those comments were couched in language that reveled in the wonder of it all.
"It's so awesome," one would say to Ana, the other nodding avidly. At which point Ana would smile sweetly, fill her thermal cup with fully leaded dark roast, and clear out tout de suite. She didn't dislike those women; she was happy that they were happy. It was just that they couldn't seem to be happy that she was happy not having kids. As if once they'd conceived, they could no longer conceive of the idea that every woman wouldn't want the same thing as them.
"It's that water purifier," proclaimed Adrienne about the epidemic. "I'm not drinking out of that fucking thing anymore."
Yet what were she and Adrienne doing today? Reviewing the casting for children for the spot they would be shooting in a few days. They needed a kid for a nonspeaking role. It was simple stuff that required minimal attention. They just had to lock themselves in a conference room where they wouldn't be interrupted. They just needed a nice, normal-looking Midwestern kid to be part of a nice, normal-looking Midwestern family.
"God, this is terrifying," Adrienne said with a strained voice, as she stared at the laptop screen, finger poised over the touch pad, ready to instantly skip ahead once Ana gave the go-ahead to do so. "How these parents make these perfectly cute kids so hideous is beyond me. Look at this child. Poor thing has one of those horrible Hollywood Little Lord Fauntleroy haircuts. He's been brainwashed to smile after he says anything. That kid's already been so messed up by his parents. He hasn't got a chance at a normal life."
"And we're helping to exploit him," said Ana, only half kidding. "We ought to be ashamed of ourselves."
Adrienne laughed. "I'd be happy to exploit him, and so would his parents, except he can't act his way out of a dry cleaner's bag."
"Next," said Ana. Adrienne clicked forward.
"Ouch. Ana, I do believe that child is wearing makeup."
Ana nodded. "Moving on," she said.
Adrienne fast-forwarded the DVD to the next audition. On the screen appeared a blond, blue-eyed child, so beautiful, so perfectly coiffed and styled as to be almost otherworldly. It was like looking at a video of a rare wood nymph. Beautiful, but eerie.
Adrienne had a similar reaction. "No thank you. No Children of the Corn in our commercial. Mind if we move on, A?"
"Yes please."
Adrienne clicked the fast-forward button. "You okay? Usually casting is much more cruel fun than this."
"Eh." Ana fell back in her chair. "I just . . . eh."
"What?"
She thought about chewing Joe out for blabbing personal matters to his friends, then decided that she didn't care. "Weirdness at home, that's all."
"Everything okay? You want to talk about it?"
She did, but she didn't. "Too embarrassing."
Adrienne took her hand off the touch pad and looked pointedly at Ana. "Now you fucking have to tell me."
Ana threw her mechanical pencil onto the stack of casting notes and exhaled. The noise she emitted might have been either exhausted sigh or annoyed growl. She grimaced, not wanting to say it, yet knowing she would.
"Ugh. I left him at the house this morning, then I realized that I had forgotten my laptop, so I had to turn around and go home."
"Uh-oh."
Incredulous, Ana looked at her. "What? You know what I'm going to say?"
Adrienne raised an eyebrow, made a fist with her palm up, moved it back and forth as if she were shaking dice, but that was not what she was pantomiming. It was a gesture Adrienne was known to make often, especially when she knew that they were going to be wasting their time on a project.
"How did you know?" said Ana.
"What? I know that scenario, come on. So what's the big deal? He's a man. He can't even help himself. They do it constantly. They're like dogs except they can't lick themselves, which is a good thing because if they could, they would never stop."
"So it's nothing?"
"Unless he's not saving any for you. Then it's a problem. How are you guys doing in that department?"
Ana did not speak.
"Well, that doesn't sound good. Okay. How long as it been?"
Ana stared at the frozen close-up of a child on the television. "Months."
"Holy shit. I'm getting way more play than you."
Ana smiled blandly. "Yes. Thank you for pointing that out. It never once occurred to me while you were regaling me with tales of three-times-a-night Darryl."
"Sorry."
Ana reached out to touch her friend's hand. "Don't be. There's nothing to be sorry about. It's not your fault the man I live with would rather jerk off to MILFs than fuck me."
Adrienne put a hand over her mouth in fake horror. "I don't think I've ever heard you say anything like that. It's kind of shocking."
"Yeah, isn't it?" Ana looked for something to do with her arms besides fold them, fumbling them a bit on the conference room table, then folded them anyway. "I guess I'm starting to get over the shock. Now I'm just getting mad."
"Ruh-roh," said Adrienne in the manner of Scooby-Doo.
"I mean it. What's going on here? This is fucked up."
"Ana, it's not that fucked up. This stuff just happens. People are together for a while and—"
"What? Familiarity breeds contempt?"
"No. Familiarity breeds familiarity. Entropy. Come on, you've been with Joe for a long time. You guys are used to each other. Those women he's looking at are just different."
Ana folded her arms tighter against her body. "That's pretty much what he said . . . You know, it's not even just that. It's just gotten harder for us to, you know, be intimate with each other these days. It's harder to make the commitment. We're both so fucking moody and high-strung. He'll come to me and I can tell he wants to do it, but I had a bad day here or there was something on the news that pissed me off or I just don't feel like being touched." Ana glanced up at Adrienne, who was staring at her. She did not like the pity she saw in her friend's face. "I'm sorry. This is pathetic, isn't it?"
Adrienne tried to smile, but it just looked like she was displaying her teeth. "Little bit, yeah."
"Am I like a walking cautionary tale for not ever being in a long-term relationship?"
"Come on, it's not that bad."
Ana thought she was lying. Right now, Adrienne was probably thinking, If I ever get married, this will never happen to me. She was probably right.
Ana reached over and unpaused the DVD. "We should get back to this." She watched the little redhead thespian on the screen in front of her. His parents had obviously coached him to play up his lisp. The child was not at all natural and he was simply talking to the casting director. You could see that he was just trying to please everyone. She wanted to kill this poor kid's parents.
"Adrienne, please fast-forward before I have to pull my eyes out and stuff them in my ears so I don't have to look at or listen to this abomination."
"Ah, now you sound like you."
"What? Mean and bitter?"
"Yes. That's my girl. Look, maybe you just need to shake things up."
"What are you suggesting?"
Adrienne laughed, but Ana got a feeling that she wasn't going to say what she was thinking. Sometimes Ana got the feeling that maybe Adrienne was against the whole concept of monogamy.
"I don't know, lady. Only you know how."
"Hm. I don't think I like the sound of that."
7
Ruin and Other Porns
Later in the day, Joe was back home, doing some research. He was thinking of pitching a long piece to his editor at the Independent about The Paris of the Midwest Is Crumbling, a blog devoted to the photographic chronicling of the many deteriorating and abandoned buildings in the city of Detroit. It was one of Joe's favorite websites and he'd wanted to do something on it for a while. It also crossed his mind that something like this could be a great piece for the New York Times (they seemed to be paying a lot of attention to Detroit lately), or maybe even a book, some sort of collaboration.
The creator of the website, a Brendan Sanderson, would enter these old buildings to photograph their dilapidated interiors. There were incredible images of aged and decaying theaters, hotels, apartment buildings, restaurants, auto plants, churches, office buildings, many of them left over from the halcyon years of automotive industry—the forties, fifties, and sixties—when the city was still flush and glutted with people and money and power.
Joe was looking at photographs of what was left of the Michigan Theater building, a grand old movie palace from the twenties that had been slated for demolition in the late seventies for a parking lot. In fact, demolition had begun when the contractors realized that it was integrally connected to the building next door. One couldn't go down without pulling down the other. So an interior parking structure was constructed inside the shell of the old theater. Pretty shocking to see a Pontiac parked underneath an Italianate ceiling or an SUV snugged beneath the proscenium where they had projected Valentino films in the twenties, where Sinatra had crooned in the forties, where Iggy and the Stooges had bled eardrums in the seventies. When film crews shot in Detroit for movies or television, they invariably ended up there. The image of parked cars surrounded by crumbling grandeur appealed to auteurs as the perfect symbol of the decline of a once great metropolis.
At home, the image was pretty much a cliché, the quintessence of everything that locals considered "ruin porn," the vacant exploitation of Detroit squalor and "grittiness" for fluff—Hollywood films that needed the perfect postapocalyptic environment, street cred for gangsta indies, or as background fodder for European fashion shoots or J-pop videos—all with no thought to the people who lived in the city and considered it home. To a lot of people in America, the fleeting image of an abandoned building just seemed to fulfill every idea they already had about Detroit—that it was a place uninhabitable for humans. At least that was what
Brendan Sanderson had to say about the subject. He photographed these sites out of respect for them, with historical context and editorials that spoke of what it meant that these formerly sacred sites were now moldering. He was also active in historic preservation and trying to shame the owners of these decaying buildings to properly secure them, rejoicing when he was no longer able to trespass onto them.
There were also photographs of the colossal old Packard plant just off of East Grand Boulevard that had been abandoned since the fifties—building after building, forty-seven in all, chockablock with broken windows, rusted girders extracted by scrappers, derelict equipment, rubble-scattered factory corridors, tumbling walls, collapsing rooflines, essentially a sprawling thirty-eight-acre architectural exoskeleton. Joe had once gone to a rave there in the late eighties and remembered thinking even then that the place was spooky, but cool. He didn't actually remember much of the evening (a significant amount of alcohol and marijuana had been consumed), only fragments—the orgiastic thump of insanely loud techno music (had it been Richie Hawtin?), ecstatically dancing people, the swelter of the room, and the lights of the city that had looked so beautiful that night, there from a window of an abandoned factory.
Joe lingered on the curious image of a graffitied dump truck hanging from a fourth-floor ledge and thought that wandering around in the place now sounded both intriguing and terrifying. Then he heard Ana's key in the front door and flinched, surprised by the sound and the breathless whoosh of dread that rose suddenly in his lungs and gut. Well, this is going to be interesting. He decided that he would just try to act normal when he saw her. What else could he do? He heard her stamping some snow off her boots and putting her coat away. So he decided to get up, head downstairs, and meet her in the kitchen, where she would surely be pouring herself a glass of wine.
The Narcissism of Small Differences Page 4