by David Poses
A string quartet plays Shostakovich at the top of the president’s driveway while white-gloved waiters in tuxedos crisscross the lawn with silver platters, serving tall flutes of champagne and fancy hors d’oeuvres. On a small table near the bar, I find our names among all the place cards. We’re table 2. I spot Letty’s card and flip it open. Table 2.
When the musicians segue into Pachelbel’s Canon, Jane and I file to the end of the second row on the groom’s side and sit in folding wooden chairs with an unobstructed view of all twelve guests on the bride’s side. Not knowing what Letty looks like, I scan the faces, and my heart sinks. She isn’t here. Unless she’s in her twenties.
A few minutes later, Dave and Ana are pronounced husband and wife, and they kiss to applause. I wait close to ten minutes for a Coke at the bar and then join Jane at our table as a waitress serves an amuse-bouche of corn chowder in a white ceramic spoon. The smell makes me sick. Across the table, a couple complain about the traffic in Hartford.
“We almost didn’t make it,” the man says.
“So much rubbernecking,” the woman says. “Why don’t people just keep going?”
“People rubberneck because they want to see a fatality,” I say.
Jane smiles and squeezes my thigh under the table.
I lean over and whisper, “I’m nervous.”
She whispers back, “I know. You’re a rock star.” She kisses my cheek.
Salad is served on chilled plates with three-tined forks. I nudge Jane. She knows they’ve been a bad omen ever since my father’s second wife moved in and replaced his perfectly serviceable silverware with a set containing three-tined forks. Nice enough woman, but I preferred Dad’s original forks—and wife.
Between courses, as the first few brave couples take to the dance floor, I get up and look for a heads-up penny to cancel the negative implications of the forks. I don’t find any and return to the table.
“Letty isn’t coming.”
“Relax.”
“She’s not. You saw the salad forks, and there weren’t any pennies on—”
“There’s no God. The universe is run by forks and pennies.”
“You make me sound crazy when you say it that way.”
Through the shrubbery, I watch cars come up South Road. Letty doesn’t drive a Hyundai hatchback or a rusted-out Subaru station wagon. The sun dips behind the mountain. Busboys scurry around, replacing salad plates with clean chargers and fresh sets of silverware.
Jane pokes my arm with her new fork. “Four tines.”
An older couple arrives, white, possibly Jewish. Dave and Ana walk them to us. Ana looks at me. “David, Jane, Peter, and Susan, please allow me to introduce two very special people who drove a long way to be with us. Ted and Lenore, Dave’s aunt and uncle from Virginia.”
Fuck Ted and fuck Lenore. Fuck them and all of Virginia in its stupid fucking ass.
Eyeing the empty seats, Ana says, “Hmm. Letty and Sid aren’t here yet?”
“Maybe they’re stuck in Hartford,” Susan says.
“Hartford.” Lenore moans.
So begins another round of “why was there so much traffic in fucking Hartford?”
I lean toward Jane and open my mouth. She drills the tip of her index finger into my thigh. “She’ll be here,” she says through gritted teeth.
Dinner is served. Ted and Lenore and Peter and Susan and Jane have orgasms over the delicious halibut. I stare at the plates next to me—rapidly cooling slabs of fish with diagonal grill marks. I make a deal with myself to leave after the next song.
I force a few coughs as a preamble. “I’m starting to feel sick again.”
Jane sighs. Balling up my napkin, I rise to my feet, but then I sit back down as a shiny black Mercedes sedan coasts into the driveway. An older couple emerges. The woman has short, reddish hair. Ana runs over and escorts them to the table.
“David, Jane, Peter, Susan, Ted, and Lenore, please meet Sid and Letty Aronson.”
Sid plays the Hartford traffic game with Ted, Peter, and Susan. Letty sits next to me. My heart sinks when she asks how I know the bride and groom. Ana didn’t say shit about me. I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry if this is uncouth, but it’s an amazing coincidence to meet you since I’ve had a correspondence with your brother.”
“Woody?”
“Jane and I saw his band at the Carlyle last year. I slipped him a note.”
“You slipped Woody a note and he wrote back? You must have a real way with words. My brother does not respond to fan mail.”
“We’ve been going back and forth for a while. He sent me his copy of the Deconstructing Harry script.”
I’m kind of on autopilot, not really aware of what I’m saying as the conversation gets deep and eclectic in a hurry. Movies. Books. Art. Philosophy.
Judaism as a cultural phenomenon versus religion. Letty props her elbow on the table and her chin on her fist. She maintains eye contact throughout.
Toasts are made, and the cake is cut and served. As the band transitions to down-tempo instrumentals, Letty and I keep talking. She says Sid is a high school principal. They’re interested in Marlboro’s unconventional approach to education. I explain that the Plan of Concentration is an undergrad version of a graduate-level thesis.
“Mine is on existentialism in Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman films. It includes an essay relating Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche to the filmmakers, along with a few short films I wrote, directed, and edited and an original screenplay.”
Letty nudges Sid and leans in close. “Tell me about your movie.”
The projector in my mind flickers on. A black-and-white shot of a young man, my age, from behind, sitting on the front steps of an old house by a lake. Light snow falls from the sky. The story goes from my head to my lips before I can think.
“A young man writes a best-selling novel and then has a nervous breakdown. While he recovers, he tries to repair the relationship with his estranged father.”
“Very Bergman,” Letty says, nodding at Sid, who also nods.
“Two parallel arcs weave in and out. One goes forward, the other goes backward, but you don’t know that until the movie’s over. The last shot is the same as the first except you see the guy from the front and realize he froze to death, waiting outside his father’s house all night. The audience has to decide what was real and what was a hallucination brought on by hypothermia. That’s the title.”
Letty says “hypothermia” slowly, enunciating each syllable. “I’d love to read it. If you’re comfortable.”
Eyes bugging out, I nod like a maniac. Letty writes on her place card—a phone number and address on Fifty-Seventh Street in Manhattan: Jean Doumanian Productions.
“We’ve been talking about finding young, up-and-coming writer-directors to make art-house films on shoestring budgets,” she says. “This is really very serendipitous.”
My body warms when Letty passes the card to me. I breathe. I can breathe.
After the wedding, when everyone in the cottage is asleep, I walk up the hill to the editing room with my laptop, and I write. The words flow so fast that my fingers can barely keep up. I write for almost twenty hours straight.
On Monday morning, I print the file, tuck it into a manila envelope, and write “David Poses” above the return address. Letty calls on Wednesday.
“I was delighted to see your script in this morning’s mail. I’ll read it this weekend and give you a call on Monday.”
part three
1999
twenty-five
I’m at the top of a ladder, two rungs above the one with the red line and the warning “DO NOT CLIMB HIGHER THAN RED LINE.” The soundstage is an inferno. Heat rises.
When Trevor, the producer and director, calls “Action,” I pour a bucket of confetti into an industrial fan above a fake fuselage. Then I remain still as Carson Daly ad-libs with mannequins standing in for celebrities.
“Madonna—may I call you Madge? Great. What’s that? You�
��re pumped to ring in the new millennium on MTV, on this private jet, in every time zone? Me too. Me. Too.”
“Cut,” Trevor says, and I shimmy down the ladder, pick confetti out of the rug, and return to my perch. I don’t know how many times I’ve executed this Sisyphean task since we started shooting at seven-thirty. Ten hours later, we still haven’t taken a break, but every fly on the set has sampled and shat on the nachos and wings and chicken flautas on the craft services table.
“Yo, T,” Carson shouts, “some mango would be the bomb.”
Trevor snaps his fingers at Annie, a production assistant on the ladder to my left. “The Talent wants mango,” he says. She hustles down and out of the building and returns ten minutes later with a plastic flower-shaped platter of freshly sliced mango.
The Talent samples the offering and proclaims it “bomb-ass.” He licks his fingers, says “I’m gone and this place is history,” and takes off.
The rest of us stay and shoot B-roll footage until midnight, when Trevor notices some confetti in the carpet. “People,” he says, “okay, people. Might I remind you of the million film school grads who’d literally kill to work on my set. If you want to make it in this business, it takes more than hopes and dreams.”
He’s right. I found that out twenty-six Mondays ago, when Letty didn’t call. Two more silent Mondays passed before I tried to contact her. Crickets. Ditto for Woody and Lauren. Fine.
Since graduating in December, Jane and I have been living at my aunt Jo’s apartment in Midtown. Jo is in Florida on a long-term work assignment. Her cats stayed behind, shedding enough hair on any given day to make half a dozen new cats.
Jane gets up from the couch. “Hey, Poses,” she says, “you’re looking kinda slim. I brought food home from work.”
Every refugee resettlement agency in the city wants to hire her. None have funding to offer her a job, so she’s working as a hostess at an upscale Chinese restaurant. She sticks the Village Voice in my face and points to an apartment listing surrounded by red stars drawn around it.
“Brooklyn Heights studio near the Promenade. You said you love it there.”
I say a lot of things. That doesn’t mean they’re true. And on the emotional spectrum, the closest I get to love lately is tolerance, and even that might be a stretch. Anhedonia. Nothing is pleasurable. Anticipation and retrospection beat the moment every time.
Last month, I couldn’t wait for a Radiohead concert. When the first notes rang out, I couldn’t wait for it to be over. I couldn’t just be. I can’t just be. Not long after the show, while working as a temp receptionist at an accounting firm in midtown, I read an article in a psychology magazine about the ways opioids permanently change your brain chemistry. It said something to the effect that every time you put dope in your body, your receptors multiply to accommodate the flood of dopamine and serotonin, so the more and longer you use, the bigger the field you have to saturate to feel “even.”
In other words, I was miserable before dope, and that’s the happiest I’ll ever be.
My so-called disease, in remission since Northampton, is no less ravenous. I light a cigarette and open the window. Leaning into the freezing air, ten stories above the sidewalk, I spit and watch my saliva come apart—a straight shot down between the balconies. From this height: quadriplegia or death? Headfirst would be a challenge. I never learned how to dive properly. Jumping out a window isn’t the answer. It’s too tough to make it appear accidental.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll get hit by a bus or be pushed in front of a subway. Pianos and safes and anvils fall from pulleys in cartoons—why not in real life? Are there random acts of cyanide poisoning? Why am I so nonchalant about life and death? Why is “nonchalant” a word but “chalant” isn’t?
I call it elevator roulette. Waiting in the hall before the bank of elevators, I press the down button, my back to a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking Manhattan. The leftmost door opens. The elevator is full. I pat my pockets, turn, and mutter, “It’s in the apartment.”
What percentage of the building’s upper-floor population thinks I leave something in the apartment every morning?
Outside, a vague hint of early spring is stifled by bus exhaust and subway fumes rising from grates in the sidewalk. I descend the steps to the Thirty-Third Street station. On the platform, commuters jockey for a position. A female voice crackling out of a loudspeaker is too muffled to understand.
I think about Chessa and her new husband in Kansas. She told me about him in a letter she sent to my mother’s address in December. It was on my bed when I came home after graduation. I still haven’t responded.
A packed train pulls in. Nobody makes an effort to get on during the brief, awkward moment when the doors open and some passengers look out, somewhat apologetically. On the other side of the tracks, a Tylenol PM poster gives me an idea.
LETHAL SMOOTHIE FOR ONE
Ingredients:
Tylenol PM—1 fuckload (approx.)
Vanilla ice cream—¼ pint
Directions:
Combine Tylenol and ice cream in blender. Mix to desired consistency. Pour concoction into a plastic cup. Clean blender thoroughly. Discard all evidence in public trash receptacles.
Consume beverage in a subway station and discard cup.
Board a train, find a seat, fall asleep.
When my mother’s face appears in my mind’s eye, I know I won’t do it. The day I stop caring about the pain my death will inflict is the day I die—unless I get lucky and something kills me first.
Every five minutes for an hour, Trevor says, “The Talent will be here in five minutes.” He gets a phone call at nine-thirty and announces a slight change of plans. “People, okay, people. We’ll shoot on Saturday instead of today.”
The crew groans in unison.
“I don’t know why you’re complaining, people. This is literally the most gorgeous day ever, so take a hike. Scat. Scram. Vamanos. Au revoir. Arrivederci. Auf Wiedersehen.”
I’m on the loading dock smoking a cigarette with most of the crew when Trevor leaves in a chauffeured Town Car.
Annie waves. “Bye,” she says through a smile. “You condescending prick.”
“I hate to make generalizations,” I say, “but every Trevor’s a condescending prick.”
“I hate how he says literally: ‘litch-ruh-lee.’ And he says it a hundred times a day.”
“And it’s an adverb that, literally, means without exaggeration. But he only uses ‘literally’ hyperbolically, figuratively.”
Annie laughs, guttural and sincere. Waifishly thin, with medium-length brown hair, she stuffs a cigarette in her mouth and leans over. “Hey, cowboy, got a light?”
I take out Herbie’s old Zippo, spin the wheel, and hold the flame to her Marlboro. She cranes her neck and blows smoke toward the sky and waves it away.
Geoff, a production assistant who is very particular about everyone knowing his name doesn’t start with “J,” drapes an arm around Annie’s shoulders.
At the other end of the loading dock, Will, also a production assistant, sucks on a Newport like it owes him money and complains about the recent seismic shift in New York City’s drug-dealing paradigm.
“Fuckin’ Giuliani made the city too clean. And the beepers and cell phones. It used to be you go to shitty neighborhoods to buy weed from shady individuals. Now, they come to you—if you know how to get in touch with them.”
“I have a guy,” Geoff says.
“Not that asshole from the mp3 website?” Annie says.
“Fuck that. He only had fucking heroin.”
I drop my cigarette and run to the subway. Over the past few months, I’ve downloaded thousands of albums from hundreds of mp3 websites. They’re all bookmarked on my laptop.
When the train stops at Thirty-Third Street, my feet refuse to move. I ride to Eighty-Sixth Street and wander into Barnes and Noble, to a display table in the fiction section: “Books about Armageddon.”
Scanning the titles
the way a froufrou woman looks at designer purses, I wonder how I’d be perceived with Nevil Shute’s On the Beach in hand or The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard. I pick up Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. The chapters are short.
One of my favorite lines is from Vonnegut’s novel Mother Night: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Keith Gordon directed the film. He played Rodney Dangerfield’s son in Back to School. Vonnegut had a cameo.
I park myself in an overstuffed, coffee-stained chair and start reading. I read and read and read. Save for a few smoke breaks, I devour the book in one sitting. In Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut writes about a made-up religion—Bokononism:
We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon . . .
“If you find your life tangled up with somebody else’s life for no very logical reasons,” writes Bokonon, “that person may be a member of your karass.”
. . . The first sentence in The Books of Bokonon is this:
“All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”
My Bokononist warning is this:
Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.
So be it.
Late in the afternoon, I leave the store, somewhat disoriented—similar to going to a matinee that ends when it’s light outside.
Under a streaky orange sky with polluted, pale pink cotton candy clouds, I feel the presence of a force. Not some dude with a beard in a robe. A well-intentioned, precisely timed blowing of wind at my sails. The Talent didn’t show up and Trevor would dismiss us. I’d hear about a heroin dealer online, resist temptation, and read Cat’s Cradle, which, for all I know, Kurt Vonnegut wrote to keep me clean.
When I return to Jo’s apartment, the first thing I see is Sunday’s New York Times Help Wanted section on the table by the door. My eye is drawn to a big ad for an advertising headhunter. Get paid to make shit up? I call the number in the listing. A woman with a Long Island accent and a gravely, five-packs-of-cigarettes-a-day-for-two-hundred-years voice answers.