“Which bad guys?” says the less lupine of the dudes.
Nikki shakes her head. “It’s too shocking to say.”
“Tell us,” says Teen Wolf—a little rotely, Cel thinks.
Cel has agreed to a trial period of following Nikki’s advice—advice that essentially boils down to: talk less—and so, instead of answering, she gives them her signature mug-apology-shrug: raised right shoulder, head cocked to left, cheek pulled into sardonic half smile. “It needs a catchphrase,” Elspeth had told her when she’d been brainstorming it at Smith. “Like ‘Whaddaya gonna do?’ Or something.” Cel had tried bellowing this in an overwrought Italian accent—“Whaddaya gonna do!”—and it did seem to add something, though, for obvious reasons, she isn’t about to do any of that now.
“We’ll never tell,” says Nikki. “You’ll have to guess.”
“You say this badness is shocking,” says Non-Wolf. “So I guess you’re probably not one of us.”
He means finance, Cel figures. Muteness isn’t so bad if you regard it as a game, or a sort of formal constraint—she thinks of her college creative writing seminars (write a haiku, write a paragraph using one-syllable words, write a sonnet in iambic pentameter) or the drama exercises from her improv days (Be a walrus! Be a walrus with a limp! Be a walrus with a limp and a dark secret!). Structural parameters can open up artistic possibilities—look at the villanelle, or the Oulipo’s fussy shenanigans—so why not romantic ones, too? It is in this spirit that Cel has experimented with some creative interpretations of talk less over the weeks: once she’d pretended to speak very limited English, and once that she was hard of hearing, and once that she was slightly mad. For the madness, she channeled her own undergraduate performance as Ophelia—which role she had played as a “goggle-eyed, breathy-voiced schizophrenic,” according to the Smith Sophian; reprising the part in the bar, she tried to make her voice even breathier. Nikki had refused to talk to her for a while after that. Tonight, as promised, she is keeping it simple.
“No,” she says.
“Pharmaceutical company?” says Teen Wolf—he was Alec, maybe? Cel knows a person can’t help having hair in abundance any more than they can help being bald. Still, there’s something a little decadent, almost rapacious, about having quite as much hair as this.
“Getting closer!” chirps Nikki.
“You work for Saddam Hussein?”
“You work for Jesse Helms?”
Cel can’t believe they’re still asking—she is amazed by how reliably this routine inspires male curiosity. They must imagine she does something sexily ruthless—something sinful-chic, capitalist-naughty. Something that pays her lots of money to click around on stilettos and be very good in bed. People always forget that professional low-grade wrongdoing can, like anything else, be boring.
“Professional assassin?” says the non-wolf—Scott, she thinks. “Mercenary for hire?”
Cel taps her nose, and Teen Wolf looks for a second like he might almost believe her. This thrills her, childishly. He isn’t sure she’s kidding, and why should he be? She could, for all he knows, be anyone at all.
“Do you give up?” says Nikki.
“We give up,” says Teen Wolf.
“Even our depraved imaginations have limits,” says the other one, and Cel looks at him in what she hopes doesn’t scan as a double take.
“Sweet little Celeste here,” says Nikki, lowering her voice in conspiracy, “works for The Mattie M Show.”
At this, Alec makes a sound that is a cross between an “oh” and a “ha.” Cel shrugs like Guilty as charged!, aware that her performance is veering perilously close to full-blown mime.
“You guys!” says Nikki. “I mean, The Mattie M Show! Come on! You can’t tell me it’s not crazy that she works there.”
“It is crazy,” says Alec.
“I am completely obsessed with this fact,” says Nikki. She is; it seems to clash with some firm concept she had formed of Cel before they actually met, and she’s never quite gotten over the surprise. It is true that in Cel’s response to Nikki’s ad for a roommate she’d introduced herself only as a Smith graduate (true) with good credit (more like no credit) who worked in public relations (technically also true, though there was more she might have said about that). And it was also true that when Nikki first met Cel—at a coffee shop on the Lower East Side one rainy afternoon—Cel was wearing a bright yellow rain slicker and too-long jeans that were soaking wet at the bottom, and had probably appeared entirely incapable of ever surprising anyone.
The first thing Nikki said to her was, “You weren’t kidding. That raincoat really is yellow.”
The second thing—after Cel mentioned where she worked—was “Holy shit.” Nikki slammed both hands onto the table, her rings making a boisterous clattering. She leaned over with blazing eyes and said, “Tell me everything.”
“But there’s more!” says Nikki now, and Cel can tell she’s worried about losing the room. “You’ll never guess what she does there.”
“Security guard?” says Scott.
“Booking agent?”
“Morbidly obese drag-queen stylist?”
“She’s the publicist!” exclaims Nikki, as though learning this herself for the very first time. She is exceptionally good at this whole act: dropping hints, throwing cues, drawing Cel out of her faux-recalcitrance and then reacting with faux-shock—which men should really find confusing, but somehow never do. Cel feels that there must be some way to monetize this skill, but every time she tries to think of something she just comes up with pimp.
“Tough gig,” says Alec. “Were you there when that guy got tire-ironed on the set?”
“It was the parking lot,” says Cel. “And no.”
“That publicist had a breakdown,” says Nikki. “And Cel’s her replacement!”
This is usually the part of the conversation where Cel says, “Hey, it’s a living!”—and just because this has become something of a catchphrase doesn’t mean it isn’t true. It is a living: she makes more than anyone in her family ever has. She makes enough to pay her rent and loans. She makes enough to stand here, in the most expensive city in the country, drinking an eight-dollar cocktail, having this stupid conversation.
Cel has the sense that someone has asked her something. “Sorry?” she says.
“I said, how do you sleep at night?” says Alec.
“Pills,” she says, and decides to start counting her words.
“The Mattie M Show,” says Scott. “Wasn’t there a guy who married his sheep?”
“Goat,” says Cel coolly.
“Don’t,” says Nikki, shifting into her civilian register. “The woman’s only on her first drink.”
“I’ll have to buy her another, then,” says Alec, and Nikki nods her approval. To the extent that this whole thing is a shtick, Cel finds something generous in Nikki’s willingness to always play the straight man. Though then again, Nikki does tend to come away from these evenings with dates more often than Cel does—so perhaps it’s really more of a symbiotic thing: something ecological, evolutionary, like the remora and the shark.
Alec points to her martini glass. “Gin?”
Cel nods.
“Olives?”
She holds up three fingers. Nikki says it’s important to issue very specific drink orders to men you might sleep with, and Cel sees the logic of this. Though also she’s just really cheap and loves olives.
When Alec returns, he clinks his glass against Cel’s and says, “To Mattie M.”
“Long may he reign,” says Scott.
“Cheers,” says Cel, and Nikki winks at her. A carnival barker, maybe, is what she should have been.
“So, I have to ask,” says Alec, and Cel thinks she knows what’s coming. He leans toward her; his breath is gingery. “The fights. Are they real?”
Cel squints at her olives. She never knows what to say to this, even on nights when she’s saying anything at all. The fights are real inasmuch as they occur—chairs are really thrown, beefy security guards really intervene (Cel is always surprised that men so large, for whom sweating seems so imminent, smell as good as they do: light citral cologne, mint from the wintergreens they crush during commercials). Cel has never seen anyone get really hurt, but she doesn’t imagine that they aren’t getting a little hurt: having a chair thrown at you can’t feel great, even a cheap one from a short distance. The Secret Crush guy got really hurt, of course—but that was unambiguously real, and also happened in the parking lot.
“They’re staged,” says Alec. “I knew it.”
Cel shrugs and makes a So-so wave with her hand. Are the fights real? is, at the end of the day, too simple a question. The fights are preordained but not rehearsed; they aren’t explicitly encouraged, but everyone knows the drill. And though the guests do amp up their reactions, they aren’t inventing them, exactly. The whole thing is part playacting and part reenacting: both a pantomime of imagined feelings and a ritualized display of real ones—something between a gladiator fight and a bacchanal.
“Sorta,” Cel says finally. Are the fights real? Is this conversation? When you get right down to it, it’s all very hard to say.
“Well, I guess it doesn’t matter,” says Alec, looking a little disappointed. “Those people are probably gonna brawl whether you put them on TV or not.”
Cel wobbles her head on a diagonal axis that communicates neither negative nor affirmative: she knows because she’s practiced in the mirror. Maybe the fights are a formal constraint of the show the way Cel’s silence is a formal constraint of this evening. One could argue that Mattie M is best understood as a subversive commentary on the talk show format; that its rigid structure is, paradoxically, precisely what enables its daring anarchy; that its careful adherence to the aesthetic it’s critiquing is at the very heart of its vital genius. One could argue that the whole project is actually a triumph of Keats’s negative capability—a masterful inhabitation of that liminal space between incompatible uncertainties. Cel doesn’t actually believe any of that, but she can see how someone could.
To Alec, she says, “Yeah.”
She’s forgotten if she was supposed to be agreeing with something and, if so, what—but then again, it doesn’t really matter. The very act of speaking to this sort of man mutes her meaning—just as another person’s deafness makes you dumb, and another person’s blindness renders you invisible. Alec swallows the last of his drink in a soundless glug.
“So you still haven’t told me where you’re from.” His tone suggests that he has asked.
“New Hampshire.” It is extremely unfair that this should count as two words.
“Oh yeah?” says Alec. “My family has a house on Lake Winnipesaukee. Beautiful area. Does your family live near there?”
Cel shakes her head.
“Near Dartmouth?”
“Berlin.”
“Oh,” Alec says, and winces. “I’ve been through there. Really economically depressed area.”
Cel feels a familiar flash of heat; she isn’t sure what kind of face she’s making.
“If you ask me, I mean.” Though she didn’t, and anyway it is not really a matter of opinion. Cel feels her ire unfurling; she takes a sip of her martini and waits for anger to cool into resolve. She is accustomed to this process—this sort of internal annealing. Still, there is the question of how to respond. Asking Alec where he’s from will mess up her word count. Eliding “where” and “are” won’t make up for “New Hampshire,” and will also probably make her sound drunk. Cel feels her ongoing low-grade desire to flee flaring into an electric sense of requirement—something like the prickling dawn of a panic attack, the first hazy aura of a seizure.
“Another drink?” says Alec. Cel nods, ordering the panicked feeling down. All that evil requires is for good women to remain polite! She laughs, and Alec looks pleased with himself.
“Be right back,” he tells her.
“ ’Kay,” says Cel. A syllable saved is a syllable earned! Should she be counting syllables? She would have to consult Nikki. Cel turns to find her, becoming aware as she does that 1) she is in fact conclusively drunk, and 2) there’s been a subtle shift in the bar’s background noise. The sound of conversation has become both softer and denser, and she notices a weirdly orderly bunching of people near the bar. The group seems to pulse a bit, revealing a glimpse of Nikki’s velvet hat. Cel picks her way toward her, mentally preparing to argue—should Nikki object to her abandonment of Alec—that a man who is into muteness is probably really into invisibility.
The group, it seems, is gathered around a television. She can hear it but not see it—the broad-backed financiers are blocking her view—which means it must be small, and not for watching sports. Cel hadn’t known this bar even had a TV.
Cel pokes Nikki in the back. “What’s going on?”
“Shh.” A financier reaches over to turn up the volume, knocking over a hillock of peanuts. The vine-tattooed bartender eyes him fretfully.
“—In the stricken community of Glendale, Ohio, grief turns to terror tonight amidst reports that one of the two shooters responsible for today’s massacre is still at large—”
Cel can tell from the anchor’s voice that this is network news: this is a voice prepared to tell the nation anything—presidential assassination, space disaster, nuclear holocaust. She maneuvers in order to see the screen: CBS.
“—Though police have yet to release the juvenile suspect’s identity, authorities have confirmed that the second assailant has died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound sustained during the incident—”
“Awful,” Cel hears herself saying again. The word’s wrongness has expanded since she said it last.
“Yeah,” says Alec, who is suddenly behind her, the two martinis pretzeled into one hand. Cel registers an automatic sense of envy at the male hand’s capacity to hold so many things at once—an inequity so indisputable, so bloodless, that she has even managed to semi-successfully joke about it with other men, at other bars, on other days—then feels a flood of self-disgust for even noticing it. Why is she thinking about these things right now? And why is she now thinking about thinking about them?
“They said it was a student?” she says to Alec, to apologize.
“That’s what they said a minute ago, yeah.”
The screen is showing the same row of emergency vehicles from earlier—though either the shot is wider, or there are many more of them now. Behind the fire trucks and ambulances is an ominous cluster of black SUVs, and behind those is a line of yellow school buses. They look expectant and incongruously cheerful, like pencils in a case. Cel tries to focus on the screen, but her gaze keeps slipping to Alec—his hand, cradling its forgotten drinks; his face, utterly absorbed in what he’s watching. It is a perfectly fine face, after all—the face of a man you would be glad to see your friend marry—and Cel feels a sudden, inexplicable tenderness for him. She is appalled at how she’d hated him, only moments ago, and only for mistaking her for someone else—when in fact she invites such misunderstandings, she revels in them. She loves being free to thrill in the secret fact of her own mind; she likes to feel aggrieved by her mask while delighting in the hideous privacy behind it. I’m here, I’m right here and you don’t even know it! Cel knows this much about herself.
Time has gotten staticky, and after a while Cel realizes that the crowd around the TV has dispersed. She has entirely lost track of Nikki: life, after all, goes on. She taps Alec on the shoulder. From his expression she sees he’s forgotten she was there, but she leans in anyway and gives him something between a hug and a shrug. Whaddaya gonna do? A line she’d never used onstage but uses all the time in life—usually as a way of suggesting she’s forgotten something that she has, in fa
ct, never known. She wonders if one of these days she’s going to catch herself using it to apologize for her entire life.
Cel is halfway home before she realizes that the shooting might be the kind of news big enough for people to tell each other where they were when they heard of it. She already knows that if anyone asks her, she will lie.
* * *
—
Tonight, like every night, Cel dreams of the woods. Ziggurats of pale green ice on the river; frozen sap cracking like gunshots. Silver birches, shining like polished pewter under even a quarter moon. Tracks sketched on the snow: the angular calligraphy of wild turkeys, the semicolon hopscotching of rabbits. “It’s like Route 66 out there,” her grandfather, Hal, always said.
On good nights, Cel dreams only of the woods: tonight she is not so lucky.
The silver birches: staggering like sylphs in the wind. The trees, Cel: are they drowning or waving?
The silver birches gone, her mother weeping among their stumps. Her mother saying, “How? How?” Her mother saying: “I can’t believe it.”
And Cel saying: “I can.” Her mother’s eyes: rheumy and uncomprehending. The part of Cel that wants to stop is smaller than the part that wants at last to speak. “I can definitely believe it.”
The silver birch trees on the ground: a glowing ossuary in the moonlight. Cel saying, finally: “You’re horrible, you know. You are absolutely horrible.”
TWO
semi
1969
By the spring of 1969 we’d moved into a walk-up on Fifteenth Street, and were mostly done with the taking and renouncing of each other as lovers. Our group back then was sometimes five, often six, though never less than four. There were substitutes and swings—ex-roommates who came from California; theater aspirants pretending not to be alcoholics; lovers who joined for a night or a season—and we all provided our share of extras. But it was Brookie who cast the principals: finding the ones who’d really matter, then Pied-Pipering them back to the apartment.
The Spectators Page 3