The Spectators

by Jennifer Dubois

  There was a long pause, and I started to think he wasn’t going to answer. I busied myself with the mental isometrics required to keep from asking another question. But then the room crackled into clapping, and Matthew Miller shook his head, as though rousing himself from something.

  “Not that either, no,” he said, raising his voice over the crowd. “I want to be something else.”

  * * *

  —

  As soon as Stephen left, Brookie began hunting replacements.

  He found Nick and Peter at 17 Barrow Street, where they were extremely hard to miss: they worked on Wall Street and dressed like Andover, and Brookie introduced himself by asking whether they were lost. Peter was older than us, with a pale leonine face and nascent muttonchops and a swinging, single-beaded necklace that appeared only during his off-hours. Nick was, by universal consensus, an Adonis. We awaited their relationship’s demise with jackal-like enthusiasm, though we all liked Peter very much.

  “That face,” Paulie would say mournfully. “What a waste on that face.”

  Nick and Peter were attentive to the point of retentive about their things, fearing professional downfall via blackmail via document theft. They said it happened all the time, to bankers and lawyers and stockbrokers (the rumors about the NYSE bathroom, they said, hardly did it justice). They even knew someone this had happened to—a disgraced finance guy named Anders who worked the door at one of our clubs. He was extremely handsome, with pale Nordic eyes and a knotty wolverinish musculature—but Nick and Peter dragged us away whenever he was working the door. In a strange way, they were terrified of him, as though he had something they could catch.

  * * *

  —

  It was a time of vanity.

  We chiseled ourselves at the McBurney Y. We adopted diets of ritualized weekday asceticism, imagining these might offset our less wholesome enthusiasms. Stonewall had survived for three months, and only as a juice bar. But in those days there was always a new sex club south of Fourteenth Street.

  It was a time of intrigue, of fleeting drama and disaster. Stephen moved back into the apartment in February, following a reconciliation with Brookie the terms of which neither would discuss.

  “Face-saving measures,” Peter whispered knowingly. “Real Cuban Missile Crisis–type stuff.”

  It was a time of affectation. Nick took to smoking cigarillos. Paulie hijacked a corner of the apartment and created an “industrial chic” quarter: minimalist and hatefully clean, with a single backlit orchid on the mantel. Brookie, who had almost no patience for the actual theater, had lately developed a taste for its political variety. He attended a meeting of a Young Republicans’ Club—a hundred tuxedoed men drinking scotch out of snifters, Court of Versailles drapes, the whole deal—in order to shout things about gay militancy during the cocktail hour. I began conspicuously reading Baudelaire.

  Paulie had purchased a Pentax camera and was forever trying to take our pictures: we called him Diane Arbus or occasionally Lois Lane. (“Lois Lane was a journalist, you philistines!” said Brookie.)

  These pictures—some of them still exist. This is how we know that once, or maybe more than once, we sat beneath a patchy-barked plane tree in Bryant Park, eating a wedge of Brie.

  This is how we know we shared a spoon.

  This is how we know there was an ant on the spoon, though we don’t know whether we knew that at the time, or exactly what happened to the ant if we did not.

  It turns out to be the most banal questions that make death real—the hazy half-anecdote, the minutiae on the tip of one’s tongue, the climactic punch line that triumphed at countless parties just a decade ago. And was it really only a decade? And was that a memory or a dream? Time goes on, and these questions crop up perennially—reminding us by their stubborn stupidity that death really is permanent, and that strictly no exceptions will be made.

  From the pictures, we know that we once spent a day at Jones Beach—this was because Fire Island was closed due to raw sewage—and by the trip back we’d turned crimson from sand and sun. From the pictures, we know that we once biked to Prospect Park with Stephen in the pouring rain. How did we ever convince him? The pictures do not say.

  The past is a forgotten language, and every photograph a glyph: the only meaning is in the suggestion that there was once any meaning at all.

  * * *

  —

  In March, Matthew Miller announced his candidacy for New York State Assembly.

  Brookie and Stephen had been searching for Medical Center—a sense of ghoulish curiosity was one of the few things they ever had in common—and they stopped when they caught sight of him, giving a press conference in the rain on Channel 5. Next to him, Alice clutched ineffectually at an umbrella: what little there was of her seemed to be always in the process of melting.

  “Alice!” cried Paulie merrily. “Alice!”

  From the first time we’d seen her, we’d cast Alice as a sort of folk figure of convention: we imagined Rigaud candles, vermeil forks.

  “Don’t get rowdy!” we’d hiss at each other at restaurants, if we already had. “Alice will alert the manager.”

  Then: “She’d alert the authorities if she wasn’t already out of dimes.”

  Though we did not, in fact, know anything about Alice, besides how she looked from a distance. Nevertheless, we felt certain that she represented something demanding our derision—fustiness, squarishness, all the obsolescent values against which we were righteously forging ourselves, and the future. Brookie tried to put this feeling into Marxist terms once.

  “It’s one of the most fundamental foundations of the system!” he declared. “The male worker is given the illusion of participating in the power of the ruling class through economic control of his wife, who is his sexual object and household slave.”

  We nodded wisely. Why this view of marriage should have explained our collective hostility toward Alice—theoretical household slave in question—was not something we considered.

  On Channel 5, it was still drizzling; Matthew Miller’s hair was darkened slightly by the rain.

  “Cynicism is easy,” he was saying. “It’s everything else that’s hard. Progress is hard. Compassion is hard. Anyone who says it’s easy isn’t actually trying to be good at it.”

  He seemed to be suggesting he might be the man for the job. And perhaps it was forgivable—in that moment, for a moment—to believe that he would.

  “New York State Assembly!” said Brookie, shaking his head. “Well, if we know one thing, it’s that that man has an attachment to perversity.”

  “Shh,” said Paulie, and turned up the volume.

  “But I am going to try,” Matthew Miller was saying. “I promise you, I am going to try. Because anything is possible. And that means this is, too.”

  A hush had fallen in the apartment—not at all common for us, in those days.

  “Ha,” said Brookie, finally. “Not bad. If you didn’t know any better, he could almost make you believe it.”

  * * *

  —

  I cannot remember giving Matthew Miller my number, and yet these are the facts: one month later, he called me.

  “Who is this?” said Paulie, as he handed me the phone.

  I took it warily: I had absolutely no idea.

  “Hello?” I said.

  He sounds old, Paulie mouthed, and I swatted him away.

  “Hello,” said a voice. “How’s the theater?”

  “Grand.” I had no idea who I was speaking to. “How’s the, ah, wife?”

  The man laughed, and I felt something like fear piston down my spine.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is Matthew Miller. I thought your friend told you.”

  “Of course.” I switched the phone to the other ear and mouthed Fuck you at Paulie.

  “I’m calling
because I have an idea I’d like to run by you,” said Matthew. “I very much enjoyed your play—”

  “You went?”

  “I said I would,” he said, as though that explained anything at all. I’d tried to avoid thinking about exactly what I’d said to Matthew Miller, having learned that revisiting such moments tended to lead to lacerating spears of embarrassment, which led to random wincing, which led to looking insane and, of greater concern, to the incipient wrinkle I thought might be growing on my forehead. “Anyway, I have a municipal issue I’m dealing with that I’d like your perspective on. I’m wondering if we could meet. It’s a little complicated to explain over the phone.”

  I’m wondering if we could meet must have overridden municipal issue on my face, because Paulie stood up and launched into a jig. In response, I flung a checkbook at his head.

  “My perspective?” I said. “Now I’m sure you have the wrong number.”

  “I guess I’ll just have to see who shows up.”

  Paulie picked up the checkbook and began flipping through it sadly; it must have been his own. I turned to the wall and twisted the phone cord around my wrist.

  “When?” I said.

  “Tomorrow? Only if you’re up for it.”

  Up for what? I didn’t ask. Matthew was giving me the name of a restaurant on Fifty-fourth; he was telling me it served food until four. Paulie, thank God, had at last retreated to his bedroom.

  “All right,” I said, a little coldly. I wanted to retroactively insert some aloofness into the conversation before I took the subway forty blocks uptown on a day’s notice. I stared down Paulie’s plants in the fireplace.

  “You know,” I said finally, “I can’t seem to recall giving you my number.”

  I was picturing him tearing through the phone book, I suppose—asking around everywhere, giving frantic descriptions. Who was that enchantress and how can I see him again?

  “It was in your arrest file,” he said, sounding suddenly in a hurry. “See you tomorrow.”

  And then, not for the last time, Matthew Miller hung up on me.

  FIVE

  cel

  On Wednesday, the Mattie M staff assembles to watch Donald Kliegerman try to run a meeting.

  This is not a production meeting; until further notice, Mattie M is in reruns. They are here today to talk about Going Forward. The real subject of the meeting, everyone knows, is Suzanne Bryanson—who a day’s worth of research has revealed as the spokeswoman of a nonprofit pressure group called Concerned Parents of America, which seems largely composed of same. (Suzanne Bryanson herself does appear to be the parent of at least two children; Luke had even found a picture of them in a profile from the Minneapolis Star, a pair of towheaded boys straight out of central casting.) Exactly what these Parents of America are Concerned about remains hazy, but as far as the money has been so far followed, it leads nowhere useful—no fundamentalist cabal, no vast right-wing conspiracy. All of this makes CPA seem more mysterious, and in some ways more threatening. (“Any group with an acronym that boring is clearly up to something,” Luke intoned before the meeting.)

  Their challenge today, Donald Kliegerman is proclaiming, is to brainstorm strategies for how—and, to be completely candid? whether—to address the current situation. Strategies that are sensitive to that situation’s gravity, he is saying, while also true to the irreverent, provocative Mattie M sensibility. The feeling in the room is tense and proto-mutinous. There is the sound of bodies shifting in chairs, the sense of gazes being affixed to clocks.

  “In the past, we’ve sometimes had the luxury of deciding which national news stories we wanted to engage with,” Donald Kliegerman is saying. He is visibly resisting the impulse to crack his knuckles. “But in this case our decision is complicated by the fact that The Mattie M Show is already a part of the discussion, as I’m sure you’re all aware.”

  This lands as a sort of dare—certainly, yes, they are aware. Discussion of the shooters’ Mattie M fandom has grown more pointed over the most recent news cycle; at least two television reports have made reference to some sort of Mattie M Show–inspired skit occurring at the school in the days before the shooting. Exactly when this happened and who might have participated in it remains unclear—Cel is given to understand that the students who might know are unavailable for comment—and it hasn’t been reported in print media, so it might not even be true. Even if it is, Cel thinks the connection is a stretch. No, it can’t be good for impressionable youths to watch Mattie M: the luridly troubled and theatrically unhinged, the booing of the audience—the sound of an entire civilizational aquifer sputtering dry, according to The New Yorker. But after watching all that, Cel thinks, the only person you want to kill is yourself.

  Though then, she reminds herself, one of them did that, too.

  Donohue and Oprah have already acknowledged the incident, Donald Kliegerman is saying; Ricki and Jenny have episodes in the works. He pauses for response, but there is nothing—only effortful silence; the strained, algebra-class feeling of everybody willing the teacher not to call on them to speak. The pause expands into a creepy, lunar silence. Donald Kliegerman uncaps his pen encouragingly.

  “Well, I’ll venture the obvious,” Luke says finally. “What about a themed show? Children who kill, or something.”

  “We’ve done it,” says Jessica VanDeMark.

  “We’ve done the parents’ perspective,” says Luke. “ ‘My Child Is a Murderer!’ was more about the fallout for the family. In this episode, we’d be looking at the murderers themselves. We’d be exploring motivations, searching for warning signs.”

  Luke is good at coming up with these things—slogans and blurbs and catchphrases. Cel sometimes wonders if he actually thinks this way: his inner life unfurling in an endless series of conclusive-sounding parallel constructions.

  “But who’s gonna appear for this?” says Jessica. “We’re probably not gonna land Ryan Muller.”

  At this, light laughter. Cel makes a mental note: if you jump in to shoot down an idea, nobody will remember you haven’t ventured one yourself.

  “We’d have to bring in families with similar experiences,” says Luke. “Probably not exactly similar. Assaults, smaller-scale homicides. Because the point is really about the capacity, you know, in a child. We talk to parents of kids currently in juvie. Maybe a reformed kid or two. We ask them everything we’d like to ask the Ohio parents, invite them to speculate on some things. Then we bring in the psych panel to connect the dots and offer the takeaway. Things to watch out for in your own child, ways to get help. Et cetera.”

  Donald Kliegerman is nodding, either jotting or pretending to jot notes. “Other thoughts?” he says, without looking up.

  “Well,” says Sanjith. His voice has a note of determined apology—like a person gearing up to collect an overdue debt. “There is a risk of appearing callous.”

  This strikes Cel not as a risk, but a certainty.

  “But not addressing it looks callous, too,” says Luke. “And it also looks guilty.”

  The word “guilty” rings in the air—and though there is no way Donald Kliegerman is going to acknowledge it, Cel senses he is grateful it’s been said.

  “Maybe we can’t win no matter what we say,” says Sanjith. “I mean, yes, the pundits are linking Mattie to this, and that makes not responding feel—uncomfortable. But why should we let this accusation dictate what we do? Give me any unfortunate thing going on in this country, and I’ll give you five people who want to blame it on Mattie M. That impulse is just gonna have to run its course. And maybe that means our voice is inevitably gonna backfire. I mean, what’s the NRA saying right now? Not a whole lot.”

  “Well, that’s different, though, isn’t it?” says Cel.

  The room turns to look at her. Donald Kliegerman seems a little startled—as though he’s been addressed by a statue he didn’t re
alize was animatronic.

  “Well.” Cel’s voice sounds off—possibly she is speaking too quietly? “I just mean.” Now her voice sounds alarmingly, catastrophically loud. “The NRA can’t get around the fact that guns are involved, right?”

  The room is still staring intently; Cel can nearly hear their syncopated, underwhelmed blinks. Donald Kliegerman steals a glance at his watch.

  “I mean, say what you will about The Mattie M Show—you can’t write it on an autopsy report.”

  She knows no one will laugh at this, and indeed, no one does.

  “So what then?” says Luke. “Just keep running the goat fuckers?”

  “I do wonder if the nation’s appetite for goat-fucking might be pretty limited right now,” says Sanjith.

  The room laughs again, gratefully.

  “Right, and that’s the dilemma,” says Luke. “The choice isn’t between a Mattie M episode and dignified silence. It’s between this particular Mattie M episode and the usual. And if we ignore it, we’re saying it’s okay to be curious about why a man fucks his goat, but not about why a kid shoots up his school. But people are curious—not because they aren’t horrified, but because they are. The question is genuine. It’s a time of national soul-searching—maybe even our viewers are looking for heartier fare.”

  “But are they looking to us for that?” says Cel. In for a penny, in for a pound, was something Hal used to say. When she’d parroted this at work, Luke had asked if she was familiar with the concept of a sunk cost. “I mean, this show has always been a guilty pleasure, right? Okay, okay—not always. But it is now, right? It’s escapism.”

  The room is staring goggle-eyed once more—as though she’s said something shocking. It galls Cel, if she’s honest, this chivalric fealty to Mattie’s vanished better self. Everyone was someone else once—for everyone besides Mattie, this is a liability.

  “And, like Luke said, people have been shocked by a national trauma. And they want to follow it, yes, but maybe they also want to forget it—at least sometimes. At least for a while. Maybe Mattie M gives them permission to do that. And maybe that’s the way the show can be most helpful—by letting people off the hook for an hour. When they’re ready, they can tune back in to 20/20.”