The Spectators

by Jennifer Dubois

  Though maybe, by that summer, we were beginning to know each other a little less.

  * * *

  —

  When I finally did tell the boys, they thought it was hilarious.

  “Why is this ridiculous to you?” I said. “I am a writer. I have a grant from the fucking NEA!”

  Thereafter, they’d often ask if I was off to see His Highness, the G-Man, the Sultan. They called me Cyrano de Bergerac and Svengali. Sometimes Matthew was the Professor and I was College Boy—which really made no sense, since almost all of us had been to college, more or less as boys. In response, I quoted Matthew’s resume at them.

  “Did you know he campaigned to get the American Bar Association to accept black members?” I was using a brightly curious, teacher’s pet sort of voice, and Brookie laughed right in my face.

  “Glad to hear you found yourself such an enlightened boss,” he said, wiping his eyes.

  Another time I mentioned that Matthew had gone to Mississippi to register voters in ’64.

  “Nineteen sixty-four! Well then, the man deserves a vacation!” said Brookie. “Forget the vacation: how about a medal?”

  “Come on.”

  “You mean to tell me he once sort of helped some people who once sort of helped some black people?”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “How was I not apprised of this? How did this not make it into the Negro newsletter?” His expression snapped into a mask of goggle-eyed worry: he was doing an impression of Paulie’s impression of Alice. “Don’t mention the newsletter, though, okay? I wasn’t supposed to say. And it’s a real powerful outfit now. All us Negroes are very powerful as a group now, actually. Ever since this one white guy filed some paperwork ten years ago. Pretty much been smooth sailing ever since.”

  “Okay. Enough. I get it.”

  “Do you?”

  “Okay,” I said, getting that I didn’t. “Okay.”

  The lesson: never propagandize a propagandist.

  But I couldn’t stop threading Matthew into conversation, if only by reporting on all the things he’d told me—historical trivia and municipal news items that were, at best, of dubious general interest.

  “Did you know that there are people who can tell the sex of a chicken without knowing how they do it?”

  The boys stared at me blearily.

  “Isn’t that incredible?” I pressed my hands against my clavicle. “Truly, this world never ceases to amaze me.”

  And in that moment, I felt it might be true. Repeating something Matthew Miller had told me was to reify the link between us; even without saying his name, I felt the nova of his presence pulse momentarily in the room—I was powerless to stop it.

  Brookie glared. He could tell, I think, already: I was powerless to stop that, too.

  * * *

  —

  One thing I liked to tell myself: I was a constituent, first and foremost.

  “You want my vote?” I liked to ask Matthew. I was always stalling; I must have already known that the current moment would never really be enough. I wanted all the time with Matthew all at once; I wanted the seconds all lined up and amassed into something concrete that I could hold and hold and hold. That I couldn’t have this seemed a sort of foreshadowing. I didn’t understand yet that life is only foreshadowing: the foreshadowing is all we get.

  “I want everyone’s vote,” he’d say. He’d have just come from talking to constituents in Hell’s Kitchen, maybe. The next day, the paper would run a photo of him in front of some luridly bright mural—cartoon primary colors, etc. I’d taken to clipping out such articles, for reference.

  “So then, tell me,” I’d say, and bring up some unimaginative everyman complaint. The trash, the crime, the subway. I don’t know that these were terribly convincing—in fact I always loved New York, even at its worst—but Matthew Miller didn’t seem to mind. He was indulging me, maybe. But also, of course, he was practicing.

  I’d conclude my rants with a huffy little flourish. “And don’t tell me to blame City Council!” I said once.

  He scoffed. “City Council isn’t worth your blame. The real issue is that the city is broke. Have you been in a patrol car lately?”

  “I wouldn’t say lately, no. Rest assured you would have been my first call.”

  “Well, they’re falling apart. The stations are literally leaking.”

  “And you’re going to fix that?”

  “I have a few ideas.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” I said. “I’m beginning to get the sense that you’re a man with a whole bunch of ideas.”

  In his eyes, a subaquatic flash of something?—no: only the reflection of a passing cop car’s headlights.

  Afterward, I’d walk back dumbstruck, dreamy, bumping into lampposts, getting myself screamed at by taxi drivers and once by a woman with a tiny pouting dog who looked like it would have liked to scream at me, too. I didn’t care. I couldn’t muster it. I’d be too full of a starry generosity that extended outward in all directions: toward the trash and the taxi drivers; the witchy old lady and her little dog, too; the grimacing statues in Washington Square Park and the censorious owls on Fourth Street and the glowing sugar refinery across the water the night I found I’d somehow, without noticing, walked all the way to the East River.

  SEVEN

  cel

  “Quit,” says Elspeth on the phone on Wednesday. “You just really need to quit.”

  Cel is staring out the living room window—she is always staring out some window or other. On the street below her, a frizzy-bearded man with a shiny purse is eating what appears to be a corn dog.

  “You say that like it’s so simple,” she says.

  “It is! You walk in, you say, ‘I quit.’ ”

  Cel is glad Nikki isn’t here. The apartment is too small for another opinion, and Cel has more or less given up trying to keep anything to herself around here. They have noisy floors and high, eastern windows that admit relentless amounts of light; the walls are so thin they’re essentially decorative. Their bathroom has a sink so tiny they’ve taken to brushing their teeth in the kitchen, and its door closes in a way that never inspires full confidence. The apartment is like an architectural version of The Mattie M Show: the keeping of secrets a structural impossibility.

  “Do you want me to do it for you?” says Elspeth. “Because I would, you know. I’ll call them up right now. I’ll say I’m the publicist’s publicist, and that unfortunately?—she quits.”

  Cel leans back from the window. There is a little semicircle on the glass, a faint intaglio of forehead. She wipes it away with her fist.

  “I’ll say I’m the publicist’s lover and see if they fire you,” says Elspeth. “Then we can sue.”

  “Great.” Cel begins stalking down the hall, the phone cord pulling behind her. “The only thing better than working for Mattie would be staring him down in court.”

  Nikki’s door, Cel sees, is slightly open. As a child, she’d been a hideous snoop, on those rare occasions she found herself in other people’s houses. She’d invariably be shocked by their cleanliness, their sense of order, the matching plates and napkins she somehow associated with dollhouses. It seemed a sort of witchcraft was afoot. How else would the mothers know that Cel would not have brought a sleeping bag? How else would they know to give her a toothbrush they said she could keep?

  “Well then, I don’t know, Cel,” says Elspeth. “I mean, I’d call in a sexual harassment complaint against you—I’m just that good of a friend, you know? But I have a feeling you’ll shoot that down, too.”

  “The paperwork alone,” Cel says weakly. She taps open Nikki’s door with her foot. Inside, she sees a wedge of bright purple comforter, neatly tucked at its corners; she sees a spangly-looking lamp on a desk. As a child, she’d learned that too much marveling over other people’s t
hings elicited uncomfortable reactions—queasy frowns from other children, sad little smiles from their moms—so after a while, Cel learned to confine her investigations to the bathrooms. She’d pull back shower curtains to sniff at bleach-smelling air, open linen closets to fondle impossibly soft towels. Later, in her own bed, she’d lie awake thinking about the towels, fussy with a feeling that wasn’t quite covetousness—more a sense of indignation that such things could exist without her knowing. She deserved to at least know about them, she felt.

  “I don’t get it.” Elspeth sighs, as though Mattie M is her problem. Cel would never admit how much she cherishes Elspeth’s familial, nearly uxorial, presumption. “I mean—you can afford to quit, can’t you?”

  Cel stares into Nikki’s room. All of Nikki’s things always look so new, and Cel had been impressed by this at first, and wondered how she was managing it. Cel’s mistake had been assuming that—because she and Nikki shared the same rent and the same militant cockroaches and the same warped bathroom door—they were subject to the same arithmetic. It was months before Cel realized that money in New York was almost never a question of arithmetic, but algebra; for Nikki—for a lot of people—the entire equation was determined by a set of offstage variables. Their values might be minimal, or even hypothetical—a co-signing of a loan, the promise of a bailout, a little help with an apartment deposit or an interview outfit—but they were there, creating an invisible protective buoy, magically squaring the circles for all the people whose lives, when you got right down to it, simply were not possible on paper.

  “Cel: seriously?” says Elspeth. “You make like fifty thousand dollars a year!”

  A frantic feeling kicks up inside Cel; she closes Nikki’s door with her toe.

  “I know it sounds like a lot,” she says. She is trying to sound knowledgeable, steadying. She does have a bit of savings in her checking account, a miracle now dwarfed by her sense of its terminal inadequacy. Part of the reason it took her so long to figure out that everyone in New York was secretly rich was that everyone talked so much about being poor—and after a while, Cel came to understand that this wasn’t exactly pretense. In New York, both luck and deprivation turned out to be gauged in relation to a whole other stratum of wealth—an overclass so remote they were invisible to Cel entirely, possessed of treasures and shortcuts beyond imagination or envy. Money, it turns out, is extremely complicated—governed by unspoken protocols Cel can never hope to predict, or expect anyone to explain. The idea of quitting her job makes her dizzy with fear.

  “I mean, in Northampton, it would be a fortune,” says Cel. “But here I live in a coffin with Tupperware. You’ll see for yourself when you come.”

  “New York, good God. You wildly overpay to live in squalor, and all you get is the chance to correct some poor tourist’s pronunciation of ‘Houston.’ ” This had happened to Elspeth once, and she’d never forgiven the city for it. “I’d like to know who does New York’s publicity.”

  “New York doesn’t need publicity.”

  “They had those pins.”

  “Oh. Right. Well, I’ll buy you one when you come.” Cel retreats to the kitchen. “You are still coming, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” Elspeth is quiet for a moment. Cel stares at Nikki’s juicer—more evidence that was there all along, hidden in plain sight, threatening her daily with subdural hematoma. “Is it possible, Cel, that you actually like this job?”

  Cel says nothing: on this subject, this is the most that she’s ever said.

  “You know you don’t have to pretend that you hate it, right?”

  “I do hate it!” Cel is very, very sure she hates it. She just isn’t sure she doesn’t somehow like it, too. She can hear the faint tapping of Elspeth’s earring against the phone.

  “Cel, to be honest, more and more? I just don’t understand you.”

  “Elspeth, you claim to understand cannibalism.”

  “I do understand cannibalism. It’s a ritual of grieving or conquest.”

  “Exactly! Understanding the inexplicable is sort of your area. So shouldn’t my life intrigue you? Just, I mean, academically?” Cel is trying to make her voice sound less chilly, but this seems to be making things worse.

  “That’s—well, no. Not exactly.”

  “Come on! You’re telling me you wouldn’t be excited to find a specimen like me out in the field? Someone so far beyond the pale that I have the potential to give us all a new understanding of the human family?”

  “You certainly are one of a kind.”

  “Well, here I am, only a bus ride away! You don’t even have to get any shots!” Cel is aware of laboring at the spirit of things; she smiles to make her voice sound warmer. “I mean, it’s good you’re coming to do some research before anyone else gets wind of this.”

  “No research this time,” says Elspeth coolly. “This is my vacation. Any observations about your life will be regarded as pure entertainment.”

  “Fantastic!” says Cel. “You won’t even need tickets to the show.”

  * * *

  —

  On Thursday, Cel is summoned via page to the conference room.

  “Why didn’t you just call?” she asks.

  Luke shrugs. “I wanted to see if it would work.”

  Jessica and Sanjith are already seated at the table, looking grim. They have been gathered, Luke explains, to hash out the details for a possible Mattie TV appearance. He sounds as though he thinks they should be flattered by this, though Sanjith and Jessica seem more or less indifferent; in the current context, all careerism seems meaningless.

  “How does Mattie respond to reports that the shooters were fans of the show?” says Sanjith, in what Cel takes to be a very half-assed Tod Browning impersonation.

  “Well, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were, Tod,” says Luke. “Ten percent of the country are fans of the show.”

  He throws a Koosh ball in the air.

  “You want to take responsibility for ten percent of the country?” says Jessica. “Don’t you think two sociopathic kids are enough?”

  “Two sociopathic—two troubled—kids, out of literally millions of people.” Sanjith is trying to do a Mattie impression now, though Mattie is notoriously unsatisfying to imitate—they almost never bother with him on Saturday Night Live, though the Mattie M format would obviously be the perfect template for all kinds of sketches. “These kids probably did things millions of people do—drive cars, skip school, go on dates—well, maybe not dates—”

  “The point is, they did things,” says Luke flatly. “Isolating Mattie M as the variable doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Say that again in English?”

  “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.” Cel can’t tell if Luke is angry. Sanjith is already up at the whiteboard, adding “10%!!” to their bulleted list. Their other ideas so far are (a) Acknowledge! (meaning the tragedy) and (b) Trivialize! (meaning the show; this was Luke’s contribution: “Essentially: this is serious, the show is silly. The show is trash, right? And trash may be gross, but it’s inconsequential.”).

  “How’d you come up with ten percent, anyway?” says Sanjith. He sniffs the marker before capping it.

  “Long division,” says Luke. “There is an average of five million viewers per show, thirty million discrete viewers per year—”

  “Thirty million is maybe better than ten percent,” says Cel.

  “They’re the same, apparently,” says Sanjith. “Don’t tell me you’re challenging HAL’s numbers? Cel, he’ll short-circuit!”

  “I mean—when you say ten percent of the country watch The Mattie M Show, people start thinking about the ninety percent of the country that doesn’t watch. Especially if they’re in the ninety percent, which, statistically, they probably are.”

  “And they say girls can’t do math.”

  “So if we’re saying
it makes no sense to link the show to the killers because ten percent of the country can’t be monsters—well, I think a lot of people are going to think, Maybe they are. I bet most people think at least ten percent of the people they know personally are monsters.”

  There’s a pause in which calculations are made.

  “That’s probably a conservative estimate,” Jessica says finally.

  Sanjith goes to the whiteboard and wipes out “10%!!” with the side of his fist, replacing it with “Ten million!”

  “Your hand is blue,” says Cel.

  “It’s metastasized from his balls,” says Luke, standing up—which is how Cel knows that the meeting is over, and that Luke was never angry at all.

  * * *

  —

  After the meeting, Cel drifts homeward. She registers the city peripherally: cracked-marble sky, mottled seagull pecking at condom wrapper, woman with faintly bugspray-smelling perfume. Clouds of cool air billow out from stores, bearing the scents of synthetic fabrics. If she never really looks at New York, will she ever remember it later? Her memories from Smith are vivid and hyper-articulated: the spade-shaped leaves from the ginkgo trees imported from Japan; the mural of women’s accomplishments in downtown Northampton—done in swirls of blue, socialist-realist decisiveness. The lanterns on Illumination Night, like pale jellyfish against the black sea. Her first year, they’d reminded her of the mountain laurel at home; her second year they’d reminded her of her first year. The bready smell of wine at those endlessly replicated wine-and-cheese parties. She remembers the food at these parties, as humorless as the ideologies under discussion. She remembers trying to banter with an Amherst boy while masticating some incomprehensibly resurrected biblical grain—some desiccated fiber that, for good reason, had been unable to survive the competition of early agriculture. “If there’s one thing you want to trust the free market on, it might be this”: her first laugh in a crowded room.