“What politics?” I said.
“Exactly! No sense rocking the boat now! Wouldn’t want to spook the market. Wouldn’t want to alarm the PTA!”
What did the PTA ever do to you?, I almost asked, but I was afraid he might actually have an answer.
Instead, I turned toward Paulie. “How do I look?” I said.
“You sure you were tryna look like something?” said Cherry Cerise. She had hated me instantly. Brookie enjoyed pretending this bothered me a great deal.
“I think what my esteahemed cawleague here means to say,” said Paulie, “is that you, my deah, look rahvishing.”
“Is that—is he trying to do Kennedy?” said Brookie.
“I think he just veered Jimmy Stewart,” said Stephen.
“Ravishing!” said Cherry Cerise. She issued an unfeminine little snort and waved her hands. “I’m so bored I can’t even see you.”
“Anyway, Semi, it doesn’t really matter how you look,” said Brookie. “You’re not that young anymore, doll, but to Matthew Miller you are literal jailbait.”
“Rah-vishing!” Paulie said again. “Why, if I weren’t awlready mahried—”
Brookie shook his head. “The ‘National Lawyers Guild,’ man.” He sounded tired, which annoyed me. “That is one phrase I never imagined would get thrown around in this apartment.”
“Well, I’m thrilled to have had the honor of surprising you.” I said it snappishly, wanting to goose that tiredness out of his voice. What I really wanted to say was this: Matthew Miller is a good man, though he is very different from you, especially in the ways that he is good.
“Surprise me.” Brookie laughed emptily. “Yeah. You have done that, all right. You have definitely, definitely done that.”
* * *
—
Brookie’s view of Matthew as appeasement: it hurt me then, it haunts me now. Because he was right, in a way, though his prophecy operated through an ironic, queered mechanics. In the end, it was indeed my proximity to Matthew—that striving boy from Crotona Park, careful by nature and necessity; that blood-tested husband, pinned by expectation, then scrutiny, into a more conventional life than he might have led; that known philanderer who, either through inclination or circumstance, remained reasonably faithful to two people during the whole ignominious span of his adultery; this man who was my first and, as it turned out, only love, and whose departure left me gripped by a lethally unattractive sadness that didn’t lift until it was subsumed into a much darker one—in the end this, all of this, saved my life.
The genocide was coming for my people. And because I’d loved Matthew Miller as I had, I would be condemned to live through it.
* * *
—
In the end, I didn’t go to the party, or anywhere else, that night. Instead, I hid out in my bedroom, waiting for the boys to leave. They seemed to take forever to get ready—had we always taken quite so long? It never used to feel like any time at all.
When they were finally gone, I crept into the living room and opened the window. A chlorinated smell came blasting in from nowhere; the ferry schedules rattled on the counter behind me. Above me, the sky had the density of velour; across the street, someone’s geraniums or whatever seemed to bob in their window box. On the sidewalk below, an old lady locked eyes with her Chihuahua while it took a shit. The boys, of course, were long gone.
It was quiet, I remember, so construction must have been suspended for the night: everything was in a state of tearing down or building up back then. This lends to the eeriness of still living here, or at all. Talking about this sort of thing is one of the most efficient ways to make yourself sound old, I’ve discovered—good luck finding someone who cares about who you are in this life, let alone your last one! But again and again, it stops me short; this sense that the years are only different plays shown in the same aging theater. I turn a corner or run up a subway stop or walk into a building and think:
But wasn’t this something else once?
And wasn’t I?
And what life was that then?
And whose life is this now?
* * *
—
This was a thought that came back to me recently, when I received a message from a journalist wanting to talk about Matthew Miller.
Matthew Miller, from what I try not to gather, has been in more PR trouble than usual lately. His show is already routinely described as one of the fundamental pathologies of our age; one hears it spoken of in the same breath as video games, and this comparison has become particularly relentless since the shooting in Ohio. Although this parallel seems to invert the issue, when you really try to think about it—which, clearly, no one ever should. The concern with video games seems to be that their simulated violence might somehow alchemize into reality. But what’s potent about Matthew’s show—the few dire times I’ve caught it—isn’t that it makes fake things seem real, it’s that it makes real things seem outlandish. The true meaninglessness of this whole discussion can only truly be grasped when experienced from a rollaway cot in a hospital room where the TV is bolted to the wall and the remote is wedged impossibly underneath a dying man who is finally, finally sleeping.
One must submit to many outrages in a hospital, and cable television is not the least of them.
I doubt this analysis would interest the journalist, however. He’s from a tabloid, most likely, and I decide not to return his call. Not that Matthew Miller doesn’t deserve it. But these days, the idea of justice strikes me as straightforwardly perverse; my appetite for that particular futility is, at the moment, exhausted.
But then, tomorrow is another day. And I suppose it is just possible that the journalist will try me back.
ELEVEN
cel
On Friday, Cel sits in Mattie’s dressing room, listening to Luke conduct the handoff.
The whole thing feels overly elaborate, like a changing of the guard. Cel’s eyes keep flicking between her knees, which seem to be jiggling of their own volition, and the back of Mattie’s head in the mirror, where the vanity lights offer an unprecedented view of an incipient bald spot.
That morning, Cel and Luke had received a special lecture from Joel on the importance of prepping Mattie “within an inch of his life.”
“I don’t want him to blink in a way that surprises me,” said Joel. “You got that?”
Cel and Luke had nodded solemn nods, blinked what Cel hoped were unsurprising blinks.
Now Cel stares at Mattie’s mini-fridge—she wonders what he keeps in there. Maybe it’s serial-killer empty, or filled with rows of only one strange thing. She glances at the CCTV monitor, casting its Orwellian stare on the empty soundstage. In the corner she can make out Theo, doing something inscrutable with the cables; they are filming promos later. What the hell, Luke had said on the phone: well, what the hell, indeed.
“Is that so?” says Mattie, and Cel snaps to attention.
“Oh,” she says. “Well.”
“She’s being modest,” says Luke. He knows she wasn’t listening. “You’re in good hands.”
He stands and offers Mattie his hand; Mattie shakes it without standing, making the exchange look like an ingénue dismissing her unsuccessful suitor. Then the door closes and Cel is left alone with Mattie—who is staring at her now with real curiosity.
“So!” Cel coughs irrelevantly into her sleeve. Echoing what Luke said would be a spectacular way to start—echoing what anyone said was generally a good way to start anything—and this is what she would say, obviously, if she had been remotely listening earlier.
“So as Luke indicated”—which probably he did—“we need to be really, really clear in our messaging.”
“Yes.”
Mattie already looks far too entertained by this.
“We just need to really be on the same page.”
“Naturally.”
“Given the situation. So, the approach we’re taking, as you know—wait, let me back up.” Cel inhales a short puff of breath. “The very first thing you should say on the air—after thanking them for having you on, of course—”
“Of course.”
“Right—so actually the second thing, I guess, should be to express your sorrow at this tragedy. Your bewilderment and outrage.”
“Sorrow. Bewilderment. Outrage.”
“You want to offer your condolences to the families—well, actually maybe you should offer the condolences before the outrage, but you know.”
Mattie takes a sip of water. “I don’t want him to take a sip of water you haven’t discussed ahead of time,” Joel had bellowed that morning. Cel watches Mattie swallow, searching for unforeseen publicity dimensions.
“And actually the word ‘condolences’ might be—might imply more ownership than we want to, you know?” Mattie is giving her an odd look, but it’s too late to know why—there are already too many disastrous variables in play to hope to isolate just one. “It’s a little stiff, maybe, too? It sort of sounds like you’re issuing a press release.”
Mattie gives her a look like Am I not?
“You may want to say something like ‘My heart goes out to the families’ or ‘I can hardly imagine the pain these families are experiencing.’ Something that basically conveys that you are just a person trying to wrap your head around this tragedy.”
“Identify basically as a person. Gotcha.”
“But so, okay, then—” says Cel, breathing wheezily. She seems to be developing some sort of late-onset asthma—could she actually be allergic to Mattie? She’s never been this close to him for this long, so it’s very possible she wouldn’t know. “Before they even get to their questions, they’re going to present a sort of sketch of the show.”
“The goat,” Mattie offers dully.
“The goat, sure! Stuff like that, exactly. Things that have nothing to do with the issue at hand, but that, you know—”
“Frame the discussion.”
“Right.” Cel swallows stickily.
“Do you want some water?”
“Oh no.” This comes out far too emphatic—she sounds like she’s declining a priceless family heirloom, a nip of black tar heroin. “But then after all of that, they’re going to launch into their questions. And their questions are really going to be statements.”
“Roger that.”
“And the statements that we really, really need you to resist are the ones linking the show to any sort of, you know, sweeping cultural analyses.”
Mattie blinks. “That sounds, you know. A bit sweep—”
“And this is where you need to be sort of trivializing!” If Cel can step on the end of his sentences, maybe it won’t seem as though she’s improvising her own. “Well, not trivializing of the event, obviously! Or even the suggestion per se.”
“Which suggestion?”
“Well, whatever one they’re making. That’s the thing, actually—you have to act like the conclusion is ridiculous but that the question itself is not.”
Cel can see Mattie’s tongue bulging in the corner of his jaw.
“But so then, they’re probably going to want you to speculate.” Cel looks at his water glass longingly—it’s half-full, the objective correlative of all of Mattie Miller’s unwarranted luck in this life. “Like in court cases, where defense lawyers have to come up with someone else who did it, you know? Well, I mean, of course you do.”
“I do.”
“Like, if it’s not The Mattie M Show, then what?”
“What?”
“What?”
“Well, what?” Mattie’s lips are contorting into an ambiguous tilde, part smile, part sneer. “Or is that not in your notes?”
“Um.” Cel shuffles her papers around as though it actually might be. “Well, what you think isn’t the point, exactly.”
“Oh no?” Mattie’s eyebrows have now gone the way of his lips. Cel closes her good eye, and for a moment his face appears as a riot of squiggles, as resistant to interpretation as a work of modern art. She opens it again.
“I mean, viewers don’t expect you to have the entire answer,” she says.
“That’s certainly a relief.”
“But if you could venture something that most people agree is a problem, even if it isn’t the reason for this problem, then they’ll hear you out. And then even if they disagree with you—at least, at that point, the conversation everyone is having is about that other thing you’re wrong about. And not about, you know, you.”
Mattie leans back into the couch. On his face is an expression that Cel might once have hazarded a guess at naming, but that now she is hesitant to confidently deem an expression at all.
“Conversations about me are my least favorite conversations,” he says.
“That’s the spirit!” says Cel. “And the way to get out of them is to downplay the show’s significance. And that’s where your kind of self-deprecating attitude can really work for you, I think? You can maybe say sure, it’s maybe crass, maybe it’s not to everyone’s taste, but ultimately it’s harmless and stupid. Not ‘stupid.’ I mean.” She riffles through her notes. Any minute now, she tells herself—yes, any minute!—an intern will come to escort Mattie to the soundstage, delivering them all from this hell they’ve created together. “ ‘Silly.’ You want to say it’s a silly, sexy show.”
The pause that follows seems to contain not only this but all theoretical worlds—Cel feels the entirety of human history, the ghosts of all possible string-theory pasts and presents, slide silently through her own.
“There is nothing about the show that is either of those things,” says Mattie finally, in a flat, profoundly non-television voice.
There’s a tap on the door then and the intern enters, holding hair gel and a towel.
“You ready, Mattie?”
“Eternally.” He stands. “This has been illuminating,” he says—probably to Cel, though he doesn’t turn around to look at her again before walking out the door.
* * *
—
The night before Lee and Lisa, Cel is back at Sligo’s.
“You’re not going to sleep, so you may as well drink,” said Nikki. This seemed like a good idea—had seemed, in fact, like the only one—but now, waiting for her second gin and tonic, Cel thinks it might have been a mistake. It is still early; a caul of grimy light filters in through the windows, illuminating the usual vista of flirtation and maneuver, naked ambition and brute-force advertising. Cel hasn’t been to Sligo’s since the day of the shooting, and she’d like to believe this is the reason for her sodden jitteriness—rising flutter of anxiety, sinking sensation of doom. Really, she knows, she’s just nervous about the show.
“Hey,” says Nikki, emerging from the crowd and handing Cel a cocktail. “Do we know that guy?”
Cel looks where Nikki is pointing.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Well, it looks like he maybe knows you? Hi.”
The man is upon them. He has brown-gray hair and wintry eyes; up close, Cel feels a decided recognition.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” Cel adds, because this seems to be what’s being said.
“We met the other day,” says the man.
“Of course.” He could be a lawyer for the show, maybe; she never can place those people out of context.
“Here,” he clarifies. “On the day of the shooting?”
“Oh, right.” This does seem right, though ultimately she’ll have to take his word for it. She’s pretty sure he isn’t the one she spent the whole night talking to.
“Sorry,” Cel says. “That was such a weird day.”
“It was,” says the man, swallowing an ice
cube.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “but can you—”
“Scott. You’re Cel.” His face clouds with an ironic sympathy. “Some week you guys are having.”
“I’m sorry?”
“At the show?” She’d forgotten he knew that part already. “Bad luck about the shooters being fans.”
“Well, a lot of people are,” she says.
“And that skit, or whatever.”
“I don’t think we really have the details on all that.”
“Can I ask you something you probably get all the time?”
“You can try!” chirps Nikki. Scott smiles at Nikki—does Cel dare to think: a little indulgently?—and leans toward her.
“What’s Mattie like in person?”
“Oh, don’t bother,” says Nikki. “She’s getting paid not to say.”
“You know, it kind of doesn’t look great if your publicist won’t even tell people what a good guy you are.”
“Trust me,” says Nikki. “I’ve tried.”
“No, I mean, Mattie is a good guy,” says Cel. “He’s a really great boss—everyone always says so.”
“Really?”
“And—that’s about it.” Cel begins to apology-shrug, but something about Scott’s squint makes her smother this. It comes out instead as a little spasm.
“But really?”
“I don’t know, I mean—” Cel is talking quickly now, trying to outrace the purplish heat she can feel heading to her ears. “I mean, he’s not really like anything, per se. He sort of lights up when the camera’s on—he’s like a Teddy Ruxpin doll or something. He’s not like that the rest of the time, but he’s not really like anything else, either.”
“This is literally the most she’s ever said about this,” breathes Nikki.
“I wonder what he does in his free time,” says Scott. “How he unwinds after all the, you know, Ruxpinning.”
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