The Spectators

by Jennifer Dubois

  “I do,” says Elspeth, and Cel can tell she’s thought about this a lot already. “I think it all matters, sooner or later. Because at the end of the day, what we do is who we are.”

  “At the end of the day, we are our pedicures. Man, you sure know how to catastrophize,” says Cel. “That’s the word you use when other people do it, right?”

  Elspeth shakes her head. “I mean it, Cel. The fingernails, I mean, whatever. But you’ve got to quit that job.”

  “I’m trying!”

  “No, you’re not. That’s just a thing you think a person in your position would say.”

  She reaches out to touch Cel’s shoulder, but seems to reconsider; instead, she pretzels her hand into a fist.

  “We are who we pretend to be,” says Elspeth. “Kurt Vonnegut said that.”

  “I know that,” says Cel. She didn’t. “Anyway, if that’s true, then maybe you can just pretend to be a decent friend for a while?”

  “I am being a decent friend.” Cel can tell Elspeth believes it, and maybe Cel believes it, too. If goodness is tireless effort on behalf of pure intention, then Elspeth is probably the best person she knows.

  What does that make Cel?

  “I’m saying this because I care about you,” says Elspeth. She is, she is—good Christ, she is. Cel glances at the place on her shoulder where Elspeth decided not to touch her. “That elasticity of yours—I’d watch it if I were you.”

  “Or even if you weren’t, apparently.”

  “Or don’t, then. Whatever.” Cel can hear in Elspeth’s voice that she’s been giving Cel a chance to surprise her, but did not actually expect her to: Cel is behaving exactly as Elspeth knew, deep down, that she would.

  “I mean, obviously you know this about yourself.” Elspeth has turned to face the window now; she is no longer looking at Cel. “But the thing I’m realizing now is—I think you like it.”

  1983

  At school, Cel is one of those children who never seem quite clean, her hair never decisively combed. She is helpless before the physical world, her person and belongings perpetually anarchic—her erasers are always gray, her homework always lost. Nobody believes that she actually does it. The teachers decide stupidity is not the issue; for a while, they explore alternative explanations. Maybe Cel is autistic (after she is observed talking to herself at recess), or hearing-impaired (after not responding to a teacher’s fourth question), or attention-deficit-disordered (after her auditory tests come back okay)? For a few weeks the school nurse gives her a pill that makes her heart pound and brings her even further into herself—into her own secret thoughts and plans and memories—which, it seems, is something like the opposite of what’s intended. After a while the pills stop coming and everyone seems to conclude that Cel is nothing, really: merely defective and limited in disappointing, subclinical ways, ways that cannot be explained in a single sentence.

  Her teachers, at a loss, keep reminding her she is smart—though this, at least, she does not doubt. Cel returns from school each day ever smarter, full of lectures and pedantry.

  “You shouldn’t stand under the air conditioner,” she tells Hal after her first week of life science. “You’ll get Legionnaires’ disease.”

  “What air conditioner?” says Hal.

  “You shouldn’t use the dented cans,” she declares. “You’ll get botulism.”

  Hal squints into his stew and says, “I’ll take my chances.”

  She learns things from Hal, too—quietly, without her noticing, he teaches her a million little economies. The endless uses for, and surprising durability of, dental floss. How to wipe down her arms and legs while she’s still in the shower, so that she can get most of the water off in a hurry. An old army trick, he tells her: it’s more important to be dry than warm. They read their way through his National Geographics, memorizing and then reciting their facts. At school Cel announces that tsetse flies are the cause of sleeping sickness, and the teachers look at her like she’s Linda Blair. Cel rewards Hal by bragging about him for a week: she brags about his gun, his plumbing expertise, his framed collection of willow-green Nazi stamps, displayed on the wall. They are from the war, Cel tells her classmates, and for the first time she is a little proud of Hal—proud of his part in slaying the dim, vast evil meant by those stamps. Her pride lasts until her teacher pulls her aside and tells her to stop talking about them at school; she adds that, if Cel ever wants to have friends over, she should probably take them down altogether.

  “Your school wants me to take them down?” says Hal, when Cel reports this.

  “Well, obviously,” says Cel, her voice high and didactic. “The Nazis were very, very bad.”

  Hal gulps down a laugh she’s never heard before. “The Nazis were bad,” he says. “Okay, Celeste. If you say so.”

  And then he takes them down. He with the limp they never speak of, the origins of which Cel never does inquire.

  She is such a little shit.

  “Classic,” Elspeth will say later. “Your mother was a victim, so you had to make your grandfather into the oppressor. In order to be an ally. Otherwise you were the oppressor, too.”

  And Cel will say: “I don’t know about that.”

  “Classic,” Elspeth will say, and wink knowingly. “I mean, absolutely textbook.”

  It’s no secret that Cel prefers Ruth, in the seasons when her madness is more like a fairy tale than a nightmare. Hal is just Hal, and is the same in all seasons. He’s forever fashioning a fix for some gnawing plumbing problem, eternally handing Cel a sad-looking sandwich that half the time has sawdust inside.

  If Hal doesn’t fix the house, will it fall down around them in the night? If he doesn’t make Cel sawdust sandwiches, will anyone make her anything at all?

  Cel does not consider these questions, and Hal never raises them. In this way, she is allowed to be young—which she is, for a very long time.

  Hal is an old man by the time Cel remembers him, and he might have even acted like it if he’d ever had the time. But oldness, like a lot of things, turns out to be a sort of luxury—a thing you can resist in small degrees, for a little while, until there is somebody else around to take over.

  But who? Cel will wonder years later. Who was Hal counting on to relieve him, and what did he imagine he was waiting for?

  And then years after that she will realize that she was the person he was counting on, and what he was waiting for was for her to grow up.

  And, in this moment, for a moment, she’ll believe that she has.

  TWENTY-SIX

  semi

  I arrive at the Mattie M studios at nine on a Tuesday. It is a warm, grubby morning; low-hanging clouds are backlit by invisible sun, making the sky look like an egg with illuminated veins. In the lobby, I flash my VIP pass, and am granted access to a special elevator. I head to the fourteenth floor. Like someone planning mass murder, I have studied the layout of the building.

  The upstairs offices are bright, incongruously cheerful. The wall above the reception desk exclaims THE MATTIE M SHOW! in bouncy pink letters; the whole place feels like the set of Sesame Street, and I begin to suspect that everyone working here is heavily medicated.

  At reception, I nearly run headlong into an intern—stupidly young, tepidly attractive, poring over a sheaf of papers while she walks.

  “Excuse me?” I say, and the Chi Omega pledge drops her papers. I kneel down to help her.

  “Um?” she says, and we both stand up. “Can I help you?” She isn’t even trying to sound like she wants to.

  “I’m sorry for startling you.” I look at her badge. “Celeste.” In her picture, she is giving a tight-lipped, secretive little smile.

  “You didn’t,” she says, and frowns. I see now that she isn’t quite the second-tier debutante she’d seemed at first. She has a quasi-hooked nose, just shy of witchy, which offsets
her slightness and gives her a patina of something else—not danger, exactly, but a sort of flickering puckishness. Something that hints at mischief you aren’t sure would be benign. “Are you here to see Sara?”

  “Oh, I’m not a guest.” I know Sara is their audience coordinator. I hope I sound insulted.

  She blinks slowly—is it possible, sarcastically? “Well, what are you then?”

  “I get that a lot.”

  I expect her to laugh at this—I’m good at girlfriend-ing, when I must—but instead, she just stares. I begin to wonder if what I’ve been taking for coldness is, in fact, a bewildering stupidity.

  “It was a joke,” I tell her.

  “I know. I didn’t laugh because I didn’t find it surprising.” She blinks again—this time forcefully, as though scolding herself.

  “I’m here to schedule the VIP Meet-and-Greet,” I say. “I think Scott Christakous mentioned I was coming?”

  “Oh.” Now she just looks terrified. “Yes. Remind me your name?”

  “Semi Caldwell.”

  “Semi like the truck?”

  “Sure,” I say. “I’m such a big fan of Matthew’s show.”

  The “Matthew” just slips out, and I can see it makes her curious—suggesting, as it does, some particular knowledge of a different life, a truer self. Now, of course, I know that the distinction between “Mattie” and “Matthew” is as significant as the distinction between “Bigfoot” and “Yeti”: at the end of the day, the ontological problem lies elsewhere.

  “Well, he usually likes to do these things after the taping.” The girl frowns again. “But I’ll tell him that you’re here.”

  She leads me to a waiting room. There’s a pretty interesting crew in there already: enormous-breasted woman; a tiny man with webbed, nearly flippered hands; a person who seems to be either at the very beginning or the very end of a serious relationship with methamphetamine. They glance at me, briefly bored, then away again. They’re here for auditions, I guess, if that’s the way it works around here. The sorority girl gives me a sharp, inquisitive look on her way out the door, and I wonder what she’s wondering. Well, let her wonder. Let her gossip, even, if she’s the type! The space between Matthew and me contains several lifetimes of trouble: high-stakes professional blackmail; garden-variety soul-annihilating heartbreak; personal disgrace, divorce, the exciting possibility of national scandal—not to mention the twin hypotheticals of our deaths: since, strictly as a matter of statistics, we should certainly not both be alive. Next to all of this, what I’m doing amounts to nothing. It is, essentially, a prank—a whoopee cushion on a chair, a water balloon dropped from no great height. A decade of watching lives fall to pieces will really blunt one’s appetite for blood sport. I have no interest in ruining Matthew’s life at this late date.

  Then again, I remind myself, times have changed. Queers don’t die from rumors anymore, only from absolutely everything else. Death has been outsourced to a more efficient entity; it is now being ruthlessly mass-produced—blame globalization! What a relief that would be—to be able to lay the blame on an insensate historical force, rather than the callousness of actual humans. I realize I’ve begun jotting notes; I laugh and throw my pen against the wall. Now a few of the other unfortunates are staring: well, who cares! The bottom line is that I don’t mind if I leave my visit with a few people scratching their heads and wondering, What the hell? What the hell, indeed, kids—you tell me!

  The sorority girl returns and pulls me into the hallway. Across the hall, a tiny man in a leotard is bellowing into a pay phone.

  “He wants to meet you for lunch,” she says. “Gabriel’s on Columbus Circle. Noon tomorrow.”

  “I do not wanna see any of your animal-nosed friends running around dressed as fairies!” exclaims the man across the hall.

  The intern is staring at me patiently, awaiting explanation.

  “I knew Matthew a little,” I say. It seems I still cannot say his name without a slight, nearly subliminal tenderness in my voice. “Back in the seventies.”

  “Oh great,” she says.

  “Well, there’s a reason Steven Ortiz doesn’t dance on the stage,” says the leotarded man. “I wouldn’t start anything till you start hitting the gym.”

  “You’re not going to ask to be on the show, are you?” says the intern.

  “What?” I scan the hall again—with its manic chromatics, its exuberant promotional posters, its coyly arranged head shots—all of it seeming to screech in unison: We are having fun here: aren’t we?!

  “Because he really hates when people do that, and it isn’t even up to him,” she says.

  “…You know what happens if you take steroids without going to the gym?” says Leotard. “You get fat.”

  “Why would anyone want to be on this show?” I say.

  “You’d be surprised.” She looks so serious that I want to laugh at her. “He gets it all the time.”

  “Well, I’m just here as a spectator,” I say. “Believe it or not.”

  “I’m just letting you know,” she says. “We’ve seen it all around here.”

  “…No, your job is just to stand there as a tree and look pretty,” says Leotard.

  “I doubt that very much,” I say, offering her my hand.

  * * *

  —

  A page leads me back down to the line outside the auditorium, where I wait with an army of polo-shirted out-of-towners, already starting to sweat into their fanny packs. A different page walks down the line, distributing nondisclosure agreements. A hush falls over us as we enter into this new, more formal understanding with the show—although if I’ve learned one thing from my time with Matthew, and it may indeed be only one, it’s that these sorts of things aren’t legally binding. They are psychological maneuvers, not unlike the things hospitals get you to sign to make you think you’ve forfeited your right to sue them.

  In front of me, a couple is discussing the Ryan Muller suicide note. At this point, the story of Matthew and the shooter seems to be running on its own inertia—though the two stories are both so dense, the gravitational pull between them so massive, that it’s hard to parse its mechanics: What exactly are we saying happened here, and what exactly are we deciding that it meant? At the end of the day, which of these two black holes is being subsumed into the other? And how many of us will be sucked in, too, before all of this is over?

  Not me, I decide. Not me.

  After a while, a cheer goes up: we are being ushered into the studios. Inside, the walls are lined with posters of Matthew—looking amused and intelligently handsome, in a nice-dad sort of way. One can nearly imagine him as the sitcom straight man, playing opposite the antics of all of fucked-up America. I remember a book Matthew had had, about the theory of the changing American character; I wish, for the thousandth time, that I could remember who wrote it. My mouth, I am noticing, is very dry.

  Inside the auditorium, beaming pages direct us to our seats. I am in the fourth row. Next to me is an enormous woman wearing a confusing amount of paisley. A man behind me comments that we are lucky to be here: they usually film three shows at once, but today it’s only one. A real scholar of the form, this guy. And all at once the house lights dim, a jazzed-up version of the Mattie M theme music commences, and an unseen announcer declares that the man himself will be imminently upon us.

  And then, as prophesied, he is.

  Matthew jogs onto the stage, clapping along with the crowd. He is, naturally, much older. But his aging is somehow abstracted—lacquered beneath something more than money, or stage makeup, or fame. He is half-dancing in a way that makes me almost glad I could never take him anywhere, back when I wanted to.

  “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” he says. So his nerdiness, at least, remains intact. You never know what will be the last to go: I’ve learned this from watching a lot of deme
ntia. “I’m not ready to give up the ghost quite yet.”

  The crowd squeals, and Matthew flashes them a smile. It’s as though he isn’t really here—as though he has, in some fundamental way, absented himself from these proceedings. Perhaps his real self is shut up in an attic somewhere, decaying in a portrait. I try to remember what his real smile looked like; I’m pulling a blank, which is too bad. But this is the way of memories, I’ve found: you can’t make any assumptions about which ones will stick around.

  And now Matthew is leaving again, promising to return in mere moments with an absolutely fantastic show. And are we ready for an absolutely fantastic show? We aver as a chorus that we are. I remind myself that most people take pleasure in affirming their agreements in unison. Sports fans, religious believers. The paisley-shirted woman is staring at me; I am, it seems, forgetting to clap. I clap, obediently. I absolutely will not hoot.

  After Mattie exits, the paisleyed woman leans in and asks me where I’m from. Iowa, I tell her. She beams and says that they’re from Indiana. How about that, I say. And you’re here all alone? I tell her that I am. You poor thing, she says. She looks actually sorry, and I wonder darkly who she voted for. I take solace in the idea that she doesn’t know to whom she’s extending her pity, or to what deviant purposes it might be used.

  And then the cycle starts anew: Matthew is bounding out all over again, a kicky Astaire-ish spring in his step. This is nothing like the beleaguered shuffle he’d once used to traverse county courtrooms, prison hallways, the trash-strewn streets of a city given up for dead. He stops at center stage, waving with fresh enthusiasm. Somewhere far out beyond me, the crowd is going crazy. This is the stamina of the campaign trail, I realize—to do and say the same things over and over, to make them feel personal and necessary and new, every time. Mattie is making modest now-now motions, and I feel the audience understand collectively that there’s a preordained shape to this ritual—something like haggling, or a mating dance—and that we will know by instinct when it is time to end.