The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (17 page)

Judy sidled up to me, and I inquired about her sister.

“She is so happy about your divorce,” Judy said. “She’d been pleading with Cyd to leave you for years. She and I used to argue about you guys all the time. ‘Cyd deserves better,’ she’d say. ‘Cyd sucks,’ I’d say.”

“I had no idea our marriage generated such controversy.” I was more than a little embarrassed. “I hope the divorce was sufficiently entertaining.”

“Oh, don’t get huffy. That’s the only time I don’t like you, when you become Mr. Huffy. Get me a drink. Liquor me up and I’ll tell you wonderful things about yourself.”

I accepted her offer. Her litany of compliments did, in fact, lift my spirits. I discovered that I had a kind voice, sexy eyebrows, and a graceful way of “bopping around”—something I’d always secretly suspected of myself. She also loved my book.

“Poor Koos-Koos,” she said. “I identified with him completely. One misunderstanding and your whole life is turned around.”

“Yes,” I said, “but how does that apply to your life?”

“I completely misunderstood my parents. I thought they were normal,” she explained. “I’m still playing catch-up.”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

“It’s your basic younger sister story or Electra story, kind of a Gretel-and-Gretel-make-it-back-from-the-witch’s-house-and-their-father-won’t-believe-the-younger-one-until-the-older-one-puts-in-her-two-cents story.”

She began to add something more about her sister but was interrupted by facial hair, who was quite drunk now, asking her to dance. Frieda and FTD were already fritzing about, as were a few others whose names I’m omitting to protect their publishers.

“Nah,” Judy said to him. “I promised the first dance to How.” To me, she added a seductive, “C’mon.”

How should I describe Ms. Guevera’s style of dance? An undulation with horns, perhaps, though that doesn’t capture the distinctively postmodern charm of it. Meanwhile, the beard made it onto the floor with his second choice and immediately seemed to suffer electroshock convulsions. Frieda hula-hooped about, letting her bib-dress slide around her hidden parts. Husband of Frieda waffled between off-beat hand-clapping and a horsey sort of
clompity clomp
. Suddenly FTD yelled, “Limbo!” and—oh, you get the picture. A riotous time was had by all.

Benjamin and I were close, despite what his mother called “our opposite dispositions,” which is an uninspired way to say Benj was polite to strangers. Since the divorce, our time together was restricted to Saturdays, and what I hated was that it robbed me of the everydayness of him: the nocturnal refrigerator plunderer, the six o’clock news-groping purist, the mealtime barbarian. When we meet now, he’s on best behavior, and so am I. Our time is too short. I never get to see him with his hair uncombed, or when he’s in his grubs doing the lawn. I miss my boy.

A week before the party, we’d met in a café near the subway stop, where we’d planned to eat before heading to MOMA for a highbrow day of chat-and-stare. However, he’d brought a disreputable-looking friend with him, and our plans were ruptured.

“I don’t think my eyes could handle it,” Benj said of the proposed excursion, blinking owl-like behind his cheap lenses. His magnified eyes made him seem especially the child, calling to mind a baby’s exaggerated features—though the tiny post through one of his nostrils bearing a Guatemalan Worry Doll undercut the image somewhat. “Besides,” he went on, “Ogle doesn’t like art.”

“How is it possible that you do not like any art?” I asked Ogle (not his real name; his father is a lawyer).

“Rack your brain, señor. I’ve racked mine and it’s done zero, but there it is anyhow. It’s all no-go artwise for me.”

Unlike the skunk, who despite his bad odor and poor reputation is said to have impeccable table manners, Ogle ate beans by trapping a few in a bit of ravaged bread, then thrusting the dripping mass in the (approximate) direction of his mouth. Thank god he was garrulous; otherwise, we’d have been denied the sight of his amazing mastication.

“Your manner of eating is ghastly,” I said.

“Funny you should bring that up,” he began, and then launched into a defense of his eating like a buffalo (my simile, not his). His argument had something to do with the First Amendment.

Benj, meanwhile, wolfed down his chili cheeseburger quietly and with relative decorum. When Ogle finished his treatise, Benj said, “So you seeing anybody, Dad?”

“No,” I said, startled. “Not really. Not at all.”

Benj nodded, poking his glasses. “Mom’s got a new boyfriend. Pretty cool guy, I guess. She says he’s the first guy she’s met since you who has backbone.”

“Oh,” I said casually. “Had a large sampling, has she?”

Ogle answered, “Backbone’s way way overrated.”

To which, I replied, “Such is the argument of most invertebrates.”

“She goes out some,” Benj said. “Pretty much, I’d say. I think she misses you.”

I held my tongue and let Ogle launch into a directive about backbone and the poor and the superiority of unwaxed fruit.

We spent the day wandering about music shops, looking for a tape by the Revolting Cocks, a disc by Public Enemy, and Madonna’s snake poster.

“No way it’s Madonna who does the snake thing,” Ogle pronounced late in the search. “We’re barking up the wrong babe.”

Benj just shrugged. To me, he said, “I don’t much like him really. The guy Mom’s seeing.”

He stared at me plaintively, afraid he’d offended me earlier. I was touched.

Ogle agreed with him. “Major stooge,” he said, nodding like a straining horse.

Cyd had sent me
The Good Enough Parent
, and at moments like this one, I almost wished I had read it.

“It’s all right to like him,” I said to Benj, “and it’s all right not to like him.”

“Yeah,” Benj said. “Like I’ve got any choice, you know? How can you control who you do and don’t like?”

Ogle, as if to prove the assertion, scratched athletically at his crotch.

A funny thing happened after the party, not directly after but during the following week: I quit my job. Call me impetuous, call me impulsive, call me unemployed. I don’t know why I did it, but I told my immediate superior, V___________ himself, that I was ripe for a change.

“My marriage has ended you know,” I said.

V___________ replied, “Metamorphosis is passé. Ninety percent of butterflies suffer from airsickness.” His idea of humor, and evidence as to why he needed to change my mind: he had the creative repertoire of a tomato. “How, how ’bout a twenty percent raise?” he said. “The average butterfly would give his right wing for that kind of dough.”

You see, I’m a very good ad man. I started the whole eco-ad trend, connecting the purchase of our brand of toothpaste, motor oil, and luggage with saving the whales, protecting the rain forest, and plugging up the ozone hole. I did the wandering-camera, narrow-focus ads, too, that elusive, suggestive darting that other agencies are still copying. I got Nike Michael Jordan. I’m
not
a let’s-get-them-to-pay-for-a-rock kind of advertising man. I’m into big ideas. Laugh if you wish, but you’re wearing my products. You’ve probably taken out a loan to purchase something that I convinced you you couldn’t be done without.

V___________ insisted I take a two-week vacation rather than giving notice. He was certain I merely needed a rest. I walked a couple of buildings down the street and got a new job in twenty minutes. More money, roughly the same benefits. I don’t know why I did it.

I preserved the two weeks of vacation, however, and tried to arrange to take Benj—sans Ogle—to Vermont to hike, but Cyd accused me of wanting to hog Benj’s time, and though it wasn’t the way I’d have put it, her analysis was accurate. I missed the boy so acutely I found myself weeping at anything even mildly sentimental: AT&T commercials or Robin Williams films. It was a pathetic business.

During those moments of helpless weeping I would hate Cyd for breaking us up, the way Beatles fans used to hate Yoko. Afterward, I would take it all back, in case some friendly god had been listening to my evil thoughts.

When Judy Guevera called and invited me to dinner at her apartment, I was free to accept. She lived in the Village, on the second floor of a three-flat, a nicer place than I had expected. She answered the door wearing only a robe, her hair wet and uncombed. Her mascara perfect.

“Would you believe I haven’t even had time to get dressed?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t believe that for a minute.”

Oh, well, you know what followed. Do I really need to describe the touching of fingertips to clothing and then to flesh? Or the staring, that nervous yet gooey brand of staring? We began the maneuvering of bodies and body parts, the strange little dance that precedes First-Kiss, our heads lifting and lowering, finding a parallel and then collapsing it—not suddenly but with little jerks forward, tiny retreats back—until finally our lips touched, our mouths opened. All of which served to create a dribble of sensation like a tickle or a lemon drop. Our tongues shyly collided, then less shyly commingled, and our mouths became sources of heat and sweetness—yes,
sweetness
; what a fine word for the pleasure of a woman’s mouth against yours.

Okay, I hammed that part up a bit. She was the first woman I’d kissed on the lips since the divorce, and the only one, besides my wife, in seventeen years. We bopped right into bed. Which happened to be next to the dining table because Judy’s absent roommate paid an extra thirty a month to sleep in the bedroom. I found that my sexual hunger had hidden an even more basic desire for food. By the time we finished the bed business, I was ravenous, too much so to cuddle, which seemed to suit Judy fine.

“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s chow.”

I grabbed my shirt and began buttoning, but she brought plates to the bed and sat cross-legged and naked in front of me, eating fried chicken with her fingers, licking often.

It was not at all erotic, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ve never questioned why restaurants require their patrons to wear shirts. A beautiful woman. Have I mentioned that? Judy is beautiful, and being naked certainly enhanced her attractiveness, but I couldn’t look at her and swallow. I stared at her wall hangings and knickknacks, making vaguely polite comments. I ate in a rush.

Without any prompting, she began telling me about Cyd and her sister when they were teenagers.

“Cyd always took Sis’s boyfriend
after
convincing Sis to drop him.” Judy shook her head over her chicken. “Sis was a sap.”

Judy went on to explain that she had slept with many of the same boys herself, as well as her sister’s first husband. It didn’t seem to dawn on her that I was not the ideal audience for this confession. I came to understand that her hard work to win me stemmed not from great attraction to me for my mind or even for my body, but for my position in the constellation of her universe.

We got married a month later.

This is my first attempt at a comeback into the literary world since
In a Foreign Land
. (If you must know, the book was published under the title
Koos Koos, the Cuckoo Outlaw
.) Judy insisted I start with this, the history of our romance. I’m hoping FTD will give me a blurb, and I have left out several damning bits about his dress and grammar as a result.

I’ve been at my new job two years now and made my hours flexible to have time to write and to be home when Judy’s there. At work, she comes over the speakers in my office, introducing Mozart and Sibelius.

Cyd has taken my sudden marriage to her best friend’s little sister as well as can be expected, which is to say, she hates me with a deep and genuine passion. I would prefer Judy didn’t have the old, long-standing connection with Cyd, though I know it’s possible that some of my love for her has to do with her position in my constellation, too. And what of it? I find I care no more about the emotional origin of this love than I do the paternal origins of Benj. He is my son, and Judy is my wife. My love for Cyd has moved to some posterior chamber of the heart now, back there with cheap pizza, J. D. Salinger, Sophia Loren, Hermann Hesse, and, yes, the Rolling Stones.

Benj no longer wears magnifying glasses. He is out of high school and, against my wishes, enlisted in the army. Any day now he’s going to be sent to the Middle East. He’s waiting for his orders, waiting to discover his destination. Cyd claims he’s doing this to impress us. (She’s dating her therapist.) I don’t think it’s that simple.

When Judy gets in from the radio, she joins me on the floor in front of the Magnavox, and we watch the newscaster sanctimoniously describe the world. Between reports, my ads appear, and I’ve discovered that I’m proud of them—not for what they’re doing, but for the care that went into their making. Then the newsman returns, looking solemn. “In Baghdad…,” he begins, or “In Afghanistan…”

We hold hands, Judy and I, and listen. We wonder to which distant country Benj will be sent, wonder what it was he misinterpreted that led him into uniform, wonder where the next unnecessary battle will be fought.

Marriage suits me. It’s so red, white, and blue, but also
subversive
. We didn’t understand that in the sixties. The subversive in matrimony will be the next wave in advertising.

You wait and see.

Helen Swann shivers in shirtsleeves at the bus stop, coatless and confident the
day will warm. The city bus, as it lumbers toward her, cracks the ice that lines the gutter. Frost nubs its broad, bald forehead and clouds the immense windshield. Like glaucoma, Helen thinks. It’s one of the old buses, which means the brakes will shriek and the heat won’t work. She boards at City Self-Storage, a concrete bunker directly across from her apartment building. She rents units on either side of the street. From the front window of her living room, she can see the corrugated metal door of her storage shed. This fact pleases her. The vehicle’s brakes bleat, and something under the great body rattles. The morning air is the gray of doves’ wings.

The driver slumps behind the steering wheel, his head bulging beneath his city cap as if it were screwed on too tight. His name is probably Otis, but his name tag bears an extraneous u (
Outis
), and at each scheduled stop he bellows not the street corner but merely
Out
, as if to confirm his complicity in a divine pattern. He is her least favorite driver. His hand rests on the steel knob that operates the door, the first two fingers tobacco-stained to the second knuckle as if dipped daily in a secret vat. He keeps his eyes on the asphalt, does not nod or smile as she boards, the bus accelerating as the doors whip shut, his aftershave as pungent as poison.

The few passengers already aboard, veterans all, avert their eyes as Helen navigates the rocking aisle. She feels the urge to hike her skirt to her neck to see if any head will turn. They space themselves about the bus, each in a separate stall. Helen sits equidistant from the fleece cap three seats ahead and the fur coat three behind, inclining her head against the chilly window as the behemoth carrying them plods around a corner.

The view is too familiar to seem remarkable, and yet she looks for evidence of hidden splendor. High above her, the sun notches a gloomy body of clouds. Snow lingers in north-facing lawns and the scant sunlight makes it sparkle. Winter is finally coming to an end. The channel nine meteorologist has promised it. His kind voice and sly face (as if he knows more weather than he’s letting on) visit her apartment five nights a week. She wears no coat as testament to her faith in him. He is a central figure in her secret life.

The bus slows and stops. Cars huddle at the traffic light, a woolly frost layering their backs. Helen’s mother died earlier in the year, and Helen had not wanted to fly across the country to go through the possessions. A moving company delivered it all to City Self-Storage. The van was full, and she advised the men to stack the boxes to the ceiling. When she came home from work, she discovered that the crates and furniture filled only the back wall of the shed. She had room to park a car in there if she wanted.

She had planned to go through her mother’s belongings quickly, discarding or selling most of the artifacts. But investigating the crates tired her. She pulled an overstuffed couch free of the pile in order to have a place to rest. She set boxes about as if they were tables. She bought a space heater, leaving the big door open, providing a view of her apartment window. One evening she fell asleep in the easy chair, as her mother had often done. She did not wake until after midnight, cozy in her friendly cavern. A light shone in her living room window across the street, the curtains slightly parted, as if the apartment itself were jealous.

The bus wheezes forward as far as the intersection. Helen’s sigh hazes her window. She does not want to go to work. Her desk is in Public Records at City Hall, a room as mammoth as a toothache. Until last month, her job entailed filling the great room with papers—certificates of marriage and divorce, deeds to houses and cars, licenses for businesses and bureaus. Every civilization must leave a record of its existence, she had told herself. It was important work. But now she is required to empty the same wide hall, transferring documents to computer files. At her present rate, it will take another dozen years to erase the tangible evidence of the first twelve.

It seems to her that she has ridden this bus more than twelve years. Fifty, perhaps. Thirty, at the least. She can shut her eyes and describe the paltry buildings along the route: the white bank winged with a drive-through, the elegant brick courthouse warted by a concrete addition, the sleek silver supermarket on Laurel, the slate steak house on Sacker, the ugly new library spouting its shiny sculpture of the letter O, and the chalk white astonishment of her own City Hall. This daily edifice trail resides in her mind like something less than a city and something more than a routine, a coded sentence that is, at once, meaningless and beyond her ability to decipher.

“Out,” Outis yells and a bundled-up man and child obey.

To be fair, it’s her birthday. Thirty-five is a troubling age, especially if one is alone, a woman without husband or children. Helen doesn’t particularly long for either, but she has always assumed she would have a few of each. Today, she has her doubts. When she was fifteen, she ran off with a boy. The police tracked them to a neighboring city and arrested him on
his
birthday. He had turned eighteen, which meant he could be charged with statutory rape, as well as kidnapping. Sometimes she believes they purposely waited until he was of age. The channel nine weatherman makes her think of him, although the weatherman looks nothing like the boy. Her lover had been short with a leonine mane, while the weatherman is tall, his premature white hair thinning and wispy, like cirrocumulus skies.
You remind me of the ocean
, the boy had said to Helen in the motel room, minutes before her rescue and his arrest, sirens already singing for them on the avenue.
Something big
, he continued.
Like… I don’t know… the air
.

Her mother pressed charges. For years, until near the end, Helen and her mother were estranged. Malignant polyps brought about the reconciliation.

Today Helen feels that the remainder of her life may be like this very morning, a repetitious trip over familiar ground in an anonymous and nearly empty hovel of transport. She stares at her fingers’ web on her lap as if it is literally her womb and feels suddenly weepy. Normally, she treats a maudlin thought like a stranger’s sudden interest—something to flee. Today, she is defenseless. She pictures the weatherman bumping up against her in a tight-fitting tavern, his hands tumbling down to her waist, his tongue touching the soft hide of her lips. The image both excites and embarrasses her. “The future is fair,” the weatherman likes to say, “no matter how stormy the past.” He’s folksy but also a smart aleck. Helen likes to invent new lines for him. “Weather is the forbidden frontier,” she would have him say. “What we do about the weather defines us.” She knows the actual man who appears on her television is a jerk. She saw him once in a bar sitting with one woman and staring at another. His real life is of no interest to Helen.

In the fantasy world she daily creates, the forces that battle over the weather have volition: they are gods. The mortal things—humans and trees, buildings, sewers, and homes—both serve the gods and struggle against them, until they fall weather-beaten to the hoary screech of crane, the thunder of wrecking ball, or the insidious algebra of cancer. Each morning she searches the city for signs of change in the struggle, and each evening she listens to the weatherman predict tomorrow’s skirmish. Her secret life has no other plot. It is not so much a narrative as an embellishment. An insanely elaborate construct, but Helen Swann knows she is not insane. Merely intelligent, alone, and gravely bored. In her private world, actions have meaning, and the trivial torment of daily life is transformed into a grand struggle.

“You should get professional help,” her mother said when Helen described her attachment to the weatherman. They were on the phone. Helen had grown tired of the silences and revealed too much. “And I don’t mean one of those TV psychics,” her mother added to make the conversation lighter.

“I should go to a real psychic?”

Her mother offered a polite laugh. Helen wanted to tell her that the weatherman was something like a psychic, an oracle who forecasts the future, details the past, and ascertains from the incalculable morass of existence the high temp for the upcoming day and the low for the night.

“He’s pretty,” Helen said at last. “Like an antelope.”

“Like an antelope on
television
,” her mother said. “Get yourself a real antelope. You’re still an attractive woman.”

That had made Helen ready to hang up.

“I suppose that means I’m
ancient
,” she said and changed the subject without letting her mother reply.

Helen had booked a final flight to Arizona, but her mother died the weekend before. Helen canceled the trip. She did not want to see the emaciated body, and there was no one there with whom to mourn. Her father had left them when she was an infant, and her mother had destroyed every photograph of him. But she had kept the name Swann.

“It’s the only thing he ever gave me that he didn’t later take back,” her mother explained.

Helen had thought,
What about
me?

For years Helen tried to conjure from memory the image of her father. She found family albums among the things in the shed. One eight-by-ten showed baby Helen standing on tiptoes between her mother and a man, but the man’s face and body were covered by a picture of a swan clipped from a magazine—her mother’s idea of a
joke. Helen pulled the clipping away carefully, but glue had damaged the photo, erasing most of him. Her father was tall, she could determine, with narrow shoulders. Either he wore a hat or he had a pointed head. Helen slipped the photo into a cheap frame and it hangs in the storage shed, the incomplete shape of her father drawing the eye away from the smiling woman and pretty little girl. She has not made much progress emptying the unit. She gave her mother’s clothing to Goodwill and threw away the porcelain figurines that were broken in shipping. Her mother had collected the figurines for decades, but Helen did not feel obliged to glue together their hollow bodies. She never understood the attachment.

A motorcyclist slips through the gap between the bus and the curb, the blank space needed for the colossus to make a turn. A contemptible red motorcycle, like a fire ant. A car pulls in behind it, a pieced-together creature, the front half a Mustang and the rear of something cheaper, like a Cavalier. Auto titles and death certificates are handled with equal aplomb by Helen’s new software program. One format for all public records. If she clicks on “Marriage License,” certain boxes are highlighted and the cursor moves to them automatically. If she clicks on “Death Certificate,” some of the same boxes but also different ones are illuminated. It will simplify her work once she feels comfortable with it. She doesn’t look forward to her elementary job becoming even more rote, but neither does she wish to be slow to learn it.

“Out,” Outis calls, and the herd do as they’re told. They are at the corner of Laurel and Main, halfway through her daily odyssey. A man takes the seat in front of her, although there are plenty of empties—a newcomer, a stranger to their customs. His long coat is made of camel’s hair or ermine or the pelt of some more exotic creature. He turns sideways in the seat to face her. He speaks her name.

“Don’t tell me,” he says. “Your car broke down, too. These things tend to happen in bunches.”

It is Henry Alt, who also works at City Hall.

“I always ride the bus to work,” Helen replies. “Better for the planet, saves wear and tear on my car.”

“Really?” Henry Alt says. “I guess. Although you know what they say—something there is that doesn’t like a bus.”

He doesn’t smile but
grins
at her. He is likely forty-five and the hair at the front of his head is scarce, but the women at the Hall think of him as handsome. Helen has never participated in the speculation as to why he lives alone. The consensus is that he drinks too much.

His eyes patiently roam her face, which embarrasses her. She studies her lap and thinks about the software, the mistakes she made the day before. She needs a new computer, one that can run the program as quickly as she can type, but she dreads learning the quirks of a new machine.

“Does the bus go left on Olive?” Henry Alt asks her.

Helen nods.

“You’ve seen him then?” He leans in closer. His shirt is made of yellow silk, the shade of old leaves. “The fellow who works that corner?”

Fellow
, she thinks. Who says
fellow
anymore?

“I’m not sure,” she says. “Who do you mean?”

“I always drive by—look at that!” He aims a finger out the window.

A snowman stands on the steps to the library, a gold crown on his head, something peculiar for a nose, an open book jabbed into his frozen abdomen as if he’s reading. Charcoal briquettes serve as eyes, but one has fallen out. Henry Alt laughs heartily. The snowman’s nose, Helen sees, is the toe of an old shoe. Either the shoe has been cut in half, or the remainder of it is packed inside the snowy head.

“My god, when I was a boy,” Henry Alt says, shaking his head happily, “how I loved
snow
. Snowmen, snow angels, sledding, sliding, rolling down that hill in Penny Park, you know the one?”

“No,” Helen says. “I didn’t grow up here.”

“Neither did I,” he says. “Upstate New York. You ever been there?”

“No,” she says again.

He
is
handsome, she decides. There had been a meeting last fall when he sat beside her. He made a joke about the mayor and everyone laughed. His breath had smelled of wine, but it was right after lunch. People often have wine with lunch. He wears a suit every day, and a laundered shirt. He has an array of ties. Evidently he has income from sources besides the city. Or he has family money. She cannot recall the kind of car he drives.

“I spent a few winters here as a boy,” he says. “I guess that’s why I live here now, those winters. Little islands of happiness.”

“Out,” Outis calls.

They’re stopped at the intersection of Laurel and Sacker. The bus takes in a few additional people. Henry Alt seems to be musing over his youth, his lips pursed in memory. He has been passed over for promotion, Helen knows. One of the men in his office is ambitious and clever, and has skipped ahead of Henry Alt, who seems naive about such things. His tie today is made of alternating diamonds of black and gold. It, too, is made of silk. She doubts that he needs the job at City Hall. She considers telling him that it is her birthday. What would such a man do with this information? He would feel obliged to do something, she thinks. Take her to lunch, perhaps. Or, at a minimum, burst into song.