Vintage Contemporaries, page 29
Peter loved to pitch and took pride in writing the team’s lineups. He couldn’t hit worth a damn, but in literary softball could usually hustle his way to an infield single or two. Mostly he enjoyed peppering the game with old-timey baseball chatter, which his coworkers found mildly annoying but which drove other teams insane. Once, Emily was standing on base and the exasperated first basewoman from the Paris Review said, “Why does he keep saying, ‘can of corn’?”
The game ended as the lights started coming on in the big apartment buildings surrounding the park. As they walked west with the Bloomsbury team, Emily spotted the San Remo, where Edith used to live, right by the Dakota, where John Lennon and Rosemary’s baby lived. They often invited the other team to a bar in the west 80s, where Peter would hold forth and where, occasionally, junior editors would begin star-crossed romances. Sometimes, the opposing shortstop would flirt lightly with her, which she enjoyed. This happened less and less frequently, now.
Tonight she could stay for one beer, she thought. Peter had already had a few at the field and told Evelyn to order pitchers for everyone. Like many new assistants, Evelyn did not have the kind of credit limit that allowed her to plunk down a card for the night and expense it later, so Emily gave the bartender hers instead. “Thanks,” Evelyn said. The problem was now she was stuck for longer than she wanted to be stuck. She texted Alan.
I gotta stay another hour or so, I’m sorry
no problem! We’re food
*good
Kiss my baby for me
Mission Accomplished
She talked to a nice senior editor at Bloomsbury about a book they’d both bid on recently and lost. Then she checked on Sondra to make sure she was having a good time. Finally she judged the pitchers emptied enough to order four more and close out her tab. It was less fun being the grown-up, she found, than she’d thought it would be when she was a kid. She’d thought she wanted to be in charge, but mostly that meant cleaning up messes a lot.
She looked around the now-crowded bar for Peter to say goodbye. He was holed up in a booth, close-talking Evelyn, who was laughing hard but also trapped against the wall. She came over, slid into the booth across from them, and threw Peter a glare. “Hey,” she said to Evelyn. “Sondra wanted to explain the expense system to you. She’s over by the bar.”
Peter got up and gestured gallantly to Evelyn. “Right this way, my dear,” he said. She got up and headed across the room. Peter slid back into the bar with a guilty schoolboy’s look. “Sorry, Mom,” he said.
“Don’t ‘Mom’ me. What are you doing?”
“I’m keeping it in my pants.” He giggled.
“Peter, I talked to Marta.”
“Oh no, Marta,” he said with mock horror. “What did she tell you?”
“She told me you made her feel like shit. She told me you wouldn’t stop commenting on her outfits.”
“She wore amazing outfits! She didn’t want me to say anything?”
“Come on!” she said fiercely. “You are making a fucking fool of yourself!”
“Ah, mind your own business,” he said, waving her off.
“I talked to Kim. I talked to Nicole.”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, Jesus, Girl Detective.”
To keep from saying something else, she said, “I’m going home.”
“That’s a good idea,” he replied.
“You should go home too.”
He looked uncertain, finally. “Maybe I will.”
“Come out with me. Here, here’s your bag. Come on.” She picked their way through the bar, told Sondra she was leaving, asked if anyone wanted to share a car uptown. Thank God, no one did.
She put Peter in a cab and flagged down her own. She checked her bag, her wallet, her phone. She had everything, just like always.
* * *
Over the summer she’d been researching climate change and structural engineering for Emily’s show. “By then New York will be basically subtropical,” she said over the phone during the design conference call. “More like how coastal South Carolina or Georgia is now. There should be cypress trees.”
“Oh, that’s fascinating.” Emily said.
“The fun thing,” she said, “is that actually that part of Brooklyn is gonna be more of a swamp, with a mixture of salt and fresh water.”
“Tell me there will be alligators.”
“You could make a case for alligators. Eventually, anyway.”
“You hear that, Soleil?” she crowed. “We got our gators!”
* * *
Emily apologized for all the time she was spending on the phone; there was a little bit of a mess at work, she said, and she was trying to clean it up.
“Are you or are you not available to eat crabs?” Derreck said.
“I can fit that into my schedule.”
They were staying in Annapolis, where Alan’s family had gone for summer vacations for years, with Derreck and Eric and their new baby, who was named Tariq. The stress is on the second syllable, their birth announcement had assured everyone.
Tariq was adorable but very, very fussy. Jane enjoyed holding Tariq on her lap, but immediately gave him back to his dads whenever he started crying. “You got it, kid,” Alan said. “That baby is somebody else’s problem.”
“Noooo, we all love you, Tariq,” Emily said, but the day they went out for crabs, she felt enormous relief when it was Tariq who wailed so piteously that Eric had to walk him down the pier, out of earshot. She loved it when her child was good, but in a dark way she loved it even more when other people’s children were bad.
“Why is Baby Tariq so sad?” Jane asked.
“He’s a baby,” said Alan.
“It’s hard to be a baby,” Derreck said, sucking Old Bay off his fingers. “Dur dur d’être bébé.”
“He wants to talk with us and eat crabs with us, but he’s too little to do anything,” Emily said. “He’s frustrated!”
“He doesn’t want crabs,” Jane said. “Ew!” She was entirely grossed out by all the cracking and tearing and scooping involved in a crab feast. She didn’t even like to look at the piles of shells on the table.
“Isn’t it better being a big girl?” Alan asked. “You can talk to us, and walk around and do things.”
“I can eat hush puppies,” she said.
“You bet.”
“They’re not real puppies,” she confided to Derreck.
Emily was often surprised how much of her time as a parent she spent trying to make deadpan eye contact with Alan, as if she were Jim in The Office and he a camera.
They heard the approaching cries of Tariq. Eric stood on the sidewalk, helplessly bouncing the inconsolable infant. His forced jollity was reaching insane-asylum levels.
“Being a daddy is hard!” Jane announced. “Being a mommy is easier, because the baby can just drink your milk from your nipples.”
“It didn’t work as smooth as all that, kid,” Emily said.
“Uncle Derreck doesn’t have any milk in his nipples,” said Jane.
“I better get him,” Derreck said, glancing mournfully at the bucket of crabs, still half-full. He got up, cleaning his hands with a wet wipe.
“I’ll leave you one or two, don’t worry,” Alan said as his brother left.
“I don’t miss that,” Emily said.
“It is crucial,” Alan said before Eric came back, “that we never forget what it was like.”
“Like the Alamo,” said Emily.
* * *
After dinner, the phone rang. “Hi Peter,” she heard Alan say. There was a short pause. “Let me get Emily for you.”
Emily picked up in the bedroom. “You told him,” Peter said.
“Of course I did. He’s my husband. You told Chessie, right?”
“Yes. She’s upset.”
“She has every right to be.”
“She’s upset at you.”
Of course she should have anticipated this. “I’m sorry she feels that way. I love her, still.”
He snorted. “I wouldn’t offer her your hand anytime soon, she’s liable to bite it off. She thinks this is a power play.”
“Is that what you think?”
“No. I don’t think you want my job. You’re not ambitious like that.”
Though he was right, she didn’t and she wasn’t, it still stung. Fifteen years and he could still hurt her when he wanted to.
“What did Eileen say?”
“She’s hiring an outside firm to do an investigation. Until then I’m working from home.”
She heard the clink of ice in a glass. She even knew what he was drinking right now: Jack on the rocks. He always had money, but he never cared about expensive liquor.
“I never harassed you,” he said. “I never propositioned you, not once.”
“You never did.”
“Quid pro quo, I never did that. So what is this?”
“You spent three years yelling at me, Peter, until I left for Houghton.”
“I saved you,” he said. “I saved you from a batty old bitch who stole your work. I put you in a place where you could excel and every single thing you accomplished was you. Sure, it was hard. Shit is hard in the real world!”
“I don’t know, Peter,” she said. “I don’t know why you made it hard that way for me and why you made it hard this way for Marta.” He scoffed. “I do know that in the past eight or nine years every one of your assistants has left, and they’ve all left unhappy. And the ones who aren’t white, they were even unhappier. I could barely get them to talk to me. But now I know a little bit more about the different ways you made it hard for them.”
“What are you doing, Emily? You’re just telling a story here.”
“No,” she said. “I’m helping other people tell theirs.”
He laughed, a short sharp bark. “Just because they couldn’t take it. Not like you could take it.”
“I took it. It was not a sign of my talent or my strength of character that I took it.”
She heard him sip his drink, up there in his big house in Westchester. His kids were in fifth grade now. She hated this. Alan cracked open the door to the bedroom, caught her eye, sat down on the bed, held her hand.
“The investigation is not gonna turn anything up because there isn’t anything,” he said. “I’m a tough boss. I tell dirty jokes. Big fuckin’ deal.”
“I don’t know what the investigation will turn up.”
“I always thought we were partners,” he said. “When you came back, I thought, This is it. I had my guy, finally.”
“I wish I could be your guy this time, Peter.”
“Ehhh,” he said. “I’ll forgive you, someday.”
“I wasn’t apologizing.”
* * *
“It’s a perfectly constructed narrative,” she said. Emily laughed. “You could teach it in an MFA workshop. Rising action as ever-larger groups of guests arrive. Finally the house is filled—”
“With hippos.”
“It seems to be a large house.”
“I assumed so. Ow FUCK that’s hot.” They were sitting in a park near Emily’s apartment in Brooklyn, across Smith Street from the hole-in-the-wall bar from which they had procured a bag full of deep-fried cheese-and-prosciutto balls. They were incredibly delicious, but the insides were still near-nuclear in temperature.
“Not yet, honey, they’re too hot,” she said to Jane, who had run up, eager for a snack. Alan followed, also eager for a snack, and she said, “You and Daddy can share one. He’ll blow on it for you.”
“So the house is full of hippos,” Emily prompted her.
“Right. And then, there’s an incredible climax, right in the very center of the book: ALL THE HIPPOS GO BERSERK!”
“Hippos go baserk!” Jane cried out in delight. She and Alan wandered back toward the swings.
“They’re dancing around, swinging from chandeliers. The works. But then when the party’s over, the hippos begin to depart. First nine, then eight, then seven.”
“Falling action. Aristotelian.”
“Right. And then they’re gone. And the final hippo sits at home alone, missing all forty-four of her friends.”
“Then what happens?”
“That’s it.”
“That’s the end of a children’s book?”
“Yes. One hippo sitting alone at a table.”
“Wow,” Emily said. She sat back and took a meditative bite of a prosciutto ball. “That’s intense.”
“I sincerely love it.”
“What a lesson for children. ‘Your friends will eventually leave you.’”
“Well, Jane doesn’t see it that way, I don’t think. When you read a book over and over and over, it’s less like”—she made a single up-then-down motion with her hand—“and more like”—she made a continuous wave, up and down and up and down and up and down. “It’s like the difference between Beckett and, uh . . .”
“Joyce.”
“Yeah.”
“Hippos come and hippos go.”
“Such is life.”
* * *
What she should have been doing, with Peter out, was consolidating power, managing the narrative of his absence in a way that would make things easier for her when he inevitably came back. Instead, she spent two weeks of vacation time in rehearsal with Emily and all the twenty-year-olds. Emily had lost all objectivity, so she had no idea if she was right, but the show seemed really good. In the old days her friend’s scripts had been full of posturing and long agonizing speeches and obviously autobiographical score-settling, but the scenes between the three women and one man in this loft in Williamsburg were quiet, practical, elusive. The relationships between the four of them were revealed through how they treated one another, the secrets they kept and shared. They were like children in a fort, but with adult desires. In Emily’s favorite scene, one of them brought back a container of Swiffer wet wipes she’d found in an abandoned building, and the four of them spent an intent, nearly silent five minutes cleaning their home, a place they’d only ever seen filthy. All fights were forgotten, all resentments forgiven. The instantly identifiable smell of Swiffer made its way through the loft as they worked.
Then one of them was eaten by an alligator! Emily couldn’t believe it when she read it in the script. But in this weird mix of realism and science fiction and punk rock and fairy tale, with these four young people as Lost Boys, it totally worked. Hoo boy, she’d drunk the Kool-Aid, she guessed.
To the work friends she’d told about this production, it was difficult to explain what a dramaturg actually did. Basically, she was the person who watched, asked weird questions, and made weird suggestions. The Swiffers were her idea. So was the sound of rain, which soundtracked nearly every scene. When everyone was racking their brains trying to figure out how the loft could be breached from the outside by the raiders who attack at the end, it was Emily who said, “It’s like other kids raiding the tree house, right?” Soleil found some panes of safety glass, rigged up an incredible air cannon kind of deal on the outside of the building, and now at a crucial moment a ratty old baseball came crashing through the window to land at the actors’ feet.
During tech week, her mom came out from Wisconsin to stay with Alan and Jane. Each night they all stayed in the loft late, long after the actors were gone, fixing technical problems, working out light cues, tweaking the sound. She loved working with all these women—it was almost all women—and she loved most of all watching Emily put it all together. She couldn’t believe Emily’s patience, her calm, her openness to others. She had always had a sense of a director as the voice of God, like in A Chorus Line, she guessed, but Emily spent most of her time in the loft sitting on the floor, surrounded by the other artists, soaking up their words. She thought of her friend all those years ago, boiling over with countless ideas, alienating countless collaborators. Maybe we’re all frauds at twenty-five. But in our fraudulent selves we see the seeds of the artists we might become, if we can overcome our worst tendencies.
One morning she was woken up by Jane running into her room and climbing up on the bed between her and Alan. “Sorry, sorry,” her mom said from the door. “I was just making her breakfast, and I turned around for a second. She’s a slippery one.”
“It’s okay,” Emily said, and her mom went back to the kitchen. Jane burrowed under the covers, squirmed around. Alan, well experienced by now, turned his body so he was not directly facing Jane, whose little feet were precisely at nut level.
“Don’t you want to snuggle with us?” Emily asked, trying to get Jane to stay still in a hug.
“I want to wiggle!”
“Whoa, careful there,” she said.
“Mommy!” she said, surfacing. “You got no pants on!”
“Silly Mommy!” Alan said. “Where are her pants?” Last night she had gotten home at midnight, crawled into bed wearing only a T-shirt, woken Alan up by rubbing his dick through his boxers, and climbed on top of him. She was currently off the pill on the advice of her psychiatrist and her OB-GYN, so every time they had sex was a little bit of an adventure. Would they manage to get the condom on this time? She was not loving the current shape of her body, but Alan sure seemed to like it. They had turned into horny teenagers, stupid with lust, right down to shushing each other so as not to wake her mother.
The dress rehearsal went great except that none of the lights worked. Emily was surprisingly sanguine about it. “You guys were so good, I barely even noticed,” she said to her actors. To Emily she muttered, “If that happens tomorrow night I will murder every single person here.”
On opening night, she and Alan took the elevator up together with two complete strangers. People she did not know, coming to their play! The doors opened on the loft, dark and quiet. Through the full-wall windows, lightning appeared to flash in the night sky. Alan looked at her in surprise. When they’d entered the building from the sidewalk, it was a quiet autumn dusk. It was all projection work, designed by Soleil and a video artist Emily had met while on an artists’ retreat in Georgia.
