Amateurs (15 page)
Authors: Dylan Hicks
“But what is truth?”
“Though some of the made-up stuff is remarkably close.”
She pushed her hair back. “Goethe said something about
Elective Affinities,
that it didn't contain a line that hadn't been experienced, but no line the
way
it had been experienced.”
“That's cool. The key, I think, will be nailing down which of the false claims are, like, artistically indispensable, then which of those could be disproven. A few tweaks here and there and I'd say we're golden, but we'll want to be careful. Oh, I should have you sign a nondisclosure.” As it turned out, he already had one prepared. “And if the essay does get accepted, I'd want you to respond to all editorially directed changes. Posing as me.”
“I'll try to write in a deeper voice.”
He ignored her admittedly lame joke. “I opened a new e-mail account for writing stuff,” he said, writing down the address. “The password is
sarcher.
”
“That's a terrible password.”
“It combines our names.”
“I see what it's doing, but it's totally insecure.”
“Sara, we're all inse-curr.” He said this like Kanye West. “On that subject, uh, this part you have about me beingâwhere is it?ââespecially stung by and defensive regarding the criticisms of women'?”
“Yeah.”
“I really don't think that's me at all.”
“It could be argued that your objection proves the point.”
“Maybe, butâ”
“We're trying to create an essayistic persona, right? Maybe you're not like that in real life, but you are for the purposes of this essay. I think your essayistic personaâ”
“Are you gonna say âessayistic persona' a lot?”
“Are you gonna contractually prohibit me from doing so?”
“Probably not.”
“I think your essayistic persona should be nakedly forthright, uncompromising, unconcerned with what other people might think.”
“Wow, wouldn't that be cool, huh?”
She couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic.
“Also”âhe flipped to page fourâ“I think male masturbation
is
more maligned today than female masturbation, you know, the male masturbator seen as abject, comic, lonely; the female, healthy, liberated, self-sufficient.”
“Frustrated that she can't get off with her boyfriend,” Sara said. “Anyway, male masturbation per se isn't ridiculed and maligned so much as its trappings: the porn and the blowup dolls and the crusty tube socks or whatever. And maybe female masturbation is portrayed differently
by men
because it arouses them. They can't imagine that girls and women attach far more remnant shame to it than boys and men do. You see that cluelessness in, say, the pie bit versus the flute bit in
American Pie.
”
He nodded. “Let's get that in the essay, the
American Pie
thing.”
“It's not really a thing,” she said. “More like provisional blah-blah-blah, to be honest.”
“You shouldn't.”
“Shouldn't what?”
“Be honest. Maybe watch the movie again and cook something up.”
She wrote a note to herself.
“I remember reading in
Playboy
that men rape themselves when masturbating,” he said, “when they should be making love to themselves. I tried switching to my left hand, but . . .”
She let him soak for a moment in quiet.
“But first things first,” he said. He didn't have sleeves to roll upâhe was wearing khakis with frayed hems and a Che-like T-shirt featuring a drawing of the Métis leader Louis Rielâbut he transitioned into more systematic work by moving closer to Sara and fluttering his pen over the essay's opening sentence.
It was thrilling to look so closely with another person at something she'd written, away from the shibboleths and nitwit observations
she'd endured in writing workshops, and as they moved through the pages she got happier and calmer. He knew how to reject an idea, not too bluntly but without lots of time-wasting gingerliness, and he endorsed his favorite revisions with theatrical flair, in one instance shouting his approval and rubbing his hands together like a melodrama's villainous landlord. She typed up some of the notes on her laptop while he made a competent Thai curry. He asked about her writing while they ate, seemed really to be listening (though he didn't ask to read any of her stuff). As they were clearing the dishes, he asked if she would “care to take a postprandial constitutional.” She got over her annoyance at the phrasing and enjoyed the shoulder-brushing walk. They worked late into the evening, late enough for her to consider dozing off on his hard sofa, a consideration that included a mayfly thought of him patting her blanketed arm or performing some other tucking-in procedure. In the end she mustered the strength to leave. Feeling flush, she took a taxi.
She bought a drink, a fifteen-dollar drink, at the hotel lounge. She thought about the wardrobe overhaul her windfall would facilitate, but she knew she would spend the money reasonably (damage deposit, bed, credit-card payment, sofa). She rotated on her barstool to face the crowd, made a show of waiting for someone, checking the time on her phone, scanning the room with an impatient brow. A woman near her kept tugging at the back of her miniskirt while her boyfriend talked loudly to someone else. The lounge was burbling with anodyne dance music, peppered with preciously designed chess sets, filled with people Sara probably wouldn't like, but at least for the moment contempt and superiority had slipped from her thoughts like subscription cards from drugstore
Elle
s. The music continued in the elevator up to her room, and she swayed her shoulders and smiled at herself in the reflective gold doors.
In bed she resumed reading a slim European novel that had been both well- and ill-suited for the plane: impressive looking and easy
to slip into her purse, but too slow and challenging for distractive settings. As usualâeven in hotel bedsâshe wrote down unfamiliar words on an index card that doubled as a bookmark. Later she would type the words and their definitions into a document that she called a commonplace book, though it was mainly a word list. She'd been doing this for years and liked seeing the words get more recondite as the document enlarged; many of the recent entries (“siffleur, an animal that makes a whistling noise, or a person who entertains professionally by whistling”) could be used only on rare occasions and at risk to one's popularity. Writing and typing the words and definitions was supposed to aid retention, but that wasn't always true; she often encountered a word that was no clearer to her than it had been before she had typed its definition a year earlier, or vocabulary that made repeated trips to her index cards but always seemed too common for her commonplace book. In those latter cases, before scribbling on the card, she would include a qualifier: “again,” “clarify,” “whet understanding of,” “check etymology,” or some other frequently dishonest indication that she possessed at least a weak grip on the entry and was only seeking a refresher or mastery. As if she needed to persuade readers of her private index cards to judge her linguistic gaps more compassionately. This finical self-absorption, this timorous, circular miniaturism, often seemed emblematic of her shortcomings as a writer, even as a person. The consensus in grad school had been that nothing was at stake in her well-written but amorphous stories of longing, bewilderment, and acedia. Of course, she thought
everything
was at stake in her stories, though she also worried that her everything was nothing, that her passions were misplaced. Given the opportunity, she could talk for hours about when a comma might justifiably be placed between parts of a compound predicateâand when its placement there was purposeless and arrhythmic!âbut she was laryngitically silent, because short of deep conviction, about Israeli settlement of the West Bank.
Tonight, though, her index cards didn't seem pathetic; they revealed one aspect of her character, her pettiness perhaps, but also her devotion, her devotion to somethingâshe couldn't always say whatâmaybe to the English language. And it hadn't been wasted effort! For a long time she had thought that if she could follow her passions, such as they were, do her thing, as Aunt Marion might have put it, someone would take notice, single her out, pluck her from the throng. More recently she had thought that no, she was a fool, it didn't work that way at all. But it did! It really did!
June 2011
“I thought maybe I could swing by with my suitcase,” Lucas said over the phone, “then just bike over on the morning we leave.”
“I'm not following.”
“My friend has a car,” he said, and explained his plan again, how it would save Karyn from having to pick him up, though it seemed obvious to her that his plan would only make things more cumbersome when they were returning exhaustedly home.
“I don't mind picking you up,” she said.
“Yeah, but I'm in the opposite direction.”
“The opposite direction from Winnipeg? I thought you said you lived in Stevens Square.”
“Well, yeah. I wasn't thinking of, like, literal compass points.”
After she got off the phone, she put her dinner plate in the dishwasher, cored an apple, and carried the
New York Review of Books
into the living room. Lucas must have been calling from the road, because a car door slammed in front of her house fewer than ten minutes later. She turned around and kneeled on the sofa, watched through the window as he unstrapped his bike from the rack. A swatch of wokbelly was exposed when he carried the bike to a boulevard ash recently ringed with terminal green paint. He fetched his
suitcaseâsome would have called it a hockey bagâfrom the backseat. For a moment he talked to his friend through the passenger-side window, leaning like a streetwalker, the sun shining in retiring amber through the leaves. It was the sort of light by which people stand in long lines at Dairy Queen.
“Snazzy bike seat,” she said a moment later.
“Yeah, classic,” he said, caressing and slapping the leather seat. It was long-nosed and honey brown. He leaned the bike against a recliner she had inherited and ostracized to the porch with other renegade objects: unread community newspapers, a cracked plastic sled, a tote bag filled with tote bags. “You pay a weight price with this model,” Lucas said about the seat, “but there's a payoff in beauty and comfort.”
“In comfort?” she said, bending down a few inches to touch it. “It seems
un
comfortable, seductive and uncomfortable, like five-inch stilettos. Not that I have experience with heels that high.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, âno'?”
“Just that they come with . . . podiatric perils.” He seemed pleased with the alliteration.
She returned his smile. “I was at this posh hotel in LA where the women were wearing heels for everything,” she said. “At the pool they were wearing heels.”
“Oh God, I love that.”
“Mm-hm. One night we went out to see this band my ex-husband used to be in, and we were waiting for our rental car at the hotel's turnaround. Which was cobblestone, so the women could barely walk in their stilettos. They were like sex foalsâsex toddlersâboyfriends and bellhops rushing to their sides. Of course that's part of the appeal, right, that the woman is fettered?”
“Um.”
“But I like wearing heels. Sometimes. It takes me a while to re-acclimate in the spring.”
“These saddles, though, they're actually pretty comfortable,” he said. “Stiff at first, but eventually they conform to the rider's sit bones.” He pointed out the saddle's indentations.
“It's like an intaglio of your . . . sit bones,” she said.
“I left my bag on the sidewalk.”
After he'd stored his things in the coat closet, he stood expectantly by the front door. There were sumo wrestlers printed on his sweat-spotted shirt.
“You want an iced tea or something?” she said.
“Ice tea, wow.” He seemed unreasonably impressed. “Is it in one of those glass pitchers with lemons on it?”
“Uh, no, it's in one of those pastel Rubbermaid pitchers with the white top that either strains or pours freely.” They made their way to the kitchen, his bike shoes clicking the Pergo.
“Maybe just water,” he said.
“My pitcher's not good enough for you?”
“I actually think ice tea's kind of yucky. Where's Maxwell?”
“With his dad.”
They sat on stools on the same side of the kitchen island, not quite facing each other. He pushed up his huge black glasses. She could make out a thumbprint on one of the lenses.
“The truth is,” she said, “I've had some previous run-ins with those bike seats, or saddlesâis that the preferred terminology? I made it seem like it was all new to me, but that's not quite true.”
He tipped his head rightward. “Weird thing to lie about.”