Amateurs (2 page)

Part One

Prenuptial

May 2011

The invitation to Archer's July wedding was beautiful, expensive, and somehow French, its palette of blue and white more reminiscent of Yves Klein than of Tiffany. Karyn at first took the envelope's calligraphy as a sign of fussy ostentation (on the part of the client, that is, not the calligrapher, who's obliged to at least be fussy), but as its imperfections revealed themselves, to the point where you might not even call it calligraphy, her thoughts grew more generous, turned to a leather-topped desk in a sunlit room; an amateur forming a monumental capital in some state of doubleness: intoxicated serenity, maybe, or patient excitement. She handed the envelope to her son. “Look at this writing,” she said.

He was eleven and uninterested. “Is it a computer?”

“No, that's just it: it's good but kind of sloppy.” She took back the envelope. “I think it's the bride.” The sylvan folk music drifting in from the kitchen caught her attention for a few seconds. She was on the verge of what felt at once like the purest of tears and like the class of tears prodded by life-insurance commercials. She compared the address on the envelope with the plainer five-word note on the invitation and didn't say anything for a while. Their meals were often marked by expanses of silence, rarely antagonistic but sometimes sullen, a mood encouraged by the small, woody dining room and its one murky window. The table was the color of rotten apples and half-covered with newspapers, cards for a Tolkienesque fantasy game, and a week of mail, under which there may have been hardened rice. It was one of Karyn's breakfast-as-dinner nights, not unanimously popular. While preparing the food she had taken perverse pleasure in anticipating Maxwell's opposition; she wanted him to suffer, a little, for his choosiness. She loved him fervently but sometimes found herself rooting against him, hoping his occasional pride or sloth would be answered with a chastening defeat. A stern
C plus, say, though his cosseting hippie school didn't give grades. It was hard to square her hopes for his uncurbed success with her lifelong affinity for underdogs.

She watched him conduct a scrambled-egg diaspora on and around his plate. “I can't explain the science of it,” she said, “but eggs cool, like, super fast.” The construction was meant as a concession to kidspeak, a move at odds with her priggish shunning of baby talk during Maxwell's early years (“Please talk to him in a normal voice, Mom,” she would say, a directive that was both resented and ignored). Maxwell pretended to have trouble getting the egg on his fork. “You won't want to eat them cold,” she said.

“I don't want to eat them hot.”

They laughed.

“I think we should go to this wedding,” she said.

Archer was one of Karyn's distant Winnipeg-bred relatives and, absent strong competition, the most glamorous of the scattered Bondarenkos. Having seen a drawing of him in the
New Yorker,
she had a rough sense of what he looked like as an adult (prematurely bald?), but when she pictured him it was as a five-year-old boy, auburn-haired and polo-shirted, crying after a s'more accident, his mother slapping at mosquitoes while rushing to rectify things, marshmallow splotches turning from white to brown to black on a log. Karyn hadn't seen Archer in the flesh since that family reunion in 1982. In his autobiographical novel and assorted other writings she sustained a tepid interest of long standing.

To any other cousin she would have sent polite regrets and bath towels, but this was different. To begin with, there was the allure of wealth; though she had been to at least one wedding of people who were rich by all standards except those of the Western rich, she had never been to a wedding of people who were rich by any standard. And she was on the wide edge of going to Winnipeg anyway. She and Maxwell had been slated to go there the previous summer, but
late that July he had decided to play in a youth football league, whose demanding schedule scotched their vacation plans. Perhaps it's too much to say they had plans, since Karyn hadn't booked a hotel, or submitted a PTO request, or even plugged in
MINNEAPOLIS TO WINNIPEG
on a driving-distance website. She had, at least, rented the Guy Maddin movie
My Winnipeg,
which she admired through some irritation and didn't finish.

Although she liked expatriate novels and could speak Spanish and German, especially if you wanted to speak about hungry cats in big rooms, tourism most appealed to her when the destination was no farther than twelve hours by car, urban, and seldom subjected to discernible incursions of tourists. She and Maxwell had been to Des Moines, Kansas City, Green Bay—all for no special reason and with no itinerary. Winnipeg seemed a logical tick on her indifferent bucket list, the next stop for someone whose faith in her innate eccentricity survived overflowing evidence that her behavior, opinions, and tastes were in truth only slightly out of step with her demographic peers. Here again was a case in point: she considered it whimsical and unexpected to spend one's vacation in Winnipeg, yet half the people she mentioned the idea to had been there themselves, and all but one (“fucking snoozefest”) spoke of it warmly. People were going to Winnipeg all the time! One of her colleagues, it turned out, made regular trips to the city with his boyfriend and could name its best galleries, restaurants, and bookstores. Karyn had been happy to hear these names and recommendations, equally happy to forget them as soon as they were spoken. A month later, sitting in her saggy lawn chair while one of the more martial football coaches led an exercise called “butt kickers,” she considered, not for the first time, that a benefit of passivity is that there's nothing to undo, not even names to forget or scraps of paper to throw away.

“An old friend of mine makes Winnipeg out to be a bohemian Shangri-la,” she told Maxwell nearly a year later.

“What's a Shangri-la?”

“An earthly paradise from a book I haven't read.” She didn't much miss her marriage, but she missed having someone around to challenge her half-truths. The “old friend,” for instance, was more accurately one of her ex-husband's acquaintances, a hairy-eared flâneur who in the nineties supposedly made a scraggy living recruiting new members into the Columbia Record Club, and who once raved about Winnipeg for several minutes outside a Kinko's. She remembered staring at his ears. It wasn't just that they were hairy, but that he confronted the problem with an electric razor, so that his ears sprouted little flattops. “He also said that Winnipeg is the Chicago of Canada.”

“I've never been to the Chicago of America,” Maxwell said.

“So.”

“So to me the Chicago of Canada is like . . . nothing.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“But you have been to the Chicago of America,” she said, “though I guess it was before you had a full concept of selfhood.” Had she and Jason, the ex-husband, known definitively that Maxwell would forget the trip, they might have spent more time looking at art, less time watching fish. She asked Maxwell a few questions about school but learned nothing specific. If she could afford to, she would quit her job and spend the summer with him, though he was getting too old to want that. She often preemptively mourned the passing of his childhood phases: the last time she would understand his math homework without a refresher on operations, the last standing hug in which his head nestled perfectly under her chin, the last time she could climb into bed with him after he was asleep without feeling slightly creepy. She stood up. “I should do some work.”

“Oh, okay.” He had green eyes, a haircut like a yak's.

She made a subtle show of hesitating. “Do you wanna watch a movie or something? A short one.”

After the long action movie and Maxwell's shower, she did her back exercises, took over the bathroom, and swallowed the contents of her pill organizer's Thursday compartment. Instead of hanging up the wet towel Maxwell had left on the floor, she carried it to his bed, laid it on his pillow, and called him back upstairs to bed. She used her fuzzy-socked big toe to turn on her PC tower, its monitor surrounded by tackboards populated with obsolete notes and allegedly inspirational photos. One of the three small bedrooms on the underlit second story of her old house (1911, she'd say confidently when asked, but really she'd forgotten) was a guest room and office that hardly ever lodged guests or facilitated what would normally be recognized as work. It was thinly furnished. Its status as a guest room could be contested on the grounds that it didn't have a proper bed, though an innocently bloodstained futon kept the closet door from closing flushly. Only part of the room's faded balloon-motif wallpaper had been scraped off before a rented steamer was returned at dusk some long-past Sunday; at a later point she and Jason wordlessly concluded that the half-finished job fostered a ruined charm.

As the computer soughed to its vintage speed, she breathed deeply, trying to suck in the calm, flinty mind-set she was after—whenever she wasn't after irruptions of disheveled emotion. She opened the document (“Untitled Play”) and scrolled to a stubbornly problematic scene. It had started out as play of a different type. After Jason moved out, she would come to this room late at night to improvise faintly satirical a cappella songs—the most inspired was “Kissing Bug”—and during these retreats she began to imagine herself as a witchy pre-Raphaelite hippie at the romantic center and on the musical periphery of an eccentric Scottish folk group. The group was closely patterned after the Incredible String Band, and at first she didn't bother to change the names of the ISB's joint leaders. She would pretend to play one of her songs for Robin or Mike, usually Robin, and he would demur: the song wasn't ready yet, he would say,
wasn't right for the new album, though probably there would still be room for “Kissing Bug.” He said the name with a smirk. After their argument and his offstage ramble, a precarious reconciliation.

These fantasies seemed to progress without calculation: Robin took on some of Jason's qualities and was renamed—no, he simply
became
—Callum; Karyn recorded several of her improvisations on her phone and transcribed the best parts into a notebook; at a garage sale, she stumbled on a pair of suede lace-up knee boots and a peasant blouse that smelled, she was sure, like her protagonist, now named Anisette. After Karyn had memorized, effortlessly, much of what was clearly a play, she started typing it up.

Now she fine-tuned Act Three's showcase speech, checked her e-mail, and searched out interviews, reviews, and miscellanea pertaining to
Eminent Canadians,
Archer's debut novel from a few years back. In the interviews he was sometimes charming (to write the book, he told two separate interviewers, he'd “taken pains as well as naps”), sometimes goofily pompous (“I want every sentence to stand as impossibly as a tower of blueberries,” he said on the podcast
Dog-Eared,
“and the only means to that end is draconian self-editing”). The reviews were by and large favorable though never ecstatic; a few were cutting (
Bookforum:
“This is one of those novels in which characters are said to ‘walk right off the page.' From there, apparently, they amble onto the set of a bad sitcom”). The blurbs, oddly, could also be called mixed. One nasty endorsement praised “a young writer who's just loaded with talent,” inviting in-the-know readers to put ellipsis points or a full stop after “loaded.” Karyn teleported the book into her e-reader, retweeted a girlfriend's so-so aperçu, and got up to thumb Maxwell's toothbrush for moisture. She could tell from his sighs and rustles that he'd been lying awake for the past hour. “Did you brush your teeth?” she called out. From bed he answered that he thought so. “It would be a very recent memory,” she said.

Back in the office or guest room, she used customer-rewards points to book a hotel room in Winnipeg, judged the word
relished
at the start of the Isle of Wight scene to be too breathless, and checked the Facebook wall of a systems consultant who'd spent part of the previous month introducing Karyn's department to the new HRIS. He was home now in Lake Forest, Illinois, where he remained, among other faults, libertarian and married. She resisted looking carefully at his photos but gathered from abashed glimpses that his wife was plain.
Bear'st thou her face in mind? is't long or round?
(She'd played Cleopatra in college.) Karyn was surprised by the wife's plainness, since the consultant was quite good-looking. When considering men at first hand—when she wasn't, that is, in the semi-ironic locker-pinup sphere of waxed Olympic swimmers or Hemsworth-as-Thor—she was ordinarily turned off by physiques denoting even a measured commitment to weightlifting, but the consultant evoked galleries of classical sculptures rather than gyms of grunting bouncers. (Well, kind of.) She lately thought often of how his bicep veins had distended as he hovered over her and held down her wrists, how she'd wanted him to stay like that for longer than would have been comfortable, and at the same time how badly she'd wanted to touch his chest, dotted with cherry angiomas. His orgasmic grunt was short, friendly, and workmanlike, as if he were lifting one end of a couch. Later and without encouragement he rehearsed the case for a flat tax.