Amateurs (3 page)

After an uncommunicative fortnight of presumed spousal loyalty, he was in the picture again, recklessly liking Karyn's status updates dating back a week. Partly hoping for this very sort of attention, she'd had Maxwell take several photos of her gardening in their backyard, had this morning posted the most flattering one, presenting it as if it were a PSA for growing one's own food and not an exhibit of her fairly well-preserved looks and narcissism. (But surely the person who fears she's succumbing to narcissism isn't a
full-blown case.) It really was a remarkable, if not a wholly realistic, photo: her head tilted in the way of a fixated dog without underlining the association; her chin irrefutably single (not wanting Maxwell to shoot from below, she'd made him stand on a birdseed bucket); her black-fingered gardening gloves elusively sexy. Twenty-four likes, close to double those incited by her recent post about neti pots. There were admiring comments too, which after a mood-lifting while started to embarrass her, started to feel well-meaningly condescending, as if the whole procedure were a collectively presented
FOXY GRANDMA
T-shirt. She wasn't that old, but still.

Though the affair with the consultant was atypical—to deal in numbers, their one afternoon and two nights together represented the lion's share of her nonsolo sexual experience of the past four years—more and more this was how things went during the time between Maxwell's bedtime and her own: the posting and liking and commenting and checking, the distracted revising of her play, the shutting down of her desktop computer, the crawling into bed, the distracted reading of a book, the booting up of her laptop.

Twenty-five likes, the latest from Paul, the systems consultant.

It wasn't, usually, that internet socializing was making her lonelier, but that it was just sustaining enough to discourage socializing off the internet.

A message popped up from Paul: “Hi.” Not, so far, a Cyrano of written seduction. Queasily she responded in kind.

She thought she craved conversation of a literary-intellectual bent, but in those rare cases when she was with someone who wanted to talk about books and ideas, she found that the revelation of shared enthusiasms meant less than it once did, that her discourse wasn't as glimmering as her interior monologues augured, that she was sweating to seem sophisticated for one person and constricting herself to seem down-home for another, that her companion's thoughts on the book were fuzzy compared to those in the more accomplished
reviews, from which Karyn's own fuzzy thoughts derived. Either there wasn't much to say, or much to say but no spark of affinity and thus little drive to say it.

An ellipsis foreshadowed another IM.

She wasn't nostalgic for the immodest social needs and modest standards of her youth, but she missed the easy birth of new friendships, the seemingly wild luck of three simpatico women housed on a single floor of a small dormitory, whereas now, to find two people whose company seemed more attractive than solitude, she thought she might need a bigger city.

A floater crossed one of her eyeballs, a muscle contracted below her right shoulder blade. The message came through: “They're calling me back to mpls for a few days in June. Looking forward to seeing you.” Then, to cover his tracks: “and the rest of the eam.” And an addendum: “Typo, meant team.”

She decided to rebuff him, then decided it would be better to rebuff him in person.

August 2004

The editor at the
Stickler
seemed to think Sara lived somewhat closer to Manhattan than Buffalo and that her name contained an
h,
but Sara said yes without corrections when he asked her to blog non-remuneratively about the protests surrounding the Republican National Convention. She had done one earlier piece for the website, a fitfully comic essay about kickboxing. On her first day in the city, she felt more than briefly jubilant amid a river of marchers, then galvanized by an Iraq War veteran's speech, his camo blending in not only with the imagined desert but also with his blond hair and suntanned face. That evening she joined a looser, smaller march, falling in with an anarchist funeral band playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” She sloped her head skyward, smiled to announce
how serenely she could be alone in a crowd. The man in front of her carried a placard of the famous hooded figure from Abu Ghraib, and when the marcher began to move to the music, the hooded figure bobbed and swayed too, choreographing Sara's shame and weary happiness.

But when she tried to convey that ambivalence in the blog tent, working next to a relentlessly macking Vanderbilt senior with an unfortunate Tintinish haircut, the results seemed forced and unctuous. Her style, too, was wrong, not exactly mandarin but too stiff, her sops to the accidental prose often found on blogs coming off like the outfits John Kerry wore for farm visits: the rolled-up oxford, the work boots diligently scuffed by a campaign aid. As easy jobs went, it was hard. Some of her preferences and aversions militated against reportorial excellence, such as her preference for “soaking things in” rather than taking notes, and her aversion to asking questions of strangers. Normally this was a mild aversion with mild consequences—spending many minutes in the ticket-holder's line before moving quietly to the one for buyers, say—and it only affected her in certain moods. She was fine with people who had an occupational obligation to answer questions, salespeople, for example, except those in stores where she felt outclassed or otherwise prominent, stores where sizes above six were purportedly kept in back. She could remember lots of times when she had confidently asked a stranger a question (“Does this go downtown?” “Is this seat taken?” “Quelle heure est-il?”). She wasn't continuously shy. In fact, her occasional extroversion sometimes retrospectively embarrassed her. The RNC assignment, though, aggravated her reluctance to approach strangers toward agoraphobia, and she spent much of the week in a state of stomach-knotted dread of having to attempt the next interview, mingled with self-reproach for having not seized the previous moment's countless opportunities. She hated to impose on people, and her inexperience and slender credentials made her feel like both an imposer and an imposter.

Knowing she could brave few interviews each day, often fewer than two, she tried to home in on faces combining intelligence and receptivity, qualities that shouldn't be in opposition but started to act that way. Probably when we see what a Victorian novelist might call “an intelligent visage,” we're really seeing skepticism, severity, sadness, or the sort of intense tic that mesmerizes Slavoj Žižek fans. Her own face, she feared, was a dumb one; her allergies to dust mites and other microstuff promoted oral respiration. In any case, the homing-in strategy failed. By the second day she had switched to prospecting negatively, eliminating people whose shyness or unfriendliness seemed worth respecting, then those whose opinions, she sensed, would be uselessly naïve, lunatic, banal, incoherent, doctrinaire, or stupid. Through these means she was able to rule out roughly everyone, a winnowing that betrayed reticence more than misanthropy. (Although once, when asked in a job interview if she was a people person, she had detrimentally hesitated.)

During what turned into a lonely, disheartening week outside the RNC, a week in which she ate almost nothing but laxative slices of floppy pizza at odd times of day, she frequently visited the action at Union Square, the site on one afternoon of a long battle between police and protesters for control of a fenced walkway through the park. The cops eventually moved in with riot helmets and shields to keep protesters from partially obstructing the walkway, a show of strength that fully obstructed the walkway. Sara did her best to stay in the thick of things. There were spasmodic waves of moshy movement and at least one instance, she thought, of frottage.

It was in trying to follow a cop's command to get out of the way that she backed into the soft body of Lucas Pope, a fellow fiction writer from the second-tier MFA program Sara had attended from 2001 to 2003. During his MFA candidacy, Lucas had mainly distinguished himself though the prolixity and unrelieved irrelevance of his in-class comments and marginal notes. The closest he came
to competence as a writer—a nine-page story about a substance-abusing prison guard, transparently written under the spell of Denis Johnson—might have amounted to something, had he seen fit to make even a quarter of the workshop's more sensibly proposed revisions. His early departure from the program was met with no professorial resistance. After some exclamations, he noticed Sara's blank steno pad. “You're a reporter?”

“In the sense that someone videotaping little Zach's first toddle round the coffee table is a filmmaker,” she said. Lucas didn't quite catch her analogy and was candidly disappointed when she repeated it at his request. “But yeah, I could probably be called a reporter,” she said, “an exploited one. I was hoping to get a laminated press pass, at the very least a card to slip in the band of my fedora. But I didn't, mostly because I have access to nothing. Well,” she added, raising a fist, “nothing but the streets!”

“Except the streets the cops have cordoned off,” Lucas said. He nodded at an agitprop thespian sweatily dressed as the Monopoly mascot. For his part, Lucas was wearing Harry Caray glasses, an underproportioned cycling cap, baggy shorts, a
LICK BUSH
button, and a plaid shirt, short-sleeved and untucked. He looked like a semifamous cartoonist, or like someone who would recognize a semifamous cartoonist. They moved away from the dying conflict.

“That was weird,” Sara said. “I've rarely experienced such a convergence of tension and pointlessness, stimulation and boredom.”

“You haven't played enough chess or watched enough porn,” Lucas said.

“Ha, that might be true. What did Flaubert say about chess? ‘Too serious as a game, too pointless as a science'? I think that was it, though now I'm thinking it wasn't something Flaubert said but something he said
other people
said. Stupid people.”

“It does sound like something stupid people would say.”

She ignored the implications of that.

“Wow, Sara Crennel. Crazy running into you.”

“Yeah.”

“Serendipity,” he said, punning. He seemed to be done with the protest. “It's cool that you're still writing.”

“Yeah, sorta. It probably hasn't been long enough to applaud me for persistence.” An older woman carrying a Cheney effigy offered a knowing smile reminiscent, a moment's concentration determined, of Sara's late aunt Marion. Still, Sara couldn't bring herself to approach her. She turned back to Lucas. “And you?”

“Still writing? Neh, not really. I have an idea for a screenplay, but . . . no. I'm at Citibank.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, in marketing, mostly implementing marketing collateral.”

“If I ask what that is, will you keep it short?”

“Signs and brochures, stuff you see in the bank, some white papers. There's a poster of a couple yuppies kind of flirtily painting a room that I was pretty instrumental in.”

“Is that the one where they're painting each other's faces, like there's paint on her nose?”

“On her nose? No.”

“Maybe I—”

“You're thinking of cake frosting.”

“Yeah, I was probably—”

“It'd be kind of wack to purposely brush oil paint on someone's face,” he said.

“Yes, okay, I understand,” she said. “They'd probably be using latex, but whatever.”

After a beat he said, “I'm amped that you were so surprised when I said I work at Citibank.” She hadn't been that surprised. “Sometimes I tell people what I do and they don't react much, and I think, Do I
seem
like I work at Citibank?”

“No, you don't seem that way.”

“Though they might think I have one of the cooler bank jobs. Security or something.”

She saw him checking out a woman in tacky hip-huggers. In school his stories were provocatively libidinous and syntactically carefree.

“Also I have this venture in the works with reusable bags,” he said. “Brand Nubagian.”

“Brand Nubagian?”

“I don't have all the cheddar together yet, but I've been sensing it forthcoming, feeling things in the works. I know that sounds kind of Joan Quigley, but check it: Two weeks ago I'm flying home for the weekend, right? Settling into my seat, testing the tray-table, adjusting the belt, all that, when this lady asks if I'd switch seats with her. I'm sitting next to her best friend from summer camp or some shit. She's in first class, so I say sure.”

“You wouldn't have switched if she'd been in coach?”

“Well, yeah, I would have. So I get promoted to first, and it turns out the guy next to me, 3A,
makes bags
.”

“He sews them?”

“No, his company”—Lucas pulled out a business card from his Velcro-clasp wallet and handed it to her—“is this huge B2B bag-manufacturing operation.”