Amateurs (5 page)

Gemma, at least, rarely stayed overnight or even visited her former apartment, but she was there now with the others in Lucas's bedroom, its futon couched to reference a living room, two vinyl-and-chrome chairs imported from the kitchen, shoeboxes stacked profusely against the walls. (Lucas was a pioneer of sneaker speculation; he'd recently sold a pair of vintage Adidas for more than four hundred dollars.) The plan was to go to an inauthentic Mexican restaurant—secretly Sara's favorite kind, though at this restaurant there'd been an unpleasant episode with a slug—then proceed to a Williamsburg gallery where tinily meticulous dioramas were being displayed next to magnifying glasses. “Will we have to wait in line to use the magnifying glasses?” Sara asked.

“I suppose we don't know what to look forward to in terms of attendance,” Gemma said.

Sara had hoped that she and Gemma would become pals, but despite herself she had stymied more than nurtured the possibility. Really she hadn't made any female friends since moving to New York, though everywhere she turned there was someone whose friendship she might have sought out in high school or at UB. Maybe it was like the summer she worked at Kone King: after a while the ice cream not only stopped being tempting but grew slightly repellent. She missed
Emily, her best friend from Buffalo, though the distance between them had grown more than locational. Emily married shortly after college and had in recent years swerved deeper and deeper into neo-traditionalism. She now attended church services of some kind in a former Office Max, spent many after-work hours on avowedly punk-rock needlepoint.

Mostly to Gemma, Sara said, “Because stuff like that makes me feel bullied. And then when I get my chance to use the magnifying glass, I'll have to look with philistine brevity or else irritate the people behind me.”

“I doubt they'll be put out,” John said. His voice was unusually deep, a true bass that would have been frightening had it been more energetic. Hearing him in a group setting could call to mind recordings by the Oak Ridge Boys.

A comfortable silence. There was something sedative about John; he was dull, one could argue, but more than that he was calming. He was one of those impressionist posters sometimes tacked to ceilings above surgical tables. Sara didn't feel completely calm around him—especially now that she was poised to abandon him—but she felt calmer around him than she did around most people. He was an equanimous, accepting man: accepting of people, accepting of failure. He was twenty-eight but had the drawly air of a graying widower soliloquizing while rearranging the toolshed after church. “I reckon that'll do for now,” she could imagine him saying as he clapped dust off his hands. His settled tone was deceptive, though, or at least premature. He had once told Sara that in the end he would become a programmer, accountant, or analyst, and she guessed he was capable of all those things, but the prediction reminded her of boys slinking away from playground fistfights (“I'd clobber you if I wanted to!”). In a real fistfight he would probably have an edge; he was a Viking mesomorph who moved with an upright fearlessness in contrast to his general diffidence. In addition to building bike
frames, he worked part-time at a men's clothing store on the Upper East Side, and as a result he was often flagrantly overdressed, this time in his three-piece suit of brown, chalk-stripe flannel. The suit had recently earned him a full-body shot in Bill Cunningham's On the Street.

Gemma, refusing to pursue the argument about the magnifying glasses, turned to John. “Is your friend as a rule a punctual man?”

“He can run late,” John said. He had pulled out a mandolin from his weekend bag and was arpeggiating what he believed to be a G-major chord.

“People from hot climates have a reputation for tardiness,” Sara said, “but do people from cold climates have a reputation for punctuality?” John opened his mouth to respond, but she went on: “I suppose that's obvious. I suppose people from temperate and cold countries that aren't part of the former Soviet Union set the criteria by which those from hot climates are condemned.”

“Archer's from Canada,” John explained.

“I believe that's racist,” Gemma said.

“Being Canadian?” Sara said with what she hoped was a subtly parodic British lilt.

“No, the correlation between southerly climates and laziness.”

“I didn't say laziness, I said tardiness.”

“It is racist,” Lucas said.

“Or xenophobic,” Gemma said.

“Depends on how you feel about time,” John said. If she stayed with him, empty remarks like that would become a source of wincing regret.

“That's so,” Gemma said charitably. Her top had an enterprising V-neckline and silver rivets on its sleeves. England was Europe's most buxom nation, according to a book Sara had skimmed in a London bookshop on her one overseas trip. The book was by an unfunny French humorist who preferred small breasts.

“Germans have a reputation for being on time,” John said, not seeing that the conversation needed to change course. He put down the mandolin and looked at Sara: “Does it get very cold there?” And yet she liked the admiring, unmasculine way he sought and advertised her knowledge, which didn't significantly extend to German temperatures.

“Cold but not Canada cold,” she said.

“I've been thinking—”

“In the mountains, maybe.”

“I've been thinking about what you said about lugged frames,” Lucas said to John. “Maybe for my next bike I'd be more interested in that than the, er . . .”

“Fillet brazed? You'd definitely open up some sweet design options, but you'd want . . .”

Sara stopped paying close attention. She courted a look of sororal boredom from Gemma but got nothing. Stylish, milky-skinned, dimpled, Gemma was attractive—probably not in danger of being accosted by reputable modeling scouts, but attractive, notably more so than Lucas. It made Sara wonder if Lucas was more attractive than he looked, like that quip about Wagner's music (“better than it sounds”). A sexual virtuoso, he could be, if such people existed outside books and songs by men who, as her aunt Marion once put it, thought women were violins. And yet: since there were obvious differences in sexual ability, generosity, invention, and knowledge, it was reasonable to think virtuosi existed and were distributed across the sexes, though not so far among Sara's seven or eight partners, ten or eleven if one didn't require penetration, a less heteronormative but perhaps unduly inflationary standard. Maybe there was something about her that failed to recognize or inspire virtuosity. Or failed to desire it; in songs and books, sexual virtuosity usually had to do with superendurance, which sounded painful. John wasn't the worst, but, in life as in bed (and it was really just a mattress), he was
too tentative, too puppyish, too much the follower. She wasn't into heartbreakers, but she was on the lookout for traits more exciting than loyalty.

“. . . still fairly green when it comes to making custom lugs,” John was saying, “but I'm working on some now—for none other than Archer, matter o' fact.” This last phrase was delivered with a suspicion of affectionate irony; it seemed that John was trying to assert a native right to elide the
f
in
of,
but simultaneously conceding that the right had been surrendered or was controversial to begin with. He was proud o' his rustic roots, talked more about the relatives he had in and around Zellwood, Florida, than those he had in suburban Denver. His Floridian grandmother, he said, used phrases like “belly girt” and once warned him not to get above his raisin'. “I'll send you some photos when the bike's done,” he told Lucas.

“Yeah, I'd love to peep it.”

Gemma sighed in a sort of iamb.

“What's he do for work, then, your friend?” Lucas asked John.

“Archer?” It was clear that John didn't care for this line of inquiry. “I don't think he's working a steady job at the moment.”

“According to John,” Sara said, “he's a man of means.”

John gave her a peeved look to suggest she'd disclosed a guarded secret, though one of the first things he'd told her about Archer was that he had a lot of money. The word he used was “shitload.” Once, as part of an ambitious bike trip, John had visited the house where Archer spent most of his childhood. Archer's parents, he said, owned matching Range Rovers, paintings by Gerhard Richter, a vacation home in Dominica, and a professional hockey team.

“A man of means,” Lucas echoed.

Gemma turned to Lucas. “You should suss out his interest in rare and vintage trainers.”

“So where's all the cheddar from?”

“Oh, I don't rightly know,” John said. “His parents are in business.”

“Dr. Knox,” Sara said.

Lucas squinted, looked up: “Dr. Knox . . .”

“Rhymes with
cocks
,” she said. “They make dildos.” In a comic whisper she added, “Archer's family makes dildos.”

John said, “Not just dildos,” while Gemma said, “Of course, Dr. Knox! When the doctor knocks, open up.”

“Fuck outta here,” Lucas said. “That can't be their slogan.”

“I just dreamed it up,” Gemma said. “I told you I should be in advertising.”

“You
are
in advertising,” Sara said.

“Yes, but I don't write the adverts.”

“Anyway,” John said. “Archer's not uptight about it or anything, but don't bring it up when he's here.”

“Okay, okay.”

“We'll just hint at it incessantly,” Gemma said.

“I'm sure he's heard it all,” John said. “In school they called him—not to his face, but—what's the word that means, like,
heir,
but it's not
heir.
”

“Heiress,” Lucas said. “It's like a girl heir.”

“Scion?” Sara said.

“Scion,” John said. “They called him the Dildo Scion.”

The buzzer buzzed.

June 2011

“Hi, Karyn, this is Gemma Pitchford, Archer's fiancée.”

“Oh, hi, yeah, it's—I believe you called a few days ago.”

“Yes, and didn't leave a message. I hope in time you'll be able to forgive me.”

For a moment Karyn suspected a prank call from a friend, but her friends, Facebook aside, were scarce, no longer given to prankishness, and unfamiliar with Gemma Pitchford. Also the accent
seemed genuinely English, not that Karyn had a refined ear for such things. “Well, congratulations on your engagement.”

“Thank you. Rather out of the blue of me to call, I realize, or it would have been had you picked up the first time, but I have an odd little proposal to run by you. You see I'm quite sure you and your son—who sounded charming on the phone, by the way—”

(“Hullo,” he'd said flatly, and “I'll get her.”)

“—quite sure the pair of you make up two-thirds of the wedding's Minnesota contingent.”

“Oh.”

“I don't excel at maths, but these calculations I'm certain are correct.” After a flitting pause, Gemma provided the questionably called-for laugh herself. “I have a friend, you see, Lucas Pope, who also lives in Minneapolis. I mentioned your name to him, but it seems you two are unacquainted.”

“It's a reasonably good-sized metro area.”

“He's having nasty car trouble. And ongoing financial trouble. Constant calls from creditors; now even his mother is dunning him. Really he's quite clever, but he was made redundant some two years ago and has been unable to find suitable employment since. You're familiar with the discouraged?”

“I don't keep up on music.”

“No, no, it's the people excluded from unemployment figures because they've stopped looking.”

“Oh, right, yes,” Karyn said.

“Lucas has joined their ranks.” A moment of mute sympathy. “There was an ill-starred entrepreneurial endeavor as well. The greater exigency from my vantage is that he says his car trouble will keep him away from our wedding. He can't afford to hire a car and obviously can't afford to fly. So,” she sighed, “I'm wondering if you might consider car sharing with him to Winnipeg.”

“Give him a ride, you mean?”

“He was trying to convince me to bring him in as the DJ, but I fear that's not quite the fix. It's how we met, actually: he the wedding DJ, I the too, too intoxicated dancer. Brilliant music, but there was something wrong, a balky needle or something with the calibration of the tonearms—I can't claim a consummate understanding of the technicalities, but the records kept skipping.” She imitated the sound. “I suppose I could pay his way, but I've already established a dangerous precedent of charity.”

“Yeah, I—”

“It's vital to me that Lucas attend the wedding. Naturally at this stage I'm inclined to believe this will be my
only
wedding, and just as naturally I want to be amidst the people I care most about—as well as interesting new people such as yourself! I'll confess to you now that there was a time I fancied Lucas almost intensely”—Karyn weighed how and whether one should modify
intensely
—“and saw myself walking the aisle towards
him,
though in the end we couldn't make a go of it.”