Amateurs (6 page)

Gemma seemed to expect an answer to a question Karyn had lost sight of. “I guess I was looking forward to a road trip with just my son,” Karyn said after a moment. “Sometimes it's hard to get kids to talk, you know, but a lot can come out on a long drive.”

“Vomit, for instance,” Gemma said.

A hesitant laugh from Karyn.

“I only say so because I'm susceptible to carsickness, motion sickness of all stripes, really. I recently became dizzy while riding an extremely aged and sweet-tempered horse.”

“Hmm.”

“On even terrain.”

“That must be frustrating,” Karyn said.

“The horse was called Sleepy.”

“Still, I think it'd be nice for Maxwell and me to be alone.”

“But you practically would be alone.”

“Well, we'd be with your friend.”

“Let me ask you something, Karyn:”—like someone selling a dishwasher, Karyn thought—“When you share a taxi with a friend, do you think, Oh, we had better include the driver in every aspect of our conversation, we certainly wouldn't want him to feel left out, or do you proceed essentially as if you were alone?”

“If anything I'd be
more
likely to chat with the cabby if I had a friend to act as a buffer.”

“Lucas would be mortified if he knew I was asking you this favor. Mortified. He's not a freeloader or an idler at heart.”

“It's not that I have any objection to him,” Karyn said, “except that he's a stranger.”

“Yes, well, perhaps it would be better, then, for the two of you to meet in advance.”

“Wait, is this whole thing—”

Gemma interrupted, “Sorry, one moment.” Now to someone else: “Oh, how thrilling!” To Karyn: “
Publishers Weekly
has given Archer's new book a starred review. What do you think of the title, Karyn,
The Second Stranger
? It's too late for changes, so do say you approve.”

“
The Second Stranger,
” Karyn said thoughtfully. “What was I supposed to say again?”

“That you like it.”

“I like it.”

“It's quite an unusual book, much more so than the first. Archer's been joking that it should be called
The Second, Stranger.
With a comma, you see.”

“Ah.”

“Oh my, listen to this: ‘Not since Norman Rush's
Mating
has a male novelist rendered a female narrator with such authenticity and brio.' The reviewer is doubtless male,” Gemma put in sotto voce. “But it truly is a striking piece of ventriloquism.”

“I can't wait to read it.”

“Can you not wait? Because people said that to Archer about his first book, that they could not wait to read it; but often they would say so when the book had been out for many, many months and they had already—well, just then!—admitted to knowledge of its existence. In a word, they
were
waiting, and proving they could do so quite contentedly.”

“I see your point.”

“I suppose those people are better than the ones who play at having read the book when they so obviously haven't, which is what I tend to do with writers other than Archer—who doesn't care a whit about any of this, I should say. I'm more sensitive about these things than he.”

“Well, I'm eager to read the book,” Karyn said.

Gemma called out again to Archer: “May we send your delightful cousin an ARC?” It wasn't clear if she had waited for an answer when she said, “I'm sending you an advance review copy.”

“Oh, you don't have to—”

“But I'm sorry, I cut you off. You were about to say . . .”

“I'm not sure I remember.”

“In connection with Lucas.”

“Oh, it was—it was just that this call was starting to sound like a matchmaking ploy.”

“Mmm, I can see that, now you mention it,” Gemma said. “But if it were a matchmaking ploy, I suspect I would have downplayed Lucas's expanding indigence and would not now raise the issue of his appalling clothes.”

“Maybe—”

“Or the fact that he spends much of his time at a computer looking at pictures of women dressed like Jessica Rabbit.”

“Maybe you think I'm into mothering sad cases,” Karyn said.

“I don't get that sense at all. On the contrary, frankly.”

They listened to the phone static for a few seconds, then Karyn said, “Do you just mean redheads in sexy dresses, or do you mean women deliberately trying to look like Jessica Rabbit?”

“Oh, very deliberately, Karyn. It's a whole community.”

They laughed.

“Just to be clear,” Karyn said, “I'm kind of seeing someone.” She wasn't
seeing
Paul the consultant, of course. He was now plotting a dirty weekend in Wisconsin, but Karyn wasn't egging him on.

“You misunderstand me,” Gemma said. “I have no ideas in that direction. I only suggested you two meet in advance because I see that you're right, it would be uncomfortable to make the trip as strangers.”

“Yeah, I'm not sure.”

“But you'll think about it?”

“I can't imagine my thoughts will change.”

“I'll call you back,” Gemma said, and hung up without saying goodbye.

December 2004

“Laqueur's central point is that what he calls ‘modern masturbation,' in other words, masturbation as a medical and social crisis, arose synchronously with the Enlightenment—”

Sara missed a few of Archer's words while sliding a knife under a dab of misplaced guacamole. Lucas, who “hadn't eaten all day” (she'd seen him eat breakfast), was hogging the thick, limey chips, Archer the conversation. Sara, too, had come to like the sound of her own voice—droll, she hoped, and in a cultured midrange (squeaky at matriculation, she had worked to drop her pitch by a quarter octave over her freshman year), but she didn't need to hear it all the time. Archer's was a tall, stocky voice, though he was of average height and slightly built. For the past hour or so Sara had been trying to figure out
if he was an asshole. He didn't seem aloof, exactly, but he could be disdainful, which to her was worse. When she mentioned how much she had enjoyed
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
he flicked his wrist as if executing a Ping-Pong winner—“overrated”—and added that one of the supporting actors was “an absolute fucking tool,” insinuating that the appraisal was derived from real-world experience. When Sara asked for elaboration, he scrupled as if he'd been transported by palanquin to the high road. It was a new variety of name-dropping for Sara (or a new variety of name-withholding), different from the sort practiced by John, who constantly, artlessly, and with genuine enthusiasm brought up his two semifamous college friends, the minor tech entrepreneur and the one in the floundering sitcom.

“. . . perversion of Enlightenment ideals,” Archer was saying. “Instead of aggregate self-interest serving the greater good, self-pleasure serving only itself; instead of quiet reflection, solipsism; instead of . . .”

A long pause. Sara, Lucas, and Gemma looked at Archer. John picked napkin lint off his suit.

“It was about imagination. Sorry. I was quoting from my essay and drew a blank.” His first show of humility.

“I thought you were quoting this Laqueur,” Sara said.

“Well, yeah, quoting my paraphrase of Laqueur.” He then spoke at half speed, as if the sentence were returning to him word by word on a baggage carousel. “It went like, ‘Not imagination applied to great social and artistic puzzles, but . . .'”

“Fantasy run amok in an intemperance of secret violations,” Sara said, feeling a frisson when Archer responded with a stream of decaying
yeahs
like the dying of a lawn mower engine.

“I told you she was crazy smart,” John said.

“Really, it's off,” she said, not wanting John's embarrassing use of the third person to go unchecked. “
Amok
is too recent a loan word to apply to a discussion of the Enlightenment.”

“We have to use period language when speaking of the past?” Archer said.

“One would need to be quite polyglot,” Gemma said.

“Yes, all right, point taken,” Sara said. She hadn't been challenged like this in a while. “But I'd rather summarize an old idea in language neither blithely anachronistic nor strainingly antique.”

Unconvinced silence from Archer and Gemma. “What Laqueur shows,” Archer resumed, “is that the ‘problem' of masturbation developed with the Enlightenment, as I was saying, because it was a perversion of Enlightenment ideals. Before that it was sometimes ridiculed as the domain of losers and satyrs or whatever, and some Protestants thought of it as a monastic vice, and here and there it was, you know, censored.” Did he mean
censured
? She might have misheard him. “But generally people didn't think of it as such a big deal.”

“What about Onan?” Sara said as the food arrived.

“But if you actually read the story, Onan wasn't even beating off.”

There was no grosser term.

Archer went on, “Onan's older brother did something to displease the Lord and was killed, right?”

“I don't really know the Bible,” Sara said. It was one of the few major books she didn't mind confessing ignorance of.

“Well, that's what happened. So it was Onan's duty to marry his brother's widow, Tam-something—”

“Tammy?” Lucas said. Earlier, while Archer held court on an invasive fish species that was “plundering” the Caribbean, Lucas had indiscreetly rolled his eyes.

“Tamar, maybe,” Archer said. “So whenever Onan fucks Tamar—or whenever, I should say, Onan
knows
Tamar, his sister-in-law-cum-wife—no pun intended.”

“Nice,” John said. He was ignoring his food, busy again with the napkin lint. Once, when visiting him at work, Sara had been baffled by how long it took him to incorporate a small influx of necktie
inventory into a display organized by color and pattern. The ties bordered a round wooden table, and he would hold them up to the light for what seemed like cryogenic minutes, looking for the perfect progression of shade. His deliberation intimated the craftsmanship associated with watchmaking or cabinetwork; but he was just dawdling.

“It's not what
cum
means, though,” Sara said. Archer had pronounced the word not to rhyme with
womb
or
loom,
but like the vulgar variant of
come.
She was happy to let that part slide; a word's more defensible pronunciation isn't always the right one.

Gemma said, “Isn't it just ‘wi—'”

“It's about duality or simultaneity,” Sara rushed in. “Like if you lived in your car, it'd be your Honda-cum-home. Or if you were a flea living on the skin of a collie, it'd be your Lassie-cum-home.”

Lucas was the joke's lone supporter, laughing dorkily between bites. He was eating as if his burrito had said something unkind about his mother.

“So it's like
slash,
” Archer said.

Sara wasn't proud of her know-all streak, particularly when one of her elucidations or corrections contained its own mistake. (A week after this dinner, for instance, she consulted five dictionaries and found disparities about when
amok
was introduced from Malay into English, apparently by way of Portuguese, while she herself concluded that her argument about anachronism was pretty much groundless.) In the teeth of arrogance, however, pedantry seemed a lesser crime than meekness. “
Slash
usually connotes either-or,” she said.

“You should send Sara your essay,” John said. “She's a professional editor.”

“Proofreader.”

“The piece isn't that far along yet,” Archer said, which may have been true, though he said it as if the weight of his borrowed ideas would overwhelm all errors and infelicities.

“Do you write, then, for a living?” Lucas said.

“No, for now it's more of an avocation than a vocation,” Archer said.

“So what's your vocation?”

Lucas could be such a jerk, but Sara admired him for it. It had so far been an odd, tense meal, and she kept switching sides, just as she had as a kid during sports broadcasts in which neither the Bills nor the Sabres were playing. “You have to pick a team,” her dad would say, and she would answer, “I just want it to be close.”

“I do some consulting,” Archer said vaguely, “some work in the art market. It's a patchwork of self-employment.”

“Hey, I wonder if you know anyone who'd want to invest in this company I'm starting,” Lucas said. “Sturdy vinyl grocery bags.”

“That's the name?” Archer said wearily.

“No, the name's Brand Nubagian.”

“The first name was better,” Archer said.

“They're to come in all sorts of bright colors and designs,” Gemma pitched.

“It's an opportunity,” Lucas said. “The reusable bag thing is moving way beyond self-righteous hippies in bad shoes.”