Amateurs (7 page)

“Soon even the smartly shod will be self-righteous about their tiny sacrifices and adjustments,” Sara said.

“Eminently machine washable,” Lucas said. “In cold.”

“I doubt investors will care what temperature you wash the bags in,” Archer said. He looked back at Sara, changing his expression from bemusement to something hard to interpret. “So Onan always pulls out,” he said, “spills his seed, because he doesn't like the idea of giving it in some magical way to his dead brother.” Sara didn't understand why Archer felt the skeevy need to look at her during this part of his lecture, or why he wouldn't let the subject be changed. People were always misreading the clearly marked maps of conversation. In fairness, she had drawn him out on his essay (of course he would never send it to her). Once prompted, though, he had proceeded as if
he were sitting down for a half-hour interview with Leonard Lopate. “God kills him for failing to honor the rules of levigate marriage,” he said. She silently reiterated the new-to-her word; later that night, she saw that he'd meant
levirate,
with an
r
. “Only way later was Onan's coitus interruptus conflated with masturbation.”

“But don't you think,” John started to say, then faltered. “Don't you think that when he pulls out he jerks it a little to come?”

“Charming,” Gemma said.

“I actually think it's a good point,” Lucas said.

Archer: “Genesis is, um . . .”

“Silent on that particular question?” Sara filled in. John could say the dumbest things, but now she was contemplating the matter, picturing Onan by some dusty pillared house, bearded, she guessed, like John, whose beard bothered her face but felt good on her thighs. It was unusual but possible, she could testify, for a grown man to come without much direct genital stimulation, for instance—

“Yes, completely silent,” Archer said, interrupting Sara's thought and finally moving the discussion in another direction, away from himself but not explicitly toward anyone else. He wasn't a great asker of questions. Sara—big on civility, insecure about her current status—disapproved of this but liked not having to answer the customary questions. As a confident man with a putatively Croesan net worth, he was probably used to being the center of attention, even if he wasn't someone you'd necessarily notice on the subway, or for that matter on an airport shuttle bus with many available seats. His strongest feature, if something below the chin can be called a feature, was his very pronounced Adam's apple, almost ugly, though again, not to such a Tom Pettyish extreme that you'd necessarily notice it. He was jowly and his hairline was receding, but unlike most of his young-and-balding peers, Lucas for one, he wasn't keeping his hair cropped, was in fact showing what she hoped was an inadvertent comb-over. His face, in contrast, was wide and innocent, a Boy
Scout's face; looking at him could yield the sort of chronometric confusion one might get before a neo-Gothic building. Maybe a tendency to arouse such confusion united Archer and John? Archer could have found more interesting companions than John, Sara thought, though maybe Archer didn't want interesting companions; maybe John put him at ease like he nearly did with Sara, or maybe Archer saw John—legitimately working class: his father a pipefitter, his mother a part-time church secretary, his brother reportedly the kind of guy who blows marijuana smoke into the mouths of dogs—as a sartorially assimilationist exotic. The check arrived.

Gemma and Lucas had been getting more tactile over the past hour and decided to return early to the apartment, while Sara, John, and Archer shared a cab to the art gallery. John paid the fare and tipped with what Archer implied was a yokel's munificence. Archer laughed about the tip as they slalomed through the millers and smokers outside the gallery, John accepting the teasing as if it held only affection. Archer's full smile was strange and gummy, like an angry horse, and that ugliness probably made his teasing seem crueler than he meant it to be. “It's no crime to send a taxi driver back to Queens with a few extra dollars,” she said, but by that time the men were filing into the gallery, and either they didn't hear her or chose to ignore her.

Inside, everything was crowded and cute, like the squeezed rightward letters on a grade-schooler's title page. She watched Archer and the others drift away from her, or maybe she drifted away from them. She had expected Archer to be handsomer, having envisioned the playboy aristocrat of half-remembered movies. She gave some credence to the terrible idea that the rich are better looking than the middle and lower classes. The exceptions were countless, of course; most members of the lower- and underclasses wouldn't get the chance to rise no matter how spectacular their beauty, and plastic surgery's frequent deformation of elderly elites was a great leveler, though obviously not an inheritable one. Maybe Archer wasn't as rich as John
said. There was nothing immoderately swanky about his appearance. He wore jeans that had blued the tops of his canvas sneakers, a button-down shirt the color of avocado flesh, and a parka that he stashed in a corner of the gallery, unconcerned about theft. She watched his loose-limbed movements through the crowd, watched him greet someone with a shoulder-level handshake, low-key but affected, like they were fellow messy-haired indie rappers, their music as white and uneven as salt stains. Archer's shirt, she noticed again as she pressed into his widening circle (in which John looked ludicrous in his Ronald Reagan getup), was much too big, definitely not tailored, unless, paying a premium to ward off foppish perfection, he had asked his tailor to duplicate a shirt bought hastily off the rack from a store catering to gutty businessmen. The jeans were Levi's, though they did seem to be one of the upmarket selvedge reissues. On the right leg there were two bleach drips that might have pushed someone altogether money-blithe toward a new pair. The stains also advertised that from time to time Archer handled bottles of bleach, that he took pride and pleasure in doing things for himself. Near the end of their stay at the gallery (Archer bought two of the dioramas, the same two Sara found most bewitching), she examined the back of his head, staring at it from a distance, the crowd now thinning in sympathy with Archer's hair, and she wondered if, like a thrifty and suicidal boyfriend she'd had briefly in college, he even served as his own barber.

She didn't really like him but was thirsty for his approval, the approval he wouldn't give that “fucking tool” of an actor. She wanted to finish the evening with Archer and John in some quiet bar where she could show that, in addition to being sharp and glib, she could be soft and contemplative. After social outings she often had fantasies of laconism, wishing she had maintained a mysterious but not detached silence interrupted infrequently by blinks of gnomic wit and koanlike wisdom. And often she
was
quiet and shy, especially at parties, but rarely in small groups or around people who interested
her. She wanted to interest them too, after all, and she didn't have the reputation, beauty, wealth, or power to do so without talking. Maybe once in a while she could arouse curiosity with the sphinxian wonder of her interiority, but more often she would just be thought boring, burdensome, and pudgy, if she was thought of at all. People are sympathetic to the shy, sometimes, but they resent them for making others do all the work. Then again, someone like Archer might welcome any boon to his conversational hegemony.

Saying goodbye, Archer touched John's back with a force harder than a pat, softer than a slap. Then he hugged Sara gingerly, caressing her back for a few seconds. “It was great to meet you,” he said, wrinkling his forehead, making eye contact, putting the words in a consequential minor key, like he was telling a child not to forget her mittens. In theory she didn't like that either, but something about it felt good, to be looked at with such passionate intensity, the right phrase, she thought, though one yoked to Yeats's famous line about what the worst are full of. His eyes were brown and prettier than the rest of his face, and it surprised her to realize that one of the things she was feeling was lust.

That feeling haunted her on her last night in New York, lying guiltily in her little bedroom, listening to John's de trop words of love and dedication. She didn't think of Archer while she and John made love, not much, but he returned in force to her thoughts immediately afterwards. She waited five minutes to ask, “So how much money specifically do you think Archer has?”

“Oh, I don't know,” John said into the semidarkness. “A shitload.” (Again with that.) “In college he got a major allowance. Like, major. I don't know how much, but it seemed . . .”

“Inexhaustible?”

“Near about. It was tricky at first, 'cause he always wanted to go out to restaurants and concerts and that, or like go to New York for the weekend. And I didn't have too awful much money. Then midway
through freshman year he called his parents. It was cool because he was talking to his mom on the phone, but he was also talking to me—I mean, I was in the room and he was looking at me, and he told her how he'd lucked out with his suitemate, the Idaho one, not the other guy, but that I was broke, and could she maybe send something extra for me.”

“All so the two of you could pursue recreational opportunities on a more equal footing?”

“Yeah, I guess. Just to narrow the gap. I don't like to feel beholden and all, but, you know, it was really nice of him.”

“Sure, very,” Sara said. From Lucas's room someone sang in a melancholy falsetto over squelchy dance beats. “Though I suppose you could argue that it was a somewhat wanting act of noblesse oblige, in that if his allowance was really so inexhaustible, he could have given up some of his own money without noticeable deprivation.”

“Well, maybe, but—”

“Petitioning his parents for an extra allotment was just a way to seem thoughtful and openhanded without making any sacrifice whatsoever.”

“That's pretty harsh. His own money was his parents' money too, so I don't really see the difference. Someday his parents will die—I don't like to say that, 'cause they're really nice—but someday they will, and he'll inherit a bit less money because he gave some to me. Or
they
did.”

She drowsily pretended agreement, though she wasn't tired, and they both lay together for another quietly wakeful two hours. Then, as if a day passed outside of memory, she was back in her single bed in West Seneca.

June 2011

Standing in the gym's jump-ball circle, the camp director reached what Karyn hoped was the peroration of his speech about adversity, team-work, and much of his own childhood. Too grudgingly respectful to
take out her phone, Karyn instead inspected the remains of Maxwell's lunch: the sandwich bitten daintily into the shape of Arkansas, the browning apple slices, the wrapper for one of the invariably stale youth-market energy bars she often bought for the last time. She shifted her weight, tried to obscure the pain in her back by focusing on the pain in her knee. Some days she wished she could just be a consciousness floating on cotton balls; other days she wished she could be on codeine. In the car she said, “So how was that?”

“Good,” Maxwell said, meaning the opposite. Questioned further, he explained that he didn't like his group; the better players were imperious ball hogs, the lesser ones distractible doormats. “This one kid yells ‘Brick!' every time I get the ball, even though I hardly ever shoot and only one of my misses was a brick miss.”

“He says it just to you?”

“I don't know.”

She never knew how to advise his responses to minor bullying. A certain cheek-turning sangfroid seemed wise, but she didn't want him to grow into a knot of stanched resentment. At a different day camp, she had complained when a sexist little homophobe said Maxwell's shoes were in a “sissy color,” but her intervention, she feared, had succeeded only in making the taunting subtler. “I'll mention it to the coach,” she said now as they drove into the garage, the side mirror bumping against an unfinished credenza from Jason's bout with woodworking. “Maybe robotics camp will be better.”

“Maybe.”

The landline was ringing when she turned the back door's deadbolt. In her work voice: “This is Karyn.”

“Gemma Pitchford, but you know that.”

“I just got in. Can I call you back in an hour?”

“Bated breath.”

While the meat grayed for hamburger mac ‘n' peas, she ran up to change (drawstring shorts, Miranda Lambert baseball shirt, toe
socks), poured a glass of wine from the seventeen- rather than the twelve-dollar bottle, and set up her laptop on the kitchen island, resolved to an efficiency she rarely applied to her nonprofessional life. First she would cut it off categorically with Paul the consultant, who at this moment, conceivably, was reserving a B and B on Lake Winnebago and wondering if he had after all married too young. She tried to formulate a discreet cipher:
I think we should keep the system offline,
something like that, though of course discussing the HRIS on Facebook would in itself be—