Amateurs (8 page)

It seemed, however, that he had already unfriended and—she ran a few more tests—blocked her. Beeswax versus an unsinging siren.

She took a moment.

She dumped the peas and pasta into a strainer, mixed them in a plastic bowl with the meat and the packet of powdered cheese, called Maxwell away from the collaborative computer game he was playing over Skype, and closed her laptop screen. She called him again.

“Two minutes.”

Seven minutes later, he took the stool next to hers and raced through his first half-dozen bites. Karyn was almost finished. “How'd your game go?” she said.

“We could've won but Galen rage-quit.”

“Oh.”

Some silence.

“If a genie gave you a million dollars,” he said, “would you wear the same Hammer pants every day for a year?”

“How do you know about Hammer pants?”

“Everyone does.”

That point didn't seem worth arguing. “I've
paid
to wear dumber things than Hammer pants,” she said.

“So you would? It's every day,” he stressed. “To work, to church.”

“We don't go to church.”

“But if we did. Or like to that wedding.”

“How would you feel about a guy driving with us to that wedding?”

“What guy?”

“I'm not exactly sure—I mean, not a hitchhiker or anything; I know his name.”

He shrugged. “And you can't wash 'em.”

“The Hammer pants?”

“Yeah, 'cause then what are you wearing?”

She sipped her wine. “I'd do it for fifty thou. Less if I knew I wouldn't lose my job.”

“What if they had swastikas on them?”

“Do I get the money ahead of time?”

“No, after.”

“So I couldn't just stay inside like a Nazi invalid.” She thought for a moment. “No, not worth it.”

“A billion?”

“Then it would be wrong not to take the money,” she said. “I could help a lot of people.”

“Yeah, like me. You could help me buy stuff.”

“Better to disgrace myself for the greater good. Utilitarianism. Not that disgrace has to enter the—”

His chair honked when he stood up. “Did you know there were swastikas before Hitler?”

“Yes.”

“You could say they were those kind of swastikas.”

“Put your bowl directly in the dishwasher, please.”

She pushed her own bowl aside and opened her screen. Googling Lucas Pope led her to a website, its design clearly guided by thrift, for a badly named line of reusable vinyl bags. The last of the site's three blog posts was two years old and underpainted with frustration. She didn't find much else: he, or another Lucas Pope, was quoted in a competently written, poorly reported piece from 2004's Republican National Convention, and his name turned up on a few
old alt-weekly calendar items for DJ gigs in and around Philadelphia. She clicked back to Facebook and paused over his five-day-old friend request. To her mind, accepting his request was the same as agreeing to drive him to Winnipeg, the same as demoting Maxwell to third wheel. Having a child ride shotgun when there was an adult in back would be an affront even to her progressive ideas about natural power.

Buying time, she did yet another search on Archer. A few new items emerged: a picture of him looking stylishly rumpled at a fundraiser for refugees, a skiing piece for
Outside
magazine in which he courageously used the word
schussboomer
in the first sentence, and, on the third page of results, an essay from a journal Karyn knew by reputation to be fashionable. It began:

In college I took a fiction workshop from a prominent visiting novelist whose marginal notes were sometimes incisive, sometimes obliquely pictographic. He wasn't like those famously ego-maniacal, belittling writing instructors who rip up manuscripts in front of the class. He was soft-spoken, warm, and encouraging. Much of his encouragement must have been disingenuous, but he provided clues—pauses, equivocal inflections, ambiguous adjectives—by which one could gauge his sincerity. I reasoned at the time that he was sincere when praising my work, insincere when praising almost everyone else's. For one of the early classes I submitted a story written in the form of a family Christmas letter and heavily indebted to Donald Barthelme, my literary polestar of several weeks. One of my classmates, a hiccupping Arizonan whose story I considered precious and backdated, though I hadn't said so, accused my story of being “masturbatory.” Later in the semester, another of my stories was summed up in the same way, this time by a student whose work I jealously admired.

The criticism is scarcely unusual and has been leveled at work of infinitely greater value than my collegiate “fictions,” as I was then calling them. Byron, for instance, used the metaphor to excoriate Keats, as Thomas W. Laqueur reminds us in
Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation.
The artist is most readily linked with the onanist when his or her work is fantastic, silly, rebarbative, abstruse, or ostentatiously intellectual (rhymes with “hen-peck'd you all,” as Byron himself reminds us; I note this perhaps to admit that I'm especially stung by and defensive around the criticisms of women). But any imaginative artist is open to the attack, since the campaign against masturbation has been in part a campaign against imagination, or against the wrong breed of imagination, not merely the concupiscent sort but the indulgent, daydreaming sort that is seen to serve no public good. (The self-indulgent writer is the masturbatory writer snubbed by more polite critics.) Often the campaign is fought not in the name of disciplined purity but of disciplined cooperation. If one wants to make love and one's partner instead chooses what William Gass called “handmade sex,” one is angry. Likewise, the reader undelighted by a story that seems to have been oodles of fun to write (or, short of that, a story rooted in antisocial pleasure) might feel a kinship with the housekeeper—alas, I'm thinking of a specific one—compelled to handle tissues, wadded and dusty, under a forgetful teenager's bed.

In my case, though, the criticism was subtextually pointed. I went to an elite university where wealth was relatively common, but just the same many knew me as a student of exceptional means, and further knew that my wealth flowed to some extent from my stepfather having founded a company that was for several decades the world's leading manufacturer of sex toys. I had courtiers and detractors. In both camps there were
people who found my inheritance amusing; in the latter camp, I inferred, there were people who associated my presence at the school, where I was an undistinguished history major and budding alcoholic, with a pulling of strings sufficient for the most Napoleonic of puppet-theater battle scenes (and it's true that my parents, particularly my stepfather, Cole Neblett '66, were major donors, though I'll add that Cole was the first in his family to go to college and that, some three decades after making his fortune, he still delights in playing Trimalchio). I'm close to certain that my second critic, the talented writer and teacher's favorite, knew something of my family. She was a homely spurter of nonsensical arguments, but I was attracted to the challenge of her unmasked antipathy toward me. For the record, in the early part of my college career I was spending not from an inheritance under my control but from a liberal allowance, and when I did succeed to a full independence, the money came mostly from a trust established by my maternal grandmother. Her father, among other things, developed a kind of borosilicate glass widely used for lab instruments and kitchenware. Nor has Dr. Knox (toys and marital aids) been my stepfather's most successful enterprise. But there's rarely any percentage in making these points, explaining, in other words, that my (considerable) sex-toy money is just a drop in the bucket. Besides, the mere phrase
borosilicate glass
seems to have soporific effects. I've accordingly grown accustomed to being thought of as the Dildo Scion and variations thereof.

All this has made me predisposed to . . .

Karyn reached the firewall. She would have paid to read on, but her credit cards were several feet away, and she was late in returning Gemma's call. She accepted Lucas's friend request without further rumination and reached for the phone.

“Ms. Bondarenko,” Gemma answered.

“All right, have him call me.”

January 2005

Bad form to alter a colleague's work, but the more John examined the mannequin, the less he liked the foulard pocket square that Ray or Clee (probably Ray) had puffed out in the mocha herringbone jacket. For starters, the Quadrangle model was cut trim; properly fitted and tailored, it would never accommodate a bulging puff. Sure, you could finesse that on a mannequin, but you were leading the customer astray, just as you were when you sold a 42 Quad to an obvious 40. Basically spits on the whole point of the design! Just sell him a Walbrook in the right size!

He studied the mannequin some more, reached back to tighten one of the pins. He could fold the square—not so meddlesome—but its relationship to the tie would still be a mite too on the nose. Decent guy, Ray, but kind of Garanimals.

After picking out a subtly patterned linen handkerchief, he surreptitiously made the swap. Archer's greeting startled him while he was smoothing out the breast. “Ah hell, sorry,” John said. “I thought you were Ray.”

“Who's Ray?”

“Or Clee. But don't sweat it.” John motioned Archer to one of the store's tufted leather club chairs. “New swatches came in last week. I picked out a high-twist blue that'd be great for you.” Archer sat down, started flipping unobservantly through the fabric samples. “The one I have in mind's right in front,” John said.

Archer held up the card. “Seems just like my current suit.”

“Well, but it's a much lighter shade.” John's Moleskin contained many comprehensive and maybe only subtly differentiated lists of his dream wardrobe. It killed him that Archer wore the same blue
suit year-round to weddings, funerals, and charity functions, the same one he'd worn for graduation.

“Yeah, I don't see the difference,” Archer said.

“In sunlight you would.”

“I'm not gonna wear it to the beach.”

“Even in artificial light, though, if we did a side by side.” John had been an authority on style and grooming long before he had the testifying closet, and in college he had sometimes played the valet. Archer arrived in Cambridge just barely able to tie a four-in-hand and with no knowledge of the half Windsor, a more complementary knot for his widish face. Surprising ignorance, it seemed to John, or, as Archer joked, “Engels-level class treachery.” John laughed at that, not quite getting it, then stood behind Archer in front of the cloudy mirror John had hung in their suite's common room, guiding Archer's long-fingered hands through the steps of three essential knots. “Lighter weight too,” John said now. “Nine seriously airy ounces. We could have this made just in time for spring.”

Archer brushed threads off his jeans.

“I noticed last time that your current suit's getting awful shiny at the elbows,” John said.

“Lends character.”

“That comes from dry-cleaning and pressing it overoften. Really a suit shouldn't need more than a natural-bristle clothes brush like the one I gave you and occasional sessions in a steamy bathroom. Resort to the cleaners—I still like Jeeves on Madison—only if the suit's been dirtied beyond the hopes of at-home spot-cleaning.”

“Got it.”

“Which I can help you with, man. Just come over sometime; I'll run you through it.”

Archer decided to hold off on the suit, left instead with a cashmere robe for his stepfather. He was a great one for unoccasioned gifts. Over the years he had given John a pair of vintage cuff links, a
monogrammed flask, a mandolin (a challenge for John's fat fingers, but still). On his way out of the store, Archer proposed a jogging date for the unspecified future. It seemed to John—not always, but it sometimes seemed to John that Archer was trying to maintain their friendship in the most efficient way possible, often building plans around mundane things he was going to do anyway. But then, maybe that two-birds-one-stone approach had always held sway; maybe in the past Archer would have gone from restaurant to gallery to bar to party whether John was with him or not. It hadn't felt that way, though; it had felt as if the barhopping and what all were secondary to their togetherness, even if it was agreed—established, you could say, by Archer—that they would abandon each other on the arrival of what Archer called “sex-type potentialities.”

Not heaps of those arrived for John, who had little aptitude for bar chat and assumed that all lack-love sex started with dishonesty and led to heartbreak. Mostly he and Archer stuck together, talked about movies and Archer's travels and their mutual friends; sometimes they touched on spiritual matters in a chill way that made John feel deeply understood. These days, a jog's spare, panting conversation met their needs, or Archer's, and even when they had more to say, the extra words only stressed what was missing. Or worse, what had never been there, like with the italicized words in the King James Bible: what often seems like random emphasis is actually the translators' honesty, their way of pointing out clarifying or grammatically necessary words not found in the Hebrew or Greek.