Fire in the Firefly (11 page)

“It's my job.”

“So it is.” Roebuck returns his mug to the tray and does the same with Greenwood's. “Where did you find that poster?”

Greenwood follows Roebuck's eyes to the image of the sleeping fawn. “Isn't it great! I picked it up in one of those secondhand shops down in the Junction. It's from sometime in the eighties, I think. So retro. Clients will appreciate the irony.”

They intended something quite apart from irony, in Roebuck's memory, those girls who taped that poster to the dorm walls of his youth. “So we're set then. Good. I'll be curious to hear what the rest of the group thinks.”

“See you at two!” says Greenwood, smirking at his fawn.

At 1:45 PM Anne walks past the receptionist and straight into Roebuck's office. “News.” She seats herself in the chair on the near side of his desk. 

Roebuck pushes away his work. “I'm guessing it starts with a Y?” They study one another carefully.

“She's been in touch with several clinics. Apparently, if you want to be a donor …”

“Which I absolutely don't.”

“…there's a protocol. The clinic has to run a background check, test your blood, analyze your sperm, and so on. Then there's a waiver and a bunch of legal disclaimers you'll have to sign.”

“You know as well as I do …”

“Yes
! Exactly!
”

But what, exactly, she means to say is postponed for the moment by the appearance of Daniel Greenwood, striding through the door of Roebuck's office. “The meeting's here, I take it. Oh, sorry!” Greenwood has skidded to a halt on Roebuck's Tibetan rug. “I didn't know you were with someone.”

“Daniel, you haven't met my wife. Anne, meet Daniel Greenwood. Daniel is shaping up to be a major acquisition.”

“Hello, Daniel.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Anne.”

Roebuck has risen to his feet and come around his desk. “Daniel,” he says, “I'm sorry to say that something has come up. I'm going to ask you to flesh out your ideas with the team. By all means use this office, but Matrix Two is also available if you would be more comfortable there. You've floated some interesting concepts. Listen to what the juniors have to say and, remember, this is only ideation. There's no actual client for the present.”

Anne, too, has risen to her feet and is standing beside her husband by the door. Roebuck takes her elbow and steers them through.

“Nice to meet you, Daniel,” she says over her shoulder.

Roebuck leads his wife to a bistro down the block. “I didn't ask you if you've eaten.”

“I have,” she says. “Yasmin needed lunch. But I could use a glass of wine.”

“I didn't want to have this conversation in the office. Daniel can handle things for an hour or so. Besides, we haven't been to lunch in months, just the two of us.”

“He's so young!”

“Daniel? Older than he looks. He's been around. More and more, I'm thinking he's an ideal fit.”

A server comes to take their order. Roebuck has already had a sandwich at his desk. They settle on a bottle of house white and a bowl of frites to share.

He's had the time to think things over and has decided that from here on in, it's equilibrium. He will be content, from this point forward, to leave matters in the hands of fate. “I'll tell you one thing,” he says, pouring for them both. “There's no way I'm adding myself to the roster of a …” even the words feel uncomfortable, “… sperm bank. I just don't have time for that. To say nothing of inclination.”

“That's exactly what I told her! Julius, don't you see? This is our out!” Anne is looking happier than he's seen her in ages. “She can't expect you to put yourself at the service of some …” 

“You think?”

“Yes! Yes, absolutely!”

“Well, it's true. I
don't
have time to take off work and sit around …” Roebuck lets the sentence finish itself. “I'm just not prepared to get into all that.”

“And I don't see why you should! That's exactly what I said to Yasmin. I said, Yasmin, Julius has an advertising agency to run. You can't expect him to go through all that … performance.”

“What did she say?”

“Well, she was disappointed, of course. But she agreed that you're a busy man. I think it's finally sunk in, how completely unreasonable she's being.”

“What else?”

“What do you mean what else?”

“What else did she say?”

“That's it. That she knows you're very busy and that she understands that you want nothing to do with being a supplier, or donor, or whatever they call it.”

“It seems a little inconclusive …”

“Not at all. If we stand firm on this, Julius, that's that. This is our solution.”

“Well, you know better.”

“I do. And I think that we can finally put all this behind us.”

“I'll drink to that.”

Anne raises her glass. They touch rims across the table.

“God, it's such a relief!”

Women recognize. Men discover.

The Collected Sayings of Julius Roebuck

W
ednesday morning is a restful one in light of what's ahead. Roebuck spends it on the telephone, reassuring clients that he thinks about them night and day. It's religion with him, keeping up connections. Come a weekday morning, and Julius Roebuck is likely to call out of the blue, just to say hello. Mostly it's the upper levels—Presidents, VPs, CEOs—though he always keeps a bright light burning for the good folks in the dimmer echelons as well. And it's true that he genuinely understands their business: Roebuck really does think about his clients every waking hour. He is almost always ready with some useful piece of information he's picked up to pass along.

All morning, he's been monitoring email. Nothing so far from Lily, which means by now the light must be green. It's not uncommon for one of them to have to cancel last minute. But if something had come up, she'd have let him know by now. Roebuck has ensured that his own afternoon is in no way
double-booked
.
He is contemplating whether to use the flower shop just down the street or a better one he knows on the far side of the viaduct when the phone on his desk lights up. For a moment he's afraid it's Lily calling to cancel, but this is the internal line.  

“I have someone here to see you,” the receptionist says.

“I'm just heading into a meeting.” Roebuck makes a mental note to have another chat about the functions of front desk personnel. “Who is it?”

“She says she's your designer. She says to say it's Yasmin.”

It strikes Roebuck with an almost physical shock that the woman who walks into his office is the same one he was conjuring with Greenwood only yesterday. Exactly what his mind's eye was presenting.

“Hello, Julius. What are you mumbling?”

“Yasmin. Hello.” Roebuck hurries to the door to head her off before she gets too far inside. “Only that I'm just on my way out.” He stops, steps back, and offers up a formal handshake.

Yasmin takes his hand and slips behind him and into his chair, crossing an eternity of naked leg. “Then I won't keep you.” One shoe dangles in the way of women who loll their pumps so perfectly. Roebuck breathes her scent. He perches on the edge of his desk and looks pointedly at the clock, certain that his pupils are dilating and his nostrils commencing to flutter. “Allergies,” he says, fishing out a Kleenex. It's unlikely she dressed like this for lunch with Anne. Then again, she might have. Yasmin is more and more an unknown quality.

“I know you're busy, so I'll come straight to the point.”

“Honestly, Yasmin. Really, it's …”

“We don't have to use a clinic.”

“Sorry?”

He watches her rise from the chair and step in close, just short of touching. “If you have a problem with a clinic,” she says, “we don't have to use one. In fact, it's easier this way.” She has positioned herself with her feet between his legs. There's nowhere for Roebuck to retreat. Yasmin takes his hand in both of hers.

“Yasmin. I …”

“Next week,” she says, lowering her voice—Roebuck feels something warm pressed against his palm—“next week is when it happens.”

“Next week?” His voice has died away from want of oxygen.

“Next week,” she whispers, “I'm
ovulating
.”

It takes him several heartbeats to understand that the thing in his hand is a plastic receptacle. Roebuck gazes at it mutely. Yasmin strokes the inside of his wrist. What he's holding is a squat transparent jar like the one his doctor provides when he needs a sample for Roebuck's yearly physical. There's a paper seal with a label and an orange lid. He can feel her breath against his ear. “I'm
regular
,” she murmurs, “so I
know
it's going to be next week. I'll monitor my temperature, and when I'm certain, I'll call. You just …” she walks her fingers up the jar; Roebuck feels it rocking in his palm, “…then I'll wrap it up and take it home.”

She steps away and smooths her dress. “I know you're in a hurry, so I'll be on my way. But the thing is, Julius, if you want …” Yasmin has paused in the doorway. “If you want, we don't have to tell Anne. We can do this any way you want to do it.”

They have never been the kind of couple who fall instantly to bed. They'll talk before, during, and afterwards, too, time permitting. The relationship is highly verbal. But today he is hardly through the door before he has his hand beneath her skirt and her panties pushed below her knees. “Julius!” she says, hands against his shoulders. He has lifted her against the wooden casement of the fireplace, the fabric of her skirt caught up around her waist. “My goodness!” says Lily. Roebuck groans.

“Only you …” But the act of considering how this sentence ought to end calms him so that he is able to withdraw and begin again more carefully and so acquit himself over the next few minutes—very few minutes, still—without too much cause for
self-recrimination
.

“Okay,” he says, recovering his breath and kicking off his shoes. “I owe you one.”

“How long have you got?”

Roebuck lifts her arm and looks at Lily's watch. “I absolutely need to be out the door by
three-fifteen
. Latest.”

“Then I absolutely intend to collect. But first,” she says, pulling him by the hand, “I've made some lunch.”

He has always loved her kitchen—pumpkin pine, raw ceramics, pots of basil in the windows facing south—her whole house, for that matter, a tiny
east-end
semi so different from his own. She has left her skirt and panties in the crumpled heap where he dropped them by the hearth and stands in the sunlight by the counter cutting bread, the tails of her long, loose cotton shirt trailing down her thighs. She's humming.

Weighing his timing, Roebuck clears his throat, clasps his hands behind his back, and like a schoolboy from another era solemnly declaims a verse he has been saving for a time just like today.

The modest Rose puts forth a thorn,

The Humble Sheep a threat'ning horn:

While the Lilly white shall in Love delight,

Nor a thorn, nor a threat, stain her beauty bright.

“Delight? Did you say
delight
? You fuck me on the woodstove, come before I even know you're there, and now you're at me with William Blake? You're too much,” she says, popping a heart of artichoke into his mouth and licking the oil she has spilled beneath his lip.

Roebuck, chewing, marshals his reply. “ ‘He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.'
Besides,” he says, reflecting, “that's not a woodstove. I would describe it as a traditional brick fireplace.”

“A
scratchy
brick fireplace. And don't get me started on pestilence.”

“ ‘The Eternal Female Groan'd! / It was heard all over the Earth.' That one,” he says, “I admire in particular.”

“Enough! Seriously! Enough with the Blake. Everything that guy ever wrote was rant. The only interest Blake ever had in any ideas outside his own was to refute them.”

“I like rant.”

“Well, at least that's vaguely original.”

What he adores about Lily is that she loves this pointless, lowbrow banter every bit as much as he does. Arguing for them is like sex: pleasure for pleasure's sake alone, or so he's always thought.

“What are you working on?”

Always, always he is flattered when she offers him her pages, tracing with a finger over passages she feels are not quite right, sounding out her cadence like a brush against his ear. Roebuck listens with his own eyes closed, sublimating syntax. On a good day he will offer a word she hadn't yet considered and marvel at the jolt of pleasure if she pauses, tries it on her tongue, then nods, and writes it in. Roebuck keeps copies of every magazine and journal Lily's verses have appeared in—tucked into careful nooks and crannies at his office or mixed discreetly with the books and periodicals that line his bedroom shelves—though he does not share her admiration for most of her contemporaries. Interchangeable, he tells her, as the voices of the boy bands his daughter makes him listen to on their morning drive to school.  But he loves what Lily writes, and quotes it back to her by heart.  

She sighs, and he hears suppressed regret. “That's on the back burner for now. It's strictly meat and potatoes this week. The McCann gig ramped up sooner than expected. They wanted me in today, but I told them I had a doctor's appointment.”

He is startled by the overlapping fictions and very nearly blurts out where he's going, once he leaves this house. “What's the job?” he asks instead.

“Boring. I'll show you after we eat. Pays the bills. Which reminds me, I haven't asked about your onboarding session at Artemis. How'd that go?”

“They're throwing out the creative.”

She pauses, a tactful pause, and stirs her soup. “That might not be such a bad thing.”

It cuts both ways with Lily. If she values his input, his esteem for hers is even higher. Roebuck waits a little longer while she fishes out a sprig of thyme, balanced on a wooden spoon, considering her words. Lily has a way with tone. He sent her jpegs of the presentation, asking for her thoughts.

“The execution's very sharp. Your new guy definitely has an eye. I just wonder where the concept is taking you.”

“Meaning?”

“I think you are shading a little too far into the exploitive.”

He knows there's more she means to say. Lily places the spoon on a dish beside the pot, then puts her arm around his waist, and leans against him. “Don't you think,” she asks, “that there's enough acrimony out there already without you creating more?”

“It's only branding.”

He has chosen his reply as deliberately as she has phrased her question. They have ploughed this ground before, the two of them. Branding—as she has more than once reminded him—is what cowpokes do to cattle to establish ownership of meat. “In this context,” Roebuck counters, “all it means is getting people attached to something through emotion. That's all it is, Lily. And anger is as valid an emotion as any.”

“Valid,” she says. “Tried and true. Hitler got people attached to his ideas by getting them to hate the Jews. You're motivating women to buy your product by setting them against their boyfriends, even husbands …”

This makes him smile. “Since when are you a defender of husbands?”

When it is clear there will be no reply, he tries another tack. “There's a rule in debating, you know, that says if you bring Nazis into it, you lose automatically.”

“So I lose automatically?”

He wants to take the ladle and stir the soup himself, but Roebuck holds his ground. “I'll waive it for today because you make a useful point. Sure, Goebbels tapped into a
pre-existing
well of
anti-Semitism
and malignantly pumped it for all it was worth. Am I doing the same with women and men? All right. Yes. Women have always been pissed off with men; that's the historical truth I'm exploiting. But consider it from our perspective. Or mine, at least.”

“Give me a sec to brace myself this time.”

“Men of my generation have made enormous efforts to make the world a better place for women. We've gone so far as to become like women ourselves, the better to level the field. So what happens? Exactly what was supposed to happen. Women have caught up. Or if they haven't yet, they soon will. But somehow they're more pissed off than ever. The difference now is that they also have the economic power to express their anger. And boy, do they ever. But it's kind of a drag for the guys of my era who really thought that what they were doing was a good thing. So you can't really blame us for making the best of a bad situation by using it to sell you stuff. There's got to be a silver lining somewhere.”

“Fuck, do you spin.”