Suitable Precautions (10 page)

But she was already turning down the shadowy hallway that led to her room, led to her suitcase and her clothes, to the airport and her mother and her childhood bed of thick grey sheets that smelled of flowers, not of bleach or strangers' skin. Mairin remembered waking up in that bed, eight years old and afraid, the taste of rotten lemons in her throat as she called out for her mother in the darkness. She remembered opening her mouth. I threw up, Mairin had said stupidly. I'm sorry. Shh, was all her mother had said as she cuddled Mairin, the heat of her body radiating through her thin nightgown. Mairin had fallen asleep, knowing for the first time that anything could be forgiven. The bad inside of her, spilled out across the clean white carpet.

N
EXT TO VICTOR IS AMELIA, who is worried that it still looks like she has pissed her pants. When she arrived at Kevin and Sharon's house, coincidentally at the moment that Jeremy slammed the door of their Volvo with his knee, one hand holding his tie, the other the bottles of wine, she had hopped off her bike and trotted up to him for a kiss, but he held his mouth away and looked at her crotch and said, Jesus, Amy, you look like you pissed yourself. Learn to drive, for fuck's sake.

It was almost a joke, the way he meant to say it.

There was no opportunity to fight, even though Amelia felt like beating Jeremy with her U-lock and watching him hold both hands to his nose like he was trying to push the blood back in. Kevin has a sixth sense about dinner guests, and he opened the door before they knocked. Kevin, Amelia hammed, you scared the piss out of me. Kevin hauled the bike in beside the jogging stroller. They discussed the trouble of vinyl bicycle seats while Amelia shifted back and forth in an effort to dry off. Both men smelling her.

Kevin is next to Amelia, to go along with Sharon's rules of boy girl boy girl, no spouses beside each other. Everybody but Sharon thinks that rule is pretentious, and besides, Victor messes up the system, so why bother? But Sharon is particular about her ideas. Her friends will get drunk in a respectable way and enjoy themselves at these parties. They will dress up, or at least funky. What a fun dinner party club, they'll say, toasting each other on their jobs and babies and renovated houses and funky clothes. On the eggplant and steamed pea shoots. It will make them all feel better.

Sharon, who has Jeremy on her right, has a big ass, the kind that justifies the word rump. Kevin has the idea that women should be horse-like in the way they walk: one hip bone rising as though independent of the other, proud and heavy, before dropping in a slow curve of muscle and sex. Attractive women, Kevin thinks, should make you think about childbirth, but in a sexy way. Of sex that could possibly lead to childbirth, but sex without that purpose behind it. They should smell the way Amelia smells. On his right.

Amelia's smell, more particularly Amelia, is a problem. At Amelia and Jeremy's dinner last fall, Jeremy came back from the bathroom and accidentally bumped into Kevin. Kevin, leaning against the recently refinished stairs, sloshed port on himself, staining his funky shirt. Kevin told Jeremy to watch where he was fucking going, fucking idiot. What the fuck did you say to me in my own house? Jeremy said back. Things got nasty from there.

Sharon, pregnant with Max, her swollen feet jammed into a pair of old flats, told Jeremy to back off, and Amelia (jealous of Sharon's pregnancy) told Sharon to back off herself, and the conversation of drunk or pregnant adults
degenerated: Kevin telling Jeremy, You don't appreciate Amelia; Amelia telling Kevin, Kevin shut up, you're drunk, and also telling Jeremy, Kevin's drunk, don't listen to him; Sharon saying she felt crampy and wanted to go home (Max born the next afternoon, Kevin hung over); and Amelia, smoking with Victor, crying that all she wanted, fuck it, was to have a baby, but not with Jeremy, who was turning out, five years on, to be a total prick. Exhale.

Joe and Shirley were in Portugal on their belated honeymoon and missed everything.

Shirley is on the other side of Kevin, which makes Sharon feel better. Sharon doesn't appreciate Kevin and Amelia sitting beside each other, even though the whole thing, the fight, whatever it was, was almost a year ago, and everyone just wound up blaming it on the wine and then going ga-ga over Max. But still.

Sharon has the idea that Shirley tells her everything, but Shirley has not told her that Joe's doctor found a lump on his prostate. The doctor waggled his finger in my ass, Joe said. Waggle. It was ridiculous. The word kept him from crying.

Shirley is of the opinion that men don't cry unless they are dying. She saw her father cry before his quadruple bypass surgery, and her brother, naked and bleeding from the wrists, bawled into her shoulder when she broke into his apartment and found him on the floor, fistfuls of pills scattered like confetti.

Joe (on Sharon's left) doesn't think he is dying, but he is scared of the surgery, which can cause impotence. He's heard people say that once you've been married for a while, a long while, all a person really needs is a best friend. Someone to hold hands with during movies and share the sudden orphaning that happens when parents die. Ridiculous.

Joe told Victor that making love to Shirley is the only time he's ever completely happy. They were smoking on Kevin's refinished deck. (Sharon checking on Max. Shirley stirring the sauce for her. Jeremy coming from work, Amelia on bike.) Do you know what I mean, Vic? Joe asked. Did you ever feel that way, you know, about Cathy?

Victor shook his head, and Joe resolved to sit next to him during dinner.

About Victor:

Victor's appendix burst when he was nine years old. His mother thought he was faking so he would miss a math test. He almost died.

Victor snaps a photograph of himself naked every morning. He slips it into an album. He has almost five thousand photos.

Victor's ex-wife, Cathy, is now dating a black man, and this makes Victor feel inadequate, sexually, and also racist.

No one knows any of this.

Dinner is four hours long and all they talk about is the monkfish. It is a new recipe. The monkfish is steamed and not particularly delicious, despite what everybody says.

T
HERE IS NOTHING in the first room until we get there and that is why we love it. “This is not a gallery. It's a hallway,” the guide says. We are both sympathetic towards the guide, who wears trousers one inch too short for her long and spindly legs. Such a trouser-wearer cannot be expected to know the difference between a gallery and a hallway, but having an inch less than us, as she does in several respects—not that we are bragging; we are not those kinds of men—we are inclined to think of her fondly as she studies us, the study in itself proving, among other things, that we are not in a hallway at all. We did not pay twenty dollars to see a hallway. And if we did, we will certainly demand our money back. We confer and decide to see where the gallery that may be a hallway will lead before we launch our tirade of righteous indignation upon a woman who is in need of pants with a longer inseam. We are not unnecessarily cruel. We have questions.

“No, that's an umbrella stand,” the guide says.

“Yes, for umbrellas,” another woman says, bobbing her head around as though she thinks this is the function of a head on a neck. Her bulgy forehead lolls towards the ground like a slave to gravity, forcing her to snap her head back every once in a while in order to keep up with the conversation. “It's just not raining today, that's probably why you were confused,” she explains to us, her fat fingers dancing in a grotesque parody of raindrops, as though we did not speak the same language. Come to think of it, we do not. Come to think of it, we cannot understand a single thing she says, dancing fingers or no. She babbles on incomprehensibly and we exchange knowing glances, because we know that an astonishingly high percentage of New Yorkers are insane. Seventy-nine percent, at last count. It just happens to be the case that we are employed in the business of celebrating that fact. And we are on assignment.

“This way to the second floor,” the guide says with an air of superiority.

“Baa,” you and I say to each other. The insane woman overhears and raises the corners of her mouth, expressing amusement, pleasure, or approval with her face. It is amazing how barnyard animal noises can bridge barriers. Even though I am ready to crucify myself with umbrellas (there are a few) to prove my willingness to suffer for art, we follow our guide. We did not pay twenty dollars to be left behind.

But there is a problem in the hamburger room:

“I don't get it,” says an old man with a cane. “What is it?”

“It's a giant hamburger,” his wife says.

“I know it's a hamburger. I'm not an idiot.”

“Well then, why did you ask me?” she says.

“What do you think of this?” (He is asking us, for he can sense that we are arbiters of taste.) “Is this what passes for art nowadays?”

Some questions answer themselves by being asked. We say nothing except to each other.

“Do you think they have hamburgers in the restaurant here?”

“They have a restaurant here?”

“Yes, and I could really go for a hamburger.” Somebody famous said that. Not the part about the hamburgers. The part about questions answering themselves. I said it. At least I thought it. Being that it is much harder to think something than it is to say it, and also much harder to say a thing than it is to do it, I think it is fairly self-evident that I do a lot of hard work. My position as a contributing member of society cannot be disputed.

“How much do you think this'd sell for?” the old man asks with a persistence that must have been instilled in the Great Depression or the Great War, whenever it was that he ate nothing but cabbage and wore his malnourished flesh like a badge of honour.

“I think I'll have a cheeseburger,” you say.

“Seriously, this is what passes for art nowadays? Giant hamburgers?” the old man says again to no one in particular.

“Actually,” our guide says, “it's what passed for art in the eighties.” I have a new appreciation for gallery employees the world over.

“Christ, what's the point?” the man says. He is obviously missing the apocalyptic connection between the burger and his own mortality, between art and death.

“The point of art is the end of art. Art wants to put itself out of business, out of its own misery!” I shout.

“Shh,” you say.

“I think I'll have a cheeseburger too,” I whisper back.

We consider another piece. It is a giant plaque. It was generously donated, a little plaque next to it tells us, by someone with a name so aristocratic I can barely make out the letters. Something like, Pierpointmorgansonrockefellersworthberg. The giant plaque, which the little plaque tells me is called “Art” and measures eighteen feet by thirty-six feet, says: Ego, by Me.

“Put that in your pipe and smoke it!” I say, not without some malice.

“Ceci n'est pas une pipe,” you say. You light a cigarette for dramatic effect and we are kicked out of the gallery, without enough time to pick up our umbrellas, should we have brought them.

I am at a loss, confounded by the subjectivity of metaphor.

I renew my suggestion for cheeseburgers.

“I don't understand the need for this,” you say as you are searched by a fat man with some sort of beeping baton. “This is an indignity. Do you know who I am?”

The fat man does not respond, obviously embarrassed by the fact that he does not know, or possibly the man is a deaf-mute. Possibly this is why his employers have given him a beeping baton.

“Communication technologies are the hallmark of the modern age. You may quote me on that,” I tell the fat, possible deaf-mute as I am asked to remove my shoes.

“For the last time, please remove your shoes, sir,” a woman in a uniform says. She evidently is not a deaf-mute, just culturally undereducated. There is no excuse for this, and I blame the public school system, the clergy, the government in power, the previous generation, and the general lack of appreciation for the arts.

“This is a travesty of justice,” I say.

“No, sir,” she says, “this is JFK security.”

I am so glad to be leaving New York, where all the escaped mental patients think they have a sense of humour.

“Destination, sir?” the woman with my shoes asks.

“Destination?” I say. “Up, most definitely. Up into the cloudless climes and starry skies, or somewhere in the general vicinity, at least.”

“Business or pleasure?” she asks.

“Pleasure, always pleasure. I never conduct any business.” This statement is somewhat truer than I would like. It is degrading to soar among the heavens on one's way to the glittering galas of Europe when one is lodged in economy seating next to a plaid shirt, overstuffed with skin, connected to a potato chip-smelling mouth that insists on telling all within smelling distance about the tire business in New Jersey. But our magazine is working very hard to increase its readership, and these things take time.

I explain this to the woman who has my shoes, and all she says is, “Have a nice flight.” I start to suspect that everyone in New York is not crazy, but rather that everyone in New York is a robot. This is the new millennium and I am shocked by nothing, least of all by mechanical people. Mechanical people are not new, I suspect. Rather, I'm inclined to believe that the mechanizations have just made their way to the surface.
Now we can see what was always there, clanking underneath.

You are waiting at our gate, looking through a dirty window at the jet in which we will be flying. “In some cultures, to travel in the air is to go against the gods,” you say.