The Egg Code (13 page)

“What are you—almost fifty, right? You can’t collect on your retirement unless you’ve got something to retire
from
.”

“Money isn’t a problem. I wish it was. I wish Derek would at least give me something to fight him on.” Gently, she reached under the table and held her own hand.

“He’s not contesting anything?”

“Nothing worth going to court over.”

Lydia leaned forward. “Is he well?” she asked.

Donna laughed; the question made her nervous. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with him. I thought that when my father died last year, everything would get better.”

She remembered those weeks. The morning Derek woke up before sunrise, rubbing his head—nearly bald even then—and she’d asked what he was doing, but he just opened the door to the balcony and stepped outside, still rubbing his head, not a hard rub, but enough to make his scalp red, and she remembered the noise it made, a rhythmic shift, round and round, until finally he stopped and pulled out a suitcase, filled it with socks, just balls and balls of socks (looked attractive, all the different colors) and he closed the case and strode down the hall, shaking her off, the weeping woman, and he turned in the driveway to say something nasty—the final fuck-off, not worth recounting—and when he started up the car, the radio was on, a Pink Floyd tune, slow and somber,
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon,
and he left it on, backing away even as her fingers clutched at the locked driver’s door, and as he moved out onto the main road, the sun broke over the pines and the music changed to Hall and Oates.

Lydia pulled a plastic cutlass out of her drink and swished it around. “It was like he was waiting for the moment when he knew you were most vulnerable, and then he stabbed you in the heart.”

“I don’t blame him. I can’t blame him.”

“Oh, please.”

“I’m sorry, Lydia.” Fork shift. “You don’t know the whole story.” No! Move it over . . . here. “I did some things that weren’t very nice.”

Lydia signaled the bartender and ordered another round, increasing the wattage, wine for vodka. “You need to get back at that man somehow, Donna dear.”

“There’s nothing I can do, and besides, whatever I try, he’ll win anyway. I guess the only thing left is to just move on and—like you say—find another man who’s willing to put up with a fifty-year-old, half-used-up—”

“Oh, come on. The self-pitying thing is not very appealing.”

“At least I don’t have any kids. That’s a selling point.”

“Never mind the man. I just said that as an example. No, of course, everyone knows that you don’t need a man.”

“Especially since, hell, I’ve got all this money now that Derek doesn’t want it.”

“So? That’s great! If that’s what he wants, if he’s that stupid, let him!”

“Hmmm. Wonderful. I’m tickled pink.” Donna moved her plate a quarter-turn; the strawberry seed slipped from nine to six o’clock. “You want some of this cheese?”

“No, I don’t want the cheese, and don’t change the subject.” Lydia guzzled her vodka tonic and slammed the glass. “Now, this man has hurt you, and you have the right to say something about it.”

Donna settled back into her chair. “What can I do?” she asked, starting to panic. Everything they’d ordered for lunch—the drinks, the hors d’oeuvres—suddenly seemed too expensive, way out of her means.

“Write a book.” Lydia pointed. “There you go. Write a book. I dare you!”

“I can’t write.”

“So? Whoever told Derek he could write? Have you ever actually read any of that garbage?” She paused in the middle of buttering a bran muffin. “I mean, no offense, Donna, I know that you’re still very close to the man, but talk about making a fortune off of the most dopey dreck ever committed to paper. What was that one . . . ?
Good God, Don’t Do
It! . . .
?”

“
Good God, Don’t Jump! Getting from Suicide to the Sunny-Side in
Ten Easy Steps
.”

“There! See, now you’re laughing.”

“It’s funny.”

“It
is
funny.”

“Always the ten easy steps. He made everything sound like a . . .” Donna trailed off, blanking on it.

“
That’s
what I’m saying. You’ve been the good girl for twenty-five years, very supportive, very loving, and now this is what happens. Okay—boom!—now it’s your turn.”

Thinking it over, Donna turned her glass, looking for a clean spot, but the rim was dirty and so she kept turning it. “Reggie Bergman could probably help me out.”

“Him, anyone. This is your chance. Derek Skye is all about one thing, Donna: men.”

“Oh, well—”

“No, wait. Not just that.
White
men. Read what he’s saying with that nonsense. The family. Keeping the family together. Success in the workplace. Doing the right thing for your family. We all know what that means.”

Donna saw the books on display. Hundreds of copies, stacked high. “
A Woman Speaks Out
by Donna Skye.
A Woman’s Turn
.
My Turn
. Didn’t Rosalynn Carter write a book called
My Turn
?”

“Nancy Reagan, dear.”

“I think
A Woman’s Turn
is better. It’s more specific.”

“No, it’s
too
specific. This is what you should do.”

“Oh, no.” She smiled, feeling teased. “Do I want to hear this?” Lydia removed her sunglasses and set them on the table. “A book of lore.”

“Lore?”

“Legends.
Fables.
Stories collected from all around the world. Tahiti. Where was the place with the AIDS? Was that Tahiti?”

“That’s right.”

“We go all over. Here we are in Outer Mongolia, where the natives are busy repairing the damage from last year’s flood.”

“Good, that sounds good!”

“Well, and then you write the commentary at the end. We can learn a lot from primitive cultures such as these. That way you can tap into the self-help market and cut Derek right in the balls.”

“Lydia!”

“The ancient clay-maker.”

“Who?”

“The old lady throwing a pot. See how her hands fashion the clay . . . this time-old tradition . . . like her mother, and her mother’s mother, and blah blah, whatever the bullshit. The more pathetic and run-down, the better. Guatemala. The Australian Outback. Naked children diving for pearls in the Indian Ocean. Anything but Cal and his tweed pants fucking around on the putting green.” She slapped the table. “
Many
Voices, One Vision
. That’s it!”

“That’s what?”

“The name of your book.
Many Voices, One Vision
. Get a napkin and write that down.”

“Phew, this one’s yikky.”

“We’re writing things down on napkins. We’re brilliant now.”

Donna scribbled the title on a cocktail napkin and held it up to her blouse. It looked good there, like a boutonniere. “But the one thing we’re missing, Lydia, is that I don’t know anything about third-world folklore.”

“So? Who gives a fuck? Who absolutely gives a fuck? Get him back here. Let’s order some champagne.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Look, Donna, listen to me. If you can read, you can write a book. If you can do research . . . go to the library, they’ll show you what to do. Or, the other thing, with the computers.”

“Oh, right.”

“Facts at your fingertips. And what you can’t find there, you make it up, it’s that easy. No one’s going to care whether you checked your sources when you’re sitting on top of the best-seller list.”

“No, I suppose that’s true. I just feel like I ought to be interviewing people or something.”

“You want to round up a few thousand refugees, we’ll go on down to the docks and chat for a few hours . . . these people can barely talk, Donna, for Christ’s sake.” She paused, then undid the top two buttons of her shirt. A busboy refilled their water glasses as she held the flap away from her chest, letting the air in. “You want to talk to someone, I know who you should talk to. The black guy, the one who just moved up to the lake.”

“Which one?”

“As if there’s more than one. He moved in a few days ago. Right on the water. You and I, we’ll both go. Safer that way.”

The ladies clinked glasses, and Donna imagined the work already completed, book published, congratulations all around. It intimidated her, for she knew she
could
do it, could get the thing in the right hands, but there were so many words involved, and each one had to mean something, and that’s what scared her, making meaning, making it right. Angry questions. Nasty men.
Now Ms. Skye, on page 208 . . .
Oh, I don’t know. I don’t remember page 208. But if she smiled, if she seemed sincere. Then they would understand. No, it didn’t have to mean anything.

“We’ll do it today,” Lydia said. “On the way back, we’ll drop by. He won’t care.”

“Is he young? Old?”

“Older fella.”

“How could he ever—”

“God knows. So, that’s what you ask. You want authenticity, here you go. I’m sure he’s got some gripping story to tell about life on the streets—”

Donna covered her mouth. “Oh, gee. Now we’re being silly.”

“We need that champagne.”

“We do.” She held up her glass. “Where’s the waiter?”

“Here he comes. The dark one? Here he comes.”

“I wonder . . . what is he, Spanish or Italian?”

“Spanish, looks like.” Lydia studied the man. The waiter smiled, approaching. An easy glide. Pulled on a string. “I wonder if he plays the guitar,” she mumbled, thinking—
ask him?

The Black Man
in America

From the attic, Julian Mason could look out across the lake, past the tower and on toward the row of mansions near the opposite shore. The trees were wine and green and bare. The elm beside the house reminded him of a begging woman, limbs outstretched, body twisted in despair. There she was: his mother, guarding the place, her dead hands scraping the window.

But Mrs. Mason never begged—she’d worked hard, just like his father and the rest of the family. These references came from somewhere else. Whose memory was this, anyway?

The attic was dark and poorly ventilated. He’d brought his office up here for a reason—fewer distractions, too much hassle to go back downstairs. Near the window, a computer displayed a lowercase
h
—an italic, a digital recreation of the old Garamond issued by Adobe in 1989. The original letter had a heavier weight, with broad terminals and a large opening near the baseline. These new forms were too narrow. In Julian’s prime, typesetting machines dictated the design, and men like Goudy and Morison worked hard to meet the demands imposed by this increased level of production. Their work began on simple graph paper, and from there traveled from metal to type and from type back to paper. Yet times had changed; as Julian grew, the art form grew away from him. New fonts, new versions of old fonts, all lacked those elements formerly associated with type—lead, tin, antimony. The digital designer worked with spirits, two-dimensional phantoms stored on magnetic tape. No punches. No files. Unreal.
Press F6 to erase.

Julian sighed, touching the screen. Balls of white packing material clung to the plastic console. A flimsy instruction manual stood open to page 4. The woman on the customer service line had been very helpful, in a patronizing sort of way. Sir? The blue button on the back? No, not there. One over. There ya go! Slumping in his chair, he stared at the receiver, waiting for her to call back, to feed him the commands one at a time. The phone was a vintage rotary dial with a top-mounted cradle. Julian loved the old shit. The circuits never went bad. The great innovations of the last quarter-century seemed designed to function only under a given set of circumstances. Each configuration of hard drive versus OS versus application versus program versus installation was a unique phenomenon—essential today, junk tomorrow. Learning the software wasn’t good enough. You had to stay plugged in, addicted to the vibe. It was all too much for an old man. Sheer incompetence blocked his ambition, hiding the dream. The goal was too remote. Toward the end of his life, Julian imagined twenty-six unborn letters, monster shapes lurking in the mist. An alphabet-in-the-making. There were other types with other names—Caslon, Fournier—but Candace was different because it was his mother’s name, and after Julian was gone, there would be no other way to remember her except for this.

The phone rang. Two round bells mounted on tiny pins clanged together, making an awful noise. He jumped, looked over his shoulder, then smoothed his hair and picked up the line.

“Jules, T. Kenneth West here. How’re the rednecks treating you?”

“Hello, sir. I’m fine. And how might yourself be?”

“Well, Jules, actually we’re in a bind, which is why I thought I’d give you a try.”

“Well, all right now.”

“How’d you feel about pitching a contract to Cam Pee later this afternoon? You don’t have to say yes or no. If you can just give me an answer within the next ten minutes.”

“I don’t know the person.”

“Cam Pee’s the CEO of Living Arrangements. They’re a regional chain of mid-to-low-end retail establishments. They’re looking to spread out, go zone-wide, hit the rest of the Great Lakes. They need a new print campaign, something snappy, something poppy, something hip and now. I figured maybe you could throw something together.”

“Well, now. I seem to recall a prior commitment—”

“Don’t answer yes or no!”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Just let me know within the next nine minutes and we’ll get going.”

“All right. I’ll wait, then.”

“It really would be a big help, Julian. Naturally, we’d pay you under the table.”

“Well, I don’t need much.”

“Oh, that’s great. You’re considering it. You’re neither saying yes or no. This is good news. ’Cause I’ll tell you, Jules, if not for you, I gotta go to Gray Hollows, and we both know what a pain in the ass he is.”

“I don’t recollect the name.”

“Sure you do. Gray Hollows. He was here when you were here. A real smart aleck. My frustration level is at an all-time high. We need you back.”

“Oh, well, now you’re trying to talk me up, sir.”

“Not at all. You were a coup for us. I need to hire more New Yorkers. This town’s a wasteland. Look—I’m looking out the window. Nothing! Okay: a car.”

“I like it, myself.”

“Two hours, max. This is free money, Julian.”

“Well . . .”

“No! You’re right! Just think about it. I’m going to hang up. This conversation needs to end at this point. To say another word would be to disrupt the delicate balance between forces much too subtle to describe.”

“Mmmnnnnallrightsir.”

“I’ll only say this. You should neither consider the words
yes
or
no
with respect to this issue until the proper length of time has passed. Which would be about eight minutes from now.”

“Mmmwell, you have a pleasant day then.”

Julian hung up just as the bell sounded in the entryway. Hurrying downstairs, he told himself to slow down. At his age, he’d earned the right to take his time. Still, he couldn’t help it; he didn’t like to keep anyone waiting. The unpacked boxes in the living room throbbed blue and red as his pulse pressed against the backs of his eyes. He slid from the bottom step and skated on slippered feet into the foyer. Two women were standing on the front porch. One was nearly as tall as Julian, and she wore round sunglasses that made her face look like a skull. The other was petite, pretty; she stood apart, drifting toward the edge of the porch. He opened the door and stepped aside.

“Brother sir, good day.” The tall woman spoke in a solemn voice, using inflections that seemed unnatural to her. “My name is Lydia Tree and this is my friend Donna Skye. That’s Skye with an
e.
”

“With an
e,
” he repeated tonelessly, staring at the woman’s hair. Her assertive coif—blond and stiff—recalled an elaborate headdress.

“I understand that in your culture,” she said, “names are determined by a spiritual leader who blesses the newborn with an iron brand.”

“That a fact?”

“Welcome to the community!” She seized his hand and pumped it twice. Her skin was cold and hard, like a wet rock. “Are you a first-time homeowner?”

“Well, I’ve been a renter most of my life.”

“Ah, yes.” She turned and looked at her friend, who was standing on the lawn, nudging an orange leaf with her shoe. “The impoverished tenement houses. Tattered laundry blowing in the breeze. Elevated trains running at all hours of the night.” Patting Julian’s arm, she peered into the house over the top of her glasses. “May we come in?”

He nodded and led them past stacks of unopened shipping crates, tables and chairs wrapped in clear furniture bags. He felt oddly out of place—a squatter in his own house. Apologizing for the mess, he made a few trips around the living room with a small plastic broom, then found a pair of cement pedestals for the ladies to sit on. Fleeing to the kitchen, he opened the freezer and pulled out an ice tray, twisting it, making the cubes pop. Returning to his guests, he handed the ladies two iced teas and a plate of cheese and crackers.
Damn!
Forgot the knife.
Go back?
No, later.

“This tea is positively charming,” Lydia said, smacking her lips. “Did you grind the leaves yourself? No, of course you didn’t. How absurd. I’m just making conversation.” Glaring, she tipped back in her seat; the rest of the room seemed to lean behind her. “The reason, sir, why we’ve come here today is because we need some information.”

“Information?”

“Donna, perhaps you’d—?”

“Oh, Lydia.” The other woman fiddled with her glass, watching the liquid slosh and settle.

“Donna is writing a book.”

“She’s exaggerating.”

“How can you exaggerate you’re writing a book? Either you are or you aren’t.”

“Lydia
thinks
I’m writing a book. I never said—”

“Discussions were made vis-à-vis ‘Do we do this thing?’ and the answer you gave me was yes.”

Julian let the ladies argue for a while, then asked, “What sort of a book are you writing, madam?”

“Oh. Well. Hmm.” Donna blushed, stirring her drink. “It’s not really a book.
If
I write it. I don’t know.”

Lydia broke in. “It’s a collection of motivational lore. A sprawling compendium examining the belief systems of many cultures from many different lands.” Her hands flashed, pitching the words. “Their varied heritage. Their spiritual convictions. Their rough-hewn ways of life. I’m just stringing words together. This is a broad overview of the sort of thing you can expect.”

“I always wanted to write a book.”

Lydia slapped her partner’s leg. “There! That’s what we want!”

“Ma’am?” he asked, wanting to take it back—whatever it was.

“ ‘I always wanted to write a book.’ See, Donna, that’s your lead-off sentence. The black man in America. His noble courage. Sweating over a factory job fourteen hours a day. Picture his children.”

“One child, actually.”

“Naked. Swinging from a fire escape.”

“A girl. Emily. Course, she ain’t so little anymore.”

“This is perfect. This is exactly what we’re looking for.”

Julian reached out to pick up the cheese, but it had glommed onto the plate, so he set the whole thing back down, plate and cheese and crackers too, a nice fan of twenty, the top one broken but the rest okay.

“I don’t know that I’d be all that useful to you ladies.”

“Nonsense,” said Lydia, turning to her friend. “Now, Donna, you ask the questions.”

Donna stopped playing with her drink. “Oh, gee, uh . . .”

Lydia snapped her fingers, three regular beats. This is the tempo, darling. “Age, birthdate, middle name.”

Trying to be helpful, Julian offered, “I was born in 1936.”

“Ah.” Lydia brightened, hearing a hook. “Near the height of the Depression!”

“Not really,” Donna moped. “Depression was early thirties, wasn’t it?”

“Near the height,
near
the height.” Lydia huffed on her sunglasses and wiped the lenses with her sleeve. “It’s gotta be at the very top, otherwise it’s no good?”

Boots sounded in the hallway—slow, even strides. A young man appeared in the corridor, adjusting the clasp of a canvas tool belt. His faded denims looked rugged, and his flannel shirt hung open to show his bare chest. The ladies stared; their heads banged together as they both reached for a cracker.

“Hello? Mr. . . . Mason?” The man read Julian’s name from a yellow notepad and knocked on the wall. “I’m the electrician,” he said, scanning the floor. “Door was open so I came in. You want me to check the wires upstairs?”

“Oh. Oh, yes!” Julian’s slippers slapped against his heels as he crossed the room. “No, not upstairs. I mean yes—upstairs, but all the way upstairs.” He pointed at the ceiling, feeling silly. “My office is in the attic.”

The young man brought out a huge screwdriver and cocked the shank. “I’ll find it,” he said, then continued up the steps. The ladies watched him go. Tipping her drink, Lydia cupped her hand around her friend’s ear and whispered, “How’d you like to put
that
in your mouth?”

Julian returned to his guests, eager to speak after the lengthy preamble, and so he talked about his childhood, the wartime factories, his mother and the other women, the bomb builders, the celebrations after Nagasaki and the subsequent rush to buy property, but by the time he got to the fifties, he noticed that several minutes had gone by without an interruption, and so he stopped, waiting for a sign, a show of interest.

“Excuse me,” Donna said, coming out of a daze, “what was that?”

“When I was living in Boston.” He broke a cracker in half. Dust sprayed across his lap. “That was when I was working in the shipyards.”

“Before that.”

“Ma’am?”

“What did you say before that?”

“Before I moved to Boston?”

“I wasn’t listening to any of it.”

He coughed. “Oh. All right. Boston came right after Detroit— would’ve been about ’52 . . .” He pointed at different spots on the wall. The places, mapped out. “Before that you’d have to go all the way back to Pittsburgh, which was where I grew up.”

“Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.” Donna spoke the words slowly, making the place sound exotic, Polynesian.

“That’s the one. We lived there for several years, back when my father was out fighting in the Pacific.”

“And he was . . . ?” She frowned, needing more. “Killed in the service?”

“No, he came back after the war and worked in the auto industry for another twenty years before he passed on.”

“Damn.” She sucked in her cheeks. “This isn’t really . . . dismal enough, is it Lydia?”

“It’s coming, Donna. I can feel it.” Lydia clapped her hands, resetting the scene. “So: Boston, 1952.”

Julian straightened in his seat. “Yes, so I went to Boston and got a job working on the docks. I lived in a one-room place down by the water. Just me and a little coil to make sandwiches on.”

“Describe the coil,” Lydia said, closing her eyes.

“Uh . . .” He made a shape with his hands. “Little thing . . .”

“Okay, okay.” She swished her drink, spilling some of it. “Just give us the nuts and bolts, and we’ll take it from there.”

He thought about that, the nuts and bolts, wondered what to say next—the essentials, okay, just the bare statistics, leave out the details, the old heating coil, the way the melted cheese dripped onto the hot part, then sizzled and turned black, and the taste of the sandwiches, always a little charred, the same thing each day, getting up at five a.m. for a quick breakfast, the harbor visible through his broken and barred window, the sounds outside, the bells, the bang-bang of the boats in the shipyard where he worked along with a thousand or so dockhands— mean guys, liked to fight, no harm intended but you might get a busted nose, and he recalled how they passed the time, painting dirty pictures over the hulls before covering them up with gray primer, and the funny accents of the beat cops, a constant menace, old Boston rednecks striding the boardwalk,
Hey, nig-gah, why doan you go hoam ahn take ah
nahp?,
streets overrun with drunks and pissed sailors, and the bar on the first floor of his building where they’d patched a blown window with a red-and-black dartboard—window was round too, you see, so the dart-board filled the hole perfectly, and motorists would drive by and try to hit the target, thump thump, darts dropping to the pavement at all hours of the day and night, particularly between two and four in the morning when he worked on his drawings, his letters, designs of his own invention, and once a month he would send them home to his mother in lieu of money—ha ha, Julian very funny, but he told her that one day he was going to join a foundry where great men still developed new alphabets—not
new
alphabets but new ways of drawing the old ones—and his mother said that if he wanted to do that with his life then he must be someone special, which he believed at the time, but then she died and the decades passed, and little happened after that: some money made, but nothing permanent or particularly important.