The Enthusiast (7 page)

“Is there something we can put in instead?”

She nodded. “I have some penguins I can move up.”

That night Rensselaer called me at my motel and said he was quitting. I said, “How's Arnold taking it?”

“Really well. I said I'd stay long enough to finish the issue and he said to stay the fuck out of the building.”

I told Rensselaer I'd been thinking of quitting too. “It's up to you,” he said. “I think he's bringing a guy in from
Nine-Hole Golfer
. I feel bad about this, but, yeah, you might want to push on.”

“Do you know where you're going?”

“A daily paper in Ellis. The, hold on, ‘The Award-Nominated Voice of the Tri-County Valley.' I'll be doing state politics.”

“That sounds good.”

“Yeah. If you want, there's a guy I can talk to at
Ultra Running
. It's in Nevada.”

The next day I told Cerise I was quitting and asked if I could leave her the negatives of Wendy Probst's throws and keep the prints. She said okay. I took a bus back to Clayton and walked into the office at 4:00
P.M.
The receptionist looked alarmed and said, “Henry, you don't want to go—”

It was too late. Dobey came out of the inner office with a half-crumpled page proof in his hand and yelled, “You little
shit!
You have the nerve to come
back
here?”

“What?” I said. “Wait, what—”

He backed me toward the door, holding up the proof of the L.A. story. The noun
motherfucker
jumped out. I'd somehow put the unedited Chief Boy R.D. interview into type.

“This was on
plates
!” he said, backing me into the hall. “The
press
was turned on! The
truck
was waiting!”

“It was a mistake,” I said. “On the computer. I sent the wrong—”

“I
know
what you did! Let's take what Arnold built up from printing eviction notices and piss it away! It'll be
funny
!”

“No. I'm sorry. It was—”

“I
live
here! I have to walk down the
street
here!”

I almost fell down the stairs, but I caught the railing and held on to it while he told me never to show my face there again. He did such a good job of yelling that he became the hectoring voice in my head for years to come—not Dad or Barney or Freddy Krueger, from my childhood, but the Popeye whose smeary invitations were the third choice of wedding planners even in Clayton.

When he finally went back to his office, I went outside and sat on a bus bench. Jillian found me there and said, “We would have caught it. He swooped in and read it first.”

“Hi,” I said.

“How long are you in town for?”

“I'm not sure yet. I have to find a job.”

“You can stay at Megan's a few days. She's in Kenya.”

We went to the bottomless-pasta place on Meader with the five friends, but I was too shaken by Dobey to eat, and it took Scott and Jeff to beat the house edge. Megan's apartment was filled with foreign fashion magazines and watercolors of her dress designs. I fed her cats, Housebrand and Co-Pay, and then opened the closet to hang up my jacket.

Masking-taped to the inside of the door were ten Polaroids of Jillian modeling clothes Megan had made. It was a designer's portfolio, ranging from benefit-dinner dresses to I'm-dinner lingerie. A lot of women, posing in the latter, would have looked down with a bashful grin or affected homicidal ennui like the pros, but Jillian's face, a clear sky, said, “Sex, I know. We're so lucky to have bodies that can do this.” The pictures in the dresses said she didn't need a tertiary town at all, that she could move to New York or L.A. and be in charge there in a week. I got my camera out, took a picture of each picture, jerked off in the shower, got yelled at by Dobey for it, and tried to sleep.

 

R
ensselaer called his friend at
Ultra Running
and faxed him my spring break and low buggier stories. They hired me at a lower salary than I'd been making at
Kite Buggy
but promised me first dibs on review shoes in my size.

The day before I left town I called Steve and asked him to
meet me for dinner at the Hotel Clayton. He said yes, though he sounded wary. I was a little nervous myself. We'd been avoiding each other since I'd walked in on him and Jillian at Riddenhauer's.

I spent the day dealing with U-Haul, U-Store-It, and Massey's Used Furniture, till I owned only what I'd brought to Clayton plus a purple towel and enough money to last till my first paycheck in Nevada. While Steve and I waited for our soup, I spread the photos of Wendy Probst's throws on the table.

“Wow,” he said. “Are those knitted?”

“Crocheted,” I said. “You sell your work in art galleries, right?”

“Houseware galleries. But I know those people, yeah.”

I gave him the pictures and Wendy's phone number, and said the gallery people might have to explain to her why they were calling. Putting the photos in his pocket, he paused and said, “Is that what you wanted to see me about?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I'm leaving town.”

He nodded. “I'm looking at that myself.”

An hour later I met Jillian outside the bus station and got her to go in and buy my ticket from my ex-neighbor. When she held it out to me, I pulled her in and kissed her. She pulled away and said, “Henry ‘Hank,'” like I was full of zany surprises. I took a seat on the bus and watched her recede through the window.

 

I
stayed at
Ultra Running
three months, then did ten weeks at
Row!
magazine, “The Coxswain That Comes in Your Mailbox,” in Swint, Massachusetts, and moved on from there, associate-editing my way across the country. I never stayed anywhere long, and I was the civilian at every magazine I worked for. At
Ice Climbing
I was the only staff member who still had all ten
toes, and at
Metal Detector Treasures
I was the only one without twenty rings on his fingers.

I kept calling Barney, and he kept being distant. The towns were small and slow, but they weren't Clayton. Maybe it had been the river air there, or the borrowed friends, or just the fact that it was my first real town, but I couldn't duplicate it any more than I could Jillian or Gerald. They all went in my loss column, along with Barney's blessing and the late-boyhood dream of saving Dad.

On the plus side, being in the enthusiasm business let me see people being happy, doing what their bumper stickers said they'd rather be doing, what they braked for. For a long time I was able to coast in the wake of that happiness. Winning the prize for biggest geode or scariest wipeout changed their faces, and I was there, writing down the shop talk of the work that's not for money. It was a country of fevers, and I only had to deal with the harmless ones.

A
year after I left Clayton, Mom called to tell me that Barney was engaged to a woman he'd met at the University of Kansas. He had a grant there, folding proteins in his computer and researching stem cells.

“Her name's Deirdre,” Mom said. “They're coming here next month. Maybe you could come then too.”

I said yes and started looking for a Fun Fare. I was a little nervous about seeing Barney, but the conditions were probably as good as they were going to get. He and his girlfriend would be floating on sex and wedding plans, he'd want her to see what a model son and brother he was, and maybe she'd have a gentling effect on him. I pictured a cute Midwestern girl with a great laugh. With luck, she and I would be making affectionate fun of him before the weekend was over.

I landed in the afternoon and passed the Controlled Dynamics buildings on my way from the airport. An Internet startup was in there now, and the parking lot was full of cars on a Saturday, supposedly a buy sign for a company's stock. The Valleycrest Mall had come back to life too, but Dad was still working at the salad bar in Altadena. He was home alone when I got there, and we sat in the living room with beers and Cheese Nips.

“I do every aspect,” he said. “I chop. I clean the sneeze guards. I'm physically dead afterward. You forget what that's like.” He pressed himself back into his chair as if there'd never be enough sitting down. I thought of apologizing for leaving Troup, but I'd done that before and he'd waved it off. I let Sergio Mendes on the stereo fill the silence.

Barney and Deirdre arrived just as Mom got home from putting in fan palms at the Internet startup. Deirdre was pretty but sterner-looking than I'd imagined, with pale skin, long brown hair, a gray turtleneck, and a mossy-looking floor-length skirt. Barney had changed his style of clothes again, to scratchy forest colors and drawstrings, in line with hers. We shook hands, his new self clashing with the old foyer. He didn't smile at me but gave a little nod, as if the handshake needed certifying.

Mom squeezed Deirdre's hand and gave her a welcoming smile but said she needed a shower before she hugged anyone. She made an exception for Dad, though, and when they embraced I saw them locate the aches from the day's work and press closer together to ease them. They hadn't done that when he was corporate.

Mom came back from the shower in long pants and a shirt with buttons, dressy for her. Deirdre helped her with dinner and asked her about the succulents outside while Barney told Dad about his work, a tangle of biochemical talk. For a minute
I thought Dad was moved by the exciting things Barney was doing, but then I realized that what I saw on his face was nostalgia for being baffled by the scientists he'd managed.

We went into the dining alcove for quesadillas and a big bowl of work Dad had brought home. Barney passed it to me. When he'd left for college I was the family champ at reading him, but now I couldn't tell if the look he gave me over the bowl meant “It's your fault this is what Dad's doing” or just “Here's the salad. Try not to drop it.”

Deirdre was an anthropology major specializing in folk myths and a mover in university causes—divestment, T.A. salaries, soy ink. She'd grown up in Kansas, and this was her first trip to California. “That was kind of scary, all that housing and stuff coming here from the airport,” she said. “You can't believe there are enough people to fill it up.”

“It's a crazy scale,” Barney said. “You have to get away from here to realize it.”

“All the people we went past were like, ‘Look at my body, look at my car,'” Deirdre said.

“I always thought that was nice, when I came out here,” Dad said. “It was like you have to have a car and a body anyway, so they might as well be colorful.”

“Oh,” Deirdre said. “That's kind of neat, when you see it that way. The ornamentation. Barney said you work at a salad place?”

“Just for now,” Dad said.

“That sounds good, though. Making salads for people, and then you see the results of it right away.”

“It's just temporary,” Dad said. He was getting the transit look, and Mom jumped in, asking Barney and Deirdre how they'd met.

“A guy was lying down on my car,” Barney said.

“They were protesting the stem cell work,” Deirdre said. “A group called Fundament House.”

“I was just standing there, but Deirdre came over and started talking to him.”

“I just said, ‘Okay, you're doing civil disobedience for what you believe in. Let's value that, but let's look at what's at stake here.'”

“She actually debated with him. I never—”

“No, you got into it too,” Deirdre said. “When he said, ‘Life is sacred,' you said, ‘Exactly.'”

“I said one word.”

“Yeah, but it was the right word.”

Barney, loved, gave a little smile and shrug. Deirdre leaned her head on his shoulder and he kissed her hair. I'd always thought he would marry a fellow scientist, but she made sense. His work and her causes were going to fix the world. It didn't matter if their ideas went over ninety-nine out of a hundred heads, as long as their own heads stayed huddled together the way they were right now.

I wanted to have that with someone too, someone who'd come through the door like Deirdre and say, “Thanks, little California family, I'll take him from here.” I hadn't met anyone since Jillian, but I hadn't looked much, either. At my recent jobs I'd spent most of my evenings at home. When your only tool is your ass, every problem looks like a couch.

 

I
got up early the next day and took some work out to the patio. Barney was there with a stack of printouts and a scientific calculator.

“How's it going?” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Hard.”

“I really like Deirdre,” I said.

He nodded. “I was spending all my time down at the cell level,” he said, tapping his printout. “There wasn't that much I was interested in up here before I got involved with her. Now I kind of commute between the two. I'm down to like sixty hours a week in the lab.”

“That's still a lot.”

“That's the other thing about her. She understands why I'm there so much. This could end up helping with all kinds of problems. You could grow heart tissue. You could have people who can only move their eyes now getting up and walking around.”

“That's great.”

“If it works. First you have to run through all the methods that don't work. There are a lot of those.” He rubbed his eyes.

“Tell me where you work now?”

“Ice Climbing.”

“What is that?”

I had a copy in my work bag. I handed it to him and he flipped through it, past the jargon, the
ONE BADASS CRAMPON
ads, and the beauty shots of climbers hanging off escarpments with the obligatory winter sunlight bouncing off the lens.

“People need a lot of stimulus now,” he said. “Going to the park and throwing the football around doesn't cut it anymore.”

“Not for some people, no.”

“Do you go out and do this with them?”

“They gave me a lesson.”

“How was that?”

“Okay. It was good.” Especially getting back to safety. “I probably won't stay there that long.”

He nodded. “I think I'm going to be in Kansas a while. I like
the people I'm working with. We might be getting somewhere on spinal cord injuries. And Deirdre and I are going to start trying for a baby.”

He closed the magazine and looked at the climber on the cover, a spinal cord injury waiting to happen, before handing it back to me. He hadn't brought up Dad and the sneeze guards, but waiting for it had put what felt like a weather front in my chest, and it was still there.

I put the
Ice Climbing
away and Barney went back to his calculator. He didn't stare at the backyard landscape anymore, so I did it for him.