Соавторы: Katrina Onstad
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“Do they care about the weather? It’s indoors, isn’t it?” He touched her hair. She reached up and took his hand.
“We should get ready.”
“Whatever you need.”
Ana dropped his hand, deciding that not holding it was what she needed.
She was surprised to have been invited to the wedding. Sarah and Marcus were new friends. The four of them were tentative around one another still, counting on the wine to pull them through.
James followed Ana through the church gardens. She stooped to pick up a half-empty McDonald’s cup of Coke. James watched her: her foot popping ever so slightly out of the arch of those black shoes that looked like ballet slippers. He didn’t think about her beauty, but her lightness, the sense of upward motion in her body at all times, the ever-present possibility that she might bend her knees, push off, and float up and away from him.
“Just leave it.”
“It’s too pretty here for all this garbage.”
This wasn’t true. Ana was projecting a month into the future, when the famous gardens would be in bloom. At the time she received the referral, she had been pleased that the doctor’s office was so close to the church, picturing bougainvillea and tulips bracketing each visit. But her timing had been off. Their first appointment had been in winter, when snow blanketed the grounds. Now the gardens were just dirt beds, thawing, and the grass was patchy, defeated. And they wouldn’t be back for the bougainvillea. They were done. Ana carried the cup in front of her, arm straight, thumb and pointer finger just skimming the rim, the other fingers curled into her palm like a TV dad confronting his first dirty diaper.
Ana deposited the cup in a garbage bin. Following, James glanced over the bin’s edge. Soda everywhere, soaking old newspapers and fried chicken bones and dog shit and a single needle.
He walked behind her to the parking lot. He knew that he cried too easily, and the crying acted like a defenseman’s shoulder check, sent her flying. But still he hoped, just a little, that she might break. Then he could be wonderful.
“Give me a second,” he said.
Ana sat in the car while James lit a cigarette, leaning on the hood, frowning. In the sky, a flag appeared. Wind must have loosed it from a pole, and now it flapped above James’s head, moving closer, as if preparing to drop and cover him. And then the flag revealed itself to be, in fact, a flock of birds, diving down in a solid, waving page.
He flicked his cigarette butt into the garden.
In the car, Ana had a small white mint in her hand. As she held it out to him, James remembered all the women who had held out a hand to him over the years, uncurling a palm to reveal a joint, an ecstasy tab, a condom, a ZIP drive.
“Let’s go,” said Ana.
* * *
At 2:47, a sound, deep and dark. A moan, gathering strength as it awoke, fattening into a full scream.
James got up first, running down the hall in his boxer shorts, turning on lights, trying to flood it out. Ana was behind, walking quickly, arms around her torso.
“Finny, Finny,” said James. He could hear him but not see him, his eyes scanning the room, the empty bed, the quilt on the ground. And then he saw the boy, limp and piled in a corner on the floor, his head next to a bookshelf. The sound had returned to a moan by then, gaining momentum, like a police car getting closer.
“Finny,” said James. He gathered him up off the floor. His body softened in James’s arms.
The moan became a whimper, and then the whimper silenced.
Ana put the quilt on the bed and turned back the top in a triangle.
Slowly, James placed Finn on the bed. Instantly, the boy flopped toward him, hands up, the moan returned. James sat on the bed, rubbed his hand along Finn’s back, feeling his spine through the thin material of the borrowed pajamas. The boy quieted again, his breathing slowed.
James felt like he knew exactly what Finn was seeing, because he was seeing it, too: the wall coming toward him, the stupid thump of bodies on a dashboard, the shattered glass. Or maybe it was just a kid’s monster, a purple one with bony knees. Finn didn’t have the language. There was no way in.
“I’m going to stay here for a while,” James whispered.
Ana nodded, useless again. She straightened the cushions on the floor surrounding the bed, then left them alone.
Finn ran up ahead of James, stopping at the fence enclosing the playground. James glanced down at the piece of paper in his hand with the address on it and then up at the sign: FAMILY PLACE DAYCARE. He had walked by the gray stone building, a former elementary school, many times and never considered who was inside. So Finn was changing the city for him, too. James remembered that when he finally bought a car, auto body shops seemed to suddenly spring up everywhere, tucked between the buildings in the neighborhood where he lived, previously unneeded and therefore invisible.
Early in the morning, when the sun was just rising and Ana and Finn still lay sleeping in their separate rooms, James had walked to Sarah and Marcus’s. He had a key, and implicit permission, but a neighbor appeared immediately on her porch next door, peering at him. They had met before—James remembered that she was a teacher, like Sarah, and Marcus complained that while she was going through her divorce, she whaled on some kind of brass instrument at all hours of the night. The neighbor informed him that she was looking after the cat (There was a cat! thought James, stung by all he couldn’t remember) and had put a lamp on a timer. “I suppose you’ll be taking care of the rest,” she said.
James nodded weakly.
Inside, the one lamp made everything seem darker. James felt criminal. He couldn’t bear to look around. He would find the address of the daycare only and leave the rest to Ana. He tiptoed through the domestic scramble of dishes and strewn clothes. On the fridge he found a handwritten list of phone numbers: M at Work, M: cell, S: cell, Dr. Garfield, and Family Place Daycare. He took the paper, picturing himself on some future day carrying Finn, hot with fever, into the office of this Dr. Garfield.
Now, at the gate of the daycare, James looked around: So this was where Finn spent his three days a week away from Sarah.
“James open gate?” Finn called. The cheap black sneakers from the social worker looked gigantic and theoretical on his feet, an idea of sneakers sketched in a factory by someone who had never seen them.
Finn led James inside the building by the hand, toward a hook marked with the name FINN in a laminate square. Finn had already removed his red hoodie and dropped it on the floor, then his baseball hat, a breadcrumb trail behind him as he ran down the hallway in a race with a smaller black-haired girl. James was a beat behind, picking up after Finn, putting the coat and hat on the hook, walking quickly to keep up.
A woman did the same, collecting her daughter’s droppings. James glanced at her hair; it must have been a style at one point, but now it was just a shape, a rectangle. Her eyes were padded with exhaustion. James turned on a smile and tried to catch her eye, hoping to share a moment of parental chaos. But she looked straight ahead and strode away, putting distance between them.
The classroom was a whorl of sound, high-pitched. One wall was covered in paper plates painted different colors: some splattered, some entirely solid, one or two with just a brushstroke. James moved closer, scanning for Finn’s name like he would at a gallery opening.
“You must be with Finn,” said a voice next to him, a man with two gold hoops in his ears and a glowing bald head. He held out his hand: “I’m Bruce, one of the educators in the preschool room.”
“I’m James,” he said, surprised by the man’s strong grip. “Finn’s—” They looked at each other, waiting. “Guardian, I suppose.”
Bruce nodded knowingly and ushered James to the sink, out of range of the children.
“We heard what happened from the social worker, and we’re all so unbelievably, unbelievably sorry,” he said.
“Oh, I believe you’re sorry,” said James with an awkward laugh. He became glib when nervous. But Bruce was not the kind of person to be hindered by other people’s responses. He continued.
“I want you to know that I personally have taken a training seminar in children’s grief, and everyone is on alert,” said Bruce. “Sad to say, but it’s not the first time we’ve had a child lose a parent.” James glanced at the circle of kids sitting cross-legged on a blue carpet, eyes upon a young woman reading a book out loud: “Olivia likes to try on everything!” Their size was incompatible with Bruce’s admission; how could these children possibly contain such sadness? Where would it go?
“Where do you take that kind of seminar?” asked James. At the five-minute mark, he had learned that Bruce had a B.A. in social work, and an Early Childhood Education Certificate. He hated the caseload as a social worker and always wanted to run a daycare, but it’s unusual for men to work with children in this day and age with all the suspicion, and on and on and on.
Oh, how much people will share. James saw Bruce naked in animal form, snarling and crouched in waiting, praying to be asked to spring upright and grunt out a story.
“How is Sarah doing, anyway?” asked Bruce, laying a hand on James’s forearm.
James was struck by guilt: He had not been thinking of Sarah. He had considered the situation decided.
“We have to wait. The prognosis is still vague.”
Bruce nodded. “Just keep us informed.”
“Same here,” he said, gesturing toward Finn, who had separated himself from the circle of readers and was stacking plastic animals: a bear riding a tiger; a hippopotamus astride a dinosaur.
“I’d like to live in that world,” said James.
“Pardon me?”
“A world where a tiger gives a ride to a bear. You know, everyone helping one another out.” He was joking, but Bruce lit up.
“If only!” he said.
James turned to find Finn, anticipating his first public sendoff. But the boy was captivated by the stacking animals, frowning as each pair toppled.
Suddenly, Bruce let out a chirp: “You know, James, I remember you from TV, right? Aren’t you on TV?”
“I used to be.”
Bruce clapped his hands together.
“Ha! I knew it! You know, we have a lot of famous people at this daycare. Ruby’s mom wrote that cookbook, the one about organic baby food? And in the kindergarten room, there’s a little boy named Luke whose mom was in that miniseries, the one about the hockey wives?”
James clucked his interest, but he did not appreciate being in this particular lineup.
James leaned into Finn’s line of vision, tried to catch his attention. He felt Bruce watching as he blew him a kiss that went uncaught.
James crossed the street, glancing back at the daycare.
As he did at least once a week, James walked back to the TV station where he used to work and sat facing the building on his favorite bench. He thought of these visits as a kind of crime-scene reenactment, as if by going back again and again to the site of his firing, he could make sense of it. He lit a cigarette.
The day James got fired had not been the worst day of his life. He was as still as a man Tasered to the ground and he contemplated this calmness as Sly—his old friend, his boss—sat across from him, slick with sweat, panting, saying what they both knew was coming. “This kind of television isn’t resonating in our research.… It’s not you, we think the world of you, it’s the genre … the demographic … the economy … the Internet …”
James’s mind was a jumble of all the things that made this moment not so bad: the unwritten novel, the untapped potential, the upcoming summer.
He had suddenly thought of a parlor game he and Ana had played in the early years of their marriage. “Who are you? Four things only.” James, when he read aloud his own list, was always: “Husband, journalist, hockey player, future novelist.” He thought that listing his marital status first would flatter Ana, but she saw through it. When Ana did James, she put journalist first. But now what he had written had come true: He was mostly her husband.
Ana would know what to ask. Severance package. Legal loopholes. He got into her head, tried to emulate her thinking, as ordered as a plastic binder divided by tabs. James said some adult-sounding things, and Sly gave answers. Sly even lowered his accent to something kind of Cockney for the occasion, as if they were a couple of British coal miners at a union meeting in the Thatcher years. Then, when Sly had wrung out every cliché, he leaned in, as if about to go for a hug: “I’m so sorry, mate.” He reached out a hand. James thought: I’ve never heard him use the word “mate” in my life. He noticed that Sly’s hand was shaking, and he felt bad for him. James had never had a job that required him to fire anyone.
A thought crept into his head, surprisingly, of his old favorite childhood thing, the rock tumbler—and how he would sit for hours in his bedroom watching the rocks go up and down the tiny conveyor belt, growing smoother and more similar to one another—and then he thought of his wife, of Ana’s ass, particularly, turned toward him in bed. The first thing I will do is my wife. And the ass image faded to be replaced by a face, that of the intern Emma. Emma: a name no one used to have, but now there were three Emmas working on his show.
This Emma’s face in his head was all lips, red, which of course meant baboon ass, and soon James was thinking about the fact that he was an animal and marveling at how base it was to be a man, waking up his goaty longing.
It was Emma who brought in a stack of collapsed cardboard boxes.
“At my last job, they, like, escorted this guy from the building. They didn’t even let him take his pictures or turn off his computer,” she said, standing near the open door. Her voice was shrill, pointed. It corrupted a unique silkiness in her body.
James had nodded. He took a framed picture of Ana from the desk and put it into the empty box, facedown.
“So you know, they obviously like you here,” said Emma. She was wearing all black—black T-shirt, a tight black skirt, black boots. But she looked naked to James. He could barely stand to look at her, the curve of her breast, her dark skin. What was she? Was she black? Asian? Some modern hybrid.
If she knew what he was thinking, he’d be called a racist, on top of being a sexual harasser. It was as if, by being fired, he was able to see new shapes in the picture, to really look at this woman without the echoes of workplace propriety seminars and interoffice “plain language” memos. He felt like a priest who had been handed civilian clothes.
“I don’t think I’m unliked, I just feel—” James paused. “Obsolete.” Before the word was out, he realized he had potentially bricked a wall between them. It was a word that drew attention to his age, which was about fifteen years worse than hers. But the repulsion he anticipated didn’t happen: Instead, she made a clucking, aww-ing sound, like she was tickling Finn under his chin. Then she turned and shut the door, faced him again in the sealed room. She walked toward the desk, smoothing her skirt at her hips. It was a surprising gesture, and it amplified for James the sensation that, with his firing, a range of previously unthinkable things could now occur.
“Can I say something to you?” she asked. She was quite close to him, eye to eye, with only the desk between, at the level of her crotch.
A peep escaped James’s throat. He nodded.
“I really love what you do,” she said. He tried to smell her, but his nose was useless from smoking. “I think it’s really important. Like, seriously, no one else is going to do the stuff you do. That piece you did on the Inuit film collective? I totally loved that. I think they’re making a huge mistake.” She stepped back, shook her body a little, relieved to have unburdened herself.
James wanted to lean over, curve a finger, and say: Come here. He wanted to make her climb across the desk on her knees, put his hand between her legs. He wanted to shake her for her feeble attempts at consolation. He loathed her inexperience and her boots that were too pointy for walking. Then he loathed himself, too, the never-ending stream of hateful thoughts like these. A lifetime of images of women glorious and grotesque trotted beneath his eyelids, unfulfilled, ungrabbed hands and fists never inserted, things that occupied his mind, filled him up, kept him dumb. He wished she would leave.
“Thanks for saying that,” said James. She stood there, as if waiting for something.
James doubted she was waiting for the same thing he was. Without looking at the title, he pulled a book from the shelf and handed it to her.
“You should have this.” She flipped it this way and that, like she had never touched a book before.
“Thanks.” She held it out to him: “Could you write your number in there?” James hesitated: It was the phrasing. “Could” he? Well, he could. And so he did, his cell phone number in red ink, right on the title page, like an author’s autograph under the title: Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television. It was the first time he’d cracked its spine.
James had walked home with the box of books dragging down his arms, his back moaning. He had decided to carry the box because it was the first really, truly nice afternoon of the year, the kind of day when he would usually leave early anyway. He walked with purpose, wondering if anyone in the windows of the cubic building where he’d worked for years was watching him go. Perhaps there was someone standing at a revolving door, under the propaganda-size posters of the network’s news anchors, head shaking sadly: Glad it’s not me. James was almost certain this was not happening, but still, he couldn’t bring himself to look back.
When he was far away, and standing in a grassy area near the art college, he dropped the books and smoked a cigarette. Then he called Ana on his cell phone. He left a message: “It’s just me.”
James heaved the box back into his arms, felt the sweat at his forehead. He had not gotten fat yet, but it was coming. Oh, he was old, old, old. He still couldn’t fathom that he was forty-two. He felt seventeen, always, expected to see seventeen every single time he looked in the mirror.
The sweat trickled down his forehead, needled him in the eye. His arms weren’t free to rub so he squinted, shook his head. He deduced that he looked crazy. The students walked around him, giving him space.
He liked to cut through this campus, wondering if the art school girls mistook him for a hip young professor. Academia was one of the few professions where forty-two seemed relatively young, he thought. In television, even public television, it was ancient. Why did this suddenly come as a revelation to him? Why had he never prepared for this moment? It occurred to James that he might be in shock.
He put the box of books down on a bench and sat next to it, breathing heavily. A mother—squat, rigid with anger—walked by quickly, dragging a toddler by the wrist. Both of them were silent, the mother staring straight ahead and the boy blank, inert. They had just exited a fight and were moving fast through its plume. The boy wore a backpack with the tail of a lion poking out of the bottom.
James walked in the opposite direction from the pair, carrying his box through the fish gutter chaos of Chinatown. The crowds thickened and thinned as he passed McDonald’s and the hospital. A new organic chocolate store had opened up where a Chinese grocer had been.
James’s arms were aching by the time he reached the bottom of the street. He passed the two-in-one semidetached houses, his neighbors joined at the hips, with shared yards and little fences between.
He knew that Ana would be home soon, and he was pleased to see a parking space right in front of their lawn. Ana had taken the car to work so she could grocery shop after, and she would need a place to park.
The neighborhood was permit-only and in the throes of what James had labeled, in his letters to the city, a “parking crisis.” He had considered pitching a piece to his producers on the absurd parking situation in the city (There was no logic to it! No system! No grand vision!), but couldn’t figure out the right angle. And it was too blatantly antienvironment for Sly. Who had sympathy for drivers these days?
But James loved the car, a leased black Jetta. He wished it were here right now. He would get Ana to pack one of her wondrous picnic lunches with the white cloth napkins, a glass bowl of green grapes, her chicken sandwiches. He would drive her anywhere she wanted to go, out of the gridlock, maybe to Niagara Falls to look for barrels, suicides, get a drink in a horrible restaurant with gigantic plastic menus and cream sauce on everything.
This was, he realized, a memory from their twenties.
Suddenly, a silver SUV pulled into the space directly in front of James’s house, a space James presently thought of as Ana’s. Now where would she park?
James hated the silver SUV. It was a bully. The cars on the other side of the street had garages and no reason to take up perfectly good parking spaces that were meant to be used by those on James’s side of the street, where there were no garages, just small gardens backing on to other small gardens. But this particular guy—a loud, brickish Portuguese construction owner whom James called Chuckles to his friends—used his garage as a woodworking shop and cannery, and paid for permit parking (James had done some sneaking around the lane to figure this out). He had a large van, too, which often had two-by-fours sticking out the back, taking up even more spaces. All of this infuriated James, who loved rules when they worked to his advantage but was otherwise an anarchist. Ana had pointed out that he might be a libertarian, but James bristled, picturing people in mountains with war-painted faces arming themselves against immigrants.
Chuckles got out of the car, pulled up his pants over his hips. He had a Bluetooth clipped to his ear and was gesticulating, but James couldn’t make out the words. When James got closer, and Chuckles disappeared into his house across the street, James saw that, of course, he had taken up nearly three parking spaces, parking smack in the gravitational center between two cars, leaving emptiness on either end much too big to be acceptable, much too small for anything but motorcycles. Now Ana would probably have to park a block over, which meant it would take her longer to get back and comfort him, and also the extra walk with groceries would be hard for her after a long day.
James staggered up onto to his porch and dropped the box of books. He unlocked the door to the smell of cut lilies and last night’s olive oil. He threw his jacket on the ground. In the kitchen, he found a black marker and, in the recycling bin, an old photocopied flyer for a maid service. On the back of the flyer, he wrote:
WE HAVE A PARKING CRISIS ON THIS STREET. PLEASE RESPECT YOUR NEIGHBORS AND PARK NOSE TO TAIL—YOU ARE TAKING UP SEVERAL SPACES.
James wrote fast, wetting the paper, letting the ink leak through onto the countertop.
He paused.
YOU HAVE A GARAGE—WHY DON’T YOU USE IT, YOU FAT FUCK
He looked at the paper. More? He added punctuation:
YOU FAT FUCK!
James stood beside the car, humming profanity under his breath. He placed the note under the windshield wiper and went inside, sat on the white club chair facing the window, and waited. Soon, surprising himself, he fell into a deep sleep. When he woke up, darkness had come to the room. His cell phone beeped from somewhere. He had missed a call from Ana, who was on her way home. She had texted: Anything else from the store?
He looked out at the SUV, the flyer paper flapping in the breeze, and a deep pull of panic set in his stomach. No, no, no! In his stocking feet, he got up and ran to the door, down the stairs, looking both ways, wondering if the fat man would appear, or Ana, or—this was the worst image—both at the same time. Both of them, dots far away coming into focus, rolling in from two different directions: Ana’s puzzled face as the fat man pulls the paper off the car; Ana, looking up at James in the window as the fat man shows her his handwriting—
James grabbed the paper from the windshield and ran to the porch. But then he saw the box of books there, and remembered his day. He looked at the paper and tore off the bottom part, crumpling “YOU HAVE A GARAGE … YOU FAT FUCK!” and sticking that portion in his pocket. Then he walked back to the car, calmer now, and placed the rest of the note, the part he told himself was neighborly, on the windshield.
Then he went into the house and waited for his wife.
The firing didn’t seem to gut him today, James noticed. There wasn’t the same pleasurable pain in reliving it, and he left his bench.
At a café, James drank his second Americano of the day. Bruce had suggested that he update Finn’s enrollment, “considering the circumstances.” James felt like he was applying to grad school, filling in the sheaf of forms: phone numbers and work schedules, dietary restrictions, religious practices. He signed in the space marked “Parent/Guardian.” He circled the latter. Below his and Ana’s numbers, he put his mother’s as the emergency contact.
“Is there any information that would help us get to know your child better?” James considered writing: “Mother in a coma; father in a drawer.” He didn’t, but smiled at the possibility, then accepted the sorrow on the other side of the smile.
The door of the café opened, and a red stroller appeared. It stuck in the door, then jiggled this way and that until, finally, a seated young man clicked shut his laptop, pulled out his earbuds, and loped over to pull it through. A flushed woman on the other end thanked him, and then immediately behind her, another red stroller stuck in the doorway. The young guy pulled that one through, too, and accepted the thanks. And then, finally, a third one appeared, this time green. The women laughed loudly. Chairs scraped, and tables banged. James relinquished an extra chair. The young man packed up his laptop and left. When finally this swell of bodies settled, the room’s tininess had lost its charm. James was now wedged too close to the espresso machine, which stopped and started with a go-cart revving in his ear. He attempted to finish his papers while the women talked. There was such panic in their voices, such urgency, as if they had just had duct tape stripped from their mouths. It seemed to James that there was nothing linear in this talking, no distinguishing one voice from the other, no call and response, just call.
“The thing is, if you don’t want me in your store, then fine, I won’t go in your store—”
“Right, right—”
“But then, you don’t get my business—”
“Right, right—”
“And what is this contempt, then? Right? What’s the expectation?What are we supposed to do, stay in the goddamn house all day and watch the tampon channel? Like, sorry, I’m not—”
“Giving up everything—”
“Right. You’re the same person. You have a right to—”
“Theo says: ‘Just stay home.’ But what the hell does he know? I mean, he comes in at eight—”
“And he never gave up anything. He doesn’t know what it’s like. No one tells you what—”
Then, atop the symphony of exigency, a baby began to moan. Then another set free a wail. Soon, all three had shaken off their flannel blankets and uncoiled from their baskets to lie across their mothers’ bodies. The sounds of soothing were as loud as the babies’ cries. Plastic toys were shaken. Songs and murmurs. Breasts appeared from sweaters.
All those years that James had been in his office, women had been having this conversation. It came to him as a major revelation that the city was lived in all the hours of the day, and often not by him. He felt strangely left out, as if the city had been duplicitous, a disloyal friend. Borrowed. He had never really known it after all.
James put on his jacket and stepped into the day. The sidewalks were clean, crowded with sunlight.
James tried to imagine what Finn was doing at that moment. He knew there would be a nap at some point, and he liked that idea: all the little cots laid out on the floor, a shuttered room, dark and silent, in the middle of the workday. He felt a little envious of all they were permitted.
James walked until he was in the mall, which he had covered on the show once, gleefully, as a kind of Ellis Island of shopping. Turbans, saris, burkas, baseball caps backward on the heads of brown boys, their underwear waistbands exposed. A celebration of the interstice of commerce and immigration. Or something like that.
James headed toward the most expensive corner of the mall, a children’s store with fall displays: kids in rainboots with animal snouts on the toes; umbrellas resembling frogs. He grabbed a basket. After staring at the labels for several minutes, he realized that the child’s age determined the size. Finn was two and a half, so he piled size threes in the basket. James thought, Wouldn’t it be great if the size were still the age? Give me the forty-twos, please.
