Amateurs (16 page)

“I didn't
lie.
I'm not sure I've ever touched one before. My ex had one, but I get tired of referring to him.”

“Although you just did—the band he used to be in and all.”

“But that seems less about him than the bike seat,” she said. “I never saw him as a legit musician; it never seemed to
come out
of him, you know, or maybe I just can't remember when it seemed that way. But he was, I don't know, into
things.
”

“A materialist.”

“In limited areas. He was—well, the line between connoisseur-ship and consumerism gets blurry for most of us, right? With him the distinction seemed nonexistent. He was always digging up arcane objects of desire, making them seem hidden and cultish and timeless, and then I'd come to see that he just had a good spot in line for some broadening niche market.” She worried for a moment that, while critiquing Jason, she was unwittingly critiquing Lucas. “Not to knock your bike saddle,” she said. “It really is pretty.”

“A friend of mine has a Tumblr devoted to pictures of them.”

“You're joking.”

“Not really, no. He's the guy who built my bike”—he gestured toward the porch—“Archer's old roommate. He'll be at the wedding.”

“I'll get the Tumblr URL straight from the source, then,” she said. “Anyway, I'm trying not to talk about him, my ex, trying not to define myself against what I used to be.” She rubbed her jaw. “For a few years in my twenties I was an actor. Years after I stopped doing it, I'd still find myself at parties saying, ‘I used to act,' ‘I used to be involved in theater.' It had only been seven, eight shows.”

Lucas held a blink as he nodded. “You miss it?”

“I don't, which is funny because for a while it seemed so all-consuming.”

After a short lull, he said, “I'm in sort of a funny mood.” He seemed content, at first, to leave it at that, then confided that his mother was asking him for money.

“She's having financial problems?”

“In a way, yeah. Although the money she's asking for is money I borrowed.” He rubbed his right forearm. Karyn wondered if there was a connection between his apparent carpal tunnel and that Jessica Rabbit site. “I had this idea,” he said, “forever I had this dream of making reusable grocery bags.”

“All right.” She hoped she wasn't registering foreknowledge. Then again, her ignorance might imply apathy. She thought about her life's ungoogled names; these were people about whom she truly gave not one fuck.

“Yeah, I even tried to get Archer to invest.”

“Really?”

“Not interested. Things kind of languished,” he said, “but when I lost my job, I went for it.” Karyn overrode a smile when Lucas revealed the name, but the venture became less of a joke as she took in his enthusiasm, his pride in the bags' construction (“incredibly sturdy”) and design (“there's one with tigers”). There was a shakiness to his voice that seemed to admit failure but not defeat. He had turned his chair to face her, and she noticed again how the corner of his lip sometimes curled upward when he talked, a gentle tic more than an Elvislike sneer, as endearing as a missed belt loop. “So I borrowed ten grand from my mom,” he said, “who doesn't have much money, almost none. I should never have asked her, but I was so confident I'd make it back.”

“Sure.”

“Yeah, so: had the bags manufactured, hired a friend to build a website, did some SEO. Only, by the time we were ready to roll, reusable grocery bags were the new T-shirt, like people were constantly getting them for free.”

“Right, right.”

He took a deep breath through his nose.

“I'll buy some of your bags,” she said. “If you still have any.”

“I do. I made five thousand of them, so I should have, let's see, just under five thousand of 'em in the basement. My mom's basement.”

“I'd probably want a marginally smaller quantity.”

“Up to you.” He changed the subject: “Have you been gardening a lot?”

“Garnering a lot of what?”

“No, gardening. I like your profile photo, with the gloves and all.”

“Oh, right,” she said. That photo was now sullied by its association with the systems consultant, but she thought that changing one's profile photo too often looked self-absorbed. “No, not much, not this week.”

“I was thinking that, if you want, I could make some mixes for the trip.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“What kind of music do you like?”

“Oh, different kinds.” She felt like a kid, answering a question like that. “I feel like a kid,” she blurted.

“What?”

“I like a little of everything, or everything from A to, I don't know, L. Lately I've been listening to British folkie stuff: Incredible String Band, Sandy Denny, Pentangle.”

He waved a hand over his head. “I guess I don't mean ‘over my head,' just that I haven't heard of those people.”

“I know them mainly through—” She stopped herself from mentioning her ex yet again. The String Band project grew naturally out of her divorce because it was Jason who had exposed her to the group. It was the sort of music he listened to in college with his set of fellow geology majors, high-testing, tentative neo-pagans or, in campus parlance, “cloak people,” though maybe that designation was for less tentative types. Some of the soundtrack from her marriage was too painful to return to, but Jason's British hippie folk had taken the opposite course; she embraced it only after he and roughly half of his records were gone. The String Band's music was full of the dichotomies she loved—earthy/ethereal, local/ecumenical, plus the usual sublime/ridiculous—and their songs affected her more than any had since she was a teenager. They were “songs as empathy evacuation engines,” as Rae Armantrout put it. Karyn looked at Lucas and restarted: “It's been an obsession because, well”—so far she'd told only Maxwell about her project—“I've
been writing a play about a woman who's part of a group a lot like the Incredible String Band.”

“A playwright! Like Yeats.”

“Yes, I recall our common expertise in Yeatsian dramaturgy. I guess it's a play—it is, but it started with me just acting, escaping into this, I don't know, this kind of dreamy, forestlike world.”

“Forestlike?”

“Nothing takes place in a forest, but it
feels
like a forest.”

“Like
Midsummer Night's Dream
?”

“Well, I might prefer to lower the bar of comparison. But I loved it, loved acting the stuff out. When I said I didn't miss acting, I really meant that I don't miss it now, 'cause I've been doing it, but for myself.”

He was listening with a hard-to-come-by attentiveness.

“And the world of the play had all this mystery and melancholy and romance that I could disappear into; it would sort of overcome me, so that even though I knew I was making everything up—I'm not crazy—it felt like there were outside agencies at work.”

“Like in a holodeck?”

She didn't know what that meant. “Maybe,” she said.

“It sounds great—seriously,” he said. “I've been—this isn't at all the same as what you're talking about, but I've been imagining this—let me backspin: I've been having trouble reading lately, okay, like the only thing I can concentrate on are these obsolete travel guides the previous tenant left in my closet.”

“I can see those being addictive, though. A friend of mine has an amazing collection of nineteenth-century Baedekers.” Why had she said that? It wasn't true, though she'd once read an essay by a man who collected old Baedekers.

“These are from, like, ten, fifteen years ago,” he said. “A whole box of them, which is strange 'cause I don't see how anyone living in my shitty apartment could have such extensive travel plans. I've been picturing this wanderluster—is that a word?”

“I think.”

“Yeah, who's so ashamed of how badly he wants to travel and how little he can afford to that he hides
Exploring Rome '95
like it's
Barely Legal.
”

“What's
Barely Legal
?”

“Oh, well, it's a pornographic magazine with an emphasis on—”

“Little joke; I figured it out.”

“Oh. Yeah, so for me it's less a box of old travel guides than it is an epic quest novel or something, with this pathetic, thwarted hero.”

“Schmodysseus. Sorry, that was awful.”

“No, I'm laughing on the inside,” he said. “I guess I didn't tell you, but I was once in an MFA program for fiction.”

“Oh,” she said, surprised.

He named the school; she hadn't heard of it. “It wasn't quite the right—I didn't graduate. Back when I was in Philly I wrote a story, really a pretty good one, about a prison guard. It came in a rush, you know, four days in the ‘zone' or whatever. So kind of as a lark I sent it off to a couple programs. Well, six. One took me. I wasn't all that literary, to be straight with you; I mean, I read books.”

“Travel guides.”

“Yeah, and the investigative pieces in
Barely Legal.
But I wasn't a—what do they always say readers are? Copious? A copious reader?”

“That's for
notes
,” she said. “Copious notes.”

“Right.”

She suggested
avid.

“Yeah, an avid reader.”

“Or voracious.”

“I wasn't that either. Kind of stupidly, I thought that gave me an edge, like when Tea Party candidates get all,
Vote for me 'cause I have no political experience and what's more I despise the very idea of political experience.
”

“Right.”

“But I hated everyone in the program. Not
hated,
not everyone. Sara—the one who worked for Archer?—I came to like her. She was in some ways the biggest pill in my class, but also the best, the best person. We lived together awhile.”

“You hadn't mentioned that.”

“Not boyfriend-girlfriend,” he said. “I'd love to read your play, though. I don't have much background reading plays, but I'm good at giving notes.”

“I'm sure you are, but I'm not really looking for that. I don't have ambitions to see the play produced or anything.”

“Hey, that's cool.”

She swallowed audibly.

“So maybe,” he said, “you can bring some of your Ultimate String Band on the trip, and I'll make my mixtapes.”

“I don't have a tape deck in my car.”

“I mean ‘tape' like how we ‘dial' and ‘hang up' cell phones. I'll keep 'em clean on account of Maxwell.”

“It doesn't matter; he's heard it all—most of it.”

“I'm mainly into hip-hop, if that's cool. Some R & B and EDM, a bit of jazz.”

“He'll love that. He's gotten into”—she thought for a moment—“sorry, who's the fat rapper who died?”

“Big Pun?”

“More famous than that.”

“Notorious B.I.G.?” He seemed horrified that she hadn't summoned the name. She was glad she hadn't asked him to explain what EDM stood for.

“Yes, of course,” she said. “He came around a few years after I stopped paying attention.”

When he reached an index finger under his glasses to pull an eyelash, his eyelid made a little kissing sound. “Gemma wanted me to
DJ the wedding party,” he said. “But I sold all my equipment a few months ago.”

“You had turntables and all that.”

“Yeah, two 1200s. It was almost my job back in the day. I was never a technical wizard, but I was good at moving the crowd, you know, giving them what they wanted without necessarily giving them what they thought they wanted, 'cause maybe the song they want most is one they've never heard before.” A presumably nostalgic smile passed over him. “It's an amazing feeling, getting people to dance, watching them adjust to the next record, like if I'd done my beat-matching properly so the kicks and snares were locked, but maybe there's some dissonance in the rest of the music, some tension that hypes people up for a few measures. Which is kind of what grabbed me when I was writing that first story, about the guard. It wasn't totally autobiographical, but still the narrator and I blurred and overlapped in a way that was, like, seamless but uncomfortable, so it was like a good cross-fade.”

“I've felt that onstage,” she said. “I've felt it working on this play.”

His eyebrows were black and peaked like the adhesive corners used by scrapbookers. He raised them. “Will you send it to me?”

“Okay.”

“Though, actually, could you print it out? I don't have any paper at home, and I hate reading on a computer.”

“Paper can have a nice decelerating effect,” she said.

“Is this just regular water? It's good.”

“Yeah, just tap.”

“I knew a girl who—you could pour three different kinds of water, like tap and different kinds of bottled, and she'd be able to identify which was which every time.”

“Maybe I'll print that play.”

“Perfect.”

May 2006