Amateurs (17 page)

Despite having come within fourteen months of earning an MFA in creative writing, Lucas's policy vis-à-vis literary journals, with three remembered exceptions, was the standard one: he didn't read them. He wasn't among those writers, often alluded to with bridled pique in editorial guidelines, who submit to journals they haven't bothered to so much as skim, because he had never submitted his stories for publication. He hadn't even saved them, a notable renunciation in that he saved lots of nonessential things—old issues of the
Source,
broken handheld video games, two deutschmarks, punch cards for sandwich shops in cities he probably wouldn't return to—and for that matter he had made and kept PDF files of his fellow MFA candidates' manuscripts, not for their Fisher-Price stories and novel excerpts but for his own discursive annotations. He put in more effort on those annotations than he did on his fiction. For a time he even thought they could be mined for a book, something like
Pale Fire
meets
Friends,
in which the story of a romantically entangled, endlessly treacherous writing workshop is told through the annotations of its most discerning participant. The project never advanced past this germinal stage.

It was during his aborted graduate studies that he found two back issues of
Granta
in a professor's please-take box, setting up the sequential second of the three above-mentioned exceptions regarding literary journals. About eight years earlier he had read the
Paris Review
interview with William Faulkner and had wedged one of its cussed and oracular quotes into a high school term paper (“above and beyond,” commended the teacher, who ostensibly didn't detect that Lucas's knowledge of
The Sound and the Fury
's late and late-middle pages stemmed from a yellow-jacketed secondary source).

So, in the spring of '06, when he started to read an essay in the fourth issue of an instantly influential journal out of New York, his immersion was a breakthrough of sorts. He and Gemma had been
browsing the stacks at McNally Jackson after dinner. He'd gotten signals that they might sleep together that night for old times' sake, as he thought of it, though only a few months had passed since the start of their friendship era. He had picked up the journal at random. Its table of contents was austere save for a tiny, unaccountable drawing of a porcupine. It took him a moment to place Archer's name. Lucas's old MFA peers stayed safely under the radar, so it was unprecedented for him to run across a piece in print whose seed, as it were, he had witnessed; it was additionally coincidental that earlier that day he had been allowed to work from home, which mostly entailed watching pornography while avoiding work, or daydreaming about Gemma while avoiding pornography. When away from the computer, he had assumed positions he hoped to be in later that night, murmuring sweet and dirty things, then with tentative transsexualism he had assumed positions he hoped Gemma would be in, at one point inserting an extraordinarily lifelike Dr. Knox dildo, complete with testicles, into his mouth. He had two tangerines with lunch, and his spine tingled when he freed them from their red net, remembering the time that Gemma, on all fours, had let him tear her old fishnets . . . then kissing her thighs, nibbling her pelvis, the first fingertip of wetness. He couldn't imagine meeting another woman with whom he was so sexually compatible and to whom he was so attracted. It wasn't reasonable, he knew, to think he was permanently spoiled for all others, but all the same that's what he thought.

He had been able to sustain such a consuming state of lust, compulsion, pleasure, and anxiety throughout the day in part because, though he had masturbated liberally, he hadn't done so to orgasm. He would get himself as hard as he could, sometimes sucking in his stomach to check his profile in the mirror, then, on the edge of coming, he'd zip himself back into his jeans, wait until he shrank to a nub, and repeat. The idea was to arrive at Gemma's apartment with as large a store of pent-up arousal as possible. The hazard in this,
he conceded, was that he might arrive overeager and selfish, with a stockpile of porny demands or unarticulated porny fantasies or various signs of pornographic derangement. A gamble.

Still, with the benefit of hindsight, he wished that he had elected to masturbate to orgasm three hours before the date, so that he might stand here now with his libido relaxed but rejuvenating. Instead, when he made it to the bookstore's magazine racks, he was nervous, suffering from some bladder discomfort, and determined to give up porn again for good. At least during work hours. It seemed that Archer, besides sharing interests and concerns in this arena, had experience, too, with creative-writing pedagogy, or had at least taken one workshop at his “elite university,” probably unnamed to shroud the identities of his peers and professor, though it was just the species of falsely modest, feebly tantalizing discretion that would come automatically to Archer. Of course, Lucas was looking for bones to pick; from his perspective, the essay's paramount defect was its failure to be completely hateful. The story about the aunt's panties? Fucking hilarious!

He was about five pages in when he felt Gemma's hand on his arm. He turned to look at her. Exciting to have her face so close to his again. He remembered the third or fourth time they met, by chance at a festival in Fort Greene Park, how on seeing each other they couldn't decide whether to shake hands or risk a hug (they were both seeing other people at the time), how there was this drawn-out moment when he was staring down at their waffling hands, at her hips in her turquoise shirtdress, how erotic their closeness seemed.

After checking the contributors' notes—the relevant bio was pretentiously spare: “Archer Bondarenko lives in New York City”—he put the magazine back on the rack. He vowed not to mention the essay to Gemma.

As they were leaving the store, he said, “Remember that blow-hard Canadian we met with Sara and John last year? Super rich.”

“Sure. Hunter, is it?”

“Archer.”

“The vanguardist of wanker studies.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I didn't think he was a blowhard.”

“Either way, he did write that essay.”

“Did he?” She stopped on the sidewalk. “Is that what you were reading?”

“Skimming.”

“Well, you have to buy it.”

“It was like fourteen bucks.”

“Oh you horrid skinflint.”

She turned back toward the store, made the purchase, and they set off again for her apartment, his fingers spidering her thigh on the subway, their hands slowly coming together, though one of hers held the journal, over which she sometimes piercingly chuckled. The sex was by no means bad and was sometimes, despite Lucas's over-plotting, inventive and surprising (he was forced to consider that Gemma had already learned new tricks since their breakup). But it was bound to disappoint; he'd built it up too much, imagining a fizzy endnote rather than a moody epilogue. It didn't help that during the day he had literally rubbed himself raw. His postcoital sadness was pronounced—he more or less mewled into Gemma's neck as he lay on top of her, stroking her hair—and he grew sadder when he thought of how uncommon that had been when they were together, his postcoital norm having been starry happiness, gratitude, and take-out burritos.

He thought that would be the end of them altogether, but within a week they were able to talk again in an easy, friendly way, not untouched on his side by longing but not fraught with it. In the past he'd been partial to clean breaks, but this time that prospect seemed depressing and proved unnecessary. As the months progressed, Gemma considerately didn't fill him in on her love life, but he knew
things were happening, and somewhere around that time, he later learned, she sent Archer what must have been an entertaining and enticing fan letter.

June 2011

Without taking off his bag, John reached into the unzipped pocket that held his scavenged balls, pulled out a dirty pink one, and underhanded it onto the fourth hole's fairway, where it fell with a tap. Often after he'd served George his Heath bar, cleared the table, and filled the dishwasher, he would sneak on the course for three or four twilit holes. He was always alone, though every so often he would see groups finishing the front nine in the distance, and frequently there'd be activity in one of the yards that bled into the course: someone covering a pool or setting up a sprinkler, teenagers laughing around a patio table. Once in a while he'd chat with the bald greenskeeper, who always asked after Mr. Crennel and never reported John to the country club's high officials.

He took the tasseled knit cover off the three-wood and dropped it on the grass. The clubs were high-end Pings from the mideighties, George's last set, finally regripped this spring for John's nonarthritic hands. He raised his arm and let a few blades of grass slip from his fingers to gauge the lilac breeze (Beaufort scale three), then lined up, rocking in place, narrowly pendulating the club before taking his shot. After practicing a sloping putt on the seventh green, he walked back to the pond that took in wayward shots from the fifth and sixth holes. Scanning the shore, he spotted a ball whose retrieval called for little wading. He sat down, took off his spiked spectators, the kind with the fringed leather flap over the laces, then his over-the-calf argyle socks, and rolled up his khakis, strict reproductions of those issued to American servicemen during World War II. With each roll he pulled the cloth taut against his leg and smoothed out the new
cuff. A minute later he was back in the same spot by the pond, picking grass from his wet skin, studying a wart that looked like the nub of glue that blocks an Elmer's cap. He reached for the towel he kept clipped to his bag and carefully dried the ball and his feet. The grass felt cool on his palms when he leaned back to take in the scene, the willows swaying like those
Fantasia
mops (or maybe it was brooms), the clouds showing a touch of medium-rare pink.

He liked it here, liked Lammermuir's rolling lawns and black-topped esses, the sound of tired acorns when he drove his Oldsmobile (formerly George's) up the driveway in fall. True, he wasn't where he had once hoped to be, but he didn't feel chagrined by his station, or he felt that way only sometimes, every so often when he was kneeling to mark a customer's cuff, when George called him Beau Brummell or Fancy Dan, when Archer posted photos online, taken at some chic gala for poor people or bees, or snapped on a lido's sun-dappled deck, reconstructed Neolithic pile dwellings and rows of pear trees flowering like steam clouds in the background. John sometimes wished the peak times from what remained his deepest friendship had been documented and made public: the time the black bear visited John and Archer's campsite, the time Archer introduced John as “the only man I know who can speak with equal authority on vests and vector fields,” the party where they almost met the guy from LCD Soundsystem. Mostly, though, John had learned not to dwell on the past, not to let those best times circle in his brain like the Empire Today jingle. He saw his period of world-beating ambition as anomalous rather than unfulfilled, beyond the range of his ability, out of true with his inborn indifference to money and status. His high school dreams of becoming a serious mathematician now seemed as irrational as the square root of two, but when he thought of them, he was amused more than ashamed.

He stood up, brushed off the seat of his khakis, and turned toward home. A wide lane led from the fourth hole to a field split
between country-club property and the Hansons' lawn, which George still called the Wrightsons' lawn. John crossed the field, then crossed a narrow, unlined road to the rotting wooden bridge at the foot of George's driveway. The creek under the bridge: trickling; the driveway: steep, winding. The door to the right of the two-car garage entered into a long mudroom paved with smooth maroon bricks, where John took off his shoes and leaned his bag in an alcove tidily crowded with work boots, sweat-browned tennis visors, grass-stained golf tees, giant umbrellas. The mudroom also held a washer and dryer (laundry was another of the duties for which John received room and board and a small salary), a folding table, a freezer, and, on the opposite wall, a long shelf, above which was a squishy red vinyl frame that held a half-dozen snapshots, including one of Sara as a beginning skier, her fringed yellow scarf hanging below her puffy jacket.

He passed through the kitchen and the dining room, little more than a wide hallway since the late-fifties addition of the now nostalgically named family room, in which George was dozing through a documentary about Nostradamus. There was a fat-legged dining table in the center of the busy room, and a set of bamboo furniture spread out along the room's edges. Although for years a pall had hung over parts of the house, over the unused living room, the underlit study with its obsolete exercise bike and taxidermal big game, over the shelves of forgotten bestsellers and the pink-tiled shower that still held one of Mrs. Crennel's hairnets—although the pall was obvious to the point of staginess, there were other parts of the house, such as John's little bedroom (“el cuartito,” in George's coinage) and the big family room, now filled with a portentous chord, that retained a kind of pastel contentment, all chirping sparrows and distant diving boards, snow-drooped branches and wafts of fresh-cut grass. Of course, those are all things you hear, see, or smell through windows, but in a way a room directs its windows.