American Innovations: Stories (2 page)

But one day I woke up and heard myself saying, I am a fork being used to eat cereal. I am not a spoon. I am a fork. And I can’t help people eat cereal any longer.

I judged my sentiment foolish, sure, but it captained me nevertheless. I laid no plan, but that afternoon I found myself saying to the managing partner, “I’m afraid I’ll need to tender my resignation.” I used that word, “tender.”

I could have rescinded all those words, of course.

But that night, after the tender word, I said to Boo, “I think I’m leaving my job.”

He set down his handheld technology.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll find some other work.”

“No, it’s really OK,” he said. “You don’t have to work at all. If you don’t want to. Or you could work at a bakery. Why not? You’ll figure it out. Under no time pressure, OK? I like my work. We can live from that.”

My husband is a pretty understanding guy; nevertheless, I found myself thinking of an old Japanese movie where the father gets stomach cancer but the family keep it a secret from him, and are all just very kind to him. “But you might wake up one day and not like your work anymore,” I said.

“That’s not going to happen to me,” he said. “I’m just not like that.” Then he added, “I could see you were unhappy. I could see that before you could. Honestly, I feel relieved.”

*   *   *

When the phone rings again—Unavailable—I pick it up right away. I had been so childish about not wanting to go look for the ring; I would tell Boo that I would go look for the ring, and then I would do that, I would go and look for it.

“Fifty-five minutes,” he says.

“I’m so sorry, I—”

“You said half an hour. It’s about expectations and promises. You don’t have to make these promises. But you do. You leave people expecting. Which is why you’re not just a loser working a shit job but also a really terrible person, the very worst kind, the kind who needs everyone to think she’s so nice. I never found you attractive. I never trusted you. You say, Yes, this, and I’m Sorry, that, and Oops, Really Sorry, and We Just Want to Do What Makes You Happy, but who falls for that? I don’t fall for it. I’m the one who sees who you really are—”

“I think you—”

“Why do you apologize and giggle all the time? To every guy the same thing. Why do you wear that silver leotard and that ridiculous eye shadow? Your breasts look uneven in that leotard. You know what you look like? You look like a whore. Not like an escort or a call girl. You look like a ten-dollar blow job. If you think you’re ever going to pass in this city as anything other than just one more whore-cunt—”

I hang up the phone.

I turn off the phone.

I pour myself a glass of water, but first I spill it and then I altogether drop it, and then I clean that up poorly. I don’t even own a silver leotard. Yet I had been called out by a small and omniscient God. I was going to be punished, and swiftly. I put on my husband’s boots and his raincoat, unintentionally creating a rubbery analogue of the clean and flat-chested look I have for years longed for. I left the apartment and headed out to the courtyard, a few blocks away; I wasn’t going to come back without that ring.

*   *   *

When I get to the courtyard, I see that it is not really a courtyard, but just some concrete and a few picnic tables at the windy base of the tallest building in the neighborhood. Thinking of it as a courtyard—I guess that was a fantasy on which my husband and I had subconsciously colluded. I do see something glinting in the midday sun; it proves to be a silvery gum wrapper. There’s not even a coin on the ground. Bear suit, I’m thinking. It starts to drizzle. Then I remember: doormen are more than just people one feels one has failed to entertain. If I were in a so-called courtyard, and I found a band of gold that didn’t belong to me—

Between the doorman and me, there at his desk, are two women. The women are dark-skinned; they are both wearing brown; they are wearing, I realize on delay, UPS uniforms. One of them is also wearing a fleecy brown vest. “The guy was totally whacked,” the vested one says.

I feel somewhat bad because I find I am staring at these women’s asses (I think of that word as the most gentle and affectionate of the options) and I feel somewhat good because both of the asses are so attractive, though they are quite different: one is juvenile and undemanding, and the other is unembarrassedly space-occupying and reminiscent somehow of gardening—of bending over and doing things. The pants are nicely tight-fitting. I do know that I—and really everyone—am not supposed to think this way about women, or for that matter about men, because, I guess the argument goes, it reduces people to containers of sexual possibility. But I’m not sure that’s quite what is going on. Maybe I just think these women have solved the getting dressed problem. “I think that was his friend,” one of them says, “writing down the license plate number of the truck.”

“Was someone bothering you guys?” I find myself interjecting. “This is a weirdly rough neighborhood. Even as it’s kind of a nice neighborhood, it’s also sort of a rough one—”

“Every neighborhood is rough today—”

“It’s iPhone day—”

The UPS women have turned and opened their circle to me.

“They’ve ordered two million iPhones—”

“Someone in my neighborhood already got stabbed over a delivery.”

“I hate phones,” I offer. “I really hate them.”

“There’s no Apple in Russia,” the doorman says. “You can sell the phones to a Russian for fourteen hundred dollars. You buy them for six hundred; you sell them for fourteen hundred.”

“Delivery must be terrifying,” I say to the women. “You never know what’s up with the person on the other side of the door. It’s like you knock on your own nightmare.”

“People love their iPhones,” the vested deliverywoman says. “My daughter says it’s like they would marry their iPhones.”

I keep not asking about Boo’s ring. “I’ve never seen a woman working UPS delivery before,” I say. “And now here you are—two of you at once. I feel like I’m seeing a unicorn. Or the Loch Ness monster. Maybe both, I guess.”

There’s a bit of a quiet then.

“They don’t normally travel in twos,” the doorman says. “It’s only because today is considered dangerous.”

“There’s at least a hundred of us,” the unvested woman says, shrugging.

“Not too many, but some.”

“Good luck,” the doorman is saying.

The women are walking away.

Now it’s just me and the doorman. I am back in the familiar world again. I feel compelled to hope that he finds me attractive, and I feel angry at him, as if he were responsible for that feeling, and I find myself unzipping my husband’s raincoat and pushing back the hood, like one of those monkeys whose ovulation is not concealed. I’m looking for, I imagine myself saying to this man, a wedding ring. Oh, he says, You’re all looking for rings.

There was no ring there. But you saw a unicorn today, I remind myself. That’s something. It’s all about keeping busy. We can just buy another ring. Why didn’t we think of that earlier? The old ring cost, maybe, three hundred dollars. We could buy a new one, nothing wrong with that, no need to think it means something it doesn’t, though it would mean something nice to have it again, I think to myself, as I find an appealing empty table in the back corner of a Peruvian chicken joint, where I order french fries. Some people save their marriages—not that our marriage needs saving, not that it’s in danger, one can’t be seduced by the semantically empty loss of a ring, I remind myself—by having adventures together. We could pull a heist. Me and Boo. Boo and … well, we’d have some Bonnie and Clyde–type name, just between ourselves. We could heist a UPS truck full of iPhones. On a rural delivery route. The guns wouldn’t need to be real, definitely not. We could then move to another country. An expensive and cold one where no one comes looking and where people leave their doors unlocked because wealth is distributed so equitably. This is not my kind of daydream, I think. This is not my sort of reverie. It is someone else’s. Maybe that’s fine. I was never a Walter Mitty myself. Though I consistently fell in love with and envied that type. But a Walter Mitty can’t be married to a Walter Mitty. It doesn’t work. There is a maximum allowance of one Walter Mitty per household. That’s just how it goes.

*   *   *

“Why is your phone off? Where were you?”

I guess hours have passed. Boo is back home. It’s dark out.

“I got scared,” I say. “I was getting scary phone calls. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

There’s opened mail on the table.

Boo says, “Look, I know there’s something important that you haven’t told me.”

My body seems to switch climates. It must be the unbreathing raincoat.

“I know you’re scared,” he is saying. “I know you’re scared of lots of things. I don’t want to catch you out. I’m tired of catching out. I don’t want to be a catcher-outer. I just want to be told. Just tell me the thing that you’ve been hiding from me. This could be a good day for us. You could tell me, and then I will feel like I can begin to trust you more again, because I’ll know you can tell me things even when it is scary and difficult to tell.”

I see that along with the mail, there is a shoebox full of my papers on the table. “I was just out,” I hear myself saying. Is this something to do with the guy calling for delivery? “I was just lonely in the house, and spooked, and so I went out,” I go on. “I had a salad. I guess various things happen in a day. I guess one can always share more. But I can’t think of anything I would call a secret.”

There is a long pause now. As if, I’m thinking, I’d made an awkward, outsize observation, like calling
him
the Loch Ness monster, or a unicorn. He is my unicorn, though. I forgot that I used to say that; that’s how I felt falling in love with him, as if I’d found a creature of myth. He was less practical then, more dreamy. He had an old belt with a little pony on it; the pony was always upside down.

“Please,” he says. “I’m asking as nicely as I can. Don’t you have something you want to say to me?”

“I went out and looked for the ring,” I say. “I wanted to tell you that. I didn’t find the ring. But I did look for it. We should just buy another one.”

“A severance check arrived for you,” he says. “Actually, I’ve found three of your severance checks.”

“That’s odd,” I am saying.

“None of them have been cashed, of course.”

The unicorn suddenly has a lot to say. Why couldn’t I just tell him that I was fired? he is saying. Or he is saying something like that. I really and truly and genuinely don’t know what he is talking about. I am saying that I said I resigned because I did resign. I really do remember using that word, “tender,” in offering my resignation. And there’s been a lot of misdirected mail lately, I say. Even misdirected calls. I have been meaning to mention that to him.

He is saying that lots of people lie, but why do I tell lies that don’t even help me? It’s just fucking weird, he is saying. Also something about the rent, and about health insurance. “And I don’t even really care that much about any of those things,” he says. “I just care that even when you’re in this room with me, you’re not here. Even when you’re here, you’re gone. You’re just in some la-la. Go back out the door and it’ll be just the same: you’re somewhere else and I’m here alone—”

I think this goes on for quite a while. Accusations. Analyses. I feel something like a kind of happiness, shy but arrived. A faint fleeting smile, in front of the firing squad. All my vague and shifting self-loathings are streamlining into brightly delineated wrongs. This particular trial—it feels so angular and specific. So lovable. At least lovable by me. Maybe I’m the dreamer in the relationship after all. Maybe I’m the man.

THE REGION OF UNLIKENESS

Some people would consider Jacob a physicist, others might say he’s a philosopher, or simply a “time expert,” but I tend to think of him in less reverent terms. Though not terms of hatred. Ilan used to call Jacob “my cousin from Outer Swabia.” That obscure little joke, which I heard Ilan make a number of times, probably without realizing how many times he’d made it before, always seemed to me to imply a distant blood relation between the two of them. I guess I had the sense (back then) that Jacob and Ilan were shirttail cousins of a kind. But later I came to believe, at least intermittently, that actually Ilan’s little phrase was both a misdirection and a sort of clue, one that hinted at an enormous secret, one that they’d never let me in on. Not a dully personal secret, like an affair or a small crime or, say, a missing testicle—but a scientific secret, that rare kind of secret that, in our current age, still manages to bend our knee.

I met Ilan and Jacob by chance. Sitting at the table next to mine in a small Moroccan coffee shop on the Upper West Side, they were discussing
Wuthering Heights
too loudly, having the kind of reference-laden conversation that unfortunately never fails to attract me. Jacob looked about forty-five; he was overweight, he was munching obsessively on these unappetizing green leaf-shaped cookies, and he kept saying “obviously.” Ilan was good-looking, and he said that the tragedy of Heathcliff was that he was essentially, on account of his lack of property rights, a woman. Jacob then extolled Catherine’s proclaiming, “I am Heathcliff.” Something about passion was said. And about digging up graves. And a bearded young man next to them moved to a more distant table. Jacob and Ilan talked on, unoffended, praising Brontë, and at some point Ilan added, “But since Jane Austen’s usually the token woman on university syllabi, it’s understandable if your average undergraduate has a hard time shaking the idea that women are half-wits, moved only by the terror that a man might not be as rich as he seems.”

Not necessarily warmly, I chimed in with something. Ilan laughed. Jacob refined Ilan’s statement to “straight women.” Then to straight women “in the Western tradition.” Then the three of us spoke for a long time. That hadn’t been my intention. But there was something about Ilan—manic, fragile, fidgety, womanizing (I imagined) Ilan—that was all at once like fancy coffee and bright-colored smutty flyers. He had a great deal to say, with a steady gaze into my eyes, about my reading the
New York Post
, which he interpreted as a sign of a highly satiric yet demotically moral intelligence. Jacob nodded. I let the flattery go straight to my heart, despite the fact that I didn’t read the
Post
; it had simply been left on my table by a previous customer. Ilan called
Post
writers naive Nabokovs. Yes, I said. The headline, I remember, read “Axis of Weasel.” Somehow this led to Jacob’s saying something vague about Proust, and violence, and perception.