How Happy to Be (17 page)

“Maddy?” he asks, standing in front of me, giving a let’s-go handclap.

“My name’s Max.”

“Perfect. I’m Philippe, the director. Has anyone told you about our little project here?” He punctuates “little” with a chummy grin, making sure I know there’s nothing little about any of this.

“Last gasp advertising?”

Philippe laughs phonetically, like an ESL student reading it off the page: “Ha! [beat] Ha! [beat] Ha!”

He gets serious. Philippe puts his hands on the armrests of my chair and boxes me in, face to face. His cellular implant dangles from one ear, swaying when he smiles.

“We think that what makes
The Daily
unique is that it’s all about words. Words and people. People and words. Do you get where I’m coming from?” He smiles.

“Mmm …”

“You create those words, and this commercial is a celebration of you, the wordsmith. Hell, I know I couldn’t do it!”

Hair and makeup murmur approvingly.

“I write about celebrities,” I tell him. “I think you could probably handle it.”

I’m the eleventh writer Philippe has filmed today.

“You dig Bird?” he asks.

“What did you just say?”

“You dig Bird, you know, Charlie Parker?” Let me just mention something: Philippe is not black. Marvin shoots me a don’t-freak-out look. I answer back with a can-you-motherfucking-believe-this? glance.

“Yes,” I say. “I’ve been known to dig some Bird.”

“Great! I’m going to play a little Bird, you’re going to sit in a chair, not unlike this one, and just move around, feel the music, let it flow through you, wordsmith!”

Philippe marches me through the office. Ad Sales, shiny in a new Armani suit, looks up from his cubicle, smirks, looks down. Up-Talking Heather hovers nearby.

In the corridor by the elevators, surrounded by white screens and lights on stork legs, I’m placed on a tall revolving chair, light monitors held up to my face like Meryl Streep being checked for plutonium in
Silkwood
. Philippe claps his hands together, jogs over to where I’m sitting, and puts his hands on my shoulders, gives them a shake. His hyperactivity is having a strange, inverse effect on me. I can feel my blood pressure dropping suddenly, a deep-sea plunge. “Are you ready for this?” Philippe shouts.

“No.”

“Great! Let’s rock ‘n’ roll, people!” Philippe claps again, and the Charlie Parker starts up. I sit in the chair stock-still, trying to breathe.

“Okay, Maddy, give me a whirl. To the left, to the left!”

I try to revolve, but the chair won’t move.

“The chair won’t move,” I mention.

“Cut!” Bird is silenced. A minion whisks me away while Philippe pushes and tugs the disagreeable chair. I walk toward a table of Oreos and ice water, where I am swiftly intercepted by makeup lady.

“Watch the lipstick. Don’t drink any water,” she tells me. “No time for touch-ups.”

“Maddy! Can you come back over here, honey?” Philippe leads me back to the chair.

“We have a problem,” he tells me. “The chair’s not spinning.”

“I know.”

“We’re going to have to improvise. I need you just to move your body, just twist your body as if the chair is spinning.”

“Are you kidding?”

“And cue Bird, and ROLLING!”

I sit very still.

“Come on, Maddy! Turn! Turn!” I shift a little jerkily to the right, looking at the masking tape X above the camera lens.

“Other way, Maddy! Turn! Go! You’re a revolving chair! You’re a revolving chair!” My butt catches on the seat, but I make it over to the right, eye on the X. Philippe shouts, “Left! Left!” and I try to move as smoothly as possible, rotating herky-jerky on this not-rotating chair. “Centre! To the centre, Maddy!” screams Philippe and Charlie Parker is wailing and my heart is in my toes now – no, it really feels like it might have stopped altogether, just kind of pushed out through the bottom of my shoe. I close my eyes and shake my head to get it started again, like a self-winding watch.

“Nice! Very sexy, Maddy! Very sexy!”

And that’s when I fall off the chair.

Unbeknownst to me until this very minute, there is a nurse’s room in
The Daily
building. No nurse, of course, but there are some bandages and a fire extinguisher. It’s quite pleasant
in here, lying on a twin bed covered in a soft blanket, looking out a window that touches the branches of a tree. A tree. I had no idea there was a tree in the vicinity of
The Daily
.

Marvin sits on a chair in the corner with a laptop, clicking and chatting breathlessly, outlining his strategy for when we get laid off. Marvin is talking about taking his winnings to Spain and writing a tell-all about the inner workings of
The Daily
.

“Do you think anyone would want to read that?” I ask him. “No one even reads the paper. Why would they want to know more about the thing they’re already not interested in?”

As soon as I say it, I regret it. Marvin’s eyes fall. I’m snappy because of his certainty. He has somehow managed to come up with a plan, even a bad plan made while shopping for parachute suits and gathering phone numbers for meaningless sexual encounters. I should be proud that he truly adores his life. Where is my joy for other people? For people I love, even?

“I’m sorry, Marvin. It’s a good idea,” I say, and that’s enough. He perks up, smiles, goes into detail about the beach in Spain, how the wine there is cheaper than bus fare.

Marvin’s phone rings. He picks up, makes some sounds, and hands it to me with an apologetic wince.

“Maxime?” It’s the Editor.

I put on my weakest voice. “Yes?” I cough.

“Are you feeling any better? I understand you’re in the infirmary.” She says in-fir-
mary
, and I don’t even think that’s British pronunciation.

“I fainted.”

“I understand that,” she says, and it occurs to me that the Editor never says “I know,” just “I understand,” a nod, perhaps, to the complexities of our profession, or a fear of libel. And yet, when I think of her rushing in all directions, pointy face slicing through doorways, she is one of the least understanding people I’ve met.

“We have an issue, however, with the deadline on the
Vogue
piece,” she says. She could have said “pubic hair” piece, as it’s an article about how the new issue of
Vogue
includes a spread of several celebrities looking tufty in low-waisted jeans.

“What time is it?” I ask her.

“Two-thirty. Are you well enough to get it to me by four? I wouldn’t ask, but news wants to flag it on the banner, and they need to know …” She trails off, and I wonder if she’s a bit ashamed that she might be compromising my health for an article of this particular scope.

I cough again, with purpose, and then say, “I’ll do it.” I’m not sure why. Not doing it would be a nice red mark in my file, the kind of thing that might spur a lay off, and Marvin – who covers television, after all – assures me BFD-TV and Baby Baron are drawing up papers as we speak. But maybe I have retained some modicum of pride about my writing. Maybe not working is scarier than this simulacrum of work. Maybe I’m the prisoner in the Sydney jail, carving her name in the stone.

Marvin hands me his laptop and I log into my work file. I already spent a half-hour on the article this morning, so I’ve gathered quotes from a pair of academics interpreting pubic hair’s historical meaning, and one comment from a fashion
director in Canada.
Vogue
won’t return the calls of
The Daily
. It takes me twelve minutes to complete the piece, but I won’t send it until exactly four o’clock. Until then, I’ll sleep, which I need to do suddenly, my eyes closing as I type the final period.

Marvin removes the computer from my hands and turns out the light.

“I fainted last week,” I tell the doctor. She nods, tightening the grip of the blood pressure cuff. “And I’m tired. Really tired.”

“How are your periods? Regular?”

“Absolutely never,” I tell her.

“Any concern you might be pregnant?”

“Absolutely always. Why does everyone keep asking me that?” I ask.

“Who else asked?”

“The makeup lady.” Doctor doesn’t want details. She asks questions, scribbling hard in her file, questions about sleep and diet and exercise. We agree all of the above are good ideas.

“Drugs? Alcohol?”

“Are you offering?”

Doctor isn’t much for smiling.

“How much do you drink in a week?”

“I’m in the dark green pie,” I tell her. “I’m over the limit.”

“Drinking can affect your periods. It can also affect your mood, and your life in general.”

She hands me the same green brochure, the one from the door, italicized letters “Evaluate
Your
Drinking,” and a Dixie cup to pee in.

“Have you thought about what you’ll do if you are pregnant?” she asks.

Sure. I don’t think there’s a woman alive who hasn’t run through every single what-if scenario, moved the pieces around and back again a hundred times, playing mommy like you did as a kid.

I’ve thought about a Downsy baby born somewhere in my forties, when I’m alone and unemployed, and how the two of us will move into a shelter and I will carry our belongings in a plastic shopping bag down to the food bank for white bread and Kraft peanut butter handouts. I’ve thought about abortion, fetal sacs sucked out of my stomach with bicycle pumps. I’ve thought about adoption and whether I’d hire a detective to find a baby I might have handed over years ago, a wrapped package in pink that grew human limbs like mine.

I’ve thought about it, flipping through pregnancy books for no reason, thought about how I wouldn’t know how to change diapers, or what to do with the unceasing cry, and who would I ask about this stuff, when it’s just me and my turkey-baster baby living in the same apartment I’m in now, Marvin the donor dropping by every other Sunday, stale with last night’s club sweat.

I’ve thought about being married to a brilliant, beautiful man who’s off making gobs of ethical money all day long to line the nest, a Frank Lloyd Wright nest on a drizzly Pacific Coast where I write children’s books and eat brown rice and tofu and lie on my polished hardwood floors with teddy bears and the perfect silky baby kicking on her quilt. The father will take me in his arms and say, You’re a great mother,
Max. (Because everyone’s life is lived in anticipation of the great love. No one says, She died without the great love. They say, She had it, fleetingly, and she lost it, or tragedy struck before it came to life, or she came close, and was too stubborn to recognize it, dressed up like it was in that stupid outfit. But everyone wakes up because of the great love. The vibration sets us off each morning, one sock at a time, homing toward it.)

Pregnancy and motherhood are separate states to me somehow, bordered with explosives. When my period is late, sometimes I’ll take an Aspirin and think, Is this the thing that’s going to make a hypothetical fetus blind, or flippered, or sad? The condom breaks and there it is: my small, angry AIDS baby. I join support groups and appear on television, bags under my eyes, AIDS baby sleeping (a lot) in a papoose while I rage against the injustices of underfunding for MWAB (Mothers With AIDS Babies).

But I can’t picture anything real. When I try, here in the doctor’s office, to conjure up an image of myself with a child, my own arms holding my own child in my own apartment in my own city, I come up with white space and static. I do not know how motherhood looks.

“I’ve thought about it,” I tell the doctor and she doesn’t ask anything else.

Sunera once did something so bad that she lied about it in her journal. She opened to a blank page and wrote: “Regular Tuesday. Not much happened.” But in fact, that very day in
grade twelve, she stole an exam, a biology exam that had haunted her, kept her up at night, churning. She couldn’t keep track of the names of the grasshopper parts, the butterfly larvae, the transformative bugs with all their legs and antennae and plush organs. The diagrams overwhelmed her. She did practice tests with her father: he drew the grasshopper in his perfect draughtsman’s hand, trained as a cartographer in the Indian military, made perfectly straight lines for her to fill in. She wrote: Hind leg. Belly button. He was not amused, gave her a whack on the ear that sent her reeling.

So she was angry, and she stole the exam, and she did better than she would have because of it, and she won a scholarship to university. She told me – and she hasn’t told many – that this was the day her life changed because she tasted what she was capable of, and it made her strangely fearless. She didn’t feel guilty, she says, almost empowered. And yet she just couldn’t write it down in her journal – “Regular Tuesday. Not much happened.”

“Why do you think you didn’t write it down?” I asked, even though I knew.

“Why do you think?” she asked back.

I remembered a course I’d taken at university on the Bible. I was nineteen and I had never read the Bible before. The professor would say the name Yahweh over and over, slightly pious. All semester he said it and every time he did it conjured two images in my head: a bloody, rotten corpse nailed to a cross, howling; and a kid chewing gum on one side of his mouth, making that sound, “Yahweh, Yahweh, Yahweh!”

“Because of The Word, I guess,” I said. “Because of God.”

Sunera smiled small, but she never answered.

So here’s what I can’t admit yet, here’s my stolen bug test.

Early in the festival, I hit one of those nights when nobody’s picking up and I called Theo McArdle and he wasn’t picking up, which meant, in my imagination, that he was busy changing his mind about me.

Sunera was pretending to work all night and I couldn’t even get Marvin and when you can’t get Marvin on the line you begin to wonder if something went out somewhere, if someone reached up and unplugged a satellite. I put on music from the Nineties and tried to bounce around up and down just me and the leather couch, a one-person Nirvana moshpit (these were the moments in which I used to read), and then I danced past the newspaper and I saw the date, and I did the number thing, the thing I did when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, calculating really fast the days and weeks and minutes from when my mom died, or the amount of time until her next birthday, or the age she’d be if she hadn’t died, and I could see that two days had passed since the twenty-seventh anniversary of her death. I didn’t even have to get out a pen and paper for that calculation. So I drank a glass (or three) of wine until there was just enough in me that the wine started pulling, wanting to be close to its own kind, and I started feeling dangerous. I took my longing to the College Street corner where media brides in high heels
tottered through the slush, past thick red ropes blocking the movie theatre where some film festival thing had the street all backed up with limos and cabs and cameras sweeping their lights back and forth so it all looked like ship lights underwater. I was wading through this, arms up to ward off body blows, and I spotted Ad Sales, huddled by the entrance of a Portuguese bakery. Bad magic, the crowd parted and there he was, tassel shoes soaked in the snow, smoking a cigarette, a window of dusty plastic birthday cakes his backdrop. The thing with him is that from the ankles up, he’s damn cute, in a Ben Affleck, alcohol-swollen, super-het way and I was feeling generous.