The Future for Curious People: A Novel (12 page)

“Of course,” Madge says.

I nod, afraid to open my mouth.

“Okay, then,” Dr. A. Plotnik says, standing up and reaching out to commence another round of handshaking, Madge first, then me. “Hopefully I won’t need to see you again, and this will be our final visit. I wish you both the best of luck.” She turns quickly back to her desk, flipping through her appointment calendar, signaling an abrupt end to our meeting.

I shuffle quickly to the door, but Madge stops and says, “Thank you so much. And thank Dr. Plotnik for us, too. I really appreciate all of his time and effort on this relationship.”

Dr. A. Plotnik’s head whips around. She eyes Madge suspiciously. “His time and effort?”

“Yes,” Madge says, a little surprised by Dr. A. Plotnik’s tone. “He’s been really fantastic.”

“Well, isn’t that nice?” Dr. A. Plotnik says, and then she regards us very seriously. “Listen, I think you two have an excellent shot at true happiness. Work very, very hard on your sessions. Rarely do I see a couple with such potential.” She squints at us.

This catches me completely off-guard. “Thank you,” I say, giving a little nod. Me and Madge? We have rare potential? I’m embarrassed by my sudden hopefulness. I think back on the ultimate seating decision earlier. “We’re a good team,” I tell her.

But Madge is a little stiff. “Yes,” she says. That’s it, just
yes.

We walk out of the office, and shut the door behind us. We look at each other, but I’m pretty sure I’m looking more at her than she is at me.

“Did you hear that?” I say. “Rarely has she seen a couple with our potential.”

“Yes,” Madge says, “I heard her. It’s just that it sounded, well”—she lowers her voice—“hard to believe. Didn’t you think? I mean,
us
?”

I think about it. I look up toward the ceiling, replaying the moment in my head—Dr. A. Plotnik’s pinched eyes, the squirrel cheeks. I linger over the notion of Madge and me—rarely does Dr. A. Plotnik see a couple with this much potential? Do we really inspire that much hope? I’ve always thought of our relationship as one of those hidden gems. You know, the couple who might bicker some in public but that’s just a sign of how damn healthy and confident they are in their deeper bond. Outward signs of potential for the long haul, well, that’s not our thing. If I asked Amy and Bart and even Gunston if they thought we had real potential, would they say yes? Unlikely. Plus, Madge is good at reading people. She knows when they’re being just a little bit offish. There was a moment when I believed Dr. A. Plotnik, that brief moment, now barely a memory, when I believed that Madge and I were full of potential, when we were rarities in love.

“Maybe it was a little hard to believe,” I admit. “Maybe so.”

We walk down the hall toward the waiting room, but then Madge stops abruptly and turns to me. “ ‘
About four and a half moles, tops? It’s a small journal?’
I mean, what were you thinking? Moleskine journals aren’t made of actual moles.”

“That’s why it’s funny.” I shrug. “Or not.”

TH
AT NIGHT, I EMERGE
from the bathroom to find Madge standing on the mattress of our bed. She’s clutching Dr. A. Plotnik’s workbook (written by Dr. A. Plotnik), which she’d decided to read cover to cover before we did any of our sessions. This postponement was fine with me, as I’ve been dreading the sessions. I’m fairly sure we’ll have to look deeply into each other’s eyes, and I’m dead set against mandatory gazing.

“It’s right here,” Madge says. “It just hovers.”

“What’s right where?”

“That smell!”

“Oh, right. The death,” I say.

“It is death, isn’t it? This isn’t good, Godfrey. Death is hovering above our bed. The place we’re supposed to make love. Death!”

“I didn’t say it was good!”

“It’s worse than your identity crisis.”

“I thought it was an identity issue. When was it upgraded to a crisis?” I ask sarcastically but also a little alarmed. “I found my wallet, you know. I told you that.”

She flops onto the bed. “What are we going to do about it?”

“I think it might be a dead mouse.”

“That died in the air above our bed?”

“Stinks move and linger and hang. It’s probably just a dead mouse in the wall.”

“We’re fucked.”

“Why would you say that?” I say, crawling across the bed to her.

Madge lies there, closing her eyes tight. “You should read the examples in the book. Some people have had such great romantic beginnings. People talk about buying peaches in a market together and getting lost on a bus together. One woman talks about this carriage ride. A
carriage
ride! I mean, how can we compete with that?”

“I don’t think we’re supposed to be competing.”

“You know what I mean.” She rolls away from me and pulls her knees to her chest. “We’re doomed to that shitty little house and that fucking stupid seeing-eye dog and you creeping out my niece!”

“What?” I say. “I didn’t creep out your niece!”

“She told me, Godfrey, that you
creep her out.
She’s a sweet kid! Completely innocent!”

“You think I liked seeing an old pervie version of myself in the basement? With my gelled hair? You think I liked looking at your ugly shoes?”

“Hey, I wear those shoes now!”

“I don’t like them. There, I said it.”

There’s a quiet moment. I flop back onto the bed. I think of origami and how I wish it were human. One minute I could be a puffed-up box and the next minute a crane. “We
are
fucked,” I finally say, agreeing. “You really didn’t like the house?”

“No. And the seeing-eye dog growled at me in the car,” she says. “Those dogs are supposed to be completely gentle. And then I hit it. I don’t think you’re supposed to hit seeing-eye dogs in training.”

I love Madge for confessing she hit the seeing-eye dog. I do. I roll toward her. “Look at me,” I say.

She shakes her head.

“C’mon, Madgy.”

She slowly turns.

I look deeply into her eyes. “I think you’re beautiful. I thought you were beautiful the first moment I saw you. And I didn’t love the waitress. I loved the way you talked to her in Spanish. All chopped up. The way your mouth worked out the words so beautifully. And you used your hands.” I pick them up, place them in mine. “These beautiful hands.”

Madge smiles. These are the moments I pride myself on—quiet ones that the public never sees. We do have potential, even if it’s not completely obvious to anyone else.

“That’s pretty good,” Madge says.

“Isn’t it?” I say. “Screw that woman and her carriage ride! We’ve got a mythology. We can do this.”

Madge kisses me passionately, and I’m pretty sure that I’m going to call Chin and cancel the five-for-three deal. I love Madge.
It’s decided,
I think as I undo the row of three small buttons on her pajama top. We’re going to do this.

We start to have sex and she closes her eyes and keeps them closed. I don’t think it’s that she doesn’t want to look at me. It’s something else; I feel it, too, the overwhelming fear that we’re about to crash into something. The stench of a small death still lingers while we keep going. I imagine the disintegrating mouse and then remember the mice in the swimming pool, how they glinted and pivoted like fish and the woman, her rubber cap wet and shiny like a dome, waving to me.

I flop down on my couch with my coat still on, breathless from the bike ride, and I just stare. Chin didn’t blacklist me. He ferreted his fluffy blond eyebrows, and said, “Sister, you need to Zen your shit out.” He sold me a box of tea—handmade from some ancient mee-maw of his and it smells like a mee-maw a little, mints and mothballs—and he sent me home.

And now I sit here, like I’ve just come down from a bad trip—shrooms or frog licking or something—and I’m thinking,
In my future with Mark Standing, I have an affair with Godfrey Burkes? What the hell? Who is Godfrey Burkes? Why was he on our lawn? Why did Adam have a gun? And, Jesus, Dot went to jail!

There’s a line from Chin’s forms that’s always stuck with me:
In the case of true love, there can be system failures.
Is it wise to trust a doctor who believes in true love? Probably not. Still, I wonder—for one brief moment—if I’ve just experienced a true-love-induced system failure.

No, no, no. None of it was real. I just put in too many names and screwed it all up.

I tell myself to breathe. I quote some George Burns to soothe myself:
Look to the future, because that is where you’ll spend the rest of your life. Look to the future, the future . . .
I lift the cardboard box of tea bags and sniff a mee-maw and wonder if I should drink mee-maw-flavored tea and, if I do, will it Zen my shit out?

I don’t know how long I sit there like that, but eventually I snap to attention because there’s a knock at the door.

“Coming!” I call out. I don’t have a doorbell—I find their buzzes jarring, like little electric shocks. When I moved in, I disconnected it, ripped the wires right out of the box, meaning I will probably not be getting my deposit back.

I peer out the peephole. It’s Adrian. He’s stepped back from the door, his arms crossed on his chest. I can tell immediately that he has processed our conversation and is now more pissed off than he was while trying to attach a love note to my bike basket with ear bud wires. It’s a small apartment, and he knows that I’m already at the door. He doesn’t knock again.

Through the door he says, “I’m here to pick up my stuff. I texted earlier.” A couple of days ago, he left an exhaustive list of things I struggle to find significant.

I open the door and we look at each other like strangers who’ve just happened to constantly fall into bed with each other over the last few years.

“Come in,” I tell him, but he doesn’t move. His arms are still crossed on his chest. I don’t know what he’s waiting for. “You can come in.” I point behind me, toward everything I own. “It’s just a couple of steps, I promise.”

Finally, he walks into the living room. I point to a cardboard box. “It should all be in there.”

Adrian isn’t making eye contact with me, but he’s burned holes through my carpet, the hem of my skirt, and for a second, my collarbone.

He gets on his knees and starts shuffling through the box. I stand behind him as he sorts through his stuff, including a broken drumstick and a map of Carrboro, North Carolina.

“You could’ve put my toothbrush in a Baggie or something,” he says, holding the purple toothbrush in his hand, his thumb running over the worn bristles.

“You’re supposed to switch your toothbrush out every three months,” I say defensively.

“Has it been that long?”

I nod.

“Still, you have small sandwich bags.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, but really, I’m not sorry. The toothbrush is a cesspool of the worst parts that have crowded both of us. When did we invite such things in? I’m wondering how clean my mouth has been these last three months. “I’m sorry,” I say again. “I found the map, though.”

He drops the toothbrush and picks up the map, touches it gently. “Cat’s Cradle is one of the greatest venues in the country,” he tells me. “Too bad you won’t be with us when we play there.”

“I’ll have to read about it on the music blogs.”

“What about the Wii?” He pulls it out of the box. I left the cords attached—they dangle half inside the cardboard box and half out. “We went halfsies on it, so it really is both of ours.”

“Our child.”

Adrian doesn’t say anything. Is he getting sentimental?

He stands up and immediately starts fishing through his pockets. He pulls out a few crumpled bills and hands them to me. “I owe you for the Wii. Here.”

I don’t bother counting the money even though I know it can’t possibly cover half of the game system.
A gesture is a gesture,
I tell myself. Besides, I was the one who broke up with him. Let him keep the Wii.

“How are our Caroline and Bruce?” Adrian’s parents.

“You shouldn’t miss them.”

“But I do.”

He sighs. “You want too much, Evelyn.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s like there’s some hole in you that no one can fill up.”

“I think everyone has a hole inside of them that can’t be filled. I mean, that’s why religions exist and why some people excel despite all odds.”

He shakes his head. “Yours is personal. I’m just telling you this for your own good.”

I yearn. So what? “I want things that normal people want, Adrian.” I want to pick the right person and build a family of my own. What’s wrong with that?

“You want those things too much, and as long as we’re being painfully honest—”

“You’re being painfully honest. I’m not.”

“You’re also afraid of things that are out of your control,” he says. “That’s why you like to spend all day shelving books in alphabetical order.”

“You have no idea what a librarian actually does,” I tell him. We’ve been over this.

“And it’s why you’re obsessed with that Chin guy, who’s a flim-flam man.”

“He showed me our future, Adrian. We fought over cheese.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad to me, Evelyn. Does it? In the long run? Sometimes you just have to commit to something that’s not perfect. And you have to commit to the whole future of it. And that can’t be known and it can’t be controlled. I think that’s just life, you know? The sun wakes us up every morning and you don’t know what the day will bring.”

I don’t want Adrian to be right, but what if he is? And then my mind pivots because something doesn’t quite sound natural. I tilt my head. “Are you writing a song about this?”

“What?”

“That last part sounded like bad song lyrics. You’re testing out song lyrics on me, in the form of an argument, aren’t you?”

“My life and my art are very entwined,” he says defensively.

Now his tangibles, what few there were, are in a cardboard box and that box is leaving. His stupid broken drumstick. His stupid map of Carrboro, North Carolina. His stupid fucking cesspool of a toothbrush. Damn it. I don’t want him to stay, but I don’t want him to go.

Adrian picks up the cardboard box. “I guess I should pretend to have somewhere important to go,” he says.

I follow him to the front door and open it.

Then the lag. We both want this to end, but we don’t know how. Or we both want to stay, but we don’t know why.

I feel stuck to the doorframe. I think of spiderwebs stuck to trees, gnats stuck to the spiderwebs.

Adrian is at the other side of the doorframe. Is he also stuck? He’s holding the cardboard box like an infant he took out of the hospital for the first time. The box isn’t heavy, but it looks like it’s weighing him down, causing his feet to sink beneath the hallway carpet. Soon his ankles will be gone.

“Is this the last words part?” he says.

Last words? Last words of famous dead people are some of my favorites. My head is flooded with them. Churchill’s “I’m bored with it all.” Joan Crawford telling her praying housekeeper, “Damn it . . . Don’t you dare ask God to help me.” Pancho Villa saying, “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.” Emily Dickinson’s “I must go in, the fog is rising.” Oh, or Oscar Wilde, “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.”

But I choose to say, “Beautiful.”

“Beautiful?”

“Those were Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s last words. Her husband had asked her how she felt.”

He shakes his head. “The quote machine. I always thought you were kind of like a bottom feeder of other people’s words,” he says. “But shit. I miss the quotes.”

“A bottom feeder?” This is the worst thing Adrian’s ever said to me, but it’s also one of the smartest things he’s ever said. It doesn’t hurt as much as it baffles me. Did I ever really know Adrian? “Have you changed on me already?”

“I’ve changed a lot.”

“How?”

“For one, I’m going to a legit envisionist, not that Chin bullshit.”

“But I thought you said it was all new-agey bourgeois bullshit.”

“I’m part of the bourgeoisie, I guess.” He shrugs and then nods toward the kitchen. “I want my height erased from the doorjamb.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. I came to erase myself completely. I’m trying to move into the future now, Evelyn. You should be able to get that.”

“You think I can erase your height and it’ll be like you were never here?”

“I just want it erased. Okay?”

“Fine.”

He stands there. “Do you have any last words for me that aren’t ripped off from someone else?”

“Yeah, I do. Don’t wear your own band’s T-shirt on stage,” I tell him.

He looks down and I know that under his sweater he’s wearing one of his own band’s T-shirts. “I wouldn’t have had to if you were any better at selling our merch.”

I want to tell him the music might be the problem, not the way I stood behind a card table, with an assortment of demos and T-shirts splashed out in front of me. I don’t say it because I don’t actually want to hurt him.

I’m already beginning to feel lonely—the hole in me that maybe no one can fill. Or maybe I’m lonely because Adrian is more outside my front door than inside my front door and that means something. Even inches mean something. First it’s inches and then it’s feet, yardsticks laid out into football fields, a printing press and then so many spines filled with ink that every county needs a library, sometimes dozens. At some point, continents shifted and this is all because some Neanderthal was once closer to being outside a cave than inside it. Small stays fragile and even big is still fragile. Possible futures are the most fragile but they always end before something can truly break. Were Adrian and I small, or were we big? I know which crashes harder, but which crashes longer?

And what if he’s right and fighting over cheese isn’t so bad in the long run? What if not committing to something that’s imperfect is just a way of avoiding the future?

Adrian nods. His nod says,
I’ve got a cardboard box with a broken drumstick, a purple toothbrush, a Wii, and a map of Carrboro, North Carolina. I’ll be fine.

I lean forward, unsticking myself from the doorframe and kiss Adrian on the cheek so lightly I will probably forget I did it. Adrian shifts the cardboard box a little to the left and shrugs. I watch him walk away—seven steps to be exact—before turning down the stairwell.

I stand at the door, staring at the chipped paint, the dirty knob. If someone asked me what I was doing, I would say,
I don’t know. Please tell me.
I am not waiting for Adrian to come back. I know that.

I don’t move. I stand at my front door for minutes. This is not a habit, but maybe it will turn into one. Me, waiting at doors, for nothing in particular. On first dates, men will ask me about my hobbies and I will tell them,
Standing at front doors,
as I scrape the cheese off the top of my chicken parmesan.
It’s a lifestyle choice.

One half-filled cardboard box gone, and once inside the apartment, it feels completely empty, like movers just showed up and packed up everything—even stripped the paint from the walls. Sound was evicted. Here I am, alone. My choice but still alone. The quiet gets loud—this buzzing. Louder.

I think maybe there are bees in my apartment.

I am certain there are bees in my apartment.

A whole hive of bees. Two hives. A dozen hives. Soon the bears will come. I will die in a quiet apartment, alone and stung and mauled. My choice but still alone.