The Unfortunates (9 page)
He checks his e-mail. Junk and admin, except a sound clip from Vijay Muller, the composer he’d hired after Iris’s encouragement. A two-minute update to a change he made in the libretto, a masterpiece of logarithmic atonalities. This is how they’ve worked for the last year, remotely. He’s heard Vijay’s sandpaper voice on the phone, but they’ve met in person only once, when George finally completed a draft and made an unwelcomed pilgrimage to Vijay’s home in Montclair. Once there, he discovered Vijay’s constellation of maladies and phobias—obsession-compulsion, agoraphobia, hypochondria, and that Vijay lived not in the piano-filled chalet of George’s imagining, but in an efficiency apartment above a tea shop. George’s initial dismay—as Vijay leaned out his window, a handkerchief over his mouth—was soon replaced by a conviction that Vijay’s suffering was all the more proof of his brilliance. That the droning minors he had long been admired for in certain academic circles were the result of a bold and tragic vision and represented the future of music, just as George’s libretto represented the future of humanity. Vijay works on
The Burning Papers
only through the technological divide. They have not seen each other since.
The update sounds good. George takes off the headphones and calls Aleksandar Dvorsky, the opera’s freelance producer. George hired him only a week ago but feels he’s known the man a decade. During his interview, Aleksandar insisted George begin looking for a small theater right away. George agreed. Finally, he is among people who believe in him! To produce his opera—what was impossible now seems fated. If he keeps his courage—his mother’s being away a help in this department—soon they’ll hire orchestral and voice talent, rehearsal space, and support staff.
The Burning Papers
will debut in a modest venue with a limited run, gather momentum, be picked up by—the Met or City Opera. The Met would be good. He must send the libretto to his contacts there, let them know what is in store. Perhaps they’ll ask for it right away. Perhaps they’ll want to see it staged. Either way, he’ll be ready. Aleksandar is optimistic about returns on the limited run too, citing the finances of a few contemporary works it so happens George admires—no one winning the lottery on putting up an opera, but with the right artistic direction and publicity, no one ending up too far in the red, either.
As he listens to Aleksandar’s phone ring, George reviews his calendar and is reminded of how finely appointed his soft leather appointment book is, but not of any appointments. Aleksandar does not pick up. George checks his iCalendar. Nothing there either. He opens a Word.docx and types and deletes and types and deletes, and when he looks up, he has written:
The QUEEN sings {suggestion for Vijay: Cavatina}
Build a fence around the gypsy where you find him on your lot. / Build a fence around the gypsy, while he steals and schemes. / Look where the gypsy stakes his tent, to the moss he lays his head for he knows deep into the ground, the fruitful water-lands. / Wise nations! Listen for the gypsy / for every sound he makes—the shucking knife, the creaking wheel—sings out a murderous song: / beware the land that’s common, where still the flocks may graze, for soon it will be barren, and shepherds will be beggars too
He pauses and e-mails this progress to himself for safekeeping. With more backtracking and revision he continues:
and roam the green off every hill and starve we will together, not a crop be saved. / We thank the gypsy’s trespass, though not his greedy heart, for he has marshaled us to caution on the warming hill. / Evict the gypsy rightly and when you cast him in the road / show him all your deference as if he is a lord. / Always thank the gypsy, for though he be unclean / he is the scourge has saved us all, and kept our pastures green.
This is fantastic. The queen: powerful first by chance access to the right natural resource at the right time. Then by cunning expansion. Then by cruel suppression. Isn’t this always the way? Timeless. Genius! Is genius going too far? Does the rhythm sound, distantly—Protestant? Is it derivative? Could he be miming a hymn from childhood, long buried? It’s easy to confuse
derivative
and
classic
. His excitement indicates the latter. In his vision, the narrow band of Earth where rain still falls has seen the end of democracy and the introduction of a caste system that privileges those who can trace their heritage to former countries of the cooler North; a system to which opposition is stamped out by the queen, in part through the vilification of those southwards first dubbed
climate refugees
, then, once their papers are burned and their disenfranchisement is total,
gypsies
.
He spell-checks and e-mails his addition to Audrey. Something he likes to do.
What do you think of this bit?
he writes, and after a spell opens the door to his office.
Silence. She is undoubtedly impressed and thinking of what to say.
“Wow. Only you could have written this.”
She always encourages him this way. So reassuring, her straight talk. No flattery from Audrey.
“A flash of inspiration.”
“Slow flash.”
“You caught me. It is good, isn’t it?”
“To accomplish something important is a real accomplishment.”
“Audrey, don’t be so shy with your opinions! You’re the best assistant I’ve ever had, have I told you that? You’re going places, you! Now if you don’t mind closing the door, I’m going to have a think.”
He fiddles with the mirrored box on his desk. She’s right. It’s brilliant. Aleksandar and Vijay have been urging him to stop messing with what is already a finished libretto and green-light development. It’s time. He’ll produce it, start small, and then they’ll shop it around.
“Lunch!” he calls through the door to Audrey, unconcerned by the pinched hysteria he notes in the faraway sound of his own voice. It isn’t even close to lunchtime. “I’m on your schedule now—look at what a bad influence you are on me! Don’t move, don’t do a thing. I’ll call the car from the lobby, I’ll get the car!” He leaps up and turns off the lights. Audrey comes in, blinking in the dim, and lifts his linen jacket from the back of his chair, holds it out for him. He thrusts one arm in and then the other. She hands him his umbrella and he bounds down the hallway and past reception, pushes the elevator button again, again, again. Next, as if he’s waking from a dream, he’s climbing out of the car at the foot of his own long, curving drive, clutching a bouquet of ribbon-tied balloons in his hand.
“Arms and abs before I go?” Victor says.
“Bleg,” Iris answers. “Let me get the weights.”
She pulls from the closet an eight-pound set, then George’s old twenty-five pounders for Victor.
“Planks to start!” He drops to the floor.
“You’re a pain,” she says, grateful to have him for a friend. Once, Nellie Turner asked her to describe Stockport as she would to an out-of-town client, and now she can’t stop:
Stockport, almost as fun as a wicker basket! Stockport, the top hat full of pudding time forgot! Stockport, where the women are wives and the dogs wear galoshes!
Still, she’s shy around these chicken-jawed captains of industry. Even though the men’s faces, when they see her, unscramble to how they must have looked at thirteen. Vague-eyed, goofy-mouthed. At the dinners, at the parties, they command an exhausting reserve of facts and opinions: movies and wars and restaurants, mergers and congressmen and cuts of meat, health care to lawn care. She knows exactly nothing, has no position and is not positioned—positioned, this construction of the word she’s only learned since her marriage. It doesn’t matter. Whatever she says, they laugh. Unlike Victor, who doesn’t want anything from her—never makes a flap over the Somners. Never gives her the eyes-too-long or the sneaky up-down. Never with the
ha-ha-HA!
Or the
we should
. Never with the dreadful, eager ass-kissing that George and CeCe are so used to they notice only its absence. Without it, they flail and fuss and do not know what to do. “A rude little man!” CeCe might say. Or George: “Crazy to expect the waiter to come back with the drinks before tomorrow, I guess.”
Victor counts to sixty. Her torso shakes. She can feel him evaluating her plank with mild disapproval, as if she were the tangled back of a cable box. CeCe and George and their friends have traveled the world. How do they stay so narrow-minded? Like kids in a play, positioned on their marks, unaware of the scenery as it changes behind them, one painted cloth lifting away to reveal another: the looming towers and twinkling lights of Manhattan at night. The green quadrangles of the oldest universities. A ski slope in the Alps. The white and blue of an island shoreline, an umbrella stuck on a slant in the sand. A Roman aqueduct spanning the French countryside. A covered shopping arcade in Hong Kong. Round tables filling a hotel ballroom, each with a black number on a white card and a bun of flowers at its center. The polished brass and unfading topiary between the elevator and the door to an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The apse of a winged cathedral, its vaulted rib cage, the air thick and cool. The monitors on the floor of the stock exchange like the eye of a monster, glowing orange. A hundred dark dots over a hunting marsh—a flock of plover swooping low; one, two, three!—falling from the shot. A Carolina-coast golf resort, seen through the floor of a clear-bottomed helicopter, sandpits like nuclei. The swept main street of their own satellite town. Lawns a zillion miles long, zippered to the Sound, like CeCe’s.
“Have you always lived in Stockport?” she asks abruptly. They have begun a round of lateral raises. “I mean, since you switched to the East Coast?”
“Me? No way. I was a trapper in Maine, for about four seconds. Believe it or not. Me and Isabel met working on a cruise. We got sick of that and joined a couple of deckhands heading back to Bar Harbor, said I’d be able to get a spot. When that blew up, I was left with a lead on an oyster-farming gig in Norwalk. Down the coast I came.”
“Get out! My last two years of high school we lived in Maine. But not fish. Paper.”
“Plant in Lincoln?”
“Mm-hmm. Stinkin’ Lincoln. You don’t just break into lobster, do you? I mean, isn’t it families?”
“Yeah, nobody would let me in. Dock monopoly, even short-season crab. Best I did was net for bait. Broke even fish to fuel. It sucked.”
She remembers the low, brick high school she barely attended, the flag on a pole out front, the black bark of the pines in winter. She had her first job in Bucksport, as a barback—cold nights, indoors, a place off-harbor, being embraced in the dark warm by her boss after a Seven and Seven and Seven and Seven with that hack laugh, that old-bar embrace, football on a flatscreen over the mantel and the rattling of smoke and love and the hold the old man had on her shoulder.
“Like the work?” she asks, remembering how she liked the work.
“Eh, they called me Rusty. I was the one they said, ‘Had a drink with him and he’s okay.’”
“I don’t get it.”
“Stick around ol’ Rusty, we’ll find ya something! Local color. Rusty Heels, that was me. Fuckers.”
“No! Really?” But she could hear it: an evil thing, but said to him in friendship, a heavy arm across his shoulders, the sea stink on their clothes.
“And we did stick around, for a while.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. My wife was in a book club. I was young enough I didn’t know I could make a different life.”
“I still don’t know how to do that.”
“Well, I needed a push. I got one. I fell asleep in the sun and I had a burn on the back of my neck. I went to the general store.”
He tells her how he stood on the sawdusted and salt-stained plank holding two bottles of sunblock, comparing the SPFs, trying to remember which was deadlier, the UVA or the UVB.
“I had a strange feeling come to me. I think, ‘Everybody’s looking at me.’”
The eye of the clerk. The rounded eyes of two little girls. The eye of the girls’ mother sweeping past Victor casual and regular.
“The mom’s attention is all in my direction and she says, ‘Stay close,’ in that danger-sharp mother way. Kids grab her legs. I see this in my peripheral, as if the corner of my eye is being pulled by one of the kid’s little fingers. I felt—I wasn’t allowed to turn and look at them. I’m not a violent guy, but they made me imagine doing to them whatever they were imagining I’d do to them, which I don’t even know what that was. They made me
want
to. Almost. Can you imagine? Me? You see what a mind fuck that is? It’s like magic. Not a magic trick. That’s like real magic.”
They’re at the kitchen counter, exercise forgotten. She remembers parking her car by the harbor before work, watching the white masts of the boats knocking against the sea. When they moved, she’d told her bandmates, back in Jersey, on the phone, “It’s so pretty here!” And it wasn’t a lie. But there was no passing through to the tourist’s side of the postcard, and she got herself picked up by the band in the middle of the night, on their way to a gig in Montreal.
“So you moved to Norwalk?” she asks.
“Not yet. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was in that way where you think there’s meaning in life only when you make everything a giant pain in the ass for yourself. And Isabel loved our prefab house. Isabel was amazing. Not that she isn’t now, I’m sure. I mean, she knew before I knew she knew about me, and her accent, I can’t do it anymore, but, when I’d talk about how I couldn’t get better work because I was nothing to them but token Mr. Rusty, she’d say, ‘Year making et arll up, it’s nething.”
“That’s pretty good.”
They’d married for her visa, he said, but a real kind of love was also between them, and when she left him, he discovered as she was leaving that he’d loved her from the first, even in his limited way, even as they laughed through the drive-in wedding with the one witness. After she was gone, he drank in the quiet of the flimsy house and sent her a lot of bad e-mails, for a year. Driving his pickup one morning, the dry lobster traps still bouncing around the back, feeling strong and sunny with an early buzz, he almost killed an old woman carrying her tiny grandson along a half mile of dirt to the row of glinting aluminum mailboxes on the main road. He broke the slim arm that held the child and smashed her feet beyond anything a pin could fix. Her cheek, three ribbons. He was almost certain he would have killed himself after, except the baby was chucked into the bushes unharmed; he took it as a sign. He stood up beside his lawyer in court to confess as much, but his lawyer, low, had said, “Talk or walk, Victor. Keep quiet I might get you felony four.” And Victor sat back down. When he got out of jail was when he headed to Norwalk. He was in AA by then. He got certified in massage and personal training because it suited his new healing way of life, because it was kindly, because the other oystermen drank in the boat and thought he was weird.
