Early Work_A Novel Page 2

  “You made it!” I said.

  “Where’s my drink?” she said. “I require tequila now.”

  “Baby, it’s not that kind of party.”

  “Did you hear me say what I required?” she said.

  “We probably have some in the liquor cabinet,” Anna said.

  “Oh no, I was just being silly,” Julia said to her. “I mean, I do need a drink, though.”

  “I’ll get you a glass of the wine I brought,” I said. “It’s the tequila of Chiantis.”

  “Me too?” Leslie said. She held her glass up but remained sitting. I walked back over to her and took it.

  “A new friend!” Julia said, with a tiny edge that only I could hear. I filled their glasses in the kitchen and checked my phone. I realized only after I put it back in my pocket that I’d been hoping, irrespective of logic, that I had a text from Leslie.

  In the living room, Julia had taken my spot on the floor. She and Leslie already appeared to be deep in chat. I handed over the wine and took a seat on the couch behind them. Of course, I’d forgotten to get another drink for myself.

  “Isn’t it nice to have someone do things for you?” Leslie said. She took a long pull from her glass of wine.

  “It’s okay,” Julia said. “One certainly shouldn’t count on it.”

  “So are you applying for … a, what, residency now?” Anna asked Julia.

  “Yeah, just about,” Julia said. “Reluctantly. Lazily.”

  “Oh right, you’re so lazy,” Molly said. “My poor mother would fucking adopt you if she could. She still asks why I don’t apply to med school every time I come home. It’s like, Mom, I’m thirty years old and all I want to do is watch movies and apply for grants that will allow me to watch more movies. Focus your attention on the other creature you insisted on imbuing with life.”

  “For a medical student I’m considered, like, aggressively lazy,” Julia said. “I read novels instead of participating in masochistic obstacle courses in my free time.”

  “I admire you for wanting to be a doctor,” Leslie said. “I wish I wanted to help people.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s mostly an ego crusade,” Julia said. “As a poet, I’m required to care about myself at least twice as much as I care about anyone else.”

  “Except for Kiki,” I said. Kiki was our dog, a black and tan German shepherd–border collie–something mix, the only being in the world with whom we both had a completely sincere, openhearted relationship.

  “You love Kiki more than anything else,” she said. “I still slightly prefer myself.”

  I was in love with Julia all over again when she said things like that, and most of the rest of the time, too. We’d had a long five years together, and at that moment we both thought, without quite committing to it, that we’d continue to be together for the long, inevitably more complicated, run. Neither of us quite expected not to fuck anyone else for the rest of our lives (and we were in at least theoretical agreement that if one of us did happen to do that in the near future it would probably be best not to mention it to the other), but I thought that our relationship might be suited to withstand that, since we were, if we were anything, intellectually compatible. This might be a good place to mention that I had done a terrible job of learning anything about Julia’s medical school career outside of the most general understanding of what area of the hospital she was in at any given time.

  “Did you get a dog as practice for having a kid?” Molly said.

  “Yes, definitely,” I said.

  “I know you’re joking?” Molly said. “But I fucking hate it when people do that.”

  “All right, guys, two choices,” Anna said. “Celebrity, or Cards Against Humanity? Please note that I’ve got, like, three expansion packs for Cards.”

  Two hours later we drove home in our separate cars, both of us at least one drink drunker than we should have been for driving. As Celebrity ground on, sowing its promised hilarity, I searched Leslie’s face for any sign that she felt remotely similar to me, re: volatile sexual chemistry, but, despite my willingness to read deeply into the smallest hint of such a possibility, I didn’t find it. When we hugged goodbye, I made sure not to hold on even a second too long or a degree too tightly.

  “So good to meet you,” she said. “You guys should come over sometime. My aunt’s got a good drinking porch. And lots of cups!”

  “We’d love that,” Julia said, leaning in for her hug.

  When Leslie looked back at me, I finally caught a little spark, a frank sizing-up in her brow.

  “Write your movie,” I said to her.

  “Thanks, Mom,” she said.

  In the driveway, Julia gave me a quick kiss and we beeped our respective car locks open. I followed her taillights along back roads, a winding, more scenic route than the one I’d taken to get there. Not that it mattered, since it was so dark.

  * * *

  Back at the house, once Kiki had thoroughly greeted us—arriving together! after leaving separately!—Julia lay on the beat-to-shit leather couch and I sat in the filthy flowered armchair, reading. Julia was somewhere in the middle of Patriotic Gore, a book that I wanted to read in principle but possibly not in practice. I was “waiting until she was done with it,” which might be forever. I was in the middle of a very short Argentinean novella, the third tiny book by the author I’d read that month. I was engrossed in a scene in which the protagonist was being mocked by his voluptuous (always voluptuous!) sister when Julia stretched herself out on the couch with a theatrical yawn, then pulled herself into a sitting position.

  “I need to go to bed,” she said. “Join me for a bit?”

  This was a near-nightly ritual. She was working early the next morning, even though it was Saturday, because she was on a six-day rotation. She usually went to bed around ten, which meant she was now up long past her bedtime. I still had a lot more reading and pondering in me. The dynamic this created was not ideal, with her taking on the role of solicitor, me of the interrupted scholar. But it seemed churlish to insist on breaking a pattern that existed for purely practical reasons. My annoyance at being interrupted tended to fade between the living room and the bedroom, and if, once in bed, I thought about the goings-on in the book I’d been reading, well, who wasn’t guilty of thinking about something else during sex? It was better, probably, than thinking about someone else, though that also seemed forgivable. A less forgivable thing would be to always think about a particular different person, especially if it was a real person whom one saw frequently.

  I didn’t particularly care if Julia was thinking about someone else, even someone we both knew, unless it was one of three possible men whom I objected to on the basis of their being similar to me but a degree or two more attractive or knowledgeable in some threatening way, and/or if it was one of three possible men with whom Julia had slept directly preceding our relationship. And even if she were thinking about one of those six men, my only real objection would be in finding out about it, or if she in some way acted further on this attraction. The idea of her thinking about someone else while we had sex wasn’t unexciting to me, in truth, as long as it wasn’t about the six particular people I objected to. Sometimes, of course, I imagined her having sex with a vaguely defined amalgamation of men I’d seen in pornography, or specific men I’d seen out in the wild, though usually they lacked faces. So I guess I was getting off on imagining what she was imagining while we had sex, which was probably more interesting than what she was actually thinking about, which was in actuality probably just something she’d been reading recently, too, or something someone had said to her at a party, or how long it was until we had to send another rent check.

  So I grappled her into position, during which some combination of those thoughts did or didn’t appear in her head. She came before I did, and I went on a little longer than either of us would have preferred. Her encouragement became rote, barely distinguishable from incidental sex noises, and I overrode my speculation about the mediocr
e Argentinean novella with an image of Julia thoroughly engaged by the thrusting of a second abstracted stranger.

  And I didn’t think about Leslie at all, except to make sure that I wasn’t thinking about her.

  “Did you like that?” I said.

  She nodded with her eyes closed, her peaceful, closemouthed smile portending sleep, or at least signaling the desire to stop communicating.

  “I love you,” I said. “I’m going to read for a bit.”

  She nodded again, mouthed “Love you,” and curled up toward the wall. I found a pair of dusty boxer shorts that Kiki had dragged under the bed and turned off the light.

  In the living room, my book waited on the chair where I’d left it, glowing under the hundred-watt reading lamp that more than vaguely resembled a gallows. I opened the novella and tried to refamiliarize myself with the situation at hand. The sister was negotiating her way across the room, “her sizable breasts setting the pace like the lead dogs on a sled team,” to chastise Tomas further for his weakness and cowardice in not standing up to their parents. I couldn’t tell if I’d just lost my feeling for the story or if it had truly gotten worse. I read to page 50—“But if your own sense of complicity is damaged, where does that leave the others who have trusted your advice?”—and put the book down.

  From where I was sitting, I could see six bookcases, all filled with read and half-read and hoping-to-be-read books. Our small house was packed with stuff, stacked to the ceiling with it, not yet in a pathological way, exactly, but invasive enough to give a sane observer pause. There were books on every surface, books stacked two or three deep in the bookcases and piled horizontally on top of the regular rows, books on the floor, books, I could see in my mind’s eye, under the bed, on the bathroom shelves, stacked on top of the unused broken subwoofers in the tiny spare room. Underneath the layer of books on the coffee table was a layer of the country’s better magazines that had been piling up for months. There were books and papers and bras and underwear and a recently framed painting on the dining room table, a heavy wood monstrosity that my mother had insisted we take even though it barely fit in the room it occupied, and had now been ruined by our carelessness with coasters and cleaning supplies. There was an orange rolling suitcase on the floor of the living room, still there from Julia’s last out-of-town rotation two months earlier, surrounded by clumps of dog hair. There were CDs without cases and record sleeves without records stacked next to a cardboard box filled with records. There was a black cowboy hat and a brown fedora atop the nearest bookshelf, both covered in white dog hair, with a bright red stethoscope, possibly broken, winding around them like a poisonous snake. There were sneakers and boots and dress shoes piled on top of the DVDs at the top of the tallest bookshelf in order to keep them out of the dog’s reach.

  It was two in the morning but I was still wired. After picking up and putting down two recently published novels, I finally opened my laptop and searched for Leslie’s name. It was uncommon enough that her own work filled all of the top entries, and seemed to extend at least onto the next two search pages, and possibly beyond. The “images” row presented three different sizes of a black-and-white picture, clearly used as an author photo at some point, of Leslie looking skeptical in profile, either in an actual photo booth or a setup designed to resemble one, and then two pictures of her at fancy-looking parties, one in which she stood with her arm around a good-looking young man in a tuxedo (her fiancé?), another in which she stood, hunched awkwardly in a designer dress, next to a seated older woman with a regal haircut. (Fashion Week?) I resisted the urge to go directly to Facebook. That wasn’t what this was supposed to be about.

  The first text result was a piece published on the website of a controversial magazine/media empire, a “story-essay” about a sexual relationship between a college freshman and an unnamed “moderately famous” poet. The sections consisted of graphic recountings of sexual encounters between the student and the poet, with the conceit that the genders of the participants were shuffled in each section, so that in the first, the student was female and the poet male; in the second, both were male; in the third, the student was male, the poet female; the fourth, both female; and back around again. The “essay” parts consisted of historical and recent examples of couplings with similar age and power dynamics, again featuring all possible gender configurations. When I began the piece I assumed, as I was meant to, that I was reading an autobiographical or thinly veiled account of an affair the author had actually had, but then found each of the gender configurations convincing enough that it seemed just as likely that it was entirely made-up, or based on someone else’s experience, or simply a riff on Orlando. This website allowed comments, and many of them were, basically, “slut.” This was depressing on an obvious sociological level, but I also took the hostility personally, as if I’d written the piece. I strongly considered, for the first time in my life, type-scrawling a riposte defending Leslie’s honor. Instead, I wrote an email to Anna thanking her for dinner and asking for Leslie’s email address. Then I went to bed. I didn’t sleep much.

  Hey Leslie,

  It was so great to meet you the other night! This town needs more badass writers (especially ones with no interest in Civil War fan fic) and it’s awesome that you’re going to be here for a bit. (I hope, selfishly, for MORE THAN a bit but realize that “life,” whatever that is, might get in the way.) I read a couple of your pieces online and really enjoyed them, especially the crazy original thing for LEVELUP. I didn’t realize on Friday that I was meeting the Last Modernist. I’d’ve probably been (even) more intimidated.

  Anyway this is all winding around to a humble request for you to send me (and Julia!) your SHORT STORIES which the luddite publications you’ve seen fit to grace with your word art don’t have any interest in displaying for love or money. I can send in return my own nightmarish attempts at prose bending, or in fairer trade, fingers, blood, etc. You name it, I’ll send it. Well, not money.

  And let’s hang out!

  Yrs in Christ,

  PXC

  Hey P,

  It was swell seeing you, too. Yr too kind about my stuff, but I’ll take it. I’m proud of some of that work, but I do hope the past isn’t necessarily prelude, you know? I mean, I guess, that I hope I find some new tricks. Or something.

  But, to that end, I’m only sending along one of the other stories I’ve published, because the other couple are really just too conventional and embarrassing. Obviously I can’t stop you or anyone from tracking them down if you/they are so motivated for whatever reason. But I’m not going to aid and abet. Anyway, this is the one I’m still happy(ish) with. It’s also the most impossible to find—it was “published” by a friend of mine in what was basically a catalog for an art exhibition that only barely happened (they’ll tell you they were “shut down” for being too provocative, but really they were shut down by nobody coming to it and the gallery getting cold feet after a couple of days). It will quickly become obvious to you that I was reading too much Henry James. I need some new influences. Also need to write this dum script. Of course send me anything you want—would rather writing than body parts, but whatever’s around’ll do.

  Give my good regards to Julia, and yeah, let’s do some shit. Like … next … week? Take me drinking someplace I should know about?

  Between at least two ferns,

  L

  I was two years removed from not becoming a doctor of literature. I hadn’t understood how PhD programs worked when I applied; I imagined myself writing a long, leisurely essay on a few writers I liked—Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Muriel Spark?—while cranking out an ambitious but messy first novel about a heroically indecisive teenage alcoholic. It would be like an MFA, but I’d actually learn something. With the help of a hyperbolic recommendation letter written by a kind, unscrupulous senior editor at the content aggregator where I worked, I got into Yale. Julia was thrilled for me. She was just finishing the first year of her premed-for-poets master’s
degree at Columbia, and thought a Metro-North-based relationship sounded “romantic,” though this may have mostly been relative to the romance of my windowless room in the shadow of the Empire State Building in an apartment co-occupied by a sullenly priapic Russian law student and his ill-cared-for cat.

  I knew I’d made a mistake within a week of starting classes. Were we supposed to read these books? Were my fellow students genuine in their stupid ideas about literature? I thought I could have been friends with the professors, but that was not encouraged. New York, which I had complained about for so long, became a beacon, a place I missed terribly whenever I was away and then glutted myself on until I was sick when I came back. You move away from the city and suddenly everyone wants to have drinks. Nobody’ll hang out unless you leave.

  Julia came to visit plenty, of course, but it felt forced, us trying to find things to like about New Haven. There was some okay pizza, and we saw the Hold Steady at Toad’s Place. We got mugged. My apartment was huge, filthy, and barely furnished. My mother insisted on helping me buy an expensive bed that proved extremely difficult to get up the stairs and through the door.

  In March, Julia was accepted at three medical schools—Pittsburgh, Penn State, and the University of Virginia. Penn State was out—the medical campus was in Hershey, and Julia hated chocolate. We’d heard good things about Pittsburgh but couldn’t find them in action when we visited. The dive bar we’d been recommended was empty. The Vietnamese restaurant was terrible. We’d thought it would be kind of like Philadelphia, but instead it was kind of like Cincinnati. She chose Virginia.

  At that point, I figured I’d tough out the PhD, make it make sense. But as the reality of being seven hours away from Julia in a city I didn’t understand, doing work I didn’t like, surrounded by awful people, sank in, the idea of simply giving up and moving to where she was became a lot more appealing. This medical school thing could be turned to my advantage—I was supporting Julia’s career! I was leaning in! And then bang, I’d sell a book in the spring of my first year in Virginia and wouldn’t have to go back. Novelists don’t need PhDs. They don’t need shit.