Cool for America Page 2

  “You okay?” Kim said.

  Leslie looked up and realized she’d been standing at the poetry table unconsciously holding a waifish new Anne Carson hardcover.

  “Can I use the computer for a minute?” she said.

  “Let me just close out for the day,” Kim said. “Unless you’re buying that.”

  “Right, like I’m going to just buy a book,” Leslie said. “Oh, look at me, I’m contributing to the local economy by purchasing important literature.”

  “It does sound pretty dumb when you say it in that voice. Computer’s yours.”

  Leslie fell into the padded swivel chair and opened her email. It seemed important to write this on a computer instead of her phone. In two blurry minutes—the pot helped, if that was really the right verb—she typed out a truncated version of the gracious, medium-true email to Marcus she’d been drafting in her head for days. She hoped all was well, was glad he was coming to town, hoped they could interact without issue. She signed it “With love, Les,” deleted that, retyped it, deleted it again, retyped it again, and hit send. Then she hurriedly logged out of her email, closed the Internet browser, and shut down the computer.

  “Whoosh!” she yelled, and held her arms outstretched.

  “Um,” Kim said. “Does that mean you’re ready to help me move the tables?”

  * * *

  They were unfolding the last of the chairs when Cal arrived with the beer, thirty-six jumbo cans from the brewery down the street, purchased at a bulk discount because they’d been badly dented during the production process.

  “That guy out front’s in rough shape,” Cal said. “I tried to talk to him but he wasn’t having it.”

  “You could call the police,” Kim said.

  “That’s fucked up,” Cal said.

  “Right, well, that’s as far as we got, too.”

  “Nervous?” Leslie said.

  “What, me worry?” Cal said. “I have faith in my material.”

  Kim rolled her eyes behind his back.

  Over the next fifteen minutes, the usual suspects wandered into the store, stepping around the drunken man. Max, the owner, was one of the last to arrive.

  “How long has that guy been out there?” he said to Kim.

  “Oh, him?” Kim said. “I guess he just showed up.”

  “Come on, Kimberly,” Max said. He sat down behind the desk and put his head in his hands.

  “Leslie, come help me,” Kim said. She hooked Leslie’s arm through hers and went outside. The man was sprawled to the left of the door, his head resting on his outstretched arm, which extended into the entranceway.

  “Sir,” Kim yelled. “I’m really sorry but you need to move now, okay?”

  He grunted and shifted slightly, revealing a puddle of urine.

  “Sir, we don’t want to call the police, but you have to move now.”

  “No cops,” he muttered. He opened his eyes and fixed them unfocusedly on Leslie. She told herself that she understood this, sympathized with it. She knew what it was like to have done too much, to be out of control. She also knew, or suspected, at least, that this really wasn’t like that, and that whatever sympathy she had for him was just pity, which she was trying to keep ahead of disgust in her emotional calculus.

  “No cops,” the man said again, and began dragging himself down the sidewalk, leaving a trail of piss and garbage in his wake. They watched as he re-settled a few storefronts down, curling himself up in the doorway of the closed secondhand clothing store.

  “Maybe we should call the cops?” Leslie said. “I mean, fuck, jail is better than that.”

  “No, it’s not,” Kim said.

  They went back into the store, where a few people had begun drifting in and picking up cans of Cal’s deformed beer.

  “Hey, Les, this is Megan,” Cal said. “She’s my opening act. Or rather, I’m the, uh, cool-down mix to her energizing jams.”

  Megan acknowledged this with a stifled laugh and shook Leslie’s hand. Megan was unusually tall and long-limbed and delicate. Leslie thought Megan was raising her eyebrows ironically but it turned out that was just how they were all the time.

  “I’m looking forward to hearing your stuff,” Leslie said.

  Megan shrugged.

  “I think it’s good, at least,” she said.

  “That’s a start,” said Leslie. “What are you reading?”

  “It’s kind of a reflection on … I don’t know.” She let out a heavy sigh. “The body? I don’t really know what I’m doing anymore. It’s just … it’s really hard, you know?” She stared down at the floor.

  “I’m sure you’re going to be great,” Leslie said. “This is a very forgiving audience.”

  “Oh God,” she said, “I hope I don’t have to be forgiven for anything.”

  * * *

  Once the reading was under way, Leslie found it impossible to stay focused on what Megan was saying. The essay was as amorphous as advertised. It seemed to be about her body, and … icebergs? And her father, who was … also an iceberg? Leslie checked her phone and was disconcerted to see that she already had a response from Marcus. She had imagined—hoped was too strong a word—that he wouldn’t reply at all, that her email would simply be registered in her karmic ledger without any need for it to be acknowledged in actual reality. But here was Marcus, alive in her in-box. She looked up and saw that she was attracting a glare from her seatmate, an older woman with a long braid of white hair whom she’d seen at past readings. The woman pointed at Leslie, then at the reader at the lectern. Leslie pointed at her phone.

  “I’m texting!” she said in a stage whisper. “Sorry, I’m too busy texting!”

  This drew smirks from her friends sitting in the row in front of them, but she did put her phone in her bag. She wasn’t as rude as she pretended to be.

  “If the heart is located outside the body, is it still of the body?” Megan read. “If ice is no longer solid, will it cease to be my heart? When I melt, who will drink what is left behind? Thank you.”

  Amid the applause, Leslie returned to her phone. Marcus’s email was short. “Les,” it said. “Very glad you sent this. I think of you often. Can’t wait to catch up. Till soon, M.”

  She was torn between hating her past self—the very recently past self who had sent that email—and enjoying the surge of gratitude she felt for Marcus’s response. She was skeptical of gratitude. Like humility, it was what people told you to feel after you’d been fucked over. Marcus had been awful, drugged-out and petty and selfish in the most unjustifiable ways. But the sheer reminder of his existence broadened her outlook. The world was not Missoula.

  She felt something cold against the back of her neck and turned around.

  “Cold Smoke?” Cal said, holding a beer. “There’s a couple IPAs left, too.”

  “This is great,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Thought she was pretty good,” Cal said. “Really poetic language.”

  “Definitely,” Leslie said. She sipped her beer, which was not as cold as it had felt against her neck.

  “Hey!” Cal said to a retired UM professor. “So glad you could make it, Jim.”

  “I’m still alive, aren’t I?” Jim said. He cuffed Leslie on the shoulder, harder than was necessary. “Got a cigarette for an old man?”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to have any, Jim,” she said.

  “I’m eighty-two goddamn years old,” he said. “Nobody gives a fuck what I do.”

  They’d been through this routine a few times. She guessed that Jim didn’t know her name, but he consistently recognized her as a reliable touch for nicotine. She was only a social and emergency smoker, but she socialized and encountered emergencies with such frequency, and cigarettes in this state were so cheap, that it made sense to keep a pack on hand, if only to distinguish herself from the parasites who bummed shamelessly the minute they’d had a sip of beer. Jim was exempted from this opprobrium, of course.

  “I’ll come out with
you,” she said.

  On the sidewalk, he waved her away as she tried to light his cigarette, and lit hers first with a trembling hand.

  “I said I wouldn’t go to any more readings,” he said. “But, what the hell, it’s something to do.”

  “Do you like Cal’s writing?” she said.

  “He’s a good kid,” he said. “Doesn’t mess around too much.”

  This was interesting as a praiseworthy characteristic—all that most of the people Leslie knew did was mess around too much. She had, not quite consciously, enshrined it as something to be sought out in people, though she knew it was juvenile. Living here had brought out the hedonist in her. She’d never not had a tendency to drink too much, at least since she turned sixteen, but it wasn’t until she got to Montana that she really began to appreciate inebriation in its various forms as an art rather than an obligation. Cal, like a decent person, considered it neither.

  “Yeah, I like him,” Leslie said.

  “Not much of a writer,” Jim said. “Nobody’s perfect.”

  Leslie offered him a big smile in thanks for this assessment, cruel as it was. Older men loved it when she smiled at them. Jim’s face, however, remained set in a scowl.

  “Not that I know what the hell I’m talking about,” he said hurriedly. “You write? You want to write?”

  “Wish that I did, I guess,” she said. “I’m one of those people with lots of ideas, you know?”

  “Just fucking write something,” he said. “Worst-case it’s a piece of shit and you never show it to anybody. That’s what I told my students, at least.”

  “Did they find that comforting?”

  “A few of them wrote books. Probably no thanks to me. Nobody really cares if you write anything. I’ll be dead, at least. I don’t even know you.”

  Leslie craned her neck around Jim to see if the homeless man was still on the sidewalk. She didn’t see him. Maybe he’d made it to the parking lot of Flipper’s, the bar-casino at the end of the block, which would have a legal obligation to call the police. Maybe, somehow, he’d found the energy to carry himself with something like dignity to a place that would take him in. It was hard to be entirely hopeless.

  “It’s always good getting your perspective, Jim,” she said.

  “No, it’s not,” he said. He tossed his lit cigarette into the street underhanded and shuffled back into the store. Leslie saw through the front window that people were sitting back down for Cal’s reading. She could slip away to a bar now and be truly blitzed by the time anyone could do anything about it. Kim would come find her eventually. She’d understand, even if Leslie was unable to explain herself. The goal was to be unable to explain herself. Goddamn Marcus. As if he were the problem. She went back into the store. She still had three-quarters of a beer to finish.

  Marcus—no, Cal, Cal—knocked the pages of his story against the lectern like a professor on TV. He was wearing the “vintage” corduroy jacket with elbow patches that Leslie had tried to convince him to throw away due to its penchant for attracting mold. Cal blamed the closet it was stored in but kept storing it there, and kept wearing it to all events that could loosely be deemed “intellectual” in nature. And, well, maybe the authentic disgustingness of the thing made it a more authentic article of clothing for him, and maybe that was what gave him the confidence he needed to read his work in front of people.

  Chapter eight, the section Cal had threatened to read, turned out to be a long scene of dialogue about the nature of political corruption between the Copper King William A. Clark and his nephew Terry over cigars and brandy. “I never bought anyone who wasn’t for sale,” was Clark’s well-worn contribution to posterity, and sure enough, Cal had him saying it within his first five lines of dialogue. It drew knowing snorts of recognition from the audience. The rest was exposition-heavy tragical-historical melodrama—“But Uncle, less than a decade ago, you promised Mother you would liquidate one-tenth of the holdings you accrued during your time in the banking industry and use that money to pay for Alexander’s passage west, to start a new and better life for himself!”—and Leslie could feel the energy in the room flag with every “swirl of potent amber liquid.” He did know, at least, not to read too long.

  “‘Father,’” Cal read with finality in his voice, “‘it is half of an hour until midnight.’ His daughter led him by the hand into the grand ballroom, where he would join his guests in preparing for the long-heralded new century’s beginning. Thank you.”

  Leslie clapped hard. She really was proud of the way that he read, the poise he showed in front of a group, and the casual seriousness with which he carried himself. Jim was right—he didn’t mess around. But to what end?

  “Great job,” she said to him when he’d made his way over to her. She gave him a quick kiss.

  “Was it okay?” he said.

  “Very commanding.”

  “But not like in a fascist way, right?”

  “Only the tiniest bit,” she said. “A little touch of fascism in the night.”

  “Huh,” he said. “Well, I’m glad you liked it.”

  She squeezed his shoulder once and moved past him so that he could greet his other admirers, and then went back behind the sales desk where she knew Kim kept a bottle of Jim Beam in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. She took a pull from the half-full (or was it half-empty?) handle, then, before she could register the effect, took one more, holding the whiskey in her mouth for an extra unpleasant second before swallowing it. The immediate consequence was nausea, but then she felt the old pleasant warming in her brain and felt justified in her choice. All of these things that masqueraded as decisions, she knew, were really just inevitabilities.

  “You, uh, drop something, Les?” Kim loomed over her.

  “Yeah, I think my contact lens is in this bottle of Jim Beam,” she said.

  “Could you get out of there before Max sees you?” Kim said. “Come on, man.”

  “Feeling a little sad,” Leslie said. She stood up and rested her weight on the low science-fiction shelf. “But I was feeling so good just a few minutes ago!”

  “This is a good night,” Kim said. “Whatever it is, you’re overthinking it.”

  “I wish I wasn’t such a jerk,” Leslie said.

  “Yeah, well,” Kim said.

  They followed the exodus out of the store and across the Higgins Bridge. The group walked past the Wilma and the camera store where Marcus’s exhibition was going to be, turned left at the creepy western expansion mural, skirted the creepy Christian coffee shop, skipped the creepy casino, and entered the Rose. The bar was dark and nearly empty, a combination of the early hour and the summer exodus of college kids.

  “Shots?” Cal asked the group in general.

  “Let me get this round,” Leslie said. “Or at least ours. You want the special?”

  “You know it,” he said. Then, because he couldn’t help it, “Thanks, honey.”

  There was a panic building in her as she ordered three sets of Jack Daniel’s and Olympias, not because of the booze—though she was on her way toward being in not ideal shape on that front—but because of how little she wanted to see Cal just now. She didn’t want him to know about the unprovoked sea changes in her feelings for him, but she also wasn’t sure she could, in good faith, continue interacting normally. Everyone always told her that she was “moody,” which she usually dismissed as, well, another way to dismiss her. But she felt the force of her mood now, the physical demands that it was making on the people around her. She was mostly mood, and only a little bit person.

  She carried the three tallboys over to the table and went back for the shots. As she arrived at the bar, she saw a haggard regular dump one of her whiskeys into his own drink, then set the empty shot glass back next to the two full ones.

  “What the fuck, man?” she said.

  “Excuse me?” he said. He was accessorizing his patchy gray goatee and blotchy nose with an oversized black T-shirt.

  “I saw what
you did,” she said. “Not cool.”

  “Drinks on the bar,” he said, as if citing a house rule. “I see a drink on the bar, I don’t know whose drink that is. Could be my drink, could be somebody else’s. I see a drink on the bar, I figure it must be my drink. I think, Oh, somebody bought me a drink, guess it’s my lucky day. You bought that drink? Okay. Thank you.”

  “You’re lucky I feel guilty about a couple of other things right now,” Leslie said. She collected the other two shots and brought them back to Cal and Kim.

  “To a new century,” Kim said.

  Leslie nodded and sipped her beer. That was Kim—toasting the new century, not the last one. Kim was a wreck, too, but at least she was an optimist. She kept moving forward, maybe because she was trying to get past her family, even as she was spending all of her spare time trying to write about them. She was doing it, she would probably say, in the interest of resolving her feelings toward the past, and that was a worthy goal. Leslie worried that, for her, writing might simply be a further excuse to retreat deeper into herself, to interact with the world on the prearranged terms of her own choosing rather than the world’s actual terms, whatever those turned out to be. She didn’t believe that she would be able to both exist in the world of realistic expectations and fulfill the expectations she had for herself, expectations she had barely allowed herself to admit that she possessed. She knew, from talking to other losers, that imagining you were talented was the first step to a life of self-pity and disappointment.

  “Well, so what are you going to write next?” Kim asked, interrupting some banter that Cal was having with a punk couple about an upcoming house show by a band called Fat History Month.

  “I’ve started a couple of things,” Cal said. “I kind of need to decide between the early twentieth century and, like, way before that. I mean, okay, I know the Revolutionary War’s been done to death but it still hasn’t been done, like … sexy, you know?”

  “You’re going to do Rev War for the ladies?” Leslie said.

  “Well, for at least some of them,” Cal said. “Not in a feminist way. Just, like, hey, people had lots of interesting sex back then, too. Men and women.”