Amateurs: A Novel

Part One

Prenuptial

May 2011

The invitation to Archer’s July wedding was beautiful, expensive, and somehow French, its palette of blue and white more reminiscent of Yves Klein than of Tiffany. Karyn at first took the envelope’s calligraphy as a sign of fussy ostentation (on the part of the client, that is, not the calligrapher, who’s obliged to at least be fussy), but as its imperfections revealed themselves, to the point where you might not even call it calligraphy, her thoughts grew more generous, turned to a leather-topped desk in a sunlit room; an amateur forming a monumental capital in some state of doubleness: intoxicated serenity, maybe, or patient excitement. She handed the envelope to her son. Look at this writing, she said.

He was eleven and uninterested. Is it a computer?

No, that’s just it: it’s good but kind of sloppy. She took back the envelope. I think it’s the bride. The sylvan folk music drifting in from the kitchen caught her attention for a few seconds. She was on the verge of what felt at once like the purest of tears and like the class of tears prodded by life-insurance commercials. She compared the address on the envelope with the plainer five-word note on the invitation and didn’t say anything for a while. Their meals were often marked by expanses of silence, rarely antagonistic but sometimes sullen, a mood encouraged by the small, woody dining room and its one murky window. The table was the color of rotten apples and half-covered with newspapers, cards for a Tolkienesque fantasy game, and a week of mail, under which there may have been hardened rice. It was one of Karyn’s breakfast-as-dinner nights, not unanimously popular. While preparing the food she had taken perverse pleasure in anticipating Maxwell’s opposition; she wanted him to suffer, a little, for his choosiness. She loved him fervently but sometimes found herself rooting against him, hoping his occasional pride or sloth would be answered with a chastening defeat. A stern C plus, say, though his cosseting hippie school didn’t give grades. It was hard to square her hopes for his uncurbed success with her lifelong affinity for underdogs.

She watched him conduct a scrambled-egg diaspora on and around his plate. I can’t explain the science of it, she said, but eggs cool, like, super fast. The construction was meant as a concession to kidspeak, a move at odds with her priggish shunning of baby talk during Maxwell’s early years (Please talk to him in a normal voice, Mom, she would say, a directive that was both resented and ignored). Maxwell pretended to have trouble getting the egg on his fork. You won’t want to eat them cold, she said.

I don’t want to eat them hot.

They laughed.

I think we should go to this wedding, she said.

Archer was one of Karyn’s distant Winnipeg-bred relatives and, absent strong competition, the most glamorous of the scattered Bondarenkos. Having seen a drawing of him in the New Yorker, she had a rough sense of what he looked like as an adult (prematurely bald?), but when she pictured him it was as a five-year-old boy, auburn-haired and polo-shirted, crying after a s’more accident, his mother slapping at mosquitoes while rushing to rectify things, marshmallow splotches turning from white to brown to black on a log. Karyn hadn’t seen Archer in the flesh since that family reunion in 1982. In his autobiographical novel and assorted other writings she sustained a tepid interest of long standing.

To any other cousin she would have sent polite regrets and bath towels, but this was different. To begin with, there was the allure of wealth; though she had been to at least one wedding of people who were rich by all standards except those of the Western rich, she had never been to a wedding of people who were rich by any standard. And she was on the wide edge of going to Winnipeg anyway. She and Maxwell had been slated to go there the previous summer, but late that July he had decided to play in a youth football league, whose demanding schedule scotched their vacation plans. Perhaps it’s too much to say they had plans, since Karyn hadn’t booked a hotel, or submitted a PTO request, or even plugged in MINNEAPOLIS TO WINNIPEG on a driving-distance website. She had, at least, rented the Guy Maddin movie My Winnipeg, which she admired through some irritation and didn’t finish.

Although she liked expatriate novels and could speak Spanish and German, especially if you wanted to speak about hungry cats in big rooms, tourism most appealed to her when the destination was no farther than twelve hours by car, urban, and seldom subjected to discernible incursions of tourists. She and Maxwell had been to Des Moines, Kansas City, Green Bay—all for no special reason and with no itinerary. Winnipeg seemed a logical tick on her indifferent bucket list, the next stop for someone whose faith in her innate eccentricity survived overflowing evidence that her behavior, opinions, and tastes were in truth only slightly out of step with her demographic peers. Here again was a case in point: she considered it whimsical and unexpected to spend one’s vacation in Winnipeg, yet half the people she mentioned the idea to had been there themselves, and all but one (fucking snoozefest) spoke of it warmly. People were going to Winnipeg all the time! One of her colleagues, it turned out, made regular trips to the city with his boyfriend and could name its best galleries, restaurants, and bookstores. Karyn had been happy to hear these names and recommendations, equally happy to forget them as soon as they were spoken. A month later, sitting in her saggy lawn chair while one of the more martial football coaches led an exercise called butt kickers, she considered, not for the first time, that a benefit of passivity is that there’s nothing to undo, not even names to forget or scraps of paper to throw away.

An old friend of mine makes Winnipeg out to be a bohemian Shangri-la, she told Maxwell nearly a year later.

What’s a Shangri-la?

An earthly paradise from a book I haven’t read. She didn’t much miss her marriage, but she missed having someone around to challenge her half-truths. The old friend, for instance, was more accurately one of her ex-husband’s acquaintances, a hairy-eared flâneur who in the nineties supposedly made a scraggy living recruiting new members into the Columbia Record Club, and who once raved about Winnipeg for several minutes outside a Kinko’s. She remembered staring at his ears. It wasn’t just that they were hairy, but that he confronted the problem with an electric razor, so that his ears sprouted little flattops. He also said that Winnipeg is the Chicago of Canada.

I’ve never been to the Chicago of America, Maxwell said.

So.

So to me the Chicago of Canada is like . . . nothing.

I love you.

I love you too.

But you have been to the Chicago of America, she said, though I guess it was before you had a full concept of selfhood. Had she and Jason, the ex-husband, known definitively that Maxwell would forget the trip, they might have spent more time looking at art, less time watching fish. She asked Maxwell a few questions about school but learned nothing specific. If she could afford to, she would quit her job and spend the summer with him, though he was getting too old to want that. She often preemptively mourned the passing of his childhood phases: the last time she would understand his math homework without a refresher on operations, the last standing hug in which his head nestled perfectly under her chin, the last time she could climb into bed with him after he was asleep without feeling slightly creepy. She stood up. I should do some work.

Oh, okay. He had green eyes, a haircut like a yak’s.

She made a subtle show of hesitating. Do you wanna watch a movie or something? A short one.

After the long action movie and Maxwell’s shower, she did her back exercises, took over the bathroom, and swallowed the contents of her pill organizer’s Thursday compartment. Instead of hanging up the wet towel Maxwell had left on the floor, she carried it to his bed, laid it on his pillow, and called him back upstairs to bed. She used her fuzzy-socked big toe to turn on her PC tower, its monitor surrounded by tackboards populated with obsolete notes and allegedly inspirational photos. One of the three small bedrooms on the underlit second story of her old house (1911, she’d say confidently when asked, but really she’d forgotten) was a guest room and office that hardly ever lodged guests or facilitated what would normally be recognized as work. It was thinly furnished. Its status as a guest room could be contested on the grounds that it didn’t have a proper bed, though an innocently bloodstained futon kept the closet door from closing flushly. Only part of the room’s faded balloon-motif wallpaper had been scraped off before a rented steamer was returned at dusk some long-past Sunday; at a later point she and Jason wordlessly concluded that the half-finished job fostered a ruined charm.

As the computer soughed to its vintage speed, she breathed deeply, trying to suck in the calm, flinty mind-set she was after—whenever she wasn’t after irruptions of disheveled emotion. She opened the document (Untitled Play) and scrolled to a stubbornly problematic scene. It had started out as play of a different type. After Jason moved out, she would come to this room late at night to improvise faintly satirical a cappella songs—the most inspired was Kissing Bug—and during these retreats she began to imagine herself as a witchy pre-Raphaelite hippie at the romantic center and on the musical periphery of an eccentric Scottish folk group. The group was closely patterned after the Incredible String Band, and at first she didn’t bother to change the names of the ISB’s joint leaders. She would pretend to play one of her songs for Robin or Mike, usually Robin, and he would demur: the song wasn’t ready yet, he would say, wasn’t right for the new album, though probably there would still be room for Kissing Bug. He said the name with a smirk. After their argument and his offstage ramble, a precarious reconciliation.

These fantasies seemed to progress without calculation: Robin took on some of Jason’s qualities and was renamed—no, he simply became—Callum; Karyn recorded several of her improvisations on her phone and transcribed the best parts into a notebook; at a garage sale, she stumbled on a pair of suede lace-up knee boots and a peasant blouse that smelled, she was sure, like her protagonist, now named Anisette. After Karyn had memorized, effortlessly, much of what was clearly a play, she started typing it up.

Now she fine-tuned Act Three’s showcase speech, checked her e-mail, and searched out interviews, reviews, and miscellanea pertaining to Eminent Canadians, Archer’s debut novel from a few years back. In the interviews he was sometimes charming (to write the book, he told two separate interviewers, he’d taken pains as well as naps), sometimes goofily pompous (I want every sentence to stand as impossibly as a tower of blueberries, he said on the podcast Dog-Eared, and the only means to that end is draconian self-editing). The reviews were by and large favorable though never ecstatic; a few were cutting (Bookforum: This is one of those novels in which characters are said to ‘walk right off the page.’ From there, apparently, they amble onto the set of a bad sitcom). The blurbs, oddly, could also be called mixed. One nasty endorsement praised a young writer who’s just loaded with talent, inviting in-the-know readers to put ellipsis points or a full stop after loaded. Karyn teleported the book into her e-reader, retweeted a girlfriend’s so-so aperçu, and got up to thumb Maxwell’s toothbrush for moisture. She could tell from his sighs and rustles that he’d been lying awake for the past hour. Did you brush your teeth? she called out. From bed he answered that he thought so. It would be a very recent memory, she said.

Back in the office or guest room, she used customer-rewards points to book a hotel room in Winnipeg, judged the word relished at the start of the Isle of Wight scene to be too breathless, and checked the Facebook wall of a systems consultant who’d spent part of the previous month introducing Karyn’s department to the new HRIS. He was home now in Lake Forest, Illinois, where he remained, among other faults, libertarian and married. She resisted looking carefully at his photos but gathered from abashed glimpses that his wife was plain. Bear’st thou her face in mind? is’t long or round? (She’d played Cleopatra in college.) Karyn was surprised by the wife’s plainness, since the consultant was quite good-looking. When considering men at first hand—when she wasn’t, that is, in the semi-ironic locker-pinup sphere of waxed Olympic swimmers or Hemsworth-as-Thor—she was ordinarily turned off by physiques denoting even a measured commitment to weightlifting, but the consultant evoked galleries of classical sculptures rather than gyms of grunting bouncers. (Well, kind of.) She lately thought often of how his bicep veins had distended as he hovered over her and held down her wrists, how she’d wanted him to stay like that for longer than would have been comfortable, and at the same time how badly she’d wanted to touch his chest, dotted with cherry angiomas. His orgasmic grunt was short, friendly, and workmanlike, as if he were lifting one end of a couch. Later and without encouragement he rehearsed the case for a flat tax.

After an uncommunicative fortnight of presumed spousal loyalty, he was in the picture again, recklessly liking Karyn’s status updates dating back a week. Partly hoping for this very sort of attention, she’d had Maxwell take several photos of her gardening in their backyard, had this morning posted the most flattering one, presenting it as if it were a PSA for growing one’s own food and not an exhibit of her fairly well-preserved looks and narcissism. (But surely the person who fears she’s succumbing to narcissism isn’t a full-blown case.) It really was a remarkable, if not a wholly realistic, photo: her head tilted in the way of a fixated dog without underlining the association; her chin irrefutably single (not wanting Maxwell to shoot from below, she’d made him stand on a birdseed bucket); her black-fingered gardening gloves elusively sexy. Twenty-four likes, close to double those incited by her recent post about neti pots. There were admiring comments too, which after a mood-lifting while started to embarrass her, started to feel well-meaningly condescending, as if the whole procedure were a collectively presented FOXY GRANDMA T-shirt. She wasn’t that old, but still.

Though the affair with the consultant was atypical—to deal in numbers, their one afternoon and two nights together represented the lion’s share of her nonsolo sexual experience of the past four years—more and more this was how things went during the time between Maxwell’s bedtime and her own: the posting and liking and commenting and checking, the distracted revising of her play, the shutting down of her desktop computer, the crawling into bed, the distracted reading of a book, the booting up of her laptop.

Twenty-five likes, the latest from Paul, the systems consultant.

It wasn’t, usually, that internet socializing was making her lonelier, but that it was just sustaining enough to discourage socializing off the internet.

A message popped up from Paul: Hi. Not, so far, a Cyrano of written seduction. Queasily she responded in kind.

She thought she craved conversation of a literary-intellectual bent, but in those rare cases when she was with someone who wanted to talk about books and ideas, she found that the revelation of shared enthusiasms meant less than it once did, that her discourse wasn’t as glimmering as her interior monologues augured, that she was sweating to seem sophisticated for one person and constricting herself to seem down-home for another, that her companion’s thoughts on the book were fuzzy compared to those in the more accomplished reviews, from which Karyn’s own fuzzy thoughts derived. Either there wasn’t much to say, or much to say but no spark of affinity and thus little drive to say it.

An ellipsis foreshadowed another IM.

She wasn’t nostalgic for the immodest social needs and modest standards of her youth, but she missed the easy birth of new friendships, the seemingly wild luck of three simpatico women housed on a single floor of a small dormitory, whereas now, to find two people whose company seemed more attractive than solitude, she thought she might need a bigger city.

A floater crossed one of her eyeballs, a muscle contracted below her right shoulder blade. The message came through: They’re calling me back to mpls for a few days in June. Looking forward to seeing you. Then, to cover his tracks: and the rest of the eam. And an addendum: Typo, meant team.

She decided to rebuff him, then decided it would be better to rebuff him in person.

August 2004

The editor at the Stickler seemed to think Sara lived somewhat closer to Manhattan than Buffalo and that her name contained an h, but Sara said yes without corrections when he asked her to blog non-remuneratively about the protests surrounding the Republican National Convention. She had done one earlier piece for the website, a fitfully comic essay about kickboxing. On her first day in the city, she felt more than briefly jubilant amid a river of marchers, then galvanized by an Iraq War veteran’s speech, his camo blending in not only with the imagined desert but also with his blond hair and suntanned face. That evening she joined a looser, smaller march, falling in with an anarchist funeral band playing When the Saints Go Marching In. She sloped her head skyward, smiled to announce how serenely she could be alone in a crowd. The man in front of her carried a placard of the famous hooded figure from Abu Ghraib, and when the marcher began to move to the music, the hooded figure bobbed and swayed too, choreographing Sara’s shame and weary happiness.

But when she tried to convey that ambivalence in the blog tent, working next to a relentlessly macking Vanderbilt senior with an unfortunate Tintinish haircut, the results seemed forced and unctuous. Her style, too, was wrong, not exactly mandarin but too stiff, her sops to the accidental prose often found on blogs coming off like the outfits John Kerry wore for farm visits: the rolled-up oxford, the work boots diligently scuffed by a campaign aid. As easy jobs went, it was hard. Some of her preferences and aversions militated against reportorial excellence, such as her preference for soaking things in rather than taking notes, and her aversion to asking questions of strangers. Normally this was a mild aversion with mild consequences—spending many minutes in the ticket-holder’s line before moving quietly to the one for buyers, say—and it only affected her in certain moods. She was fine with people who had an occupational obligation to answer questions, salespeople, for example, except those in stores where she felt outclassed or otherwise prominent, stores where sizes above six were purportedly kept in back. She could remember lots of times when she had confidently asked a stranger a question (Does this go downtown? Is this seat taken? Quelle heure est-il?). She wasn’t continuously shy. In fact, her occasional extroversion sometimes retrospectively embarrassed her. The RNC assignment, though, aggravated her reluctance to approach strangers toward agoraphobia, and she spent much of the week in a state of stomach-knotted dread of having to attempt the next interview, mingled with self-reproach for having not seized the previous moment’s countless opportunities. She hated to impose on people, and her inexperience and slender credentials made her feel like both an imposer and an imposter.

Knowing she could brave few interviews each day, often fewer than two, she tried to home in on faces combining intelligence and receptivity, qualities that shouldn’t be in opposition but started to act that way. Probably when we see what a Victorian novelist might call an intelligent visage, we’re really seeing skepticism, severity, sadness, or the sort of intense tic that mesmerizes Slavoj Žižek fans. Her own face, she feared, was a dumb one; her allergies to dust mites and other microstuff promoted oral respiration. In any case, the homing-in strategy failed. By the second day she had switched to prospecting negatively, eliminating people whose shyness or unfriendliness seemed worth respecting, then those whose opinions, she sensed, would be uselessly naïve, lunatic, banal, incoherent, doctrinaire, or stupid. Through these means she was able to rule out roughly everyone, a winnowing that betrayed reticence more than misanthropy. (Although once, when asked in a job interview if she was a people person, she had detrimentally hesitated.)

During what turned into a lonely, disheartening week outside the RNC, a week in which she ate almost nothing but laxative slices of floppy pizza at odd times of day, she frequently visited the action at Union Square, the site on one afternoon of a long battle between police and protesters for control of a fenced walkway through the park. The cops eventually moved in with riot helmets and shields to keep protesters from partially obstructing the walkway, a show of strength that fully obstructed the walkway. Sara did her best to stay in the thick of things. There were spasmodic waves of moshy movement and at least one instance, she thought, of frottage.

It was in trying to follow a cop’s command to get out of the way that she backed into the soft body of Lucas Pope, a fellow fiction writer from the second-tier MFA program Sara had attended from 2001 to 2003. During his MFA candidacy, Lucas had mainly distinguished himself though the prolixity and unrelieved irrelevance of his in-class comments and marginal notes. The closest he came to competence as a writer—a nine-page story about a substance-abusing prison guard, transparently written under the spell of Denis Johnson—might have amounted to something, had he seen fit to make even a quarter of the workshop’s more sensibly proposed revisions. His early departure from the program was met with no professorial resistance. After some exclamations, he noticed Sara’s blank steno pad. You’re a reporter?

In the sense that someone videotaping little Zach’s first toddle round the coffee table is a filmmaker, she said. Lucas didn’t quite catch her analogy and was candidly disappointed when she repeated it at his request. But yeah, I could probably be called a reporter, she said, an exploited one. I was hoping to get a laminated press pass, at the very least a card to slip in the band of my fedora. But I didn’t, mostly because I have access to nothing. Well, she added, raising a fist, nothing but the streets!

Except the streets the cops have cordoned off, Lucas said. He nodded at an agitprop thespian sweatily dressed as the Monopoly mascot. For his part, Lucas was wearing Harry Caray glasses, an underproportioned cycling cap, baggy shorts, a LICK BUSH button, and a plaid shirt, short-sleeved and untucked. He looked like a semifamous cartoonist, or like someone who would recognize a semifamous cartoonist. They moved away from the dying conflict.

That was weird, Sara said. "I’ve rarely experienced such a convergence of tension and pointlessness,