Fire in the Firefly (4 page)

Nouns have gender. People have sex.

The Collected Sayings of Julius Roebuck

I
t's 4:23 AM, and Roebuck is wide, wide awake.

This happens. More often than before; he has a feeling he should brace himself for more of it to come. Insomnia, for Roebuck, tends to be coordinated chiefly with his wife. Back when they were lovers, he would press against her during nights like this, artfully moulding his shape into hers. The key was to go slowly, to listen, feeling for that catch of breath, that bend of knee, those early, drowsy stirrings of gravitational pull. A gamble, of course, like everything else. If she stayed asleep, it only made the wait for morning that much longer. But often as not the risk paid out: a shift of hip, that flutter of pulse, the soft return of pelvic pressure and finally, irreversibly, those moving, rousing hands. He always thought how wonderful it must have been, to come awake like that into the full flush of arousal, carnality unconstrained by consciousness.
In medias res
.

A rationalization?

Sure.

But every absolution wears its flip side. Anne, for her part, never seemed to mind. Much the reverse in those days. And she had that awesome knack for falling back to sleep barely minutes after, arms and legs woven like a basket all around him, snoring in his ear. He'd be wanting sleep himself by then, tapped out. But the intertwine was sometimes so complex he couldn't move without displacing her, and he was loath to wake her twice. So he would close his eyes and wait it out, trussed, wrapped into his sleeping wife until her own dreams took her back to her side of the bed. Roebuck is practised in the art of wakeful reflection.

Love?

A word so freighted with commercial application its value is persuasion only.

Love is sugar. Love is salt. It's the sum of those
trans-fats
we're advised to do without. In his youth he once believed the same applied to writing: that love is a device employed to cheat the reader into reading on. One day he will have the nerve to make that argument with Lily. But not yet.

That always cheers him up.

Oh Lord, not yet.

Roebuck clamps shut his eyes, conscious of his wife asleep in the next room. He is still awake when the alarm goes off.

It's 9:01 AM, and Roebuck's turn to burst into his art director's office, slapping down the morning paper. “There!” he says.

Greenwood is surprised—not by Roebuck's appearance at this hour, he's done this before and everyone knows it's his way of ensuring people make it in to work on time. Roebuck is a morning person; he resents the tendency of his fellow creatives to slouch in after ten. What surprises Greenwood is the broadsheet.

“You still read
paper
?”

“Print goes better with coffee. Have a look.”

Greenwood scans the headline. “President Bush Eyes Legacy? Interesting. I would not have thought you leaned Republican.”

“Not the front! Back page.” Roebuck snatches the paper and reads aloud.

“ ‘A recent study asked 1,000 women if they could remember the first shoes they bought with their own money.
Ninety-two
percent reported that they could. The same survey found that only 67 percent of the women questioned remembered the name of the first boy they kissed ...' Now what does that tell you?”

“That the survey was commissioned by a shoe company?”

“Excellent! Bonus marks. But the sample set was over 1,000 so statically it's valid.”

“I admit it's surprising.”

“No! It's not! You say that because you're a man and therefore a romantic. You want to believe that you are significant to women in the same way they are significant to you. Serious error. Who was the first girl you kissed?”

“Brenda Levi, Grade Six.”

“Theresa Anderson, Grade Eight. Things took longer in my day. What about the shoes?”

“Greenwood laughs. “Okay. Point taken.” He shoots a leg out from under the chair and studies his foot. “I'd be hard pressed to recall the brand name of the
last
pair I bought …”

“That's because it was probably purchased for you by a woman.”

The reaction is almost entertaining. Greenwood actually covers his mouth with his hands, staring
wide-eyed
at Roebuck across the table. “Holy shit! I think you're right! I think my mom got me these last Christmas.”

“Think of it like a coin toss,” Roebuck says. “If you know that eight out of ten times it's going to land on heads, you're pretty comfortable knowing where to place your bet. The vast majority of consumer purchases are made by women. Imagine zither music when you sing that phrase. Hum it like a mantra …”

As Roebuck rises to leave, he feels his cellphone purr. He removes it from his pocket, checks the number, then slips it back in again where it goes on vibrating privately against his chest.

“Hey!” says Greenwood, stopping him. He has his device out too. “I just got a message from that product manager at Artemis … She says she wants to book a lunch for one o'clock this aft.” He minimizes and consults his calendar. “Yeah, I can make that. You?” Greenwood drums his fingers. “Strange, though, that a product manager is initiating this, not someone higher up. You find that strange?”

“One way to find out.”

“I guess,” says Greenwood. “Coming?”

“Regrettably, I have another appointment. But I know you'll do us proud.”

When Roebuck is in the office, the policy is open door, a must for a creative shop. But it's closed today for this call.

“It's me.”

“Julius! Hi. I'm sorry for calling at work.”

“Don't worry. It's fine. You okay? ”

“I just wanted to try to explain. I don't know what's wrong with me lately. But listen, can I call you right back?”

“Um, sure.”

Julius Roebuck is a student of creative irony. He has to be. He accepts the premise that opposing principles can be simultaneously true. He is at peace with his conviction that having Lily in his life has made his marriage sounder. His wife is hard. Roebuck understands the many ways that he deserves this. It is also true that he could not imagine life without her. Is that what love means? Without his kids, life itself would not be worth the effort. So that's love. That one's easy. Anne is hard, though. Lily isn't hard at all.

Lily is a poet; a real one. She is often in the literary magazines and has published two volumes of verse;
slim
volumes, she calls them. Lily herself is slim and packed with meaning. Roebuck has calculated that the sum total of her earnings from all her published works amounts to less than he makes in any average week; in a good week, like this one is shaping up to be, quite a lot less. She is also a graphic designer of notable worth. Lily does freelance work for Roebuck's agency. It's a point of pride for both of them that all her contracts are arranged through his account people, not him.

One of the suits had brought her in to introduce around the office. It was a Friday afternoon in summer; Lily joined them after work at the pub downstairs. Anne had departed already with the kids for the cottage. He and Lily found themselves sitting with their chairs together as his colleagues drifted home, three or four pints down by then, arguing definitions of
creative
. She called him a purveyor of cliché. As far as Roebuck was concerned, no one could have said a better thing. Roebuck did what he is very good at doing. He told a story.

“When I was younger, I thought I wanted to be a novelist. I got myself accepted into the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa”—maybe she had heard of it?—“tracking for an MFA. They kept telling me that fine writing, above all else, must avoid cliché.”

He remembers swallowing his drink to stretch the point, touching his glass deliberately to hers. “I held out for a full semester, mostly because the place was stuffed so full of women. But eventually, I couldn't stand it any longer. So I quit, came home, and enrolled in Women's Studies, which, may I tell you, provides an even better ratio.”

“
You
took Women's Studies?”

“The only straight guy in my class.”

“What was the problem, at Iowa?”

“It's the business of writers to create clichés, not to avoid them. Their operating philosophy was completely backward.”

“Mmm, now there's a perspective.”

“Pick a great writer, start with Shakespeare. Open your search engine and type, ‘Shakespeare, clichés.' You'll get a list of hundreds,
hundreds
of phrases we use every day: a fool's paradise; a foregone conclusion; a sea change; a rose by any other name; all's well that ends well; as pure as driven snow; as dead as a doornail.
I could go on—those are just a handful of the ones that start with
A
. It's the same with every major writer—Dickens, Homer, the funhouse boys who built the Bible. Take your pick.” He set his glass down on the table. Despite his intentions, Roebuck that day was taking himself seriously too. “A cliché is just a phrase so closely associated with a certain thing that it pops into your head whenever you think about that thing.”

“You've given this speech before, I take it?”

“What I know is that our job is to create clichés, not combat them. Sometimes, clients don't understand that.”

“But you persuade them?”

“That is one of my functions, yes.”

Lily took a sip, regarding. “They wouldn't have admitted you into the program,” she said, touching her tongue to the foam on her lip, “unless you'd shown them some very strong samples. I'm guessing a collection of short stories, maybe the sketch of a novel. Where is it now?”

He unbuttoned her shirt and unzipped her jeans for the first time that night. Roebuck loves sleeping with Lily. Every bit as much as he loves talking with her. Cliché has always been his strong suit.

When the phone rings again he's there and is waiting.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“I'm here.”

“Can you talk?”