Magic for Beginners: Stories (16 page)

Soap and Mike were going to be rich once they got out of
college. The two of them had it all figured out. They were going to
have an excellent website, just as soon as they figured out what it
was going to be about, and what to call it. While they were in
prison, they decided this website would have been about zombies.
That would have been fucking awesome.

Hungryzombie.com, lonelyzombie.com, nakedzombie.com,
soyou-marriedazombie.com, zombiecontingencyplan.com,
dotcomofthewalking-?dead.com were just a few of the names they came
up with. In Will’s opinion, people will go anywhere if there’s a
zombie involved.

Cool people would have gone to the site and hooked up. People
would have talked about old horror movies, or about their horrible
temp jobs. There would have been comics and concerts. There would
have been advertising, sponsors, movie deals. Soap would have been
able to afford art. He would have bought Picassos and Vermeers and
original comic book art. He would have bought drinks for women.
Beautiful, bisexual, bionic women with unpronounceable names and
weird habits in bed.

Only by the time Soap and Mike and the rest of their friends got
out of school, all of that was already over. Nobody cared if you
had a website. Everybody already had websites. No one was going to
give you money.

There were lots of guys who knew how to do what Soap and Mike
knew how to do. It turned out that Mike’s and Soap’s parents had
paid a lot of money for them to learn how to do things that
everyone could already do.

Mike had a girlfriend named Jenny. Soap liked Jenny because she
teased him, but Jenny really isn’t important to this story. She
wasn’t ever going to fall in love with Soap, and Soap knew it. What
matters is that Jenny worked in a museum, and so Soap and Mike
started going to museum events, because you got Brie on crackers
and wine and martinis. Free food. All you had to do was wear a suit
and listen to people talk about art and mortgages and their
children. There would be a lot of older women who reminded Soap of
his mother, and it was clear that Soap reminded these women of
their sons. What was never clear was whether these women were
flirting with him, or whether they wanted his advice about
something that even they couldn’t put their finger on.

One morning, in prison, Soap woke up and realized that the
opportunity had been there and he’d never even seen it. He and
Mike, they could have started a website for older
upper-middle-class women with strong work ethics and confused,
resentful grown-up children with bachelor degrees and no jobs. That
was better than zombies. They could even have done some good.

“Okay,” Will says. “I’ll tell you why I went to prison. But
first you have to tell me what you’d do if zombies showed up at
your party. Tonight. I ask everyone this. Everyone has a zombie
contingency plan.”

“You mean like with colleges, just in case you don’t get into
your first choice?” Carly says. She holds an eyelid open, puts her
finger to her eyeball, and pops out a contact lens. She puts it on
the table beside the bed. She doesn’t take the other lens out.
Maybe that eye isn’t scratchy. “So my eyes aren’t actually green.
The breasts are real, by the way. I don’t watch a lot of horror
movies. They give me nightmares. Leo likes that stuff.”

Will sits on the other side of the bed and watches her. She’s
thinking about it. Maybe she likes how the world looks through one
green contact lens. “My parents keep a gun in the fridge. I guess
I’d go get it and shoot the zombies? Or maybe I’d hide in my mom’s
closet? Behind all her shoes and stuff? I’d cry a lot. I’d scream
for help. I’d call the police.”

“Okay,” Will says. “I was just wondering. What about your
brother? How would you protect him?”

Carly yawns like she isn’t impressed at all, but Will can see
she’s impressed. It’s just that she’s sleepy, too. “Smart Will. You
knew this was my house all along. You knew Leo was my brother. Am I
such a bad liar?”

“Yeah,” Will says. “There’s a picture of you and Leo over on
your parents’ dresser.”

“Okay,” Carly says. “This is my parents’ bedroom. They’re in
France building bicycles, and they left me and they left Leo here.
So I threw a party. Serves them right if someone burns their house
down.”

“I feel like we’ve known each other for a long time,” Will says.
“Even though we just met. For example, I knew your eyes weren’t
really green.”

“We don’t really know each other very well,” Carly says. But she
says it in a friendly way. “I keep trying to get to know you
better. I bet you didn’t know that I want to be president
someday.”

“I bet you didn’t know that I think about icebergs a lot,
although not as much as I think about zombies,” Will says.

“I’d like to go live on an iceberg,” Carly says. “And I’d like
to be president too. Maybe I could do both. I could be the first
black woman president who lives on an iceberg.”

“I’d vote for you,” Will says.

“Will,” Carly says. “Don’t you want to get under the covers with
me? Are you intimidated by the fact that I’m going to be president
someday? Are you intimidated by competent, sucessful women?”

Will says, “Do you want to fool around or do you want me to tell
how I ended up in prison? Door A or Door B. I’m a really good
kisser, but Leo is asleep under the bed. Your brother.” Jenny and
Mike used to go off and kiss in the museum where Jenny worked, but
Soap never kissed Jenny. Once, in college, Soap kissed Mike. They
were both drunk. Men kissed men in prison. White men made out with
black men. Becka used to make out with her boyfriends out on the
beach while her brother hid in the dunes and watched. In the zombie
movie, a zombie ate Becka’s lips. You don’t ever want to kiss a
zombie.

“He’s a heavy sleeper,” Carly says. “Maybe you should just tell
me what you did and we can go from there.”

Soap and Mike and a couple of their friends were at one of the
parties at the little private museum where Jenny worked. They drank
a lot of wine and they didn’t eat much except some olives. Jenny
was busy and so Soap and Mike and their friends left the gallery
where the wine and cheese were laid out, where the docents and the
rich people were getting to know each other, and wandered out into
the rest of the museum. They got farther and farther away from
Jenny’s event, but nobody told them to come back and nobody showed
up and asked them what they were doing. The other galleries were
dark and so somebody dared Mike to go in one of them. They wanted
to see if an alarm would go off. Mike did and the alarm didn’t.

Next Soap went into the gallery. His name wasn’t Soap then. His
name was Arthur, but everybody called him Art. Ha ha. You couldn’t
see anything in the gallery. Art felt stupid just standing there,
so he put his hands straight out in front of him in the darkness
and walked forward until his fingers touched a wall. He kept his
fingers on the wall and walked around the room. Every now and then
his fingers would touch a frame and he’d move his hand up and down
and along the frame to see how big the painting was. He walked all
the way around the room until he was at the door again.

Then somebody else went in, it was Markson who went in, and when
Markson came out, he was holding a painting in his arms. It was
about three feet by three feet. A painting of a ship with a lot of
masts and sails. Lots of little dabs of blue. Little people on the
deck of the ship, looking busy.

“Holy shit,” Mike said. “Markson, what did you just do?”

You have to understand that Markson was an idiot. Everyone knew
that. Right then he was a drunk idiot, but everyone else was drunk
too.

“I just wanted to see what it looked like,” Markson said. “I
didn’t think it would be so heavy.” He put the painting down
against the wall.

No alarms were going off. The gallery on the other side of the
hall was dark too. So they made it a game. Everyone went into one
of the galleries and walked around and chose a painting. Then you
came out again and saw what you had. Someone got a Seurat. Someone
had a Mary Cassatt. Someone else had a Winslow Homer. There were a
lot of paintings by artists whom none of them knew. So those didn’t
count. Art went back into the first gallery. This time he was slow.
There were already some gaps on the gallery wall. He put his ear up
against some of the paintings. He felt that he was listening for
something, only he didn’t know what.

He chose a very small painting. When he got it out into the
hall, he saw it was an oil painting. A blobby blue-green mass that
might have been water or a person or it might have been trees.
Woods from very far away. Something slow and far away. He couldn’t
read the artist’s signature.

Mike was in the other gallery. When he came out with a painting,
the painting turned out to be a Picasso. Some sad-looking freaky
woman and her sad-looking freaky dog. Everyone agreed that Mike had
won. Then that idiot Markson said, “I bet you can’t walk out of
here with that Picasso.”

Sometimes when he’s in houses that don’t belong to him, Soap
feels bad. He shouldn’t be where he is. He doesn’t belong anywhere.
Nobody really knows him. If they did, they wouldn’t like him.
Everyone always seems happier than Soap, and as if they know
something that Soap doesn’t. He tells himself that things will be
different when the zombies show up.

“You guys stole a Picasso?” Carly says.

“It was a minor Picasso. Hardly a Picasso at all. We weren’t
really stealing it,” Will says. “We just thought it would be funny
to smuggle it out of Jenny’s museum and see how far we got with it.
We just walked out of the museum and nobody stopped us. We put the
Picasso in the car and drove back to our apartment. I took that
little painting too, just so the Picasso would have company. And
because I wanted to spend some more time looking at it. I put it
under my coat, under one arm, while the other guys were helping
Mike get past the party without being seen. We hung the Picasso in
the living room when we got back and I put the little painting in
my bedroom. We were still drunk when the police showed up. Jenny
lost her job. We went to prison. Markson and the other guys had to
do community service.”

He stops talking. Carly takes his hand. She squeezes it. She
says, “That’s the weirdest story I’ve ever heard. Why is it that
everything is so much sadder and funnier and so much more true when
you’re drunk?”

“I haven’t told you the weird part yet,” Will says. He can’t
tell her the weirdest part of the story, although maybe he can try
to show her.

“Did I tell you that I used to be on my school’s debate team?”
Carly says. “That’s the weirdest thing about me. I like getting in
arguments. The boy with his head under my chair, I kicked his ass
in a debate about marijuana. I humiliated him all over the
map.”

Will doesn’t use drugs anymore. It’s too much like being in a
museum. It makes everything look like art, and makes everything
feel like just before the zombies show up. He says, “The museum
said that I hadn’t stolen the little painting from them. They said
it wasn’t theirs, even when I explained the whole thing. I told the
truth and everyone thought I was lying. The police asked around,
just in case Mike and I had done the same thing somewhere else, at
some other museum, and nobody came forward. Nobody knew the
artist’s name. So finally they just gave the painting back to me.
They thought I was trying to pull some scam.”

“So what happened to it?” Carly says.

“I’ve still got it. My sister kept it for me while I was in
prison,” Will says. “For two years. Since I got out, I’ve been
trying to find a place to ditch it. I’ve left it a couple of
places, but then it turns out that I haven’t. I can’t leave it
behind. No matter how hard I try. It doesn’t belong to me, but I
can’t get rid of it.”

“My friend Jessica does this thing she calls shopleaving,” Carly
says. “When someone gives her a hideous shirt for her birthday or
if she buys a book and it’s not any good, she goes into a store and
leaves the shirt on a hanger. She leaves the book on the shelf.
Once she took this crazy, mean parakeet to a shoe store and put him
in a shoebox. What happened to your friend? Mike?”

“He went to Seattle. He started up a website for ex-cons. He got
a lot of funding. There are a lot of people out there who have been
in prison. They need websites.”

“That’s nice,” Carly says. “That’s like a happy ending.”

“I’ve got the painting in the car,” Will says. “Do you want
it?”

“I like Van Gogh,” Carly says. “And Georgia O’Keeffe.”

“Let me go get it,” Will says. He goes downstairs before she can
stop him. The guys on the couch are watching somebody’s wedding
video now. He wonders what they would think if they knew Carly was
upstairs in bed, waiting for him. The dancing girl is in the
kitchen with the boy under the table. The girl in the dress is out
on the lawn. She isn’t doing anything except maybe looking at
stars. She watches Will go to his car, open the trunk, and take out
the little painting. Out behind the house, Will can hear people in
the pool. Will hasn’t felt this peaceful in a long time. It’s like
that first slow part in a horror movie, before the bad thing
happens. Will knows that sometimes you shouldn’t try to anticipate
the bad thing. Sometimes you are supposed to just listen to
swimmers fooling around in a pool. People you can’t see. The night
and the moon and the girl in the dress. Will stands on the lawn for
a while, holding the painting, wishing that Becka was here with
him. Or Mike.

Will takes the painting back upstairs and into the master
bedroom. He turns the lights off and wakes Carly up. She’s been
crying in her sleep. “Here it is,” he says.

“Will?” Carly says. “You turned off the light. Is it the ocean?
It looks like the ocean. I can’t really see anything.”