The Family Unit and Other Fantasies (14 page)

The next day, Lee didn’t need to keep an ear out for the mail. Dozing without pills, and so only really resting like a dead fish on the watery surface of sleep, she was caught and jerked into consciousness by the sound of paper sliding. She rose stiffly and saw that a note had been pushed beneath the door. It had no stamp or envelope, had just been torn out of a memo pad and folded. She stooped to pick it up.

“Meet me,” it said, at a popular bar, twenty blocks uptown, at eight on that night. And then there was a name she should have known but had never even asked to know—“Bobby”—who was she assumed, hoped (it had to be! Who else?), the doorman.

The prospect of leaving her apartment suddenly didn’t frighten or upset her. Today it seemed both a wonderful challenge and a relief. Lee took the elevator—she could have used the stairs—and was untroubled by the slow pace of the car and the proximity of two other riders. She looked nice but not nicer than she had ever looked: hadn’t done more than comb (and pin, all right, and pin) her hair.

Outside, she approached the subway entrance without her usual racing heart or the slow start of sweat upon her back. She took if not the first then the second car that came, which was full enough that she felt the touch of someone’s sleeve against her arm and didn’t panic. The knowledge that she could whip out another woman, man, or child was now her concealed weapon; it had replaced the pills in her pocket that had been her usual—ineffective—reassurance.

And then she was there—in half an hour, a straight shot, travelling like anyone else—at Tadley’s, the after-work bar that Bobby chose. (Because it was closer to his own home, which was farther uptown? She had never considered where he went after work—she’d been too tied up in her own troubles like the rest of the not-well. Well, not anymore!) And then there he was, at a table, out of uniform.

It was a startling sight—not like seeing him nude, which she already had; it was like catching him in costume, and one from a cheap, second-rate show: a checked shirt with both sleeves buttoned self-protectively, jeans not so distressed as to be stylish, and red-rimmed glasses, someone’s odd idea of “edgy.” His hair, which she had felt as thick and boyishly unruly when she stuck—when Angelique had stuck—her fingers in it was now combed conventionally, parted politely, and thinning prematurely. Or was it doing it on time? In her building, Bobby had looked twenty-five; in the bar, he was thirty-two or thirty-three, his face a little fallen, his eyes hammocked by dark rings.

“I’m glad you came,” he said, and sounded genuinely relieved—it wasn’t a formality.

“Me too,” she said quietly.

“How do you like the place?”

“It’s—” She looked at the raised TV, the paper placemats and framed pennants. “You know, it’s fine.” The drink seemed watered, but what did she know? Her medications had made her a teetotaler too long.

“Yep—my brother’s got me washing dishes for now, but he says there’s plenty of room for advancement.”

“Wait a minute—” She leaned forward and the overhanging light exposed her own brow wrinkles and light facial down. “You work here?”

“Yeah. Didn’t I tell you? Raveech couldn’t stand me screwing up so much, so I got canned. I haven’t been there since Monday. I left you that note on my way out.”

“Oh.” In fact—this was Wednesday—she now realized she hadn’t seen him in days but hadn’t thought much of it, had taken him for granted, been complacent—or unconscious?

“There was always a standing offer here,” he said, “so I took it. It’s nights for now, but that can change.”

“And it leaves you time for auditions.”

“Well—maybe. But that’s not my focus now. I mean, who was I fooling with that anyway? I wasn’t making headway. Who was I, Heath Ledger? And look what happened to him. No, that’s not for me. There’s a realistic future here. That’s what my brother says, and I believe him.”

With that, he looked more openly at her, and lights from the mirrored bar opposite made his eyes shine with hopefulness.

“I’m also, you know. . . .” he said. “The doc has put me on anti-depressants.”

Bobby continued to stare, awaiting if not her approval her understanding. She understood. This was why he had asked to see her here, on his new turf: to link the man he felt he was with the woman he thought her to be—someone mentally damaged and of limited potential. To end for them, in other words, all other options. She felt hot and pushed away her drink, pretending it had been the cause despite the little alcohol it contained.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m not used to—”

Lee walked unsteadily to the ladies’ room where she punched her face with water, her eyes closed. She didn’t prepare a thing to say, kept her mind clear, hoped irrationally he would be gone when she returned. When she came out, she hadn’t noticed that a stray red hair had fallen in the sink.

Her journey back to Bobby was slow and halting, for she walked on higher heels. The look on the face of the doorman—no, the dishwasher, and maybe one day the waiter—told her what had happened.

“Jeez,” Bobby said, standing, stunned. “I didn’t know
you’d
be here.”

“I like to look after my little sister,” Lee said—or whispered, in the Angelique way.

They took their seats and she immediately leaned forward, her breasts book-marked, and picked up and threw back the vodka Lee hadn’t finished. Bobby made to order her another. When he brought his hand down, she took it between her own and rubbed it determinedly.

“It’s warm,” she said.

Maybe she moved her fingers too swiftly on his skin, implied too obviously that she wished to cast a spell, as if he were Aladdin’s lamp, so that he’d change shape as she had done. For whatever reason, having to make an effort, he pried his hand out of her grip.

“Where is she?” he asked impatiently. “Where’s Lee?”

The use of her normal name jarred her; she had never told it to him, had kept that line blank, waiting to be filled in. Silly, she thought: he had read it on her mail and known it all along.

“I’ll see what’s keeping her,” she said, defeated.

Angelique rose, knowing he missed the seriousness—the sickness—of her sister and was in no mood for her. She didn’t bother to hide that she was hurt. She fought through the pre-commuting crowd, which was young, loud, and jungle deep.

As she did, she suddenly felt weary, being squeezed from all sides, and utterly out of place. The others looked at her with a mix of snobbery and amusement.

“What’s up with
him
?” one asked.

“Is he here to fix the toilet?”

“Be careful. He might be with the mafia.”

“Get the hell out of my way, jerk,” Lee found herself saying—growling, then coughing with a smoker’s choke, her ruddy, red, and hairy fist at her own mouth.

Ruddy and Roddy—well, that made sense, she thought, for here he was, a silver cross she had not even known he wore around his neck being accidentally yanked by the customers in his effort to get out. He was a working stiff out of water, or whatever the expression was, just as his wife—looking for love, apart from him, as usual—had been misplaced, unwelcomed, and wronged.

Roddy managed to push his way to the door and then the street, snotty asides showered on him like beer at a ball game. Outside, his legs spread, and he swung his arms like an ape—on purpose, as a warning, to regain
some
power. Then he reached and descended the subway stairs.

But once the train came—and it was even nearly empty—he went back to being weak, became even weaker. Again he was lost, and unconscionably, criminally, it was illegal to be there by himself—the incredulous stares of other riders told him so. He held onto the centre pole with both hands, feeling abandoned, trying not to cry.

“What’s happened, honey?” one solicitous old lady—maybe twenty-five—asked, half-kneeling near her, her hand clasped as well around the pole. “Where’s your Mommy or Daddy?”

Glinda couldn’t answer—she was too scared. This was not the warmth of her aunt’s apartment, with her folks somewhere around. This was a wilderness, one shaking and swiftly moving like a spaceship toward—what, another world? Who knew?

“I-I-I don’t know!” she cried, the sound covered by the subway brakes—which was to her a witch’s scream—as the train came to a stop.

The little girl ran out, followed by expressions of dismay from the good Samaritans and busybodies left behind. It was not her station—she had many left to go—but she ran by instinct in the direction of her Aunt Lee’s house.

The second she set foot in the safety of the lobby, not even looking at the new—older—doorman, and sprinted toward the stairs, there was no more little girl and she was Lee again.

Lee slammed her door behind her. Then she was shocked to see that she had company.

In fact, her apartment—which was always silent except for electronic voices from images on TV, which even the super had only ever truly entered once or twice to free a drain or fix a phone jack—was packed.

A merry party was taking place—gossip was being spread, canned music played, and old-fashioned appetizers (pigs in blankets, shrimp toast) gobbled up. There were so many guests that Lee could hardly get beyond the vestibule to enter.

Once the visitors became aware that she was home, they slowly stopped their celebration—then found new cause for it in her arrival.

“Hey!”

“There she is!”

“We’ve been waiting for you!”

Lee’s back was patted, her cheek pinched. She was pushed farther in and nearly passed around like a new hors d’oeuvre fresh out of the oven.

“Don’t be shy!”

“Don’t be a stranger!”

“Come on in!”

As if by magic, the group began to grow. She realized that it was made up of her family: cousins, uncles, even one old granddad who wasn’t dead. They had come to surprise her—no, it hadn’t been their choice, they had been summoned, like people in old movies in which a mysterious letter leads a group of strangers to a house and they find out—by telling tales—that they are linked. No, that wasn’t it, either. They’d never met each other; she’d never met them, either, but being related, how could that be?

Lee was growing dizzy, being traded from each embrace. Then she was airborne, lifted, as in a raucous rock concert—a mess kit, a mesh pit, a mosh! Her memory was being shredded as she dropped and, hugged and crushed, her clothes were being torn.

She knew now she had released them—her “relatives” had gotten loose from inside her and couldn’t ever be re-integrated. There were suddenly more and more of them—of her: some old, one infant, one ugly, another violent—they were multiplying like mice or like cancer cells that kill off the original host. Soon, as she screamed, they closed upon her, engulfed and erased her—none of them remained—and no one would be there to do the dishes or turn off the lights or set the alarm for the morning.

Lee heard a bang, a clap, a spank. This time, awakening, she kept her eyes closed. Was she all right, insane, or dead? Had the noise been made by a doorman, a paramedic, or an angel? (Was it true? Would they really exist?) Had it all already happened or was it ready to begin? Would she and someone say, “Did I scare you,” and “You woke me up”?

All she had to do was open her eyes. But suddenly she was aware she wouldn’t know the answers even if she did.

He turned the steering wheel hard to the right, changing lanes without having signalled. The driver of the car behind him, whom he had just cut off, blared his horn then tailgated him, bitterly, before moving left. The other man drove parallel for a while, giving him the finger, before hitting the gas and whizzing away.

Get a life, Bill Chubbuck thought. Then, forgetting the other man immediately, he thought: I hate that expression. I wonder who made it up: probably some poor dumb bastard like me. Now, through no fault of his own, it’s become part of the language, polluting it, one more cancer degrading the English tongue until it destroys it completely. And you’ve got men like me and whoever invented that goddamn “Get a life” to thank for it.

Bill had had a few drinks after spending a long Saturday at work. There he had been harangued, then pressured, and at last mildly praised. He had done his job for too long not to know that this mild praise—faint praise, that’s what the expression was—meant that he had done marvellously well, saved his job, that of his superiors, and even those above them. But giving him more than faint praise might mean he would want something in return—a raise or a promotion or even a better job—and that could not be.

“Damned with faint praise,” he thought and liked the expression, sensing that it was invented at a time when people were still creative and not yoked, lashed like galley slaves as all were now, no matter what age, race, or sex, to some kind of corporation.

The expression made sense: if you were damned with faint praise, well, you weren’t condescended to exactly, but, anyway, it was worse than getting no praise at all, right? So even if the expression didn’t quite apply to him today—he had been
under-
praised, intentionally—he still approved of its clarity and wit, qualities that he associated with this earlier, freer age in America, and he knew that the separate parts of the sentence did in fact apply: “faint praise,” as he had already mentioned to himself, and, frankly, “damned.”

Bill cut right, again without signalling, but this time there was no need—no one was behind him. He was entering a narrow, two-lane highway that grew more dark and deserted as it moved farther north from New York City. It was six o’clock, the sun had already set, and there wasn’t even the occasional weekday commuter to impede his speed, which was just about to reach seventy-five.

Bill wasn’t seventy-five, he was forty-two, but he thought he looked seventy-five as he glanced in the rear-view and saw the crow’s feet beneath his eyes, wrinkles which made other men look distinguished and only made him look ill and exhausted. “Crow’s feet”—he approved of the expression. Its origin might even have been archaic: it was descriptive, precise, and unsparing, and he felt like cruelly sparing himself nothing today, on a day when he had succeeded, a day when other men might have felt exhilarated.

But these other men, he thought, his speed now at eighty, weren’t working for two corporations, which were, in turn, working for two other corporations. Olly Olly Advertising, his employer, had recently been bought by—“merged with”—September, October, & Terwilliger Advertising, and was now handling the account of Cedar Ribbon Investments, which had recently been bought by—“folded into”—High Landing Financial Enterprises, which had been born during the depression as Pennywise, Inc.

Bill had survived the inevitable Olly Olly firings that came with the “merger”—firings all employees had of course been assured would not happen—because he was a gifted copywriter, the best they had, though not one apparently deserving of the praise that might give him ideas of his own worth and ambition to be elsewhere. (And where else could he go now, anyway? September October? Olly Olly
was
September October now—it was Olly-September, that was the new name!)

Even when he was given the Cedar account, it was bestowed on him with the veiled threat—“veiled”: cliché, he hated it!—that he had to deliver, because, remember, they weren’t just Cedar anymore. They were Cedar-High Landing now—they were 35 percent of the U.S. investment business now, wrapped up in one, demanding, ever-unsatisfied client. So don’t blow it, he was told, instead of, Do your best! We know you can nail it! You’re the best guy we’ve got!

A raccoon raced across the road a few feet from being crushed by Bill’s car, just missing joining the ever-growing collection of roadkill (deer, coyote, woodchuck) that smeared the shoulder—there was no shoulder, the side of the road. “Roadkill,” “shoulder”—these expressions were . . . all right, Bill thought, there was nothing wrong with them. And in this strange, sudden calm moment in his overexcited mind, his foot eased off the accelerator as he neared ninety.

He passed a billboard on the darkened road. Annoyed by the presence of an ad in what should by all rights have been a wilderness, he tried to avoid it, looked only at the logo of the billboard company at the bottom: Modern Sign. Then, helplessly tempted, he glanced back up.

It was an ad for a local bar with a sleazy joke—“Get a Margarita. And she’ll go down easy”—next to a picture of a pliant, Spanish-seeming woman suggestively sucking on a straw. It was a double-entendre about getting a Latina girl drunk and getting oral sex—right out in the open where kids could see it. Was there no decency anywhere? What the hell was happening?!

Bill’s foot slowly started to push down again. The ad was probably done by some small upstate agency. There was no money for a New York firm at Coco’s or whatever the hell the bar was called—it wasn’t part of any chain. Maybe an employee had come up with it—maybe there had been a contest and the bartender won!

Still, Coco’s played by the same rules as Olly-September did now, as everyone did: cut through the clutter, grab the attention, and whatever you do, don’t get caught advertising! People are too sophisticated to be sold to, so blur the lines between other kinds of expression and an ad: sneak the ad into (in the case of Coco’s) a dirty joke or a beautiful image or a heartfelt notion. Further pollute the language with ads hidden like terrorist cells inside words that make you laugh or cry or consider an idea. Then just put the product logo at the bottom, subtly and insidiously. Nothing was safe from it—everything was imperilled!

Bill took a turn now at a treacherously high speed. Cedar—sorry, Cedar-High Landing—hadn’t wanted an ad, they had wanted (and here someone in the office—Bill didn’t remember who, he had blocked it out—had actually touched his heart before saying) “truth.” Not “you can trust our investment counsellors,” or “please invest your money with us,” but
feel
something when you think of Cedar-High Landing,
believe
. Your money isn’t a commodity, it’s an emotion; we don’t want your wallets, put those wallets away, we want your tears, your hopes, your souls.

Make it “profound,” Bill was told—and implicitly threatened instead of encouraged, because they were all scared. Everyone at Olly-September was scared of Cedar-High Landing; one corporation was scared of displeasing another, as if they were robots with insecurity installed. Make it—and here the growing meaninglessness of all words made Bill blink, dizzily, as his car flew up the empty highway as if acting on its own volition—“real.”

And what had been Bill’s response? Revulsion? Indignation? Even a small, appropriate amount of anger? No, he had obeyed, because not only was he good (oh, don’t ruin that word, too, he thought, he wasn’t good, he was glib: glibness was both his gift and his downfall; it allowed him to make a living and buy a house ninety miles north of New York City
and
it had ruined his serious writing career
and
it had driven his wife away, for he excelled at a facile, talented imitation of truth, the kind of thing that ruins novels and ends marriages but makes one a—albeit under-praised—star in advertising) not only was he good (glib) but he was scared. His superiors always succeeded in scaring him, even though he knew better: he always feared for his future even as he knew they were faking; he was the best, he had nothing—or as close to nothing as anyone working for two (no, four) corporations could have—to fear.

He was scared because he wanted their approval, because he was weak and so he obeyed and so he was glib and so he did brilliantly, even as he hated himself for being scared and weak and glib and doing brilliantly and thereby saving a job that wasn’t in jeopardy in the first place and then feeling—for a fleeting, disgraceful moment, before he got in his car to go home—proud of how he’d done!

The world on his right, off the road, was pitch-black now—“pitch”: cliché!—and he knew this was where it all fell away, where the highway began to climb a mountain; he could feel his ears pop. For a second, deafened—before he mimed a yawn and cleared his head—Bill heard only the scream of his own thoughts, which were the words of the campaign that he had written.

They had wanted truth, profundity, reality, and he had given them those things. On a white background, the ad said, “You only get out of it what you put into it.” Then, in a different, lighter, ghostly type-face, three words, “Save,” “Your,” and “Life,” floated, as if at once disconnected and connected to each other, at once self-sufficient and dependent on each other for meaning. Finally, in the lower corner, centred, minding its own business, merely playing host to these words but not, of course, benefiting from them (if letters could say, “Who, me?” that was how he conceived it), the logo for Cedar-High Landing was placed: CHL.

Bill was a clever boots, all right! It had a little bit of mystery and, above all, meaning. The ad was a truism both for living and investing: “Save Your Life” referred both to putting your money where it would grow and remaining existent, pulling yourself back from the brink. Remember, it said—he, Bill, said, for he was responsible—without your contribution nothing can occur, whether you’re living in the world or putting your money in a high-yield IRA or secure government bond or whatever the hell Cedar-High Landing (CHL) was offering.

This was what he had written and he knew from the minute he wrote it that it would succeed, that it would be exactly the new kind of non-ad they desired—that it would fulfil every shallow, underhanded need four corporations had to insinuate themselves completely into people’s lives, to co-opt and befoul their language in the process, to replace their art, their philosophy, even their religion. Bill had been their handmaiden, their henchman in this, and for it he was both rewarded (with a hearty handshake and the implied promise that he would not be fired—for now—though the look of sweaty sweet relief on his frightened superior’s face was transparent) and damned.

At the highest point of the highway, his headlights the only illumination, he started his descent in the direction of the exit that would lead to his home. Then his eyelids began to droop. The drinks fogging his mind, Bill turned his wheel toward the flimsy guardrail that would be insufficiently strong to keep him from bursting through and crashing to his death down miles of mountain onto the black earth below.

Suddenly, he opened his eyes and turned the wheel the other way. Right before it hit the rail, he brought the car back from the edge, back onto the deserted road. Shaking, sweat streaming from his face, pits, and back, he managed to keep the vehicle steady and stay in lane. Soon his breath slowed, his heart rate eased; he even hit the brights to see his way ahead. Then, fearful of falling asleep again, he turned on the radio to keep him alert through the rest of the ride.

It had been nuts to drink so much after work—he had never done it before. But then Tony Hooker had never been laid off before, left high and dry by a liquor store that was being replaced by a chain store, a Drugall’s. If a man couldn’t get a little tight then, well, when could he? Still, look what had happened—or almost happened. Had he even
wished
it to happen? That was crazy, wasn’t it?

It was worse than crazy—cowardly. What would Connie and the kids have done without him? Still, strange to say, he wasn’t slowly being revived now by thoughts of them. It was something else that was sobering him up.

As he climbed the highway—the fastest, most familiar, and at night most death-defying way home—Tony passed the same old billboard he always did. Only this time, it wasn’t that hot Spanish chick from Coco’s who had been there for so many months. (He doubted any girl who looked like that would ever go to that crappy dump, and he’d long since grown tired of that dumb joke once his boy, Baylor, twelve, had explained it to him.)