The Humanity Project (32 page)

D
uring the last week of conference registration the Foundation had a peculiar kind of luck. Their only real celebrity, the author of those aggressively marketed and widely consumed inspirational books, was involved in an irresistible scandal. An old mistress was cast aside for a new mistress, and there followed vengeful acts and public statements by the discarded lady. There was a showy, unserious suicide attempt, and the release of some equivocal e-mails, and interviews with sympathetic media: “Serenity and compassion? He pees serenity and shits compassion. He’s just in it for the money and the sex.”

“Oh dear,” Christie said, reading Imelda’s computer screen over her shoulder, inhaling her heady, expensive perfume. “I hope she doesn’t show up at the conference.”

“Are you kidding? I hope she does. This is gold. I should get ahold of all the press contacts and remind them he’s speaking.”

“I have to introduce him. What am I going to say?”

“How about, ‘Here’s a man who needs no introduction.’ You know how many Twitter mentions he has?”

The author released a statement referring to the old mistress as “a longtime friend of my wife and myself, currently undergoing some personal challenges,” and the new mistress as “a young person who has attended my seminars, along with so many others, in the hope of building an authentic spiritual self.” The author’s wife stayed silent, in public at least. Her husband’s books, with their gauzy celestial covers, were always dedicated to her.

Christie found it all depressing. These guys never disappointed in their ability to disappoint. The same grubby behavior, the same rooting and burrowing and penis-driven folly. She told herself that there were many decent men in the world who lacked fame and the ego that went along with it, who lived tranquil, honorable lives. You didn’t hear about them because virtue wasn’t a good story, didn’t offer up any momentum or trajectory or thrilling sense of what awful thing might happen next. Virtue only kept on being itself, unchanging, like water trapped in a stopped drain.

Maybe that was why she’d given up, without knowing she was giving up, her own insignificant attempts at being virtuous. It bored her.

The conference was taking up not only most of her waking hours, but also most of the available space in her head. It was either a good idea gone wrong, or maybe it had always been a bad idea, or maybe they’d pull it off in spite of themselves, and redirect Mrs. Foster’s project into some better channel. She’d hoped it would produce some clear-minded wisdom, or kindle some blaze of good feeling, and perhaps it would, but not for her. She was too mired in the details of chair setup and parking passes. Not to mention her own machinations—who would need flattering, who would need chiding—which she observed in herself with distaste. Humans just didn’t do a very good job of rising above human nature. And here she’d thought it a good idea to arrange for some number of her fellow creatures to congregate in one space and ask each other searching questions.

Certainly all of Christie’s skills were needed when the scandal broke. Mrs. Foster had seen the famous author’s news coverage also, and she called Christie in distress. “We can’t have him on the program! Call him and tell him he can’t come.”

Christie, unprepared, only managed, “Um, why’s that?” She’d come around to Imelda’s point of view. They’d been clobbered with new registrations.

“I hardly think he sets a good example,” Mrs. Foster said sternly. “The conference is called ‘Investing in Our Better Selves,’ not ‘How I Get Away with This Sort of Thing.’”

“I doubt if that’s going to be—”

“Did you hear what that woman said about him? The kinds of filthy activities he enjoyed?”

Christie murmured that she had heard about something of the sort. Along with most of the English-speaking world. She rather wished she had not. “You know, we did sign a contract with his booking agent.”

“Well get Allen on that part.” Allen being Mr. Kirn. “He’ll know what to do.” The matter settled, Mrs. Foster was ready to get off the phone.

“I believe this represents an opportunity for us,” said devious Christie. “I believe it makes the conference even more important, because people will be thinking about moral failures and confusing impulses and good old hypocrisy, all the really truly human things. If there wasn’t any scandal, he’d just show up and talk about finding God by putting your ear to a seashell.” Christie had perused the great man’s books and had come away with a rather unfavorable impression.

“Well . . .”

“I expect he’ll speak from the heart. He’ll have to.” Of course it was just as likely he’d use the occasion to find new groupies.

Mrs. Foster wavered, and the conference went on as planned.

Imelda took Christie shopping, as she had long threatened to do, and picked out her conference wardrobe: garments in charcoal and teal and peach, in linen and fine wool and silk. Shoes to go along with the clothes, and, over Christie’s protests, makeup. “If you don’t wear makeup, people think you don’t care what you look like,” and when Christie objected that she didn’t care, really, Imelda looked at her severely.

“You can keep it at the office. I’ll put it on for you, what are you so afraid of? Somebody might pay attention to you? Here, let’s practice.”

And so Christie sat at her desk while Imelda patted and fluffed and dabbed with her deft, well-tended fingers. The conference was three days away and she still had a long list of chores to attend to. It wouldn’t matter how good she looked if the caterer didn’t show up or the programs weren’t delivered. “Make a kissing mouth,” Imelda instructed, and Christie pushed her lips forward. “Big kiss,” Imelda urged her, then sighed and muttered at the clearly inadequate effort.

Finally she was finished and held up a hand mirror. “Meet the new you!”

Christie looked into the mirror at her new and bedizened self. Her eyes were outlined in green and gray and her eyebrows were darkly feathered. Her skin’s surface was a layer of rosy sheen, her mouth glossy and pink as candy. Imelda’s face appeared behind hers in the mirror. For two entirely different people, blond and raven-haired, they now looked remarkably alike. “Too much?” asked Imelda. “Here, blot your mouth.” She held out a tissue.

“Thank you,” Christie said. Her face felt sticky. “It’s amazing.”

“Now don’t go washing it right off. Leave it on all day, get used to it. Would it kill you to smile?”

Christie made an honest attempt to leave her face alone that day. She mostly forgot about the makeup, except when she caught people giving her puzzled or intense glances. It was the new her, whoever that was, imperfectly attached to her old, tired self. Other people must be better at the makeover, transformation thing. Like Imelda, with her former and profitable career in identity theft.

She was kept busy with the hundred and one chores, large and small, that needed her attention. Almost none of them could be crossed off a list with finality. Almost all of them required more follow-up, more phone calls, more checking back. Not until she got home, late at the end of a long day, did she take another long look in a mirror.

The lipstick had pretty much worn off, but the eye color had smeared and smudged into startling green puddles beneath both eyes. Only the eyebrows had survived unchanged, dark and angry, giving her something of a Kabuki aspect. She was still scrubbing and rinsing and toweling off when Art knocked on her door.

“Hey, Chris? You in there?” Of course she was. It wasn’t like she had anywhere to hide.

She opened the door to find Art, his hands engulfed in oven mitts, holding a large cooking pot, heavy, by the look of it. “Chicken vegetable soup,” he said. “I made this big old batch and there’s not even room for it in the fridge.”

“Since when did you turn into a cook?”

Art attempted to shrug, but the soup pot was too full. “It’s just soup. Like, boiling stuff. Want some?”

Christie said that would be nice. Art took careful steps into the kitchen and set the pot on the stove. “It turned out all right. Pretty good, actually.”

“Thanks, Art.” She’d been eating a lot of sandwiches from the 7-Eleven lately. “I just got home, so this is good timing.”

Art said he’d eaten, but he’d keep her company. Of course he would. She couldn’t very well tell him no. She set out bowls and spoons, bread and butter. The soup was hot and tasty. Every so often a piece peel, of carrot or potato, surfaced in her bowl, or a limp, flowerlike piece of celery green, but she navigated around them.

They finished eating, and when he made no move to get up and go, Christie put the teakettle on. “How’s Linnea?” she asked, since Art wasn’t providing any conversation himself.

“Good, she’s good.” He wasn’t the right fit for her small kitchen chair; he kept recrossing his legs and hitching himself up. His long hair floated into his long face and he swatted it out of the way.

“Did her friend have any luck tracking down his father? I hadn’t heard.” Art looked uncomprehending. “It was something she mentioned a while back.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Art said, but he wasn’t inclined to be curious. He seemed to have settled himself at her kitchen table for some other, unknown purpose. The kettle boiled and Christie got up to make the tea.

“Work keeping you busy?” She guessed it was up to her to drag whatever it was out of him.

“Yeah, the usual. I’ve been thinking of looking for some other kind of job.”

“Really?” This was something new. Art had never seemed to put much energy into vocational matters. “What kind?”

“I dunno, maybe something in high tech. Information systems. Web design. Software applications. There’s a lot of places where they need worker bees, where they train you.”

“What brought this on?”

“I need more of a steady paycheck. For Linnea, you know, she’s a smart kid, she’ll want to go to college. Plus I might want to retire someday. So I better get to work.”

“Good thinking. I hope you find something you really like.” She wanted to be encouraging about this newly birthed Art, peeking out from behind a cabbage in the cabbage patch.

“As long as it really pays, it’ll be just fine.”

They drank their tea. Once the tea was gone, she could shoo him out, get ready for bed, and pick up where she’d left off worrying about the conference. Art put his cup down. “Beata and I broke up.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Art. I mean, if you’re sorry.”

“Ah, shit happens.”

More gloomy silence. Christie got up and cleared the table, set the dishes in the sink, and started washing up. She wished she knew what it was he wanted her to say so she could say it and be done with it, and him. But that wasn’t a charitable thought, when the guy was so clearly miserable. She said, “Maybe you could make it up with her. If you want to.”

“I don’t think she’d be very interested in that.”

So it was as she’d guessed: Beata was the one who’d ended things. “Care to say what went wrong?”

“I guess I’m just crude and insensitive.” Art laughed unhappily.

“Ha-ha,” Christie echoed, but she didn’t rush to say, Oh no you’re not, as she was meant to, because she was tired, and Art probably had behaved in some way as to merit complaint, and then, because the hair on the back of her neck was prickling, she whirled around from the sink to find Art nuzzling up against her, his mouth grazing her ear, his hands patting her up and down in a tentative, hopeful fashion.

“Art!” She pushed him away. She grabbed a spatula and flapped it in his face. “What the hell?”

“Take it easy with that thing.”

“What is the matter with you, have you lost your mind? Are you drunk?” She raised the spatula again and he retreated.

“I’m sorry, I guess I’m just . . . Shit.”

“I’ll say.” Christie folded her arms. So much for the new Art.

“I really miss Beata.” He was mumbling now, his head drooping.

“Well what does that have to do with me? With groping me?”

“Not groping,” he protested.

“Your girlfriend breaks up with you, so you grab the next available woman?”

“I didn’t grab you either,” Art said, sounding cross. “I was being affectionate.”

“Any old port in a storm, huh?”

“Now that’s not fair. You know I always liked you.”

She knew. “I wouldn’t use that as an excuse.” She had to give up being angry with him. He was too pitiful. “Honestly? It’s kind of insulting. Who wants to be the rebound assault victim?”

“I miss her perfume. You know how she always wore that stuff that smelled like peaches?”

“Well go tell her that! Call her up! Ask her how her day went, and how she’s feeling, and what’s new, and then listen to what she says!”

“You think that would work?”

“What do you mean, ‘work’? Act like you’re interested in her as an actual person. Or act that way with the next woman you take up with. Thank you for the soup, I’ll put the pot outside your door.”

“So what would I say? If I called her? How would I start?” Christie gave him an incredulous look. “All right, sorry, I’ll see you around, we’re cool, OK?”

“And check up on your daughter!”

The door closed behind him. Christie heard his feet on the outside stairs, then on the floorboards over her head, Art walking back and forth for a time, and then nothing.

•   •   •

T
he conference was scheduled to begin Friday afternoon and go through Sunday morning. On Friday, Christie dressed up in her new finery, and the least amount of makeup Imelda would let her get away with, and drove out to the seminary where the Foundation had rented space for the event. The seminary was a complex of basilicas and stone chapels, set up in the San Anselmo hills. Its white spires rose from the trees and wisps of morning fog like a fairy-tale castle. The weather was chilly, but not miserable, the view from the broad terrace was green and tranquil, and Christie took heart. She’d prepared, and then overprepared, and everything was in place, and in forty-eight hours or so it would all be over and she could worry about something besides name tags and honorarium checks and whether or not anyone would actually show up.

The famous author was not due to speak until Saturday night, the main event. Imelda was going to attend his bookstore reading in the city tonight and keep an eye out for any vindictive ladies or problem behaviors. And at some point tomorrow, Mrs. Foster would arrive and be installed in the reception suite that had been set aside for her use, where she would welcome selected notables and accept tributes. The board members had been invited, of course, and Mrs. Foster was expecting her unpleasant daughter, Leslie. But there was really no point in being nervous about her or anyone else, Christie decided. No one was likely to pay Christie the slightest attention, a minor functionary stumbling around with a clipboard.