Fiction #4, Young Girls

The opening chapters

This is the beginning of a novel from several years ago, when I was in a two-book deal, following the publication of my second novel. I was asked to show it to both agent and UK publisher very early. It was not complete, but it was pretty strong and, although nervous about it, I did hand it in. My agent really liked it. My editor didn’t.

I wish now that I had known to keep going, because I think this was a step towards the kind of novels I really wanted to write. It contains so many themes I find interesting now and is also narrated by the kind of deeply flawed but also quite funny character that back then we were talking about a lot—the unlikeable woman.

The novel is set in Maine and NYC in 2012, and it’s about adults, comphet, greed, love, sex, complicity, and about getting older without kids and with a lot of money. I saw it as a thick, rich book, literarily meaty but also a page turner, with a voice smart but almost casual, even sleepy and sundrenched; Ann being the cat who got the cream.

It’s so much fun to dig through the archives. I’m so happy to be back to writing all the time. It’s sad to see the gap between 2019 and this last year. It’s very obvious that loss led me to lose hope, and how hope for me is signposted by many, many hours at my desk, writing.

EMMA

My earliest memory of Ann is of her hair in sunlight. She is leaning over me, and it is such a bright day, and I am so taken with her, that I am almost blind. My impression of her today is rich with detail (the freckle on her neck, the confluence of veins a palm’s width below her wrist, her sigh in the morning), but the feeling is the same.

I want you to fall in love with her like I fell in love with her, because without that you won’t understand.

Like Jess cannot understand. Like my mother would not understand if she found out, or when I tell her.

When she calls me, the words I speak down the line throb on my tongue as if that muscle were having a clitoral orgasm. When she does not pick up her phone and texts me “with Jeff” and I imagine them in a restaurant, possibly bickering, possibly laughing; his hand sliding over hers in the way that I have watched it slide possessively over hers for the better part of my life; that smug grin on his face even as he is derisive about her job, her ethics, the breadth of her cultural knowledge—damn it.

When she texts me “with Jeff” and I think about what it means, the frustration and pain circulating inside my body presses outwards everywhere there is a border between what is me and what is air, but nowhere so much as on the back of my eyeballs, as if my emotions will force them out of my head.

I think Ann does not know what she does to me, so I tell her, down the phone line, “You don’t know what you do to me.”

“Do you know what you do to me?” she asks, and somehow we get to having phone sex.

SUMMER

ANN

He sits on the edge of the bed and beckons me closer. I walk over obediently and he turns me around.

“Sit on me,” he says, simply, but as if it is imperative, as if he wants me so badly he can’t wait.

I pull down the seat of my jeans and watch him apply lubricant to himself. He turns me around and wipes a surplus on me. I sit down slowly onto him.

“That’s it, he encourages me. “Look at that. I’m in you to the hilt.”

This is what it’s supposed to be like, I tell myself. I’m drunk and without thought. I’m loving every minute of it. I’m aching all the time. I’m chanting these thoughts in my mind. Concentrate, I tell myself.

Concentrate.

“Milk me,” he commands, so I ride up and down on him. I feel tears at my eyes. I’m overwhelmed. My cheeks are hot. I am trying.

He fumbles with his hands at my clitoris, not inexpertly, because he is forty-four and an experienced, educated, feminist, progressive Democrat, but without much effect.

I shut my eyes on his concave chest with the pube like hair that crawls between his nipples.

“I’m-close-are-you-close?” The demand.

“Yep.” The perfunctory response.

Think of something nasty. Think of something wrong.

I put my hands over his eyes so I am free to mouth words without him asking what I was thinking about afterwards. He thinks I’m being dirty and he grins. “Oh-hoh, yeah.”

“Yeah,” I say back, irritated by the sound of his voice bringing me back to earth. “Shh, I’m close.”

“Oh yeah!”

“Shh.”

A catalogue of pornographic images cycles through my brain and I alight on one that tickles my fancy. With a grimace I depart from the present. I’m in the scene.

In the distance, I hear Jeff groaning with ever-pressing urgency. I put my other hand over his slobbering mouth and finish myself off.

He gasps and struggles out from underneath me. “Did you come?” he says, with a smile that used to imply sexiness but on a man of forty-four is only perverted.

“Yes,” I smile and as soon as his back is turned, I clean his sweat off my breasts with a wet wipe, put my glasses back on, and pick up Lolita.

New York suffocates this time of year. In the morning the taxi arrives to take us to the airport, and we leave the windows open in our apartment, with the bug shades down. No one would ever break in. We are so high up and so overlooked.

“Where you wanna go?” says the cab driver.

“JFK, Terminal 4, please.”

He nods. “Okay.”

In a minute he will ask how to get there, but while we wait, I try to see the sky through the window, craning my neck up over the skyscrapers

“Is it stormy?” Jeff says.

“I can’t see,” I reply. “I can only see a sliver. It might be blue.”

We take each other’s hands automatically and sigh together, feeling the impossibility of fresh air and a full lung on close streets that funnel heat, every car vomiting exhaust fumes, every apartment spewing out hot air—energy from the air conditioning units inside.

“Wait-which-way?” snaps the driver almost incoherently.

“Whichever way you think is best!”

“59 or BQE?”

“Um, probably BQE from here.”

“Is this road?”

“Yes.”

“Did you call to tell Alice what time we’d be there?”

“No,” Jeff says, not to me. “I said yes, take this street!”

We both watch the street entrance as we pass it.

“Never mind. Yes, I called ahead.”

“Cool.”

We sit back and wish we were asleep.

Sometimes I think relationships are like businesses. We even have a contract for them. Each relationship has a profit and loss in terms of happiness. For instance, a year with more unhappy days than happy days, or even a year that breaks even, is a sign of a dysfunction that requires redress, or a hint that your company should dissolve or refocus. Your cash flow is your contentment, and that needs constant attention, such as weekends away, taking each other to dinner and compliments, however dishonest. Run out of contentment and you can’t continue to work. You reach a passive aggressive, miserly impasse where assets are split with great contention and blame is hurriedly thrown at each other, like maniacal sailors bailing out two sides of one boat into each other’s side. Each relationship also has an agenda and these are addressed continuously over the years. Where in a business the agenda is looked over at board meetings in conference rooms, in coupling the agenda—be it the struggle to strike a balance between responsibility to each other and sexual freedom or the question of who contributes more to the household income or compromising on different values and life goals—over years becomes several grand themes and these themes affect, underpin, and sometimes offer complications to the plot of a particular relationship. Truly, we argue about nothing else. But the grand themes of our love are hotly debated, over and over again, during fights under the covers late at night or drunk and tersely in cocktail bars or in the early evening on the sidewalk outside Bed, Bath & Beyond.

There are certain things you want to address in a relationship. They are usually based on personal inadequacies you think you can ameliorate by using someone else’s talent or input.

Jeff wants children. He pouts about it, like a baby.

After work yesterday, we met in a bar near the apartment. I had already packed; he had yet to. He got annoyingly drunk and misty-eyed and it came up as he held my hand and told me I was beautiful.

“Imagine those huge eyes on a baby.”

I withdrew my hand. “Imagine those huge welts on my stomach.”

The check had been waiting on the bar while we lingered over a whiskey and ginger and a vodka tonic. He paid it aggressively then, making a point of adding a huge tip. I earn a lot more than Jeff. You wouldn’t think it would be a problem for him.

He fumbled with his jacket while putting it on, as if his fingers were trembling with emotional trauma, which I’m sure is what he was thinking, too, but not sarcastically.

“You know,” he practically spat. “You don’t have to be so cavalier. It’s important to me. It’s not funny. You’re denying me the opportunity to be a parent.” Jeff loves to make scenes in bars.

“We’ve been over this a lot,” I murmur.

“Yet I still don’t understand why,” he says petulantly.

“You want me to go over it again?”

“Yes. Please. Please explain it to me.”

“There would be no one to take care of it during the day.”

“One of us could stop work.”

“Neither of us find babies interesting enough to stop work.”

“Daycare.”

I stop myself from asking who would pay for daycare. “Don’t you think the idea of having a baby only to put it in daycare from eight until six is a little immoral?”

“Everyone does it.”

“I find it immoral.”

“Then stop work!”

I laugh. “It always comes down to me stopping work! Why wouldn’t you stop?”

Jeff used to be in digital media at CNN, but had an epiphany five years ago on a sailing trip to mark his Dad dying and switched careers. He is now in a much more lowly position than he would be otherwise. And who would pay for everything??? I add silently, knowing that this does not need to be said and would only lead to a bigger, more thematic argument.

“Because I’m a writer’s assistant. I have to work up to staff writer, then head writer, then showrunner, then successful showrunner. Then I can take off work occasionally.”

“And I’m...”

“You’re established.”

I nod. “And...?”

“I don’t understand why this needs pointing out.”

“It clearly does.”

“You hate your job.”

I shrug. “I don’t hate it.”

“You despise it. You bitch about it all the time.”

“But I like having money.”

Jeff turns away and downs the last of his Ketel One, crunching on the rocks. He ignores this idea. Jeff often thinks my ideas are less important than his, as if being a writer means he knows what is truly valuable and operates at a higher level of emotional intelligence than I could possibly understand, being a cold, calculating, capitalist number cruncher.

“You act like you’re single,” he says tiredly. “Everything can’t be your decision all the time. It’s selfish.”

“It’s my vagina,” I point out reasonably.

“Oh!” he exclaims. Her hates it when I sound reasonable. “That’s so…!” And then he leaves without waiting for me, and I have to pace to catch him up on the corner of Mercer and Canal.

In the cab, we both stare out our respective windows. I don’t want to break up with another one. I’m tired of breaking up with people. I got tired of it ten years ago. Perhaps I’ll stick with Jeff, and his occasional halitosis and wild mop of hair.

We have the same taste in literature and want to watch the same films. He isn’t embarrassingly quiet at group dinners. He is only semi-arrogant. We are married. It would be a lot of trouble. It might be a lot of alimony. And while I wouldn’t mind being divorced, having to date again would be a terrible fate I don’t think I deserve. I’ll just stay here, in this cab, holding this hand, and hope he starts to work out and discovers floss and quits his job on Saturday Night Live and gets a teaching position at a public school, something I can’t roll my eyes at. Maybe he’lI have a mid-life crisis and it’ll suddenly all fall into place.

I wonder if Jeff is thinking similar things, and then I realize I know exactly what Jeff is thinking. Jeff likes to globalize, but hates to do anything about it. He loves to bitch about his life. His inner monologue is a list of names and complaints. This evening, for Jeff, was a success—material, in fact, for the memoir he is always masturbatorily writing in his angry little man mind. Death for Jeff would be a perfect day.

When we get past security, we stake out a place to put our bags and split off, keeping an eye on the bags in shifts. Jeff tuts when I reappear after ten minutes shoveling fistfuls of hard candy into my mouth and smoothes down his sweater so I can be admonished by the sight of his stomach, which is slightly less of a bulge than it used to be due to a fairly lax interpretation of the paleo diet. I immediately turn around and head for the bookstore.

I stand in front of the chart and stare at it. Jeff and I used to stand together and stare at the chart in airports.

I can sense him, in the way you do after a decade together, sat behind me, frowning intently at the latest Haruki Murakami as if he gets it more than other people would. He doesn’t even like Murakami. I like Murakami. But Jeff will read anything over 500 pages long, I suspect just to hold it in airports and feel superior. I crunch candy, look over my shoulder, and grin childishly. Here, surrounded by Hispanic families headed off on vacation, he hasn’t pulled it off. The effect is a little classist and inappropriate, this middle-aged, middle-class, caucasian hipster with Bose headphones and an iPad charging beside him, dressed almost exclusively in clothes we ordered online from a Swedish boutique, an irritated expression on his face, pointedly ignoring small, brown children playing nearby.

As if he wants a baby, I snort, turning back to the books. I select an Amy Tan. What would he do with a child? Order it seared squid and bok choi at Macau’s? Sit it on a bar stool and talk over it?

I add a notebook and pen to my purchase and walk back towards our gate just as they call the first passengers, feeling sated. I love spending money. I love a transaction. It feels like sex. Or how sex should feel. Sex should feel like buying something. I hold my contentment in a plastic bag on my middle and ring finger. I gave something. I got something.

We are frequent flyers, so we get on first. Jeff sits next to the window, reading his book. I watch the flight attendant in her little suit, sniffing at people bitchily as they stuff suitcases in overhead lockers.

I read my ticket. New York, JFK, to Portland, Maine.

“Excited?” I ask Jeff.

He pulls a headphone off an ear. “What?”

“Nothing.”

He puts it back on.

“Me neither.”

We pick up the rental in Portland and Jeff insists on driving, but lets me back it out of the garage before he takes the wheel so he doesn’t hit anything. Jeff is the consummate New Yorker, one of those rare creatures actually born in Manhattan and so, although he lived in Dallas for a year for work and did pass a driving test, he has never owned a car and only ever driven rentals on vacation. After he passed his test in Dallas, he spent a year driving Texan cabs from the back seat, before returning, boasting proudly to anyone who would listen that he had survived the South and managed to not be eaten or killed by the KKK or Christians.

Jeff’s family belongs to a certain strata of society that exists above the common New Yorker but below the Rockefellers and their extended group. It’s an astonishing but delightful truth about the post-war States that our parents’ and grandparents’ generations really could start off as small town wait staff and end up owning large, beautiful suburban homes and various parcels of land in distant corners of America. Even on what I eam, I could barely buy in Manhattan now but Jeff’s father, who climbed on the corporate ladder as a travelling salesman and ended up as vice-president of accounting at Bergdorf Goodman, retired at fifty-nine and has lived in a five-bedroom apartment on 70 and West ever since. When he dies, or when we get pushed off our lease in Tribeca, we’ll probably move in with Jeff’s Mom. In any case, that’s what I’m doing and Jeff will most likely come along after some protest about staying in a ‘young’ neighborhood and not wanting to move away from Macau’s, where we eat and drink at least once a week. I have tried to explain that it’s only twenty minutes on the N, but New York City is Jeff’s landscape. It’s his entire world. Uptown is the Arctic. Jeff won’t ever leave Manhattan, particularly because we have a loft apartment in Tribeca that still has Jeff’s hippy grandmother’s name on the lease and has been rent-controlled since 1983. That’s fine by me. I grew up in Bumblefuck, Ohio, with Alice.

I actually had a crush on Alice in middle school. She was a tiny, pretty girly girl where I was a tall, gangly, awkward teenager with no breasts, a deep voice and a propensity to call everyone dude, which made me instantly unappealing to nice teenage boys looking to treat me like a princess, and relegated me to buddy status with all the bad boys, who I often smoked weed with down behind the school’s indoor pool. The only difference between us was that, while they skipped class, I continued to attend and score A grades and a 4.0 GPA before ditching them forever to go to Sarah Lawrence. I still see them sometimes when I go home, pumping my gas or working the counter in diners. We exchange banter easily, because despite my earning power, I’m still emotionally a fourteen-year-old boy, and so are they. It’s clear from our behaviour when we see each other that their wives and Jeff are enabling us.

Alice and I went to the same kindergarten and junior school, but she didn’t come into her own until we were in eighth grade. Suddenly she grew these little, pert, overturned-tea-cup breasts and her legs developed a curve to the calf muscles, and when she walked past me and the boys and her cheeks went bashfully pink, I would think about sticking my hand up her skirt and bringing out the color a little more.

I thought it would feel powerful. I never quite understood why girls like Alice blushed at dicks with greasy hair and yellow teeth who farted in each others’ faces and said funny-but-stupid things in class but I loved the idea of it and for a while acting like a dick held a really strong appeal for me.

Our friendship started out like this. In a way we were great sidekicks. Alice helped me into middle school girl world and eventually into the upper echelons of high school popularity. She was accepted to be cool because she was skinny and beautiful, and she made me cool because she thought I was. In return, I would protect Alice from guys, and drag her home when she was drunk and lie to her parents, and she could revel in the dumb, teenage side of her that wanted to see what would happen if I spat off the footbridge over the highway onto the windshields of passing cars, and then hide her laughter behind the safety of shouting,

“Ew! Gross!”

My initial attraction to her disappeared quickly and we became best friends, exchanging love notes and homemade bracelets and boyfriends like younger kids swapped stickers and chicken pox.

While I left Ohio for good at eighteen, Alice stayed, attending Ohio Wesleyan University and undertaking a Bachelors in Liberal Arts that eventually translated into her running a relatively successful small business, a craft coffee shop where her clients are exclusively middle-class housewives and their children or Liberal Arts students, who come in to make photo collages and concertina fanzines while drinking expensive nonfat mochas. Alice met Todd just after University, while temping as a receptionist for a non-profit. He went to Oberlin and has worked for various charities and doomed public service projects over the last twenty years. Now he works for the Democratic National Committee in Ohio, which in its own way is also a doomed public service project. They never come to New York. We visit them on a schedule that rarely ever waivers. Every two years we take off work for a week and come over for election season, going door-to-door volunteering, or working in the DNC call center alongside Alice and Todd. Jeff does this more enthusiastically than I do at this point, because those few days make him feel like he’s on the side of righteousness, the United Nations, peace, love, puppies, charity, and all that is good in the world. That week is like our atheist Rosh HaShanah.

Other than that, I see Alice every summer in Maine. We missed last year because of Jeff’s work, so I won an argument and instead of a long weekend, we’re here for a whole week, Sunday to Sunday. Luckily Saturday Night Live can spare a lowly coffee-fetcher for that long without falling apart at the seams, although Jeff tells me it was almost a given that they could not carry on without him, almost.

“It was very hard to get the time off,” he tells me again in the car, after we have stopped for supplies and got back on the road.

“What? Turn the music down, I can’t hear you,” I say.

He shakes his head. “You’re going deaf.”

“You’re going deaf,” I reply childishly.

Jeff is a good driver, but too fast. We veer along country roads in the lengthening shadows of evergreens. He plays the new Youth Lagoon album. We stop to take a picture of a swamp and Instagram it. The lake is a glassy, silver line. A foot above it, a parallel line of bugs hovers like a heat wave in the last of the light. The sun throws up a ray like a saluting hand above the conical tops of some kind of pines, dark and tall. Jeff gets back in the car, adds a filter to the photograph and tags me in it.

The car shoots through a small town. Every year the tiny, one storey, wooden shacks take me by surprise. I expect buildings to look eternal and gigantic, to run for entire city blocks and require an uncomfortable neck movement to regard their full height. These look so impermanent, like a strong wind could blow them away. We pass the town and dirt tracks start to appear, leading to campsites and a trailer park and then the lake houses.

“Where’s our road? Is it this one? I always fucking forget.”

“They all look the same,” I agree disinterestedly, my head tilted back, looking up through the open window, watching the sky become cold and clear. “The sky looks like an iris.”

“What?”

“A blue one.”

“My eyes are blue.”

I turn to him and yawn. “So?”

“You should say the sky is like my eyes.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Why?”

“You’ve already admonished me for not doing it. It would sound ingenuous.”

Jeff huffs through his nose. There’s a moment of silence and I wait for him to say, “Do you think it’s like my eyes?”

I lean forward and look into his eyes. Jeff’s irises are blue, but I don’t feel the same way about them as I feel about the sky. They’re not beautiful. I don’t feel like men are beautiful.

“You shouldn’t have to look at them,” he says irritably. “You’ve been talking into them for ten years.”

“No.”

“Ok, thirteen years.”

“I mean, no, the sky isn’t like your eyes.” I point just ahead. “That’s the turn off.”

“Fuck!” Jeff shouts, and pulls the steering wheel harder than necessary down to the right, so we bump onto the track at high speed and the back wheels spin and kick up dust from the forest track. “Fucking Maine,” he grumbles, braking harshly and then crawling down towards the lake, not yet visible but just ahead of us, through the trees.

“Why are you going so slow?”

“These stones scratch the damn paintwork. I want my deposit back.”

When Jeff pays for things what he is really buying is the opportunity to point out to me later that he put money down for something.

“You want to drive?” he snaps.

“Sure,” I say affably.

He ignores me. There is a silence between us, filled by the rumble of the Hyundai’s engine, and the crunching of wheels on an occasional stone, into which Jeff injects another “fucking Maine.” We pass the tennis courts. I press a button and the electric window opens fully. We finally reach the turn in the track that leads to the cabins. Jeff almost shuts the engine off, but decides to drive the car down to our cabin to unload the bags. I can see the cogs turning in his slightly balding head.

I want to do what I used to do when Alice and I learnt to drive as kids, which is to slide my torso out the window, grip onto the top of the door and sit my butt down on the hard edge of the window frame. In summer we would take turns to drive as fast as possible, while the other would hold on tight, feeling her hair ripped away from her skin by the wind, and the cool air caressing the sticky summer sweatiness on the back of her neck.

I lean forward in my seat and watch the cabins grow larger in the windscreen. Some of the cabins on Cobbosseecontee are winterized, turned into modern wood and glass lake houses that look like settings for slasher movies. I don’t necessarily love the look, but the potential for rental yield appeals.

Alice, Todd, Jeff and I own our two cabins together. They are twee and tiny and haven’t been modernized since the 1950s. We have talked about scaling up, but the others are not quick-buck capitalist yuppies like me. It’s true that every year I grow quickly used to the kitsch and living outside and the shabby mustiness of the rooms and leave for New York vowing we will always keep them the same, and we will even shell out twenty thousand to get the floors renewed so we don’t keep stumbling through the kitchen along the thirty degree slant.

Jeff’s and my cabin is the first to come into view. We stay in the same cabins every year, on account of Jeff’a and my childlessness. It works out entirely to our benefit, as Alice and Todd get the larger cabin set back further from the road, which has the fatally uneven floor, a grimy family bathroom, and the only living room, dining table and kitchen and hence all of our trash and leftovers after heavy duty evenings of wine and poker. I’m certain the smell of uneaten pizza and stale beer must drift through to the tiny bedrooms in the night. Also, all the beds in their cabin are bunk beds.

Our cabin has three sections. The first is a square entrance with a bench seat and desk, overlooking the lake.

It’s a great little office, and Jeff often writes in there and banishes me to the bedroom to read, even though it’s got great light and a beautiful aspect. The bedroom has a gigantic bed we inherited from the last owners and thoroughly scrubbed down. The last third of the cabin is split down the middle into a bath and shower room with original dusty pink tiles and bath suite, and a now-brittle MIDF closet, taken up mostly by Jeff’s aspirational wardrobe of fishing waders, wellington boots, tennis whites, and mosquito net hats, that linger here to be eaten by moths over the winter months.

It’s all coming into view now, with the low sunlight filtering through the deciduous trees on the edge of the lake and playing with the shadows and placing of the kids’ old toys. There is Alice and Todd’s car, there’s our cabin, and now their cabin. There is a kayak on the driveway in the middle of repair, there is the tire swing, and the porch, with the dock tucked just behind it. There is the lawn and the willow and the lake.

And there, suddenly, is Alice, clattering through the screen door.

I grip the dashboard.

There is Alice, with her pert teacup breasts, her small, checked skirt swinging mid thigh, her fine blonde hair in those old loose waves before she started shoving it mindlessly up, there is Alice, coming down the steps to meet me, with her parting lips, and short, pearly teeth. She calls out my name. She waves one hand, her arm rising up and excited, and her breasts point out towards me and lift gently underneath her thin t-shirt. The sun is behind her. It passes around her as the car moves. I turn to stare out the open window.

There is Alice, as I knew her. Alice blows me a kiss. The sun moves out from behind her and exposes her features, just in time for me to see Alice’s cheeks as she blushes that sherbet colour, that old candy pink.

But it’s not Alice. It’s Emma, her daughter.

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