Adverbs (3 page)

“Smoking,” he said. “She’s a smoker. A smoker, and she’s a dream, and I think she might vanish if I don’t find those goddamn keys on a ring if you know what I mean.”

I knew what he meant and felt for him, to get a girl and then not be able to bring her indoors. My pal Garth blew it almost the same way after a girl he met at camp invited him down to San Francisco for a weekend. He has the kind of parents who always said no, so he saved the money himself and took the bus down, listening to a mix I made him over and over, while I stood by the phone to vouch that he was in the shower if they called. My man Garth slapped on aftershave in the station rest room so the smell of his sweat would be invisible. Picture it like a movie. Play it like a movie in your head, the montage of his Saturday, of a brunch with her parents and a walk alone across that beautiful bridge, kissing with tongue in the exact middle of it, like a love song playing for the lovely parts of the movie, some obvious love song previously unreleased by the original artist and now a theme for Garth’s motion-picture weekend with Kate, with the lyrics all hooked up to them so if it was “Everything I Do, I Do It for You,” it would be “Everything Garth Does, He Does It for Kate.”

But then he lost the fifty bucks. He took her to the movies for some French thing she wanted and had already called down on his parents’ phone to the French restaurant to reserve a dinner afterwards and was prepared to catch hell for it when the phone bill came. But the hell of losing one of his hard-saved fifty-dollar bills and to scour the floor as the audience poured out, willing himself not to cry as he brushed the spilled kernels of someone
else’s date to look for it in the nothing and gum spread out before him, while Kate stood embarrassed with her purse and finally stammer to admit the dinner couldn’t happen? Who can fucking dare to tell me that love is intangible when it’s so obvious that it’s not? The people who say
intangible
have places of their own. It’s not intangible. Garth felt it. He felt it with the lost fifty dollars on the floor. I felt it. Garth and Kate did not have sex that weekend and never wrote again in their embarrassment. “Get down!” the hero says as the windows explode, and everyone ducks so the shatter won’t rip them up. I got down on the ground all fierce with fucking chivalrous determination to find this guy Gawain’s keys, because the good guys have to be teammates or the masterminds like Dr. Drecko will make life permanently harsh, Esmeralda!

I’ve seen this movie so many times.

Gawain ducked down one row ahead of me near the make-outs, and I scanned the ugly floor with my flashlight with an imaginary rap song fired up in my head about motherfuckers finding motherfucking keys boy, as the water rose in the basement chamber with the girls all chained together and their costumes getting wet and sexy, and I found them right as the handcuffs broke.

“Hey,” I said, and swallowed my Gawain and offered a gratitude prayer someplace that I hadn’t said it out loud. “Hey, I found your keys.”

The make-out couple stopped with the tongue to shush me and it was a miracle like the ignition keys being in the helicopter when they finally reach the roof without a second to lose. It was
Keith and some other chick. She had a scarf draped around her and he was all guilty with the lipstick and he stared, knowing me, seesawing between humble and angry. He made the wrong choice.

“Shut up,
Joe
,” he said. “And stop shining that light or I’ll kick your ass. Go sell popcorn or whatever. You’re the
usher
.”

“And you’re Lila’s boyfriend,” I said.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the girl, and then it popped into her head to play with Keith’s hair.

“Lila and I have an arrangement,” Keith said.

“Then you won’t mind me mentioning that,” I said, “when I return to the escalator,
sir
.” I made good with my posture. “Lila is a lady,” I said, “kind and true. The most beautiful here is Lila, flashing her gray eye. No one has ever seen anyone lovelier in his day. The first I gazed upon her face I knew. It was in sixth grade and that girl Allison was crying about something in the stairwell, and Lila was hugging her so tight and nicely. She was hugging her out of
kindness
. She even said
ssh
, a person who has the kindness to say
ssh
when someone is brokenhearted. I watched her kind small head tucked on top of Allison’s shoulder and noticed for the first time the lovely story of her, and how gorgeous it would be to stay on this island with her throughout high school, quietly loving her all this time. It’s obvious she’s a person to love and obviously I love her. Love is this clear thing of revering her, lending your chivalry to her pretty pants and the way she tosses her hair up behind her on rare sunny days and those gray eyes, the luscious gray of them like when the clouds are beautiful even if you’re not buzzed, and so how fucking dare you, Keith. How
dare you with the insults to her character by saying there’s an arrangement. Lila has
honor
, Keith, so how dare you, and with this girl I think I recognize from the winter musical!”

By now people were shushing us and plus I didn’t really say all that, especially the parts I stole from
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
. “You don’t have to say it,” the stripper spy says at the end of the movie and ruffles the famous guy’s hair all shiny in the spinning red light of the sirens. It wasn’t the end yet but I knew what was coming. Keith stood up and sort of punched me like pizza dough at my old job, right on
WELCOME TO THE BIG SHOW
!

“If you fucking tell Lila
anything
—” he said.

“What’s up?” my guy said, standing up with a handful of something. “
Hey
,” he said, because Keith was still grabbing my vest. The guy reached out quietly and Keith put his hand down.

“This is
personal
,” Keith said, suddenly all whiny.

“He was bothering us,” said the temptress.

“This guy’s here because of me.” My man Gawain stepped into the aisle right beside me as if almost for color guard. “He’s helping me. Just chill. The villain gets his ass defeated, if you’re worried.”

“I’m not
worried
,” Keith said, and sat down.

“Then sit down,” Gawain said.

“I found your keys so let’s go,” I said to him. We paused anyway and looked down at the couple writhing in the light of the big boom as the truck went off the bridge. It looked dangerous but the hero whooped like a rodeo. “Enjoy the show,” I said calmly, “
sir
.”

We strode the aisle like we were medals of honor, or at least
deserved them. We stopped underneath the
EXIT
sign to share the spoils, the light emerald on our faces like the whole night was green. It was a pretty green night.

“Do you really have my keys?” Gawain said.

I held them out to see and then tossed them into the air for him to catch with confidence and he did. “Thanks,” he said, “and I found something for you.”

He held a hand in front of my eyes like he’d caught a frog down by the old-time creek, and then unfurled his fingers for me. Inside was a thing of beauty. It was a chain, of some dark metal, tiny thick links all wrung together so it looked like an elegant kind of tough that’s hard to find outside of certain album covers. The chain was all curled around itself like something sleeping in a lair, but at rest in the center was the beautiful pendant. Shiny with special curlicues and all ornate like a palace, it was caught mid-prance for the world to see: a unicorn, man, mighty and lovely, with some kind of tiny semiprecious stones, one on the eye, one on the tip of the horn, and a three-stone glitter of a neck harness. Fucking wow.

“I thought you could give it to the girl,” he said. “You know, by the other escalator. Looks like something that might win her heart.”

“You could tell I like her?” I asked him.

He closed his hand and then held it over mine and dribbled the necklace into my sweaty palm. “It’s obvious,” he said, and then nodded back to Screen Four. “And now maybe you have a chance, huh? With that guy Keith blowing it.”

“You heard?” I said. “You heard me?”

“I thought you did well,” he said, reshouldering his jacket. “I only stepped in when it seemed like you needed backup.”

The unicorn was cool and safe in my hand, but still it felt like it might be wrong. Some wow object like that would take me nine more evening shifts, minimum, the saving up slowed by the gas that the Sovereign commute required of me, and still I’d have to bribe my sister to help me choose and then again to shut up about it. “I can have this, really?” I said. “Are you for real?”

He swung the door open and we blinked like new babies in the lobby light. “It’s yours,” he said, “and she’s yours too, and I gotta run or else mine will kill me.”

He ran and left me with wonder in my pounding heart as he vanished, because how could this have happened? It’s not an obvious thing. Obviously what should happen is the unrequited. Obviously Lila will never notice and our chrome apartment will never appear. You dream forever of the girls who stood next to you and didn’t notice, as far as I can tell so far in this rainy life, or if you’re gay maybe a boy in a locker-room glimpse or a wine-soaked memory of something furtive in a sleeping bag, although nothing like that has ever happened to me and I don’t care what fucking Tomas says. No matter how solid and glittery the unicorn appears, it does not come true. There are no fanciful creatures from the world of epic poems prancing around Mercer Island, no matter how I dream them up. I’m not allowed them. I have a paper due on Monday. Tonight I saw Lila walk through the doors, singing along with the headphones, one of those gloomy tracks she loves with the British singer not making any sense. “You’ve got green eyes, you’ve got blue eyes, you’ve got
gray eyes,” he says to her, some guy dreaming with his band, but Lila isn’t going to turn her eyes to me because if you saw it in a movie you would say, “How did Keith bring another girl to the movies without passing either Lila on the right-hand escalator or Joe on the left?”

So I must be dreaming, however sure the necklace feels in my hands. As the story comes to this Sovereign moment I must descend back down to where they tear the tickets.
I was all led astray by women I had known, and if that has happened to me perhaps I may be forgiven
. Even Gawain didn’t get her all to himself for longer than a second, so let me believe in mine for a second, as I stand in my vest, before I turn the corner and go down down down. Obviously life and its bad times are around that corner, more of the real yearning for Lila and the loud and clear of it not happening and all my chivalry rewarded only by Ms. Wylie in an essay no one else will read. Don’t break my heart just yet, or ask me to lose my reverie on the sticky floor. Grant me one more kickass moment on my island, and hear the boom-boom music muted behind the theater door, and let me believe I’m the guy they all paid to watch all big and mighty, in the dark where I guess I belong.

M
oney money money money money money money money. Let no one say it has no place in a love story. It has a particular place. It is something on the right shelf. When Helena bought the chianti, there was no question which shelf she’d take it from. “We have the cheap stuff on the right, and then it gets more and more expensive as you go along,” said the liquor guy.

“You don’t say,” Helena said. She took a cigarette out of her ripped purse and lit it because she smoked. She was a smoker.

“I like to put the expensive stuff here where I can keep an eye on it,” the guy said.

Helena blew a smoke ring, which was illegal in this country. “Well,” she said, “I’ll be over here, as far as possible from you.”

“You have a sexy accent,” the guy said. “Are you from someplace?”

“Yes,” Helena said. “I’m from Britain, originally.”

“I told you,” the guy said. “Because you can’t smoke in a liquor store in San Francisco. In
California
, and everyone knows it. So I figured you’re new.”

“I guess I am new,” Helena said and walked toward him with
a bottle. “I imagine you have a lot to teach me,” and this is a good example. Why would she say this? Helena was a young woman, originally from Britain, whatever that means. She was a smoker. She had a sexy accent and a bottle of wine in her hands. The wine was chianti, also from Europe, and very cheap in this case, but that was no excuse for the “I imagine you have a lot to teach me,” or that milder, less scrutable joke about being cheap herself. Why behave this way? Helena was beginning to think there was no particular reason. Arguably, of course, there was a particular reason that Helena could not find. Perhaps she had left it in Britain. She paid for her wine, in American currency. Money money money money money.

Helena had moved to New York first. She planned to stay there and work on a new book until her money ran out. Her money ran out in nine days. Prices will have changed as people read this book, so I’ll try to explain it this way: let’s say Helena arrived in New York with money from the American publication of her first novel in the amount of seven hundred billion dollars. She found a hovel of an apartment, crawling with grimy American insects, that cost five hundred billion a month to rent, and half a million usually went to the taxi driver who took her there. Milk—
milk!
—cost a hundred thousand dollars. A pair of smashing, striking new boots cost over a billion. Nine days was actually something of a miracle, although not the miracle Helena was hoping for. Unfortunately this is also the way she explained it to her husband.

David sighed when he heard it. “You really shouldn’t say smashing or striking,” he said, possibly to change the subject. “Those are terms from Britain, really. In America smashing or
striking means something different, sort of violent. You know,
I’m smashing and striking you
. It’s all the same to me, but if we’re going to live here—”

“We can’t afford to live here,” Helena said in her boots. “To live in New York for nine days costs more than the gross national product of my country of origin.”

“Have you written anything?” David asked.

“Yes, I’ve written something,” Helena said. She had two drafts of the first sentence of a novel, on the index cards taped to the end of the tub, where she could look at them in the bath, if that’s the expression. One was, “I imagine you have a lot to teach me,” and the other was, “I imagine you are going to teach me a lot.” She hadn’t decided between the two, but she also had something a little longer written in a four-hundred-thousand-dollar notebook.

“Take it to your editor,” David said. “Show your editor what you have written and he’ll give you some money.”

Helena knew that’s not how it goes but she went to lunch. “Something new?” the editor said with a frown. He was Caucasian, or white, and it was almost Christmas. Helena forged ahead with her plan of reading it out loud.

“And,” Helena said, “in parentheses,
your daughter
.”

The editor took a bite of paid-for cheese but he didn’t look content. “That’s from your new novel?”

“No,” Helena said. “That’s a letter to my mother. My new novel is a love story, but the love story, your editorship, requires money.”

“The thing is,” the editor said, and Helena waited for the thing. “We’re still waiting for your first novel to really catch fire.”

Helena liked this guy, and the idea of her novel catching fire, like a virgin thrown into a volcano, if one were available, the heat from the center of the earth catching first the pages and then the cardboard cover and the dust jacket until her entire career was in ashes. It was a lovely idea but it didn’t sound like a money-maker. “What’s the problem?” she said. “Why hasn’t it caught on fire?”

“Just
caught fire
,” the editor said, “is the American term. The title might be a problem. You called your novel
Glee Club
.”

“I didn’t just
call
it
Glee Club
,” Helena said. Speakers embedded in the ceiling of the restaurant began to announce that they were dreaming of a white Christmas. “It’s
called Glee Club
. That’s the
title
.”

“It’s a British term,” the editor said, “and I think Americans might not know what it means.”

“The term
glee
,” Helena said out loud, “is derived from the Anglo-Saxon
gliw
or
gléo
(entertainment, fun) especially as connected with minstrelsy—playing, singing, dancing, and perhaps even acrobatic feats. Until fairly recent times it was in this spirit
that
American
college glee clubs, with rare exceptions, interpreted the term.” This was from the
Harvard Dictionary of Music
, second edition, revised and enlarged, by Willi Apel, the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, fourteenth printing, which she threw at David for no particular reason she could think of, even that night in the bath. “See, they know it. They’ve had two hundred years to know it. Britain and America are exactly the same. I’m tired of people saying they don’t understand, and that it’s a British expression. I
know
what expression it is.”

David had made some phone calls that afternoon, which again was a miracle. It was a miracle that the American government, in its two hundred plus years of ruthless history, did not have the common sense to shut down Helena’s phone line when there was no way in heaven or on earth that she would be able to come up with the millions of American dollars required to pay the bill. “Do you remember my old girlfriend Andrea?” he asked.

“Whom you loved,” Helena said, “and, who you told me once in a fit of pique, gave you the best blowjobs of your life?”

“That’s the one,” David said. “She works for an arts something in San Francisco and thinks she can get you a gig at a school.”

David had this kindness thing he did which occasionally drove Helena up a wall with jealousy, if that’s the term. She loved him, but arguably this wasn’t enough. She had failed him, because her novel,
Glee Club
, first edition, St. Martin’s Press, New York, New York, first printing, had failed to catch fire, and there were all these inexplicable things that came out of her mouth. Outside the restaurant she said to her editor, “What
would happen if I slept with you?” The editor, to her relief, gave the question the same false consideration he had given the two index cards she had slid his way over dessert. “I’d probably ejaculate,” he said, and got into the waiting taxi. “I’ll speak to you soon, Helena.” And look at her now, saying, “What’s the difference between moving to San Francisco and staying here in New York in utter misery without any money money?”

“It’s all the same to me,” David said, “but San Francisco is warmer and apparently the people are more something. A credit card could fly us there. Andrea was telling me about a great bar she went to, and an apartment she used to live in, and there’s a rumor that the entire city is resting on an active volcano they just discovered. Everyone’s skittish so the rent is low, and plus, of course they’re afraid of terrorists.”

“I am,” Helena said, “also afraid of terrorists. And I’m afraid I don’t know what a gig is.”

“It’s a job,” David said. “A teaching job in San Francisco. We’ll kill two birds with one stone.”

“Dead birds everywhere,” Helena said out loud. “Littering that famous bridge they have over in San Francisco. The Gate Bridge.”

“Golden.” David was picking off the traces of tape Helena had left at the end of the tub, as if they were already hoping for the security deposit back. “I think we might do better there, scrape scrape scrape,” he and his fingernails said, “and your mother scrape scrape thinks the same thing.”

Helena’s mother. Helena’s mother. Mother mother mother. Helena thinks of her mother visiting, and that she could throw
her into the active volcano. But what if these arguments were wrong? She leaned toward her husband and gave him a big kiss where the book had hit him. This is love, moving to where the money is, and all the while a volcano or an ex-girlfriend might blow the whole thing to hell, as the Americans say. As everybody says. Arguably there was more to this story, and there is. “But what if there’s no volcano?” Helena said. “What am I going to do then?”

“I imagine,” David said, “you are going to teach.”