A xeroxed flyer in neon pink is affixed to the pole with pushpins. “
WANTED:
Upbeat part-time workers for local summer temp job. Must be responsible, educated, and a good multitasker. Quick cash! Lots of fun. Call Carly: (650) 555–9221.” A fringe of phone numbers has been cut into the bottom of the flyer.
Quick cash!
Her heart thumps arrhythmically at the sight of these words. She tears off a number and slips it into her pocket, then looks over at the Ferns’ villa, where a Mexican gardener is administering fertilizer with an eyedropper to some freshly planted rosebushes. He eyes Margaret suspiciously and she quickly turns and heads home.
As she walks up the driveway, a red Chevy truck—rusting hood, dented fender—rattles to a stop beside her. Hand-painted letters on the side read, “Cool Pools,” and early REM blasts over the radio, rattling the windows. A jumble of nets and buckets and jugs of chemicals ricochet around the back. As she approaches, the pool boy climbs out of the front seat and, his back to her, scratches a scrawny rear end through the seat of tattered jeans. James. She’s only seen him through the windows before; up close, she can tell that he is a little younger than her, with dark unruly curls that hang down to his shoulders, and even cuter than she’d thought. He pulls a net from the back of the truck, turns, and sees Margaret. He plants the pole on the ground and smiles, revealing a two-millimeter gap between his teeth. The effect is sort of arrested-development satyr–meets–
American Gothic.
“Oh hi,” he says. He sticks a hand out at her, examines it, and pulls it back. “Dirty hands, sorry. Pool chemicals. I’m James.”
“I’m Margaret,” she says, realizing as she does that he is the only person her age she has seen all week. Perhaps this, too, is part of why she feels safe in Santa Rita: There are no peers to judge herself against and find herself lacking.
“I do the pool.”
“I do…well, right now, nothing, really,” she says, vaguely embarrassed by this confession but compelled, nonetheless, to reveal it to him. She senses, somehow, that he won’t care. He is, after all, a pool boy.
James smiles even wider. “Cool,” he says. “Cool. I haven’t seen you before.”
“I’m not from here. I mean, I’m from here, but am generally not here.” She considers this statement, worries that he’ll think she’s a spoiled local yuppie type, and revises herself. “Though really I’m not really
from
here, these days, either, if you know what I mean.” She realizes that she’s babbling and stops.
“Oh,” he says. “I’m not either. From here. I’m actually not really from anywhere, if you know what I mean.”
“Right!” Margaret senses complicity. “I mean, where is anyone
from
? ‘From’ is just a subjective classification anyway, a social construct of belonging. These days, we’re all just digital nomads, right?” She smiles at him.
James scratches the sun spots by his left ear; his fingernails, she notices, are chewed to pieces. “Not really,” he says, still smiling. “I just meant that I moved around a lot when I was a kid. But that’s cool, too, what you said. So hey, I’ve got to get to the pool. But come back and say hello anytime.”
Margaret grins to disguise the feeling that she has just made a fool of herself. “Sure,” she says.
James hoists the net over his shoulder, winks at her—which just makes him look that much more like he should have little devil horns sprouting from his curls—and vanishes through the gate. Margaret sighs, watching him go, wishing that she had hung on to him for just a minute longer, had invited him for a coffee, or a drink. Or just a conversation. She turns back into the house. In the kitchen, she grabs the portable phone from the kitchen counter and bolts upstairs before her mother can intercept her and smell the smoke on her breath.
“Carly Anderson,” says the woman’s voice at the other end of the line. It sounds like a cell phone. “How may I help you?”
“Hi,” says Margaret. “My name is Margaret Miller. I’m calling about the job?”
“Oh great!” says Carly Anderson. Her voice is so perky and bright it makes Margaret’s teeth ache. “Well, I like to meet job candidates in person. So I can get a sense of, you know, personality. Would you be able to meet up for an interview? I’m interviewing candidates today, actually. Could you come in?”
“Wait a second,” says Margaret. “What does the job entail?”
“Well, it would be working with animals.”
“Animals?” says Margaret, suddenly wary. “Oh.”
There is silence on the other end of the line. “Do you like dogs?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” says Margaret, suddenly afraid that she might have scared off the
Quick cash!
and also afraid to ask more about the job lest she scare herself off. “I’d love to come in for an interview. I’m game for anything.”
They arrange to meet at a café at three that afternoon, and Margaret hangs up the phone. She sits on the edge of her bed and listens to the vacuum running downstairs. Through her bedroom window she watches the top of the pool net drift into view, complete a parabola, then vanish. She feels ineffably lonely. And then, before she can stop herself, she picks up the receiver again and quickly dials Bart’s cell phone number. The call goes straight to voice mail and before she’s quite prepared herself she hears his voice, as laconic and damp as if he’d just climbed out of a hot tub. “Hey, it’s Bart. Leave a message.”
At the sound of his voice, her mouth goes dry. Oh God, she should hang up. What did she think she was going to say? Why is she even calling him? But with caller ID he’ll know it was her, and if she hangs up he’ll just think she’s stalking him, and then she’ll look like an idiot. She is still mulling over her options—to hang up or not to hang up?—when the beep comes, far too soon. “Um…Bart,” she says, and pauses to clear her throat. “Hi. It’s me. I mean, it’s Margaret. I just wanted you to know…I’m at my parents’…in case you were wondering why I called. Um. My family is in the midst of a…a family crisis. I just wanted to tell you…in case of an emergency.” She pauses. “Okay. That’s all.”
Margaret drops the phone and stares at it. “Get ahold of yourself,” she mutters. It’s been almost four months since they spoke; she owes him money that she can’t pay back. He’s dating a
movie star,
for God’s sake. And yet, deep down, Margaret can’t help but hope that he’s sitting at home pining for her, regretting the biggest mistake of his life. What would she have said if Bart had answered, anyway? Does she want him back? Yes. No. Not really. Mostly, she wants him to want
her
back: If Bart Johnson, up-and-coming actor, star of the soon-to-be-released action film
Thruster,
still wants her, it means that she must still have a quantifiable value. And how can he beg her to come back to him if he doesn’t even know that she’s fled to Santa Rita?
margaret noted two things about bart the first time she saw him: the first was his penis, painted blue and on display for all to see, and the second was his British accent. Bart wasn’t, in fact, British, although Bart’s father, a sales executive, had dragged the family to England when Bart was a teenager, and Bart had mimicked the local accent in order to better blend in with his prep school peers and therefore avoid regular beatings by members of the school’s rugby team who had issues with “focking Yanks.” When he returned to the States to attend college, he discovered that an exotic accent—fake or not—was a real asset when it came to bedding college girls, and so he kept it. After a while, he conveniently forgot that the accent wasn’t real.
Bart was a member of Berkeley’s graduate theater program. He was starring in the school’s experimental production of the play
Aristophanes in the Clouds,
a role that required him to stand onstage naked, painted a cheery shade of periwinkle, in total silence while men dressed in goat costumes feigned an orgy at his feet. Margaret met Bart at the wine-and-cheese reception after the show, on the play’s opening night. It was two weeks after she’d turned in her master’s thesis—“The Mother Alien: Contemporary Cinema and the Poststructuralist Feminist Cyborg”—and she’d let herself be coaxed out by her co-op roommate, Josephine, who was in search of actors for her own film school thesis short. Desperate to get away from the piles of papers and books in her room and the circuitous rhetorical arguments in her brain, Margaret had overlooked the fact that she didn’t really enjoy experimental theater.
Aristophanes in the Clouds
did not turn out to be an exception; she found it pretentious and bewildering, a pointless two-hour spectacle with incoherent dialogue and no discernible plot. She wished she’d curled up at home with a Robert Altman movie instead.
The reception was in the backstage area of the theater, a warren of windowless rooms scrawled with aging theater-geek graffiti. She poured herself a Dixie cup of cheap Beaujolais and picked idly at hardened cheddar cheese cubes while Josephine disappeared in search of an actress. She felt alone, exhausted, and very, very weary of all things intellectual.
She thought of the interview she had lined up at Stanford next week with the dean of the English department—who happened to be a golf partner of her father’s, which, rather than her stellar academic performance and impressive double majors, would undoubtedly be the deciding factor in why she would (and she
would
) get the assistant professorship. It was a good position, the kind of job you get and stay in forever, introducing college kids to the arcane joys of Baudrillard, writing the occasional theoretical book, living in one of the campus Victorians, and eventually marrying another professor and raising children in the easy embrace of academe. It was the kind of position she would have killed for two years before, back when she thought that going into academia—becoming part of the intellectual elite—was the most profound way to have an effect on global discourse. But after years of slogging through dense philosophical texts, growing increasingly out of touch with the world beyond the borders of her college campus, Margaret thought the job now sounded like hell.
What
did
she want? She wasn’t quite sure. To have a larger audience, probably, than the dozen or so glazed-over attendees of her thesis seminar. To
Change the World,
just like her high school classmates had predicted she was
Most Likely To
do. (She could still see the yearbook photo: herself, standing behind a podium, finger wagging in rebuke.) Instead, after so much education, she sometimes felt like she herself had vanished entirely inside the circuitousness of linguistics; instead of an individual, she was merely a signifier, a rhetorical argument, a representation. (Even when she tried to masturbate these days, she couldn’t lose herself in the physical sensations but would end up thinking of herself in the third person.
The woman is expressing her female-centered sexuality,
Margaret would neutrally observe;
she is rejecting binaries and entering into the Symbolic.
) She needed to ground herself in reality again. She needed to get a grip.
As she sipped the sour wine she thought of her old teenage fantasy about starting some sort of magazine; but the idea just seemed so reckless, so risky. She wouldn’t even know where to start. She ate a cracker while her head throbbed.
When Bart came to the card table in search of a refill, Margaret barely recognized him. He had scrubbed off the blue paint, donned an inside-out white T-shirt (intentional) and jeans with a fist-sized hole at the crotch (also intentional). He had a mop of brown hair falling over one hooded dark eye and a silver hoop plugged through the tender flesh of his upper ear. He smiled at her as he tossed back a Dixie cup of Beaujolais.
“So what did you think?” he asked. “You’re one of the few people in this room I don’t know, so I trust you to give me an honest review.”
Margaret wasn’t sure quite what to say. Even though she hadn’t a clue what the point of the performance was about—had, in fact, fallen asleep for about fifteen minutes during the second act—her graduate education had taught her that, if nothing else, that which seems bewildering is generally admirable. Just think of Alain Resnais. Long live the nonlinear, poststructural narrative, right? Plus, she had admired the sheer gutsiness that it took for someone to stand naked in front of strangers. During that long silent stretch when Bart was onstage, she hadn’t been able to help but notice that he was rather well endowed, his naked body muscular and sculpted and lean. Under the periwinkle paint, she had suspected he was good-looking, in a slippery foxlike way. She was right.
Standing before him in the dingy lobby of the campus theater, she struggled to come up with something that would sound sufficiently intellectually cutting, something that a Media Studies grad student (with a secondary emphasis in Feminist Rhetoric) would say. Her brain went blank. Her eyes flitted, instead, to the crotch of his jeans and the dark shadow visible through the hole. (Was he not wearing underwear?) “Well, I can say this: It was certainly memorable,” she managed, deciding that this was at least honest.
He leaned up against the card table, upsetting a raft of abandoned Dixie cups. “Well, that’s good,” he said. “I thought it was a crap play, myself. It didn’t make any sense. I wish they’d done something classic, like
King Lear.
Or
Six Degrees of Separation.
LaBute—anything.”
Margaret felt sudden gratitude and relief. “I didn’t really get it,” she confessed, and it was as if a burden had just been lifted from her shoulders. She smiled. “I thought that the usher had neglected to give me the Cliffs Notes. That would have helped.”
“Hah,” he said. “No one gets it, but no one has the balls to say it. No pun intended.”
She smiled. His accent melted over her, and as she thought of him (naked!) a girlish titter slipped from her lips. Good grief. “Your performance was…revealing, though.”
He smiled and lowered his voice. “That’s one way of putting it. Anyway, I just did it to pad my résumé,” he said. “I’m headed down to L.A. soon.”
“To do theater?”
“Oh, bloody hell, no,” he said, swishing wine between his teeth. “There’s no money in theater. Film. I’m going to be the next Sean Penn or, maybe, George Clooney. Do some indie, of course, for the credibility. And then a few quality studio pictures for the money, too. Get a Coppola—Sofia, of course—or an Anderson film, P. T. or Wes.” He grinned. “I’m planning to be famous by thirty.”