Amateurs (29 page)

“Oh, you can just park for free, then,” the attendant said.

“I have US currency,” Karyn offered.

“Sure, I'll take that.”

As they pulled into a spot, Karyn whispered, “It's real-life Monopoly. Free Parking.”

“Except you did pay,” Lucas said, not whispering, “and there's no pile of money in the middle.”

“That's actually a made-up baby rule,” Maxwell said. “If you look at the real rules, Free Parking is just a free spot.”

From the attendant they learned that the Winnipeg Goldeyes were about to play minor-league baseball in the large stadium Karyn had recently and obliviously driven by. They could go there. Lucas had at moments gotten on her nerves over the past few days, but she
liked how amenable he was to the planlessness she favored on vacations and weekends. When Maxwell was little, she had passed whole Saturdays like this, by simply leaving the house, letting him stop at whatever safe-enough thing interested him, playing kicking games with orphaned nuggets of sidewalk, drifting from yard to yard like dandelion seeds.

She followed Lucas and Maxwell through the crowd toward the box office, watching their backs and listening to the organ music and pregame announcements. Lucas cocked his wallet to buy the tickets—a nice gesture—but was instead handed freebies as part of a father-son promotion sponsored by the fire department. “Is it meant for fathers and sons taking in the ballgame without their, like, wife-mothers?” he asked the woman in the booth. “Because his mom's right here.”

Karyn smiled.

“Oh, I didn't know you were all together,” the woman answered from the booth.

“We're not
together
together,” Lucas said, “but we're here as a group.”

“That's cool. I'll just pretend it's a father and two kids. And if you're ever in the market to buy a fire truck, you know who to call.”

“Also I'm not the father,” Lucas said.

“Such honesty! For that I'm giving you a bratwurst coupon.”

The seats were in a front row. It happened that the Goldeyes were facing the Saint Paul Saints, whose third baseman ended the first inning by catching a foul and tossing Maxwell the ball. “Hey, thanks!” Tomorrow was forecast to be uncomfortably hot, but it was beautiful tonight. It wasn't her normal way of looking at the world, but Karyn felt as if she were being
spoken to.
Maybe none of it—the (briefly) free parking, the tickets, the coupon, the familiar opponent, the ball, the breeze—was singly so remarkable, but the run of encounters with good fortune and offhand generosity seemed
charmed in the aggregate. She put her arm around Maxwell, then put her left hand on Lucas's bicep. “Everything's free in this town,” she said to Lucas. The fixity of his expression made her look down at his hands, at a vein-crossing scar on his wrist, a subtle tan line from bike gloves. “It's like we've been given the keys to the city,” she said. She looked up when he cupped her elbow, but whatever he was about to say or do was interrupted by an inter-inning sack race.

At game's end it was coming into focus that Archer's friends were implicitly rescinding the offer of their guest room. Lucas texted them once more on the drive back to the hotel, a rambling DJ now doing a theme show of songs about con artists and small-time criminals. “The radio's so good here,” Karyn said. “It makes me ashamed to be an American.” Lucas agreed, his voice perhaps showing some embarrassment and unease about his sleeping arrangements. “There's room at the inn,” she said. “Don't worry about it.”

Lucas waited in the hotel bar while Karyn redeemed the last of her points. She couldn't help feeling miffed when all the available rooms sounded better than the one she and Maxwell were sharing. They said their goodnights.

Ten minutes later there were three quick knocks on her door. She opened it.

“The pool's open till eleven,” Lucas said from the hallway.

She waited. She didn't want to appear overeager or in a swimsuit in front of Lucas just yet.

“You up for a quick dip?” he finally said.

Maxwell: “I am!”

She looked at Lucas's cutoff Dickies. “Is that regulation swimwear?”

“You gonna rat on me?”

“I think I'm too tired to swim.”

“I'll take Max,” he said, and stepped inside. “Damn, my room's nicer than this.”

“Is it?”

“We should totally switch. My bath's all,
Calgon, take me away.
”

“We're unpacked.” (They weren't quite.) “It's no big deal.”

Maxwell was already in his trunks and shirtless.

“Thanks,” Lucas said. “I mean for everything.” Some vibrato in his voice. “I . . . I don't think I'm a lifelong fuckup.”

“I know.”

“I had fun tonight.”

“Me too.”

“I have fun with you.”

Maxwell, getting gooseflesh in the overconditioned room, followed the adults' conversation like a tennis spectator.

“Take him swimming before it closes,” she said.

She listened to Maxwell's voice get quieter as he and Lucas made their way to the elevator. With the two of them gone, a quiet spread over the room and opened up a line of thinking that she'd repressed for the past few hours. She reached for her purse, took out the pregnancy test, and walked into the bathroom. She thought she had to urinate, but only a few drops would come. Maybe it was that false signal she used to get before performances.

She put the dry stick on the sink, drank a glass of cloudy water, and decided to use this unforeseen privacy to finally commit to an outfit for the wedding. Two weeks earlier, she'd gone shopping for a new dress, but everything in the stores had seemed ugly, expensive, or both. So she'd packed two older dresses, both purchased in what for her constituted a shopping spree in the postdivorce spring of '07. She pulled on her shapewear, then the front-running dress, black and effectively scoop-necked but marred by a silk tie that now seemed twee and an Empire waist that now seemed unflattering. There wasn't a full-length mirror in the room and the lighting was bad—the bathroom unforgivingly bright, the bedroom gloomy and jaundicing—so she stood on the lip of the bathtub to see her legs and shoes, then tried the dress several times with and without a cream
shawl that was beginning to curdle, as it were, with age. Intended as a glamorizing agent, the shawl was working instead on behalf of dowdiness. There might be time to buy something tomorrow. She wanted to make a good impression on Archer and the other relatives, most of whom had never seen her grown up, and she wanted to look somewhat transformed for Lucas, who had never seen her completely made up. Weddings were always erotic for her, and though her own wedding night had been sexually uneventful, she and Jason had usually made love after other people's weddings, had even had hasty, bibulous sex in a reasonably isolated gazebo during a wedding party, a memory sometimes revisited years later when they needed to applaud themselves for bygone wildness. She looked over at the test, took a moment to gauge if she was ready, and glimpsed, with an odd laugh, the Norplant scar on her arm. No, not ready. She turned to the backup dress, a low-cut, studded thing in an indecisive color (perhaps a hybrid plum) that had earned her many spoken and unspoken compliments but now made her feel like the lopsided webmistress of an Emmylou Harris fan site. Not right for a wedding, anyway, and she wanted to blend in more than stand out, or blend in outstandingly.

She got into her nightie and took the test, her bladder now cooperative. Holding the stick, she walked slowly, as if the test were delicate, to the edge of her bed and sat down. The stick was supposed to rest for five minutes on a flat, dry surface, so she put it at her feet on her room's copy of
Winnipeg Vistas.
With Maxwell and the miscarried pregnancy before him, it had been impossible not to stare at the results window in a state of intensified Polaroid anticipation, but naturally this time was different, more like the feeling you have when the phone rings at three a.m. She stared straight ahead at the gray TV screen, not quite able to cry, trying not to think about the test, trying to resolve whether this thing with Lucas could be called courtship and, if so, whether her feelings could be called love. She turned on the TV, turned it off, looked down: a faint positive.

January 2011

Outside the Elmwood Villager, a man was shouting at something or someone invisible to Sara, spreading his arms in protest as if his fruit stand had just been disrupted during a climactic car chase. Sara looked back down at the proof sheets from
The Second Stranger
and took a bite of her pumpkin-cranberry bread. She was spending every morning in this café now, forcing herself to wake up by eight, shower, blow-dry her hair (most days), and put on something other than yesterday's outfit. The baristas knew her by name; she had watched the bulletin board take on fresh overlayers of business cards from handymen, guitar teachers, psychics, and dog walkers.

Shawn, the café's lanky, gray-haired owner, liked to spend some of his time performing routine tasks: cleaning the espresso machine, making folk-art changes to the chalkboard menu. Now he was wiping off one of the round wooden tables near Sara's. He nodded at her dictionary, papers, and red Pilot G-2s. “Whaddaya got going there?”

She answered with the mix of pride and humility she had adopted when proofreading was a full account of her work: a modest office, her tone said, but an important one not entrusted to fools. As for the full account of her work, it had been an unsettled half year. Her demand for retroactive parity had been followed by months of quiet from Archer, interrupted only by sporadic businesslike phone calls during which nothing was uttered about their earlier argument or Sara's fattened salary. There were no in-person interactions. Not sure if she was sincerely welcome at Archer and Gemma's engagement party, she had cited a prior family obligation. Meanwhile she carried on with her basic duties: communicating by e-mail with Archer's editor and agent, pitching and writing reviews, turning down a teaching opportunity, trying to stay more on top of his social-media presence. She still forwarded everything for his input, but after giving him a few days to respond, she would take his silence for ratification. She
felt simultaneously like a lame duck and a regent, on her way out but more powerful than ever.

“Yours?” Shawn said.

“No, no, it's by this guy, Archer”—she pretended to check the name—“Bondarenko.”

“Bonda . . . yeah, I read a cool essay of his a few years back, trying to think where.”

She worried that he would want to talk about masturbation.

“About this blues singer, Arkansas Bob. You see that one?”

As if searching her memory: “No, I don't think so.” She had often hoped for a chance meeting with an unwitting fan, getting to be both the fly on the wall and part of the conversation being overheard, or Viola disguised as Cesario discovering Olivia's love for Cesario via Malvolio, if Olivia's love was really directed at Cesario's selection from
Best American Essays 2008.
But Archer still didn't have many readers, and for a long time Sara hadn't taken steps, such as those leading out of her apartment, to bring about meetings of any kind.

He sat down across from her but at a neighboring table. “Oh, it's a great story,” he said. He sniffed, pushed away his dishrag. “So a few years ago this old guy from the South Side of Chicago dies.”

The West Side.

“His grandson's sorting through the old man's stuff and finds a small collection of classic blues 78s.” Every Wednesday night at the café, Shawn hosted a songwriter's showcase that Sara never attended. “This guy—the granddad—had grown up somewhere in Arkansas—”

Helena.

“—then came to Chicago via Memphis in the forties. Played a bit o' resonator guitar but never recorded or performed in public. But he kept his 78s—there weren't more than nine of them—”

Exactly nine.

“—in pristine condition. So the grandson passes 'em on as a donation to a company that puts out compilations; I'm talkin' beautifully
packaged comps of old blues, country, gospel—all type o' old-timey stuff. Come in boxes with, like, a repro train ticket inside, or some fuckin' actual dirt. Just a one-man operation run by a kid in Chicago.”

A classmate of Archer's.

“The guy's records, the dead guy's, are cream—there's a Charley Patton, a Washboard Sam, a Blind Willie Johnson—all pretty familiar stuff, ‘least to aficionados. ‘Cept there's one record, ‘One-Sided Love' by Arkansas Bob, kid's never heard of. Seems to come from one of the operations where you paid a quarter to have an acetate disc cut on the spot for your own personal enjoyment. Used to be a bunch of those. Chicago address on the label; kid dates it circa '51, '52, but more in an early thirties style, if you can even nail it down. Flip side's just so-so, but ‘One-Sided Love,' Jesus H.: solo performance, but there's like all these polyrhythms, whacked-out guitar figures and little paradiddles or some shit tapped out on the body o' the guitar; guy singing with a low, razor kind o' sound, then talking, then going way up high—it's immensely raw and complex and, like, you know, where's he going? And heartbreaking! He's just leaving it all on the table like this ammonia-funk rag, though I'm not gonna leave the rag here. Buddy of mine, used to work at Jazz Town before they closed, sent me a link. You listen, you think the guy's gonna deliver his twenty-five-cent record to his old lady, then go off and shoot himself.” Shawn held his index finger to his temple and made a sibilant gun noise.