Book of Numbers: A Novel (10 page)

But the way Rach kept her head in her hands told me the truth: that
he’d
been her true campaign, or she his, all along, and that
all her whining to me had just been a prompt or cue—to be something, to change
something, perform my regret, make amends.

What’s my line? Did I have any lines?

Otherwise, his presence would’ve been nothing but scenery to
me—he’d existed strictly in bitparts, never as a whole. Until then,
I’d thought of him only as a supporter, a walking dead rerun, I’d known
him only as a man who—a generation after appearing as the first teacher
cannibalized by student zombies in the last installment of a horror franchise, as the
smilingly wisenheimer outtaboro accent of an animated knishcart in a popular afterschool
cartoon series—didn’t even work with my wife, but worked for her.

A face without a voice, a voice without a face, though even if both were
retained, I couldn’t remember his name. I hadn’t expected him to feature
in my marriage, and, moreover, even if I had, I could never have suspected that the
character most natural for me to portray—Jewish Husband #1—would
feel guilty about it.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m
interrupting.”

Rach raised her head, said, “You’re not,” but too
formally, as if our next meeting would be with our lawyers.

“Decided to take the day off?”

“What about you—keeping tabs on me?”

“I had a meeting.”

“We’re having one too,” and she bowed to the actor,
who was friendly, or who was trying to be, I’ll give him that—when he held
my face with his and said, “You’re the husband.”

Rach, helplessly, laughed, “Take two.”

He repeated, but did so reluctantly, “You’re the
husband.”

Rach, out of control, shrieked her teethbleach, “Isn’t that
fantastic?”

“Isn’t what fantastic?”

She shrilled, clogstomped, applauded, “You never watched our
spot?”

“My apologies,” I said to him, and to her,
“I’m sure you never told me to watch it.”

“I did,” she said. “A couple’s like asleep in
bed—does that ring a bell?”

My sneaks sunk in the soppy turf, grass engrossing, growing over the
heels—“Ringing nothing.”

“Like a couple’s asleep in bed,”
she said. “At least they’re presented like a couple in bed, in the
suburbs—when suddenly an alarm sounds loud from downstairs, it wakes them up and
the woman whispers it must be a burglar, like get up, like go downstairs and be a
man—you’re positive I never showed you?”

“About the only thing I’m positive about.”

I was honestly ignorant, yet I loathed her describing ads to me, her
scolding me for having to describe them.

“So the guy steps out like with a baseball bat on tiptoe, only to
meet like a stranger prowling around the den and shouting who are you and the
guy’s screaming who are you and like he’s got the bat cocked and is about
to take a swing but like hesitates just perfectly because the stranger, the alleged
burglar who’s all balled in the corner, he whimpers?”

“I’m the husband,” the actor gave an imitation
whimper.

“That’s who you are?” I said. “You’re
the husband?”

“The other guy,” Rach said. “It’s our spot for
Skilling Security.”

\

I’ve since rectified, viewed it online:

After that line the camera pans disinterest across the cozy den, taking in
a row of photos of the wife from upstairs alongside the second man, the supposed
burglar, plowing the ski slopes, hippie fab at their wedding, babyboomed flabby on an
anniversary cruise.

After a cut to the logo of Skilling Security like a coat of arms with a
Yield sign, the ad cuts again to EMTs, fire, two burly cops cuffing the adulterer.

A final tense shot of husband and wife, confronted by infidelity, cozened
by den and moon.

The commercial’s wife, the actress, appears to be younger than Adam
but older than Rach, who cast her, I’m sure, so as not to attract him or be
threatened herself. Or just so the relationship would test appropriate agewise. As for
the husband, he’s not my type, but not Rach’s either. She had the
egalitarian audacity to cast a Vietnamese, who’s ageless.

But it’s Adam who has the last word, in custody overdub, police
cruiser voiceover, though now I can’t recall what it was, rather I can’t
differentiate it from the last words of his other commercials I
clicked on (for razors, deodorants, cholesterol meds), nor can I recall him, for that
matter, in any of the made for TV dramedies, or the direct to video aliens vs. robots
action thrillers I torrented (always portraying the reliable neighbor in the former, and
a rabbi in the latter), as having been wardrobed or madeup at all differently than he
was just then, a gentle goof in suede, an endearing streak of sunblock down the nose
stump.

“I’m Adam,” he said, finally rolling the credits.

His sitting height was my standing height. His hand was damp, but the body
behind it was muscle.

“No doubt,” I said, “Rach’s told me everything
about you.”

“You might as well join us.”

“Already?” Rach said.

I said, “Since the weather’s so nice.”

“It is,” Adam patted a slat.

Rach said, “Already?”

Adam said, “A pleasure.”

“I’d love to,” I said, “but I have writing to
do.”

Rach said, “No doubt”—like she was flinging a crust,
as I hurried off for Ridgewood.

Cut.

One last repeat, one last syndication:

Another man’s career is revived, only because of his relationship
with my wife, and I’m supposed to take that as material. A suggestion for
Adam’s next vehicle: an adaptation of Rach’s life, in which I play him and
he plays me.

How am I, a writer, supposed to feel about having lost you to a reader?
Not even—a memorizer?

What to say, Rach? Will you tell me what to say?

://

May through to June I spent my time
deciding how to spend my time, which is the first, second, and third through nine
thousand seven hundred and griftyfifth items on the agenda of every writer, or neurotic.
I was getting ahead of myself, fretting whether the book would have to have notes or
sources cited, fretting whether I’d be allowed to decide anything at all.

Meanwhile, the sweater layers came off and then the women put on shorts
and then the men put on shorts and everyone became a child. The applianceries threw up
bunting declaring preseason priceslashes on BBQs and ACs, and all the children were out
on Atlantic Avenue slurping challenging snowcones in flavors like tripe.

I, no surprise, was camped inside, grilling windowless. Heinekens,
pinching the filters out of Camels.

The desk had to be cleared, but then what—go clear out any
unmatched gloves I’d left uptown? pack out Ridgewood’s Rach clutter and
return it? Spring cleaning—my neighbors, my floor of nine thousand seven hundred
and griftyfive units, were into that too.

The unit to one side, the trove of an Albanian who peddled arts recordings
mailorder and in person, DVD, VHS, Regions 1 and 2, even rarees on reels, 10mm, 8mm, of
concerts and operas, tours of the Hermitage, the Louvre, Gemäldegalerien, both
samizdat shaky cameraworks he produced himself from the back rows of Lincoln Center, and
classier documentaries duped from public broadcasting, all for homebound infirm or dying
oldsters who couldn’t be bothered with or couldn’t afford a system
upgrade. The unit to the other side, the vault of a dire Sri Lankan trying to become the
exclusive stateside distributor of only the worst products of his island: floppy slabs
of irregularly cut rubber reclaimed from sparetires, coir, peat, microwaveable pouches
of a prespiced rice—Sprice.

I wasted a lot of that stretch with them, out in the
hall in plastiwicker patio chairs from a patio furnisher, and a homeshopping
supplier’s rotating fans.

“You can have shot the actor for $10,000,” according
to the Albanian, “or for that you can have also two new womens and not the Tirana
bitches but the healthy country girls from Kukës.”

The plaintive Sri Lankan, “You will write for the CNN about my
rice?”

I didn’t know what I wanted, Rachwise, and I was as angry at her as
I was, I’ll admit, turned on—by the thought of her wanting that actor.
After my hallmates left for their own domestic disturbances I got onto wifi and clicked
past Adam’s ads, trafficked into his filmography, his televisionography, his
large and small screen oeuvre or at least his performances not expressly endorsing
rugged yet sensitive colognes, refreshing, switching among the networks—Proven
Nexports, WinsumGypsum, AY86MNO22, Readyornotherei1111 (in order of reliability), some
from businesses whose proprietors had given me their wpas or wpa2s in order to
facilitate my redaction of debt consolidation/collection correspondence, others
I’d just guessed (either the names of the networks themselves, or abcdefgh, or
that CAPPED, or 12345678, or a combo), but none of his films or shows I found had any
sex scenes, rather he, or his characters—because a writer has to be careful about
confusing a person with his characters—weren’t involved in any of them:
always it was his son fucking someone, or his daughter fucking someone, after which he,
Adam, might have a benignly erotic talk with her about it, or a stern but supportive
discussion with her partner.
Revenge of the Nasteroids
I liked. Also the
complete Season 2 of
Fare Friends,
except for the episodes “The Bantling
Commission” and “Dolly Dispatch.”

In
Daaaabbb!
and its sequel
Daaaaaaaabbbbbb!
he was
animated again—busy, active, but also a cartoon—some type of anguimorph in
length trailing a long scorpion’s tail without a stinger. He was, I realized,
some variety of lizard, and then a franchise fansite’s posting clarified, he was
a mastigure, of the genus Uromastyx, and another posting debated which species. The
head, because I’m not sure whether lizards have faces, had Adam’s dry/wet
features, his slitherine expressions and gestures, and, of course, his voice,
conventionally rugged, with fugettaboutit dabs.
But that
must’ve been relatively easy—for the rest, it was just a matter of having
him strip and slapping nodes on his tits, letting a computer model his motions.

I clicked through the clips and, in the midst of loading part 3 of 21, I
must’ve fallen asleep and the signal must’ve too, because waking up it was
frozen, and I was in a sweat.

The phone. Aar was checking in, “How’s it going
already?”

I said, “Nothing going,” and I told him no one had been in
touch, and then I told him about Rach.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Don’t contact him, he’ll contact you.”

But I’d meant—about Rach?

Calls also came from Finnity, but I ignored them, and the msgs were:
“Is this your phone, Josh? It’s Finn,” “So this is the
number Aaron gave me, just wondering if you’ve gotten any sense of the project
timeline or maybe you’re already working?” “It’s your daily
obscene phonecall from your editor, just wondering what you’re wearing and what
the plans are if you’ve made them?” “Regrets OK if I’m
wrongnumbering you but that’s the price of an automated greeting, or else OK if
you’re there Josh I’m just going to have to conclude that your not picking
up or ringing me back is like some fantasy tantrum about something from way in the past
that neither of us had control over—it’s Finnity?”

Rach didn’t leave any msgs, just called.

\

Important that I explain.

Some, not all but some, of my avoidance of their calls was about as basic
as psych ever gets: with Finnity, I was delaying a reconciliation with the editor
who’d abandoned me and my book in our time of mutual distress and yet whose
meddling I’d now have to stet again due to a perversity of Aar’s—a
perversity I’d have to appreciate—and then with Rach, I was
procrastinating the final total squaring of even more convoluted, more vulnerable,
accounts.

But the rest of my evasion was professional in nature.

I had, contrary to the terms of the no conflicts of
interest clause in my contract, another client. I had a single active client. My last,
and special. Especially demanding.

She was a curator, and a perennially tenuretracked assistant professor at
CUNY, and I’d been
““““working”””” with her off and
on for a desultory year or year and a half, and also working on a vague ms. vaguely
concerned with archaeological controversies that if it doesn’t make her scholarly
career will at least make her scholastically notorious as it’s intended for a
general audience. In practical terms that meant helping her edit the indefatigable
writing she did for various archaeology and Egyptology journals and exhibition
monographs—which became, as I got involved, duographs, I guess—recasting
the required academese for mass appeal while retaining the authoritative tone. She had a
cubicle at the CUNY Graduate Center, in Midtown, but preferred to rendezvous at home,
specifically in her bedroom, Tribeca (bought when the market was down, when the towers
went down and only the ruthless were buying beyond Canal Street). Her name, not that
it’s important—Alana, or Lana, which is “anal” backwards,
which is how anal’s done (I initially noticed this reversal in our cheval glass
reflection—her lucubratory loft was otherwise bare).

During the second week of May—after having been out of touch, and
then away again on perfunctory fieldwork in South America—she called. It’d
been a while. It’d been ugly how we parted. Then she called again, and left
another msg, but now about having been invited to deliver a lecture at a summer
institute—a seminar series held in a pristine mountain state that presented the
work of diverse scholars and famous public policy types to the busy and wealthy who
required an educational justification for their leisure.

All that was required, she said, was a breezy summary of her blown
uncollated messy ms., though she also said she’d decided to focus her
presentation on mummies—nothing pleased a crowd of the retired rich like mummies,
apparently. So, she wanted to meet. Then, fourth week of May, she needed to meet.
Unfortunately, she knew how to find me, and unlike Rach didn’t have an aversion
to multistop, multitransfer, masstransit.