Authors: Matthew Miele
No, I said. I’ve never had a job in my life until you hired me.
Yolk hung from his beard.
Everyone must have a job, he said. Look at me, for example. I don’t need to work, but I do, I have a job, I have lunches with undertakers.
That’s not a job, I said. That’s a hobby.
Elgar raised a dirty spoon. My grandfather used to say, if a man’s hobby is his job, then he is some measure of a genius.
But you’re not a genius, I said. You have a very low IQ.
Nonsense, Elgar said. I only told you that so you’d pity me. I like to be pitied by strange women on planes. It reminds me of my youth.
I nodded dumbly.
Ask me what 2,345 divided by 453 is, he said.
I didn’t respond.
It’s 5.18. How about 33,334 divided by 334? It’s 99.8. Do you believe me now?
Elgar hopped out of bed and began unwrapping his new suit.
Where are you going? I asked.
Elgar used a razor to cut open his suit coat pockets.
He held the fortune in his palm. It shuddered under the weak wind tossed off by the ceiling fan.
Engaged apathy is not an ironic form of adoration
, he read.
Is that really what it says? I asked.
He pulled a second fortune from the breast pocket.
The woman who lies prone on the bed must have a reason, he read. But occasionally she does not This woman is called, in some medical circles, The Eternal Helen
.
Elgar put the fortunes in the waste can.
You don’t mind settling the bill, do you? he asked. I’ve got a plane to catch.
I pretended to read the paper while Elgar packed his pills. When I heard the door close, I phoned Pam in New York. The connection was terrible, punctuated by a lot of terrible hissing noises.
Pam? I said. Are you in prison again?
I’m at my son’s jai alai match. Can’t really talk now, Helen. How’s Edwin?
He left me, I said.
He can’t leave you. You’re booked on his flight today at ten forty-five.
I wonder if I’m forcing things, I said.
He won’t even know you’re there, per usual, Pam said. He always wears that stupid eye bag, doesn’t he? Just—
Pam dropped her cell phone. I heard the sound of boys screaming and punching each other’s padded bodies.
Pam? I said.
I heard Pam cursing,
Get your hands off me, you ultra-suede phony, your kid doesn’t have a hope at Swarthmore
. The ultrasuede phony said something indecipherable in a high-pitched voice, the boys screamed louder, and the line went dead.
I cut open the pocket of my new suit and extracted the fortune from inside. It read,
My condolences, Miss Winterbottom. You’re in love
.
I decided not to follow Elgar that day. I went to a disreputable bathhouse and allowed a woman with a mustache to whip my naked back and thighs with a ribbon of maroon kelp. I sat in a stone sauna beneath the city streets and listened to the trolleys roll overhead. I took myself out for bad Japanese food. The fish was cold, the tea cold, the rice cold, my bone chopsticks wrapped with somebody’s gray hair, and the waiter a sneering, tobacco-toothed Finn with soy sauce on his lapel. I returned to my hotel room, shivering my way along the Katajanokka in the shadow of the cruise ships, dodging tipsy Swedes with vomit on their chins. The room was green with eucalyptus mist. My sinuses yawned open and I started to weep, for no reason I was able to discern.
I woke up the next morning to a white sun. I called Pam as I drank my coffee. She was at the police station filing assault charges against the ultra-suede phony.
I don’t know what you’re whining about.
I could hear the click-click-click as she typed her testimony into the station computer.
You should consider yourself lucky to be rid of the pervert, Pam continued.
He’s not a pervert, I said.
He’s one step away from a necrophiliac, she said. That’s the only reason I agreed to participate in this charade, Helen. You know what they say: Nothing increases a woman’s resolve like repeated exposure to depravity.
I promised Pam I would keep away from Elgar through the holidays. I hooked up with a divorced undertaker named Silor, who was still in love with his wife, and the two of us took a cruise ship around Scandinavia. The ship’s pool was turned into an ice-skating rink and the two of us slid around under the salty night skies, holding hands and feeling nothing. I called Pam from the dead middle of the North Sea, where the reception was unfathomably good.
Do you still miss him? Pam asked. What’s his name again—Elwood?
I suppose, I said.
Helen, Helen, Helen, she said. Did I tell you my son “scored” in the ninety-ninth percentile?
Hooray, I said.
And that bitch who hit me at the jai alai match—I arranged it so her boy is sucking state school bilgewater somewhere in the low sixties.
Pam, I said. Sometimes I worry about you. You’re becoming brittle.
I am winning, Helen. Triumphant is not the same as brittle, unless you’re you.
You’re becoming brittle, I repeated.
Is the sex good with the undertaker? Pam asked.
It is what it is, I replied.
I imagine it’s like being fucked by a tall, white candle. That’s how I imagine it. All waxy and cold. So when do you dock? And if you had to choose between Garitón and Oberlin, which would you choose? Oberlin is a lot more hospitable to homosexuals.
Is your son gay? I asked. Above me, in the dark, I heard the hum of an airplane engine.
No! Pam said. I just think homosexuals are smarter, but care less about grades. My son could have very smart, very chic friends who wouldn’t compete over GPAs.
I dock tomorrow, I said.
I’ll book you a flight, Pam said.
Where has he been? I asked. The airplane hum grew louder. It messed up our reception.
I don’t know where he’s been, but I know where he is, Pam said.
Where is he? I asked. I could barely hear her.
Look up, Pam said, and her phone cut out.
Silor and I parted amiably at the dock in Helsinki. I checked into the room with the mink headboard. I pretended Elgar was in the shower, I pretended he was wearing his eye pillow and lost in the closet. He was here, though. He was here, and I lay on the bed, I rubbed against the mink headboard and waited. I thought, if a woman is prone on a bed, she must have a reason. I missed my flight, I missed another flight. I ate everything in the zinc guest fridge.
After three days, I showered and put on a new gray suit, fresh from its brown paper wrapping. The fortune said,
Who has more emotions? A squinel frozen in a waterfall or Miss Winterbottom? Ha ha ha!
The suit hung off me and let the cold air from the sidewalk up inside it. I walked into a boutique and bought a white coat, a white fur hat, a pair of elk-skin gloves the color of the teeth of the waiter in the Japanese restaurant.
I wandered through town until town was gone. Soon I came to a country club. There were tire tracks pressed into the snowy road, so I walked in them. The road curved to the left and I saw the clubhouse and a frozen lake and the white golf course beyond. I saw a pair of men out on the first tee, or maybe it was the second tee. They were practicing their swings in the knee-high snow. Each clumsy swipe lofted a sparkling wing of snow into the air.
I recognized the winter sporting-eye pillow. I had worn it to bed, once, when the hotel’s heating system failed.
You’re not following through, I heard Elgar say. The eye pillow was pushed up into his hair.
Silor gripped his club and sliced meanly at the snow.
No, no, Elgar said. Are you thinking of your wife when you swipe at the snow?
Silor nodded, grim-faced. Elgar handed him his flask.
Well, don’t, Elgar said. First rule of golf is to shelve your rage at the clubhouse. Look at me, he said. Look at how I have shelved my rage so that this driver—he shook the driver—this driver is not a barometer of my myriad disappointments. Do you understand?
Silor returned the flask. Elgar threw it into the snow. The flask sank from view.
Now then, Elgar said. Watch.
He fumbled in his hair, pushing the eye pillow over his eyes. He wiggled his bottom back and forth, he made a few slow-motion strokes through the air, he gripped and regripped the club.
Maybe I made a noise, or maybe I was simply breathing louder than the wind.
Elgar froze. He unslumped himself and directed his eyepillowed gaze at me.
Miss Winterbottom, he said.
Silor turned. Saw me. Raised a halfhearted palm.
You should be ashamed of yourself, Miss Winterbottom. According to rumor, you’ve been a very bad employee, sleeping with the clients. How does that make us look at Elgar’s Disposables? How does it make us look?
I didn’t respond.
It makes us look unprofessional, Miss Winterbottom. It makes it look like we’ve running a class-act brothel instead of an unreliable wood supply company. I need not tell you that this creates confusion with our brand identity.
I’m actually not so confused, Silor said.
Shut up, Elgar said. You wouldn’t know an orifice from a wormhole.
Silor kicked around in the snow with a black-booted foot, searching for the flask.
I think, if you want your job back, which is what I’m guessing you want, then you should take off your clothes, Miss Winterbottom, and lie down here on the snow.
He tapped at an untouched snowy spot with his driver. The driver made a whispery blue divot that the wind quickly erased.
I stared at Elgar and pretended that, beneath it all, he was a good man with some queer ideas. It was easier than admitting we were two eternally cold souls incapable of thawing, for no especially good reason. But next to him, I would never appear emotionally lacking, and isn’t that the definition of a soul mate? A person who allows you to appear gloriously as something you are not and can never, will never be?
I lay in the snow and took off my clothes. Elgar picked up his antique driver and placed the wooden club on my forehead. He ran the club along the ridge of my profile, he slid it down my throat, between my breasts. This sounds so humiliating, I know, but I cannot explain that this was a moment of tenderness between two Eternal Helens, this was a moment of gorgeous depravity for the invulnerables of this world. Elgar lifted a snowy boot and pressed the treads into my chest.
And where will you send me, Miss Winterbottom? he asked. I want to see the stars.
I was about to answer when my phone rang. Silor wrestled with my coat, and the phone fell into the snow, leaving a little heart-shaped hole.
Silor handed the phone to Elgar.
Hello? he said.
I looked at Silor. Silor shrugged.
Miss Winterbottom, how wonderful to hear from you. And how’s your son? Got into Harvard I hear? Yes, yes, I believe there’s an excellent amount of homosexuals there. Would you like to speak to your predecessor?
Elgar dropped the phone on my belly. I put it to my ear.
Pam? I said.
I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, Pam said. Who’s Miss Winterbottom?
Pam, I—
Don’t listen to a thing he says, Helen. The man’s a necrophiliac, I swear he is. You’ll be dead before he gets another hard-on. I’m thinking maybe this method of mine isn’t working for you. Have you thought about getting a job, Helen?
I have a job, I said.
You’ve never had a job in your life. You don’t know what work is. Did you hear my son got into Harvard? That little bastard owes me everything. I told him if he doesn’t call me twice a week, I’ll make sure he flunks out.
I dropped the phone into the snow and propped myself up on my elbow. I was alone on the golf course. Two pairs of footprints led into the woods. I heard laughter between the trees, I heard Pam’s voice distantly saying
a squirrel in a waterfall
or maybe it was
you’re too spineless Helen
or
look up
. I looked up but the sky was the same color as the snow, and the whole world felt like the inside of something, like a furred, soundless interior, safe and empty. I started to giggle, or cry, I wasn’t sure which, but the snot on my face made me colder than an avalanche worth of snow. I reached for my coat pocket to get a tissue. Instead I discovered a tiny filigree of paper, airmail thin and crumby to the touch, as though it had just been cracked free of its cookie prison.
It said,
If a woman is not built for laughter at her expense, she is not built for love
.
author inspiration
Cat Power’s mournful cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I Found a Reason” is all the more haunting a rendition when you listen to the original—a jaded, jangling, tongue-in-cheek love song that bears no resemblance to Cat Power’s quasidirge. I liked the idea of doing a “third-generation” cover, one that would blend Reed’s jaded with Marshall’s haunted and collapse the two versions into one that spoke to both approaches. The main characters, thus, are loosely based on what I know of Reed and Marshall. Helen hides behind her hair, as Marshall is famed for doing at performances, and Elgar is a picky eater who dines at fancy restaurants. I used to waitress at an aggressively romantic French restaurant in Manhattan that was, inexplicably, a favorite of Reed’s. But there was a lot of velvet, and since, in the name of romance, the restaurant was dark (and abutted the Holland Tunnel), you did feel you were underground. Regardless, Reed was a refreshingly grumpy presence in the midst of the near-nightly wedding engagements and the banquette snuggling and the vaguely desperate quality to everyone’s supposed happiness. That incongruity—a curmudgeon in the house of desperate love—is what, I hope, my version captures.