Harmless (5 page)

Friday-night meetings? It sounded almost nineteenth-century—men running off leaflets on a clandestine printing press as Alex tied the banking crisis, rising unemployment, and climate change into a tight ideological bundle.

“No fucking government agency or real estate developer is going to help us,” Derek said. “We have to act—now,
here
.”

From far back in his throat, Alex grunted. “No. Not yet.”

Derek wrestled a petulant snarl into a public smile. “See, this is what I’m talking about: political dialogue, the back and forth until we hit that sweet spot. None of that bullshit
irony
,” he said to Mike.

“They’re working on a secret handshake,” Mike said, embracing the role of politically disengaged Gen-Xer.

“Fifty years ago this place was hopping,” Derek said. “Mines, lumber mills, cattle farms, slaughterhouses, factories, a power plant—Christ, they even had a brewery. Never mind the fucking Hundred-Mile Diet—everything you needed you got from less than fifty miles away, from your own community. Then they shipped the jobs to China and any other Asian country where people shit in a hole in the floor, just so the rich could get richer. We don’t
make
anything here anymore. What the hell do we
do
here but spread our legs for tourists and cottagers? Alex has seen the future,” he continued. “We’re heating the planet, killing all the fish, filling the ocean with plastic. There’s not enough water and land for seven billion people, never mind when we hit ten, and our leaders are nothing but butt boys to their corporate masters.”

Alex’s eyes were vacant, but he remained watchful, as though he’d surrendered his attention to an older, more primitive part of his brain.

“Who’s going to help us when the deserts spread and the coasts flood, forcing us to scavenge to survive?” Derek looked at them with utter solemnity. “Let’s face it, boys, the West has shit the bed!”

The men all burst out laughing, lost in student-pub nihilism, as if they couldn’t wait to watch the final reel of cinematic global destruction.

“The West has shit the bed!”

The apocalypse
: hadn’t they been promised it their whole lives?

“There’s our local real estate agent,” Derek said in his hale and hearty voice as Jane and Liz crossed the yard,
both wearing green aprons emblazoned with the word
Kelly’s
in flowing script.

“Running down the Cottage Crowd again, Derek?” Liz said, picking up the end of the argument like a discarded skipping rope. “You don’t mind the money they bring into the area.”

“A few of them do. Most visit their properties just enough to drive up land prices. Christ, I couldn’t afford to buy my own place now.”

“They tip better than the locals,” Jane said.

“I’m not going to argue with aproned ladies,” Derek said, his obsequious tone consigning the women to a post-sexual demographic.

Joseph waited for Jane to cut Derek’s knees out from under him, but she seemed to accept the put-down as the natural course of things for a woman her age. She caught Joseph staring where the apron clung to her hips, and held his gaze.

“I stole the aprons from work,” she said. “The regulars think I’m the town beauty because I’m over thirty and still have my own teeth.”

Derek let out a cackle that was interrupted by the appearance of the three girls on the driveway. Where the hell did they come from?

“Nice apron, Mom,” Rebecca said, her eyes radiating the false clarity of fresh eye drops.

Franny met Joseph’s stare with rehearsed defiance as she passed. She used to be so protective of him, reminding him to wear a hat in winter and to stay out of the sun on summer days. He looked over at Jane as the girls gathered on the
other side of the truck and felt a little better when she rolled her eyes.

“I gotta get Ruby home,” Derek said. “Her mom’s already pissed at me.” He gave Joseph a cartoonish nod. “I’ll remember your name by Monday.”

Ruby held up her cell phone as Franny and Rebecca came back around the truck, Derek’s eyes fixing on their asses like a pair of manacles, studying the details offered by Rebecca’s paper-thin yoga pants and Franny’s short shorts. Joseph’s mouth went dry. An urge to protest, as faint as a child’s voice from the bottom of a deep well, rose and died in his throat. He felt paralyzed by an impersonal sense of shame, as if he was every man who’d ever ogled a woman’s body, running countless four-digit variations—legs, ass, tits, face—that never opened the constricting padlock in his chest.

Not every man. Alex was glaring at Derek with the righteous fury of virginity-protecting patriarchs down through the ages as Derek jumped into the truck and winked at them, christening his journey back to inscrutable, feminine weather zones. Joseph roused himself and ran up the short driveway to open the gate, stamping at a chicken on the way and relishing the rush of power when the bird went scurrying onto the lawn like a tumbleweed. When he reached the gate he wanted to leap over and run down the highway, but where would he go? He was already on vacation.

Twenty minutes later Joseph was still standing in the yard, taking shelter from the sun beneath an oak tree. He was
ready to fall asleep where he stood, the sound of the cicadas in rhythm with the throbbing behind his eyes, to just pass out and see if he’d wake up before he hit the ground and sent the chickens fluttering. The sky was still bright, the clouds stretched to long tatters, and the fields pulsed green. A grey satellite dish the size of a backyard jungle gym lay rusting against the fence, its pride of place hijacked by a discreet metal plate mounted on the sunroom roof, the contrast sparking a column intro:
As TV screens grow ever larger, the satellite dishes that deliver their content are shrinking to the size of blah, with experts predicting that by the year blah the dishes will be small enough to fit into a blah blah
—cue the adjective
Lilliputian
, the obligatory reference to the 500-Channel Universe, and a 150-word sidebar on a crusty local who recycles satellite dishes into folk art. The sales team could pitch the column to the cable companies. Everybody wins.

He closed his eyes, trying to dissolve his thoughts into the cicada buzz, a sound he’d long mistaken for hydro-line surges until Franny set him straight. She used to be great for weaving historical and scientific facts into their long walks in the park, her little hand in his. He cupped his hand over his eyelids, dimming the light. His life was slipping away from him. He’d gone for a rare lunch with Martha a couple of weeks ago, and when he wasn’t flirting to ward off painful topics she confessed that she’d broken the Cool Parent’s Golden Rule and read Franny’s online diary. The contents frightened her: Franny’s odes to numbness in all caps—“
I JUST WANT TO FEEL
”—and broad hints of a drug habit and emerging eating disorder written to a receptive network of
self-harm veterans. Martha also found two of her best work blouses, which Franny had deemed too low-cut for a “woman her age,” slashed at the collars. Joseph listened to Martha as she laid her hand over his, her touch uncannily alien yet familiar, like he was holding hands with his ex-wife’s corpse. She said she needed more from him, and when his eye dimmed into private fantasy, she clarified: “Franny needs a father.”

“I know the feeling,” he’d said, the punchline too perfect to resist.

Martha withdrew her hand, and the sordid history of their break-up lay on the table between them like a platter of freshly eviscerated entrails: his wavering commitment to their marriage; his refusal to “prostitute” his talents and settle for a nine-to-five job; his inability to quantify what he provided in place of financial and domestic stability. Then the final irony, when his very success as a columnist unleashed the long-suppressed Party Boy who destroyed their marriage—his fucking column, the
access
it gave him to the centres of cultural power, the invites to talk on
TV
and radio panels, all heady stuff for a certain type of younger, beautiful woman he couldn’t resist.

What a nightmare. The confrontation after Martha found incriminating texts on his BlackBerry. Franny crying on the porch as he put his suitcase into the cab. Alex showing up at his hotel to talk man to man.
You can’t just leave your wife and daughter
—Alex kept repeating the words, as if no man had ever fallen out of love with his wife or tried to spare his child the spectacle of an unhappy marriage. “They’re better off without me,” he’d insisted, sending
Alex into a tirade that effectively ended their friendship.

Fucking puritan. No wonder Rebecca can’t stand him
.

A mechanical hum cut through the cicadas as a car turned into the driveway, stopping inches before the gate. The driver’s door opened and there was Julian, God’s Own Groover, still topped by a blond lion’s mane. He pushed the gate open, moving with the loping grace of a stoned teenager, and got back in the car, failing to notice when the gate caught on a rise in the ground. No bother: he gently bumpered the gate and drove through, and Joseph laughed to see the car, a rented Japanese sedan, put to the service of such good-natured impatience. He laughed again as he imagined Julian, former West Coast hustler and junkie, signing that car’s rental papers.

Julian pulled in behind Jane’s car and huddled against his female passenger for at least a minute before getting out and winning Joseph over with a nasally “Hey brother!”

The front door of the house opened to release Liam, Mike’s oldest boy—Max?—and little Sam, the kids tumbling down the stoop to see the new arrivals. Julian coaxed the boys with a hand that glinted with chunky silver rings, and as the boys crept forward he pulled a massive cardboard suitcase from the trunk and laid it on the ground. The boys followed their straining eyes, watching Julian flip open the case and then stand up brandishing three Disney-style Arabian daggers with jewel-encrusted handles.

“Stand back!” he warned them. “These knives are sharp enough to cut rope.”

He targeted a spot in the air above his head, drew a circle with his eyes, and sent the first dagger through the
loop. The second dagger was in the air before the first began its descent, and then the whirling Ferris wheel of blades was in full motion—Julian at its centre, his arms languidly turning the glinting wheel as if it were his glad eternal task. He did a half-roundhouse kick through the daggers’ path, and it was too much for Sam, who fell to his knees and grabbed at the air as though he could capture the magic forces unleashed by this Mysterious Stranger.

Julian glanced at the door and did a literal double take, the daggers clanking in the dirt at his feet, his face like that of a man seeing a friend risen from the dead. Joseph followed his gaze to the house, where it settled on Rebecca, who was standing with Franny and Alex on the stoop. How could Joseph have missed it, the striking resemblance between Rebecca and Jane at fifteen? Rebecca was taller than her mom, but she had Jane’s light olive skin, slim nose, and wide mouth, features that must have sent Julian tumbling back through the time stream. Rebecca shuffled her feet in fascinated agitation until Jane and Liz rushed out to greet Julian.

Alex stayed where he was, watching Jane and Liz hug their old friend, a man probably known to him through Liz’s captioned photo album, in which a young Joseph struck several party poses before the photos evolved to scenes of World Travel, Blissful Nature, and Rural Domesticity. This couldn’t be easy for Alex. He’d made a point of not asking too many questions about Jane’s past, insisting that her real history began the day they met.

Julian’s “lover” finally stepped out of the car and nodded at the house and fields with great approval. Her hair was pulled into blonde cornrows, and her sharp black eyebrows
might have been plucked into shape by a pair of specially trained crows—the final effect suggesting a violent tightening process beginning at the back of her scalp. She’d been strikingly beautiful once, but drugs and partying had stripped her looks of some vital binding element, leaving her features isolated on her face like pieces of jewellery. Alex smiled at her and stepped into the role of host, showing genuine interest as Julian showed him the juggling knives while Jane and Liz gave the other new arrival a tour of the farm.

Joseph watched the happy reunion, caught up in the excitement but also observing the scene like an impartial observer perched on his own shoulder. He wondered if Alex knew about Jane and Julian’s high school affair. How much did Alex know about Jane and Joseph’s relationship, and did he suspect the brief overlap between his first night with Jane and Joseph’s last? Why should he care? Their generation was supposed to be cool about ex-lovers, their journeys into erotic excess teaching them the wisdom of limitations.

The late afternoon light slanted through the dusty, humid air, etching fine shadow lines around the windows and doors of the tall farmhouse. It was like looking at an oversized Swiss cuckoo clock, chickens rushing out from behind hidden doors to toll the hour as Alex and Jane, the farmer and his wife, were guided back into the house by invisible gears, followed by the children and happy guests.

S
itting at the kitchen table, Joseph scanned his inbox on Liz’s laptop, relieved to find no emails from his editor heaping more unpaid duties onto his sixty-hour workweek. What was he going to do—complain? A carpenter ant might as well ask the queen to reduce his daily load of leaf fragments.

He broke another Divorced Dad Promise by checking his Twitter account, which an intern was covering for the long weekend. As of 3:15 that afternoon, Joseph was “gobsmacked” by a flash mob of dancing produce growers at a downtown farmers’ market, the gushing endorsement already earning him fifty-three new followers.

Passive-aggressive little fucker
. What was his name? Booker. All the new interns had culturally exotic names—Booker, Ellie, Shiloh, Truman, Scout—their parents gifting them at birth with entry into the creative class.

Jane stopped beside him on her way back from the sunroom, staring down at the computer screen as he closed the lid. “Something you don’t want me to see?”