The Morels (7 page)

One of the men Arthur was with, upon closer inspection, was a woman. She had on the same outfit as her colleague—plaid short-sleeved shirt with jeans and Day-Glo sneakers. They both wore crew cuts and horn-rimmed glasses. Penelope introduced us and, having just met them herself, messed up their names.

“I’m Leslie,” the man said, “and she’s Lucien.” It was unclear if they were related in any way other than their place of employment. Leslie toyed with the strap of his canvas tote like he was adjusting a seat belt.

Lucien said, “You can call me Lucy.”

I was looking to chat some more with Arthur, but he was already being pulled away by Will (“You’ve got to come look at this, trust me, it’s really cool”), leaving me alone with his work colleagues and his wife. I excused myself to find Sri Lanka and the editor, who were sitting in a folding-chair semicircle with a half-dozen others.

“Geography,” the editor said, “Entertainment, Literature, Science, or Sports and Leisure.” He was holding a deck of Trivial Pursuit cards.

“Entertainment,” someone across from him said.

“Make sure you’re rotating them.”

Sri Lanka, when I sat down, said, “So I’ve been on this website lately? And it’s given me some really good ideas for our next project. Why-Frame-the-Juice-Dot-Org.”

The editor read from the card in his hand. “Here’s your question.
What actor played immigrant Latka Gravas on the television series
Taxi?”

“There’s a theory circulating that the murders of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman were masterminded by Andy Kaufman to help O.J.’s flagging career.”

“Andy Kaufman!” someone said. “That’s his name.”

“That’s a wild coincidence,” I said.

Sri Lanka, deadpan, “There are no coincidences.”

“Anyway, isn’t he dead?”

“He faked his death, dude. Everybody knows that.” Then hushed, “Listen. Are you ready to head out?”

“We’re just settling in.”

“But these are adults. If you want to have fun, I know a couple of places we can go.” He took a pull on his beer and belched. “Plus I’m kind of hungry.”

“Why don’t you go ahead then,” I said. “I’m going to stay here awhile.”

Leslie and Lucy joined the circle.

“Okay, this one’s up for grabs,” the editor called. “Entertainment, of course:
How many
Rocky
movies were made by 1990?
”

“Who on earth would admit to knowing that,” said Lucy.

“Oh, here we go,” Leslie said. “Let’s hear it.”

“What,” Lucy said.

“It’s such familiar ground you’re covering. Generations of old people have been there before you, kvetching about what heathens we’ve all become.”

Sri Lanka said, “Five! That’s easy.”

I watched Penelope some yards away cuff a small brown paper bag and set it down on the ground. Will was helping. He held the bag steady while she filled it with dried beans from a large bin and set a small candle inside. Will lit it for her and then handed her another bag from the stack he was holding. By the time they were done, the place looked like a proper roof garden.

“I’m not going to apologize for having a problem with this, Leslie. I mean, am I really wrong?”

“Yes, you’re really wrong. Besides, aren’t poets of your generation supposed to have embraced pop culture?”

“Is there even such a thing anymore? Everything is pop. Fucking semiotics.”

Leslie turned to me and said, “Departmental politics. Not all that different from seventh grade, actually.”

“It’s the very thing that bothers me. Trivia. It’s what the age has reduced us to. World knowledge as nothing more than a set of browsable, meaningless facts.”

“Wine,” said the woman next to me, handing a bottle to Lucy. Lucy thanked her and took a Dixie cup from the stack on the ground. The woman, who had introduced herself as Marsha a few moments ago, said, “It’s a good point you make. Didn’t it used to be that only the people in power had knowledge? Keepers of special knowledge?”

“The Church,” Leslie said. “Who had it on good authority that there was a big hole in the South Pole where a race of giants lived.”

Arthur had come over and was standing just outside our semicircle. He said, “You’re thinking of Poe’s novel.”

“Based on a going theory of the time.”

“It used to be that knowledge was power,” Marsha said. “But now knowledge isn’t powerful. It’s—”

“Trivial,” Arthur said.

“Fine,” the editor said, “but can you answer me this:
Do porcupines masturbate
?”

“That’s not a question!”

“No?” I offered.

“Wrong. Guess again.”

“What’s the question?” This was the man next to Marsha.

“I’m Marsha,” she said to Sri Lanka. “And this is my husband, Greg.”

“Greg and Marsha?” Sri Lanka said. “Are you serious?”

“Except we’re not brother and sister.”

“Neither were your TV counterparts—they totally could have fucked.”

Arthur stood there for a while—large hands shifting from under his armpits to his pockets to his elbows—as he looked around for a way in. After some time, he took a cross-legged seat on the gravel. I became engaged in some lighthearted repartee with Greg and Marsha, then looked over again to see Arthur staring out blankly, the way one does when caught in an awkward social situation. The people on either side of him were involved in other conversations, leaving him alone in this now-boisterous group. Eventually, he got up, brushed at the bottoms of his chinos, and wandered off. I excused myself.

I caught up with him at the base of the immense water tower. We talked for some time there, wandering the labyrinth of an idea I kept losing the thread of. In my tipsiness, I didn’t really care, content enough to drink my beer and nod away as he pursued a train of thought. Then he said, “I’m not good at this.”

“At—”

“Being with other people. I don’t know how to relax. To chat casually about the world. I do this, what I’ve been doing with you, which seems to alienate most people.”

“We can talk about the weather if you want.”

“Penelope is different. She thrives in these situations.” We regarded her as she stood by the grill some yards off with two others, gesturing wildly with a pair of barbecue tongs. The couple she was with held paper plates, onto which Penelope delivered two blackened pieces of chicken off the grill. She caught us looking and waved with the tongs.

“How did you two meet?”

“On a bus. If I think about that day, I can still smell it, the air inside that bus. That’s memory! The humid earth, the coffee, the cologne. It had been raining. Sometimes I wake up next to her, amazed. A wonderful thing, marriage is—no longer having to navigate the baffling bureaucracy of life alone. To have a partner. Someone who believes in you. Her belief is so strong. Sometimes I wonder if, without her, I’d exist at all.”

“How’d you manage it—if you’re so bad at small talk? She turned on by long tracts about the reader-driven model of literature?”

“I got her pregnant.”

“I like your technique. Effective. I’ll have to remember that. And being a father? As wonderful as marriage?”

“The boy’s a born artist—all children are, I suppose. But you get to see just how natural the impulse is to invent things out of thin air. His most recent project has been Tug, imaginary Rottweiler. Sublimating his desire for a dog through endless drawings of one. We are in the Tug period of Will’s artistic career. Pencil sketches, clay models, glazed tile. Opening a book I’d been reading the other day, I discovered a Tug on the bottom corner of every page: a flip book of Tug running through a meadow.
Tug
, because Rottweilers are ugly yet powerful—like tugboats. You’ll look through any of the sketch pads in Will’s room to find page upon page of family
portraits, featuring Tug front and center. Tug is being willed into this family through sheer force of imagination. Isn’t that right, O Son of Mine?”

Will had been beam-balancing the waist-high railing around the water tower as we talked, giving us each a duck-duck-goose on the head every time he passed. He jumped down between us and said, “I’m over the whole dog thing. What I want now is a poltergeist forensic kit. It’s for discovering unexplained phenomena.”

Will brought us over to see some “suspicious evidence” he and some of the other tenants had found. As we walked off together, I thought of myself at Will’s age, ten or eleven, with my own father. I have vivid memories of our time together—the day we toured the island of Manhattan on the Circle Line, just the two of us, and the hours spent constructing an elaborate scale-model space station I’d gotten for Christmas, heads bowed together at the dining room table, passing a small tube of glue back and forth. Strangely, I don’t much recall playing with friends, although I must have; I spent most of my time at the local playground and at school with those my own age, but I have only the most generalized memories of these as places—sandbox, sprinklers, courtyard—not what I did there. Maybe it’s for their rarity that I remember those moments with my father. He was generous with the time he had for me—but there wasn’t much for him to be generous with. His professional life took so much of him—pedaling twice as hard against the lack of even a high school diploma—that I often found myself on the sidelines having just missed my chance to hold out that cup of water as he passed. At Will’s age, I yearned toward my father, found myself interested in whatever interested him—his favorite television show (
Star Trek
) became my favorite television show; his favorite author (Isaac Asimov) became my favorite author. This didn’t seem to be the case with Will, I noticed. He was his own man. In this rooftop investigation, Will was the lead detective—Arthur the staid partner with only two weeks left to retirement.

The problem was Arthur didn’t seem to know how to play along. Will, kneeling, picked up a handful of gravel wet with an
iridescent sheen—I think it was hand soap—then let the gravel slip through his fingers, back onto the ground. He rubbed his index finger and thumb together, brought them up to his nose. He squinted up at Arthur and said, “This substance has no basis in the natural world. Let’s bag it, have our labs check it out.” And instead of telling his son that the technicians at the labs couldn’t be trusted or that he had no idea what he was getting himself into, that this conspiracy went all the way to the top, Arthur instead began a lecture about how even artificial products were technically part of the natural world because man himself was part of the natural world. And when Will countered that this particular stuff looked like it was of
alien origin
, Arthur tried arguing that aliens, though they might be from Mars, were themselves still “naturally” occurring, if one included the universe as part of nature.

As the last of the daylight faded, the votive bags shone more brightly. The gathering around the semicircle took on a campfire glow, which is to say it felt intimate—faces flickering in and out of view, everyone drawn into the radius of light—and yet at the same time it felt vast: the dark dancing shadows beyond each light’s small cone a suggestion of the great void above. I found myself standing with Penelope, both of us slurry with beer. Sri Lanka had described her as a MILF, and I guess she was, though she was our own age. She was curvy, and her playful green eyes complimented a high, singsongy voice. The arm-length tattoo was sexy, I had to admit; after she caught me staring, she held it out for inspection. “It’s a snake,” she said. The beast’s mouth was open around her wrist, its scales like chain mail. The illustration was made to look as though her limb was being devoured. “I got it so this would be less noticeable.” She touched three raised patches on the snake’s body each the size of an infant’s palm print and made of what looked like the pebbly skin of a nipple. I hazarded a feel. “The guy who did it is an artist. His ink work costs triple what anyone else on the East Coast charges. The dishwasher where I was working at the time had his back done to
look like one of those old anatomy drawings, skin peeled to show the veins and muscle and all that?”

She spoke of Arthur’s mother and father, whom she described as “totally batshit.” She said that Arthur wisely steered clear of them. “They’re Manhattan fixtures. They live downtown in a loft and keep their front door open for anybody to walk in off the street. In fact they encourage it; they welcome everybody in. That place was a madhouse back in the day. Arthur tells me stories. Once, when he was maybe thirteen he was taken by a couple—they came in right off the street and Arthur wandered back to their Lower East Side apartment with them. And here’s the kicker: his parents? Didn’t even realize that he was gone—and he was gone for two days.
Two days!
Arthur laughs when he tells that particular one, so I don’t think anything too bad happened to him while he was away, but there are other stories he doesn’t laugh about. And a few he refuses to even talk about. I’ve dropped by their loft a few times but didn’t mention who I was. Kind of fun being undercover!”

“They’ve never met you?”

“They’ve never met me, never met Will. They don’t know he’s published a book—even though the bookstore around the corner has it in the window!”

“I’ve been meaning to read it.”

“Oh, you should. He’s brilliant. You read the crap from those people he teaches with, and it’s so clever you want to vomit. Art’s the only serious one of the bunch, definitely the only one those students should be taking advice from.”

“Said the wife about her husband.”

“It’s true, though! Those others?” She cocked a thumb at a clutch murmuring behind us. “They’re just trying to keep up with their careers. They spend as much time sleeping with each other at MacDowell and schmoozing with known members of grant committees as they do thinking about what they write. Art’s different. He could care less about career, about tenure—if he continues to teach, he’ll be an adjunct for the rest of his life, and I say fine. What, you’re surprised hear me say that?”

“You’re living in the city and raising a child. Health insurance and a steady paycheck? That doesn’t interest you?”

“You’re thinking about some other man, some other marriage. I knew what I was getting into when I picked Art. He’s barely employable. He thinks too much, takes too much to heart. But it’s also what I love about him. I figured out long ago that if we were going to be together, I would have to do the breadwinning, so to speak—” She told me earlier that she was the head baker at Balthazar. “It’s okay, though. I’d rather him be brilliant and happy than a miserable so-and-so. Better for me and better for Will.”