Antipodes, p.10
Antipodes, page 10
“They’re gone,” Tony said suddenly, and Eldon jolted, startled.
“Gone,” he repeated. “Who’s gone?”
“The contest winner and his buddy,” Tony said. “I thought you’d be relieved to know.”
Eldon’s tongue felt dry and thick, and he swallowed. “Where?”
“Wherever they came from. They ate some shrimp and took off. I saw them get in their car.”
Eldon processed this. “That’s good,” he said, but what he was thinking—too embarrassing to utter aloud, he knew—was How dare they? Who do they think they are? It occurred to him that the good parties were supposed to have young people at them, not a bunch of middle-aged men and women, gnarled toes and pasty legs exposed in their absurd Hawaiian shorts and flip-flops, worn without the faintest whiff of irony. One of the Italian designers he had apprenticed with so many years ago had a saying, which Eldon had been too young at the time to understand: Il cinismo soffoca la creatività; sincerità uccide. Cynicism stifles creativity; but sincerity kills it. He had thought himself impervious to sincerity, clever, hip; his was a life lived with an arched eyebrow. Yet here he was, in his sixties, and it seemed to him for the first time that his best was behind him. Barry Levin wasn’t going to show up tonight. No one would be offering him a helping hand to the next tier of renown. And if he’d ever had any legitimate artistic integrity, he’d lost it by the time he OK’d the first batch of designs for EC Originals.
“Tony,” he said. “I’m not myself. We need to wrap this up early tonight.”
“You mean this party?” Tony looked, for the first Eldon could remember, uneasy, and he took a spiteful pleasure in having rattled him. Funny, how the thing that had made Tony indispensable to Eldon over the years was also the quality that most maddened him. To see some anger from the man, some passion—was that too much to ask?
“Yes. The party,” Eldon said.
Tony leaned in so close that Eldon could practically taste the beer on his breath. “There are probably fifty people here. Including Charlie Haas. Eva St. James. Barry Levin’s assistant promised me—”
“Fuck Barry Levin. Barry Levin doesn’t get to skip my party. His invitation is rescinded.”
“You can’t do that, Eldon. You can’t invite these people into your home and kick them out when they start to annoy you. You can’t rescind Barry-fucking-Levin’s invitation. I’m telling you that he might still show. I was just on the phone with Ally, and she’s pushing him to put in an appearance.”
“Pushing him,” Eldon said.
“You’ve got to swallow your pride for once. There are people who depend on you, goddammit.”
“Fuck them, too.”
Tony was red-faced. “Go upstairs,” he whispered with force. “I’ll keep the party going, and then I’ll say you felt unwell and had to retire early.”
Eldon laughed. “Retire early. Like I’m an old man.”
“You’re acting like an old ninny.”
Eldon passed the table of drinks on his way to the front door and ran his finger across the condensation on the large bottle of chardonnay. He had thought, after things fell apart with John, that getting sober might make some difference. That sobriety would reveal his best self, his suppressed core of goodness, and then the universe would reward him.
The indoors smelled of damp towels, sweat, onion, and cilantro. Eldon moved numbly among the laughing knots of his guests, unnoticed as they tilted their heads sideways over paper plates to take sloppy bites of the fajita wraps, as their drink levels fell and they reassured themselves by spotting the nearest restocked table of beverages. He remembered well that bright, buzzed panic. Is this my last drink? Please don’t let it be my last drink.
He was almost to the stairs when he chanced to glance into the living room and saw a group of three people clustered conspiratorially behind the sofa, backs to the door, shoulders brushing. He crept quietly in behind them, his Italian slippers silent on the wood floors.
“He’s watching us,” the woman said with a comic whisper. Eldon spotted her pink lei before he identified her as the Belk buyer.
“Darling,” said one of the men, the Jonathan Martin sales rep. “Darling, come closer. Speak into my ascot.”
“You’re not making any sense.” She giggled like a teenager. Her wine sloshed a little as she hiccupped, and the third man made a show of blotting the spill from her bodice with a clean handkerchief.
“What a magnificent act of ego,” this man said. Eldon didn’t recognize him. “You almost have to admire the audacity of it.”
“The delusion of it,” said the Jonathan Martin sales rep. He waved a finger at the painted Eldon’s unsmiling face. “I think he had George Michael sit for this.”
The woman snorted.
“He did look like this once,” the other man said. “He visited my class at Parsons. Early ’90s, it would have been. He was quite glamorous, even with the accent. Our professor called him Scarlett O’Hara.”
The Belk woman hiccupped again. “Oh, Jesus. You’re killing me.”
“Georgia Michael,” the Jonathan Martin sales rep quipped.
“Dorian Gay,” the Belk woman wheezed, her shoulders quaking.
“You didn’t know Tara had so much leopard print, did you?”
He would have revealed himself if he didn’t think it would ultimately please them, after they had gotten over their initial embarrassment and stumbled through their breathless, falsely stricken apologies. Instead, he made a silent retreat to the front hall and up the stairs. Without realizing how he’d done it, he found himself lying across his bed and staring up at the gathered center of the satin canopy. He knew every fold. He knew the way the lamplight gleamed this time of night on the polished bedpost. He knew the hanging gold thread that he had told himself so many times to cut the next time he had his hand on the cuticle scissors. The house swayed as another downpour echoed against the roof, his guests’ laughter and good cheer washing up to him in waves.
Sometime after midnight, there was a knock on the bedroom door. Eldon, who had been dozing, gasped for breath and struggled to sit up. “Yes? Hello?”
“That’s the last of them.” It was Tony.
“All right, then,” said Eldon. He swallowed hard. It seemed to him that there was a right thing he could say in this moment—words that would make Tony turn the knob of the door and look at him with something other than disgust. You’re the only friend I’ve got, maybe. Or I don’t know why I’m like this. But the words wouldn’t come—his lips refused to form them. “Good night,” he said finally, and the tone of his own voice dismayed him: the haughty impatience, the petulance.
“Goodbye, Eldon,” Tony said. It wasn’t very long at all before the sound of his car motor floated up to Eldon through the open window.
The rain had stopped. Eldon slipped downstairs, soft on his feet, as if there were someone in the house he might disturb—a beloved one, sleeping, warming the other half of the canopied bed. There was a stale smell in the air still, the lingering aroma of sweat and onion, but the plates and glasses and bottles had all been cleared away, the kitchen counters wiped to a shine. He checked the refrigerator, found three cellophane-wrapped trays of leftovers, a couple dozen beer bottles, and a half-full bottle of white wine. This last he grabbed, pulling the plastic cork roughly with his molars, and dumped down the sink. Tony usually did this for him, and Eldon wondered, sucking the faint sour tang off the end of the cork, what it meant that he had failed to.
On the patio, the marble dining table was beaded with water. His peonies were slumped flat, beaten by the downpour, and the paper lanterns, so briefly lovely, hung like wads of dough from the shepherd’s hooks. He stood in the open doorway for a long time, staring out at them, and found that he was still holding the empty wine bottle, so he tossed it underhanded, like a softball player, and it exploded deliciously on the tabletop, sending a scatter of glass onto the lawn. The shards glittered like new rain.
At last he found himself in the living room, perched on one of the striped wingback chairs. Young Eldon regarded him seriously over the back of the leopard print sofa. The Covington Three Bells Clock marked the seconds between then and now. Someone had draped a pink lei over the mahogany frame, and it hung across the painted Eldon’s forehead like a flower crown.
distancing
The roads of the subdivision were seared into a wooded tract back in the early ’90s, and the homes constructed along them are spacious and spaciously placed—not a bad place to practice social distancing if distance you must. Jana told Brian, back when they were house hunting, that she wouldn’t do a McMansion, but this is—let’s get real—the McMansion’s country cousin: four-bedroom, brick, with white pillars supporting a porch barely deep enough to accommodate a glider. They are in an excellent school district, though, not that it matters right now, with everything shut down.
Jana has been working at home for almost six years as a recruiter specializing in medical jobs at rural hospitals and clinics, and her business hasn’t been affected yet—probably won’t be unless times got even more desperate. Brian’s is another story. Three weeks into the mandatory quarantine, he and his partners made the difficult decision to close the cosmetic half of their practice and to limit medical appointments to Tuesdays and Wednesdays. He has worked sixty- and seventy-hour weeks for as long as she has known him, and this new schedule of his is more surreal than the pandemic, than the world. Every day she wakes up and registers his presence in the bed beside her with a tremor of something she can’t quite bring herself to acknowledge is disappointment.
He hasn’t exactly been much help around the house. Jana spends the mornings trying to keep the boys, nine-year-old Shawn and eleven-year-old Trevor, on track with their schoolwork. Around 11:30, she goes to the kitchen to prepare a lunch—something out of the deep freeze, with a side of something else out of the deep freeze. Then it’s Brian’s shift with the kids, which means Jana sequesters herself in the home office; the boys go to their bedrooms to stare at their tablets; and Brian, Jana supposes, does more of whatever he spent the morning doing: surfing the internet on his laptop, pacing the house, putting another forty minutes in on the treadmill. He makes excuses to go into the office on the days it’s closed, and she suspects he accomplishes nothing there but watching porn on his office computer and, according to their Netflix history, sprinting through two seasons of Rust Valley Restorers. They are snippy in front of one another, even in front of—inevitably in front of—the boys. Jana’s work has never been as lucrative as Brian’s, not even close; she knows he views it as a step or two up from a hobby, something that barely mitigates their tax liability and won’t sustain them if his practice goes belly-up. But it’s income. And it’s more productive than moping and masturbating.
When her compressed workday is done, she goes for a walk in the woods. Sometimes she can coax the boys into accompanying her. Once a week or so, Brian will tag along dutifully, edging around patches of mud in a pair of near-pristine trail shoes he bought two summers ago when they vacationed at Bar Harbor. But often Jana is alone, and more often than not she prefers it. She is drawn to the woods these days, which is odd, because she was never much of a nature person. Their appeal, during the house hunt, had been privacy—a buffer between their house, the highway, and the neighboring properties. During quarantine, however—at the age of forty-two—she has opened a door within herself that she’d thought was locked, to a room she didn’t believe existed. It’s a cool spring, and she can go out in long sleeves without being harassed by mosquitoes. The trees are in their most tender yellow-green leaf, and the last petals from the flowering trees—the redbuds and dogwoods that struggle toward light in the breaks between pines, oaks, and maples—dapple earth the color of brownie batter. It’s the earth, the dirt, that most intrigues Jana. Again, strange—she has never been a gardener, doesn’t even bother with a few herbs and tomato plants like most middle-class women her age. But when she’s alone, she finds herself pausing, crouching, gripping fistfuls of soil and then opening her hands to reveal the impressions, faintly lined, her palms left behind. She brings the dirt to her nose, nostrils prickling at the richness, the faint, slightly allergic edge of mold or must. The word that comes to mind when she inhales is delicious—again, strange. And one day, with the casual unthinking reflex of a person pulling her hand out of a potato chip bag, she finds herself not just smelling the dirt but scooping a handful of it into her mouth.
When she was a little girl, she and her family drove across town two or three days a week to visit her granny. Granny smoked, and each room of her small house had an ashtray at the ready, heaped with spent filters. Jana’s mother griped about the house, about the way the smoke smell oozed into their pores during even a short visit, but Jana had loved the cigarette stench, had put her face over the bowls of ashes and breathed deeply, getting a zing of pleasure that was probably, she thinks now, some kind of secondary nicotine hit. This is like that, a bit. The dirt doesn’t taste like food, it isn’t actually delicious, but it is something more than delicious. She takes one more bite before stopping herself, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, runs her tongue along her teeth to try to clear the last of the grit from sight. She swallows, and the dirt hits her gut as comfortably as warm milk.
That night, after everyone else from the household is in bed, she Zooms with Mizha. Her friendship with Mizha is as unlikely as everything else in 2020; it began when Jana sought her out to interview for a surgical attending position at a regional hospital in rural Kentucky. Somehow, across a handful of Zoom meetings—most of which involved Jana trying to convince Mizha that Roma, Kentucky, was an up-and-coming bedroom community for Nashville and not a town of ten thousand where a small but ugly minority of people flew Rebel flags next to their UK banners—they made an honest connection. It’s inexplicable. Mizha is thirty-three, Pakistani, stunningly beautiful. Her career was tainted early on by the bad luck of being named, as a resident, in a high-profile malpractice case out of Florida. She is in Kentucky now. It’s not so bad, she assures Jana. She gets to Nashville once a month, or at least she did before the pandemic. She is dating another doctor.
Jana tells her about the dirt eating, and Mizha surprises her by laughing.
“Jana,” she says scoldingly. “You know what this is.”
“I don’t,” Jana said. “I really don’t.”
“It is the change.” Mizha wags her finger at the screen and across five hundred miles. “You are getting ready for the change.”
“But I’m only forty-two.”
“And when did you think the change happened?”
“My mother was fifty-one.”
“Well, you may be fifty-one before it is final. It can take a while for some women.”
“Jesus,” Jana says. “Nine years! There is no way. My boys—what would they do?”
“The same thing the other sons of mothers do. They will wait and survive.”
“They’ll be men before it’s over.” She is remembering her mother’s change. Jana was in her twenties already, at college. It hardly affected her at all.
“It almost certainly will not be that long. That is a worst-case scenario. And there is some research suggesting if you go to earth early, you get through it sooner.”
“But they don’t know for sure? That’s a heck of risk.”
Mizha shrugged. “It is women’s health. No one is throwing money at it.”
“Would you go to earth early? Is that what you’d do?”
“Yes,” Mizha said without pause. “But I like to pretend I can control things beyond my powers.”
“Crap,” Jana said. The screen in front of her blurred. “I thought I had time.”
“Everyone thinks that.”
“You do. God. To be thirty-three again.”
“My mother said it was her last great adventure,” Mizha says. “What did your mother say?”
Jana thinks. She had asked her mother about it, awkwardly, because people mostly don’t talk about the change. It is like that other little death—not a topic for polite conversation. A woman will go away for a while. Mostly, after a few months, she comes back and resumes a version of her life. Jana’s father, when he told her about her mother’s absence, had stammered, cleared his throat, and stumbled on in an embarrassed way: She. You know.
