Of all Michael’s close friends, Brian seemed the least concerned about poverty. He was the oldest of the bunch and had lived in an RV for the past eight years, but he was newly married to a woman he had known for two weeks in the late 1980s, and their bliss seemed simple and complete. They were moving to a small adobe house in New Mexico that had belonged to Wren’s late aunt. Their plan was to make lamps and key chains out of recycled license plates. There was a market for that in Madrid, Wren explained, which was not pronounced like the city in Spain.
“The accent is on the Mad,” she added with a boisterous laugh. She was sprawled on the sofa at Michael and Ben’s like an eighteenth-century courtesan, steely-tressed now but as lush and striking at fifty as she had been half a lifetime earlier. “It was a coal mining town, nearly a ghost town, actually, until the hippies came along. It’s a little touristy in the summer, but it’s still funky and falling-down in places, and it’s beautiful there in the hills. John Travolta made a movie in Madrid a few years back. There wasn’t a masseur for miles around who was safe.”
Michael and Brian chuckled in unison. Brian was clearly doting on her.
“Seriously,” said Wren, “you and Ben should come visit.”
“We will,” said Michael.
“We’ll still have the RV. You can stay there.”
“It’s a deal.” Michael wished Ben would hurry up and get home to meet this still-glamorous witness to his vanished past. The mention of Brian’s RV, however, threw him back into the immediate future. “I’m glad you’re spending time with Anna,” he said. “I’m sure Brian is, too.”
“Oh, man,” Wren exclaimed, “she is such a fucking joy. We spent the whole morning with her at her flat, getting ready for the trip. I’m just jealous you’ve had all these years with her. Do you think we’re making a mistake, Michael?”
This sudden shift of tone brought a quick glance from Brian.
“We’re not making a mistake,” he said quietly. “This was your idea, Wren. Don’t start getting cold feet.”
“She’s so frail, though, pumpkin.”
“She may be, but this is important to her. It’s obviously on her bucket list, and we’re not gonna let her down. She won’t have to get out of bed if she doesn’t feel like it. We can do this, Wren. We’re probably the only people on earth who can.”
Wren undercut Brian’s melodrama by lifting her hand in a stage whisper to Michael. “Batman here means the Winnebago. We’re offering door-to-door service.”
“To what, though?”
“Not a what, a who. Someone named Oliver Sudden.”
“Who the hell is Oliver Sudden?”
It was Brian’s turn to answer. “Apparently he worked at her mother’s brothel.”
“No way. He’d have to be a hundred-and-fucking-five.”
Brian shrugged. “One would think.”
“She’s jerking your chain, Brian.” Michael laughed as the light dawned. “It’s an old vaudeville joke. All of a sudden. Oliver Sudden my heart sings. There’s a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence right now who calls herself Sister Olive O’Sudden.”
“No kidding.” With the cocksure leisure of a cowboy pulling a pistol from his boot, Brian unbuttoned his shirt pocket, produced a square of folded paper, and handed it to Michael. “Wonder how she was able to Google him?”
Michael unwrapped the paper and studied the evidence in Times Roman: Oliver Sudden, 2261 Sandstone Drive, Winnemucca NV 87678.
“Well, what do you know?”
“Not much,” said Brian. “If we’re talking about you.”
Michael ignored the bro-to-bro teasing. The printout was a city roster of some sort, public utilities maybe, a list of names and addresses, the scantiest of online profiles. He handed the paper back to Brian. “Anna Googles?” he said.
“Apparently. When we’re not looking.” A grin rippled across Brian’s face. To Michael he had always looked a little like Jeff Bridges, and even more so now that he was getting old. It allowed you to forgive him many things.
“And c’mon,” Brian added. “Is Anna Madrigal really known for jerking chains?”
Michael had to admit that she wasn’t.
Brian threw his hands up, accepting victory before an invisible jury. He had once been a lawyer, and sometimes it showed.
Wren rolled her eyes at Michael, then shook Brian’s knee in reprimand. “Don’t be insufferable,” she told him, but she made it sound like a love song.
Chapter 11
COMPLICATED MACHINERY
Shawna didn’t feel like cooking the night before the trip to Burning Man, so she asked Sharon to meet her downstairs at Another Monkey. The place was sort of elegant for a Thai restaurant: Buddhas under pin spots, copper piping as a design element, a unisex restroom with shallow sinks and translucent toilet stalls. Back in days of yore this had been one of those deafening dot-commer places with a one-word name (Revelations or Colander or whatever), but it was less pretentious now. Shawna would sometimes order pad thai at the register and take it home on the elevator. They might have done that tonight, if not for Sharon. Shawna had taken Sharon home once, and Sharon had flown with it, texting about soul mates before Shawna had time to wash the strap-on. Sharon did not need encouragement.
“The grilled beef salad is good,” said Shawna. “I’ve had that several times.”
Sharon closed the menu shut with a winsome smile. “Good enough for me, then.” She leaned forward on her elbows, brushing aside a vagrant strand of pale brown hair. “I’ve gotta tell you, Shawn. I am so excited about this.”
Shawna hated that Sharon was calling her Shawn now—not because it masculinized her name but because it claimed a lover’s right to abbreviation.
“Excited about what? Oh, your first time at Burning Man. That’s gotta be big.”
“No.” Sharon’s eyes darted around the room as if she were about to place an order for crack. “The first time I ever helped someone get pregnant. It’s like being a midwife or something. Except with a turkey baster instead of forceps.”
“A bicycle.”
“What?”
“I need you for the bicycle, Sharon. I’ve got the turkey baster covered.”
“Oh.” Sharon’s face fell. “Who’s doing that?”
“I am.” Shawna gave her a sly but gentle smile. “It’s complicated machinery, but I think I can handle it.”
It took Sharon a moment to recover, but she managed. “Oh . . . well, sure . . . I just assumed since I’d be transporting it—you know . . .” She bludgeoned the rest of that thought by reaching for the Zynga tote bag she’d left on the floor by her chair. “This is for you. I made it myself. I hope you don’t already have one.”
Shawna could feel the burn of Sharon’s expectant gaze as she removed the contents of the bag: a small blue shawl covered with yellow squiggles and circles. At least, that’s what they looked like. She could think of nothing to say.
“It’s a fanny blanket,” said Sharon. “You put it over your fanny while your legs are over your head. You’re less exposed during the impregnation, but . . . you’re still comfortable and it’s . . . you know . . . celebratory.”
“It certainly is. Wow. This is . . . amazing.”
Fuck me, thought Shawna. She thinks we’re having a baby together, so she’s made me a twat cozy. The lesson here was an old one: do not accept favors from lovesick one-night stands if you’re not prepared for them to crank up the U-Haul.
“See?” said Sharon, pointing to the squiggles and circles. “Those are little sperms and eggs.”
“So they are.” Shawna hated herself for joining that asinine Conscious Dance workshop, and for getting so gabby afterward with Sharon. But how could she have known that her unilateral pregnancy plans would get Sharon so hot? Or that Sharon, having already scored a ticket to Burning Man, would soon be inescapable?
Sharon swiped at her hair again. “I know it’s kinda silly.”
“Not at all. It’s a nice thing for a friend to do.”
The f-word was strategic, and it left an excruciating silence between them. Finally Sharon said, “Have you spoken to that guy yet? The furniture maker?”
Shawna decided it would help Sharon to know that everyone gets rejected. And it would certainly help Shawna to unload this humiliation on a nonintimate, someone who wasn’t part of her logical family. “I spoke to his husband,” she said.
“And?” Sharon gazed at her, all goggle-eyed and earnest—Amanda Seyfried in the Grecian moonlight—as if Shawna had just announced her first belly thump.
“I think I grossed him out.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No.”
“What a dick!”
Don’t attack him, thought Shawna, just so you can be on my side. “He’s not a dick, Sharon. He’s someone I’ve known all my life. He’s like an uncle, only not my dad’s brother. I think he’s squeamish about his little girl.”
Sharon frowned. “It’s not like he has to be there. And you’re gonna get pregnant one way or the other. That doesn’t feel like the real reason to me.”
Shawna hated her for saying this, because she was feeling the same thing.
“Anyway,” said Sharon, “why not just go directly to the carpenter?”
“Furniture maker. Because I’m sure he’s spoken to Michael . . . his husband, and he hasn’t called me yet. It’s gotta mean he feels the same way. Maybe they both think I’ll make a shitty mother and can’t bring themselves to tell me.”
“I think you’re better off with Caleb,” said Sharon. “I saw him this morning, and he was so excited about it.”
Shawna’s stomach knotted. “You know Caleb outside the dance workshop?”
“Sure. He works at Zynga too. In accounting.”
“He understands we’re not coparenting, right?”
“Absolutely. He says he just wants to give back to the earth. Isn’t that a sweet way of putting it? We were coordinating things at Starbucks this morning.”
This was bad news, since Shawna had already considered eliminating the bicycle—and thus the middleman—altogether. With the use of a festive partition Caleb could have given back to the earth in Shawna’s tent, thereby removing the need for Sharon, panting heroically over that grotesque taint warmer. Now there were two Zynga geeks, two pawns of a corporate empire, conspiring to play FarmVille in Shawna’s uterus. It might have been doable if not for the crazed gleam in Sharon’s eye. Unreciprocated love was the deal-breaker here.
There had to be someone other than Caleb. Someone Shawna knew and trusted who was not in cahoots with Sharon.
Stay loose, she told herself. Stay loose, and he will come.
So to speak.
For the rest of dinner, Shawna steered the conversation away from the big insemination. They talked about the practice of gifting, the Burning of Wall Street installation, the fucked-up new ticketing system that had decimated some of the camps and was now demanding online orders so precisely timed and hideously prolonged that you could have been on the line at the fucking DMV. Sharon, of course, was still auditioning for the role of desert wife, offering Shawna the use of her CamelBak, her daytime goggles, her iridescent green harem pants that would look, she insisted, totally sick on Shawna.
They parted outside the restaurant. Shawna made a show of heading upstairs to her condo (since she’d claimed to have packing to do), but she stayed only long enough to pee and wash her face and grab a drag off a doobie. She needed loud music now, and meaningless laughter, and anyone disinclined to knit things for her pussy. She knew she would occasionally need company on this long slog to single motherhood, but she wanted it to be the right company, for the right reason. And she would not beg anyone, not even family, to be part of the process.
This was her doing, her baby. Her own version of sacred.
Sofuckyouunclefuckeryou’reafuckinunclefucker . . .
Maybe she could get them to play that song at Martuni’s.
That might help a lot. That and a couple of appletinis.
She would begin the purification process as soon as she was on the road to Black Rock City. No booze, no weed, no gluten, no molly. Seriously.
But tonight she was throwing a bachelor party for her baby-maker.
Chapter 12
IMAGINING AMOS
They had found a good spot at Martuni’s (out of the crush but close to the piano), so Jake staked a claim while Amos went for cocktails. The sight of this guy—his guy—wriggling through the crowd warmed Jake with an old contentment. He remembered a time when his name was still Janice and he and Dan Strayhorn had dug army foxholes in Dan’s backyard in Tulsa. Dan had treated him like a buddy, had called him buddy, in fact—no cracks about girls—as they swung pickaxes on a sweltering summer afternoon. The foxholes were more like shallow graves, but they roofed them with planks and dirt and talked to each other for hours, soldier to soldier, each in his own bunker, through a length of buried garden hose. Reduced to a voice in the loamy darkness, Jake could be exactly the boy he was supposed to be.
Amos was that voice through the hose, that trusting headlong tumble into camaraderie. Jake had always been imagining Amos: someone who would hold him close and treat him as the same rough creature without effort or delusion. Amos, by his own admission, had never imagined anyone like Jake, but it didn’t matter. He responded to Jake, admired him. “You’re a better man than I,” he declared one night after sex, and Jake had almost instantly been moved to silence.
“I’m sorry,” Amos blurted. “That was lame.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Yeah, it was way too gooey Jewy. I work too hard at being a mensch.”
“You didn’t mean it?”
“No . . . I meant it.”
“Then shut up, dude.”
Amos laughed and used his T-shirt to mop the pearly splatter off Jake’s chest. “It just sounded so self-consciously liberal. I hate that.”
“I liked it,” said Jake. “So shut the fuck up.”
That’s how their valentine had read.
It had worked for both of them.
Someone had commandeered the piano to bang out “I’m Yours.” Amos was across the room, holding Manhattans aloft like amber lanterns, but somehow he managed to swap smirks with Jake. The two of them had a running joke about that song, the way Jason Mraz had been every-fucking-where on their first few dates, bouncing out of cars and bars with all that you-done-done-me stuff, all that certainty about love, love, love. You had no choice but to dis it with someone you’d just met, or it would take you down with it. But the very act of dissing it had already made it their song, their reason to catch the other’s eye across a crowded room.
Amos handed him the Manhattan. “I think most of it’s still there.”
Jake took a sip to prove him right. “Thanks, bud.”
Amos pulled his chair closer to Jake’s. “Isn’t that your friend over there? The one who wrote the best-seller?”
“Shawna?”
Sure enough, it was Brian’s daughter, looking more like Zooey Deschanel than ever now that she’d let her bangs grow back. She was sitting with a skinny guy whose hair was a dandelion about to explode. Jake hadn’t seen him for several years, so it took a while to place that long, blank Nordic face—Otto, the street clown/puppeteer that Shawna had gently dumped when he got too serious.
Realizing that Jake had spotted her, Shawna headlamped her eyes and twiddled her fingers at him. “Hang on to our seats,” he told Amos. “I’ll be back.”
He made his way to Shawna and kissed her on the cheek.
“Hey, doll.”
“You remember Otto, right?”
“Sure, hey!”
“Otto, Jake . . . Ja
ke, Otto.” Shawna sounded unusually chipper, hyper almost. “We just bumped into each other. Right here. A few minutes ago. Isn’t that wild?”
It didn’t strike Jake as especially wild, but he left it unchallenged, laying his hand on Otto’s shoulder. “So how’s ol’ Sonny?”
Otto looked confused. “Who?”
“Your puppet.” Jake mimed it with his hands. “The monkey puppet?”
“Oh . . . Sammy.”
“Right, sorry . . . Sammy.”
“He passed on to Nirvana.”
“Wow.” Jake spoke the word quietly, respectfully, seeing a cloudiness in Otto’s eyes that had to be honored. “How does that happen exactly?”
Otto sighed. “I was broke, so I got a job at Trader Joe’s. It was time to get off the street. I couldn’t stand to think of Sammy cooped up in the box all the time, so I took him to the Burn last year and . . . we said our good-byes at the temple burn. It was awesome, but—I gotta tell you, man . . . really, really hard.”
Jake found this tale far more disturbing than he’d expected. “I guess you couldn’t have sold him, huh? Or given him away?”
“You don’t do that to your child,” said Otto.
You don’t incinerate him either, thought Jake, unless you’re some old dude in the Bible. And there was something especially disturbing about sacrificing an inanimate object that depended on you for its life.
You just don’t do that, dude. You don’t take a dog back to the pound because you don’t want to feed it anymore.
Shawna was fidgeting with her cocktail napkin, Jake noticed. Something was distracting her, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t premeditated puppet-cide. “So,” she said in an odd little voice, “we’re all heading for the playa this year, looks like.”
Jake turned to Otto. “You too, huh?”