‘They go wrong so fast,’ his father sighed. ‘One minute it’s all Twinkies and Bosco and the next, it’s life for killing Harvey Milk.’
‘Harvey Milk’s killer didn’t get life, dear,’ said Jonathan’s mother.
‘You see?’ her husband muttered, shaking his head. ‘There’s no justice.’
Jonathan was accustomed to this sort of exchange but it never failed to delight Max.
‘Your dad is so nuts,’ he said. ‘I bet there’s some weird internal logic to everything he says but you’d need a PhD in semiotics to figure it out.’
‘What’s semiotics?’ Jonathan was drawing.
‘Nobody really knows,’ Max said, stacking Oreos in an attempt to earn a place in The Guinness Book of World Records. ‘I’m up to fifty-eight, don’t breathe,’ he whispered, just as the tower tipped and crashed. ‘Damn,’ he said, and then, ‘Rusty, no!’ as his dog slid over to vacuum up the mess.
‘Who brought that animal in here?’ Jonathan’s father called from the den. ‘You know your mother’s allergic.’
‘There’s no dog here,’ James called back. ‘We’re watching Cujo.’
‘Turn it off,’ came the reply.
Eventually, when the three of them and Rusty tired of whatever they happened to be doing, Jonathan, James and Max walked the fifty yards to Max’s house with a hundred Oreos and an unfinished comic in a plastic bag, dedicating themselves to a great deal more of the same over there, only with a slightly different view of the street and differently peculiar parents.
Over the years, Maxman Enterprises had a part-time employee in the form of Ben, who lived five doors down, but Ben’s mother aspired to bigger things for Ben (and his brother, Ed) than comic-book clubs. Ed headed up computer club and Junior UN at school, while Ben played Little League, had a purple belt in ju-jitsu and got a telescope for his birthday, so he could memorize a new constellation every week.
‘She says you three are a bad influence,’ Ben reported morosely.
At which Max and Jonathan and James grinned and gave each other high-fives, vowing to remain bad influences for as long as they were underage, and thus not legally accountable for their actions.
6
Sissy greeted Jonathan with enthusiasm on his return from work, while Dante eyed him sceptically. Jonathan tousled their ears, clipped on their leashes, speed-walked ten blocks, returned home, gave them treats (‘eat, eat, be happy despite the bleakness of your incarcerated lives’), pulled two salmon steaks out of the fridge and wrapped them in foil, dumped a bag of baby leaves into the salad bowl, filled a pan with water for the potatoes and glanced at his watch. Seven-fifteen. Julie had said she’d arrive at seven-thirty, which meant she’d be here by seven-thirty unless an asteroid wiped out all human life between now and then.
Jonathan smiled when he thought of Julie’s punctuality, her reliability, consistency, steadfastness. These were the qualities that had landed her a job as salesperson for Bridal-360, a glossy magazine and 360-degree online wedding planner with the tag, ‘From First Date to Forever Mate’. Forever Mate sounded to Jonathan like a dystopian chess game or that horrible condition where dogs have sex and get stuck. Even Julie thought the tagline was creepy. But she loved her job, loved applying her organizational prowess to tight deadlines, loved the fact that everyone marched to the same beat (Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’). She loved her job so much that she didn’t think twice about living apart from Jonathan for as long as it took to scramble her way up the greasy pole of the nuptial hierarchy.
But when, after six months, an opening came up in the New York office – and it happened to be for a senior sales position, and she happened to win the job over thirty other (many better qualified) applicants – fate decreed that it was time for the couple to be together once more.
‘We can live together for a while and see how it goes,’ she said to Jonathan, who in turn thought fondly, Oh Julie, you crazy romantic fool. He secretly hoped she’d apply her organizational genius to finding them another apartment, one whose availability didn’t require someone’s parole to be turned down.
Jonathan often considered how ironic it was that the pathologically unsentimental Julie had ended up in the wedding business.
‘I don’t know why women make such a fuss about weddings,’ she once told him. ‘It’s all they talk about in the office.’ Jonathan stopped himself pointing out that you might hear quite a lot of wedding talk if you happened to work for Bridal-360, and wondered whether she might have been better off following a career in, say, copyright law.
At precisely 7:26 she buzzed up to his apartment, Jonathan dumped the potatoes into boiling water, wiped his hands on a towel and ran out to welcome her.
He met her halfway down the stairs but before he could take her bag, a blur of black and white descended from the landing and hurled itself at Julie with a wild howl of delight that, to Jonathan, sounded sarcastic. Just behind Dante came Sissy, ears flying, squeaking with joy. Both dogs jumped on his girlfriend, knocking her off balance and upsetting her handbag, which led to a game of roll the lipstick and toss the iPhone, made more challenging by the stairs.
Julie did not shout at the dogs. She maintained a dignified silence, snatched her phone out of a long cross-pass from collie to spaniel, scooped up her lipstick, wallet and make-up bag and walked straight up the last flight into the apartment as if the dogs failed to exist. The dogs, excited by this new game, licked at her ankles, nipped at the hem of her dress, hurled themselves at her shins, snapped imaginary flies away from her face. Complex choreography was required, and Jonathan found himself admiring his dogs’ agility. Watching them move around the tiny kitchen was like observing the New York City Ballet perform in an airline toilet. Jonathan frowned conscientiously
‘Welcome to New York!’ he said, embracing her. And then, after a futile attempt to get Dante and Julie to make friends, he said, ‘Look, just ignore the dogs. They’ll get used to you.’
Julie, who had been ignoring the dogs since the moment they met, glanced around the apartment. ‘It looks smaller than I imagined.’
Jonathan followed her gaze. She was right, it did look small, what with all the dog paraphernalia. Beds, toys, bowls. Dogs.
‘How was the flight?’ Jonathan screwed the top off a bottle of wine and slipped the salmon on to plates. ‘Would you like a drink? Are you hungry?’
‘Starved,’ she said, accepting a glass of wine. ‘This looks delicious. It’s not even like I get time off to relocate. We’re frantic, right in the middle of an entire issue on non-white weddings. I’ve spent all day fielding press enquiries. The whole wedding world is aghast.’
‘Non-white?’ Jonathan said. ‘Do you mean, like, people of colour or dresses of colour?’
Julie sat down and picked up her fork. ‘Dresses of colour. And people of colour.’
‘Wow.’ Jonathan was impressed by the wild vagaries of the wedding world and wondered how you could possibly aghast this whole vital segment of society. He pictured brides in shredded scarlet and black, barefoot and limping with little horns instead of veils, flaming torches, forked tongues and green snaking tails, bridegrooms dressed as satyrs in hairy loincloths prancing on shiny hooves, bridesmaids naked except for . . .
Julie glanced at him. ‘Whatever you’re imagining, stop it now. Colour means lichen, smoke, titanium, fig. That’s it.’
‘Fig? That’s a colour?’
Julie did not appear to have heard him. For some reason, her refusal to understand or appreciate his vision of the world made him love her all the more passionately. She was a strong, sane, sensible, beautiful, no-nonsense sort of person. And he was a fumbling fool of a mortal who lived in a world of relentless self-doubt. The fact that she deigned to spend time with him cast a holy light on her generosity of spirit.
Since they’d been apart, she’d featured ever more prominently in Dante’s New York Inferno. Julie in hell was statuesque in towering platform heels, bearing an iPad in one hand and a tiny con
tainer of dried goji berries in the other. She seemed not to notice the tortured souls all around her. He captioned the scene, ‘Surely They Knew the Rules?’
Julie finished her salmon. Jonathan took the plates through to the dishwasher and began plotting the next episode of The New York Inferno in his head. He had not told Julie that she featured in his newest work. He imagined presenting it to her at the birth of their first child as a surprise. Or, very possibly, given her attitude to surprises, never.
‘That was nice,’ Julie said, clearing the rest of the table and glancing at her watch. ‘But I really have to work.’
‘Really?’ He took her in his arms. ‘I’ve missed you so much.’
‘Have you? I’ve missed you too.’ She turned to face him and he kissed her, running his hands along the neat curve of her hips.
Four years into Jonathan’s relationship with Julie, Max refused to recognize her appeal. ‘She’s about as sexy as a bank statement,’ he said, as if creating a logical argument. ‘Plus, she never smiles.’
‘She never smiles at you,’ Jonathan said.
‘Precisely my point.’
Julie didn’t protest when Jonathan took her hand and led her to the bedroom. ‘You don’t have to work this exact second, do you?’ He nuzzled her neck while she wriggled out of her cardigan and stepped out of her dress, frowning a little. She closed the door, leaving the dogs on the outside, staring in.
‘Welcome home,’ he said, kissing her.
Afterwards, while she sat at the table tapping figures into spreadsheets, Jonathan drew the scene of Julie undressing – a scene for the second circle of hell (lust) – in an attempt to capture the essence of something he hadn’t noticed before in his girlfriend’s manner. It was the frown, he thought at first. The shimmy of her shoulders as she slipped off her bra. The slight impression she gave of being alone in the room even when they were having sex.
He drew and drew and time after time he failed.
Lying wide-awake beside Julie that night, Jonathan thought about the dogs. Maybe they were suffering from melancholy. He stared at the ceiling. Or what if it wasn’t psychological at all, but physical? He’d heard that dogs sometimes developed distemper, and though it seemed a likely diagnosis he had no idea what distemper actually was. First thing in the morning he’d google the symptoms. Or maybe he should take them to the vet anyway, just to be safe. He glanced at the bedroom door and through the glass panel saw Sissy staring in at him, sadly.
Jonathan sighed, got out of bed and took his pillow and a blanket out to the couch. Julie found him there the next morning, sleeping on his side, his arm encircling the spaniel whose face nestled in the warm space beneath his chin.
7
In one or two ways, Jonathan enjoyed working at Comrade. It was a friendly place, united in general agreement that everyone who worked there was young, attractive, fashionable, underpaid, exploited and full of existential rage. The work! The clients! The overall, devastating, crushing triviality of it all! Aside from that it was fine.
But today, an odd atmosphere prevailed. No one looked up when Jonathan arrived, as if they all cared so much about their projects that even his expensive new replica Tour de France yellow jersey wasn’t worthy of the scant three seconds it would take to deride. Alarm bells rang in his head. Having clomped over to the men’s room to change, he swivelled back across the waxed floor in his retro Jack Purcell’s, shrieking rubber. No one stirred. His heart began to pound. Had they all been fired? Had someone died? Had everyone died? Was he dead? Was this hell?
He called Louise Crimple to make sure Broadway Depot hadn’t fired the agency.
‘Louise!’ he said when she picked up.
‘Jonathan!’ she answered.
‘Anything going down in your neck of the woods?’
‘We’re on fire!’
Did she mean literally? ‘That’s fantastic, Louise.’
‘What’ve you got for me, John? Fan my flames, lover-boy!’
Oh lord. ‘Will do, Lou.’ The hollow sound at the end of the phone told him she had already hung up.
This morning there was no sign of Ed. Or Shay. Were they at it already? Before 10am? Jonathan became dimly aware of agitated voices floating in from the direction of HR . What was going on?
His morning coffee came in a paper bag that he crumpled stentoriously, humming Bruckner’s ‘Te Deum’ at the top of his lungs, thinking all the while of those monks who can sing two notes at once and wondering if they ever used their skill to harmonize Broadway musicals, then hurled the empty cup at the nearest wastebasket, missed, retrieved it and tried again. No reaction. Even Max, his companion in worthless endeavour, appeared to be concentrating on his work. More than anything this terrified him.
He opened his morning Broadway Despot file and pretended to study it while emailing.
TO:
[email protected] FROM:
[email protected] SUBJECT: What’s going on?
Have I been fired? Are we all dead?
From a desk eleven inches to his left, Max replied.
TO:
[email protected] FROM:
[email protected] SUBJECT: re: What’s going on?
Strange comings and goings in these here precincts. All most serious & mysterious.
At that moment, Shay came flying into the main office area clutching the genuine Russian communist-era industrial lamp that illuminated Ed’s desk and hurled it against the far wall, exploding the bulb in a lethal shower of glass. Not content with the reaction (none) from Comrade employees, she grabbed a full coffee pot from the kitchenette, swung it around by the handle with both fists and, at the last possible moment, released it, letting it fly more or less at a perfect diagonal across the office. This got a better reaction – all twenty-two members of staff wrapped their arms around their heads as the glass orb filled with boiling coffee described a glorious parabola in slow motion through the air. It landed with a satisfying explosion against the metal door of the conference room just as Ed stepped through it.
Scattered applause broke out.
Jonathan’s face was blank but his heart performed joyous gymnastics in his chest. Why wasn’t every day like this? Wasn’t this what life was about? Not staples and copy paper. Love, sex, loathing, despair, exploding coffee pots. This scene could encompass all nine circles of hell, or at the very least lust (second circle), greed (fourth), wrath (fifth), violence (seventh) and treachery (ninth). Glorious sequences paraded through his imagination – the spinning glass orb, the magnificent impact. In his version, the coffee pot would fly up up up from the bowels of hell, through Earth’s atmosphere, through the Milky Way and, at last, to Alpha Centauri, spinning ever-faster as the great star sucked the pot into its gravitational field. If only he could start work on it now.
‘Ahem.’
He looked up to find Shay standing over him. She held a large box crammed with her belongings and thrust it at him. ‘Downstairs,’ she said.
Jonathan got to his feet clutching the box, shot a glance at Ed (motionless and fuming in a sodden green-silk suit dripping coffee) and exited the office as inconspicuously as possible while twenty of Comrade’s twenty-two employees downloaded their exploding-coffee-pot videos on to Facebook or watched it in multiple replay on their phones. It had already been tweeted under #anotherboringdayattheoffice and was in danger of going viral as Shay led Jonathan out, her tote bag crammed full of brand-new office supplies and the company laptop. She threw her shoulder against the huge industrial-steel door with impressive force and said nothing until they reached the sidewalk.
‘Taxi.’ It was an order.
He didn’t have an arm free but was quite proud of his whistle. Two cabs pulled up simultaneously and Shay shovelled her belongings into the larger, spat an address at the driver and, as Jonathan leaned in to bid her farewell, slammed the door in his face and sped off.
He stood gazing at the hole she’d left in his narrative and then trudged back upstairs to work. Ed had disappea
red. Gillian and Roger from sales were sweeping up shards of glass and mopping up coffee. A game of badminton had broken out accompanied by a techno-beat mix blasting out of someone’s computer. Jonathan sat down and opened his email. There was the usual crap about work but he clicked the all-staff memo first.
TO: all staff
FROM: management
SUBJECT: SNOW DAY
It had been typed on Shay’s account but probably not by Shay. No further message was required.
By mid-morning, badminton had run its course and the entire office retired to Guns Ammo Liquor, a grubby nearby bar with extremely attractive price points on a wide range of alcoholic beverages. By noon, Jonathan was drunk. By four he could hardly stand but it didn’t matter because he was the messiah and could crawl on water. He managed to get home by five, stepped through the door and collapsed in the hall.
His dogs sidled up to sniff him then retired to the living room. Jonathan thought he heard disgusted whispering.
‘He’s pixilated.’
‘Maybe just very tired?’
He fell asleep and dreamed of flying to Alpha Centauri in an astronaut suit with a coffee pot on his head, waking with a start and a terrible hangover a few hours later when Julie arrived home. She stepped over the crumpled figure at her feet, returning with a cup of coffee, two aspirin and two dogs on leashes. The night air revived him enough to wash down half a box of Oreos with a can of beer before collapsing into bed.
‘Nice day?’ Julie asked.
‘It started well,’ he said, edging up against her. She slid deftly out of his grasp and he sighed, realizing that action was not on the cards. With a pounding headache, a queasy stomach and a sense of deep resignation, Jonathan decided he’d sleep better on the couch. Sissy waited till he was stretched out under the blanket before hopping delicately up beside him, burrowing under the covers and settling in, her back against his chest. Dante remained on the floor all night, head on paws like a temple guard. Jonathan awoke at 5am with a raging thirst and a bad case of melancholia.