19
Andrea Bocelli’s “Con Te Partirò” started playing on the speakers over the bar.
“Who put this on?” Dorothy asked the bartender.
“Is that the song from The Sopranos?” Ashbee said.
The bartender pointed at Phil, who, to Ashbee and Dorothy’s annoyance, was finalizing his approach.
Since the day Dorothy had used it in workshop, Phil had been trying to make “Con Te Partirò” his class’s anthem, or at least its private joke. He wanted the memory of what they’d endured that afternoon, trying to keep a straight face while listening to it, to unite them. It was starting to work. He made eye contact with Olivia when the first notes played, and she smiled at him. Dan did, too. He was bringing the group together! Phil knew the Second City troupe was gathering backstage for a preperformance ritual (holding hands, letting the energy flow), perhaps uttering a nondenominational prayer for the night to go well. He envied theater people their circles, but also knew better than to suggest his classmates start one. They weren’t, in fact, a unified group of performers. They went onstage one at a time, killed or bombed alone, always. A circle would’ve sounded ridiculous to them. Each-in-their-corner preshow cohesion around “Con Te Partirò” was as good as it would get.
“I’ve created a monster,” Dorothy said to him, gesturing at the speakers.
“Did you see Manny Reinhardt’s son is at the bar?” Phil asked. “Is Manny on his way here for sure?”
“How do you know that’s his son?” Dorothy asked after Phil pointed out August. She hadn’t seen a picture of him since he was born.
“Some girl from Second City,” Phil said. “She said they went to college together.”
“You’re not supposed to fraternize with the enemy before battle,” Ashbee said.
“I don’t see Second City as the enemy,” Phil said.
“Please,” Ashbee said. “Please don’t say we’re all one big fucking family.”
“I see Second City as delusional for believing anyone cares about improvisation as an art form,” Phil said.
“That’s the spirit,” Ashbee said.
Was that punching up? Phil wondered. Making fun of improv? People liked stand-up better than improv these days, but Second City was, as an institution, a lot more famous than their MFA, so who was below whom tonight? Who was the underdog? He had to have been punching down, Phil thought, since Ashbee liked it. Ashbee preferred it when comedians punched down. He said punching down was funnier, because no one really knew the people who were up, but almost everybody had been a form of down at some point, and so punching down was in fact the most inclusive form of comedy, if you thought about it. Everyone could relate. You could get more specific, too, when punching down, whereas a lot of guessing went into imagining how the powerful lived, and guessing wasn’t funny.
Phil’s ears were pulsing. He hadn’t slept much the night before, rehearsing his Aristotle bit until three. He shouldn’t have taken that Adderall from the Second City girl in the bathroom. Maybe it was laced with something. Maybe it wasn’t even Adderall.
“I feel like shit,” he said to Ashbee. “I need water.”
Dorothy handed him her untouched glass. She watched Phil down it in one go. “Con Te Partirò” ended.
“Remember when songs used to end in, like, a fade-out?” Phil said, giving the now empty glass back to Dorothy. “I liked that. Like ‘Time of My Life,’ it just fades out. It feels like the band is just leaving the room or something, or maybe like you’re leaving but the party keeps going. Or like the song never ends, or just goes somewhere else.”
“What do you mean, goes somewhere else?” Ashbee said. “Are you high?”
Phil knew his comment would’ve made more sense, poetically, if he hadn’t taken “Time of My Life” as an example. “A Pair of Brown Eyes” would’ve been a better choice. “A Pair of Brown Eyes” faded out too, and it left you all sad and wanting to catch the very last of it and play it again.
“I’m just saying that ‘Con Te Partirò’ ends so dramatically, that high, sustained note, plus that last cello ding, like, full stop. I don’t like that. It’s so final.”
“We’ll pass on your note to Andrea Bocelli,” Dorothy said.
“Shit. I didn’t mean to insult Italian culture,” Phil said, truly thinking he’d made a faux pas. “I’m so sorry. And I made fun of improv two minutes ago, when you’re teaching improv this semester—”
“You’re all good,” Dorothy said. “I teach improv this semester because someone has to do it. We take turns. I don’t like it any more than you do.”
“You don’t?”
“I mean, there’s something essential to learn from improv,” Dorothy said, “but once you’ve learned it, once you’re not afraid of it anymore, you’re supposed to move on to written things. At least I think so. It’s like riding a bike. It’s a good skill to have, and once you have it, you have it forever and all that, but it’s a bit much to ask people to care, or to pay to watch you ride one onstage.”
“Whereas stand-up comedians, we, what, drive cars? Parachute jump?”
“No,” Dorothy said. “We just think onstage. Like adults.”
“And improv, they’re kind of like children,” Phil said. “On their bicycles.”
“Don’t quote me on that.”
The beating in his ears—he’d had to get very close to Dorothy to hear what she was saying.
“I see what you mean,” he said. “There’s something sort of obscene about improv, everyone searching while onstage. It’s like they want their epiphanies to be public.”
“Their epiphanies?” Dorothy said.
“While we keep ours private,” Phil said. “Our writing epiphanies, I mean. Not, like, our life epiphanies.”
“Our life epiphanies?”
“Did you have one, by the way? When you were stuck with Sword and you thought there was a shooter?”
He should’ve asked earlier, Phil realized, when they were all drinking at the Gage with Sword. Phil was taking this class with him about catharsis and epiphanies. What if Sword himself had had an epiphany in the last week of a semester in which he’d taught a class about it? How awesome would that be? Epiphany squared!
“I don’t understand the concept of epiphany,” Dorothy said.
“It’s like when all of a sudden you see the world in a new light,” Phil said.
“I know what it means. I’m just saying, I don’t understand why people ever speak of it in positive terms. There’s a crack in reality? Everything is different than you thought? That sounds terrifying to me. Epiphanies sound terrifying.”
“Wordsworth called them ‘spots of time,’ ” Phil said.
On some level, he already knew that this fact, years down the line, would be the only thing he remembered from Sword’s class.
Dorothy agreed with herself, but also pretty much immediately with the opposite of what she’d just said. An epiphany would’ve been great, actually. Could she perhaps have a delayed one? Was it a sign of moral sickness that she hadn’t had one in that room, where and when she’d thought her life might end? The one crazy step she’d taken since the shooting scare was deciding not to carry a purse everywhere any longer. Did that count? As an epiphany? What was she doing at the Empty Bottle anyway? She should be home, taking a bath, reconsidering her existence, trying to force an epiphany out of her brain. Her default appreciation of life was that nothing really mattered. Certainly, this “belief” could stand to be shaken up. Why wasn’t it being shaken up? By the day’s events? What was wrong with her? Though perhaps nothing was wrong with her. You couldn’t change your worldview every time something scary happened. A good friend of hers from childhood, for instance, had had cancer a few years back, aggressive. She’d gone through hell and beat it, then proceeded to return to work at Merrill Lynch, a job she’d always hated and dreamed of leaving. If that friend hadn’t taken surviving cancer as her sign to make drastic changes, if her worldview had come out of the experience unaltered, didn’t it mean that epiphanies were for fiction and not real life?
Or maybe her friend had simply exhibited true strength of character, Dorothy thought. Maybe Dorothy herself was exhibiting strength of character by never having had an epiphany. Maybe epiphanies were for dumb people. Uncommitted people. Lazy people.
This circular thought (from epiphany being stupid to epiphany being what she needed back to epiphany being stupid) took all of a second for Dorothy to go around. Once again, it hadn’t exactly been a thought, the words hadn’t exactly appeared in her head, but she’d experienced a series of split-second flashes that had contained a sense of them. Her brain was so used to opposing any point of view it became aware of, for sport, that it did the same with Dorothy’s own immediate opinions now, too. She was used to seeing these small debates hold themselves in her head, almost entirely in spite of her. That was what should be taught, she felt at times, in a stand-up MFA: how to disagree with anything anyone was saying, how to disagree with what you yourself were saying. The opposite of “Yes, and,” in a way. How to hold one thing and its opposite to be true, by way of questioning everything all the time. To ask yourself so many questions you ended up believing in nothing. Questions were the primary tool of comedy. Comedy started when someone asked, “Have you noticed?” or “You know this feeling when…?” or “What was God thinking?” A good comedian tended to cut out the actual question marks when he revised, to let the questions ask themselves more powerfully through the bit. But it always started with a question. When Chappelle opened his special talking about a friend who’d never considered suicide in spite of his terrible life situation, he didn’t literally ask, “Why do some people kill themselves and others don’t?” But really, he did. Questions were right at the root of comedy, as they were in many other disciplines, from philosophy to the hard sciences, except that in comedy you were never looking for the real answer, but for the funniest answer, and in order to find the funniest answer, you had to first go through all possible answers. It was exhausting but necessary. The inside of Dorothy’s head was a relentless stream of questions—is this better than that, is that homage or plagiarism, is that funny or depressing, is it both, why do people jog, why is this person telling me this, why did my uncle kill himself and why, of all the methods at his disposal, did he go for the rope, how is it that some potatoes look like people, real people trying to tell you something, and other potatoes just look like potatoes, why have I never wanted to have children, what’s my bit and what’s me riffing on someone else’s, what’s mine and what do I own and how serious is this—it was all questions, all the time, and the volume of questions was nothing compared with the volume of possible answers, and the faucet only turned off when Dorothy fell asleep at night, although it had happened once or twice that it hadn’t, that she’d kept asking and asking and asking in her dreams. Epiphanies couldn’t happen in this context. The best you could hope for was a good punch line.
Phil was saying something now about Tobias Wolff, about the epiphany in “Bullet in the Brain” being his favorite of all the epiphanies he’d read in Sword’s class, because it changed nothing in the protagonist’s life, because the protagonist died as he was having it.
Dorothy nodded. She hadn’t read “Bullet in the Brain,” but what a great title, she thought. She was surprised Sword had allowed himself to teach a story with such a triggering title, but good for him. Maybe he was a good teacher. Didn’t he teach film, though? She was curious about him, she realized, how he prepared his lectures, who his favorite students were, how he’d met his wife. There was so much they could’ve talked about in that conference room. Perhaps they’d wasted an opportunity to become great friends. Now that she knew they’d been in no danger, Dorothy was rewriting her time with Sword as a nice, cozy hour, to be cataloged next to other experiences she’d had of being pleasantly stuck (at home in a blackout, at summer camp in a big storm). She felt a strange nostalgia for it already. She texted him:
and Sword right away replied:
Dorothy confirmed. She apologized for having been a pain in the ass in the conference room earlier. She wanted Sword to rewrite the afternoon in his head, too, to remember it as a wonderful time with her. He said he didn’t recall her being a pain in the ass. He said he had a good time. As good as could be had under the circumstances.
Sword texted back “Asleep,” and Dorothy wondered whether that meant the wife had been asleep when he’d come home, or was sleeping now. She wanted to write “Wake her up!” and give marital advice, but she decided to hold off on that until she knew the wife a little better, until they were all friends. She wrote:
and then turned on her stool to try to get the bartender’s attention. She locked eyes with a former undergraduate student of hers on the way—she taught freshmen every spring, Intro to Comedy, a class in which famous comedies were autopsied and as little time as possible was spent on the students’ actual material. Two kinds of freshmen ever took that class: those who’d been told their whole life that they were funny, and those who had never made anyone laugh but hoped they could become a different person in college. Both categories were beyond her reach. No one had ever had an epiphany in her Intro to Comedy class, that was a certainty. Dorothy smiled at the girl (a girl who’d been in the second category, she remembered, wanting to be cured of her humorlessness), but the girl looked away, took her beer from the bar, and went elsewhere with it, opening as she left a clear line of sight to Olivia and her sister. They were both speaking over each other, it seemed to Dorothy, fighting for Manny’s son’s attention. Olivia’s twin had Olivia’s dimples, Olivia’s big eyes, Olivia’s round ears and slight overbite. The differences between them were obvious, though, too—Olivia’s wild eyebrows vs. her sister’s plucked ones, a ten-pound weight gap, Dorothy guessed. But the most striking contrast was in the girls’ body language, the way they flirted with August. A lot of hand gestures and hair movement on the twin’s part (was it Sally? Sadie?), a more relaxed posture for Olivia—one elbow planted on the bar, the other arm only moving to bring up alcohol to her lips. Dorothy started a new note. “Two kinds of people,” she typed. “People who, when they meet twins, focus on the similarities, and people who focus on the differences.” This would go nowhere beyond note stage. She’d felt no excitement typing it. She’d just had to do it. She’d also thought that Sword might respond to her invitation to dinner while she typed the note about twins, and that was what typing notes was for, too, to kill time before real life happened. After which real life quickly became material to take notes on again, until a new flavor of real life came, and so on and etc., until you died. She wondered what she would cook for them when they came, the Swords, whether the wife ate meat.
When she looked up from her phone (no answer from Sword), the twins were still talking to August, but August wasn’t focused on them anymore. He was looking straight at her, straight at Dorothy, and he was smiling.
Olivia saw the smile and followed the look.
“You a fan of Dorothy’s?” she asked August.
She thought calling a famous comedian by her first name made her look cool. She still didn’t know August was August Reinhardt.
“Big fan,” August said, turning back to the girls. He liked Olivia. No use in denying it. She didn’t talk as much as her sister and seemed less interested in him overall, but he liked that about her—not because he thought she was playing hard to get and that was attractive (August hated that kind of mind game), but because he took Olivia’s occasional and brief retreats from their conversation as signs of an intellectual complexity he found alluring. He liked seeing people’s minds go elsewhere. He never felt threatened by it, or insulted. If anything, it was people who paid his presence and what he said too much attention that he found dubious. People like Sally. While Olivia was both there and not, perhaps tweaking in her head what she would say onstage, perhaps pondering the meaning of life, Sally had kept her focus on him and him alone, asked a thousand questions about his job, what had made August want to be a lawyer, if it was like with doctors, who always wanted to become doctors because someone they loved had gotten sick and died, and yes, was it the same for lawyers, like, had they all witnessed a primal injustice? August said no. He was interning still, but the plan was to go into corporate law, and he didn’t recall an original corporate incident in childhood that could’ve given rise to his vocation.
Now Sally was asking what his favorite shows about lawyers were, his opinion on the way lawyers were portrayed in fiction. August said he didn’t watch a lot of TV, but maybe The Good Wife? The answer surprised Sally. August didn’t say that the only reason The Good Wife came to mind was that his mother had worked on the show. He repeated that he didn’t watch much TV. Sally said she took issue, sometimes, with the amount that shows and books and movies focused on lawyers, and doctors, and cops, and journalists, as if other professions weren’t interesting. It offended her that fiction treated “regular” office jobs as mere background noise in “regular” people’s day-to-day, something of no relevance to the protagonist’s life, or else a joke, or a soul-sucking machine. She herself worked for a company that studied real estate development feasibility, and she was happy there, her colleagues were wonderful, the work was stimulating, and she didn’t appreciate it that people, when she told them what she did for a living, assumed that her job was boring, or that she couldn’t really be passionate about it, as if only detectives and surgeons and good-hearted attorneys ever took their work home with them, or didn’t count their hours. August said attorneys very much counted their hours, even the “good-hearted” ones, but he knew what Sally meant. “You know what I mean,” Sally said, and she repeated the word “passionate,” how lawyers were passionate, or depicted as such, in a way that real estate development feasibility teams never were. August pretended to see what Sally’s issue was, but deep down agreed with those shows he didn’t even watch. Wasn’t it the case that most jobs were less interesting than doctor or lawyer or detective? These were jobs in which you got to see other people’s lives from within, and the people in question had to tell you everything about themselves without you needing to give them anything back—anything personal, that is: just your expertise, a service. Being a lawyer was so much better than being a writer, too (the career his father had wanted for him), because you didn’t have to try to make anything mean anything, you didn’t need to transform what you were living or witnessing into anything bigger than it seemed, you only had to respond to a situation in the way that you’d been trained, and then move on.
“Dorothy’s amazing,” Olivia said to August, as if the previous few minutes of conversation between him and Sally hadn’t happened. “But do you like Manny Reinhardt? I hear he might be coming tonight.”
“I do,” August said. “I do like him.”
“He’s the fucking best,” Olivia said.
August had to say something now. Olivia loved his father’s work, and he could see it coming that his father was going to like her, too, and even though she and Manny wouldn’t fall in love or anything like that, the relationship they’d have would make it impossible for August to exist as a boyfriend. When it came to dating, or even just sex, August didn’t go for complicated. He’d had his heart broken once, in college, after a one-night stand he hadn’t previously understood would be a one-night stand. He’d been in love with the girl for a while. Admired her. It was a girl he’d envisioned a future with. She had a boyfriend back home she hadn’t told him about. They’d been friendly but not friends, and after the one night, they’d been nothing at all. August hadn’t told anyone how painful this had been. He’d suffered in silence. That’s why he didn’t think his father had done anything wrong with the women he’d proposed to. They’d had a different understanding of where their relationship would lead, just like he, August, had had a different understanding of where his night with the girl in college would lead. These things happened. You got hurt. You got over it.
“Manny Reinhardt is my father, actually,” he said to Olivia.
Olivia spit back into her glass the sip she’d just taken.
August thought perhaps it was cold of him to think that the women who’d accused his father of emotional misconduct should get over their heartbreak silently just because that’s how he’d gotten over his at an even younger age. It was unfair how people who got over things always judged so harshly those who couldn’t.
“You’re his son?”
“The one and only,” August said. “As far as I know.”
“Jesus.”
“Maybe women are going to come forward, though. Say he got them pregnant. Maybe I’m in for new siblings.”
“Like with the prince of Monaco,” Sally said.
“No one knows who that is,” Olivia said.
“He gets demands for paternity tests from a hundred women a week,” Sally explained. “He’s fathered like nine illegitimate children already.”
“How do you know this?”
“I read world news.”
“Monaco isn’t the world,” Olivia said. She turned back to August. “How’s your father holding up? Does he hate women now? Is he really coming tonight? What makes him laugh?”
August took a deep breath and answered: “Okay. No. Yes. Holocaust jokes.”
“No, but, like, who are his favorite comedians? What are his favorite bits?”
“Your friend is coming over,” Sally said to Olivia.
Artie had been looking at the twins flirt with August for a while, trying to decide whether or not to infiltrate the conversation and subtly let August know he had his eye on Olivia.
“Show starts in five,” he announced.
He’d come from the side and was now standing between Olivia and August.
“I’m Artie,” he said, extending a hand.
“August Reinhardt,” August said.
“Of the Reinhardt family?”
“When will your father be here?” Olivia asked.
“I don’t know, fifteen minutes? Half an hour?”
Olivia turned to Artie and put her hand on his forearm. Artie knew what she was going to ask. The way the battle worked was simple: three stand-ups would go onstage first and do five minutes each, then the whole Second City troupe would do a thirty-minute improv, after which the last three stand-ups would close the evening. It had been decided that the comedians would go up in alphabetical order, which meant Olivia would go third, and third meant Manny might miss her bit. She wanted Artie’s later spot, she wanted to go as late as possible.
“That’s two favors just for today,” Artie said to her. “Two big fucking favors.”
“I know,” Olivia said. “I’ll make it up to you.”
Her hand was squeezing his arm now. Artie assumed she would let go, or at least loosen her grip the moment he agreed to switch spots with her, but her hand remained on his arm after he did, and if anything, it seemed to hold him tighter.
“You’re the best,” Olivia said, for the second time that day.
Artie stopped himself from looking around to make sure other people had heard her. Other people like August. He kept his cool, checked the time on his phone, and, just as he did, saw that Ethel was calling. She’d never called him before. He felt propelled down to a secret hole in the ground. Rather, he felt his body stay on the surface of the earth, for show, but his stomach and brain drop many feet below to a secret underground that had been there all along, a secret underground in which Mickey was dead. If Ethel was calling, it meant his brother was dead. But maybe he wasn’t reading the name right? Maybe it was Esther and not Ethel? Did he know any Esthers?
“Ethel?” Olivia said, bending over Artie’s lit-up phone. “Who’s Ethel? Should I be jealous?”
“I have to take this,” Artie said.
He stepped out of the bar and into the cold to pick up the phone. Ethel spoke before he could say hello.
“Your mother needs to stop calling my mother,” she said.
“Is Mickey all right?”
“That’s not why I’m calling.”
“Is he with you? Put him on the phone.”
“This group therapy thing you’re doing”—that’s what Ethel called the degree he was getting—“it’s working. You’re more assertive already.”
“Put Mickey on the phone.”
“I’m serious,” Ethel said. “I was worried about you going to Chicago. Our little Artie trying to make it big-time in the big city, with his tiny little brain and his tiny little jokes.”
She was teasing, Artie knew. She’d laughed at his jokes before.
“Tiny little brain,” Ethel repeated. “It must feel even tinier in the big city.”
“Stop saying ‘big city,’ ” Artie said. “I used to go to New York, like, every other weekend. I know how big my brain is.”
Ethel thought that was hilarious, though she merely said it (“That’s hilarious”) and didn’t laugh.
“Seriously,” she said. “Your mother needs to stop calling my mother. When your mother calls my mother, my mother calls me. I don’t answer, but still. I’m going to have to at some point.”
It was an odd thing to imagine, someone having power over Ethel, even just the power to annoy—Ethel having a mother of her own. To Artie, Ethel had always had the aura of a character in a novel, the kind that had secret control over the plot. No one told that person what to do.
“Why don’t you answer her right now?” Artie asked. “Tell her you’re with Mickey, and then they’ll both stop calling.”
“Mike is an adult,” Ethel said. “Your mother shouldn’t have had babies if she wasn’t ready for them to have a life of their own. You should tell her that.”
You tell her, Artie wanted to say to Ethel. Mickey tell her.
But again, Ethel wasn’t someone you told what to do. The reason she had the aura of a character in a novel was that her grandfather and Philip Roth had gone to middle school together and remained good friends: Ethel had met Roth as a child once or twice, and Roth had commented on her wits, said he would put her in a novel one day. The fact that he hadn’t, and would never, the fact that he’d probably never meant to, or that Ethel hadn’t achieved much of note in her thirty-five years of life, or that Artie had only read two of Roth’s twenty-eight novels and none of the short stories, were all irrelevant. Roth had been a giant in Artie’s household, and the Roth connection had helped Artie’s parents appreciate Ethel at first, in spite of the seven-year age gap with Mickey. If Philip Roth had seen something in her, certainly they could, too, Leonard and Leora. Also, Roth might have put parts of Ethel in a novel and no one had noticed. Ethel could’ve been the wind in the trees at Indian Hill, or a dimple on a kid’s face in Nemesis (there was this thought that if Ethel was part of any of Roth’s books, it would be Nemesis, since the protagonist bore Ethel’s last name, and Roth had to have been thinking about her grandfather, who’d had polio as a child, when he was writing it). After Ethel had left Mickey for another guy, however, and broken his heart for the first time, Artie’s mother had ceased imagining her in a Roth book. Her interest turned into hatred, a hatred she didn’t believe could get any deeper, until Ethel came back to Mickey, then left him again, and came back again. No part of that evil girl could be in any one of Roth’s lines, Artie’s mother had decided after that. Or if she was, she’d said, if Ethel was in Nemesis at all, she was the polio epidemic itself. Artie’s father had tried to calm her down, saying that Mickey would get over the girl eventually. “It takes a minute to recognize the right woman for you,” he’d added, and his wife had fallen silent after that, silent for days, a silence Artie remembered trying to interpret at the time. Had his mother been angry because her husband failed to worry enough about their son? Or because he’d made love sound so trite, a mere arrangement of comfort, the “right woman” like the right shoe? It was after that remark about the right woman that his father’s input had dried up considerably.
“Do you love Mickey?” Artie ended up asking Ethel on the phone. That was the kind of question you asked someone with a literary aura, someone who might or might not have been polio in Nemesis. It was snowing again, too. Light flurries of snow that invited confession.
“That’s a real personal question,” Ethel responded.
Was it? Artie wondered. Didn’t it concern him, too? He told Ethel that he’d once heard Mickey say that there was no such thing as personal questions, only personal answers.
“That’s a bit highfalutin,” Ethel said, but then she thought about it for a second. “I guess he’s right, though.”
“So?” Artie asked again. “Do you love him?”
“That would be a personal answer,” Ethel said.
The snow started coming down in larger flakes, and Artie watched as some of them fell directly into the trash can near him. Traveling all this way through the sky, to end up right inside that black hole, with the pizza crusts and the cold, bagged dog shit. His stomach turned.
“Do girls ever really love anyone?”
His question was so absurd Ethel couldn’t wait to hear the reasoning behind it.
“I mean girls…,” Artie went on, “you’re so ready to get hurt…it feels like you never go all in. You’re always just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s like it would be shameful to trust a man or something.”
“Listen to you, with your one-and-a-half-girlfriend experience,” Ethel said.
“I’ve had four girlfriends already,” Artie said.
“You’re counting them. That’s sweet.”
She said the fact that he counted girlfriends was evidence that men were shit, and you couldn’t fault women for being cautious. Artie wondered who didn’t count their girlfriends. Or boyfriends. Didn’t she? She’d always left Mickey for other men, and probably would again…didn’t she even keep track of their names?
“Mickey never did anything to hurt you,” he said.
“How would you know that?”
Ethel was right, Artie realized. He barely knew his brother at this point. The last thing they’d bonded over had been the Holocaust survivors’ holograms, two summers prior. He took the phone away from his ear to look at the time. The show had probably started by now. Dan had to be onstage. It would be Marianne after that, then him.
“I do love him,” Ethel was saying when Artie put the phone back to his ear. “I do love your brother.”
“Will you put him on?” Artie asked, and this time, Ethel did.
Mickey was high and spoke too slowly about Galileo. Artie hated Mickey on heroin, the gooeyness and elasticity of each word, his sentences like syrup through a sieve.
“I dreamed about Galileo,” Mickey said—four words it took him twelve seconds to get out. “He was in his prison cell, but I wasn’t in the dream at all, I was just watching.”
“That’s too bad,” Artie said, as fast as possible, like it could get Mickey to pick up speed, like Mickey, wherever he was, could take a hint. “I’m sure you guys would’ve had an interesting conversation.”
“But no,” Mickey said. “You don’t get it. I wasn’t in the dream. I wasn’t in my own dream. I couldn’t do anything for Galileo.”
Artie was relieved his brother was okay. Safe for now, at least, right this moment. But there was disappointment, too. He didn’t want to explore the feeling, figure out what he would’ve preferred (his brother in the hospital? hit by a car? his brother dead?), but Mickey’s sluggish pace invited frustrated visions.
“I get it,” he said, to bat them away. “You weren’t in your own dream. You couldn’t do anything for Galileo. You left Galileo to rot in his cell, and that sucks.”
“Does it happen to you?” Mickey asked. “To not be part of your dreams? To watch your own dreams like you’re watching a movie?”
“I’m always in my dreams,” Artie said. He was sure the fact made him uninteresting somehow.
“Then you could’ve saved Galileo,” Mickey said.
Artie had to hang up. If he talked to his brother any longer, it would sink him, fuck up his rhythm onstage.
“I have to go,” he said.
Mickey said goodbye, but forgot to hang up, and though Artie had been impatient just a second ago to get off the phone, this changed things. He couldn’t resist listening to people who didn’t know they were being listened to. He was the kind of person who went through the entirety of a three-minute-long pocket-dial voicemail, just in case.
The sound was clear in Artie’s ear, though Ethel’s voice reached him from a greater distance—she had to be a few feet away from Mickey and the phone, and it sounded like she was moving around, too, perhaps folding laundry, putting things in drawers. Artie imagined the phone gone dark next to Mickey on the couch, or on a coffee table, picking up on everything the couple said to each other and offering it to a third party, fully aware of what it was doing. It was so easy to think of phones as sentient entities, with a capacity for duplicity, for intention. He often wondered if cavemen had loaned thoughts and emotions to rocks, or the tools they built.
Ethel, eight hundred miles away, was telling Mickey that he’d confused Galileo and Giordano Bruno. “It’s Giordano Bruno who would’ve needed saving,” Artie overheard her say to his brother. “It’s Bruno who got burned at the stake for his heliocentric theories. Galileo was just put under house arrest.” Mickey said that house arrest wasn’t a picnic either, but Ethel countered that Galileo had had a nice villa in Tuscany, not a crummy studio in Hoboken. After a few seconds, she added that the other part of Galileo’s sentence had been to recite some psalms once a week, as penance, but that his daughter had taken care of that for him, so really, the guy had had a pretty nice end of life, all told, and wasn’t it crazy that you could carry other people’s spiritual duties for them? There was silence between them after that, the sound of plates clinking, and then an announcement, on Ethel’s part, that stew was served. “Did you put turnips in?” Artie heard Mickey ask, all the way back in New Jersey. Ethel had. “And I made us a nice little cobbler, too,” she said.
Artie hung up. The words “nice little cobbler” echoed in his head. How was the trash can not full of snow yet? He realized he’d never seen it, actually—a trash can full of snow. Snow accumulated on the rim, but never at the bottom, or all the way up.
He typed “trash can” and “snow” in his new note-taking app, which alerted him to the fact that he’d written a note about trash cans before, and others about snow, and did he want to merge them all together in a single document for ease of reference?
When he looked up from his phone, Kruger was there staring at him. Artie hadn’t heard him come near—had a cab just dropped him off? Had he been walking and snow muted his footsteps? There were no footprints around him, in any direction.
“Dorothy has your phone,” Artie said.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” Kruger said.
He’d found a note from Dorothy on his door, a piece of paper taped there, saying that all was well, to meet them at the Empty Bottle. He’d expected, therefore, to find Artie alive tonight, but some of the fondness he’d felt for the boy earlier, picturing his funeral, was carrying over. He was glad to see him alive, gladder than he’d been to see anyone else alive in a long time. Artie felt it, this odd warmth, emanating from his teacher. He assumed Kruger was drunk.
“Did I miss you up there?” Kruger asked. He seemed to care deeply. There was snow caught in his eyelashes, and it reminded Artie of ash building up at the tip of his brother’s cigarettes, that texture, the frailty of it. How Mickey sometimes forgot he’d lit a cigarette already and got started on another, how it had happened that he’d left two or three smoking in different ashtrays, and Artie had to put them all out.
“We should go in,” he said. “The show’s probably getting started, and I’m up third.”
“What are you going to go with?”
“I think my priest-at-confession bit,” Artie said. He’d hesitated between that bit and another, but hearing Ethel talk about Galileo’s daughter praying in her father’s stead—he’d taken this as a sign.
“That’s a good bit,” Kruger said, even though he hadn’t treated it kindly in workshop a few weeks back. Perhaps he hadn’t meant it. Perhaps people only meant a small percentage of what they said. “You’re gonna kill it.”
Artie wasn’t thinking about killing, really, or about going onstage at all. He was thinking about turnips, and nice little cobblers, and the snow on the trash can, and the snow on Kruger’s lashes. What kind of cobbler was it that Ethel had made for Mickey? That’s what he wanted to know. Was it peach? Blueberry? He regretted having hung up before he could find out. Surely, Mickey had asked Ethel what she’d put in the cobbler. There was a chance he was still asking her.
Marianne was onstage when Artie and Kruger walked in, doing her bit about puzzles—about once writing a letter to the puzzle company after she completed a fifteen-hundred-parter and realized a piece was missing. The bit could’ve worked, but Marianne always wanted things to mean other things—she wanted everything to mean at least three different things—and it was confusing. The puzzle couldn’t just be a landscape: it had to be a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica. The missing piece couldn’t be a regular piece: it had to be a “double wings,” etc., etc. It was a lot to ask an audience to keep track of and care about. Marianne understood this now. No one was laughing. She said good night and called Artie to the stage.
Artie climbed the steps there, high-fived Marianne, and considered pratfalling to get things started. He’d never quite settled on an entrance. Several times a week, he went to open mics around town to work on options, but it always took him half his stage time to get comfortable, to get the audience to like or just pay attention to him. There had to be opening words that made people listen right away.
He didn’t pratfall. He stood straight behind the microphone and said:
“I don’t feel like joking tonight.”
It felt cheap, and not many people laughed, and the few scattered laughs were quick to die, but still. The room got quieter and more receptive than any he’d performed for before. This was his biggest crowd ever—two hundred people, maybe more, while his previous record verged on thirty. Silence wasn’t an absolute notion, Artie realized. Two hundred silent people were more silent than two silent people.
“A few hours ago, I thought I was going to die,” he said. “I was in the bathroom, at school, and the lady in the next stall tells me there’s a shooter in the building. She’s in the men’s room, by the way, so don’t give me shit.”
Artie knew it wasn’t a good idea to improvise about something that had just happened. Olivia could do it. Jo. But not him. For whose benefit was he even trying? And anyway, wasn’t the idea behind a battle with Second City to prove that stand-up was the higher form of comedy? That comedy was in the writing, the perfectly picked word, the revised and rehearsed to death?
“She’s hiding from the shooter,” Artie went on, “she’s crying and all, and I have this protective layer of never fully believing life is real, so I’m fine, but still, I’m not a dick, I try to comfort her. She thinks this is it. She thinks we’re going to die together, so she wants us to mean something to each other, she wants to trade life stories before it all ends, fears and regrets and all that, and you know what she tells me? She tells me about the novel she’s writing. That’s what’s on her mind.”
Why? Why was he doing this, why was he telling the audience about his half hour with author Vivian Reeve instead of launching into his bit about confession? Artie would ask himself this later. The energy of improv didn’t allow for big questions, same as when you tripped off a cliff (one could assume), you didn’t ask yourself Why am I falling? but rather tried to look for a branch or something to hold on to.
“What really bums her out is she won’t be able to finish writing her novel. Isn’t that funny? That, in the face of death, she would be bummed about that? I can tell that you don’t find it funny. I can tell because you’re not laughing. But think about it for a second. How sad it is. If you think about how sad it is, it becomes funny.”
Manny Reinhardt walked into the bar as Artie said the words “you’re not laughing.” Artie was probably the first to notice him—his eyes kept track of the door’s every swing when he was onstage, who was leaving, who looked at those who left with envy. He considered saying something about Manny’s entrance, but improvising within the improv, that would be ruled a suicide, he thought, and understanding this brought him back to his senses. He had to get started on his actual bit, the one he’d performed a dozen times. It wasn’t great (the ending, in particular, sucked), but it was something that existed already, he knew what was in it. Some people thrived on the mystery, the process of discovery, but Artie wasn’t good at not knowing what lay ahead. He in fact sometimes thought it was because of how bad he was at dealing with the unknown that he wrote jokes and went onstage with them. He needed to know there could be five minutes here and there, short moments in his life he had control over. He needed minutes when he didn’t have to wonder what to say (it was already written!), or whether his parents were happy, what would happen to Mickey in the long run, and how did he like the cobbler.
“Anyway,” he said. “I was walking the other day, not far from here actually, and I passed by a church, and you know those big scoreboard-looking things they have outside, where they LED-display quotes from God? Like ‘God says: I’ll be back in a minute’? Well, they didn’t have a message from God on this one, or maybe it was straight from him actually, I don’t know, like a memo he sent, but in any case, it was purely informational. It said: ‘Confessions: Half an Hour Before Mass.’ ”
This felt better to Artie. He could see the sentences lined up in his mind’s eye, like items on a conveyor belt at the supermarket—the milk first, the coffee, the canned stuff, then, far away in the distance, the more fragile things, the fruit and the eggs, to handle with care at the end. All he had to do was scan everything.
“I’m not Catholic, so I was a little surprised. I thought confessions were for whenever you needed them, that there was always someone on duty in there ready to take yours, like night watchmen at Holiday Inns. But half an hour before Mass? Half an hour before showtime? For the whole congregation? That feels a bit short to me.”
He knew better than to use the conveyor belt analogy with other comics. You always heard artists in interviews say that breakthroughs happened when you stepped out of your comfort zone, but Artie liked comfort, comfort allowed him to project confidence, and positivity, and to look at the audience, see that Olivia, who still hadn’t noticed Manny Reinhardt, was scribbling something on a loose sheet of paper at the bar, that Phil was gulping water next to her, that Sally smiled encouragingly. Reinhardt, to Artie’s surprise, hadn’t made his way through the room to meet his son, or anyone else. He stood by the door, listening.
“Also: Right before Mass? So that everyone can see if you’re going in or not? If you go in, there’s gossip, people start betting on what you’re confessing to, and if you don’t go, they notice, too, like ‘Fucking Cindy, thinks she’s so perfect.’ ”
Artie’s bit went on to imagine how some priests’ association had come up with the thirty-minutes-before-Mass rule. The priests were sick of taking confession, it turned out. Really, they thought they should get paid to do this, same as shrinks. Also, they were judging the shit out of everyone who came in, according to Artie. He gave examples. He got laughs. Manny Reinhardt, at the back of the room, kept his eyes on him the whole time. What Artie first took as politeness quickly started irritating him. Why wasn’t Manny making a beeline for the bar, why was he staring? This wasn’t ballet, he wouldn’t miss a tiny little wrist gesture if he made eye contact with his son for a second…couldn’t he just look away? The end of the bit was nearing (the eggs, the delicate fruit), and Artie didn’t want too much attention paid to it. He hated that a bit could be judged on the strength of its landing alone, that comedy still valued the destination more than the journey, that his bit’s weak ending could get the audience to reassess the quality of its parts. He remembered the ending of so few things himself, books, movies—even his favorite ones. Mickey had always placed a lot of weight on last scenes, last shots, last sentences, but to Artie, these had never been more than suggestions, leaving him free to imagine what happened when Private Ryan came home, or after Zooey left the apartment, or how Natalie Portman fared at boarding school after Jean Reno died. He’d always kept his favorite stories alive beyond the credits.
Yet wrapping things up wasn’t optional, and Artie had a placeholder ending for now, in which he wondered to his audience what would happen if he were to show up to confession before Mass and take up the whole thirty minutes to confess to something elaborate in painful detail. Would he get kicked out? Could the church kick him out? He imagined a priest giving him feedback on his confession, calling him boring, his story too convoluted. Priests too, no matter how much they read the Bible, had to have opinions on storytelling shaped by TV, no patience anymore for certain digressions. Priests too demanded a quicker pace. The bit ended on the priest recommending Artie spend more time on Twitter, condensing his thoughts and emotions to 280 characters or less. The audience liked it fine, but as he went offstage, it dawned on Artie what he needed to do. If he wanted a better ending, he had to actually try it. Go to confession himself. See what happened. Research wasn’t typically his method (he preferred making things up), but he’d been thinking about this bit for months now, and the last move kept eluding him. There was something he was failing to imagine. Artie knew that the something in question could be anything—a detail in the woodwork in the confession booth, a flimsy partition, a priest with a lisp—but part of him also thought the spiritual experience itself could unlock the bit, give him a new understanding of what it was he’d been looking for. He would go tomorrow, he decided. Was there Mass on Thursdays? Certainly, he could find something to confess to.
“That was good,” Dorothy told him. “You were good.”
She’d stayed stage right his whole bit, like a boxing coach.
“Reinhardt is here,” Artie said.
Manny, his son, and Olivia were heading backstage when Dorothy spotted them.
“Come with me,” she said to Artie. “I’ll introduce you.”
Manny was already making Olivia laugh when Artie and Dorothy walked in, slumped in a couch, asking about her GPA. Was she getting straight A’s in her comedy classes so far? That was how you told a good comedian from a hack nowadays, wasn’t it?
“Leave the girl alone,” Dorothy said, even though (or perhaps because) that was the last thing Olivia wanted.
Manny jumped up to give Dorothy a hug.
“All right, all right,” Dorothy said, patting Manny’s back. “It’s nice to see you, too.”
She didn’t mind the hug, was in fact happy the hug was happening in front of her students, but she knew that cutting it short was her best look.
“This is Artie,” she said.
“You have a good presence,” Manny said.
Kruger joined them in the greenroom then, and for nearly a minute, he pretended not to notice Manny. He focused on Artie, giving him his most elaborate critique to date. He could tell Artie had compressed the bit a lot already, Kruger said, sharp edits had been made, great edits, but his description of the church’s billboard didn’t quite hit yet, and there were still many extra syllables to cut here and there.
Dorothy understood that Kruger was marking his territory, showing Manny who was boss here. He must’ve thought he was being subtle, but he was an actor, in the end, and actors, even the most talented ones on film, tended to overdo real life. Right this moment, for example, by talking to Artie and not acknowledging Manny’s presence, Kruger was performing “secret animosity,” but performing “secret animosity” meant he had to hint at animosity, and automatically lose the “secret” half of the prompt. He was showing his hand, when a nonactor would’ve kept it better hidden.
“Where were you all afternoon?” Dorothy asked him. “Manny’s here.”
Kruger ignored her question and went to shake Manny’s hand. He told him how great it was to have him on board. The students were huge fans, he said. Every word out of his mouth sounded false. Manny, to Dorothy’s annoyance, entered his game. He said the honor was all his, even though Kruger hadn’t spoken of honor.
“Are you good friends with our dean?” Kruger asked. “He defended your hire tooth and nail.”
Kruger knew he shouldn’t have said anything about the hiring process, especially in front of students, but it bothered him to see Manny so comfortable already, so at ease around Artie and Olivia.
“I don’t know any deans,” Manny said. “I made it this far without understanding what it is a dean does, actually. At this point, I’m trying to see if I can get away with never having to find out.”
“I have a similar plan with the blockchain,” Dorothy said, determined to move the conversation away from teaching and academia.
“You must be Manny’s son,” she said to August. They shook hands. “I hear you’re a lawyer.”
“Still just an intern.”
“He’s being modest,” Manny said. “He’s working on this big trial opening tomorrow.”
He wanted to keep sparring with Kruger, but that was impossible now that Dorothy had made August the center of attention. He couldn’t take focus away from his own son.
“You’re working on the Delgado trial?” Kruger asked.
“I actually won’t be in court,” August said. “They didn’t pick me to assist.”
“What happened?” Manny said. “I thought it was a done deal.”
“They took Laura,” August explained. “I’ll help with the trial, but from the office. I’ll still learn a lot.”
Manny’s first impulse was to ask whose dick this Laura had sucked to get the job. He refrained, and said instead that he was sorry, that it was all his fault.
“They didn’t want the name Reinhardt near the case,” he said to August. “I made our name radioactive.”
“It had nothing to do with you,” August said. “Laura is very good.”
No one in the room quite understood what it was Laura had won and August lost, but his dignity in the face of it all impressed them deeply. It wasn’t tainted, it wasn’t false, and they all—Dorothy, Artie, Manny, Kruger, and Olivia—wondered if they’d seen such a thing before: a person defeated, not blaming anyone for their failure. A person failing without scapegoats.
But August had always been like that. He’d always refused to blame others for his mistakes, even as a child. Maybe it was because he didn’t have siblings, Manny thought—though a different child might’ve blamed his parents for not having given him one. August wasn’t someone who blamed himself much either, only in rare situations where he was truly at fault, situations he was able to recognize, analyze, and move on from. He didn’t mull over small slights and losses, he couldn’t have been a writer, Manny realized in that moment, or a comedian, or any type of artist. Comedians didn’t know their place like that. Half the job was bouncing between self-hatred and megalomania at absurd speeds, ignoring at all costs the possibility that you could ever belong to the stodgy middle.
It was beautiful to see, though, this strength. A man knowing his worth. Manny was proud of August. But unadulterated feelings were hard for him to experience, and his pride came with a hint of irritation at how his son’s perfection was making his own faults more salient. August would never sleep with the wrong woman, Manny thought. It was conceivable he’d never hurt anyone.
The room was quiet for a beat, in awe of August’s graceful attitude (“They took Laura”/“Laura is very good”), but then a burst of muted laughter filtered through the door, and the reminder that comedy was unfolding in the next room, even in its diluted form of improv, made everyone uncomfortable. It was true what they said, that laughter was incompatible with nobility. Manny said:
“Fuck Laura.”
August forced a smile to please his father.
“Fuck all Lauras,” Olivia added.
“Except Laura Dern,” Artie said.
Dorothy understood why the kids would riff with Manny, but it pained her to see August have to take his father and two strangers trivializing his world, reducing days and weeks of work (not against Laura, in all likelihood, but alongside Laura) to those three syllables: “Fuck Laura.” She looked at him, at August. Maybe he did look a bit like young Manny, she thought, if young Manny had swum a mile a day every day of his life.
“Do you swim?” she asked him.
“Are you flirting with my son?”
“Every morning,” August said.
The laughter reaching them from behind the door sounded canned. Recorded years ago. Dorothy found it hard to believe that it was coming from actual people, and a sense memory arose, from childhood, of staying in during recess, reading in hallways or writing riddles on the bathroom walls. There, too, she’d heard muffled laughter, and screams, the sounds of children having fun in the schoolyard. There, too, the sounds had felt disembodied, and already reaching her from a distant past, or somewhere else she couldn’t go.
Her brain sent her a specific image from hours earlier, an image of Sword’s hand the moment he’d locked them in. The minuscule door lock. Her mind was sorting through all of the day’s stimuli without her having a say in editing them, Dorothy realized, discarding useless ones forever, preparing others to settle in and sediment.
She wanted to check if Sword had answered. She had this urge to know how he was doing, and his wife. She really wanted them all to be friends now. She tended to get along with depressive people. She felt her pocket for her phone and remembered she still had Kruger’s. Handing it back to him triggered a chain reaction—Kruger checking his email got Manny to google himself, which cued Olivia to browse images of gelato stores online for the bit she was working on. Seeing all the comedians in the room tapping their screens, Artie became worried he’d missed something. He unlocked his own phone, hoping to catch by osmosis the smatterings of everyone else’s inspiration. Nothing came. He looked up Catholic Mass schedules near him.
Kruger had to read his agent’s email several times, not that it contained unbelievable information, but Michelle was rescheduling his meeting with Paramount, and the name suddenly seemed so absurd to him that despite having seen it top mountains onscreen for decades, he was unsure of exactly what it referred to, or how to pronounce it. Paramount. Why had he asked Manny about a potential friendship with the dean? He knew better than to ask questions to people he feared or respected (his father, better comedians than him). You could say more with a question you asked than the other guy with the answer he gave, Kruger knew that, had always known that, yet he’d gone for it, he’d shown Manny the truth of his petty thoughts, and gotten nothing in return. Worse than that: Manny’s answer had made him look ridiculous for caring about deans in the first place, for forgetting that comedians shouldn’t care at all about deans. He’d made a mistake. You only asked questions to people who couldn’t hurt you with their answers. That’s why the internet was so powerful. Or strangers, people you knew you’d never see again. On the Metra, for example, he could’ve asked Veronica about his father. Veronica knew something he didn’t. People talked in Naperville. He could’ve used her as a search engine: “What did that guy really say to my dad at the Glass Eye?” She would’ve told him. She didn’t know him well enough to lie to him. He looked for her on Instagram, Veronica Tuft, perfect, one of those names you could only spell one way. He composed a message, polite, but empty of small talk, containing only the question he wanted her to answer.
Jo half opened the door seconds after he sent it and poked her head in.
“Fantastic,” she said. “Everyone and his phone is here.”
“We’re hiding from improv,” Artie said.
“Well, they’re almost done,” Jo said. “I’ll be onstage in five minutes, if anyone here likes laughing.”
Her head went back into the other room, bringing the word “jack-in-the-box” to Kruger’s mind. Something fighting to get out, something constantly being compressed back in. Forces opposing, creating comedy. That was in Bergson, too, if he remembered correctly. Was it today that he’d talked about Bergson in class? What a pretentious fuck, Kruger thought. Of himself, not Bergson. His students had to make fun of him. He’d quoted other philosophers in workshop, too—Kant about laughter (“the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing”), Herbert Spencer (“an effort which suddenly encounters a void”). They hadn’t liked these quotes about nothingness and void, they’d found the quotes depressing, but void was at the center of any comedian’s career, Kruger had insisted—the blank page, the doubt once it was filled, the silence when a joke crashed, the abyss you faced onstage, the emptiness you felt afterward. They had to be ready for it all. He hadn’t mentioned the postmortem oblivion, though. He assumed they knew about that, how comedians almost never reached posterity, how quickly the material aged, and the delivery, how a comedian dead twenty years might as well have lived in the Middle Ages, might as well have been one of those court jesters about whom the only thing we remembered was the funny hats.
Back at the bar, Olivia stayed close to Manny to gather last-minute intel on what made him laugh. Just like his son had an hour earlier, Manny took a money clip from his pocket and got the bartender’s attention right away. No one in the audience seemed to have noticed him yet, the room was dark, only those with their faces toward the bar were identifiable, their features lit by the Christmas lights running along the liquor shelf. Manny ordered drinks for the group.
“Is that your twin over there?” he asked Olivia. Sally was still where she’d left her, a couple of stools down from them.
“Good eye,” Olivia said.
“She’s your twin,” Manny said. “I have eyes that function.”
He asked if they should buy her a drink, too.
“She doesn’t drink much. I do the drinking for the both of us.”
Go home and kill yourself, Olivia thought. “I do the drinking for the both of us”…are you fucking serious?
Still, Manny had the courtesy to smile.
The bartender brought all the drinks, and while Manny distributed them, Olivia drank half her pint in one gulp. Where were all the smart things she’d prepared for the day she met Manny Reinhardt? She’d always imagined he would take her under his wing if they met, immediately see something in her no one else ever had, become her mentor, her friend, like in a movie, but it felt to her now like the cameras were rolling and she’d forgotten to write the script.
Jo went up onstage, and Olivia thought finally she could stop trying to figure out the right thing to say, focus on Jo’s bit. Except a new type of dread came over her as Jo started talking to the crowd. What if Manny didn’t find Jo funny? Would Olivia have the guts to laugh anyway, or would she just go along with the man’s judgment? What kind of friend was she?
“Isn’t it funny to think that we’re all going to die?” Jo’s bit opened. “Everyone in this room? Every single one of you?” The comedy was in the pauses, of course, the intensity with which she looked at the audience, singling out a few members. “You’re going to die,” she said to one. “And you, and you.” People were laughing. Manny, too. Olivia relaxed for a second, but she knew Jo wouldn’t get satisfaction from plain, hearty laughter: she’d need to wring it out before she could go on, she’d need to hear it die. Where other comics would have pointed at three audience members, bagged the laughs, and ridden on to the next beat, Jo was going to single out way too many, confuse everyone into silence, make them so uncomfortable they had to laugh again. Jo could potentially say “and you, and you, and you” to the entire room, Olivia knew, with long silences in between. Have that be her five minutes onstage. Jo had that kind of confidence. She stopped after the nineteenth audience member, though, once laughter had waned and come back to life. “You are going to die, too,” she said to him. And then: “Shit! I forgot the trigger warning. Trigger warning: tonight, I will be doing some crowd work about death.” People laughed some more, and Jo pretended to be surprised.
Olivia had never heard her do crowd work about death before. Perhaps it was something she’d just come up with, and this gave her courage. Maybe tonight was the night they all went onstage with what they’d just been thinking about the last couple of hours.
“Everyone in this room, no matter how healthy or careful, will die,” Jo repeated. “Isn’t that just wild to think about? Really, take a moment to think about it. Everyone.”
In the few seconds Jo left the audience to think about it, Olivia realized the true wild thing wasn’t so much to picture everyone around her dead, but to imagine that all of them, now so happy, so drunk, so full of laughter, would be asleep in a few hours. That’s the image that appeared in her head: everyone asleep. It was a good image, more potential for comedy than the whole room at the morgue, she thought. Not that death couldn’t be funny, but sleep seemed to her an even more vulnerable state, in a way, and exploiting vulnerability was always funnier than poking at fears. How strange was it that people fell asleep every night? When you thought about it? Some people even fell asleep next to other sleeping people! How insane! She might write about this, she thought. Imagining a whole room asleep. Although Jo might consider it too close to her own bit. Would it be? Having ideas while listening to other people wasn’t the same as stealing.
“Don’t you wish,” Jo was saying onstage, “that we could all know in advance how and when we were going to die? A little flash-forward, a quick movie of our death? Not just for ourselves, to be done with the wondering, but also for everyone else? Like when we meet someone, when we shake their hand, for example, we get to see how they will die? That would be valuable information, I think. That would help us get a sense of the person. Not only because we would know that the person would die choking on a doughnut, but also because we would know that she knew it too, and had to live with it. It’s so hard meeting new people. Don’t you think? And being alive, in general. All we can do is imagine things.” She picked a guy in the first row and asked, “You, for example, how do you imagine you will die?”
“Car crash!” the guy said, without hesitation. He sounded psyched about it.
“Do you think the car crash will be your fault, or someone else’s?”
“Probably mine,” he admitted.
Jo picked others in the crowd to chat about how they expected death to find them, and they all went along with it. The mood turned to that of a Little Big Shots episode, Jo as good-humored Steve Harvey, the audience as the excited children eager to talk, and everyone was jolly by the time she said good night and called Olivia onstage.
As she passed Sally’s stool on her way there, Olivia tried to avoid looking at her. There was nothing sadder than your twin’s encouraging smile, she thought, nothing more meaningless. Sally actually stopped her, though, grabbed her forearm and forced her to look. Olivia turned around, heard her twin say “You’re the best!” but focused her attention on Sally’s hair rather than her face. Olivia had found her first white hair just before Thanksgiving, and she’d wondered then if Sally had, too. She couldn’t bring herself to ask. In the bathroom earlier, she’d plucked out two new ones. She didn’t know what she wanted to see in Sally’s hair, if spotting white there as well would make her feel better or worse. She didn’t want either of them to grow older.
Olivia knew she was a bad sister for telling Sally not to press charges against Jarrett, but also that life was short and she could die any second, or have her whole head of hair turn white overnight, and she didn’t want to think about Jarrett in the time that was left, and wasn’t that something to respect as well? She turned back toward the stage and kept convincing herself that she wasn’t a horrible person. If it was the kind of case where she had to testify, she would do it. She would do everything she could do to help. She remembered the day Sally had first told their mother about Jarrett, she could describe it to the court. Sally was fourteen and talking about things that had happened seven, eight years prior, and their mother hadn’t believed her. She’d thought the girl had wanted to divert attention from her poor report card. “What about you, Oli?” she’d asked. Olivia’s report card had come in spotless. “Did Jarrett make you do things, too?” The problem was that Olivia had lied to her mother that day, and her sister, she’d said, “No, never,” and if she told a jury now that she’d lied that day, would they believe another word she said? She’d trained herself to forget as much as possible, but some details had stuck, she could go into those. Jarrett had asked her to kiss it once, but mostly he’d just wanted her to touch it (she hated herself for thinking the “just,” for always thinking it could’ve been worse, but she did think it, and it did help). She remembered the exact shade of pink and how soft it had been, and warm, too, like a gumball from the gumball machine by the newsstand her mother worked at, the one that was always in the sun in the afternoon. It was all true, but it would sound made up, Olivia thought. To her, almost everything did.
It wasn’t a problem for her to have this much on her mind as she made her way to the stage. She knew it would all disappear the moment she started speaking into the microphone. It was almost a game at this point, testing how many unrelated-to-comedy thoughts she could hold in her head up to the last second—the more there were, the greater the relief would be at seeing them fly away with her first line, like a flock of scared-off birds after a gunshot. That’s what Olivia had pictured her first few times onstage, a little explosion and then the birds, but now it was just a feeling, a great emptiness and then a warmth. If she’d had to describe it, she would’ve mentioned a beam, all her thoughts and energy gathering into a dense beam trained on the material, its delivery, the crowd’s reactions to it, not on her graying hair or the lie she’d told all those years ago. She couldn’t do anything about the lie now, but she’d read an article in Scientific American according to which white hair could sometimes go back to its original color, and that had given her hope. Jarrett had dyed his hair, she remembered. She’d seen the bottles in the bathroom, with the generic male model. Whenever she thought of Jarrett now (when she couldn’t help it), it was in fact the do-it-yourself hair dye model’s face that came to mind, and she liked to think she’d forgotten Jarrett’s features entirely, that she might not recognize him if he walked into the bar, but of course she would.
If she ever admitted to having lied that day, people would ask why, and she’d have to lie again, say that she’d been afraid Jarrett would get back at her. But she hadn’t been afraid at the time. When Jarrett had thanked her a few days later on the couch (the couch where everything else had happened, but on which that day he’d just said, “Thank you for sticking with me”), she’d had the thought that she could kill him—she had the strength by then, and he didn’t expect it in that moment. So no, she wasn’t afraid of him. She was angry that he’d made her life a cliché, cute little girls growing up poor but happy with their hardworking single mother until molester stepdad came along. She wanted people to never reduce her to this. But anger or pride hadn’t been the reason for the lie, either. Olivia didn’t like remembering how easy it had been to say it, “No, Jarrett never did anything to me.” It had rolled off her tongue. It was instinct. Not instinct to protect him, or to protect herself, but to be believed. A storytelling instinct. She’d sensed that in that moment it was the truth that would’ve sounded like a lie, like she was just repeating Sally’s words to get some attention herself, so she’d gone for the other thing. And though she’d always encouraged her mother to believe Sally, to kick Jarrett out (which the mother had ended up doing, months later), Olivia knew she’d committed to her own role so fully no one would buy it if she told the truth now. After all these years, she wasn’t even sure she could act it convincingly herself.
She took the microphone off the stand.
“Has anyone been to a Holocaust museum lately?” she asked the audience.
The audience laughed, more than encouragingly—they were enjoying the bit already. Olivia berated herself, though, for starting with a question. Next time, she thought, no question. Next time, start in the museum.
“I try to go to the Holocaust museum once a year,” she said, “around Thanksgiving. For emotional prep before I go see the family. Not that we’re Jewish or anything. But the amount my mother and her sisters complain, you’d think maybe there was a mix-up at birth. Like, maybe my grandmother knew her daughters would be stupid, so every time she had one, she swapped it for a Jewish baby at the hospital. It had to be easy back then, don’t you think? With everyone smoking in the hallways, there must’ve been a perpetual cloud in there—you could probably just smother patients in their sleep and steal babies and no one saw anything. You know, these hospital nurseries, by the way, with all the babies in their little bins, all lined up like that, it always makes me think of a gelato shop. And the new parents behind the window, looking at all the flavors…like they’re actually deciding which one to get.”
Olivia thought she could go there instead of where she was headed, keep digging at the newborn/gelato bin thing. The audience was liking it. But she couldn’t just digress, this wasn’t her show, she didn’t have an hour, she only had five minutes, and she’d probably used up one already, maybe more.
“I love it when there’s kids at the Holocaust museum. It’s always nice to see families there, little children seeing this stuff for the first time, their parents explaining the shoes and the tattoos. The soap is more for teenagers, I think. No? When were you guys told about the soap? The Nazis making soap out of people?”
She never really waited for audience answers.
“I was told about the soap in eighth grade,” she said. “I didn’t get it. Did you guys get it? I really didn’t. I remember everyone in my class nodded like they understood how you made one out of the other, but I truly couldn’t see it, I felt like a fucking idiot. In retrospect, I think mine was the appropriate reaction. Like everyone in my class was a psychopath for understanding the process of making soap out of people. Like that made total sense, it was a thought they’d all had. But whatever, I like the Holocaust museum. Clear distinction between good and evil, that’s relaxing. Helps to get perspective on your own problems. Also, I know the museum by now, I have a routine. But I get there last month, and they changed everything. They have this new feature now, they have a Holocaust survivor hologram, you heard of this? It’s amazing, they film a Holocaust survivor for hours and they ask him everything about his experience, and out of the footage, they make a hologram that can answer any question anyone may ever have about the guy’s life. It’s a bit creepy, but I mean, maybe it’s a good idea, because we had a real live Holocaust survivor visit my class back in the day, still eighth grade, and we were too fucking terrified to ask her anything. We didn’t want her to relive the camps, even though that’s exactly what she was there to do, to tell us how horrible it was, but whatever. We basically just asked about the tattoo, and the sleeping conditions. Some girl asked how much weight she’d lost. Stuff like that. But last month, I ended up alone in the room with the hologram at the Holocaust museum, and I let it all out. And I mean all of it. Like, I started with questions about the war, but then the guy was so nice and smart, and he seemed to really have his shit together, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask for life advice.”
Olivia wasn’t stealing, to her mind. Artie’s idea had been to discuss pop culture with a Holocaust survivor’s hologram. She’d been the one to take it further and imagine the hologram as a life coach.
“I asked about a guy, and after hearing the whole story, which I’ll spare you, the Holocaust survivor said, ‘This idiot doesn’t deserve you.’ Can you believe it? I’m sure grandfathers say stuff like that to their granddaughters all the time, but for me it was a first. I told him, ‘You’re like the grandfather I never had,’ and I was getting pretty emotional, but the hologram said, ‘Four children, fifteen grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren so far!’ And then there was this awkward silence, like he knew he’d bugged, but we both decided to just ignore it. I could’ve cried, guys. I wanted to take him home. I think I’ve always wanted a Jewish family. And I’ve also always wanted a family you can turn on and off, so the hologram man really fit the bill. Full of wisdom and super knowledgeable, but only talks to you if you talk to him first. You’re right, maybe I was falling in love a little. He was pretty funny, too, like I asked what it felt like to be made into a hologram, and he said, ‘Better than Auschwitz.’ Isn’t that something? I think maybe we were flirting. The problem is, a family came into the room after that, and it kind of ruined the mood. They had a kid, and he completely stole my survivor’s attention, he started using him to help with his World War II homework, stupid questions about Nazis, and forgiveness, and the father was filming it all, to make memories. I tried to make eye contact with my survivor so that we could joke about the family later, but he didn’t look back. Very professional. At some point, the kid ran out of questions and the mother went for it, she asked the hologram about the future, did he see similarities between 1939 Germany and today’s America, and I couldn’t help it, I said to her, ‘He’s not a fucking Magic 8 Ball,’ even though I’d kind of just used him like one. After everything we’d shared, I thought the hologram would side with me, but all he said was ‘One at a time, please,’ because I’d interrupted the lady and he’d bugged again. I felt betrayed, I’m not going to lie. I made a note in the guest book that I hope they start selling these holograms at the gift shop soon so we can all go home with our own Holocaust survivor. I think it works better as an exclusive relationship.”
Olivia wrapped it up nicely, she thought, imagining a hologram in every household waiting for the kids to come home and chat about their day, but all in all, as she left the stage, she felt the bit had been too baggy in the middle. She had a lot of cutting to do.
She assumed Artie would want to talk to her right away, but she didn’t see him at the bar. Perhaps he knew she always went for a cigarette after a performance and was already waiting for her outside.
Phil was the first to say “Good job,” and also the last for a while. His eyes rolled back in their sockets as he finished saying it, and his body went limp. Olivia tried to catch him as he fell, but the side of his head still hit the bar on the way down.
“What the fuck?” she heard someone say.
“Is this a joke?”
She had her arms in Phil’s armpits and everyone made space around them as she laid him on his back.
“He’s having a seizure,” Olivia said.
“He took some Adderall earlier,” someone from Second City said.
“Is there a doctor in here?” Dorothy asked, but why would there have been a doctor at the Empty Bottle on amateur comedy night? She took her phone out to call 911 and looked around for her purse—a stupid reflex, she thought. What would she have found in there anyway? Tissues? She could’ve wiped Phil’s forehead?
“My girlfriend’s a doctor!” some drunk guy said. “She’s smoking outside, I’ll go get her.”
Olivia was kneeling by Phil’s side. She’d tilted his head back so that he wouldn’t choke on his tongue, but beyond that, she had no idea what to do. She thought it might be important for Phil to know exactly how long his seizure had lasted, so she started the stopwatch on her phone.
The girl who’d given Phil the Adderall said it wasn’t her fault.
“He told me he’d taken it before,” she said, and then she started crying and saying it was horrible, all of this happening on his birthday.
“Phil’s birthday is in May,” Olivia said.
“He said it was today,” the girl insisted, like it mattered. She looked like no one had ever lied to her before.
“Maybe he has epilepsy,” Sally said, and this somehow irritated Olivia more than anything else her sister had said so far. Why did she always have to say out loud what everyone else was thinking? What was the social function behind such behavior? It wasn’t just Sally, though, Olivia knew. Everyone talked too much. She was so used to editing sentences, combining three words into one, cutting adverbs, that she’d started doing it to people’s speech in her head now, too, noticing where they could’ve sharpened an anecdote, or not spoken at all. She tried to focus on Phil. She grabbed his hand. It was cold, but the fingers wrapped around her palm immediately and squeezed so hard she thought her hand might break.
The drunk guy came back with his doctor girlfriend. She was drunk, too. Artie was behind them—so he had been outside, Olivia thought, waiting for her. She expected the drunk doctor to congratulate her on positioning Phil right, but the doctor made adjustments instead, turned Phil on his side, took the glasses off his face. Olivia thought she should’ve thought of that, the glasses.
Phil regained consciousness. His grip on Olivia’s hand relaxed, but he didn’t let go.
“Sir, do you know where you are?” the drunk doctor asked. She looked nauseous, worse off than Phil, in many ways.
“He hit his head on the bar,” Olivia said.
“How hard?”
“Pretty hard.”
Phil ended up saying he knew where he was, and that it was his birthday. The doctor asked if he’d taken anything to celebrate.
“It’s not his birthday,” Olivia said again, which, combined with the fact that she was holding Phil’s hand, got the drunk doctor thinking they were a couple.
“Has your boyfriend taken any drugs tonight?”
“Only Adderall, sounds like. And a beer or two,” Olivia said. She didn’t see the point in correcting the boyfriend/girlfriend assumption. It wouldn’t even be funny. “He had a bourbon earlier, too,” she recalled.
“I wanted tequila, though,” Phil said. And: “She’s not my girlfriend.”
It made the girl who’d given him Adderall laugh.
Phil told the doctor that he had seizures about twice a year, and it was nothing. The drunk doctor said someone should take him home, make sure he didn’t fall asleep for a few hours, in case he had a concussion.
Olivia thought she could’ve told Phil that, about the concussion. She’d seen the medical shows, and that Altman movie with the kid. It was such a cliché line—“Don’t let him fall asleep!”—she wondered if the doctor was a real doctor.
“Make sure to drink lots of fluids,” the drunk doctor told Phil. “Your friends will watch over you.”
“What fluids?” Dan asked.
“What friends?” Jo said.
Sally looked at Olivia. Was it okay to resume making fun of Phil so soon? Olivia had once explained to her that there was no such thing as too soon in comedy, only not funny enough.
“We’ll take him home,” Olivia said.
“You know where he lives?” Dan asked.
“He lives with his aunt on Kedzie.”
“Wait, are you guys actually dating?”
“How do you know his birthday and where he lives?” Jo asked. “Do you listen when he talks?”
“You know I can hear you, right?” Phil said. He was sitting up now.
“Marianne did our birth chart our first week here,” Olivia said. “I remember everyone’s birthday.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why? I remember them, that’s all.”
“What’s my birthday?” Dan asked, and then Marianne, and then Jo. Olivia remembered all of them.
“What a useless skill,” Jo said.
They all looked sad for Olivia, that she was wasting brain space on this.
The bartender had turned on the lights after Phil’s fall, and the audience had a collective deer-in-the-headlights glow, everyone’s face too bright, everyone a bit regretful of their last few decisions. The drunk doctor’s drunk boyfriend was the first to notice Manny. He asked him for a photo with Phil in the background. “The guy who fished out,” he called him. Manny refused.
“The kid had a fucking seizure,” he said. “How about we leave him alone for a minute?”
Phil, though, who’d overheard the whole thing, said it was fine.
“I don’t mind being in the picture.”
Manny searched for Dorothy’s eyes. What was the protocol here? He was living his first moments as a teacher. Did you go with what the student wanted? Did you deny him in order to preserve his dignity? Wasn’t Phil’s dignity Phil’s to do with as he pleased? Dorothy looked back at Manny and shrugged.
Phil hammed it up for the camera. Still sitting, he tilted his head to the side, closed his eyes, let his mouth hang half-open. The drunk doctor took the photo, and then traded places with her boyfriend so she, too, could have her future phone memory with Manny and the epileptic.
“Do you want me to lie back down?” Phil asked, in between shots. Another thing he’d learned from Sword’s class on epiphany was proper usage of “lay” vs. “lie.”
“That would be great!”
Six photos were taken in total, Phil adjusting his position slightly for each. Manny didn’t smile in any.
Olivia went for a cigarette. She expected Artie would be there on the sidewalk—she’d seen him go out again. She wasn’t eager to talk to him about her bit, but she knew it was big of him not to bring it up in front of the others, to give her a chance to explain herself. What a great guy, she thought, and it irritated her that great guys irritated her.
“That was crazy in there,” Artie said when he saw her. “Did you know Phil had epilepsy?”
Olivia would’ve preferred he rip off the Band-Aid, accuse her right away of stealing his material, so she could start her defense—it wasn’t stealing if Artie’s bit only existed as an idea in his head, ideas weren’t anything until you shaped them and brought them to the stage, etc.—but she had to follow his lead. She would look guilty if she didn’t. She had to act surprised when he mentioned it.
“He just fell,” she said. “Scared the shit out of me.”
“You looked like you knew what to do.”
Olivia said she’d watched every medical show in existence since she was a child, a habit that, according to her calculations, equated to all of med school plus a first year of residency in an understaffed hospital. She was pretty sure she could intubate someone if she had to.
“Did you ever want to be a doctor?” Artie asked.
The small talk was killing her.
“You’re really not going to say anything about my bit?”
Artie said he would if she gave him a cigarette. Olivia handed him one, and her lighter.
“I thought you were anti,” she said.
“I don’t like the smell,” Artie said. The clicking of the lighter, though, the fizzling of the cherry, the peace of the first inhale—he understood why people lit cigarettes all day. “But if I’m smoking, I don’t smell it anymore. Isn’t that weird? Is it that I can’t smell it, you think, or just that it stops bothering me?”
It was Mickey who’d taught him the trick, that summer Artie hung out with him and his friends in Parker’s garage. Artie’d never said it outright, that the cigarette smell bothered him, but Mickey had come to him and said, “If you smoke one, you’ll stop smelling it” before putting a lit cigarette in Artie’s mouth. The smell had disappeared instantly. How amazing it would be if more things in life worked that way, Artie had thought back then. If the things that bothered you stopped bothering you the moment you started partaking. Perhaps it was how life worked already, though, and he hadn’t noticed. He hadn’t been as diligent a note taker at the time, and that thought had been lost.
“Weren’t we going to talk about my bit?” Olivia said.
Artie was smoking annoyingly, like actors in the movies. Hollywood, she thought, seemed to have agreed that people couldn’t smoke and talk at the same time, that smoking was mostly for pauses and contemplation.
“Your bit was good,” Artie said. “It needs work, but I like what you did with the children.”
“The children?”
“The children going to the Holocaust museum for the first time,” Artie said. “It’s funny.”
The critiques could get elaborate in workshop, especially with Marianne, who liked to sprinkle theory over everything, but really, it always came down to that: funny or not.
“The soap thing, though,” Artie added, “I don’t know if you know it, but it’s a legend. Nazis never made soap out of people.”
“What?”
“But maybe it doesn’t matter. For your bit, I mean. It’s still part of the collective imagination. They did tell us about it in school, so I think it’s fine if you keep it.”
Olivia couldn’t decide if she believed Artie about the soap, but more confusing was his calling the bit hers. Could it be that she hadn’t actually stolen anything?
“The lampshades made out of skin, though,” Artie said. “I think that was real.”
Olivia watched him smoke cinematically for a minute, long inhales and long exhales, like yoga.
“Why are you telling me all this?” she ended up asking. “Why are you telling me anything that could make the bit better?”
“I don’t think it’ll make the bit better. I just thought you might want to know about the soap.”
“You’re not mad I took your hologram thing?”
Artie didn’t know whether he was mad or not. His immediate reaction to hearing Olivia onstage had been anger, but anger at himself, for telling her about the Holocaust survivor hologram in the first place. You weren’t supposed to talk about work in progress. Relief had followed quickly, though, a type of relief he was still trying to interpret—was it relief that he would no longer have to work on the bit himself? Now that Olivia had very publicly planted her flag in it? Relief that she liked him enough to steal from him? Liking someone’s ideas wasn’t the same as liking that person, he knew that, but still. It had to be, to some extent. What Artie knew was that she’d done the stealing in front of him, and that had to mean something. She had to know he’d have time-stamped notes on his phone, his computer, drafts of jokes about his own visit to the Holocaust museum that proved the bit was his. Unfinished, sure, but his. In essence, his. She had to know this, and yet she’d gone for it, she’d risked the consequences of having him expose her as a thief, of owing him one if he didn’t, of having him hold this over her head for the rest of her career. It was almost a proof of love, if you thought about it, Olivia stealing from him. She’d tied her fate to his. It was nice to think about it that way.
“You can have it,” he said to her. “You can have the bit.”
Olivia asked what he wanted in exchange.
“Just do something great with it,” Artie said.
“I can trade you some jokes. I have a lot of molestation material I’m not using.”
“I don’t think my mother would allow it. Wasn’t sexual abuse on the ‘Do Not Joke About’ list?”
“I think it was,” Olivia said. “But I give you my blessing.” She put her cigarette out in the snow and glanced at Artie, who was halfway through his. The slow, lengthy puffs had been unnerving at first, but they were becoming hypnotizing now. Also, Olivia had noticed, Artie didn’t look at her as much when he smoked. “You can tell your mother you have the blessing of an actual victim,” she said.
Her heart raced as she said “victim,” and it started beating even faster in the silence that followed. Olivia was using the word in connection with herself for the first time. It hadn’t been as hard to say as she’d imagined, but still, she wanted to take it back. She’d thrown it like a top, though, the kind you launch with a thin rope: all she could do now was watch it spin and spin between them.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Artie. “Pretend I didn’t say anything.”
If Artie really liked her, she thought, he would ignore what she’d set in motion, help her make the word “victim” disappear.
“Deal,” Artie said after his longest exhale yet. “You take the Holocaust jokes, I take molestation.”
They shook on it. The word was gone. Artie buried it even deeper.
“I was surprised you went for it,” he said. “I assumed you’d want to show Reinhardt a tried-and-true bit. You kind of rushed into this one.”
“I know,” Olivia said. She was still shaky from her admission, but a good enough actress to play her regular self and hide it for a minute. “But I thought it was better to introduce myself to Reinhardt with something that needed work. Something with potential, like strong beats and all, but a lot of room for improvement. It’s better down the line if he feels like he shaped me or whatever. No teacher wants a fully formed student. There’s no credit to take from that.”
“You’re fucking evil,” Artie said.
As far as descriptors for herself went, “evil” was a word Olivia liked better. She smiled as she lit her next cigarette—no small feat, doing both at once—and they resumed talking about Phil. Joking about him. They thought it would be funny if a rumor started that Phil had uttered racist slurs during his seizure. They both honed their physical comedy skills with epileptic episode impressions. Ventured the possibility that the universe was against Phil ever performing again.
“The fake campus shooting right before he’s up for workshop, the seizure right before he goes onstage…I think the world is trying to tell him something,” Olivia said.
Artie agreed, but really, he thought the world might’ve been trying to tell him something, too. It wasn’t normal that he just gave bits away. Or that he hadn’t feared for his life earlier, in the bathroom, with Vivian. She’d cried the entire time. He’d almost been bored.
“People react to similar experiences in different ways,” Olivia said. “Like you and your brother. You had the same childhood, wouldn’t you say? Pretty much? And he’s out there getting high, while you don’t even know how to smoke a cigarette.”
She was talking about herself, Artie thought. Herself and Sally. Maybe she always was.
“Vivian is going to write a memoir about today,” he said. “I can feel it. Her near-death experience in the men’s room. And I still haven’t thought of a single joke to make about the whole thing.”
“Now that’s more of a problem,” Olivia said.
She offered to help. They riffed for a minute about gun control and the memoir trend. They joked about Vivian herself. A novelist had to be the worst kind of person to be near in a catastrophe, Olivia said. Maybe that could be his angle. Had Vivian been narrating at all? In the men’s bathroom?
“She kept weeping and saying she’d never finish her book,” Artie said. “That’s it.”
Olivia shook her head slowly, like she was hearing about an accident that could’ve been prevented.
“It has to suck,” she said, “going through life thinking that what you do matters at all.”
Meanwhile, debate was raging at the bar about whether or not to resume the comedy battle. The Second City girl who’d given Phil the Adderall actually said the words “the show must go on.”
“People came here to see us.”
“It’s not like they paid money,” Jo said.
“ ‘Show must go on’ applies to all shows. It’s not only for paying customers.”
“Stop saying ‘show must go on.’ ”
Phil said he didn’t think he could go up onstage.
“I feel a little woozy.”
“You told the doctor you were fine,” the Adderall girl said. “You said this happened to you all the time.”
“That’s not what I said. I said twice a year.”
“If you don’t go, we win by forfeit,” the girl declared.
“Fine by me,” Phil said.
Dorothy said, “No fucking way are we losing to improv,” but Dan presented her with the evidence: their audience had moved on.
“Look around,” he said, and Dorothy did. People were asking Kruger for selfies now, too, fighting to buy Manny a drink. “I think they’re over us.”
Dorothy didn’t know what to think of the treatment Manny was getting. She’d expected a milder welcome—hardcore fans trying to get a joke out of him, sure, but perhaps a more confrontational part of the crowd, too, or at least some hesitation to be seen with him on social media just yet.
“They’re not over Manny,” she told Dan.
She should’ve been glad about it. Why wasn’t she glad? Wasn’t it what she wanted, her friend being given the benefit of the doubt? Except Manny was being given more than the benefit of the doubt, Dorothy thought. It was unrestrained support that people were showing, the men and the women. They were on his side. She was too, granted, but she hadn’t needed to trash or ridicule Lipschitz and the proposed-to women to get there, the way she was hearing strangers do now, left and right. “All wannabees,” people kept saying to Manny, Lipschitz “a jealous ass with no talent,” the women “attention whores,” all three of them (even the one who’d stayed anonymous). Dorothy didn’t like it when idiots wound up on her side. To have stupid enemies was bad enough, but stupid allies were humiliating. She supported Manny because she knew him, and for old times’ sake, for all those nights he’d told off assholes who wouldn’t take her seriously, the club owners who wouldn’t pay her as much as him, and for that one day he’d come to repair a broken pipe in her kitchen when she didn’t have the money for a plumber. But all these people, what, they did it because Manny was famous? Because Manny was funny? Who was asking them to take sides at all?
“He tends to get away with things,” August said into Dorothy’s ear. “It’s better to just be happy for him.”
Why was he telling her this?
“Do I look angry?” she asked August.
“A little bit,” he said.
Dorothy saw Artie and Olivia come back from their cigarette break. She watched them pause to take stock of the room, the small gatherings around Manny and Kruger, Ashbee deep in conversation with a woman near the stage. She was surprised to see them walk toward her, and Phil, and Jo, and August, and Dan, that they wouldn’t try joining the more exciting crowds.
Olivia asked Phil how he was feeling, and Phil said it was nice of her to ask, that she was nice, to which Olivia replied that there was a difference between being nice to someone and not wanting that person to die, but Phil disagreed. That’s all that being nice was, he said: making sure that people were not dead. Jo said that was a low bar, and was Phil not loved as a child? Which got Olivia thinking about Sally.
“Where’s Sally?” she asked.
“Bathroom, I think.”
“Again?”
“Maybe she has her period, too,” Jo said. “Don’t you keep track of everyone’s cycle? I wouldn’t be surprised, after the birthday revelation.”
Olivia said it was sad that just because she’d known Phil’s birthday, the drunk doctor had assumed she was his girlfriend. Jo said everything that related to Phil was sad, and could they talk about something else?
For a second, Olivia pictured Sally dead in the bathroom, or worse, crying.
“We have to figure out what to do with him for the next three hours,” she said, getting rid of the image.
Three hours was the amount of time the drunk doctor had told them to keep watch over Phil. Olivia was taking the mission seriously.
“I’m fine,” Phil said. “Really. I barely hit my head.”
“There’s a lot of empty space in there, though,” Jo said. “Your brain probably bounced on the side of your skull and cracked. It’s probably leaking now.”
“I’m just tired,” Phil said. “I just want to go to bed.”
He yawned to illustrate his point, and that got Marianne to yawn, and the few members of Second City that had gathered around them to yawn.
“What’s with the yawning?” Olivia said. “What’s wrong with you people? It’s not even midnight and you’re already talking about bedtime. This is a night job.”
“You’ll die if you go to bed,” Jo said. “You’ll slip into a coma and die.”
It sounded like a curse, addressed not only to Phil but to everyone around her.
Marianne said she’d gotten up early, and that as far as she was concerned, the evening was over: She’d done her time onstage. Second City had won the comedy battle.
“You did your time?” Olivia said. “Sorry, is there a clock we had to punch and no one told me?”
“I resent the idea that because we’re artists, we should be stage-ready at all times,” Marianne said. “Part of the job is knowing your limits and when the work is done.”
Jo said no one here had called Marianne an artist.
Olivia said they weren’t exactly running marathons here. “I think we can all do two bits in the same night.”
Dorothy agreed with her, of course: There was a microphone, an audience, and a roomful of comedians. Surely, they could find a way to kill a little time while Phil recovered. Part of her job as a teacher, however, was to let her students figure out what they stood for, without taking sides. That’s what she would tell Manny later, when they were alone, if he wanted to speak ill of Lipschitz or the women. She’d say, “I’m not taking sides. I’m a sage now. I see everyone’s arguments and I don’t judge.” If pressed to form an opinion, she’d focus on the words the media was using: “emotional misconduct.” What a joke, she’d tell Manny, like that wasn’t and hadn’t always been what life was, a long stream of emotional misconduct, like it wasn’t just people misunderstanding and hurting and lying to one another constantly. She could get behind emotional “abuse,” but where did “misconduct” start? It sounded so silly she believed the notion had been coined by a cynic who’d wanted to ridicule it and its future users. The number of people she could’ve sued for emotional misconduct, Dorothy thought, and it must’ve made her smile, because August asked her what was so funny. She pretended not to hear him. What right did the kid have to know what was making her smile? She took her phone out to shield herself from more questions. Sword had responded, finally, to her text about having dinner with her. She’d thought it pretty clear that her invitation had included Sword’s wife, but Sword was saying he couldn’t have dinner with Dorothy. He was very sorry if he’d given her the wrong impression, but he wasn’t available, his marriage was central to his life, etc. He’d said this already, Dorothy thought, about loving his wife. He’d said it just a few hours earlier. Did he think she’d forgotten? Or had he forgotten himself that he’d said it? It irritated her when people told her things twice. She always took it as an insult, either to her capacity to listen and remember simple information or to her general presence, her aura, which had to be pretty dim if Sword was able to talk to her on autopilot and forget what he’d confided to her.
Also, she’d been joking before, about being willing to sleep with him after the death scare. Did people not understand her jokes anymore? Maybe Sword felt she was harassing him now. How ridiculous, she thought, to assume she’d wanted romance. Wasn’t it obvious that she was out of the game? When she’d heard Manny’s accusers called “attention whores” a few minutes back, Dorothy had gone through a familiar taxonomy in her head, a taxonomy of whores, according to both men and women: if a woman did the seducing, she was a whore, if she was sensitive to a man’s charms, she was a whore, if she was seduced and felt taken advantage of, she was a neurotic whore, if she got hurt and told people about it, she was an attention whore, and if she didn’t respond to a man’s advances, she was a frigid whore. Dorothy was content not to fit anywhere on the list anymore. Perhaps she could’ve been considered the frigid whore type a few years ago, but since no one ever thought of hitting on her now, and unless there was a category beyond frigid that she’d never heard of, that men never even approached (the saintly whore?), she’d managed to exit the wheel of whores entirely, and what an amazing feat that was—like those truly enlightened Buddhists who exit the wheel of life and suffering. Dorothy was aware that people would have to act shocked if they knew how many times she’d thought the word “whore” in the last few seconds, and that society wasn’t supposed to think like that anymore, but she wasn’t society, and she wasn’t an exception to it either. It was good to want to change the way people perceived women, of course, but delusional to believe that it could happen overnight, or over a decade, or over two, and pretending that it could, or pretending that you knew what society thought, or what anyone thought, for that matter, was ludicrous and borderline fascistic. The collective imagination had fashioned a wheel of whores long ago. You couldn’t just erase that construction with a handful of op-eds. There was a wheel, and Dorothy had just been thrown back on it. Sword had made that decision for her, mistaking her for a woman still interested in sex and flirting, a whore of some kind, then, though Dorothy wondered what kind exactly? A sad whore, probably—she’d just been rejected, after all, without even having asked for anything. It was useless to work on the way people perceived you, Dorothy thought. You couldn’t expect anyone to see you the way you wanted them to. The world wasn’t a place that mirrored the way you viewed yourself. What you projected was always misunderstood, was always leading to some sort of emotional misconduct. Could she sue Sword for not wanting to be her friend?
She was getting worked up. She hadn’t been this angry in a while. She remembered how nice it was to go onstage angry. The worst performances of her career she’d given happy. You couldn’t go onstage happy. Happy meant limp, it meant blurry. Comedy was tension, high def, walking the tightrope of pretending a joke you’d spent hours shaping was just occurring to you for the very first time. Her anger erased all the worries she’d been waking up to since Kiki’d started scheduling the new tour, about how she should present, whether she should paint her nails, wear a dress, how she would be categorized (a female comic, a veteran comic, a niche comic, a comic’s comic—each option equally bad), if anyone would laugh. Instead of imagining how the new jokes would be received, Dorothy could get behind the microphone right now and see for herself.
She looked at Marianne, who wanted to go home.
“What’s this about Second City winning the battle?” she said to her. “I think the rules are Second City and six members of the Stand-Up MFA have to go onstage to fight it out. Six members, not students.”
Dorothy was making this up. She wasn’t sure what the rules were, or whether anyone had ever bothered to write them down. She wasn’t sure why she’d felt the need to invent one, either: nobody would’ve stopped her if she’d gone up onstage without an explanation. But the kids believed her rule. More than that, they got excited about it. It meant that a teacher could go onstage instead of Phil! The kids wanted to see their teachers perform, Dorothy realized, they wanted to see her, to see experience up there, and how moving was that? The answer was “very.” It was very moving. Until the decision was made, at some yet-unregistered-by-science speed, that the person who should go onstage as Phil’s replacement was Manny.
“It makes the most sense,” Olivia said, though she didn’t explain in what way.
“Go big or go home,” Phil said.
“What makes the most sense?” asked Sally, who’d missed everything while in the bathroom. Olivia thought her twin would always be cursed with bad timing. Just a minute ago, she would’ve been happy to see her.
“If Manny goes onstage, we’ll accept a draw,” the girl who’d given Phil the Adderall said.
“Fuck a draw,” Olivia said. “This ain’t team bingo.”
Dorothy said that Manny might not want to go up.
“I think his agent told him to lay low for a while.”
“Lie low,” Phil said. “I think.”
“Agents don’t know shit,” Olivia said, though she was actively looking for one. Turning to August, she asked: “What does his lawyer say?”
August said he wasn’t his father’s lawyer. He didn’t say “father,” though, but “Manny.”
“Manny will do whatever Manny wants.”
What Manny wanted was to get away from the fans around him. If Dorothy was uncomfortable seeing the support people gave him, he found it near unbearable. “These chicks have no case against you,” “bloodsucking attention whores”…the more they spoke, the more Manny wanted to give each woman a call, propose marriage, this time for real. That would be the best ending to the story, he thought, if one of them accepted and they actually got married and lived happily ever after. Hilarious. Couple of babies. Ready-made bits about raising toddlers in your fifties, teenagers in your sixties, living with a younger woman. He could write the stuff in his sleep and roll it out until he died.
It was a relief when Olivia came over to ask, “Would you go onstage to help us win?” He would, Manny said, gladly, and then, to himself: Anything to get away from these idiots. He hadn’t expected much from his fans, historically (when hoping for success, no one ever spent time imagining the audience that would come with it), and yet they’d still managed to disappoint—to sadden him, more exactly. He did all this so these guys would laugh? He’d turned the question over in his head for decades now, how it could be that nothing felt better than a crowd laughing, and little worse, an hour later, than individuals from that very group telling him what it was he’d said that made them laugh. It always sounded so small, what he’d written, when a fan repeated it. That’s why he’d wanted for his son to be a novelist. Novelists could go their whole career without meeting a reader. Even more prodigious: a novelist without readers could still be a novelist. Was that right? Manny wondered as he followed Olivia through the crowd and to the stage. Did he really believe that? Maybe it was just one of those lines that sounded good in his head. He’d fantasized about anonymity earlier that day, but the truth was, if Manny had been turned back into a nobody all of a sudden, he would’ve done everything in his power to become famous again, started over—the local open mics, the birthday parties—done anything to climb those five steps to the stage and forget he was the same as everybody else. He watched Olivia take them now, those steps, and even though he would be where she stood in a second, he envied her, he couldn’t wait, he wanted to be up there this very instant. A minute ago, he hadn’t been thinking about performing, but now that it had been decided, the impatience was so sharp it was turning into loneliness. He was defiant, too, and slightly paranoid, the way he used to feel when he’d started stand-up, like it was gym class in high school and everyone was pointing at him. He was nothing offstage, but in a minute, he’d show everyone what he was made of. He was a plane waiting for authorization to take off, clunky on the runway, boorish and loud before it was finally airborne, rising and rising, leaving everyone small on the ground. Olivia hadn’t even started speaking before the audience understood what was happening—Manny Reinhardt was going to go up for an impromptu set, and in the midst of a sex scandal, at that! How lucky they all were! And how fucking stupid to feel so lucky, Manny thought. The one good thing about being Manny Reinhardt was he’d never be stuck below stage level having to look up at Manny Reinhardt.
He half listened to Olivia say something about a special guest, a new recruit in the MFA program. He was only waiting to hear his name so he could join her onstage. It had never felt particularly meaningful, his name, or like it even belonged to him, but he recognized it from years of people using it as a starting pistol in a race, agreeing that those sounds it made would get him going. Olivia said the name. Manny went up. He pretended to be disoriented by the welcoming applause.
“Not sure what I’m doing here,” he said. “Sorry. I just go where I’m told now. I just go where women tell me.”
It wasn’t very funny, but people laughed. Would they laugh at anything he said? Manny’d wondered about that before, whether he’d reached such a level of fame that people would pay to hear him say strings of random words. He’d done shows on autopilot before, and audiences hadn’t seemed to notice.
“It’s safer that way,” he added.
His eyes met Dorothy’s in the audience. A brutal sadness washed over him. She hadn’t gotten fat, or too wrinkly, she hadn’t done anything stupid with her hair, but she’d aged, undeniably, and though he’d had an hour to take this in already, it hit Manny with blunt force only now that he was looking down at her, the irreversibility of it, how young Dorothy would never spring back out from under older Dorothy. It was silly to be so hurt by such a naïve realization, that time passed, that people changed forever, but hurt Manny was, overwhelmed by hurt even. What was the point of all this? Of writing, of going onstage, of art, of fucking? Wasn’t it to make time disappear? Time wasn’t disappearing, Manny thought. He was failing. Why had he wanted so bad to be onstage a minute ago? He wasn’t in any state to do this. He was sinking. He looked at August, hoping it would help, but August was miles away down there in the pit.
“My son is here in the audience tonight,” he said into the microphone, and then repeated the words “my son.”
“Fun fact about my son: he never once shat himself.
“He was born with this condition wherein the shit stays in the body. His mother and I literally had to pull it out of him every day. Several times a day. There was a lack of nerves in his asshole, basically. Little guy couldn’t push it all the way out. His shit went up to a certain point, like inches shy of the finish line, and then it got cold feet, like, I can’t do it, I’ll stay right here until someone comes for me.
“We had to use these tubes. Every week I went to Duane Reade to buy like fifty of them. And I pumped and I pumped.”
There was Manny’s answer: no one was laughing. No one looked impatient, though, either, or confused: they trusted this would get somewhere. Manny had earned that kind of trust over the years. Had he been in a better mood, he would’ve stopped for a moment and taken it in, reveled in this achievement.
“It’s fine that you’re not laughing,” he said instead. “It’s fine. You know who else didn’t laugh? Jesus. Jesus never laughed. In fact, there’s debate, too, about whether Jesus ever took a shit or not. I know this from everything I read about shitting when my son was a baby. Excreting, sorry. I read that the nourishment within Jesus was never corrupted. How about that? I told my wife when I found out: ‘Honey, major thing in common between our son and Jesus Christ!’ I thought she would find it funny, or, I don’t know, interesting, that our son was like Jesus in some weird way, but all she said was ‘Oh yeah? What about farting? Did Jesus Christ ever fart?’ Because our son couldn’t fart, either. She was so fucking angry. I don’t know if she was trying to tell me I was a jerk for joking about our son’s condition or if she was saying, ‘Fuck Jesus, my baby is a better Messiah, my baby can’t even fart!’ I still don’t know. To this day. She kind of scared me in that moment.”
Manny looked down at his feet. They didn’t quite seem to belong to him.
“I miss my wife,” he said, still looking down, and that got him his first real laugh of the evening. Finally, the audience thought, mention of a wife (which they knew, from previous bits, to be an ex-wife), Manny going for more traditional jokes, men and women, the misunderstandings between them.
“I miss my son too, actually,” Manny said, burying right away all hope for lighter material. “I miss my son even though he’s right here.” He looked at August again, but only for a split second.
“I still have nightmares about the hospital. We went there all the time, when he had fevers, when he threw up, when the shit didn’t come out right, or there wasn’t enough of it…we were constantly afraid of obstruction, of infection. And every time we went, I felt like we were flipping a coin. I felt like it was a hospital, so someone had to die, like each ward had a certain number of deaths to give per week, and if someone had to die, it was going to be between my kid and another kid, and so I tried not to look at the other kids, but whenever I did, because sometimes it’s hard not to look, especially when a kid is deformed, or there are limbs missing, or she looks like your grandma, I thought, I hope you die and not my kid. I wished for so many children to die, guys. That’s why I don’t believe in God. I should’ve been struck by lightning in my own home, I wished death on so many children. Sick children. Children who were afraid already, who kept pretending they weren’t just so their parents would stop crying for a second and they could live their last moments in peace.”
There was confusion in the audience, even among those who’d started laughing at the last few lines. What was Manny doing, talking about sick children? No one had expected him to address the accusations onstage, but wasn’t it worse to admit that you’d wished sick children dead? Worse than hitting someone, worse than taking advantage of young, innocent women? Did they really have to think about this now?
“I don’t know if any of those kids died,” Manny went on. “I assume a few of them did. Not because of me, but just…some of them were in real bad shape. My wife, she was the opposite of me, though. The second we were in the hospital, she thought nothing bad could happen, that all we had to do was stick together, all the parents and all the children and all the doctors, like we were a team, like there was some kind of ‘if one gets better, we all get better’ type deal. I could’ve strangled her.”
The little encouragement the crowd had given him before stopped dead at the word “strangled.”
“I sense a mood switch,” Manny said. “The mood shifted here. I talked about hoping for children’s deaths and you were all on board with it, but now I say the words ‘strangle my wife’ and you all get nervous. What’s up with that? I never strangled my wife. She can confirm that. I never even wanted to strangle her. It was just a way of speaking. It’s just words, guys. I admire my wife. I mean, ex-wife, yes, but who cares, I admire the person, I didn’t admire her because she was my wife, I didn’t stop admiring her when she left me. Right, Dorothy? Remember how much I loved Rachel? I couldn’t shut up about her after we met.”
Dorothy panicked when she heard her name. She went through different options in her head: Play Manny’s game, respond to him honestly (“Yes, you loved your wife, yes, it was annoying how much you talked about her”)? Or make a joke about how drunk he was? Manny was off his orbit, that much was clear, but Dorothy couldn’t tell how controlled the new trajectory was, if she should help him keep climbing or try to mitigate an unavoidable crash. Manny decided for her by forgetting he’d just asked for her opinion.
“But if you say you admire your wife,” he went on, “then who the fuck is going to laugh? Hmm? I never wished her harm. Even in the middle of the divorce. I never even raised my voice to her. Not once. I see you don’t believe me. We can call her right now if you don’t believe me, we’ll ask her. I’ll put her on speaker.”
Manny took out his phone and dialed Rachel. The crash was imminent, Dorothy understood, but the rest of the crowd still seemed to think this could go somewhere.
“It’s ringing,” Manny said, even though the audience could hear the ringing for themselves, amplified by the microphone.
He didn’t look drunk, Dorothy thought, but he had to be. You had to be drunk to call your ex-wife onstage.
The call went to voicemail: “Hi, you’ve reached Rachel, I can’t come to the phone right now—” How many times had Manny told her to change that message? “I can’t come to the phone,” how ridiculous, the phone was on her person, everyone’s phone was on their person now, what was this nonsense about not being able to come to it? Manny considered leaving Rachel a message along those lines, for the audience to appreciate, but the beep came and he didn’t have it in him to speak after it. He hung up and looked at his reflection in the black screen of his phone. Was he alive right now? Was that his face?
“What boring times we live in,” he said. He didn’t speak the sentence directly into the microphone, but it was a small room, and a quiet one now, too—everybody could hear him. “The phones,” he said, “the surveillance, everyone reachable all the time, everyone’s opinions uploaded all the time. We’re all becoming fucking machines.”
He sighed, disappointed at his own tangent. Ex-wives and tech—could he have picked more cliché topics?
“It used to be scary, being hooked to machines. Like in the hospital, the feeding tubes, the breathing tubes, the shitting tubes. But at least it was temporary. There was hope to get off them. Now we’ve become the machines ourselves, and we don’t even mind, we like it. It’s even worse than that, actually, we haven’t become machines, the machines have become us. I see some of you are filming this right now. Your machine is seeing me onstage right now and you aren’t. Your machine will store something for you that you haven’t even seen for yourself. The machine is more engaged than you are. I’m talking to you, and you’re not even moving, you’re just looking at your machine to make sure the image doesn’t shake.”
A handful of people had indeed been filming Manny’s meltdown. Dorothy was trying to keep track of them, and Ashbee was, too, already wondering how much money he would have to offer to delete the videos, if it came to that.
“Fucking machines, all of you,” Manny said. “Except my son, of course. My son is perfect. He even shits on his own now. He had a few surgeries. At four months old, at one year old, at two. He had a colostomy bag for a while. A colostomy bag, for those of you who don’t know, is kind of like the ancestor of social media. We could see his shit in real time. But then they fixed him, he grew up, and I assume everything’s in order down there for him. I can’t really ask. That’s the thing about children—they’re born, you pull the shit out of them, you take them to the hospital in the middle of the night, they piss in your mouth, they tell you everything they know, and then at some point they decide nothing concerns you. For a few years, you pretend what they say is interesting even though it’s not, and then one day, probably right when they start shaping their first original thought, they decide to keep it to themselves. Have you ever wondered about that, by the way? About the first thing your kid decides not to tell you? I suspect it’s the first truly interesting thing that happens to them. And of course, they’re idiots, so they forget about it themselves. The first thing they decide to lock up in their heads, they forget. It’s lost for everyone and forever. How sad is that?”
It was sad enough that Manny started crying. Nothing, in that moment, had ever seemed sadder to him. He cried for a solid thirty seconds, and then got it together enough to wonder how to exit the stage. To say good night or to just leave without another word. He left without another word.
The people who’d been filming kept filming for a minute, in case Manny came back. One camera stayed trained on the door he’d disappeared through, but all it caught was Dorothy pushing it herself to meet Manny backstage.
Kruger and Ashbee looked at each other from across the room and shrugged. They would let Dorothy deal with it.
“Dude went full Jonathan Winters up there,” Kruger heard Jo say. It pleased him to hear that name, that young comedians still knew it.
“Who’s Jonathan Winters?” Sally asked.
“I think he was faking it,” Phil said.
August explained to Sally that Jonathan Winters was a comedian who had once had a breakdown onstage, crying about how much he missed his wife and kids while on tour, showing the audience pictures of them.
“That’s so sweet,” Sally said.
Kruger was amazed at August’s calm. The kid didn’t seem upset that his bowel movements had been talked about in front of strangers for the last five minutes. If Kruger’s own father had done that to him…well, at least Louis, for all his faults, would never do such a thing, Kruger thought. He wouldn’t go onstage to begin with, but even if he did, even if someone forced him to tell a joke, his idea of one still started like this: “A man walks into a bar”—not “I walked into a bar,” not “My son walked into a bar.” Kruger checked his phone and saw that Veronica Tuft had responded to his message a little earlier, just past midnight. Maybe her baby was a bad sleeper, Kruger thought. He imagined her typing her reply while the child sucked on her tit. Veronica’s message said she hadn’t been at the Glass Eye the night Louis had fired his gun, but what she’d heard was that people there had been making fun of Kruger, not Kruger’s mother. They’d been quoting and/or playing clips from an interview Kruger had given on Conan while promoting The Widow’s Comedy Club, and having a laugh. “I don’t think they knew your father was present at the bar,” Veronica’s message said. Kruger tried to remember what he’d said on Conan that was so stupid. He should’ve been relieved that it wasn’t his mother who’d been made fun of by strangers at the Glass Eye, but really, he was annoyed it had been him. People always thought they’d give the perfect interview if they became famous, he knew, but he would’ve loved to see the man his father had shot give it a try. See what great lines he came up with. Veronica’s message went on to say that the man in question had either quoted or played the part of the interview in which Kruger told Conan that Meryl Streep was like the mother he wished he’d had. That, apparently, had caused Louis to take his gun out, though it was hard to say for sure. “Maybe it was an accumulation of things,” Veronica suggested. After seeing Kruger on the train, she’d watched the interview again. She was attaching a link to it, for Kruger’s reference. She’d been surprised earlier on the Metra to hear him say that Louis had been defending his wife’s honor (to her mind, this whole time, Louis had shot in defense of Kruger’s), but maybe he was right. “Maybe he was defending your mother!” the message said. “It’s a nice way to look at it!”
It wasn’t a nice way to look at it, Kruger thought. His father had indeed defended his wife’s honor. Kruger’s mother had indeed been insulted. What was news to him was that he’d been the one doing the insulting. He didn’t need to click on the link. He remembered giving the interview. He remembered thinking as he said the words “Meryl is the mother I wish I’d had” that it wasn’t right, that he shouldn’t have said it. Not because it would sadden his father, or make him angry (he didn’t think Louis would ever know about the interview), but because Meryl might see it and be annoyed. He didn’t even know what he’d meant by it.
“Should we go check on him?” Olivia said, regarding Manny.
“He was faking,” Phil repeated. “I’m sure he’s fine.”
Kruger turned to August. August would know if his dad had been faking. All the kid said was it was late and he should go to bed.
“Big day tomorrow,” he said.
“That trial?” Olivia asked. “I thought you weren’t even going to court.”
“I have to stay on top of it. In case they need me.”
“You mean like an understudy,” Olivia said. “You’re hoping someone fucks up and you can step in?”
August neither confirmed nor denied the assumption. He’d never been more interesting to Olivia.
“I don’t get why this trial is such a big deal,” Artie said. “Isn’t it just another Ponzi scheme? Some rich guy fucked some people over?”
“It’s the way he did it that is fascinating,” August said. “Very elegant. There’s a strong case to be made that it wasn’t entirely illegal, either.”
He really seemed unbothered that his anus had been talked about publicly, or that his father had left the stage in tears.
“I could tell you all about the financial details,” he went on, “but I think they only interest me, and perhaps ten other people. What makes the trial juicy to everyone else is the family stuff. How a man can scam his own wife and children. His aging parents, too. The betrayal and all that.”
“Didn’t the daughter kill herself?” Kruger asked, closing Veronica’s message on his screen, deciding never to look at it again.
“She jumped in front of a train, yes.”
“Because of her father’s scheme?” Artie said.
“Well, that’s a question people have. Was the daughter’s suicide connected to her father’s activities, or was she unstable for other reasons.”
“That’s not what her father’s on trial for, though.”
“Correct. I’m just answering your question, Arthur, about what makes the case interesting to people. What makes it interesting to people is that they think there’s another case behind it, a fucked-up family to scrutinize, something that’s more real than just money moving between accounts, and that they’re the only ones to see it.”
Artie couldn’t tell what was more condescending: August calling him Arthur, or August explaining to him (a performer, someone who was supposed to know) what stories people found compelling.
“No one calls me Arthur,” he said, though that wasn’t true. Mickey called him Arthur sometimes.
“Do you care about the daughter’s suicide?” Sally asked August. “Why she did it?”
August said it wasn’t his job to do so, no.
“I didn’t ask what your job description was,” Sally said. “I asked if you cared that the guy you’re defending might’ve pushed his daughter to suicide.”
“Leave him alone,” Olivia said. “Not everyone has to be full of feelings all the time.”
“Fuck you, Oli,” Sally said.
It came out so naturally, so simply, no one but Olivia could’ve known it was a first: her twin saying those words to her. “Fuck you.” Olivia heard those words every day from others—most of her acquaintances said them all the time—and in movies, and in shows. She said them herself more often than she should have, too. If asked about it a minute ago, she might’ve defined herself as impervious to the words “Fuck you,” “Fuck off,” “Go fuck yourself,” but now that they were coming from Sally, they stung, and Olivia was relieved to find out that they did, that it made a difference who said them, that Sally could hurt her by saying them. She didn’t think Sally realized the power her words had had. Sally wasn’t very quick to notice things. It had in fact always been the main difference between her and Olivia: Olivia noticing things just a touch ahead of Sally, a short but constant delay between them that was at the root of much of Olivia’s aggravation and impatience with the world. In this moment, though, Olivia was grateful for what she’d privately dubbed Sally’s extra beat. Had Sally understood that she’d surprised and unsettled her, she might’ve apologized for saying “Fuck you,” she might’ve taken the words back, and Olivia didn’t want her to. The surest way for Sally not to take back what she’d said was for Olivia to act as if she hadn’t heard it.
“Let’s go check on Manny,” she repeated, and this time, they went.
Ashbee joined them on their way backstage.
“What if Manny’s still crying?” Phil asked. “What’s the plan?”
“I thought you thought he was faking,” Olivia said. “Why would he be crying now?”
Ashbee said the plan was one of them should open the door an inch and see what the scene was like. If Manny was still crying: retreat quietly. If he wasn’t: go in and pretend that what had happened onstage had never happened. What else could they do?
Artie volunteered to be their scout. When he peeked inside the room, Manny was bent over laughing. Dorothy was in the middle of a story, something about their youth, Artie gathered, the New York scene. Manny was laughing so hard Dorothy had to wait for him to recover before she could go on. When he started straightening up, Dorothy said, “Remember that guy Scooch?” and Manny started laughing again, even louder than before, even more bent. Artie’s impulse was to shut the door and leave them alone, but Kruger, who’d heard the laughs, pushed it open and went in.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
He’d meant for it to be friendly, but it came out aggressive, like most of what he’d said to Manny so far.
“We were discussing your career,” Manny said.
“Which part?”
“The overall arc,” Manny said. “The absurdity of it.”
Everyone in the room, students and teachers, wondered how seriously to take the passive-aggressive banter between them. Was it all in good fun? Or did Kruger and Manny really hate each other? If it kept rising, someone would have to address it. That was part of comedy: you didn’t let a tension go unpoked too long. You put your foot in it, you made it worse if you had to, but you didn’t save it for later. Who should do the addressing, though, was an equation still to be solved.
“We were just reminiscing,” Dorothy said. “New York, the nineties.”
“I remember Scooch,” Ashbee said, but this time, Manny didn’t laugh. His focus was still on Kruger.
“Did you already have that stick up your ass in the nineties?” he asked him, and Kruger said that he did.
“I was born with it,” he explained.
“And you never considered taking it out? See what happens?”
Kruger, instead of firing back, paused to consider Manny’s question.
“If I take it out,” he said after a moment, “I say stupid shit.”
“That’s the whole concept of our profession,” Manny said.
“Stupid shit like what?” Olivia asked.
“Stupid shit like Meryl Streep is the mother I wish I’d had,” Kruger said.
“Jesus,” Manny said.
“That’s really stupid,” Olivia said.
“I said that in an interview. My father’s pretty sore about it.”
“And your mother?”
“She died many years ago.”
“Well, at least there’s that,” Manny said.
He was drinking water now, from a plastic bottle. The bottle looked small in his hand. Kruger wondered if he’d ever held a gun, who in the room ever had.
“How do you plan to make peace with your old man?”
It surprised Kruger that Manny would want to know. Maybe he was setting up a joke.
“I bought him a gun today,” Kruger said. “He seemed happy about that.”
“Your father was angry at you, and so you bought him a gun?”
Kruger hadn’t thought of the act as stupid before Manny said this. Careless, yes. Selfish, perhaps (or perhaps generous?), overly dramatic, potentially disastrous, potentially rich (a source of material), but not plain stupid. That’s why he usually kept the details of his life to himself, he thought. If he kept the details of his life to himself, he could arrange them into intricate structures and believe they made him complicated and interesting. Once you gave other people two or three elements to put together about you, though, their impulse was to distill and simplify, summarize into short, blunt sentences, a series of choices that you’d previously thought made your existence an impenetrable mystery.
“He’s not even allowed to have one,” Kruger said. “He shot a guy last summer.”
The rationale behind admitting to this was Kruger thought Manny and the others would find it funny. But no one found it funny. Instant cold filled the room instead, as if an actual gun had been produced. Which brought Kruger to the decision of telling the whole story. The whole story would give perspective.
And so he told them about the Glass Eye, the family heirloom M1917 the police had confiscated, the girl reading Joan Didion on the Metra, the shooting lesson in the woods, Tony, his realization that he didn’t personally know any Tonys, the words “negligent discharge,” the emotional subtitles at the old folks’ home, his father hurting his wrist trying to pry a newspaper out of his hands, his father pretending it didn’t hurt. He’d never talked so much about himself. There were probably rules he was breaking, talking about himself so much in front of his students, but he wouldn’t remain a teacher for long. He might not even finish the school year. Teaching had been his attempt to be closer to his father, both physically (moving all the way back to Chicago) and in spirit. But he didn’t like it. He had nothing to teach anyone, and even his father knew it.
At some point in Kruger’s story, the bartender came in to announce five minutes to last call. Beside him was the girl who’d given Phil Adderall, eager to share information of her own: the audience had spoken, and Second City had won the night’s comedy battle. As per the rules, she reminded everyone, the losers now had to buy the winners a round. It was obvious she expected the stand-ups to express outrage, or at the very least disappointment, but no one paid her much attention. It wasn’t clear what got them all to treat her news as irrelevant, but they simply nodded and turned back to Kruger after she spoke, to hear the rest of his story. It might’ve been a silent but collective decision not to give her the satisfaction, or it might’ve been that everyone in the room was in fact interested in what Kruger was saying. Either way, no one fought the girl on the night’s results. Manny simply took out a credit card and told the bartender to put the round on his tab. The bartender asked how many drinks he was putting on the tab, how many people Manny was buying for, and Manny said it didn’t matter, to put it all on his tab, everyone’s next drink. “You mean, everyone in the bar?” the bartender asked, and the fact that Manny simply said “Yes,” and nothing like a pro forma “No, I mean everyone in the next bar over, you idiot,” was confirmation that he wanted the matter resolved quickly so that Kruger could go on.
Which Kruger did, once the bartender and Second City girl left the room. He told Manny and the others about buying the gun in the woods, about how his father had asked him to stay for soup, and about how the whole time he was there, he’d believed that Artie was dead.
“Sounds like you had the shittiest day of us all,” Manny said after Kruger was done talking.
“I don’t know,” Kruger said. “Phil here had a seizure before stage time.”
“Right.”
“That was pretty bad,” Olivia agreed, and then she turned to Phil. “You said some fucked-up shit while you were out, too.”
“Wait, what? What did I say?”
“Pretty offensive stuff.”
Dorothy, who’d always wanted to witness the moment a rumor was born, still nipped that one in the bud.
“You didn’t say a thing,” she told Phil.
The story of Kruger’s day had moved her, and she wasn’t ready to see focus shifted away from it just yet. It was the part about the old men watching emotionally subtitled TV that was sticking with her. She wasn’t picturing it the way it had happened (men too lazy to figure out how to turn the captions off), but imagining the old men as lost instead, so removed from the world (like an untouched civilization, or an alien one) that they needed the descriptions to make sense of human feelings. She wanted to ask Kruger what show they’d been watching, but Kruger spoke first, still contradicting Manny’s pronouncement that he, Kruger, had had the worst day of the group.
“You cried onstage,” he said to Manny. “There might be videos of you crying circulating online as we speak. Artie had to shelter in place in the bathroom, thinking he might die. Dorothy was stuck even longer. With her superior. Most everyone in this room lost to an improv team at a school talent show. Your son just—”
“I see your point,” Manny said. “It’s not a contest.”
“That’s not my point,” Kruger said. “Maybe it is a contest, I don’t know. I don’t make the rules. All I’m saying is, if it is a contest, I’m not winning it.”
Dorothy wondered why it was so important to Kruger not to have had the worst day. Most comedians would’ve jumped on the title, worn it like a crown, falsely equating worst day with best story to tell, best potential bit. Kruger hadn’t tried to make his account funny, though, Dorothy realized. She hadn’t laughed once listening to it.
“Let’s vote on whose day was shittiest,” Jo offered, to settle the matter. “I personally think Ben’s day wasn’t so bad, because even though it sounds like he’s kind of a disappointment to his father, first of all, who in this room isn’t? And second of all, he knew this before going to visit him today.”
“Thank you, Johanna,” Kruger said.
“My son is not a disappointment,” Manny said.
Jo ignored them both.
“As far as today goes,” she said, “I think Phil wins worst day.”
“Let me guess,” Phil said, trying to disarm whatever comment Jo was preparing. “I had the worst day because I’m unfunny and it sucks to go through life being me?”
“No,” Jo said. “You had the worst day because you didn’t get to go onstage.”
“I vote Ashbee,” Dorothy said. “Tell them about your date, Ash.”
Ashbee told them about his date, which got Dorothy to talk about Sword misinterpreting a friendly text she’d sent as a romantic proposition, which got others to inflate various aspects of the last eighteen hours in their lives in order to sound like bigger failures than the previous speakers. Manny mentioned his fear that crying onstage meant he had brain cancer.
“I don’t think that’s a symptom,” Olivia said.
She wasn’t liking the game very much, of making your day sound like the worst ever. She didn’t want to talk about her day. She could tell that Artie didn’t either.
“Where should we go next?” she said, hoping that a change of location would prompt a change of topic. “They’re going to kick us out of here soon.”
“There’s a place open all night like six blocks away.”
“Do they have milkshakes?”
“Why would we go anywhere else?” Marianne said.
“We have to monitor Phil for another hour,” Olivia said.
“We don’t all have to.”
“I’m fine, guys,” Phil said. “Really, I feel great.”
“People always feel great just before they die,” Olivia said.
Manny said that was reassuring. It meant he wasn’t dying just yet.
“I enjoyed your bit, by the way,” he added, to Olivia.
He said it needed sharpening, but the beats were all there, and the premise was killer.
“I agree,” Artie said.
Olivia looked for a hint of sarcasm in his voice, of bitterness, but Artie was his usual earnest self—a little too encouraging, a little dull. She’d have to teach him, if they were to be friends their whole lives, to become harder to read.
Manny was starving, he said, and if they had to keep an eye on Phil all night, they had to go do that somewhere that had burgers. Everyone was in favor, even Marianne, now that it was Reinhardt suggesting it. Only August tried to excuse himself—early day tomorrow, he said, once again.
“I think you should come with us,” Manny said to his son. “I think you should stay up all night.”
He was serious—a father giving advice, not a drunkard encouraging his teetotaler friend to live a little. August noticed, of course. It had been years since his father had last pretended to give him advice.
“I’ll call a cab,” he said. “I need to sleep if I want to be any use at work.”
He already had his phone out.
“You need to sleep?” Manny said. “Do you think your client is sleeping right now? The night before his trial opens?”
“How is that relevant?” August asked.
“What you need to do is feel what he feels,” Manny said. “Go to work red eyed and unshaven tomorrow. Commit to the case. They’ll respect you for that.”
“I am committed,” August said.
“Commit on a personal level,” Manny said. “Show a little empathy for your client.”
“Isn’t the guy a real bastard, though?” Jo asked.
“That’s not what being a lawyer is,” August said to his father.
Would his dad never understand what he did for a living? Did it matter? August didn’t think he understood what his father did for a living. He’d learned early on not to ask about it, that Manny hated explaining how jokes came to him, how he recognized a good one, and so on. He’d heard his father complain about journalists since he could remember, journalists and their stupid questions. He’d heard this so often, in fact, that he remembered his surprise at being told, in grammar school, that there was no such thing as a stupid question—he’d been convinced by then that all questions were stupid, that there was in fact nothing but stupid questions. With time, he’d understood that reality lay somewhere in between what school and Dad said, that life presented a mix of both good and stupid questions. Still, he’d never dared ask his father anything about his job, why it was that he kept on doing it if he was never satisfied, if it made him so sad, too, sometimes (for he remembered his father sad a lot, growing up, the crying a recent development, yes, but not such an unforeseeable one). He’d preferred to make his own assumptions back then. That’s what all families did, wasn’t it? Assume things about one another. You only asked questions to people you didn’t know that well, or people you could cut out of your life if necessary. That was why his father never asked if August found him funny (August did). That was why August wouldn’t ask his father about the crying onstage. He would let him say whatever he needed to say about it in the future, whatever he needed to tell himself—that it was nothing, that the crying was fake, that it was a revelation, the turning point of his career. It wasn’t that August didn’t want to know what his father thought, but that asking was too risky. Perhaps his students would dare. August hoped Manny wouldn’t find their questions stupid.
“I guess I could eat a burger,” August ended up telling Manny. Some battles were worth losing.
Kruger still hadn’t eaten anything all day, but the hunger he’d felt at Sunset Hill had vanished entirely. He wanted to go home now. Sit with his bird, doze off in front of a movie, not think about his father sleeping with his new gun under his pillow. He wanted to go home, talk to his bird, tell him about his day, ask him what movie they should watch. He liked telling the bird about his days—the bird was a great listener. Kruger had assumed every one of the bird’s days looked like the previous, but it struck him now, as he put his coat on, that the bird had to have bad days, too, that he’d perhaps just today had a horrible one. Maybe another bird had crashed against the window, maybe fire alarms had gone off in the building, maybe an insect in the corner of the kitchen had moved at exactly the wrong speed. Maybe the bird had had a stream of terrible days, actually, and no one to joke about it with afterward. The thought made Kruger want to stay out a little longer.
As he followed his students out of the room, he heard Dorothy, behind his back, ask Manny where his stuff was. Hadn’t he come to Chicago with a backpack, a small suitcase? Manny said he hadn’t. Manny had come to Chicago empty-handed.