“Scary.” Neale notices a new beauty shop/reflexology place called Bionic Hair. This particular stretch of Broadway has businesses that seem to have slid in from a parallel universe, or a lost time. Pleasant Travel. The Double Bubble bar. The Loving Hut vegan restaurant. Neale is riding shotgun in Cate’s car, twisted into a position that would only be comfortable for a yoga teacher. She’s swiping photos right and left on her phone. She’s on several dating apps. So far, none of this activity goes beyond her thumb. Although she’d like to be having sex with someone, she’s leery of bringing home random guys from the internet, especially with Joe there and all the complications around that. Who she’d like to be with is Claude, her ex, Joe’s father. She is still hung up on him; this puts a definite crimp in her forward momentum.
“What do you think of him?” She holds the phone out toward Cate at the next red light.
“He looks like Conan O’Brien. I mean, the exact hair thing.”
“Which would be okay, unless he’s deliberately trying to look like Conan O’Brien. That would be a problem.”
They’re running errands. They enjoy driving around together, which they’ve been doing since they got their driver’s licenses in high school. Today they start out at Cermak, a global supermarket with extremely cheap vegetables.
“If we knew what these were, we could save a lot of money by eating them.” Neale takes a picture with her phone of a hairy, dark brown root that’s on special. Cate gets bok choy and head lettuce, cherries, then lingers in the Indian aisle picking out a frightening jar of mango pickle for Graham, who’s a hot-pepper addict. They drop off a pair of Neale’s boots for new heels at the shoemaker on Damen, then head down to Costco for paper towels and laundry soap. Dog food. Small vats of yogurt. By midafternoon they are smug with thrift.
Neale doesn’t exactly know how much more crucial the penny-pinching is for Cate, doesn’t know that Cate routinely takes cash advances from her viable credit card, while another carrying scarily high interest is maxed out. Financial management that’s barely a step up from going through the couch cushions for loose change. If Cate didn’t have the adjunct position, with its benefits, she wouldn’t even be able to dangle where she is, off the edge of the middle class. If she weren’t subsidized by her parents, she would only be living in one of the higher echelons of poor.
For her pride’s sake, it’s especially important that her parents not realize how crucial their support is, how cheese-paring her personal economy is. So today at Costco Cate splurged on a shrimp cocktail platter as her contribution to her mother’s Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. As soon as they’ve left the store, she regrets the purchase. Instead of retro-glamorous, Ricky will see it as outdated, a sad attempt at irony.
Neale says, “Thanksgiving seems antithetical to everything about your mother. I mean first of all, Ricky doesn’t really eat. And I’ve never seen her particularly thankful for anything. Whatever she has, she got it herself, with her bare hands. Hands and claws. And I have to say, she has never seemed particularly sympathetic to Native Americans. Or Pilgrims, for that matter. Holidays are just shit, aren’t they? But look. All you have to do is make an appearance. You’ve got your shrimp, your expectations are low. You’re good to go.”
“No. I can already hear the force field of her disappointment, waiting up there. Buzzing.”
“Yes. Of course. I can see her pulling her expression into place. That little twitchy thing she does around her mouth. The way she folds her expression into something that subtly implies diminished expectation. Slightly disappointed is her neutral, resting state.”
“I think most of her disappointment is around my being queer.”
“Oh no, it goes way beyond that. She’d also like you to have some sort of regular job. She’d like you to be working on Broadway shows. But if you were, she wouldn’t like the particular show. And she doesn’t care for your hair. She told me you look like a boy from an English boarding school. She’d like for you to go long and ombré.”
“The hair thing.” Cate runs a hand through it. “At least I won’t have to have another depressing conversation about the election. It’s only been a couple of weeks. There’s a possibility my mother hasn’t heard yet that there was an election. Why do you get to have warm, friendly holidays?”
“Well, friendly, yes, but you know parties at my parents’ aren’t exactly warm. More like spirited. All those old lefties in a small, enclosed space. All those saggy sweaters, all that corduroy. This year it’ll probably be a wake, a funeral for democracy. My parents have worked their whole lives for equality and diversity, the good of the common man. What’s coming is going to be a total teardown of all that. That guy’s going to come in thrashing at everything decent and good. Thrashing with a machete.”
“I know.”
“There’s going to be a women’s march. Around the inauguration. My mother’s working on it. It’s going to be big.” Then she puts a light, restraining hand on Cate’s arm. “I need to talk with you about something. It’s Joe. I need you to tell me what to do.”
“What is it? God, I hate to ask.”
“I went through the browser history on his laptop.”
“Porn.”
“Well, of course. I mean, he’s twelve. And I wouldn’t worry about busty babes, or even blow jobs. But what I found was Czech Fantasy 8—Part 3.”
“Oh, I really don’t want to hear this, do I?”
“I’ll be vague. It’s a glory hole sort of situation. Wandering guys with their dicks poking out of their jeans. Naked women are behind the walls. The guys wander around trying out one hole, then another. Like they’re shopping. Then the camera switches behind the holes to where the women are lying on their platforms. They are deeply bored. Like they’re thinking they don’t get paid enough to do this. Like they wish they’d brought their phones so they could play Toon Blast while they’re getting banged. They’re not attractive or aroused. Neither are the guys. Everyone has skin problems. They all look like they’ve already given up hope for anything good. Doesn’t this seem like too sad an idea of sex to have at twelve?”
“He probably just tripped over it cruising through regular videos.”
“But maybe not. Maybe all his fantasies are Czech. Maybe he’s already seen numbers one through seven. Maybe because he doesn’t have two happy parents to model healthy sexuality for him. And I don’t know what I can do about that. I’m in a business that’s like ninety percent women. I’m never going to find anybody new. Anybody good. I’m worn out. And too alone. I hate going down in the basement to replace fuses at night. Not to mention living in a house that’s so old and unrenovated that it still has fuses.”
“Don’t they have internet locks so kids can’t get to that stuff?”
Neale pushes this advice aside. “I can see it’s a problem that I think of him and me as buddies. I hate when he’s gone way off-road on his own and I have to come down hard as a parent. And I don’t really want to let him know I’ve been snooping.”
“Oh, but you really have to. He can’t watch that stuff. Think of who he’ll be at thirty if he does. You’re going to have to have a talk.”
“I hate when you’re strict with me.”
“You don’t. You love it. And you know I’m right. As usual.”
Someone driving an ancient Lincoln Town Car glides from the right lane across the middle lane, into the left-turn lane in one long move, then doesn’t turn left, just slides back in ahead of a by-now-frantic reassembly of traffic. Cate lays on her horn, just to assert herself in a situation over which she has no control.
“Major drugs” is Neale’s guess, which is always her guess about these sorts of drivers—extremely calm but totally clueless. Cate takes a quick left at the super-cheap car wash (and wristwatch outlet, if you count the guy with a few hundred of them pinned to the inside of his coat). Next door is her branch of the public library.
“You haven’t mentioned Maureen today. Have you moved on?”
“Oh no. I’m actually kind of pinning my hopes on her.” Cate hasn’t mentioned Dana at the beach. Even saying Dana’s name gives her a level of reality Cate can’t bear.
“Really!?” Neale sounds surprised, and not pleasantly.
“I don’t want to still be looking for a relationship at fifty in what are probably going to be reduced circumstances.” What she doesn’t say is what she found out on the dog beach—that it is still possible she could retreat into a life lived in someone else’s back pocket. Going around with frostbite on her hands from making time-pressured love in the freezer at Toaster, haggard from nights of euphoric insomnia. Dana is Cate’s narcotic. Huge highs. Crash landings where she finds herself alone in an empty room. Yet here she is thinking about Dana even as she’s talking about Maureen. She has totally disconnected from this conversation. It’s like she’s speaking through a ventriloquist’s dummy. The dummy sounds confident saying, “I think if I put in all my little details, the algorithm on any dating site would come up with Maureen as my best match.” She pulls up in front of the library. “I just need to stop here for a minute. Maybe only thirty seconds.”
The book she has on hold is a collection of letters Vita wrote to Virginia Woolf. Cate has read the current draft of the play. Also two biographies. The corkboard in her workshop is tacked up with photos of
The space she has pulled into is right in front of the library entrance, marked LOADING ZONE.
She punches the flashers, tells Neale, “If you see a ticket person—”
Parking enforcement, once a lazy, city-run revenue effort, has been sold off to a ruthless corporation based somewhere in the Middle East that conducts a reign of terror. Meter readers in Day-Glo vests troll relentlessly, ubiquitously. Everyone now lives in fear of huge tickets.
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll take the wheel.” Sometimes the smallest thing like this blooms into a nervous consideration of what would she do if Neale weren’t there. To shift into the driver’s seat and, of course, everything else. Cate travels with a sense of safety, that if a trapdoor opened beneath her, Neale would grab her before she went down.
Inside, she goes to the on-hold shelves, which means a journey that requires running a gauntlet between two long Wi-Fi access tables. Any time Cate has come here, every monitor has someone sitting in front of it. Some of these are regular people, but more fall into the irregular category. Irregular and often talking softly, as though they have a Bluetooth thing, but they don’t. Or irregular in their intense smell. Today’s smelly person is a huge guy with a tattooed neck. The tattoo, half-covered by his jacket collar, appears to be of Daffy Duck. She catches a nice whiff off him as she passes to, then again fro, on her way back to the checkout desk. Not a urine smell. More like a bad egg. The patrons near him seem oblivious. Oblivious or resigned.
While she’s standing in line to check out, Cate reads a few of the Vita letters. She is so happy to have a shot at this gig. Tons of possibilities for the sets. Long Barn, the Tudor country house where Vita lived during the 1920s, and Sissinghurst, a crumbling castle Vita and Harold restored in the 1930s, are going to be amalgamated into one interior. Serious surroundings for romantic treachery. Treachery because Vita had nothing beyond sex and flattery on offer for Woolf, or the others who came before, or the ones who followed. She didn’t jettison them, just gently set them to the side and kept writing them flattering notes while she moved on to someone new. The teacup of jealousy stirred and stirred again.
“After their first night together,” Cate says, getting into the driver’s seat and tossing the book into Neale’s lap, “Virginia went out and bought gloves. I think she felt her hands were now erotic elements and needed to be covered. Poor Virginia. All that genius, but she didn’t see that Vita only liked beginnings.”
“I see you’re on a first-name basis with both of them now.”
“Well, the whole thing is pretty compelling. Aristocracy and Bloomsbury and queerness. Historically, all that rustling in the back of the closet. All the codes and signals. The letters within letters, the pinky rings. Something delicious about all the secrecy. Now everything’s so in the open, we’re free from fear and oppression, but we’ve traded it for being commonplace. Queer’s as boring as straight now.”
“Oh, I think you still have a little cachet. You still have a bit of shadow. There are still places where you could get beat up.”
“I love thinking of Vita getting Virginia into bed. Seducing someone so physically vaporous. So graceful and elegant, so inexperienced. Then add in the fragility from her mental illness. She absolutely needed someone to touch her. I like thinking of her being helped out of her long skirt and dowdy underwear. It’s the first time in a while I’ve been so ramped up about work. Not since the last play I did for Adam. I’m thinking this will be sort of a fresh start for me.”