“You went off the reservation, that’s for sure,” said Becky.
LATER, KAT SAT in the living room breathing hard. There was a good reason she wasn’t in touch with Becky: it upset her. She thought about what had come out of her mouth, unsummoned: I ain’t Mrs. Danhoff no more. When’s the last time she used a construction like that? Was that “Indian”? Or just bad English? Or something else entirely?
8
AFTER meeting Argenziano, Kat spent the night in Cherry City at a motel near the airport. She ate food from Chili’s out of an insulated foam box. These boxes invariably held out a promise, a promise that was never broken, of a gelid and congealed unappetizingness, a promise that seemed inherent in their awkward unbalanced heft, their spongy texture. The room smelled strongly of barbecue sauce. She closed the lid. The perforated lip that fitted over the tab had broken and the lid kept springing back up. She tried to get it to stay shut. The box wasn’t quite strong enough to support the weight of the Bible she placed on it to hold it shut. She thought about testing objects of varying weight, different combinations of them, but the idea brought her back to the essential unimportance of the task. It was just a way she had of thinking about her surroundings to comfort herself. For instance, she thought like this when she and Justin argued: thought, then, of straightening pictures and evening the spines of the books on the shelves; of centering objects on the coffee table. She was still kind of listening to Justin, kind of, but it was someplace else to be, something else to be doing other than being jammed at the end of the couch or on a corner of the bed, pinned down in whatever position she’d occupied when he decided to strike. Some people, no doubt, thought of a distant beach or a favorite city, slipped away to some Old Quarter of the mind, but she wasn’t interested in a complete removal, only in vaulting back into the everyday. She wanted to be sipping wine while holding a bitter nicotine lozenge in her mouth, reviewing the copy she’d written that day, futzing with it, one hand lazily typing in minor corrections, the fingers of the other loosely gripping the stem of her glass. She wanted to be attacking the unremovable stain on the front right burner. Evening those spines, pulling the books flush against the edge of the shelf, Justin going on and on about whatever she’d done lately that had disappointed and upset him. They were everyday tasks, built up out of nothing and into the world of routine.
She was done eating this stuff and wanted to drink her second bottle of beer, but she knew he’d call soon and she wanted to save it to relax with, after. He would relax as they talked, thawing whatever stanchion of icy tension had formed in him over the course of his day. She might have called him, but she didn’t feel like it. She pushed the box aside (the lid bouncing) and placed her computer before her on the table. Within fifteen minutes she understood that while transfer pricing ordinarily was something she’d probably have to ask one of the financial reporters about, in this case it seemed very likely that the strict definition of the term did not apply to the joint practices of South Richmond Consultants and the Northwest Michigan Band of Chippewa Indians. If she had correctly interpreted Argenziano’s off-the-record hypothetical, Saltino was a bagman, just as Becky had told her.
The phone rang and she talked to Justin by the light from the bathroom, sitting on the floor next to the bed. The room seemed no more strange to her in semidarkness than it did fully lighted. She heard the muffled voices of people in neighboring rooms, water rushing through pipes, the engines of late-arriving jets falling toward the runway. The mean, scarred carpet underfoot felt as if it had been laid directly over poured concrete. She could still taste and smell barbecue sauce. She fixed the full bottle of beer, unopened and beaded with sweat, with her gaze. Justin talked.
“I get the edits back and he says you didn’t talk about the décor. Day core? I’m writing about food, I thought. He’s, they want to know where they’re eating, you’re sending them out to the West Loop, bla bla bla. I’m all, this is Chicago. We’re talking about people who at least want to be hip enough to not worry if there are red leather banquettes like at the fucking Pump Room. Come on please. They know they’re not on Rush Street. He says Rob Itzik writes about the day core. Rob Itzik.” Rob Itzik wrote the restaurant column for the Sun-Times. “Rob Itzik writes like a fucking used-car salesman. And I don’t know shit about day core. Just food. It’s the food section. You want someone to write about day core, put it in the day core section. So he says, the condescending hack, he, he, he gives me tips. Tips. These are just some words you can use, he says. He says, storefront. He says, homespun. He says, cozy. He says, romantic. Homespun. What does this even mean? A shawl? How does this correspond to what’s on the plate? And then. Then the piece de resistance. We finally get past the fucking furniture and he goes, so why did you write about these dishes? Why didn’t you write about the country ribs? That’s the specialty. And I’m, everybody’s written about the country ribs. The country ribs were practically on the cover of Time. Hello! This is the mind of a guy who says homespun. I honestly don’t know if I can do this anymore. I honestly don’t.”
A weird panic came over him sometimes, cohering, always, around a dream of flight. It was never a plan, it was a stab. He’d stabbed at her one day, fleeing from something else. That was how they’d come together. It struck her as stupidly inevitable that she’d ended up with a man like him — the one guy, among the half dozen who’d gone gaga for her after she’d left Danhoff, to whom she’d said, exhausted, OK. She surrendered. It struck her as stupidly inevitable that she would have proven to be a disappointment to him. He was like a child. His passion for her turned out to be a child’s infatuation. His loyalty to her turned out to be a child’s possessiveness. She could watch him self-confidently manipulate camera equipment or order some sophisticated restaurant food or place Werner Herzog in context without ever forgetting that this was the convincing disguise behind which the child hid. The child was always ready to run. She couldn’t bear sitting there in bed trying to do something humanly normal like watch TV, with him lying next to her calling out asking prices and square footage from realtor.com, shoving the computer at her so she could look at some Victorian a thousand miles away. Look, a butler’s pantry. Did he really think this kind of amenity could shield him from anything? Look, a separate studio out back. It was impossible to remember if this had ever been fun. Now it was a lancing indictment against their lives. The indictment came in like waves — which never cared what they were eroding. Just kept coming. She knew that if he got an eyeful of Cherry City, of the handsome old houses, the wide tree-lined streets paved with red bricks, the amenity-laden but not completely homogenized main drag, he’d stab at it just as he stabbed at everything else. The mere names of certain towns had a transporting effect on him: Hudson NY, Brattleboro VT, North Adams MA, Marfa TX, Bozeman MT; each brilliant with the meaningless beauty of a distant star.