By Darren Kaminsky
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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Thursday, July 20
“No one is supposed to know about John Slater,” Brenna whispered to me when we were alone in the TV Dinner Room watching something useless on the tube. “It’s our secret.”
“Mine and yours? Don’t you think you should involve him?” I asked.
“No, dumbass, it is my secret with him. I’m telling you about it because someone in house has to know.”
“Then it’s my secret with you and him. Awkward...don’t you think?”
“What am I supposed to do when you come in with him?” I asked and held my arm out and pointed, “Shout 'Hey Jean, look over there, I think there’s a spider near the ceiling'?...Because, you know, 'it' seems to consist of him skulking through the back door and creeping upstairs to your bedroom.”
“He’s not skulking. It’s just not ready for the rest of everyone yet.”
I didn’t pursue it after that, mainly because there was an exciting news story on about dangerous types of mold that could affect air conditioning and some of the footage was of these captivating huge walls of psychedelic multi-colored spore blotches that were as complicated and startling as any abstract painting.
But I was soon to find out that Nell and Jean have also been officially notified of “it,” each separately, and each told that we had been let into the secret exclusively. We had also been collectively instructed not to notice when John Slater Alcott the Third or Twenty-Third or whatever, scion of an American political dynasty that’s been around since before the Revolutionary War, slinks past us at the same time every night like some very efficiently scheduled train.
Unofficially, I sometimes wave and he, if he notices, looks down at his shoes and raises his hand up to around the level of his face. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be him waving back or if he’s blocking his face from our imaginary cameras as he envisions himself caught, like a bug pinned to a page, on a phantom tabloid cover and is attempting to hide his shame at being exposed headed in the direction of his disreputable paramour’s boudoir.
I think Brenna would like being thought of as disreputable.
This has been new for me. I’ve never really gotten to watch anyone skulk before and I have to say it’s not pretty. It has made me realize that I’ve skulked myself (just without the training or obvious instinct for secrecy). I now plan to permanently renounce skulking for all time.
Maybe the reason for his not even bothering to say hi is embarrassment and he imagines us judging him harshly? I wouldn’t judge him...but since he’s not providing any evidence to the contrary...I’ve decided that he’s an asshole.
Last week his nightly skulk inspired a debate on skulking, which we, after many long minutes of contentious argument on phrasing, formally defined as those sort of supposed-to-be-secret-but-everyone-does-in-fact-know-we’re-sleeping-together-arrangements. This might seem like an obvious definition, but Jean was not giving much ground on the issue of everyone actually knowing what’s happening being fundamental to the definition or just something that’s usually true of that type of circumstance.
I was very much of the opinion that it was definitional, but I did side with Jean in the second half of the debate where I came down against skulking. As Jean said, “If you’re going to be doing it, you shouldn’t be doing it with anyone who’s afraid to be seen with his/her arm around you.”
Jean has been the skulkee in a skulking arrangement so she has very particular feelings on the subject.
“But, don’t you think it’s kind of romantic?” Nell countered.
“How?” Jean asked her.
“You know, the government’s secret police can’t know that you’re the mistress of the guerilla leader so you hike into the mountains after dark and walk back before morning?”
“Uhh, why don’t we keep this conversation on Planet Reality?” I asked.
“Those things still happen,” Nell protested and her mouth became a straight line and her jaw tightened so that it knotted up near her ear.
I couldn’t just let it go, too much fun not to, so I made another foray...“Don’t those stories usually end with the mistress being captured by the secret police and used as bait so that the guerilla leader is lured into town and either shot and buried in a ditch or decapitated and buried in a ditch?”
“Wow, I’m impressed. You did that all in one breath,” Jean said still staring at the TV as she slid further down the couch.
“Yeah, I’ve been practicing,” I said.
Nell folded her arms across her chest and said, “Cynical. Nothing would ever change if it were up to you, either of you.”
“Well, yeah, it’d be hard to change things from my position here on the couch,” I said. “But I am more of a realist.”
“Which just means lazy as far as I’m concerned,” Nell replied.
“Have it your way,” I said. “I sure wish the bathroom wasn’t all the way upstairs.”
Jean giggled, but Nell didn’t. I think she was honestly annoyed. Of course, she’s now in Peru. I think that she was still slightly annoyed at me when she left and determined -- on principal -- to either become a guerilla leader or find one to skulk into the jungle looking for.
Maybe Kerran is the only one who doesn’t actually know about John Slater. Bleed Monkey has been practicing a lot so he’s not around much. Plus, he and Sam are definitely full-tilt shacked up again so I think that he’s staying at her place. Last time he was here, he, very loftily, announced that this place was too much of a “zoo” for Samantha.
Everything that Kerran says is soaked in so much irony that if his words were brandy a match would cause an inferno -- making it hard to tell if Sam really thinks it’s too much of a zoo to hang around here or not enough of a zoo to hang around here.
Kerran hasn’t been around, but on second thought I’m sure he knows about John Slater anyway. He’s the type that, if it wasn’t a secret, he would probably not care, but, since it is a secret he probably picked it right out of the air. He’s completely clairvoyant when it comes to secrets.
One time I was out with him and we were drinking and playing miserably bad pool at the Rickshaw, a bar up on Columbia. It’s dark in there and never crowded, making it a perfect place to spill your guts; so I laid out the whole Dani/Bella situation for him. He listened and looked just about as attentive as I’d ever known him to look, then he turned to me and said, in his least ironic tone of voice, “That’s fucked up man.”
The next day I told him that I hadn’t actually told anyone else all the situation’s nuts and bolts and that I’d appreciate it if he didn’t tell anyone. He turned to me and said, “Dude, I was so wasted last night that there’s no way that I could remember all that. Hell, if you hadn’t told me that you’d told me then I’d have forgotten completely...But, you know, you’re probably doing the right thing.”
“The right thing?”
“Yeah, going out playing pool, getting hammered. The right thing.”
“Oh, yeah sure,” I said.
Saturday, July 22
There had been no prostitutes out the night of the stake-out and the after-hours places that we barged into had been very tame.
The most lively one had two burly, thick-necked guys wearing t-shirts and jeans sitting at the bar drinking Jacks and Coke.
I took a photo of one of the cops standing behind these two and the two them looking annoyed. I got another of the outside of the building, a nondescript, cinder block painted in a flaking, unrecognizable turquoise.
After the cops had dropped us off and Henry and I were both walking north on 18th, he told me that since there’s been nothing to really hang a story on that he planned to “exaggerate.”
“Exaggerate how?” I asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” he said. “Maybe some couples doing lines of coke in the corners of the club, the women could be wearing bondage gear and the men could have arms full of scars and track marks....You know, some small exaggerations to give it color. Just enough to turn a dull night into a good story. Or, who knows, maybe they’ll bust that drug house and we’ll both strike pay dirt?”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said and didn’t say any more since -- if he had another factoid or two -- he might just make me the centerpiece of his story. I had a feeling that he’d swallow me whole if his career required it.
“Those don’t sound like small exaggerations,” I said. “They sound like you’d be changing the character of the thing. Plus, I don’t have photos for that.”
“It’s OK. We’ll just tell the editors that the people were, you know, too menacing to be photographed or wouldn’t give a release.”
“That won’t make me look good.”
“Happens to everyone,” he said in a comforting voice as if he really was consoling me and the subjects of his article really had refused to have their photos taken.
Monday, July 24
The editor pulled me aside. His face was all scrunched up in concern. He put one of his large fish-flesh white hands on my shoulder and said in a cold I-am-Mr. Spock-and-not-from-your-strange-planet attempt at a grandfatherly, mentorish voice, “Did you get cold feet? It can be tough, especially when the people are intimidating. People don’t like being photographed breaking the law so if you got intimidated, that would, to my mind, be natural...”
He paused and looked at me, like I was now going to give the really good reason why I hadn’t been able to photo Henry’s rubber hose people. Since I had none, I stayed silent and looked at the lines in his face. I thought that maybe he was in his late 30s, one of those men who look like really stretched out little boys. He was even dressed in one of those striped t-shirts that I always associate with being 7 years-old.
Since I wasn’t cowering and making excuses, the editor started back in again, “But, I’ve got to be honest, we knew there’d be this type of thing and when we picked you, we did it with the thought that after the images you were able to get of that woman getting her arm fractured that you’d have no difficulty with an after hours club...”
His voice dropped off and there was this long unexplainable pause and he made a gulping sound like he’d had to swallow cough medicine and then, in a way that reminded me of someone having to carry his first dirty diaper to the trash and doing so by holding a little corner and extending his arm as far as possible from his body, he said, “We really thought you’d have, you know, a pair.”
It would have been so much better had he not said it. He was so obviously parroting a line that he’d heard a more convincing editor say and everything about it just undermined him. It was so fake that it made my skin crawl in embarrassment for him and I knew exactly what he meant, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him.”
“A pair of photos?” I asked.
“No, you know...” he said and his eyes got wide and his mouth crinkled in frustration, “...balls."
Meanwhile, Henry the wunderkind had put me in a position where I could either rat him out or admit to not having “a pair.”
I could see Henry across the room talking to one of the features editors. They were both smiling. Henry was laughing at regular intervals. The editor was very obviously praising him for the nice, large “pair” that Henry had. Henry was smiling and describing his “pair,” the size of them, his pride in how difficult it was for him to walk normally, the problems that his mother had had in birthing him. ‘The Triplets’ is how his proud father had referred to him with a guffaw and a laugh.
Just before we left, Henry walked up to me and extended his hand. “I hope we can work together again,” he said.
“Why?” I asked, “We didn’t work together this time.”
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
© 2005 Me Three
