Lydia Netzer - Shine Shine Shine

They had disposed of their old coffee table, a huge chunk of green glass. It wasn’t child safe at all, but that was the least of its issues. “It doesn’t look right,” she said to Maxon. “And to be frank, baby, neither do you.” Maxon, like the great green coffee table, would not have been featured in Architectural Digest . Sunny didn’t want to sell it, so she rolled it out into the alleyway and left it, like a translucent question mark in the city.

She would never have rolled Maxon out into an alleyway. However, if she had been able to confine Maxon to his study on that night, she would have closed the big heavy door on him, and stuck duct tape around the seams of it, so that not even the slightest bit of air or hint of Maxon would come out.

It’s not like he had even wanted to come. It’s not like he had said, “Can I come?” In fact he had said very clearly, “I do not feel comfortable with anyone coming into this house. It appears you have invited the whole neighborhood.”

“Maxon, the more the merrier,” Sunny had trilled, smiling down into the sink, washing carrots.

“That’s a terrible phrase,” he had said. He grabbed a diet Coke from the fridge.

“But really, it’s socially accurate,” said Sunny, “and in this case the numbers are in your favor.”

“How’s that,” he said, snapping open the can. She gesticulated with a shaved carrot, a twinkle in her eye.

“The more people, the less you have to talk, actually, right? If I invited one person over, you’d have to talk plenty. But with twenty people here, you can disappear into the sofa. Nod, smile, and no one will notice.”

Maxon swept the magnets off the fridge, the recycling calendar, the postcards, and attacked it with his dry-erase marker. He always had one somewhere. She loved to watch him work, loved to see him put it into his own language. In a moment like this, when everything went flying, she knew they were really communicating.

“So, like this?” he said.

“And w is the number of words I’m responsible for?” He paused, waiting, his marker still hovering over his last equation.

“Yeah, I mean it can go up to fifty percent if n equals two. You know, like a dinner date. But if n equals twenty, negligible.”

“Great,” he said. “Well, okay. I see your point. But for the moment I’m going back to my office, where n equals one.”

“Maxon, where n equals one there should be no talking!”

She let him go. But she had to allow him to come out if he wanted to come. They knew who he was. Maybe they would put his behavior in context. As the hour arrived, she put the finishing touches on her own wig, asked the maid to pay special attention to the baseboards, and hoped after all that Maxon would not emerge. Maybe if the house looked magnificent enough, they would not notice his absence.

The favorite final touch, she thought, was a glass cabinet that held their curios: a Burmese nat, a basket of pinecones from the woods by her mother’s house, and on the top shelf a ten-thousand-dollar Mont Blanc pen. The pen had never been used, so it sat there in a spotlight, completely full of ink. She had found it in a catalog full of other such things, pens so expensive they must be kept in cabinets, wallets made of lambskin, all the things that real people use, responsible parents, not weirdos who wandered in from another planet or continent and decided to have kids. Sunny looked on it with love, as if it were her real husband, this pen, so perfectly made and elegantly wrought. Hello, she would say to her guests. I’m Sunny Mann, and this is my husband, Maxon. She would point to the pen. All of the guests would incline their heads toward the pen and nod and smile. The pen would glisten perfectly. It would not say anything strange or crack its thumbs loudly.

Sunny was pregnant, just getting used to the feeling of a wig on her head, and just getting used to the feeling of another person moving around inside her, nourished from her bloodstream, holding its breath, waiting to emerge. She was really trying to make everything all right for the baby to come out. She was really trying to correct the wrongs that had been established in the universe, all of the missing fathers and the baldness and the condition people kindly called “eccentricity” now that Maxon was a millionaire.

The first guests to arrive were Rache and her husband, Bill, and then Jenny and her husband, Roland. Others arrived. The women allowed Sunny to take their cardigan wraps, and took their saran-wrapped plates into the kitchen. There were little dipped cookie platters and bowls of starfruit stabbed with colored toothpicks. The men nodded and smiled and looked around, then began talking to each other, settling into matching leather armchairs. Conversation went appropriately. Sunny found herself saying the things she should say, things of which the neighbors would approve. She realized she was saying them with a confident energy she had previously felt only in situations where she was not wearing a wig. It made her feel good, having this dinner party. It made her feel like she belonged in the wig, belonged to the world of people who have lived their whole lives under hair.

It’s not a wig, it’s a hat. It’s not a hat, it’s a head of hair. It’s not a head of hair, it’s a uniform, she thought. Meanwhile her mouth was saying something about the yard guy they all used. Her mouth was agreeing. She should use him, too? Oh, she would call him. Inside she knew she would hire him, find fault with him, fire him. She would find a new yard guy, someone they all would adore. They wouldn’t want to be seen with any other guy doing their lawn. In a month her guy would be edging corners for the mayor. Sunny filled her lungs with air. Her feet hardly touching the kitchen tile. Her hand gracefully landing on the counter, imitating Rache’s gesture as she swept away an invisible piece of dust from the glistening edge of the sink.

Then the door to the office swung open. Maxon came out. She noticed for the first time that day that he was wearing a Joy Division T-shirt and bright blue sweatpants. No, she shook her head at him. You can’t come out here wearing that. You go back in the office. But he did not look at her. He had a large whiteboard under his arm and a red marker in his hand. The room paused and all the neighbors looked at him, and Sunny looked at him, and she was afraid. On the whiteboard was a labyrinth. And she couldn’t believe he’d brought his labyrinth out to the party.

Sunny knew this form of labyrinth was a medieval meditation aid, one way in, one way out. A labyrinth is not like a maze with dead ends. It is just switchback after switchback leading you to the inevitable center. She knew this because she and Maxon were talking about it all the time, at this point in their lives. They kept informing each other all about it. They kept drawing them, on napkins, on the front of the dishwasher, on Sunny’s scalp.

Actually the whole labyrinth thing had originally been her idea, as she had done a wig in this style while in college, the lines and corners of a skewed oval labyrinth stretching over the bones and planes of her skull. In the center of the labyrinth there was a little bug with its head drawn stuck into her scalp. But Maxon hadn’t been able to let it go, kept photographs of her labyrinth, modified it, cross-checked it with the famous labyrinth he’d seen at Chartres, becoming obsessed with the idea of the decision-making process as a single line, not a series of branches, not a flow chart at all, but a single strand folding back on itself. He was working on structuring his artificial-intelligence logic around this idea—that the robot would not face a series of choices that fork off, but that the robot was experiencing a single train of thought, along which decisions were made. As soon as those decisions were made, the unused choice no longer existed, had not really existed in the first place. “If you look at it this way,” Maxon had said, “it all becomes very simple. You need about half the code you think you need. People just can’t get away from the old either/or.”