Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

The music transitioned from hard rap to solo Sting. Chest claps issued from the mic. I approached the tattooed one. She was sitting half naked at an empty table, her face lit from below by the white light of her me-machine. I introduced myself. “Steve,” I said. “Narcy,” she said. We shook hands. A few minutes later, when she was through with her texting, she arrived at my table to give me a lap dance. She had Bettie Page bangs and a belly ring. Across her spine on her lower back was a tattoo of a chess piece, a bishop in black ink. As the dance progressed, she acquired a rigid look of concentration. It gave the impression that she would be just as surprised as anyone else by whatever move her body made next. “Where are you from, Narcy?” I asked her, and she began to sing. In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine. She reared back and flashed me her tits. They were ringed underneath by a Celtic design. I think she was relieved when enough time had passed that she could begin undressing in good conscience. She took off her top and began to treat her breasts roughly. I didn’t know how that could be pleasurable. I almost asked her to stop. “So you’re from the pines,” I said. She pressed her chest into my nose and put my hands on her ass, then pulled her body away in an awkward slink. Watching her strip was like receiving an inexpert massage from a blind lady. “But where are you from really?” I asked. “I mean your family. What are your family origins?” She stopped dancing. “Do you want the dance or don’t you?” she asked. I nodded. She turned around and gave me a shake of her ass while her split ends swept the concrete floor.

I spent the rest of the night splitting my attention between the girls onstage and the regulars arrayed around it. They were muttlike men minding their treasures of single-dollar bills, awash in purple light and heading toward midnight without purpose or prayer. They were generic remnants of a gene pool drifting out with the tide, leaving them naked and lost beneath the moon’s blank guidance. And I was sitting beside them feeling sorry for myself, still cringing inwardly at having called Stuart “Uncle.”

My cell rang at 3:00 that morning—10:00 a.m. Tel Aviv time. It was Grant Arthur.

The next morning I leaned against the front desk and started telling Connie about the headline I’d seen the day before.

“If I had been more like Harper,” I began.

“Sorry,” she said. “More like who?”

“Harper,” I said.

“Who’s Harper?”

“Of Harper and Bryn.”

“Who’s Bryn?”

“You don’t know Bryn? Bryn from Bryn ?”

She looked at me like I was trying to talk through a stroke. “I have no idea who you’re talking about,” she said.

“Harper was gay for a while? Bryn was the porn star who found God? The ‘Porn-Again’? None of this rings a bell?”

“It’s like you live in a parallel universe,” she said.

“I’ll go show you the magazine,” I said. “But let’s say I had been more like Harper, you know… more family oriented.”

“Harper’s a family man?”

“Huge family man. They’re huge family people. And we’re not talking model citizens here. You don’t expect them to give a damn about family. You really don’t know Harper and Bryn?”

“I really don’t know Harper and Bryn,” she said.

“Well, it doesn’t matter for the purposes of this discussion. When I saw how much family meant to those two, and read about it in the cover story?—”

“You don’t believe what you read in those magazines, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Because it sort of sounds like you do.”

“Can I make my point, please?”

“Make your point.”

“If I had been more willing to have kids,” I said, “do you think it might have worked out between us?”

“Wait, what?”

“If I had been more willing—”

“But what does it matter?” she said. “You didn’t want them. And you weren’t going to change your mind. Why ask hypothetical questions about something predetermined? I mean, you wouldn’t even talk about it. So to ask now if it would have made a difference when it was never really an option is like asking… like asking if things would have worked out if you were someone entirely different. The answer is yes. If you were someone entirely different, and that someone had been willing to have kids with me, you bet, there might have been a chance that things between you and me would have worked out.”

I walked away. Then I came back.

“That’s who Ben is,” she continued unabated from where she left off. “He’s like you, except an entirely different person. He’s at least hypothetically willing to have kids. He’s at least willing to talk about it. So there’s your answer. Your answer’s yes, and his name’s Ben.”

“You expect me to believe that you didn’t tell your uncle about those tweets?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “Paul, I didn’t.”

“I specifically asked you not to tell Stuart,” I said. “I thought he might have come in for a checkup, but no. He’d come because somebody told him I was a huge anti-Semite on Twitter.”

“I told him no such thing,” she said. “Do you want to know what I told him? I told him that someone was taking advantage of you. That’s all I told him.”

“Who gave him the name Grant Arthur?”

“Well, me, obviously. But that’s because somebody is taking advantage of you, Paul. And for some reason, all of your fury, all that outrage you had when this first started, has just, like, disappeared, and you spend all your time emailing, you can’t concentrate at the chair, I bet you’re not even paying attention to the Red Sox. Can you tell me their standing right now?”

I was quiet.

“Win-loss record?”

I was quiet.

“So that’s why I told him the name. I overheard Frushtick say it, so I passed it on to Stuart, who found out about all this shit not because he’s related to me, hard as that is to believe, but because there are people who pay attention when crazy people say incendiary things on the Internet about Jews. And in this particular instance, that crazy person happens to look a lot like you.”

I bent down to be level with her chair. “I know all about Grant Arthur,” I said. “I know more than your uncle. I know why he moved to Los Angeles. I know who he fell in love with there and why he tried to convert to Judaism. And I know that when he got his heart broken, he did some stupid things that got him in a little trouble with the police.”

“How do you know this?”

“He was lost. He didn’t know who he was. He’s not a criminal. He’s just a sap who fell in love with the wrong girl. I can relate to a guy like that.”

I walked away. Then I came back.

“And just so you know,” I said. “I’m also dating someone new. Her name is Narcy. She’s a dancer.”

I went back to work. Then I went out to the waiting room where I looked for the magazine with Harper and Bryn on the cover so I could show it to Connie. But somebody must have stolen it. It sucks being a dentist. People are always stealing your magazines.

Mercer had just finished telling me what his time at Seir was like and of his plans to return. We were sitting in a quiet bar, no TV screen in the corner, our me-machines stowed away, nothing before us but the booze and the bartender and a distant tune on the jukebox. Everyone spoke in the same low key as a little ice in a glass. I told him that I’d gotten a call from Grant Arthur. I asked him if he knew about his thwarted love for the rabbi’s daughter.

“Mirav Mendelsohn,” he said. “Sure, I know. It’s the first thing he tells you about himself.”