Daniel Price - Slick

By that point, the clerk was sniffling, crying. Her burly manager had caught the tail end of the cutdown and was fixing to pound Ira into chutney. Wisely, he fled.

Poor Ira. Yeah yeah, what about the poor clerk? Look, she was young and pretty. She probably went home and cried to her boyfriend, who held her, stroked her hair, told her she was beautiful, and then screwed her raw. Ira had no such solace.

I can only assume it was a desire for human connection that had brought him to that Young M event in the first place. Still, it took just one game of Pictionary to clear out the room. The Mensans were too polite to tell him to take his art critiques and shove them up his alimentary. They simply found excuses to go home early, no doubt praying for his absence at the next gathering.

Unlike the others, I stayed behind and talked with Ira until 3 a.m. Once he realized he couldn’t push me away, he retracted his quills. The thing about Ira was that he loved people as an entity. He was a chaos mathematician, a brilliant one. By the time he was twenty, he had five published papers. When I met him, he was twenty-seven and widely considered to be the wünderprick of his field.

Soon after graduate school, he began working his way through each of the Big Six (now Big Four) accounting firms as a top-level market analyst. The drill was always the same. He went out of his way to earn the contempt of his bosses and peers, but because his work was so revolutionary, they labored to put up with him. Inevitably, the commoners would unite to gather their torches and run him out of the village. By the time I met him, he had already been chased out of Deloitte & Touche and Arthur Andersen and was repeating the process at Price Waterhouse. He lasted only five months there.

The real tragedy was that he got painfully depressed every time he was banished. After the Price Waterhouse fallout, in which a manager actually throttled him, he visited my apartment for the first time. I was stunned to come home and find him literally crying at my doorstep.

“I feel like I was born without something,” he told me. “Something everyone else has. I just can’t bullshit people. I can’t ask them how their weekend was when I really don’t care. I can’t tell them that I like their outfit when I really don’t notice. And when they do something to screw up a project, my project, I can’t just sit back and say, ‘Hey, good work.’ I wasn’t built that way, and they all hate me for it. When did it become such a handicap to be honest?”

Once he was began his next job at Ernst & Young, he swore to amend his ways. His resolve lasted about a week. But this time his boss came up a clever way to handle him. They insisted he telecommute. This worked out beautifully for Ira. It also led to him discovering his next true love: the Ishtar .

That’s where I went late this morning, right after dropping off Miranda at the Claremont. After the sex, which we had both agreed was terrible, we simply held each other and talked. That made up for everything. If I had known the postcoital communion would be so pleasant, I would have suggested we skip the coitus altogether and spoon. To most men, that probably sounds as lame as drinking nonalcoholic beer at a game of touch football. Untrue. It was that kind of intimacy I had missed more than sex. Her skin was smooth and warm. Her small fingers ran back and forth across my wrist. We spoke in tones so soft that the specters of Gracie and Jim took the hint and left. For all intents and purposes, it was the first time we’d ever truly been alone with each other.

“I think lifelong monogamy may be one of those myths that the human race is slowly catching on to,” she theorized, shortly before dawn. “I mean in these modern times, it’s presumptuous to assume that two people will continue evolving along the same path for the rest of their lives. You know what I’m saying?”

I held her from behind, nodding, enjoying.

“Conservatives keep freaking out about how more and more couples are getting divorced sooner. You know what I say? Good. That means more people are being honest with each other when it’s time to move on. I mean what’s the big deal? With one out of two couples getting divorced, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Fifty percent of companies fail within the first five years, even in a good economy. The bottom line is that things change. People grow apart. Why deny it? So we can justify all the flatware we got at our wedding? That’s bullshit. Don’t you think?”

After a few seconds of silence, she laughed and checked my wrist for a pulse.

“I’m still here,” I said. “Just listening.”

“Am I even making sense?”

“Yeah. Definitely. Your statistics are off, though.”

“What, about the companies?”

“Well, that too. But I was mostly referring to the divorce rate. Everyone throws that figure around all the time, but it’s just a media myth.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know the folks who started it. They’re an independent research group in Boston. Twelve years ago, they were hired by a Christian organization to get some hard numbers they could use. They said, ‘We don’t care how you get them, just get them.’ So the researchers spent six months raiding the public records of a hundred and fifty counties, tallying the number of approved marriage licenses and divorce papers signed in 1987. They discovered exactly half as many divorces.”

“So? That’s one out of two.”

“No it’s not. They were counting the divorces from all married couples, not just the ones who got married in 1987. Look, let’s say there are ten million married couples in those counties. One hundred thousand of them got married in 1987. Fifty thousand of them got divorced in 1987. Guess what? That’s fifty thousand out of ten million, not a hundred thousand. It was totally faulty reasoning, but the Christian group went all Chicken Little to the press anyway. Nobody ever stopped to question it.”

Miranda rolled over and eyed me in full skeptical journalist mode. “Scott, are you trying to tell me that the divorce rate is actually one half of one percent?”

“No. That’s just the same mistake reversed. My point is that you cant compare one year’s results to the whole pool. You have to take it year by year.”

“But in 1987 it was fifty percent.”

“In 1987 there were half as many divorces as there were weddings. In those counties.”

“But if that statistic matches up every year, then the divorce rate will still be fifty percent!”

“Yes, but that’s a very big if for such a small sample. Look at the stock market in 1987. One bad day turned it into a very abnormal year. Hell, if l only used this week as a sample, I could say that I have sex with a married woman at least once a week.”

She stared at me, stunned, and then turned the other way. I looked over her shoulder.

“Oh no. Did I upset you again?”

“I’m not upset,” she said. “I’m just… I’ll put it this way, Scott. You know just what to say to make a girl feel numb. Is it okay if I check my messages?”

She reached over me to use my phone, resting on top of my chest. I felt like apologizing, but I didn’t know why. I thought I was showing her respect by not subjecting her to any romantic clichés. I knew Miranda was strictly anti-sentiment. Then again, so was Gracie, until the day it suddenly occurred to her that if she stayed with me, she’d be numbed out of existence.

Later in the morning, outside the hotel, Miranda and I sat in awkward silence. She kissed me goodbye from the passenger seat. Not an eternal goodbye, of course, but it told me what I wanted to hear. The show was over. Brigadoon officially went back to being a grass field.