David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Then he winked at her. Mark had an excellent wink. There should be no cranial scrunch in a wink, no lip work. Too slow, and it’s silly; too fast, and it’s a tic. (Mark also had a great whistle; it could summon taxis from across the avenue.) Camera two caught Mark’s wink perfectly, and camera one recorded something like a blush rise on Margo’s face.

“Okay, you’re joking, I guess,” she said.

“Yes, Margo, I’m joking. You pretty much made me.”

“Oh, I think your work made you, Mark. Wouldn’t you say so?”

“I have and do and will. But who would believe us if we pretended that I’ve earned all this?” He put down his tea and made a gentle gesture at the lights and cameras.

“Well, as you say in your book, you futurized, committed, and strove .” She paused, looked at Mark. He lifted his hands a little bit, turned his palms up and his gaze down, and raised his eyebrows: the picture of a man sincerely doubting what he has just heard. Margo took up his slim book with both hands. “You did those things”—here she read from the flyleaf—“and what you wanted flowed to you ‘like water down a mountain, like information out of a search engine.’ I think that many, many people have found those words inspiring. Don’t you?”

“Apparently, yes.” Mark leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and templed his long fingers. He drew in breath to speak, but then held it, creating the kind of pause that, on television, feels like weeks. “And I thank those people just for listening to me. It is such an honor to be listened to. You know that, Margo.” Another pause, and something like a tiny wince on his face. “But I need to come out right now and say that my success, the success of this book, is hard for me to credit. I am all the time full of doubt, and I’m uncomfortable being described as the man with the answers.”

“Mark Deveraux is all the time full of doubt?”

“Oh, absolutely,” said Mark, perking up.

“Doubt about what?”

“Doubt as to, you know, the general shape of the curve, the fairness of the judges, the notion that we can make ourselves better.”

“But you made yourself better. You say so in your book. You write that you were a, what, a…” And Margo started to flip through the pages.

“A ‘whining, blaming, suffering zero,’” Mark supplied.

“Yeah, that. It’s so cutting. And then you discovered consciousclusions,” she prompted. “You made yourself better.”

“Well, I got better. Did I do that? Who can say? And did I discover anything? Certainly, I gave voice to something. And it’s resonated. And, again, Margo, I’m so grateful to each and every person who read or listened to a single word of mine…It’s just that I need to be clear…”

“It sounds like you’re backing down from what you said in your book, that the power to change ourselves is in all of us.” Margo straightened her back and raised her chin.

Mark took in another one of those breaths. He leaned close to Margo so that his butt lifted off the cushion, his right hand sharp-angled to the little table between them. And then he tapped the table, hard, with an index finger. Four times: tap-tap-tap-tap.

“I’m. Not. Backing. Down,” he said, one word for every tap. It was the strangest gesture that anyone had seen on the Margo! show since a chef had lit his sleeve on fire and then swatted it out with a duck breast. Mark’s arm retreated; his body settled back in the chair. “Look, Margo. We’re changing all the time. There is no stasis. But that’s incredibly good news. It means that we can always become better.”

“More successful.”

“Ahhhm, yes. More successful.” Mark had gotten a little lost. But now he saw a thread. “When I wrote what I wrote, I did so as a different person. I did it by faith. Do you remember, Margo, when you woke every day wondering whether you were on the right path?”

Margo actually nodded, involuntarily.

“Now I have this affirmation all around me,” Mark continued. “You know: the money, the people asking me what I think, what I want. And now I see that it was living in the doubt that gave my thoughts strength. It was having to place that bet on every day.”

“You know what, Mark?” said Margo. “I do remember those days. I once had to sell my piano to make a month’s rent.”

“Your piano? Oh, what a shame. Tell me about that piano.”

“It was a no-name upright that had spent forty years in a church basement. It had these beautiful flowers carved into the front of it and a sounding board that was too warped to stay in tune. But I loved it.” She smiled broadly, and was beautiful.

“I’ve read that you have twelve pianos now. Is that true?”

“Oh, Mark, I love music.”

“But what wouldn’t you give to have that first piano back, right? Well, get this: It’s not coming back. We’re all looking for our madeleine.”

“Yes. We’re all looking for someone, aren’t we,” agreed Margo.

“Of course we are. We are borne back ceaselessly.”

“That’s beautiful.”

“Thank you,” said Mark, graciously. “Yes, we are borne back ceaselessly. I suppose that’s how it will always be. My method for personal success requires that we futurize ourselves; that we see ourselves in the future being as we wish to be. But we can’t shut the door on our past. We have to be whole people.

“You see, Margo, I’ve been confused recently. Just now, before coming on with you, I was meditating, trying to futurize. But I’ve been thinking of my father lately. It was on this day, ten years ago, that he died.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Margo.

Mark did not know the date of his father’s death, but it seemed to him perfectly plausible just then that it was the anniversary of his father’s death. And, though he hadn’t consciously thought of his father in weeks, when Mark heard Margo say the word sorry, he knew she was for real, and he felt a stone of grief rise in his throat. “So I guess that’s what I’ve been going through. And it’s been making my practice more difficult. The very practice that I’m trying to teach to others…now I find that I don’t always have access to it.” The stone in his throat was melting away. But Margo was hanging on his words now. He could feel it: ten million people wanted him to cry.

So he thought of his little dog, from long ago. An off-brand terrier named Monopoly who used to poke through the tall grass and broken bottles with Mark endlessly in the long lot that gave way to scrubby pine woods behind the Gasso station. One night Monopoly puked grass and chicken bones on Mark’s new Star Wars bedspread; Mark was livid, chased the dog outside, roughly, and went to sleep without her. Two raccoons, hopped up on garbage, opened her up during the night, ripped apart her soft, low-slung belly with stinking teeth and sickle claws. Mark may have heard the attack, Monopoly’s yelps colored his dream and woke him briefly. But he didn’t go to his dog because he was a little boy and afraid of the night outside: the sodium lights and bashed trash dumpsters with drooling stains; the chill, wet ground and the warm tar streets. Maybe he made up the part about hearing Monopoly’s murder; he would never be sure. Nor would he ever tell any of this to anyone. And he never forgave the Star Wars tchotchke mill, or Luke Skywalker, the soiling of whose prissy image had caused him to betray his dearest friend.

Mark closed his eyes and shook his head slightly. “I must now seem an odd sort to be talking about how to achieve success and serenity, Margo.” He bit his lower lip with whitened teeth, Clintonishly. He remembered how Monopoly sat still beside him while he built elaborate marble slides around the kitchen with lengths of pine siding he found beneath the house. How, when she woke beside him in the morning and stretched, she seemed to rub her eyes with the backs of her sandy paws. A wave of pure grief climbed through his chest and throat and settled in his jaw, where the camera caught it quivering. Tears came to his eyes, and when he spoke next, his voice was thickened by the humidity in his head. “I’m sorry. I suppose I should have prepared better.” Margo’s studio audience was rapt, enraptured. Across America, women saw a strong man crying about something abstract.