Colson Whitehead - Apex Hides the Hurt

It did not take long for the couple sitting next to him at the bar to interrupt his noodling. Jack and Dolly Cameron. He’d overheard them talking about houses they’d passed on the way to the hotel, as they formed from exteriors conjectures about interiors that might meet their needs. Behind that window or that one was a family room, surely there was room for a home office and a place for visiting in-laws to sleep twice a year. The man addressed the side of his face. “You here for the Help Tour?”

“Help Tour? No—”

“Not everybody’s here for the conference, Jack.” She smiled.

“It’s a natural question,” her husband snapped. She looked down at her drink and he continued, “Everybody in here is on some kind of business. Why else would they be here?” Jack returned his attention to him. “What’s your line of work?”

“Consulting.”

“What kind of consulting?”

“I’m a nomenclature consultant. I name things like new cars and toothbrushes and stuff like that so that they sound catchy. You have some kind of insurance policy to reassure people or make them less depressed so they can accept the world. Well you need a reassuring name that will make them believe in the insurance policy. Or you have a new breath freshener. Now who would want to buy a brand of breath freshener called Halitotion ? No one would buy that. So I think up good names for things.”

“Wow,” Dolly said.

“You’re here about the town’s new name,” Jack said. “Heard about that.”

He nodded. Jack wore khaki pants and a blood-red sweater. White collar erupted out of the V-neck. How did they skew, the demographic of two sitting next to him? He wrote the script: Jack had responsibilities, he was climbing the ladder, but was trying to hang on to some notion of the youth rake. On Saturdays he put on his old college sweatshirt and hunkered over the papers he had to get through by Monday a.m., as if putting on sweats could take the sting out of working on the weekend. There were stains from his glory days, from poker marathons and touch football. The detergent was never what it was cracked up to be and Jack was grateful for that, because those stains were reservoirs of hope, and cherished as such, accounting for all those lost years.

Dolly was also decked out in the national khakis, accented by a seaweed-green blouse. A small string of pearls cupped her neck, and when her husband said something that diminished her, she ran a finger across the pearls to reaffirm their presence. Perhaps she did this to remind her of his affection, perhaps the necklace was an asset she might pawn one day as part of her exit strategy. According to the script, she had a full-time job, nine to five, but outside the nine to five there were hormonal hours, and she cocked her ear to their little ticking. Thus her earnest talk about bedrooms, and how far away the kids’ rooms should be and the system of who would get out of bed to soothe on what days of the week. Jack drank scotch, Dolly nursed a vodka tonic. He had no idea what a Help Tour was at that point, but he liked the name.

“Winthrop sounds nice,” Jack said. “Sounds distinguished. I mean look around this bar, the history. But I think Lucky is up to something with his idea. I mean this is the twenty-first century. Sometimes you got to catch up with what’s going on.” His watch clinked as Jack rested his arm on the bar. It was an expensive watch, and made its way into the script: poking out of the sleeve of his sweater, it told Jack what he was working for, and what he had achieved.

“It is a homey little place, though,” Dolly said. “We came a day early to look at property,” she informed him, grinning away.

“I’m not saying it’s not a nice place to raise kids, honey. I’ll tell you, brother, where we are now, the housing stock has gone through the roof. We go out to see a place from the newspaper—”

“—or our realtor drives us out there—”

“—and what you’re getting for the price is a damn bungalow. There are these retirees who try to get ten—”

“—twenty—”

“—times what they bought their houses for thirty years ago. Move to Florida with that money. But for a couple like us—”

“—bedroom for each of our kids and a guest room at least—”

“—it doesn’t make any sense.”

Muttonchops offered his back to them, obviously eavesdropping despite the occasional cover gesture, smearing a cloth across a glass, turning labels on bottles face out. He wondered what he would have made of their little back-and-forth if he hadn’t been looking into their faces, cataloging every twitch. Their tag-team wrestling match with the domestic world. It was in the little gestures that he found the true meaning of what they were saying, in what their hands darted toward, in how their eyebrows and lips tilted, dipped, and scurried about their faces. It was there he saw the honesty.

In the old days, these were his Great Unwashed, the clueless saps who came to his names and connotations seeking safe shores and fresh starts. Try This, it will spackle those dings and dents in your self. Try New and Improved That, it will help keep your mind off the decay. But he didn’t feel that warm old happy feeling of condescension in the bar that day. He hadn’t felt it for a long time. All he felt now was envy. These people had expectations. Of the world, of the future, it didn’t matter — expectation was such an innovative concept to him that he couldn’t help but be a bit moved by what they were saying. Whatever that was.

“And the schools.”

“School system going to pot. Do you know in some classes they have kids who don’t speak a word—”

“—of English—”

“—the English language. Mangling it. Now, I heard how Lucky just gave a heap of money to the little elementary school here. So you can see what he’s trying to attract.”

“Right,” he said.

“When I first heard about this conference last year, I thought, that’s the middle of nowhere. But look, XMB has moved down here and I went to college with their CEO and he sings the praises. Listening to the guy, fuck. Barbecuing. Never flipped a burger in his life and he’s barbecuing. Just barbecuing. Added 30 percent to his workforce and at a fraction of what it would have cost back west. Hell, I’d be barbecuing too, hours I put in.”

She shook her head. “He’s always at the office.”

“Working those hours. XMB and Ambiex last year, but this year there’s a whole new bunch coming down to check this place out. You gotta think, if it’s not us, it’s gonna be someone else and the plum spots’ll run out. From a fiscal point of view it makes sense if you can get around the thing of picking up stakes.” He slapped his palm on the table and startled everyone. “If they want to change the name of the town to bring things up to date I say let ’em. I think Lucky’s proposal is a great idea. Bottom-line-wise.”

“Did you come up with the new name?” Dolly asked.

“Not me, the company I used to work for. And it’s not the new name yet — it’s only a proposal. There’s been a little controversy in town over whether or not it’s appropriate. I’m here to arbitrate, you might say.”

“I think it fits. Winthrop —that’s a bit old school, don’t you think? Three martini lunches and cholesterol and all that?”

“I think it’s quaint.”

“Her father owns a bank. This is his kind of place. You should have seen our wedding.”

“Oh Jack.”

“The ice swan alone.”

“Jack.”

“Okay, okay. Well I think your company does good work. I think New Prospera is a great name.”

He raised his mug to New Prospera. That’s one vote for you.

. . . . . . . .