J. Lennon - The Funnies

“Yeah, sure.”

She started at the beginning, filling in far more detail than I had. She was once an editor at a cookbook publisher, and the fiancé had been, and still was, a food photographer, who couldn’t cook to save his life but knew a good-looking meal when he saw one. They met at the publication party for a cookbook written by a famous talk show host’s chef. A lot of the talk show host’s friends were there — movie people, some sports figures, a U.S. senator. Susan found herself pushed into a corner with the photographer, who complained to her about the buffet tables, that the white tablecloths showed stains, that the food wasn’t being replenished fast enough. Susan complained about the chef himself, his proud arrogance and mustache yeasty with recent meals.

“I should have known,” Susan said. “Complaining in the first five minutes. We complained all night.”

They became lovers, attended parties together, slept over a lot. Their relationship consisted mostly of talking about the collective output of mankind, or at least Manhattan, ferreting out the poseurs, seeking honesty with a dogged, almost desperate persistence, yet remaining more or less aloof about one another’s hopes, fears, etc. “The standard stuff,” she said. “Too boring for Lyle. We were normal people, and he was not interested in normal people, and for the time being neither was I.”

Lyle suggested he move in with her, as she had the larger apartment in the better neighborhood, and so he did.

“Now at this point,” she said, “I figured the lid would come cracking off this arch little critic thing we had going, and we’d start spooning out the goo. But it didn’t happen.” If anything, they became, thanks to the sheer volume of their critical output, even more detached. Their everyday discourse had the tenor of a book review: mild enthusiasm thinly obscuring deep disdain. “For me, the dissatisfaction was about the dissatisfaction. I mean, I liked everything but the constant nitpicking. That sounds foolish, I know, but I suppose I had invented a rich inner life for Lyle that in retrospect it seems he didn’t have. Or if he did, it wasn’t the one I’d imagined.”

She began to prod him a little about his feelings, question his criticisms. It became a game, an extension of the old detachment, but this time focused on him. Then he began to do it back. For the last six months, both were on edge most of the time, though they never thought to stop and make a truce. Apparently the game itself still felt normal — it was, after all, a version of what had held true for two and a half years — and Susan didn’t connect it to the anxiety she was feeling. “I had just switched jobs, to Burn Features. I figured I was stressed over that.”

Then, one night, they were playing the game, criticizing a movie they’d seen in which a woman leaves a man. Susan argued she had every right to leave; Lyle thought she had a responsibility to him.

“But she didn’t see it that way,” Susan said.

“But that’s the way it was,” Lyle said.

“Not for her,” Susan said.

“Everybody doesn’t get their own personal view of things that they can act on,” Lyle said. “There have to be rules. Or I could go committing heinous acts whenever I wanted.”

“But you wouldn’t. Most people don’t want to.”

“Because the rules have told them they shouldn’t.”

“What if there were no rules? What would you do if there weren’t rules?”

Lyle considered a moment. “Leave you.”

That hung in the air for a moment. Then Susan said, “What rule is keeping you?”

“I owe it to you to stay.”

“You owe me nothing,” she said. So he left.

* * *

“I thought we were still playing the game,” Susan told me. She licked her lips. There was something terrifying about her face in its pure and open expressiveness; the whole of her could be seen there by anyone who wanted to look. It was as if she’d left her car unlocked in a bad part of town. “There was no change in tone,” she said, “no escalation of emotion, nothing. He just walked out, then came back for his camera equipment in a few days.”

I had been plucking grass from the ground between my legs as she talked, and now when I looked down I noticed a small bare circle, which I had cleared. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be.” She shook her head. “I hated him. I’m not just saying that, either. I hated him all that time and didn’t even notice. That’s how clueless I am. I let myself be in love with a guy I totally hated, and when he left me I cried like a little friggin’ girl.”

“And now?”

“Now I don’t even much like me.”

* * *

We went on some rides. Susan headed straight for the tilt-a-whirl and insisted on riding it over and over, with the unhinged scowl of a mad Civil War lieutenant driving again and again, with tragic hopelessness, into enemy lines. Afterward we tried the Ferris wheel. It turned out to be pretty slow after all. Several times it stopped turning entirely, due to some ominous mechanical trouble, and as we swung in silence at the top of the world, I looked down at the crowd and picked out the Family Funnies characters in their plush, outsized costumes, frolicking maniacally in the dust below. “Is that you?” Susan asked, pointing.

“I think that’s my brother.”

We watched in silence as the surrogate Bobby made his way through the throng of revelers, throwing his arms in the air, doing little dances. It was disconcerting, like watching Mickey Mouse get drunk. Then I noticed Mal. He was sitting on a bench, holding an ice cream cone and gazing into the sky, perhaps at the Ferris wheel, perhaps at me. His glasses, reflecting sun, were twin glinting blobs that made my eyes pucker. I held up my hand against them.

What was he doing here alone? I couldn’t recall ever seeing him at FunnyFest before. Once, he even told me that he didn’t like what my father turned into during the ‘Fest, when Riverbank took him into its greedy arms.

Or was I making that up? Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember it actually happening. With the afterimage of Mal’s glasses still burning in my eyes, everything seemed to have an equal chance at truth or falsehood. Even my childhood memories were open to interpretation. When my sight came back, Mal was gone, and the Ferris wheel jerked into action.

After the ride, I wanted to find the characters, to see how the costumes looked close up, but they had all disappeared, as if evading me. I forgot about them for a while, but when Susan and I were waiting in line for foot-long hot dogs I saw my mother ducking behind some shrubs that ran along the fence about forty feet away.

“Can I leave you here a second?” I said. “I want to check something out.”

“Sure.”

I walked along the bushes, trying to find the gap the false Dot had passed through. For some time, I could see nothing. Then, feet: giant orange cartoon feet, milling around barely visible behind the hedgerow. I ducked down as far as I could, closed my eyes, and plunged through the branches, emerging in a peculiar cul-de-sac, a gumdrop-shaped space between the shrubs and the weathered wooden fence that demarcated the fairgrounds’ border. It seemed to have once been the site of a ticket booth or power station, now removed. In it stood six teenagers, smoking marijuana, each dressed up as a member of my family. I identified the Tim costume immediately by the striped T-shirt I was always made to wear in the strip. Its inhabitant, a thin-faced girl with a squint, held my head under her right arm.

“Hey, man,” she said. “I know you.”

But I didn’t know her. I didn’t know any of them. There was something familiar about each, though: a bend of the nose or an expanse of forehead that might have been hallmarks of Riverbank’s stagnant genetic pool. But the girl I didn’t recognize at all.