J. Lennon - The Funnies

Dorn laughed. “Don’t kid yourself, Mix. You know I have the inside track.”

“Shove off.”

I stole a glance. Across his face spread the priggish leer of a corrupt cop about to toss a ziploc bag of marijuana into my car. We stood glaring at one another for a few seconds before he turned, pointed at the counter, and said, “You’re up, buddy.”

I asked the clerk to next-day my package. She taped it back up and stuck a sticker on it. I scanned the place: Dorn was gone.

“That’s fifteen bucks,” said the clerk. I barely had the energy to take the money out of my wallet.

* * *

Two days later I had come down with the post office cold and was on my way to New York to meet Susan. I had a box of tissues wedged between the seat belt thingies and a lukewarm travel mug of mint tea in the pull-out drink holder. Pierce had put some foul powder into it that was supposed to ream out the sinuses, and though I winced with every sip, I breathed better than I had in eighteen hours. I made frequent and disgusting sounds into balled-up kleenexes, which coated the floor of the car to a depth of several inches. I was not one to pretend I wasn’t sick.

Parking a Cadillac in New York was no small feat, so I gave up entirely and resorted to a garage. If things somehow managed to work out, I figured I could deduct the cost. I stuffed a wad of fresh tissues into my jacket pocket, and emerged into the cab-agitated air of New York. With my head in such a state, every gentle breeze felt like a sock in the jaw; I was convinced I could feel Brownian motion at work on every follicle of my hair.

I had expected to be on edge about Burn’s impending decision, but for some reason — the inner dullness the cold had brought on, perhaps, or the fatalistic fog encounters with Dorn invariably put me in — I was completely relaxed. I rode the elevator to the syndicate with a kind of objective calm: whatever happened, I told myself, it would have no more or less power over me than if I was watching it happen to someone else.

For this reason, I was more than a little surprised to find myself panicking at the sight of Susan sprinting past the receptionist’s desk, holding a giant cardboard box. I leapt out of the elevator, head pounding, as she vanished into the stairwell. The receptionist sat very still, her eyes round as cherry tomatoes.

“Susan?” I said. The stair door sucked shut and I could hear her footsteps faintly echoing off the concrete walls.

I ran to the door and flung it open. “Susan! Is that you?”

The footsteps stopped. I could hear her breathing. I looked down the long shaft and saw a hand, two floors below, gripping the rail. “Who is that?”

“It’s me, Tim!”

“Tib?”

“Tim!” I hollered. “I have a cold!” I hurried down the stairs, my throat feeling brittle and untethered, rattling loose in my neck. She had already begun walking again, slower now, by the time I reached her.

“Where are you going?” I said. Her face was tight and furious, like a welterweight’s.

“Out.”

I was having trouble keeping up. My nose had begun to run, and I fished a tissue from my pocket to wipe it. “What about Burn? I thought…”

“Don’t bother,” she said. “You didn’t get it.”

I stopped on a landing. She kept going. “I didn’t?”

She reached the next landing, then turned, slumping against the wall. “No.”

“Dorn got it.”

“Dorn always had it.”

“And you knew that?”

She put the box down. “No, I actually thought you had a chance. But you didn’t. So.”

“So?”

“So I quit.”

I looked down into the box: tape dispenser, photos, plush armadillo toy. I started slowly down the steps, keeping my eyes on her face, which in its anger and humiliation had taken on a dozen harsh new folds. She looked like a pug dog. She was mad . My mind raced. “You quit?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t quit!” I blurted, and immediately I wanted to take it back, because the train of thought I had taken to get to it suddenly came chugging into view: if you quit, then who’s going to support us when we move in together?

“Why not?”

“Because…Because…” I had almost reached her now. She bent over and picked up her box.

It was then that I had a kind of epiphany. I saw Susan, really saw her, in a new way. At first this perception wouldn’t entirely reveal itself to me, the way a mysterious shape in a dark room takes a moment or two to resolve through light-drunk eyes. She was no longer the old thing but was not yet the new thing, with her blouse crooked around her neck and her bra strap cleaving the flesh of her shoulder. She was undergoing a kind of phase change.

And then, as she stood, I had it: I knew how I would draw her. I knew how I might do the liquid squiggle of her hair and the unlipsticked perpetual half-grin of her mouth, and the assemblage of concentric roundnesses that was her body. More significantly, I had at last come to a sense of the wholeness of her, of what she meant . Of her body’s truck with her brain.

I also understood that this wasn’t a revelation about her at all. It was about me.

“Do you think I like working for these people?” she was saying. “The boy king and his loyal subjects? I’m quitting because they insulted you, Tim.”

“I…I love you,” I said, apropos of nothing. Her jaw dropped.

“Bullshit!”

“No, really.”

She put down the box a second time and moved a step closer. There was something unfamiliar in her eyes, something that looked like it might give. “You remember I said I’d kick your butt.”

“I know. I…don’t have anything. A job, money, anything. I’m living off my brother.”

“But you love me.”

“Yeah.”

She took my hands and, stepping up to meet me, kissed me on the lips. “Then it’s safe.”

“Safe?”

“For me to love you,” she said.

I felt, however clumsily, that this was true, though I hadn’t the wherewithal to figure out how. No matter. “Sure,” I said. “It’s safe.”

* * *

We worked things out in the car. She would get out of her apartment, which, having quit her job, she could no longer afford. She assured me that quitting was a long time coming. “Don’t go feeling all guilty about it,” she told me. “I’ve felt like scum since the day I set foot in that cathouse.” And she would stay with us for a few days until she could find a place somewhere — Mixville, Titusville, anywhere — to live while she sorted things through.

It all sounded fine to me. We wouldn’t move in together, not right away, anyway, so that I could help get my mother settled. I told Susan I wanted to live at home for a while to be with her. “And then, who knows?”

“Right.”

We talked about our sudden freedom without regret, with something like joy. I was beginning, on this ride home, to see my life as something I could fill up, rather than something I was stuck in, and my family, for the first time, the same way. For better or worse, my mother’s decline would bring us together, in the place we ought to have been truly together in the first place. I was full of high hopes for everyone: for Bobby to relax, for Sam to sleep, for Bitty and Mike to reconcile. I saw us rallying around our mother like destitute burghers after a hurricane, eager to set things right, and secretly happy for the new opportunities, new beginnings.

Then we got home, the pair of happy failures, and walked into a house so gummed up with gloom that we could barely push through the doorway. Mal and Pierce sat across the kitchen counter from one another, their heads in their hands, and Gillian stood behind my brother, gently running her hand up and down his back. She looked up at Susan and me, and so did Mal, and I could tell by the pitiful wrecks of their faces that my mother was dead.