Jokes made her happy. I crammed my paragraphs full of every old joke I could remember.
Up top of each new chapter, I placed an epigraph. I copied out of my notebooks a quote that my same clumsy fingers had, earlier that year, just copied in. That book is the dance card of ideas we shared in the foyer of our joint life. A dance card where the partner's name was already printed in, a given. I wrote down only the steps themselves, the ideational dips and sways from the course of that evening when C. was my one date, the lone museum guard of all my thoughts.
Sometimes the steps were literal. One night, I read her a chapter so short it left us more time than even love could fill. She'd listened well; it was time for a walk. We drifted out, a slow, deliberate stroll along the parkway that flanked the trolley tracks out to the suburbs.
In the chapter, my contemporary technical editor, in a city much like B., had journeyed home to his immigrant mother in Chicago to find mysterious papers up in the family attic binding him to an unknown past. The passage back left C. expansive.
"I like that guy of yours," she said. "I like your Lithuanian graffiti on the sidewalks. Do you have any idea what it feels like to be the puppy raised by ducks?"
"Tell me."
She heaved a sigh. "I've been to more Polish weddings than I can count."
"Well, we know about your head for figures."
She laughed and flank-attacked. "Come on, you. Let's polka."
"The polka is no more than a spot of local color from out of Washington Square, I'm afraid."
"Don't be afraid," C. purred. She could be coy at times. Funny. I'd forgotten. "Here. I'll show you."
She stomped it out for me. I was comic, crippled, a laughingstock. But she stuck with me. Of all the countless thousands of things C. taught me, that polka might be the best. I picked it up somewhere along the length of that greenway down which we hurled ourselves, a couple of parka-packed, manic Polacks making tracks into the Arctic dark.
"It makes me sad, Beau," she told me, another chapter night, perhaps halfway through.
I panicked in the space of a phrase. "What? Something's off? I can fix it. Don't worry; it ends happily."
"Not that, silly. It makes me sad. You have this — work. And I have nothing."
"I don't get it. I thought you liked putting on that uniform."
"Oh, I did. And it's still the greatest job in the world. In some ways."
"What's wrong, then?"
She wasn't sure. She still loved the paintings. But they had started to fade into overlearned monochrome. Standing in place for so long began to fog her. The boss was growing creepy. She felt embarrassed explaining herself to others. Ashamed of doing less than she might.
"Maybe we should look around for a new job?" The "we" that would take such toll on her.
"It's the middle of winter. Nobody's hiring. Besides, what am I qualified to do?"
"Well, I don't know. Anything. If the job you have is making you crazy—"
"I know, I know. I need something more than just a paycheck. The problem is, I'm not ambitious. Put me on a rug, I'll lie there forever."
" 'Put me out on the lawn and I'll wail'?"
She clouded. "It's not funny. I'm sorry I ever showed you that picture." I tickled her to re-create that infant expression.
"Quit it!"
"I'll give you prickling."
"Don't, Beau. Not now. This is serious."
"So serious we can't—"
The obvious yes stopped me in mid-cliche.
"What's the matter?" I asked. Ready, already, to be dead.
"It's your story." She looked down, away. Anywhere but at me. "It makes me feel worthless. I know it's awful. Do you hate me?"
She got a new job. A friend of mine from the computer world tipped C. to an opening. Wire operator in a brokerage. "Not something I'm going to make a career of," C. joked.
But something to engage her, salve the sense of self. She came home animated again. As I fed her, she entertained me with tales of eccentric colleagues, wigged out on Opportunity Loss. Her accounts of that quintessential late-twentieth-century business delighted me. The parasitic middlemen, extracting margin from the news feed, the Teletype romances and tragedies. The spigot attached to the pipeline, leveraging profit and hedging loss as it trickled through capital's tap.
So I did the only thing imaginable. I went back and worked her new material into the book as well as I could. The market and mad brokers became yet another subplot. I fit it in, between jokes from the front and tales from the tech editing crypt, between the Maas and the Rhine, between the war and its permanently militarized peace, between the Great Personalities and the clueless lives, between fairyland and documentary fact, the aperture and the print, then and now, filthy lucre and the Fine Arts.
What did the finished thing mean? It meant that our private reservoir, when face-to-face with the outside, is all we have that might help a little. That book was no more than a structured pastiche of every report I'd ever heard, from C. or abroad. All a patchwork to delight and distract her. One that by accident ate her alive.
The key to that book, the one that preserves it for me, is that the triple braid — the magic driehoek of the photograph — fails to come together as expected. The lens does not have the last word, nor does the glance of the viewer, nor does the look of those boys, out over the shoulder of the photographer, back behind the lens. The dominant tense was now. The point of stories was what you did with them.
With my last chapter, the charm broke. I knew it in advance. I saved every trick I had for the end, to break her heart and win her for the present, forever. But of course, a return to feeling only made things worse. I read her the ending. Lovemaking stayed silent this time, skin more a checkpoint between us than a visa in.
"What will you do with it now?" C. asked.
"I don't know." The plot had gotten away from me. Escaped its frame. "Send it out, I guess."
Too rapidly, she agreed. "Of course. You have to."
Only the usual literary biography would have saved us. Fifteen years of waiting to be taken. Growing stronger, closer to each other on the mound of rejection slips, which we'd have burned for fuel.
The day we heard the book had been bought, we celebrated. Cheer felt forced and punch-drunk. C. assumed the virtue of excitement as bravely as she had managed each chapter up until then. But she was like a mother losing her preschooler to the talk-show circuit.
She tried to show enthusiasm for the production process. She pitched in, but her heart had bolted. She hated those grubbers in New York touching the manuscript, even to typeset it. It killed her to watch those fanners make their way into the brutal market. To see them join the ranks of the century's displaced.
She would never again listen to a word I wrote without suspicion. Endings, from now on, betrayed her. Simple associative fact: it wasn't even a question of remembering. What chance does story have against neurons that generalize from a single instance?
The week we learned the book's publication date, C. received an offer of promotion. The brokerage wanted her to run their Operations cage. The jump, steep and quick in coming, surprised no one but C. She was alone in never knowing how competent she was.
The offer could not have come at a better time. C. needed something, and nothing that I could give. A hurried, three-week trip to Limburg to check on her folks left her edgier than ever. Not even walks worked any longer. A real career might be no more than a changeling baby. But even a changeling can take up the slack of care.
She had some days to decide. We spent them spinning skeins of reassurance. "You'll be great at it. They wouldn't have asked you otherwise."