He asked for two weeks off from his column, then three. When he finally brought himself to cobble together a review, of Jeff Koons’s window installation at the New Museum, it was immediately rejected, on grounds of being, as the Arts editor’s squeaky assistant Seth had put it, vacuous.
“Well, it should be vacuous!” James yelled at Seth. “The installation is a bunch of vacuums! Form as content, Seth! Didn’t they teach you anything in journalism school?”
Seth just stuttered a half-assed apology, hung up on James.
This was only the first of many rejections that followed, from the paper that had so confidently published him for years, given him his own little corner of newsprint in which to spill his every whimsical thought. Each rejection came with a new qualifier from Seth: impersonal, unrealistic, lacking oomph. When Marge flicked through the Sunday paper to the Arts section, like she always did, James made the excuse that he was working on a more research-based piece that was taking him longer than most, and that he’d be in next week’s, don’t worry. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her about the rejections; he still wanted to prove the Times, and himself, wrong. He needed to keep trying.
But another month passed without a bite from the newspaper. And then two. And then finally, in June, they gave away the column completely. To someone, according to Seth, “whose interests were more in line with the publication’s.” Seth added tentatively: “Oh, and Mr. Bennett? He asked me to tell you not to send any more submissions through.”
“Excuse me?” James said.
“He says your time at the Times is done,” Seth said. “Okay?”
Not okay. In the lead on James’s List of Running Worries: that losing his invisible powers had rendered him completely invisible. Close behind: that he was a terrible human being for not telling any of this to Marge. But he didn’t want to worry her; and how she worried! He of all people knew how unproductive and paralyzing worrying could be, and he did not want to weigh on her, like he always seemed to.
So he didn’t tell her; he couldn’t. Not in June, when Marge’s grandfather had a stroke; not in July, when he died in his sleep and she took three weeks off of work to be with her family in Connecticut; not in August, when their apartment got so hot that the slightest disturbance would surely lead to a screaming match; this was divorce weather. It wasn’t until September, when he was meant to give his metaphor lecture at Columbia, and then, fearing he would have no metaphors to talk about and would have to stand in silence in front of all those eager faces, called the program director and canceled, that he knew the problem was too big to hide. Not to mention the fact of their joint savings account, which was dipping into the red zone in a way it hadn’t before, pulling James’s confidence and heart down with it. He’d have to tell her. That he was not an upstanding American citizen / valid human / real man, and that he had been keeping this fact from her for the better part of the year.
He took her to a diner on Sixth Avenue, where they went when they wanted to feel like real New Yorkers. At the tail end of a mostly quiet breakfast, he pressed one of his hands over the smooth part of his head, inhaled as much air as was available in the stuffy, bacon-aired room.
“If I tell you something,” he said, wishing with all his might that it wasn’t fall, that so much time had not passed, “will you promise not to be angry?”
“Why would I be angry?” Marge said.
Next to Marge at the diner counter was an elderly woman with a pearl ring and puffy curls, and when Marge said this the woman chuckled, seeming to impart that of course she was going to be angry, a woman was always angry at her husband for one thing or another. For a second James imagined it was Marge as an old woman, and he was an old man, and they were sitting here under these diner lights as old people who had spent their entire lives together, living inside the bubble of all the unspoken things that being old together entailed. Suddenly James felt that there was no more time left on the planet.
“They took away my column,” he blurted.
“What do you mean? Why?”
He watched Marge’s hand press into the speckled Formica counter. The knuckles raised like a small, knotty hill. This was Marge when matters concerning real life were on the line: all knuckles.
“But it’s because,” he went on, seeing that she was unclear on how to react. “It’s because… well, don’t think I’m insane, but… the strawberries are gone.”
He looked from the hand and into his wife’s face. The face had gone pale.
“My strawberries?” she said. Her face retracted, as if she had been slapped.
“Yes,” he said. “And everything else, too.”
“And that’s why they scrapped your column?”
“I’ve tried. So hard. I’m trying so hard. I’ve sent in fifteen articles now. Maybe twenty. None stuck. Nothing is sticking. It’s like my brain was switched off or something. It’s just… blank.”
The old woman got up abruptly to go to the bathroom, patting her cloud of hair with her hands. James was thankful and embarrassed.
“James, I don’t even know what to say.”
“Say it will come back.”
“How could I say that? How would I know that? I’m just hearing this, James. My first time hearing this. You told me you were doing something that needed research.”
“I didn’t mean to not tell you, or to lie, or… anything. I just didn’t want to make you upset. I didn’t want to be the disappointing man that I always am. The burden that I always am.”
“You’re not disappointing.”
“I am.”
“You’re not disappointing, James. But you cannot lie to me. That’s part of the deal. It’s part of the real-life deal. I don’t care if you aren’t making money. But I need to know about it.”
“I know that, but I just… I didn’t want to give up. I still don’t want to give up.”
“Do you think you should, though?” she said. She said it quietly, and even kindly, but she said it.
“What?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I feel like — for both of our sakes — maybe you need to think about what’s going to work for you. For us. You’re a part of a relationship, we’re an us, remember? Something bad happened, we lost our baby, and I get it. I feel it, too. I want to go into a hole and never come out. But that was nine months ago, James, and now you have to move on. You have to be a real human in the world just like the rest of us. You have to help me. You have to work. Especially if we want to try again, with another baby.”
James felt a dull ache in his chest: an ache he had expected but that still ached. On his Running List of Worries: that another baby was an impossibility due to the fact that his sperm were lame, near invisible little tadpoles that couldn’t navigate the treacherous terrain of his wife’s insides. Though they were taking all the necessary steps — taking Marge’s temperature religiously, keeping a journal that tracked her ovulation, having sex in the kitchen, if her timer happened to go off when they were in the middle of dinner — there was something off about the whole thing, and both of them knew it. And that something, they both also knew, was James. It was as if Marge’s eggs could sense in James’s sperm the just-not-himself-ness of their creator. Before, when he had had his colors, he had seen his sperm as a brilliant fireworks show, a whole Fourth of July celebration complete with the national anthem and hot dogs and fun barbecue smoke, taking off into his wife. Now: lame tadpoles.