Boutique cynicism.
“There’s a saying that goes,” says the lawyer, “if you want a million-dollar verdict, start with a million-dollar client.”
The party of the first part is definitely a million-dollar client. Without giving away specifics that I can’t give away, let’s just say that through pretty much admitted negligence on the part of the party of the second part (do they really write like this, lawyers?), something horrible happened to the party of the first part, and I’m not on the jury that’s deciding how much the party of the first part will get, in economic and non-economic damages. (We are instructed not to consider punitive damages, though the party of the second part ought to have it coming.) Instead, I’ve been hired for the day to sit on a fake jury, so the lawyers for one part or another can figure out just how the case is likely to play out. And it’s a good temp job, as temp jobs go, and there’s something engaging about sitting in a room with five other people and laying out why you think thus-and-so, and listening to other people say why they think this-and-that, and figuring out where the boundaries are and the middle ground and the size of the ballpark, and then figuring out what game you’re playing in it, and everybody being more solicitous than usual in such circumstances, hearing each other out and paying attention, because even though this is fake, it’s still close enough to something we were all taught was holy, in a secular sort of way. (No one’s been sued, among the six of us, that I know of. I doubt anyone’s been arrested.)
But we are basically deciding what the party of the first part gets for the trauma; for having this event occur, and affect them. The economic damages—lost wages, medical expenses—are undisputed. It’s merely the bonus money, in a way. It’s not like something like this happens every day; there’s no going rate for this event. We have to pluck a number, pretty much out of thin air. (How much longer will the party of the first part live? How much does that break down to, per year? What’s a good, round number?) We get hung up, arguing over the final amount—we have our good round number, but some want the agreed-upon economic damages added to this number; others want the economic and non-economic to add up to the number, which the jurors of the first part claim is unfair, as, if the party of the first part had made more money, say, the economic damages would then have been higher (more wages to have been lost), and the non-economic damages thereby lower—in effect, punishing the party of the first part for being a more productive member of society. (And in fact, the lawyers for one part or another were curious as to the possible effect the relative affluence of the party of the first part might have on this aspect of the proceedings.)
—The book I’d brought with me was The Royal Family, which I’m re-reading for whatever reason, and I’d been in the middle of the “Essay on Bail” when the paralegal came down to let me into the building. So maybe I’m worrying overmuch about the price of everything and the value of nothing, but it seems to me we’re dealing with a singular event, here; I don’t want this to have a going rate. (I don’t want it ever to happen again.) It seems to me important, then, to signal this (somehow, but to whom?) by joining the jurors of the second part. Let it be a flat number, overall. What does it matter, at this level? I don’t think we ever settled it, but the basic questions had been answered, so we were free to go. Here’s your check.
It wasn’t until today, reading “The False Irene,” that I remembered the three guys in the toy store. Coming around the corner, looking for the Legos, and hitting the—smell, that was the first thing: sweet, but the sort of sweetness I used to smell when I had the problem with my ingrown toe and couldn’t afford to have it looked at. It’s a high, bad sweet smell, the sort of smell that reminds you sugar is a poison. There’s a sour roundness to it, a saltiness almost, approaching that corn-chip smell of old socks—a stale, burring undertone to the high strange keening of that sweetness. The smell coming off these three, or one of the three, I don’t know: a man with a mustache, black hair shining unwashed under the lights, a black jacket, smeared; he’s throwing boxes of Legos to the floor, laughing. Two—kids?—one was a middle schooler, I think; the other older. I do not have a clear picture of them. (He wasn’t throwing Legos to the floor. He knocked one box down—on purpose, I think—and picked it up, shaking it. Shaking it in the face of the older kid. “I broke it,” he said, rattling the Legos around inside the box. “I broke it.”) —But that smell; that smell. I’m wondering, now, later, how much he would have gotten. Had that event, you know, happened to him, instead.
(As a side note: Vollmann’s Amazon page currently notes that customers who bought titles by William T. Vollmann also bought titles by these authors:
- Marcy Sheiner
- Penthouse Magazine
- Caroline Lamarche
- Rick Moody
- Paula Fox
(I somehow think he’d be amused.)
Döppelganger.
I like to imagine that he dresses better than I do, but I’m pretty sure when he’s at his computer he’s got cigarette burns on his T-shirt and cat hairs all over his sweater. We have two cats: one’s black and white, and the other a motley calico diluted with Russian blue (brindle, or so we’ve been told); upshot being no matter what I wear—the dark green, almost black sweater, the pale uncolored polar fleece—the cat hairs show up with little effort on their part. I imagine it’s the same with him.
I was writing something somewhere about love and domesticity, I was talking about (some of) the reasons why I dropped out of college, which had a lot to do with blond hair to the middle of an amazing back and a coyly winsome smile and a situation of achingly pure tragedy, or so it seemed at the time; I was going to make some point about the different kinds of love, and how the kind of love that’s usually celebrated, the kind that reaches its culmination just before the credits roll, after many wacky misadventures that end up mostly for the best and if there’s any screaming or crying it mostly involves a secondary character, somebody’s best friend, the grace note giving the whole thing its biting something of fragility, its pleasingly bitter affirmation of reality without spoiling the broth—do you remember how Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross turn to look at each other at the end of The Graduate? That’s what happens usually after most such loves burn themselves out all too quickly, that look, that empty, terrified, what-the-fuck look, and Edna may tell you that the candle burning at both ends makes for a lovely sight, but she knows, she knows that carefully husbanding a fire, building it with kindling and good dry logs with some foresight, red hair and a slippery snarky look that sneaks in under my radar, that opens and unfolds into something rich and new when I’m not looking and yet that I know, that knows herself, down to her toes; all that will last much longer, you see, and you know, fireplaces aren’t without their romance. —See? That was the point I was going to make, and then he walked in. I narrowed my eyes at him. (He still smokes.)
“I already said something with all that,” he said. And it’s true; I’d loaned him the anecdote for something else, another essay, and he’d been focussing on a different look entirely, a grin this time, or not so much a grin, from some other movie, or not from a movie, per se, but it was different; he hadn’t been making a point at all about love and domesticity, but about memory and the vagaries of sex and lust but nonetheless, there they were: the hair, the back, that smile, the unbearably beautiful angst I just wouldn’t put up with now, today. Different points entirely, but suddenly the point I was making went grey and listless; friable; ashen; and I put it away and never bothered to finish it. —Nor does it help matters much that he’s been making more money than me. Lately. Bastard.
“Whenever that pervert shows his face,” sings Momus, “my friends all think he’s me. They give him records by Squarepusher, and a box of Japanese tea.” Which isn’t exactly my problem, but I know what he means, or maybe I know what Nick Currie means. Whatever.
Camryn Manheim.
Amy and Aaron, over for beer and pizza, and in goes The Great Muppet Caper, the Empire Strikes Back of the Muppet trilogy. (Should I be putting a ™ after every Muppet™? —Ah, screw it.) Amy, of course, is on tenterhooks (after announcing the “Best. Musical number. Ever,” in her best. Comicbook guy. Voice, which is pretty darned good), waiting for the best. Line. Ever, but—as Miss Piggy, duped by the deliriously itchy Charles Grodin, takes the runway in the latest of Diana Rigg’s awful swimsuits—Amy pauses a moment and pontificates in that peculiarly Amy way: “You know, it was a hell of a long wait from her to Camryn Mannheim.” Which—ignoring the intended ironical recontextualization, and the idea of a man’s right arm in drag, and the whole host of bendings over backwards you have to perform to read just about anything the way you want to read it these days—that says something, you know, in its own modestly profound way.
And I’d forgotten how squiffy the Muppets can make me feel. And I’d forgotten John Cleese’s bit. And the best line ever? “You can’t even sing! Your voice was dubbed!”
