Extraordinary Adventures Read online

  The typing stopped. “About women? Bronfman, playa, you surprise me.” Again he appeared above the wall, jack-in-the-box style. “Consider me Mr. Answer. And if I don’t have the answer I will be happy to research it and come back with one tomorrow. Try me.”

  Nothing about Sorsby seemed authentic or trustworthy, honest or well-meaning, but none of that meant that he couldn’t help Bronfman with his problem. Maybe it was just these characteristics that actually contributed to whatever knowledge he did have, since Bronfman, who was exceptionally authentic and trustworthy, honest and well-meaning, knew next to nothing. “Shoot,” he said.

  “Okay. So. Say you meet someone, a woman, and talk, the two of you talk, engage in a conversation that both of you seem to enjoy, but that conversation comes to an end. If you wanted to continue talking at some other time, possibly even at some other venue, how would you accomplish this?”

  Sorsby stared at Bronfman blankly. “Let me stick that into Google Translate.”

  He disappeared, and Bronfman could hear him pretending to type. It was easy to tell the difference between real typing and sarcastic typing, and what Sorsby was doing now was clearly sarcastic.

  Sorsby reappeared. “So I think you mean, how does one ask a lady out on a date.”

  “Please keep your voice down,” Bronfman said. “And no, that’s not what I mean.” Asking a lady out on a date—or this specific lady—was emotional trigonometry. Bronfman needed to learn the addition and subtraction of simple conversation first. The physics of engaging with the world. Things were happening so fast! Carla D’Angelo said he had seventy-nine days: how was it everything could be happening now, on the almost very first of them? He had only a vague notion of what a real date would look like, having been on too few to say for sure. He had a feeling that his experience wasn’t really real, though, the same way he thought the food he ate at the Chinese restaurant downtown wasn’t what Chinese people ate in China.

  “I just want to talk.”

  “How old are you, Bronfman?”

  “Thirty-four,” he said.

  “You’re ten years older than I am.”

  “What are you saying? Should I be asking someone with more experience?”

  “No,” he said. “Maybe someone with less experience, actually. The challenge for me here is in understanding how a thirty-four-year-old man doesn’t know how to talk to a girl by the time he’s twelve. Because some guys are born knowing. There are cases of babies actually asking the nurses who helped deliver them out on a date not long after the cord was cut. Did you know that, Bronfman? True story.”

  “That’s not a true story,” Bronfman said.

  “No, it’s not. I was just highlighting through exaggeration how odd it is that a man your age doesn’t know how to have a conversation with a woman.”

  Bronfman did not like Skip Sorsby, he had never liked Skip Sorsby, and every day something happened to remind him why he felt that way. “Well, thank you for your helpful jokes.”

  Sorsby winked.

  “Look, if I was being a total dick I would say something glib, like Just ask her, but both of us know it’s more complicated than that. It’s how you ask. How you look when you make the ask. How nonchalant do you want to be—or do you want to be non-nonchalant? And also, you know—not my business—but you might want to think about working out a little, toning up. Presenting a better package.” He gave Bronfman the once-over. “I’m not in the greatest shape, either,” said Sorsby, who was working on a solid belly, “but for me it’s a lifestyle choice. Fatty foods are better for you. With you, it’s like you don’t give a shit.”

  This was true. Bronfman tried not to think about how he looked beneath his clothes. He avoided mirrors as he would an oncoming car.

  Sorsby chewed on the inside of his lower lip. “That about covers it, I think,” he said. He closed his eyes and placed his hands together and slowly lowered himself behind the cubicle wall, perhaps intoning some yogic prayer, where he disappeared, Bronfman hoped forever.

  Bronfman didn’t move. The sounds of the office enveloped him: the air-conditioning units, the telephone calls and angry typing, laughter, coffee slurping, a dozen whispering fans behind the grated computer towers. Then he removed three silver paperclips from the small plastic box full of paperclips to the right of his mouse, and in deliberate, precise, and yet thoughtless motions he pried and pulled and turned the soft metal until—each clip magically attached to the other—they took on the form of what looked like, what very well could have been, a giraffe. Or something like a giraffe.

  Just ask her, said the total dick.

  Good advice.

  FIVE

  He told himself that he had been planning on leaving early anyway, and there was something to that. It was his mother’s birthday—she was seventy—and the older she got the earlier she asked him to come over. (Tonight, five-thirty. If she lived to be eighty, they’d be having dinner at breakfast.) But the truth was that he had not been able to stop thinking about Sheila McNabb, not for a single instant throughout the entire day. Even when he was thinking of something else he was thinking of her, or, if not her, then of giraffes, of marmosets, of black-eyed frogs, of what it might be like to live in Paris, France, which was the same as thinking of her, because without her he wouldn’t have been thinking of any of these things at all. So he left almost thirty minutes early just so he’d be able to talk to her one more time, one more time on a day in which he had already spoken to her once.

  He wondered what might happen.

  So, he straightened his desk and put on his jacket and boarded the elevator for his lobby-bound trip. Elevators in other buildings zipped through space with the smooth velocity of those banking vacuum tubes; this elevator creaked and moaned and stopped and jumped and was slower than a two-legged dog. And yet he was glad of the length of time it took today, as he had yet to come up with anything remotely appropriate to say to Sheila McNabb, and, against his better instincts and lifetime of experience with last-minute decisions, he thought something might happen when he got there. Something had happened when they were talking earlier in the day—something wildly different from anything that had ever happened to him before—and he hoped it would happen again. He was hoping for something abnormal. But his mind was still a vast field of nothing at all when the elevator landed, and the doors groaned apart and he took a step into his future, where this woman waited to welcome him.

  But Sheila McNabb wasn’t there. At her desk was Crawford, maintenance man to the Cranston Building, looking at the telephone console with studied disdain. Crawford was from Texas, and had a cattleman’s hard-nosed, no-nonsense approach to broken things: they might try to stay broken, they might want to stay broken, but he was going to fix them—if not today then tomorrow. Bronfman had watched him assemble cubicles, install software, summon electricity from a dead socket. He was as solid as an old fighter and, since quitting smoking six years ago, kept a coffee stirring straw in his mouth that he chewed into a crumpled mass and replaced with a fresh one as soon as he was done with the old. He was a chain-chewer.

  Crawford glanced at the puzzled Bronfman. Something was awry.

  Her nameplate was gone.

  “What can I do you for?” Crawford asked him.

  “Sheila,” Bronfman said. “Sheila McNabb. The receptionist. Do you know what happened to her?”

  Crawford shrugged. “That is something I do not know. But, from what I gather, she was just here on a temporary basis. I think she’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yep, gone. She’s turned into the girl who used to work here now. Like the girl who worked here before her and the girl before that. There are so many girls.” Crawford chewed that straw. Bronfman thought he might actually be eating it.

  Bronfman nodded. “Ah, I see,” he said. “Do you think there would be any way to get in touch with her?”

  “I’m sure there is,” Crawford said. “Everybody is somewhere. But in my experience that sort of informa
tion is closely guarded by the Cranston Gestapo. Why? Did she owe you some money?”

  Crawford winked at him. Second wink of the day.

  “No,” Bronfman said. “I just wanted to tell her something. I was talking to her earlier today—”

  “I get it. You were this close to getting a little snatch and she left you with a stiffy. I talked to her a couple of times. Nice girl. Had that fresh look, but take the lid off and she was a boiling pot of water. I bet. Spank Bank material, if you know what I’m saying.”

  Bronfman didn’t know what he was saying. He wasn’t familiar with that expression. But, judging from the leer on the face of this Crawford, it was either a very good or a very bad thing, possibly both. “I was just hoping to contact her,” he said.

  Crawford wasn’t listening. “A head case, though, for sure. Happy as a clam at high tide one minute, laughing and all, then sad as a circus elephant the next. I gave up trying to understand women years ago. Not sure there’s anything there to understand, actually. Just a bunch of live wires and leaky faucets, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “I see,” Bronfman said, not seeing anything at all. He was unsure how to proceed.

  Crawford had lost interest in Bronfman, anyway, and had turned back to the console. “Okay, then,” he said. “Arrivederchi.”

  Bronfman turned and walked away from the desk where Sheila McNabb had once sat. He was on autopilot, lost in nameless emotions, confused by the term Spank Bank, probably on the way to his car. His insides felt taut, as if they were being tied into knots, tighter and tighter. He missed her. He actually felt a little lonely without her. But why? He had never even spoken to her before today. The feeling made no sense. Still, there had been a spark in the darkness of his lonesome soul, a spark that could start a fire. But then it died, and Bronfman was Bronfman again, waking as if from a trance, and found that he was in his car driving through the streets of Birmingham on the way to his mother’s home.

  SIX

  For her seventieth birthday, Bronfman had ordered his mother a pair of battery-heated socks because she said her feet were always, always cold. On the way to her house he stopped at the liquor store and bought her the scotch she loved so much, a scotch so expensive that he couldn’t even pronounce its name. Bronfman had to write the word out on a yellow Post-it and hand it to the cashier, as if it were a stickup. He wasn’t much of a scotch drinker himself, gravitating toward white wine and the occasional summer sangria. At a stoplight he looked at the bottle, which had directions on how to make a Rob Roy. One part this and another part that. Someone had thought to write these directions. Perhaps it was Sheila. Perhaps this was a sign.

  He parked, and gathered his presents. Then he gathered himself. He breathed. Because even though Bronfman loved his mother more than any other person on the planet—even though he had no one else in his life remotely close enough to him to love and it was the same for her—she was challenging, even infuriating at times. In the past few months, though, his visits to her had become tricky at best. She had become erratic—sweet, funny, vicious, forgetful. She’d never not been a free and blatantly outrageous spirit, but it was becoming clear to Bronfman that what was going on now was more than just an extension and exaggeration of who she was. He was afraid she was losing her mind.

  The house was so quiet, but it almost always was. Old people, he noticed sometimes, made no sounds at all except when they cleared their throats. Still, he imagined the worst every time he walked into this soundless gloom, one dreadful scenario after another.

  “Mom!” he called. “Mother! Muriel!”

  Nothing. He called again. He felt his heart race, veins near his ears throb.

  The back door was open. Odd. He peered outside and saw that the gate to the backyard—always shut, always—was banging against the fence in a phantom breeze. Bronfman was already rehearsing the words in his head: And that is where I found her.

  That was where he found her. Not dead but fully alive, with her back to him, on her knees, a tiny shovel in hand, digging in the dirt. She was wearing her yellow Lilly Pulitzer high-waters, a T-shirt commemorating a 5K run for something, and no shoes. Her ankles had a stegosaurian horniness to them, and her feet were deflated, deeply wrinkled, and black with dirt. They looked unsalvageable.

  “Mom? What are you doing? It’s me, Edsel.” She’d called him Frankie a few weeks ago; he wanted to make himself as clear as possible. Still, she didn’t turn around. He glanced about. The backyard had never been much of a backyard. Small, scrawny inbred treelike weeds, lunging for light; a cloud of kudzu draping the fence; grassless rocky soil; two sweet-gum trees.

  Finally, she turned to him and smiled. Her face, deeply wrinkled and smeared with mud, looked as if it had been made up for some Aboriginal magic party.

  “Looking for Barney,” she said brightly.

  “Barney?”

  She turned away and went back to digging, unearthing little treasures that he couldn’t see. Barney was the dog he’d had as a boy, from the age of ten to eleven and a half. A quarter of a century ago they had buried Barney together, after finding him on the side of the road without a mark on him—just dead, hit by a car, they gathered. She did all the digging. While Bronfman mostly watched, she set her cigarette down on the edge of a wooden fence, where it could balance and burn in the air. When she finished digging the grave, stuffing the corpse into it, and covering the hole with a dusting of dirt (Bronfman saw part of the plastic shroud that Barney had been wrapped in edging out of the divot), she reclaimed the cigarette, gave it a long, breathy pull, and said, through a lung-rattling cough, “Ashes to ashes, Edsel.”

  She was so old now. Even her ears looked old, withered, like creatures that had abandoned their shells and crawled from the sea and attached themselves to the side of her head. She’d quit smoking years ago and now chewed Nicorettes obsessively. He kind of missed the cigarettes; the smell of smoke reminded him of home. It was nice. He wanted to encourage the habit, because he couldn’t let go of the younger model, the one he’d imprinted on as a child. Even though Muriel was thirty-six when she had him, she seemed younger than all the other mothers of his set—prettier, snappier, smarter, too. A single mother, no husband or father ever even referenced, because there had never been one, except in the strictest biological sense. Bronfman was the product of a one-night stand with a man named Roy something or other. If he was an accident, which he was, then she was an accidental mother. Even when she took part in the functions one expected a mother to take part in (birthday parties, soccer games, neighborhood picnics, school events), she seemed to be attending them ironically. It was as if she were pretending to be a single white middle-class mother—a paralegal, of all things—while in reality she was something else altogether.

  True, she leveraged her charm. She was a bit of a vamp. She wore cowboy boots and skirts and blouses unbuttoned one button too far. She chewed gum with the artful ability to pop it whenever she thought she wasn’t being attended to. And she had a little mole above her lip, to the right of and just below her nose. She looked exactly like the kind of single mother who would sleep with your husband. He would learn much later, because she told him, that she was the kind who actually did. Bronfman had a lot of “uncles” wandering in and out of his life, their house, brief appearances by men with small roles, few lines. Some of them were lawyers; others were crooks those lawyers were defending. They all seemed pleasant enough, but detached in the way someone renting instead of buying is.

  But it had been some time since the last one—Uncle Rajiv. Now Bronfman was the sole man in her life, and he was watching her rob his dog’s grave. What was he supposed to do? Pull her away? Call someone? Nothing seemed to be the right thing, but standing there with a bottle of scotch and a pair of electric socks in his arms seemed especially wrong.

  And then she stopped digging. She turned and looked at her son with a smile so sunny that it flaked off some of the dried mud on her cheeks.

  “I found him,” she sa
id.

  * * *

  Bronfman followed his mother down the path back toward the house. She walked so slowly that it wasn’t clear to him whether her momentum was enough to carry her forward, as if any second she might just fall backward, or to the left or the right, and if she did he wanted to be ready to catch her. In her arms, she was holding Barney’s skull.

  But they made it inside without calamity. She regained her balance, some strength, as if the air-conditioning (always kept shockingly cold) had in it some restorative properties as well—caffeinated air. She took the skull to the stainless-steel sink and set it down like a dirty plate and turned on the water. Bronfman stood behind her, helpless.

  The water trickled out. The dirt washed off the skull in thin brown streams. Dirt he must have known as a child, dirt he must have touched. That same dirt had been on his fingers. That same dirt had been wet with his tears.

  “Look,” she said. “Amazing. That was Barney. Barney was inside there. Everything that made him him was in this little package.”

  Bronfman touched his mother’s bony shoulder. She could feel his concern. “Not to worry. Just investigating the cycle of life. I’m next up, after all.”

  She laughed and focused on the bundles he still carried in his arms—the socks, the booze—and she beamed.

  “Let’s eat,” she said. “Then drink.”

  He should have brought dinner. Why hadn’t he brought dinner? All she had was one cold chicken leg wrapped in tinfoil, a box of Triscuits, a package of stale American cheese, each slice carefully separated from the one above and the one below it by a waxy sheet of plastic, and some Dijon mustard.

  They ate off the same plate. She pushed the half-gnawed chicken leg toward him. He demurred. If he looked just a little to the left he could see into the kitchen, where Barney’s skull was drying, glowing in the fluorescent kitchen light. “Thought you’d bring something to eat,” she said, her tone shifting. “But life in a cube is hard.”