The Enthusiast Read online

  I went up to my apartment. It occurred to me that it couldn’t have been Jillian who’d said, “Fuck you,” to Rensselaer the first time he called me. She didn’t talk like that. Maybe it was Suzanne.

  I was almost at the ticket counter of the Clayton bus station when I realized that the clerk was the woman who lived across the hall from me, wearing makeup that made her look a little less spectral than she did at home. I stopped for a second but then continued to the window and said, “Hi, how are you?”

  She said, “Can I help you?” as if she didn’t recognize me.

  I bought a round-trip ticket and asked, “How long is the return part good for?”

  “One year from the date of purchase.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Yeah, I might not be back too soon. I’m looking forward to getting away. You know, someplace quiet.”

  Now she looked at me like she knew exactly who I was and said, “That’s nice, that you can get to do that,” so that I had something to feel bad about for all seven hours of my bus trip to the least scenic part of Michigan.

  Cerise Lander was in her fifties, a little stocky in a fleece top, stretch pants, and a space-helmet perm. She said, “Come in and excuse the mess,” but her split-level house was spotless, with a La-Z-Boy, graduation pictures, squiggle-icing cookies, a thermostat set to seventy, and a dog scrabbling on the linoleum by the constantly spinning clothes dryer in the pantry. Her husband was a civil engineer.

  Crochet Life had a small office in town, but Cerise did most of the work at the computer and yarn basket in her living room. “I’ve been talking to Arnold on the phone,” she said, “but I’m not that clear on what he’s asking for.”

  “I think it’s mostly about keeping the snap going,” I said. We looked at each other. “Maybe you could kind of walk me through what you’ve got coming up.”

  She showed me the next issue on her computer. I searched for flaws and said, “I wonder if the ladybug could be doing something.” When I suggested adding a few more colors of yarn to the Weekend Wonder project, she asked if I’d ever tried crocheting, handed me some yarn and a hook, sat on the sofa with me, and showed me a basic stitch. In fifteen minutes I had a lumpy row, and a kind of calm was setting in.

  Cerise took a half-finished throw with Monet water lilies on it out of the basket, sat down across from me, and started running off fast three-color rows. I tried to think of more suggestions for the magazine but it made me lose track of my stitches. Neither of us said anything until she asked if I’d like some lunch. Two hours had vanished, but I had eight rows I was pretty happy with.

  I was surprised at how much I liked being in her house, as if I’d been briefly exiled from places like this and then repatriated. It was like a Klondike in Rancho Cahuenga, cost-effective rooms on a cul-de-sac. I’d fled all this a year ago, but after a few months at the Tradewinds, I couldn’t get enough of Cerise’s pocket doors and lazy Susans.

  Over soup at the kitchen table she asked if I’d like to go to Belton, Ohio, to see a woman named Wendy Probst whose throws always got good reader response. “You’d just take some pictures of her new pieces and get any comments she has on them,” Cerise said. “She and I can do the technical stuff later on. I still get letters asking for her Paddington Bear.”

  The next day I took a bus to Belton, a poor town with houses the same size as their satellite dishes spread out through thin woods. Wendy Probst lived in a red wooden house with a sagging flat roof, bandanna curtains, and a dirt yard inches deep in pine needles. When I knocked on the door, she opened it looking like I’d wakened her from a dream of falling. She was in her thirties, thin, in a worn yellow housedress, her breasts and hair going where they wanted. In her hands were a crochet hook and a nearly finished throw the size of a twin bed.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Hi. Are you Wendy? I’m Henry Bay. From Crochet Life. Cerise talked to you?”

  “Oh gosh. Yes. I’m sorry. Come in.”

  It was an enthusiast crime scene in there, with teetering piles of unfolded clothes, unopened mail, dishes, skillets, sketchbooks, shower caps, pets’ leashes, and Midol bottles. Industrial-size balls of yarn, in twenty colors, were spread around the house like designer tumbleweed.

  She put the throw on the couch. The crocheted picture showed an equipment yard full of pallets and forklifts. A man in a uniform shirt and ball cap was shooting a woman with a handgun, her blood spraying across the scene. Another man, on his knees, pleaded with the shooter as people ran away in the background. The detail was finer than anything I’d seen in Cerise’s house or the magazine, but the style was blunt, the people’s heads like swollen knees and their hands like sandbags.

  “That was a workplace shooting last year at Belton Lumber Byproducts,” she said. “I wasn’t there, but I saw the coverage. Most of these things, I was there for.”

  I looked at the other throws lying around. They showed violence, sickness, arrests, and people weeping into pay phones.

  “I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I was starting out to do some stuff for the crafts fair in Dundee. In Kentucky. I was going to make a geometric, but the first line across it came out crooked and I said That’s how the ground looks out here. The horizon. That’s how it started. I had a big bag of frozen drumettes in the house and I just kept going.”

  She bent over a pile of throws on the floor and flipped through them. “This is the kids from Washington Park kicking my nephew Danny’s head on the curb. He had eighteen stitches. This is us waiting in the emergency room. This woman had a chest wound. This one is Danny after his bad reaction to the medication. This is a fistfight at my niece’s First Communion. This is a dishonest lawyer.”

  She stood up. “I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s not like I can take these to the crafts fair. I’m sorry I got you all the way out here.”

  “No,” I said. “I think Cerise will like these.”

  She looked at me like I was crazy. “Cerise will shit,” she said.

  I photographed them anyway. When I finished I said, “Can I get you anything? Some food? Do you want to go into town?”

  “No thanks,” she said. She’d picked up the workplace-shooting throw again. “I think I need to finish.”

  I walked out of her house and straight into one of those unearned euphorias Jillian and I had talked about. For some reason Belton looked beautiful now, with its doublewides and shot-up STOP signs, and a ripped page of arithmetic homework on Big Chief paper lying in a patch of dirty snow. I saw the ratty horizon from the crochets laid over the real one. When I spotted a pay phone I called Barney and said, “It’s Henry.”

  He said, “Hi,” but not “How are you?” a habit of his that usually started the first of several silences.

  “I think I might be leaving my job,” I said. I hadn’t known it till I said it to him, but Dobey had me troubleshooting unicorns, Jillian thought our kiss was a freak accident, and that shaky yarn horizon was making the world look wider.

  There was a pause. “Okay,” Barney said. “I’m sorry it’s not going well.”

  “I didn’t say it’s not going well. It’s just going how it’s going. There’s a woman I don’t think I’m getting anywhere with, either.”

  “Are you going back to college?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Look, I know you’re mad at me. I’m sorry about that. I just want to tell you what I’m doing.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m in front of a grocery store in Belton, Ohio. The sky is bright orange. It’s pretty, but I don’t think it’s healthy. I think it’s from a company called Belton Lumber Byproducts. What are you doing?”

  “I was reading about nuclear division in strange cytoplasm.”

  “Okay.” It was getting colder. “Do you remember when we went to the zoo in L.A.?”

  “I remember we went there, yes,” Barney said.

  “Do you remember telling me what the animals’ philosophy was?”

  “Thei
r philosophy? No.”

  “Yeah. You watched them all day, and then you said all the animals had the same philosophy. It was ‘I think I’ll go over here for a while.’”

  Another pause. “How old were we?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Young.”

  I took the bus back to Wellfleet, and in the morning I went to Cerise’s house to show her the photos of Wendy’s new throws. “This one is a social worker from the county,” I said. “This one—”

  “Oh my God.”

  “That’s her friend’s daughter. She was ten.”

  “Is she okay? Wendy?”

  “I couldn’t really tell.”

  “Well. We can send her a little money.” She squinted at a picture. “How is she doing this? It’s very fine yarn, but still.”

  “Is there something we can put in instead?”

  She nodded. “I have some penguins I can move up.”

  That night Rensselaer called me at my motel and said he was quitting. I said, “How’s Arnold taking it?”

  “Really well. I said I’d stay long enough to finish the issue and he said to stay the fuck out of the building.”

  I told Rensselaer I’d been thinking of quitting too. “It’s up to you,” he said. “I think he’s bringing a guy in from Nine-Hole Golfer. I feel bad about this, but, yeah, you might want to push on.”

  “Do you know where you’re going?”

  “A daily paper in Ellis. The, hold on, ‘The Award-Nominated Voice of the Tri-County Valley.’ I’ll be doing state politics.”

  “That sounds good.”

  “Yeah. If you want, there’s a guy I can talk to at Ultra Running. It’s in Nevada.”

  The next day I told Cerise I was quitting and asked if I could leave her the negatives of Wendy Probst’s throws and keep the prints. She said okay. I took a bus back to Clayton and walked into the office at 4:00 P.M. The receptionist looked alarmed and said, “Henry, you don’t want to go—”

  It was too late. Dobey came out of the inner office with a half-crumpled page proof in his hand and yelled, “You little shit! You have the nerve to come back here?”

  “What?” I said. “Wait, what—”

  He backed me toward the door, holding up the proof of the L.A. story. The noun motherfucker jumped out. I’d somehow put the unedited Chief Boy R.D. interview into type.

  “This was on plates!” he said, backing me into the hall. “The press was turned on! The truck was waiting!”

  “It was a mistake,” I said. “On the computer. I sent the wrong—”

  “I know what you did! Let’s take what Arnold built up from printing eviction notices and piss it away! It’ll be funny!”

  “No. I’m sorry. It was—”

  “I live here! I have to walk down the street here!”

  I almost fell down the stairs, but I caught the railing and held on to it while he told me never to show my face there again. He did such a good job of yelling that he became the hectoring voice in my head for years to come—not Dad or Barney or Freddy Krueger, from my childhood, but the Popeye whose smeary invitations were the third choice of wedding planners even in Clayton.

  When he finally went back to his office, I went outside and sat on a bus bench. Jillian found me there and said, “We would have caught it. He swooped in and read it first.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “How long are you in town for?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I have to find a job.”

  “You can stay at Megan’s a few days. She’s in Kenya.”

  We went to the bottomless-pasta place on Meader with the five friends, but I was too shaken by Dobey to eat, and it took Scott and Jeff to beat the house edge. Megan’s apartment was filled with foreign fashion magazines and watercolors of her dress designs. I fed her cats, Housebrand and Co-Pay, and then opened the closet to hang up my jacket.

  Masking-taped to the inside of the door were ten Polaroids of Jillian modeling clothes Megan had made. It was a designer’s portfolio, ranging from benefit-dinner dresses to I’m-dinner lingerie. A lot of women, posing in the latter, would have looked down with a bashful grin or affected homicidal ennui like the pros, but Jillian’s face, a clear sky, said, “Sex, I know. We’re so lucky to have bodies that can do this.” The pictures in the dresses said she didn’t need a tertiary town at all, that she could move to New York or L.A. and be in charge there in a week. I got my camera out, took a picture of each picture, jerked off in the shower, got yelled at by Dobey for it, and tried to sleep.

  Rensselaer called his friend at Ultra Running and faxed him my spring break and low buggier stories. They hired me at a lower salary than I’d been making at Kite Buggy but promised me first dibs on review shoes in my size.

  The day before I left town I called Steve and asked him to meet me for dinner at the Hotel Clayton. He said yes, though he sounded wary. I was a little nervous myself. We’d been avoiding each other since I’d walked in on him and Jillian at Riddenhauer’s.

  I spent the day dealing with U-Haul, U-Store-It, and Massey’s Used Furniture, till I owned only what I’d brought to Clayton plus a purple towel and enough money to last till my first paycheck in Nevada. While Steve and I waited for our soup, I spread the photos of Wendy Probst’s throws on the table.

  “Wow,” he said. “Are those knitted?”

  “Crocheted,” I said. “You sell your work in art galleries, right?”

  “Houseware galleries. But I know those people, yeah.”

  I gave him the pictures and Wendy’s phone number, and said the gallery people might have to explain to her why they were calling. Putting the photos in his pocket, he paused and said, “Is that what you wanted to see me about?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m leaving town.”

  He nodded. “I’m looking at that myself.”

  An hour later I met Jillian outside the bus station and got her to go in and buy my ticket from my ex-neighbor. When she held it out to me, I pulled her in and kissed her. She pulled away and said, “Henry ‘Hank,’” like I was full of zany surprises. I took a seat on the bus and watched her recede through the window.

  I stayed at Ultra Running three months, then did ten weeks at Row! magazine, “The Coxswain That Comes in Your Mailbox,” in Swint, Massachusetts, and moved on from there, associate-editing my way across the country. I never stayed anywhere long, and I was the civilian at every magazine I worked for. At Ice Climbing I was the only staff member who still had all ten toes, and at Metal Detector Treasures I was the only one without twenty rings on his fingers.

  I kept calling Barney, and he kept being distant. The towns were small and slow, but they weren’t Clayton. Maybe it had been the river air there, or the borrowed friends, or just the fact that it was my first real town, but I couldn’t duplicate it any more than I could Jillian or Gerald. They all went in my loss column, along with Barney’s blessing and the late-boyhood dream of saving Dad.

  On the plus side, being in the enthusiasm business let me see people being happy, doing what their bumper stickers said they’d rather be doing, what they braked for. For a long time I was able to coast in the wake of that happiness. Winning the prize for biggest geode or scariest wipeout changed their faces, and I was there, writing down the shop talk of the work that’s not for money. It was a country of fevers, and I only had to deal with the harmless ones.

  4

  A year after I left Clayton, Mom called to tell me that Barney was engaged to a woman he’d met at the University of Kansas. He had a grant there, folding proteins in his computer and researching stem cells.

  “Her name’s Deirdre,” Mom said. “They’re coming here next month. Maybe you could come then too.”

  I said yes and started looking for a Fun Fare. I was a little nervous about seeing Barney, but the conditions were probably as good as they were going to get. He and his girlfriend would be floating on sex and wedding plans, he’d want her to see what a model son and brother he was, and maybe she’d have a gentling ef
fect on him. I pictured a cute Midwestern girl with a great laugh. With luck, she and I would be making affectionate fun of him before the weekend was over.

  I landed in the afternoon and passed the Controlled Dynamics buildings on my way from the airport. An Internet startup was in there now, and the parking lot was full of cars on a Saturday, supposedly a buy sign for a company’s stock. The Valleycrest Mall had come back to life too, but Dad was still working at the salad bar in Altadena. He was home alone when I got there, and we sat in the living room with beers and Cheese Nips.

  “I do every aspect,” he said. “I chop. I clean the sneeze guards. I’m physically dead afterward. You forget what that’s like.” He pressed himself back into his chair as if there’d never be enough sitting down. I thought of apologizing for leaving Troup, but I’d done that before and he’d waved it off. I let Sergio Mendes on the stereo fill the silence.

  Barney and Deirdre arrived just as Mom got home from putting in fan palms at the Internet startup. Deirdre was pretty but sterner-looking than I’d imagined, with pale skin, long brown hair, a gray turtleneck, and a mossy-looking floor-length skirt. Barney had changed his style of clothes again, to scratchy forest colors and drawstrings, in line with hers. We shook hands, his new self clashing with the old foyer. He didn’t smile at me but gave a little nod, as if the handshake needed certifying.

  Mom squeezed Deirdre’s hand and gave her a welcoming smile but said she needed a shower before she hugged anyone. She made an exception for Dad, though, and when they embraced I saw them locate the aches from the day’s work and press closer together to ease them. They hadn’t done that when he was corporate.

  Mom came back from the shower in long pants and a shirt with buttons, dressy for her. Deirdre helped her with dinner and asked her about the succulents outside while Barney told Dad about his work, a tangle of biochemical talk. For a minute I thought Dad was moved by the exciting things Barney was doing, but then I realized that what I saw on his face was nostalgia for being baffled by the scientists he’d managed.