The Office of Historical Corrections(30)

The Model/Actress called her marketing people about canceling the volcano product launch and figuring out how to repackage and rebrand the makeup that was already in warehouses. Marketing called back and said that preorders were actually up, and they could take the loss if she felt sentimental about it in light of recent events, but as a limited-edition line it was poised to sell out. The Model/Actress went to the memorial service in a tasteful smoky eye. They were going forward with the launch because what better way to honor the man who taught her how to really see color, she said. Plus, marketing said, everyone could see now that the makeup was tear proof.

It sounded calculated, but she really had cried. Afterward, someone asked the Model/Actress why she’d ever said volcano in the first place, and whether she felt at all responsible for planting the suggestion. The Model/Actress thought she had probably said volcano because sometimes when she thought of him she thought of burning. The local opera had been doing Dido and Aeneas the winter they were last together, and after he left her, and after the after, when she asked him to say sorry, and he said he was sorry they’d ever met, she thought all the time of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and her funeral pyre. For months she dreamed of showing up at one of his shows to light herself on fire and make him clean up the mess.

The year they were together, back when he was only moderately famous and she was nobody, he had asked her what she wanted out of life and she told him, because she didn’t yet know any better than to say the truth, which was that she wanted everything. He kissed her forehead and said, “My little lady of ruthless ambition.” In the months after that, he would sometimes ask her “How’s conquering the world going, my sweet ruthless girl?” in the delighted dumbed-down tone you would use to tell a house pet it was ferocious. She would nuzzle him, beginning to understand that just because he didn’t see something in her didn’t mean it wasn’t there, knowing there was still some freedom in the way he did not fathom yet how real and how necessary her ruthlessness would be.





Anything Could Disappear


Vera was moving to New York on a Greyhound bus, carrying only a duffel bag. The morning she left Missouri, there was a heat advisory and an orange-level terrorism alert. An hour outside of Chicago, there had been an older woman, crying and demanding that the bus pull over to let her off. From Chicago to Cleveland, she had sat next to a perfectly cordial man who had just finished a ten-year prison sentence and was on his way home from Texas with nothing but his bus ticket and twenty dollars in his pocket. Between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, there had been a man who kept trying to get her to share a blanket with him, citing their proximity to the air-conditioning vent, and between Pittsburgh and Philly, a teenage runaway had sat beside her and talked her ear off. And now there was this: a small, wobbly child whose mother had deposited him in the seat beside her with a simple “Keep an eye on him, will ya, hon?”

Vera tried to catch the eye of another passenger, maybe the woman two seats ahead of her on the other side of the aisle—she looked like the sort of person who would turn around and say, Keep an eye on him your damn self, lady; he’s yours, ain’t he?—but nobody looked up. The boy was around two years old, brown-skinned with a head of curls that someone had taken the time to properly comb. He was dressed in a clean, bright red T-shirt, baby jeans, and sneakers nicer than Vera’s. The mother was a thin, nervous white woman, with wispy hair in three shades of blond. She smelled strongly of cigarette smoke and chocolate milk. She had gotten on the bus with the boy and a girl, about seven, who looked like her in miniature. The little girl was chewing purple bubble gum with the kind of enthusiasm that would have prompted Vera’s own mother to ask, “Are you a young lady or a cow?” The mother had a cell phone pressed to her ear and was having a terse conversation with someone on the other end. She kept the phone cradled between her ear and shoulder, even as she leaned over the baby to kiss him on the forehead before walking farther toward the back of the bus.

“I feed him, don’t I?” she said into the cell phone. “When was the last time you did?”

The little boy made Vera nervous. He was a quiet, happy baby. He would occasionally clap his hands together, applauding something only he could appreciate. Still, he was so small. Vera was overcome by the unreasonable belief that he might break if she looked away from him. As she watched him, he seemed to be watching her back. In the window on the other side of the boy, Vera could see her own hazy reflection, nothing to write home about one way or the other. She had been on buses, at that point, for sixteen of the last twenty-one hours. She was wearing jeans and an old T-shirt from the college she’d dropped out of two years earlier. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail that was starting to frizz. Vera was a few months past her twenty-first birthday, which had happened without any of the fanfare and excess people tended to associate with turning twenty-one. Josh and her coworkers at the record store had ordered her a pizza at work and opened a few beers to toast her. That was it.

Somewhere on the Jersey Turnpike, the bus pulled into one of those rest stops that appeared up and down 95 like punctuation marks. Vera went into the travel plaza to get a cup of coffee. In the women’s restroom, she stretched her arms above her head in the mirror and rolled up on the balls of her feet, then down again. She splashed water on her face, then pulled a small bottle of mouthwash from the duffel bag she’d carried in with her and swirled a capful around in her mouth before spitting into the sink.