Amateurs Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Dylan Hicks

  Cover illustration and lettering © Carolyn Swiszcz

  Book design by Rachel Holscher

  Author photograph © Nina Hale

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  For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to [email protected].

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible.

  We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hicks, Dylan.

  Amateurs / Dylan Hicks.

  pages; cm

  ISBN 978-1-56689-433-3 (eBook)

  I. Title.

  PS3608.I2785A43 2016

  813'.6—dc23

  2015030138

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Anitra Budd, Caroline Casey, Ben Findlay, Chris Fischbach, Amelia Foster, Molly Fuller, Carla Valadez, and all at Coffee House Press. Liz Van Hoose provided exceptionally perceptive, intelligent, and creative editorial direction. This book, I decided, didn’t require Herculean research efforts, but I’m grateful to Kurt Froehlich, Jean Mohr, Benjamin Jones, Molly Pfohl Rand, Michael Tortorello, and others for sharing their expertise along the way. Thanks also to the novelist and anagramist Ed Park and to the artist Carolyn Swiszcz. And everything is better because of my wife, Nina Hale, and our son, Jackson.

  23 22 21 20 19 18 17 161 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

  for Nina and Jackson

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One: Prenuptial

  Part Two: Postnuptial

  Funder Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  April 1972

  Marion straddled a vinyl-strap patio lounger, absently revising a metaphor about circuit breakers while her mother, Phyliss, trimmed an azalea bush in the Japanesque garden. Phyliss had been working unassisted for several hours (Marion felt a resistible pull to help), and the garden—with its Japanese maple and ornamental pines, its stone lantern and stepping stones, its rock beds, pools, and mossy little bridges—was reviving. Phyliss had majored in art history, and it was sometimes said that she applied that training to the arrangement of her garden and the glass-doored family room that looked out on it. It depressed Marion to think of the largely unused degrees, thwarted ambition, and undertapped potential of her mother’s generation of women, potential so undertapped in this case that it was hard for Marion to imagine her mother (bibliophobic, susceptible to insipid prettiness) as a museum curator or a professor of art history, hard even to imagine her as a critic for a lightly circulated daily. But perhaps, in a fairer world, Phyliss still wouldn’t have been drawn to such paths.

  “I would bottle it,” Phyliss said.

  “What’s that, Ma?” For a moment Marion thought she was being asked to suppress her uncharitable thoughts.

  “This is a gorgeous day. I’d like to bottle it.”

  To hint that a warmer day ought to be bottled, Marion reached for her black crochet poncho, fringed and redolent of smoke, but she didn’t otherwise dispute the day’s gorgeousness. The willows on the Crennels’ two acres were losing their wintry gold, and the elms, red oaks, and birches were budding or about to. A few clouds smeared the cornflower sky. Marion sipped her spiked Dr. Pepper, shaking the highball glass so she could enjoy the sound of ice cubes and rejuvenated carbonation.

  Her anger over unused degrees wasn’t strictly retroactive. Her own English degree from Northwestern had won her a secretarial position at a literary agency, which in the end was less appealing than the Marshall Field’s sales position her mother landed after college; at least Phyliss’s gig came with a discount. Marion had initially trusted, despite her professed mistrust of the system, that once dues were paid and her taste and intelligence recognized, she would be given a shot as an agent. Four years on the payroll cast opportunities for advancement in a growingly chimerical light. One Tuesday she didn’t come back from lunch.

  She heard breeze-blown voices from the fourth hole, then an Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight Regency coming up the snaking driveway. “Here’s your father,” Phyliss said. He took the stone path to the kidney-shaped patio. Corinne Wrightson trailed behind him in apparently borrowed tennis whites, her encased racket strapped around her chest. She was visiting for a week, home from Berkeley.

  “Look who I found,” George said.

  “I know I’m early,” Corinne said. “I thought we could—”

  A jet briefly shadowed the patio on its way to O’Hare. When it passed, George turned to Corinne. “Fix you anything? G and T?”

  “Jorge, she doesn’t want a cocktail before tennis,” Phyliss said. The nickname arose from the occasional business George did in Mexico.

  George smiled as if he and Corinne were in a secret society of drunken tennists. “Fun to see you girls together again,” he said.

  Marion and Corinne hadn’t been close since they were seventeen, when Marion started to break away from the village of Lammermuir and its namesake country club. It wasn’t fair, but for many years Corinne seemed inextricably tied to Marion’s earlier self, the neatly dressed, prim yet coquettish, anxiously beauty-obsessed self whose sweaters so magnetized the hearts and paws of local footballers (a history and legacy at the heart of Marion’s novel). But these associations were ebbing, and though Corinne had never been a serious movement type, no matter the movement, her subcultural status currently seemed stronger than Marion’s. She was living cooperatively, doing something with film, while Marion was living parasitically, doing nothing with literature. In ’67, Marion had helped draft a (scuttled) women’s resolution at the National Conference for New Politics, shortly after which she became a reserved but allegiant member of the Westside group, Chicago’s first women’s liberation organization. By now she had lost touch with everyone.

  She took the last sip and went to fish her racket out of the mudroom jumble.

  The club’s six tennis courts were buzzing with the vernal ebullience midwesterners understandably exaggerate. Corinne had learned the two-handed backhand but was still too slack for Marion’s drop shots, though Marion guessed it would be unmannerly to demonstrate this more than once. “Let’s just hit,” Corinne had said at the start, blocking a renewal of their teenage rivalry along with Marion’s chances of having much fun. Marion never understood how non-competitive people so often prevailed at establishing the rules.

  Corinne let down her long, center-parted hair as Marion latched the chain-link gate on their way out. They talked about this latest round of bombings, then about Marion’s older brother, Chick, now wholesaling baseball caps in Buffalo. It was thoughtful of Corinne to ask about Marion’s novel, though Marion wasn’t sure she wanted to talk about it.

  “I’m nearly finished,” Marion said, “which is different than the book being nearly done.” Earlier this week, she had started Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen with an uneasiness that built to a crescendo of resignation. Coolly considered, the similarities between her manuscript and Shulman’s novel were superficial, perhaps only suggested by the relative paucity of women’s art. Memoirs was a nonlinear, episodic tour of a life’s first half; Marion’s manuscript, though long on retrospection, took place over eight days, beginning with a New Left conference, ending with a wedding (though it was meant to be a parody and refraction of the kind of nuptial denouement one finds in Shakespeare or Austen). Shulman’s style was straightforward and witty; Marion’s, lyrical and sometimes abs
tract. And so on. Granted, there were thematic links and parallel scenes, but isn’t the history of art one of ceaseless variation and telling coincidence? On some level Marion knew that Shulman’s book—a feminist novel published by a major house and already finding a hungry readership—should be a spur, not a bridle. What to do was finish the manuscript, get it to an agent, and make her way back to the city. Instead, she felt that her novel had been made redundant, that Shulman had said what Marion wanted to say about beauty and bohemia and body image and sex and power, even though they hadn’t said the same things and material like that was inexhaustible. “I just don’t feel in a gut way that I need to go on with it,” she said to Corinne.

  “So take a break. See how you feel in a month.”

  “Yeah.”

  “A year.”

  After crossing a field used mainly for mowing, they reached the road above which their hilltop houses stood. Marion said, “I still have that collage you sent me.” It was a weak endorsement to say merely that she hadn’t thrown the collage away. Which she hadn’t (but: where was it?). She asked if there were more recent collages.

  “No. I’m mostly busy with the film collective,” Corinne said, and began to talk about the documentaries she made with her three housemates. She and Marion had touched on this the other day, but Marion hadn’t asked for details. Now Corinne described the weeks of footage she and her collaborators shot independently and edited into two-hour “polytonal almanacs”—1970, 1971, 1972 (in progress). Listening, Marion started to see her friend not as a normal wading in the sandier shores of weirdness, but as a relative straight in the rocky thick of it. Marion wasn’t sure if these films were often screened for the public, or if they traveled much beyond the Bay Area. Maybe that wasn’t of great concern to Corinne. The Wrightsons had more money than the Crennels, and there didn’t seem to be viselike pressure on Corinne to work for her keep. “You should come out and be in 1972,” Corinne said. Marion liked the sound of that; so far she’d been in 1972 only remotely.

  They passed quietly over the creek and walked up the Crennels’ driveway. Ania, the twice-weekly housekeeper, was hefting two sacks into her trunk. She smiled at Marion as she drove away. Many years ago Marion had accused Ania of stealing a locket. Marion stopped at the crest of the driveway, tapping her racket against her calf. “Do you mean it?” she said.

  “Of course I do,” Corinne said.

  “And could we drive?” She pointed to the convertible parked under the basketball hoop.

  Corinne took Marion’s free hand. “We could drive.”

  That night in her room—not her childhood room, but a spaceless guest room that George called “el cuartito”—Marion put her manuscript at the bottom of one of the many boxes on hand from the Crennel Paper Board Company. On top of the manuscript she put a pair of too-tight corduroys, three paperbacks, and, as if there were something fragile in the box, a crumpled Tribune. A door from el cuartito led to the attic; she walked softly up the dark staircase, not wanting to arouse suspicion (of what she wasn’t sure). She pulled on the light. Holding the box at the top of the stairs, she looked for a good spot to stash it, eventually settling on a corner near a complex of retired golf bags and a garment rack protected by a taupe quilted cover. Already in the corner were two identical boxes, one unmarked, one labeled COOKIE TINS, and as she created a new tower with her box at the bottom, she felt a bubbling sense of victory.

  Part One

  Prenuptial

  May 2011

  The invitation to Archer’s July wedding was beautiful, expensive, and somehow French, its palette of blue and white more reminiscent of Yves Klein than of Tiffany. Karyn at first took the envelope’s calligraphy as a sign of fussy ostentation (on the part of the client, that is, not the calligrapher, who’s obliged to at least be fussy), but as its imperfections revealed themselves, to the point where you might not even call it calligraphy, her thoughts grew more generous, turned to a leather-topped desk in a sunlit room; an amateur forming a monumental capital in some state of doubleness: intoxicated serenity, maybe, or patient excitement. She handed the envelope to her son. “Look at this writing,” she said.

  He was eleven and uninterested. “Is it a computer?”

  “No, that’s just it: it’s good but kind of sloppy.” She took back the envelope. “I think it’s the bride.” The sylvan folk music drifting in from the kitchen caught her attention for a few seconds. She was on the verge of what felt at once like the purest of tears and like the class of tears prodded by life-insurance commercials. She compared the address on the envelope with the plainer five-word note on the invitation and didn’t say anything for a while. Their meals were often marked by expanses of silence, rarely antagonistic but sometimes sullen, a mood encouraged by the small, woody dining room and its one murky window. The table was the color of rotten apples and half-covered with newspapers, cards for a Tolkienesque fantasy game, and a week of mail, under which there may have been hardened rice. It was one of Karyn’s breakfast-as-dinner nights, not unanimously popular. While preparing the food she had taken perverse pleasure in anticipating Maxwell’s opposition; she wanted him to suffer, a little, for his choosiness. She loved him fervently but sometimes found herself rooting against him, hoping his occasional pride or sloth would be answered with a chastening defeat. A stern C plus, say, though his cosseting hippie school didn’t give grades. It was hard to square her hopes for his uncurbed success with her lifelong affinity for underdogs.

  She watched him conduct a scrambled-egg diaspora on and around his plate. “I can’t explain the science of it,” she said, “but eggs cool, like, super fast.” The construction was meant as a concession to kidspeak, a move at odds with her priggish shunning of baby talk during Maxwell’s early years (“Please talk to him in a normal voice, Mom,” she would say, a directive that was both resented and ignored). Maxwell pretended to have trouble getting the egg on his fork. “You won’t want to eat them cold,” she said.

  “I don’t want to eat them hot.”

  They laughed.

  “I think we should go to this wedding,” she said.

  Archer was one of Karyn’s distant Winnipeg-bred relatives and, absent strong competition, the most glamorous of the scattered Bondarenkos. Having seen a drawing of him in the New Yorker, she had a rough sense of what he looked like as an adult (prematurely bald?), but when she pictured him it was as a five-year-old boy, auburn-haired and polo-shirted, crying after a s’more accident, his mother slapping at mosquitoes while rushing to rectify things, marshmallow splotches turning from white to brown to black on a log. Karyn hadn’t seen Archer in the flesh since that family reunion in 1982. In his autobiographical novel and assorted other writings she sustained a tepid interest of long standing.

  To any other cousin she would have sent polite regrets and bath towels, but this was different. To begin with, there was the allure of wealth; though she had been to at least one wedding of people who were rich by all standards except those of the Western rich, she had never been to a wedding of people who were rich by any standard. And she was on the wide edge of going to Winnipeg anyway. She and Maxwell had been slated to go there the previous summer, but late that July he had decided to play in a youth football league, whose demanding schedule scotched their vacation plans. Perhaps it’s too much to say they had plans, since Karyn hadn’t booked a hotel, or submitted a PTO request, or even plugged in MINNEAPOLIS TO WINNIPEG on a driving-distance website. She had, at least, rented the Guy Maddin movie My Winnipeg, which she admired through some irritation and didn’t finish.

  Although she liked expatriate novels and could speak Spanish and German, especially if you wanted to speak about hungry cats in big rooms, tourism most appealed to her when the destination was no farther than twelve hours by car, urban, and seldom subjected to discernible incursions of tourists. She and Maxwell had been to Des Moines, Kansas City, Green Bay—all for no special reason and with no itinerary. Winnipeg seemed a logical tick on her indifferent buck
et list, the next stop for someone whose faith in her innate eccentricity survived overflowing evidence that her behavior, opinions, and tastes were in truth only slightly out of step with her demographic peers. Here again was a case in point: she considered it whimsical and unexpected to spend one’s vacation in Winnipeg, yet half the people she mentioned the idea to had been there themselves, and all but one (“fucking snoozefest”) spoke of it warmly. People were going to Winnipeg all the time! One of her colleagues, it turned out, made regular trips to the city with his boyfriend and could name its best galleries, restaurants, and bookstores. Karyn had been happy to hear these names and recommendations, equally happy to forget them as soon as they were spoken. A month later, sitting in her saggy lawn chair while one of the more martial football coaches led an exercise called “butt kickers,” she considered, not for the first time, that a benefit of passivity is that there’s nothing to undo, not even names to forget or scraps of paper to throw away.

  “An old friend of mine makes Winnipeg out to be a bohemian Shangri-la,” she told Maxwell nearly a year later.

  “What’s a Shangri-la?”

  “An earthly paradise from a book I haven’t read.” She didn’t much miss her marriage, but she missed having someone around to challenge her half-truths. The “old friend,” for instance, was more accurately one of her ex-husband’s acquaintances, a hairy-eared flâneur who in the nineties supposedly made a scraggy living recruiting new members into the Columbia Record Club, and who once raved about Winnipeg for several minutes outside a Kinko’s. She remembered staring at his ears. It wasn’t just that they were hairy, but that he confronted the problem with an electric razor, so that his ears sprouted little flattops. “He also said that Winnipeg is the Chicago of Canada.”

  “I’ve never been to the Chicago of America,” Maxwell said.