The New Republic. Lionel Shriver
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4
Inversion 101
Hanging on the subway strap, Edgar considered Toby Falconer, Joe Average. Certainly senior year at Yardley Edgar had caught a harried look in Falconer’s eyes, the submerged panic of a boy who couldn’t swim sinking below the surface. Edgar had worked hard at the time at foreshortening his former icon into another small-pond egotist.
From a distance, Edgar had discovered everything that had captivated him about Falconer could be slyly inverted: confidence transposed to arrogance, grace to effeminacy, popularity to shallowness. That famous sense of humor upended into flippancy, powers of persuasion into slimier powers of manipulation. Apparently the most sterling quality could be turned upside-down, like a reversible placemat. Courage flipped to irresponsibility, passion to mawkishness. The self-sacrificial were dupes, and the loyal? Were clingy. Now Falconer had gone and inverted himself. It should have been satisfying.
Childhood obesity having put his own flaws on such flagrant display, in self-defense Edgar had developed an eagle eye for the faults of other people. Though the facility gave him a deadliness it didn’t make him happy and it probably didn’t make him attractive. Nor did it save him from practicing the craft of inversion on himself. Resigning from Lee & Thole, for instance: heads, the move was bold. Tails? It was retarded.
Fearing a failure of nerve, Edgar had rung the Portuguese airline TAP from a pay phone in front of The Red Shoe to make a reservation for Barba via Lisbon three days hence. That would give him just enough time to wrap up loose ends—like Angela—and not enough time to back out.
The process of inverting Angela was almost complete. He had yet to get over wanting to fuck her, but everything else that had first drawn him to her had capsized. Her far-flung general knowledge, for instance, translated neatly into superficiality: she could discuss anything for five minutes and nothing for half an hour. When she professed strong views about new Freud biographies at parties, she’d only read the reviews. She subscribed to all the right magazines but only skimmed the pull-quotes, and in movies concentrated primarily on the credits. That she remembered names, exact addresses, and which restaurants had changed hands had once made her repartee seem zippy, but nowadays when Edgar pictured her mind all he saw was the Yellow Pages.
More to the heart of the matter, that enigmatic quality of hers had revealed itself in time as garden-variety duplicity. For everything Angela said there was something else she omitted. At first the gaps had been scintillating. But after living with her for two years Edgar put his gift of inversion to proper use for once and concluded that Angela wasn’t elusive. She was a liar. She wasn’t mysterious or complicated. She was, and always had been, in love with someone else.
As Edgar slipped his key in the apartment door, he could hear Angela chattering on the phone, and before he’d pushed inside he knew she’d be on her feet.
Pacing, fidgeting from one piece of furniture to another, sure enough Angela was picking and poking at faxes and fountain pens; she couldn’t stand still. Edgar’s entrance earned him a distracted nod. As usual, she’d wedged the receiver between her ear and shoulder so that she could use her hands when she talked. He used to find it charming.
Now Edgar could only picture what Angela doubtless looked like when she was talking on the phone to him. Perhaps she languished on the sofa with her eyes shut, the cord slack, one arm tossed limply midair. In any event, she definitely didn’t use this voice—plosives pipping, aspirates rushing, and fricatives fizzing with the effervescence of Perrier:
“You should have seen him—that’s exactly! Then naturally after—HAH! ha-ha-ha-hahhhhhh …”
As for content, there wouldn’t be any that was discernible on this end. He’d heard her go on like this for an hour without planting enough substantive key words in a row for him to determine whether the conversation was about toenail fungus or Senate hearings on the Waco siege. Of only one thing could Edgar be certain: she was talking to Jamesie—an affectionate private nickname that Edgar had only recently started using aloud.
This glib, gray-templed geeze in his fifties had kept Angela on the side for years. James pre-dated Edgar, who had come to suspect that he wasn’t the first to fill in for James when the old fart was nailing someone else. Angela was forthright about having once been gaga for this big-spending silk importer, but that was all over and now, officially, James and Angela were just “veryveryveryvery good friends.” After two patient years of observation, Edgar had concluded that those two should probably spring for an extra very.
Edgar’s initial tolerance of this “friendship” had won him credit with Angela for being a sophisticated man who realized that all adults in their thirties had pasts. Edgar didn’t go funny when she announced that she was meeting James for dinner, and he didn’t wait up. He didn’t replay Angela’s messages, rifle her mail, or sniff her panties; he didn’t third-degree and he didn’t stage scenes. All of which made him a secure, mature, respectful partner, a.k.a.—Inversion 101—a chump.
“Bye—I can’t now, you know why—later! Bye-bye.” She hung up tenderly. “You wouldn’t believe what—oh, I forgot.” Angela’s bubbly cadence sloshed a bit and then went stagnant. “No more stories about James. You’ve got touchy.”
“Just bored.”
“You were sent some more rejections. They’re on the counter.”
The flaps were sealed. “How can you be sure they’re rejections?”
Angela tossed her hair impatiently, and Edgar finally noticed that it was the same color as the adolescent Toby Falconer’s. “These days, only bad news comes in the mail. That’s what it’s for: to blow you off with as little personal contact as possible. Good news comes in phone calls, or for the last year or two e-mail, if the opposite party is the slightest bit hip. Christ, they should start dyeing all envelopes black.”
“You sure seem torn up about my disappointments.”
“I don’t mean to sound callous, Edgar, but if I stroked your head every time one of those letters arrived, you’d go bald. This journalism gambit sounded good at first, ’cause I thought we’d go somewhere exciting. Even James—” her spine straightened in a refusal to apologize—“James travels everywhere, like, China, Hong Kong. So far your ‘freelancing’ has landed us mostly in this apartment. Night after night, I might add.”
“I’m happy as a clam to eat out,” Edgar said flintily. “You just have to pay for it.”
“I’m a publicist, for Christ’s sake. The Garden swamps me with comps but they pay crumbs, and you can’t satisfy AmEx with free tickets.” She flounced theatrically into the kitchen, to retrieve a lone can of Bartlett pears.
Edgar’s heart wasn’t in an argument, and he cast his eye around his living room with the generosity of nostalgia. Even quotidian quarters achieved an Edward Hopper glow when you were leaving them forever. So did women. Contemplating his girlfriend—her lithe legs, impetuous gold hair, and close breasts that didn’t need a bra but still had an alluring quiver—Edgar despaired that there was one attribute he had never successfully inverted. Good taste boomeranged to snobbery, self-respect to self-regard. But he was at a loss to hold against any woman the fact that she was beautiful.
“Have you ever considered how it might go, living with Jamesie?” Throwing Angela on her new future felt almost as delicious as embracing his own.
“Certainly not, not for years,” she growled, managing to make opening that can look like hard work. “We’re just—”
“Friends,” Edgar completed with a smile; funny, all the old sourness had fled. “You might think twice. Shadowy characters don’t always function in the foreground. If nothing else, Jamesie needs me around to make himself look good.”
“Honestly, Edgar, you’re getting to be impossible!”
Edgar collapsed onto the corduroy sofa with his feet up,