writing – DAVID V. MATTHEWS

Capital-Q Quirky

Another excerpt from “Our Putative Couple,” a work in progress. For the first excerpt, please click here.

■

At a dark wooden table in downtown Garnetville’s trendiest bar, Bouquets, whose drinks all had floral names and steep prices:

“I broke up with Brody yesterday,” Cassie says.

“You did?” Olivia says.

“Uh-huh. We got along well enough, but sometimes—sometimes, if you don’t watch out, you can fall down the well and drown.”

Cassie sips her rhododendron (2 ounces [60 milliliters] dry vermouth, 1 ounce [30 milliliters] red herbal liqueur, 3 dashes absinthe, garnish with an orange twist—US $28.00 total but pretty dang great).

“Also,” she continues, “I think he kept trying to push me down that well.” She adopts a slightly gravelly voice: “ ‘Yes, look a li’l bit deeper, Cass, you’ll see our future together, where you prostrate yourself before me twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week, just for the heck of it—ah, yes, the heck-related reason, the best reason for prostrating.’ ”

Olivia laughs while reaching for her delphinium (1½ ounces [45 milliliters] white wine, ½ ounce [15 milliliters] lime juice, ½ ounce [15 milliliters] orange liqueur, ¼ ounce [7½ milliliters] blueberry syrup, garnish with skewered blueberries—also US $28.00 total, also dang great, the dangest, in fact).

■

During Brody and Cassie’s first date, in which they stroll around the Garnetville University campus, Cassie tells him (as she does with every guy during the first date, to make a capital-Q Quirky first impression and thus maintain her brand) about her “bio-dad,” Dr. Reed Flanagan, white, cisgender, unmarried, a media and cultural studies professor at that school, who, in 1985 at age forty-six, not long after Cassie’s birth, had a brief romance with one of his graduate assistants, Sydney Bartholomew, a white, cisgender, unmarried woman half his age, the first time he’d ever “boinked a student during his sixteen years there.” A few weeks after the relationship “had cratered,” she paid a surprise visit to his campus office, where she told him “he might as well hear” from her and “not from the ol’ grapevine” that, first, “he’d knocked her up”; and second, “she planned to have an abortion, a legal abortion, back when every state still permitted women to have reproductive rights, excuse the editorializing.” As it turned out, he supported her decision. He supported it so much, he insisted on paying for the procedure. No, he “vehemently insisted.” He actually used that adverb. How could she refuse? “Perhaps she would have used the V-word if he hadn’t offered to pay.” Anyhow, he “forked out three hundred bucks, a bargain back then.” Then he resigned before he could face disciplinary proceedings for his “inappropriate relationship.” He spent the last nineteen years of his educational career teaching media and cultural studies at the only place that would hire him: “a much smaller and more intellectually undemanding school,” Trebain College, in Trebain, Iowa. He still resides in “that minuscule town,” from which he sends Cassie “epic e-mails extolling the Midwest” and suggesting she move there. No thanks—she’d rather continue living near Pittsburgh, “essentially one big Superfund site,” than “suffer through the most stultifying boredom ever conceived of by demonic geniuses who speak with a twang, eeeee-yup.” Anyway, as it turns out, before leaving for Iowa, he “knocked up another woman,” Cassie’s mother’s sister, “during that rarest of occurrences, a one-night stand.” The result: Cassie’s “nephew-slash-half-brother Zane,” who receives the same e-mails from their father, “cat memes included,” as she does.

Pause.

“Do you like oatmeal?” Brody asks.

Pause.

“Cooked oatmeal?” Cassie replies.

“Uh-huh.”

“Yes, I like cooked oatmeal, but only with brown sugar.”

“I like oatmeal, too, but in my case, only with fruit cocktail, the type in heavy syrup with artificially-colored cherries. It makes the oatmeal taste like—Santa’s helpers.”

“You into cannibalism?”

“Candy cane-iballism. Sorry.”

“Why apologize?”

■

By her mid-teenage years, Olivia decides to devote her life to literature (the more classic the literature, the better), as a way to rebel against her parents. Her father, Grant Purcell (a white cisgender man who received a master’s of business administration [1978] from the Alden Business School, and who serves as the CEO [chief executive officer] of Shining Beacon, one of Pennsylvania’s largest insurance companies), reads only two types of books: ghostwritten memoirs (in hardback) from white, presumably cisgender, male American tycoons, about the tycoons’ inexorable rise to fame and how anyone can succeed just like them; and action-adventure novels (in paperback) about white, presumably cisgender, male American police officers, private detectives, secret agents, and mercenaries who battle—and always triumph over, usually lethally—Eastern-Bloc Communists, Middle-Eastern terrorists, Central-American narcoterrorists, African-American gang members, treasonous bleeding-heart white liberal American politicians, and other violent, savage, grotesque, human-adjacent foes. By comparison, her mother, Ruth Purcell (a white cisgender woman who received a bachelor of science in entrepreneurship [1983] from Lockridge University, and who runs her own business, New Performance Consulting, Incorporated), never reads any books, at least in her daughter’s presence. That doesn’t necessarily mean Mrs. Purcell never reads any books at all, just that, on a typical evening at the family’s near-mansion, while Grant sits alone in his charcoal recliner in the den (the room he calls his “sanctum sanctorum”), savoring every page of, say, My First Billion Dollars (Give or Take a Nickel), or Ghost Squad: Takedown in Tehran, Ruth sits on the teal couch in the living room (the room she calls “the living room”), watching, almost always with a rudimentary smile, a rented VHS tape of a popular mainstream hit movie of any genre, showtime always starting exactly at eight. Sometimes she watches an entire franchise from the beginning, one entry a night; on July 28, 2003, the eighteen-year-old Olivia joins her mother for the first time in doing just that, watching Extreme Weather (1994); followed the next night by Extreme Weather 2 (1996); then Extreme Weather 3 (1999); then the final one in the series, the straight-to-video Extreme Weather: Tsunami (2001), all on rented DVDs (the Purcells had replaced their VHS player with a DVD player by this point), and all of these movies featuring white, cisgender male protagonists and their much younger, white, cisgender female love interests fleeing from cheesy-looking, computer-generated dangers that include rainstorms, snowstorms, sandstorms, hailstorms, and genetically-modified wolves with foot-long fangs.

Olivia had never seen any Extreme Weather movie, due to her aversion to lowest common denominator entertainment product; however, wanting for some unfathomable reason to experience more than a few milliseconds of quality mother-daughter time before leaving for college in a few weeks, Olivia, for four nights running, slowly walks to the couch (sometimes shuffling her feet as noisily as possible upon the hardwood floor, to warn every inhabitant of the Western Hemisphere of her approach); sits down next to Ruth at 7:59:58; and watches her press the remote control’s PLAY button. The two Purcells stare straight ahead at the screen for the movie’s duration (including the entire closing credits), neither mother nor daughter saying anything. Afterwards, Olivia mutters “G’night,” Ruth says “Good night,” and Olivia walks (or noisily shuffles) off to bed.

But during the fourth night, after the final Extreme Weather had ended and Ruth had pressed the remote’s OPEN/CLOSE button to eject the disc:

“God, Mom, how could you stand watching that sexist garbage?”

“Sexist garbage?”

“Amber [the white, cisgender female love interest] whines like a little kid for the entire movie. She can’t do anything. She needs a man to save her. She never gets stronger or more independent. And when she runs from that humongous wave, of course she has to say”—Olivia adopts a squeaky voice—“ ‘Ohhh noooo, I broke a nail! Sob sob sob!’ ”

“In other words, you prefer feminist propaganda.”

“If you mean movies that don’t dehumanize women, then, yes, I prefer feminist propaganda.”

Ruth pauses.

“Can’t you just enjoy a movie for once?” she asks.

“I dunno. Anything can happen, I guess. Good night, Mom.”

To Recalibrate

A toned-down excerpt from “Our Putative Couple,” a work in progress.

■

One drizzly Friday afternoon several weeks before the 2024 United States presidential election, twenty minutes and seventeen seconds into our putative couple’s first visit, either together or separately, to the airport development district’s newest cultural venue, the Kinnick Museum of American Folk Art, the abovementioned couple starts staring at an anonymous painting, Peaceable Kingdom (circa 1860s, oil on canvas, 36.5 inches by 48 inches [92.7 centimeters by 121.9 centimeters], collection of BXR Funds International), that shows a dog, a cat, a hen, a rooster, an eagle, a bluebird, a turkey, a lion, a lamb, a cow, a bull, a bear, and a giraffe all standing in a field and grinning queasily at the viewer. “I don’t know about you, but I love the color scheme,” Brody Waters, our putative couple’s cisgender white male component, age forty-two, a poet/creative writing instructor at Swensen College, says about the work’s dingy, gritty pastels. “It reminds me of depressed cotton candy. No, actually, it reminds me of depressed cotton-polyester blend candy. Artists back in the olden days loved tints and hues and whatever that didn’t require ironing.”

“I like the colors too,” says Cassie Flanagan, our putative couple’s cisgender white female component, age thirty-nine, a trend forecasting analyst at Mattercomp, “but do you know what I like a little more? How the creatures all have dilated eyes. A super new dispensary must have opened in the neighborhood.”

“Yeah. Bambi needs some wacky tobacky, stat. Who wouldn’t, if you lived in a Disney cartoon?”

She chuckles.

Our putative couple continues staring at the painting.

■

An hour, twenty-seven minutes, and forty-three seconds later, they stand outside the museum.

“What a rewarding cultural experience,” Cassie says.

“Yes indeed. I never thought scrimshaw could cause such a frisson of excitement in me,” Brody says, loudly pronouncing that French word as “freeee-sooohn.”

“Ooh la la.”

Pause.

“So you want to attend that concert tomorrow?” he asks.

“No thanks,” she answers.

“How about a movie?”

“Nope.”

“What would you like to do?”

“Uhhh—actually, I’d like to spend the day by myself tomorrow. To recalibrate?”

“To recalibrate?”

“Yup.”

“Recalibrate from what?”

“From everything.”

“All right.” He pauses. “How about Sunday?”

No response.

“Monday? Tuesday? Any day?”

No response.

“Exactly how much time do you need to recalibrate?”

“I don’t know. I’ll call you, okay?”

Longer pause.

“If you recalibrate too much, you’ll go blind,” he says.

She chuckles.

Brief pause.

“So, uh, I guess I should go now,” she says.

“You want a ride?” he asks.

“Thanks, but I’ll walk. I need a good walk.”

“So do I. Maybe I’ll have one someday.”

She chuckles.

Another brief pause.

“Well, uh, bye,” she says.

“Bye,” he says.

They walk off in opposite directions.

■

Two years later, Brody has his first novel published, Livin’ la Vida Locher (304 pages, paperback, Quarto House Press, US $21.99 [Canada $30.00]), whose title paraphrases “Livin’ la Vida Loca,” the 1999 hit by Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin. The novel deals with a white, cisgender, forty-six-year-old man named Larry Locher, a cultural studies instructor at Gunderson University, who has a brief affair with one of his graduate assistants, Jazmín Torres, a transgender legal immigrant half his age from somewhere unspecified in Central America. As a result of what the novel’s free indirect narrator calls the “hashtaggers (more like trash-haggers—those pests don’t deserve a wittier label)” and the “cancel crowd who’ve cancelled growing the hell up,” Locher loses his job; and his white, cisgender, thirty-nine-year-old wife, Connie Dean-Locher, a trend forecasting analyst at Mastercorp Technology “who pretty much PMSes twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week,” divorces him, taking fifty percent of everything; and Jazmín, who more than once told him “Steeck jour beeg white deeck eenside me, pronto!”, writes Honor Roll, a best-selling, thinly-fictionalized novel about the affair, whereas he cannot get started on his thinly-fictionalized, affair-related novel, What REALLY Happened, because “his ex-wife and his ex-mistress must have sucked the life out of him but not through that certain beeg appendage of his, unfortunately”; and “one of the world’s most popular streaming services, Mango Deluxe,” adapts Jazmín’s novel into a limited series, that service’s most popular offering ever, inspiring “a million memes on the young people’s favorite social media platform, DingDing (and judging from those memes, the young people’s brains must have shrunk in the wash, as that renowned social critic, Gage Cutter [from Cutter’s Law, a 1994 American action movie], would put it)”; and Jazmín and Connie start a romantic relationship, announcing their status via the latter’s account on “that platform for formerly young people, Sunnyday,” via a close-up, sepia-filtered photo of them kissing, with the caption RELATIONSHIP STATUS: TAKEN ✓; and worst of all in Locher’s opinion (or maybe best of all, considering the readers’ proclivities), he can get aroused only when “self-abusing” to fantasies of those two women “humping up a storm.”

Livin’ la Vida Locher receives laudatory reviews both online and in that retro medium, print.

“Waters proves adept at sculpting prose.”—Thomas Woo, pitchingwoo.com
“At last, a one-stop source for political incorrectness.”—dripnose2008, litfreek.com
“This ripped-from-the-headlines novel not only rips up the headlines, it might also rip you a new one.”—Addison Andrews, The Neater Reader

However, Olivia Purcell, in her weekly wordgasm.com column, Purcellular, calls Livin’ la Vida Locher “the worst release yet from that legend in his own mind, the poetaster Brody Waters[,]” who “has really, truly outdone himself this time in the cringe department while adding heaping helpings of MAGA-capped bigotry”; he “obnoxiously” wants readers to sympathize with the white male protagonist, “an aging Gen-Xer who quotes pop culture from the 1990s while going up against deranged, all-powerful enemies: feminists, brown people, immigrants, gays, lesbians, the transgender, Democrats, and—most heinous of all—anyone who quotes pop culture from past the year 2000.” She concedes this novel “has one redeeming quality: the almost-clever names Waters gives his off-brand equivalents of Apple Plus, TikTok, Bluesky, Pornhub, Grindr, et cetera.” But “that still can’t salvage a book even Chad Chaddington would find malodorous. (Though Waters refers to ninety trillion ’90s TV characters, he doesn’t mention his probable role model, Chad, once. To quote a popular hit song from that decade, how bizarre [a reference to “How Bizarre,” a 1995 single from the New Zealand group OMC].)”

Brody can usually shrug off negative reviews. At least they provide a change from the nonstop adoration he receives, not that he hates nonstop adoration, heh heh heh heh heh. But this hatchet job—

He knows Olivia Purcell, white, cisgender, thirty-eight, a presence in airport development district literary circles. He’s run into her over the years at readings, art openings, chamber-music concerts, and other cultural events. “Hey,” she says with a vacuous smile. “Hey,” he replies similarly. They exchange small talk for no more than half a minute, say “Bye” (sometimes he says “Ta-ta”), and part company; otherwise, they have zero contact, though he does hate-read her column every week, to find out what she’s praised or (far more often) what she’s premenstrually eviscerated. She has horrible taste, preferring virtue-signaling pabulum over more intelligent, more challenging fare. Typical book critic—she wouldn’t recognize good writing even if it did the Achy Breaky dance on her face. (He’ll have to remember that line for a future project.)

But perhaps that airhead he’d dated for maybe five seconds a few years ago, Cassie, uh, Cassie Flanagan, had something to do with that review. Both women had attended the same vaguely prestigious school, Garnetville University, together two decades earlier and (at least when he knew Cassie) still kept in touch, having friended each other on Facebook and even occasionally hanging out in person. Cassie might have told her that an insensitive, un-woke poet she’d dated for maybe five milliseconds a few millennia ago had released his first novel; perhaps Cassie had given her a copy. Thanks, Cass.