Read an Excerpt
Miss Kansas City
A Novel
By Joan Frank THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Copyright © 2006 Joan Frank
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-11575-4
Chapter One
People always said at first that Alex Blue looked like Alice in Wonderland. Not the Disney one, but the original, strange, big-headed-dolly Lewis Carroll one. It was her hair, many felt, but also a certain lack of affect, an Alice-like reserve. She hated the comparison. It made her sound simple, she thought, a wide-eyed dolt. The more careful observer-say, of Alex hanging her coat at the office, or wandering the bright fruit piles at the market-might suggest that by temperament and manner, she far more resembled a very young Lauren Bacall. She was tall, large-boned-not fat, though she tortured herself about her size. For this reason she wore black jeans overlapped by long, thick sweaters, and over them a heavy, dark wool coat, so you could hardly guess what sort of body might be moving under all those layers.
She had a flattish face, pale. A smooth, wide forehead. Beautiful skin, white and poreless with a faint gleam like good china-hair a conference of blond and pewter, falling dense and stiff down her back. It was the hair that prompted the Alice comparison, by strangers who first saw her. She couldn't bring herself to chop it, felt it both a shield and source of strength, like Samson's. But the Alice remarks set her jaws grinding. People neverrepeated the mistake once they'd talked to her, though she was no less mysterious to them afterward. Alex was wretchedly shy, and to the unapprised, shyness is fairly indistinguishable from disdain. In truth, shyness and scorn operated together in Alex, like a pair of demented twins. The young men and women at the office risked scorching themselves if they sought to engage her in banter. Alex didn't do banter. Beautiful day out there, they'd chime, or How was your weekend. She'd look sideways at them with her smallish bluegreen eyes, lips pressed, Bacall nostrils flaring: equal parts irony, reproach, and pain. Confused, they would cease talking and go away.
Alex was an editor for Infinite Information, Incorporated, a firm that published software instruction manuals. Her language skills were keen, for she had read a great deal from the time she was small. She had a fine mind, and a family she despaired of-marshaled all her energies to flee (along with several stupid jobs) after college. She answered an ad in a Sunday Chronicle she 'd bought in a bookstore. Drove out to interview, took the editing position in Sausalito. And while on surface these actions appeared decisive and vigorous, her energies in fact played tricks on Alex: sometimes they deserted her, and she could scarcely urge her big-boned body out of bed. She lived alone in a small town at the foot of the vineyard-covered mountains, two hours north of her office. She drove that distance every morning and evening without complaint, because-she told those who asked-she liked living far from the rush and noise of the seaside city where she earned her money, because the drive was pretty, and because she liked being able to think alone, hidden, in the car. Her apartment was on the town's square (much like a village square) above a yarn shop, and at night the heavy countrified quiet, the dark with its thick spray of stars, cool breath swooping down from the mountains with no obstruction from city lights or exhaust fumes, wrapped and consoled her. Alex's life could be called a pleasant one, if the pronouncer of that judgment were looking briefly, from polite distance.
In truth, Alex's life contained a series of underground chambers: wandering them siphoned off the best portion of her thought, set her apart, and defined her look of lonely grief. Alex was twenty-seven, the year 1984. An ozone hole had been discovered, Africa was starving, stone-washed jeans the fashion.
A man named Gray claimed to love her.
Grayson Merritt was married. He was forty-two, tall, well-made. Silver had barely begun to fringe the red-gold hair that kept falling-though he combed it straight back-in boyish planks, like a man in a Thomas Hart Benton painting. His face was the sort seen in highbrow ads, framed by safari fatigues and good scotch, fireplaces and golden retrievers. Gray wore an expression of quiet knowing. He seemed not so much to arrive somewhere as to manifest, often understanding Alex's thoughts before she spoke them.
They had met in a shopping mall near Alex's job: a department store smelling of new fabric and colognes, a wide, wooden sale bin piled with cotton sweaters. Alex had a special love for these sweaters. They soothed her, became softer and more comforting the older they got. She was lifting one from the jumble to examine its label when a leather-gloved hand was pulled toward hers by the very sweater she had lifted, a sweater the color of chocolate dusted with cinnamon.
"It suits you," said the owner of the leather-gloved hand. Not hello. Not excuse me. Not I was holding this first if you don't mind. The voice had a muted, mealy smoothness-so quiet Alex thought at first she may have imagined it. She turned to find the owner of the voice and hand. And though she turned in a reflex of annoyance-what moony geek would she now have to dispatch?-once her eyes found his face, its startling red crown (brows and lashes to match), the edges of her lips began to twitch in a wish to break out laughing. She forgot to be disdainful, and she forgot to be shy.
"You think?" The words issued from her as if she 'd known him since she could walk.
"I think." He nodded, blinking once. Yes, my child. Affirmative.
She walked through the dressing room's swinging doors not looking back, clasping the chocolate and cinnamon sweater; once inside under surgical white lights, struggled out of her wool layers, her heartbeat a detained, shallow thrum. She looked in the mirror, saw a face hectic with dark patches of blood. Mutation, she thought, Frankenstein's bride. She turned from the mirror, lifted her hair from her sweatered shoulders (it was a good color). Pushed back through the swinging doors to seek the stranger's face. He had not moved, stood at the sale bin in his Burberry topcoat, looked at her.
"It's ideal," he said simply.
Alex felt her face open like a child's. She could not have told you a single fact about her own history just then, but in the same instant could have sworn (had anyone asked) she was being seen and somehow-in some buried, central place, for the first time she could remember-known.
"Can I buy it for you?" He offered as naturally as you'd hold open a door.
Absolutely not. She had recovered enough to recall basic protocol. But her chest squeezed at the offer; she thanked him, short of breath. Her breath was playing tricks, dashing away and back. She would remember how baffling it felt that day to have suddenly misplaced her breath, like a wallet or keys. She paid for the chocolate sweater, and as they left the store together-her gaze lowered, noting his expensive leather shoes, golden brown, supple and soft as ballet slippers-he wondered aloud whether she might at least consider finding some coffee with him. It was a clean, cool Saturday morning in early October, the kind of day that makes people step outside, turn their faces up, open their arms: air snapping, sunlight clear and fragile, colors saturated. It smelled of fresh rain, everything rinsed, polished. Long streaks of light played off the storefront windows, the shining leaves of potted camellias along the walk; light kindled the baskets of begonias dripping orange and vanilla blossoms.
She would be pleased to have coffee.
Days weren't always crystalline in Marin. Once winter set in, cold fog could hunch over the bay for months, and a large part of Alex's time with Gray that winter felt suspended, muffled in thick mist. There was a pier down the street from her office where she walked at lunchtime, past the Best Mart supermarket, the real estate and esthetician offices, the marine supplies store, past the Wayfarer restaurant. She would stand for long intervals at the edge of the thick wooden planks. The pier jutted midway into the harbor, amid patient rows of anchored yachts, trawlers. They bobbed and clanged in the fog and currents, battened against winter. White gulls strutted the planks and circled above, crying their high-pitched scree. Alex thought there was nothing so lovely or sad as this sound. She also loved the sound of the metal lines hitting the masts while the vessels bobbed in place, a slow chiming that seemed to toll, as if it were urging better use of time. But Alex didn't know how to better use her time, besides to be twenty-seven, an émigré from the Southwest, working for a modest living and hopelessly in love with a man who could not leave his family.
Gray had founded a famous company, famous around the world but headquartered in San Francisco. He had started the original store not far from his home. The business specialized in kitchen and dining tools and supplies-not just any tools, but a select concept of them. They were designed with extreme simplicity, which was meant to imply their owner's superior relationship to earthly life. The superior part was not stated, or advertised outright. Instead the discerning consumer could see it-was expected to feel it-in the heft and purity of the products, each outsized bowl, cup, shiny woks with their patented, heat-conducive surfaces, in the dense-weave linen, heavy silver, their nouveau-crude lines, subdued, organic colors. Sand, willow, periwinkle, wheat. Lately the inventory was expanding to carry olive oils, maple candy, a line of bee-pollen products. The store 's catalog had gained notoriety, its language sonorous, calm. To buy from Scallion was not only to make a statement but to appear-and this was crucial-to care not at all about making statements. An anti-statement statement. The cookware and dining sets would age softly, like beloved leather.
Their prices were stratospheric.
The concept, Gray explained, was called "taught valuation." You paid for a thing once, very highly. Then you treasured it for life. If you had paid shockingly for it, you esteemed it more. The population of the area liked the idea of owning not just the best, but the artful best-by implication, the moral best. So the products' beauty, their longevity, their ability to age nobly and stand for a kind of low-key wisdom, would justify their eyepopping prices. Elegance serving integrity, in a stroke. It was, Gray concluded, a win-win event, a zen of economics.
"The language of our concept takes us there," Gray told Alex.
He had granted many interviews about Scallion's success, its business philosophy. (The name came to him, Gray told Alex, in a dream. It conveyed exactly the rogue mystique he wanted, its logo on catalog and storefronts now hailed across the country as a masterpiece of simplicity-the word in slanted script, the single onion lengthwise beneath as an underscore.) The franchise stock, only recently offered, was performing miracles. Gray had written articles, appeared on talk shows. He was writing a book, An Architecture of Essence: The Scallion Story-had recently signed the publishing contract during a gleaming lunch at the Trident. The restaurant sat on its own pier stretched out over the water, a boxy building painted gray-blue (strangely plain outside, as though it housed a strip club). Local media caught the parties descending the wide wooden front stairs to leave, popping flashbulbs at them, calling questions in excited, man-to-man voices. (The parties paused to smile, but would not comment.) People magazine had picked it up, as had Time: "The Rebel Prince of Cookware," its cover said. Gray's name and face-its boyish soberness, at once modest and firm-seemed to show up everywhere that year.
Alex had listened to all this in silence. Gray was explaining in the same careful, thoughtful way he always did, the way he'd spoken when she'd met him: that slow, half-swallowed voice. Remarkable, she'd thought-the unswervingness of his ambition. To wake in the morning with such clarity. How would that feel? She tried to climb, exploratorily, inside Gray's certainty. You'd feel fresh and well. On track. Capable. No trace of the stomach-dropping dread that always suffused Alex when she woke. She had to push aside that dread every day, force herself up and into the role like a tired actor into costume, do what someone else wished her to do, for money. What was it Alex actually wished to do? She had yet no notion. And this vacancy, this void where a clear desire should be, shamed her. By contrast, Gray seemed a tower. Standing calm as the camera bulbs flashed, microphones thrust in his face. Quietly accepting. As if all this fanfare had never been his wish, but he would tolerate it, to help convey his purpose.
Yet something in Alex could not imagine that at his center, Gray really took all that marketing gabble seriously. Taught valuation? The phrase rang like another term she'd heard somewhere that scraped at her, made her irritable: learned helplessness. Taught valuation. If you focused on it, it poofed away like dust. Alex wondered whether a man like Gray could not at heart know that beneath all those words, he was simply selling things. Of course, a hothouse climate for such words existed then, as baby boomers told themselves they could earn livings in colorful ways without becoming what they still believed they most loathed. The Whole Earth Catalog (its home office a few blocks from Alex's software building) was thriving, as were Amway, North Face, similar outfits. And by then Scallion-Jack Heath, its venture capitalist, lived most of the year in Costa Rica-by then the business had gained a reputation so swollen it might be excusable for anyone, not least its handsome founder, to be swept into the bosom of its propaganda.
Alex put the troubling issue aside to pull Gray toward her own bosom, which was white and silky and warm, rising and lowering subtly with her breathing. They lay that Saturday afternoon-early November, one month after the Saturday morning over the sweaters-in her four-poster bed above the yarn store, under three worn quilts, listening to the chirps of a lone bird in the oak tree behind the building. A square of window brimmed with backlit fog. The ceiling slanted like a loft's, its beams striated with smoky grains. Alex loved to look for pictures in those swirlings, and to smell and listen to Gray beside her. The room was a different room with him in it, just as her sense of herself was different: magnified, hushed. She kept one hand on his chest, to feel his voice as he spoke. (She had an idea that something of him osmosed into her this way, through her hand.) He had a clean, woody smell, his body like a tree. Hard and smooth, except for the soft red-blond down on his arms. Warming in that chilly room. Somehow she never minded her own body so much, while Gray aligned his own with it-he seemed to adore her body, though she knew her thighs were bigger than his, and a flatter stomach would have been nice. His admiration astonished Alex in a slowwitted way-an idea too vast, too improbable for her to face directly: it would have been like staring into the sun. Her body seemed womanly when she was with him, fundamental in some way, and that seemed like enough.
"You are a tree, and I am-what," she said. They lay on their sides, facing each other.
"Venus," he said, regarding her steadily.
Morton Levi was director of print production. Alex had not first interviewed with Mort, however, but with nervous, bespectacled Letty Kaplan, his assistant. Mort had been "given" Letty like a bonus attachment, to monitor staff while he carefully mapped the progress, against stern deadlines, of the books their department made. The books-ugly paperback manuals-were birthed in litters like rodents, as the software constantly changed. They bore titles out of science fiction. Expocalc II, Centrack, SonicSpell. And her two bosses, Alex often thought, could themselves pass for spaceship captains in a spoofy sci-fi movie. They'd be wearing helmets too big for their heads, staring out the spacecraft's windshield at the asteroid hurtling toward them. Mort the meek, Letty the flummoxed.
But Mort was the greater puzzle, for he seemed not at all right for his work.
He was a small, thin fellow, olive-colored, with shiny, straight black hair combed neatly sideways from its part, a goatee and mustache almost feverishly well-trimmed, and huge, deep black-brown Italian eyes, solemn as a child's. Two darkish-brown shadows encircled them completely, like moonbows. His eyes seemed to own the whole rest of him. His body was proportioned-he dressed it in quiet good taste-but so small and thin it looked like a scaled-down model of a man. Alex sometimes wondered if he'd been malnourished as a child. Mort had turned thirty-four that year, but looked younger. He had a habit of glancing around the room apologetically before he spoke, eyes moist, as if anticipating a violent objection before he 'd uttered a word. Mort's voice was kind, a peacemaker's-the voice of a man who might gather people to pray. Maybe, Alex mused, Mort should have been a clergyman. But this was Sausalito in 1984, and every young adult with any intelligence styled himself a pirate or gypsy or artist, with a day job. Infinite Information, Inc. was Mort's. Unlike most of his peers, he gave it his best.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Miss Kansas City by Joan Frank Copyright © 2006 by Joan Frank. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
