Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel Read online

  Then Paul found himself idling at the light where he had used to turn off into the leafy neighborhood where he’d lived with Kymberly, and the memory of his fall from grace gathered gloomily on the horizon of his good spirits like a massive Texas thunderstorm. Once upon a time, Paul had been a very promising literary theorist with a very impressive Ph.D. from a very prestigious school, the University of the Midwest in Hamilton Groves, Minnesota. But within a few years of matriculating, he had found himself stuck in the last year of a nonrenewable postdoc at an undistinguished state school in Iowa, cruelly writer’s blocked, and up to his neck in a pointless affair with a sleek graduate student in communications, a kinetic California girl named Kymberly. His only hope of professional salvation had been to ride the coattails of his wife, Elizabeth, as she negotiated a tenured position for herself at Chicago University. But riding Elizabeth’s coattails depended on Elizabeth not finding out about Kymberly, and that in turn depended on placating Elizabeth’s sinister cat, Charlotte, who lived with Paul in Iowa while Elizabeth commuted back and forth to Chicago. What happened next was sort of willfully blurry in Paul’s memory, but there had been a titanic battle of wills between Paul and the goddamn cat. Charlotte had hoarded evidence of Paul’s infidelity—panties, an earring, wine cooler bottle caps—while Paul had alternated between trying to buy her affection with catnip mousies and fish snacks, and terrorizing her. The battle ended badly for both of them. Call it a draw: Elizabeth found out about Kymberly and cast off Paul like a sack of old clothes, effectively ending his academic career, and Charlotte ended up drowned in Paul’s bathtub. Somehow.

  An angry honk from the pickup behind him startled Paul; the light had gone green without his noticing. He jerked his foot off the brake and accelerated grumpily through the intersection. Now he had to let the little mental thunderstorm blow itself out. After Iowa, Paul had followed Kymberly to Texas, where she had gotten a job as a junior reporter at a struggling network affiliate in Lamar, KNOW, channel 48, “You’re in know now with K-Now 48,” intoned the announcer, “your home for news and entertainment in central Texas!” while a giant K meant to appear carved out of limestone rotated in a depthless TV null space. But KNOW was fighting for its life in a tough market, and everything was done on the cheap, and Paul came to refer to the station as Know Nothing 48, Home of the Giant Rotating Styrofoam K. The station’s threadbare budget worked both to Kym’s advantage, allowing a rookie a great deal of airtime on big stories, and against her, allowing her to make all her mistakes live, as she mispronounced names, lost her place in her notes, and asked wildly inappropriate questions of the grieving families of murder victims and death-row inmates.

  But then Kymberly toughened up and buckled down. She took a stenography course; she cut her hair into a stylish and professional bob; she bought herself a word-a-day calendar and practiced her pronunciation every morning with steely determination, baring her teeth at herself in the bathroom mirror and carefully working her lips around “eleemosynary” or “prestidigitation.” Her performance improved so much that Paul was surprised one evening to realize that the brisk young woman in the trim, lemon yellow suit he was admiring on TV was actually the woman he was living with. This revelation allowed Paul to tap into previously unknown reserves of lust (his desire for her had begun to wane, for all sorts of reasons), and that evening when she came home, he begged her to keep her suit and makeup on, murmuring in her ear, “I’ve never fucked an anchorwoman before.” And Kymberly, even though she was bone tired, allowed him to do it, asking him breathlessly at a crucial moment, “Do you really think I’m anchorwoman material?”

  And soon she was an anchorwoman, at least on weekends. On Saturday and Sunday evenings she shared the fortresslike anchor desk with an aggressively cheerful fireplug of a guy who doubled as the weekend weatherman, wearing his immense double-breasted blazer like a cuirass. Paul was bemused to realize that the guy had a crush on Kym; at the end of one of their first broadcasts together, as he reminded viewers of stormy weather heading their way, he laid his stubby little hand on Kym’s wrist and said, “You be careful driving home, pumpkin.”

  “ ‘Pumpkin?’ ” said Paul when Kym got home. “I know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “The news director told him not to do it again. He was crushed.”

  “He looks like a lawn statue,” Paul laughed. “The Weather Gnome.”

  “Stop!” laughed Kymberly in a two-syllable singsong, batting his arm, but over time she seemed to find the sobriquet less funny. Paul was too busy foundering professionally to notice. He taught composition at Lamar Community College for a couple of semesters, for a thousand dollars per course, but when the budget was cut they let him go. After that, Kym agreed to support him for six months while he wrote a book. He worked fitfully on a memoir of his expulsion from academia, leaving out the adultery and cat drowning, only to learn from an acquaintance in publishing that the market was glutted with memoirs of downsized academics recovering their self-worth, saving their marriages, and becoming better fathers through redemptive manual labor. Everybody was looking for a gimmick; one guy, Paul was infinitely wearied to discover, was writing horror stories set in academe.

  When Kymberly found out that Paul spent more time napping and going to the movies every day than he did writing, she bullied him into taking a job at a textbook company, the Harbridge Corporation. For eight months Paul sat in a little gray cube under harsh fluorescent lighting and composed grammar exercises for grades six through twelve. His job was to update an old workbook by expunging any content that did not meet the textbook guidelines of Texas and California, the company’s two biggest markets. Fundamentalist Texas forbade even the most benign references to the supernatural (the first step towards the Satanic sacrifice of newborns), while nutritionally correct California forbade any references to red meat, white sugar, or dairy products (the biochemical causes of racism, sexism, and homophobia). Pretty quickly the effort to write exercises that were simultaneously inoffensive to Dallas and San Francisco left Paul struggling to stay awake in front of his computer screen by the middle of every afternoon. In his stupor he began to imagine an actual battle on his desktop, a ragged collision of Lilliputian armies out of Spartacus: a well-drilled phalanx of Promise Keepers and West Texas cattlemen on his right versus a scruffy rabble of Berkeley vegans and Earth Firsters on his left.

  Paul’s supervisor, Bonnie, was an embittered former high school English teacher from Little Rock who had lost her job to budget cuts. He attempted to express solidarity with her as one academically displaced person to another by dropping quotes from Milton and Pound, but this only humiliated her; Bonnie’s knowledge of the canon was limited to middlebrow high school “classics” like Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird, and she didn’t get the jokes. In return, she never missed an opportunity to remind him how far he had fallen from his prestigious Yankee university. “Guess they didn’t get around to adjective clauses up there in Minnesota,” she’d say, handing him back a clumsily executed exercise to do over. Paul retaliated by surfing the Web all day and deliberately missing deadlines. When he was really pissed off, he composed items with inappropriate references that he figured Bonnie wouldn’t get—“Mr. Humbert (brought, brung) Dolores a banana”—or arranged an exercise so that the first letter of each item spelled out a subliminally subversive message like “MEAT IS GOOD” or “BOW TO SATAN” or (in a twenty-item review exercise he was particularly proud of) “SATAN SEZ EAT MORE CANDY.” And when he was feeling unusually ambitious, he combined the two techniques into one exercise:

  In each of the following sentences, underline the direct object once and the indirect object twice. Not all sentences have an indirect object.

  1. I gave Renfield instructions not to wake me until sunset.

  2. Lizzie offered her father a close shave that morning.

  3. Oliver, have you told Mr. Fagin about the missing waller?

  4. Vita showed Virginia a thing or two.

  5. Eagerly, Oscar taught
Bosie the backstroke.

  6. Sid gave Nancy the surprise of her life.

  7. Affectionately, Mrs. Donner gave Jeffrey a second helping.

  8. Tara offered Willow a token of her affection.

  9. After a delicious Irish stew, Mr. Swift told us his modest proposal.

  10. Norman gave his mother a carving knife for her birthday.

  Paul complained bitterly about Bonnie at home, especially on those days when she had caught him asleep in front of his monitor in the middle of the afternoon. What he didn’t tell Kym was that most of his coworkers were pert and stylish young women ten years younger than him, women just out of college who wore airy sundresses or tight, wraparound skirts to the office all summer long and decorated their cubes semi-ironically with magazine photos of pretty-boy actors. Some of these girls found Paul’s wiseass bitterness intriguing, and they slouched fetchingly in his cube doorway and flirted with him about books and movies, grad school life, or last night’s episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One of them, a dark little Russian emigré named Oksana who worked in the Harbridge science department, took Paul into her bed on the evenings when Kym was working. Oksana had a wry twist to her lips and an adorable accent. “Say ‘moose and squirrel,’ ” he’d murmured to her in the clinch, and she’d slapped him on the backside and whispered salacious Russian in his ear.

  On those evenings when Kym was working and moody Oksana did not want to see him, Paul haunted the coffeehouses near the campus, where he could eye bohemian young women or intense graduate students in sleeveless blouses over a copy of the local alternative weekly. He had prepared a story to explain his situation in case he managed to engage one of these thrilling women in conversation; the last thing he wanted them to know was that he was a failed English professor. Instead, he told them that he was a former writer/producer for The X-Files, and that he had walked away from his television career and moved to Lamar to write a novel. “I wanted to get out before the show went down the tubes,” he was going to tell them, and he had prepared answers to the questions he thought he was likely to get: “He’s an asshole.” “She’s even smarter than she looks.” And “I wrote the ones about worms. If it had a worm or worms in it, that one was mine.” But in the end, he wasn’t able to use the story. In one of the coffeehouses, a renovated old house with creaking floors and mismatched couches and easy chairs, he ran into Virginia Dunning, an old friend of his ex-wife’s from graduate school. Paul had always considered Virginia a bit too, well, virginal for his taste, but since he had known her in Hamilton Groves she had picked up a mordant wit that Paul found instantly attractive. To Paul’s astonishment and envy, Virginia was not only a tenured full professor before she was thirty, she was already chair of the Longhorn State History Department. To his further surprise she invited him back that first night to her little Texas bungalow, where, as luck would have it, she lived with a cat, whose name was Sam, and who put his ears back and flattened himself to the floorboards at the sight of his mistress and Paul coming through the door. “Don’t mind him,” said Virginia, “he’s an idiot.” Paul laughed, but he wasn’t quite sure if Virginia was talking to him or to the cat.

  Virginia’s avidity in bed was yet another surprise. “I’ve never fucked a department chair before,” he murmured in her ear, and Virginia flung him onto his back, straddled him, and said, “Let’s see if you’re tenure material, Professor.” Afterwards she rolled over and went to sleep, and on the drive home, Paul had time to contemplate the three women in his life, none of whom knew about the other two. He’d told Oksana that he lived alone, and he’d told Virginia that he was working as an “independent scholar,” a dodge he’d come across during his abortive attempt to write a book. Rattling home through the hot Texas night, Paul thought, my life could be worse.

  Shortly thereafter, it was. Oksana discovered Paul and Virginia tête à tête one evening in a coffeehouse near campus, while Kym coincidentally happened to be on the television set in the corner, making vapid small talk with the Weather Gnome. Oksana stalked across the creaking floorboards, screaming abuse in Russian. Then, as Virginia looked on in astonishment, Oksana emptied her double latte into Paul’s lap and stalked off, pausing only to add, in her adorably accented English, “Focking esshole!”

  Oddly enough, this incident didn’t seem to bother Virginia, who simply shrugged it off. But later that same night, as Paul followed Virginia into her bungalow, Sam went into his crouch, hissing and growling before he bolted from sight.

  “Idiot,” muttered Virginia.

  “I don’t think he’s hissing at you,” Paul said, still brushing at the coffee stain on his trousers. “He’s hissing at your dog.”

  “What dog?” Virginia whirled on him.

  “That big black dog that came in right behind you,” Paul said. “I assumed he was yours.” He glanced about Virginia’s living room. “I don’t see him now.”

  Virginia stared at him, all the blood draining from her face. “Get out!” she gasped.

  “Sorry?”

  She drew a shuddering breath, as if gasping for air at high altitude, and shouted, “Get out!”

  “Is this about the girl at the coffeehouse?” Paul asked, as she slammed the door in his face. “I can explain that!”

  The following morning he lost his job at the textbook company. A sharp-eyed copy editor had caught some of Paul’s subliminal messages, and that morning the efforts of the entire department had been diverted to reading through every grammar exercise written in the last six months.

  “ ‘EAT ME SATAN’?” said Bonnie, gleeful with schadenfreude. “I suppose you think that’s funny?”

  In the end Paul was escorted from the building by a beefy security guard who repeatedly called him “sir” as he yanked Paul’s arm up behind his back and marched him to the elevator on his tiptoes.

  “I have a real Ph.D. from a real goddamn university, not some peckerwood teacher’s college in Arkansas!” Paul shouted. “I graduated summa cum laude! I was a finalist for a Guggenheim!” He glimpsed Bonnie’s triumphant gaze one last time, and he shook with rage in the guard’s painful grip.

  “You fucking cow!” he roared as the elevator doors closed. “I was almost a Fulbright!”

  By late that evening, Paul was drunk on wine coolers, the only alcohol Kym allowed in the house on the theory that they were less fattening than beer. He lounged in bed watching cable, a clinking heap of empties beneath the bedside table. Hypnotized by the endless whine of some NASCAR race on ESPN, he dirtily heard the front door slam and managed to push himself up in bed as Kym posed primly in the doorway in her lime green on-air suit, broad in the shoulders and nipped in at the waist.

  “We have to talk,” she said, very gravely.

  “I can explain,” Paul said immediately. In his fruity stupor he tried to cipher out what Kym knew and how she knew it.

  “I’m in love with someone else,” she announced, luckily before he started to stammer about Oksana, Virginia, and the loss of his job.

  Paul stopped trying to stuff the latest empty under the covers. “What did you just say?”

  In a matter of moments Paul learned that Kym was carrying the Weather Gnome’s child. His immediate reaction, even drunk, was to imagine Kym and the Weather Gnome and their child as a row of lawn statuary.

  “This is outrageous!” he cried, rising from the bed in manufactured dudgeon. But he bungled the effect by tangling his ankles in the bedclothes and toppling flat on his face.

  In the end Kymberly paid him to move out, loaning him enough money for a damage deposit and a couple of months’ rent on a new place. He quickly learned that he wasn’t able to afford a place in the leafy collegiate neighborhoods he wanted to live in, nor was he able to afford even one bedroom in the nicer apartment complexes in south Lamar. He had to settle for the third part of Lamar, the commercial wasteland past the interstate, which he was now entering on his way home from work. Twenty-five minutes in the car in the heat and traffic had largely cooked away his
elation over his raise. Like Dante descending into the lower tiers of seducers, deceivers, and falsifiers, he entered into a curbless region of self-storage units and U-Haul dealers behind cyclone fences and curls of razor wire, interspersed with empty lots of yellowed grass and heat-baked earth. He passed a catfish parlor advertising ALL-U-CAN-EAT in huge block letters on its blank concrete wall; a vast barn of a Texas dance hall with a corrugated tin roof and a neon sign that read RIDE ’EM, COWBOY! in a script of looping lassoes; a ramshackle wooden vegetable stand slung with bunches of desiccated jalapeños; and a windowless cinder-block tavern called This Is It. With a sinking heart he turned down the cracked old two-lane highway to San Antonio, towards his home for the moment, his temporary refuge from the blows and buffets of the world, the small apartment complex he called the Angry Loner Motel.

  SIX

  IT WAS AN OLD MOTEL from the fifties, two separate oblongs of colorless cinder block, two stories each, facing each other across a wide parking lot of parched asphalt, seamed with cracks and punctured exactly in the middle by the square, rusty, rattling grate of a storm drain. The place’s official name was the Grandview Arms, but the only view from Paul’s front window was of the apartments across the way, and the only view from his tiny bathroom window in the back was a stretch of Texas savannah littered with rusting pickups and abandoned appliances. Paul’s shoulders clenched as he turned off the highway, clanked over the grate at the middle of the lot, and pulled into the space in front of his apartment. He switched off his car, and the engine gasped to a stop. Paul’s Colt was the smallest and youngest car in the lot; each of his Angry Loner neighbors drove an enormous, spavined automobile from the seventies and eighties, some extinct Detroit saurian that listed to one side or the other or dragged its rear end as if it had a body in the trunk. Whenever one of these aircraft carriers came to life (which invariably required a two- or three-minute warm-up period of guttural, unmufflered roaring), its engine grumbled, its tailpipe rattled, and its shocks—or what was left of them—groaned and squeaked like old men.