“You meet the creative director yet?” he asks before asking my name.
“Not yet,” I say.
“He’s the best,” he says. “He got drunk at our last holiday party and started giving out hundred-dollar bills. Last year we shot an air freshener ad in Tokyo and he bared his ass to the whole of Shibuya Crossing from a Starbucks window because he lost a bet. All these Japanese people were freaking out.”
“And yet, amazingly, the glass ceiling still exists,” I say.
Myke rolls his eyes and wheels his chair away from my desk. “It’s not because he’s a man he did that stuff,” he says. “It’s because he was drunk.”
*
My brother Levi calls from upstate to tell me he got a new job at the hot food counter of the local supermarket. Levi plays experimental jazz and still lives in the same town he went to college in. It has a gas station and four churches. He shares a house with a litter of his bandmates and his girlfriend, who may or may not have been homeless before they got together. He told me that the only thing she owned when he met her was an industrial-grade hair dryer.
“Congratulations on your job at the food counter, Levi,” I say.
“Hot food counter,” he says.
*
Before I left LA, I started a script about two parasites, Scrip and Scrap, who live in a junk heap at the end of the world. When I close my eyes, I see colorful mountains of trash, skeletal sofas, strollers covered with moss, pigeon-winged books, twisted condom wrappers, crushed paint cans, smashed computers, moldy bedspreads, burned-out TV sets … It’s a kid’s show, I think. Or maybe a comedy. A kid’s comedy. It’s called Human Garbage.
*
I find Jacky making coffee in the office kitchen. She is dressed a bit like a Palm Springs realtor from the 1980s, all sunset hues and shoulder pads.
“So, where were you before this?” she asks. “Another agency?”
I tell her about the clairvoyant cat show, leaving out the part about my ignominious departure.
“My sister has three cats,” says Jacky.
“Any of them clairvoyant?” I ask.
“Not that I know of.” She laughs. “I don’t get the appeal of any animal that shits in a box.”
“More of a dog person?” I ask.
“Dolphin person,” says Jacky.
*
The creative director comes by to introduce himself. His name’s Frank. I once heard a man described as having so much sexual gravity, he could be his own planet. This is not exactly how I would describe Frank, but he does have a sort of electrical energy—jolty movements, a static shock of hair, and weird flashing eyes—that sends a current through his hand to mine.
“My mom’s name is Eleanor too,” he says and smiles. “But I’ll try not to hold it against you.”
*
Before she retired, my mother taught English at a high school for gifted children. Now she plays bridge with other women from her synagogue three nights a week and takes courses at the School of Professional Horticulture to improve her gardening. My mother is like a hummingbird in that if she stops moving, even for a moment, she will surely die.
*
My father lives in an assisted living facility for people with Alzheimer’s not far from my mother’s house. He was, up until a few years ago, a celebrated OB-GYN. My parents divorced when I was ten, and then my father moved in with a Brazilian dermatologist, who in turn left him for another woman. Despite all that, my mother still visits him once a week. We only ever refer to the place he lives in as That Home. Not to be mistaken with a home, which it isn’t much of.
*
A Jewish gynecologist and a Brazilian dermatologist. There must be a joke in there somewhere, my mother likes to say.
*
“I heard something wonderful on the television today!”
My mother is calling to me from the kitchen table, where she is reading about different varieties of hydrangea. I come in and take soy milk from the fridge.
“Don’t you want to know what it was?” she says.
“You can just tell me, Ma,” I say. “You don’t need an invitation.”
“Bite my head off, why don’t you,” she says, passing me a mug. Sparrow. “Well, it’s because of you I remembered it. It was on one of those daytime talk shows I never watch. A matchmaker came on to talk about dating in the digital age. And do you know what she tells her clients to say to themselves first thing every morning? ‘Remember, you could fall in love today.’ And I thought, I bet Eleanor would like that. I’m sure Eleanor would think that was just great.” She beat the words out with her pencil. “You. Could. Fall. In. Love. Today.”