|
|
Executive Times |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
2006 Book Reviews |
|||
|
|
Waterloo
by Karen Olsson |
|||
|
Rating: |
*** |
|||
|
|
(Recommended) |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Hometown In some ways, Liza was the first woman Nick had been
serious about in a long time. He couldn’t bear losing her, if only because it
seemed to condemn him to another long spell of six-week entanglements, of
capsule biographies traded over beers on the first date, of trying to
insinuate his general outlook on life (or rather, a more charming and
positive version of same) between entrée and dessert on the second. Of long
silences on the third. It was over with Liza, he
had lost her, but in his head he was still in the process of losing. His story wouldn’t
interest her; she didn’t care about an interview he’d done the day before.
Yet he heaved it along. “The man is in his
eighties,” he said. “Eighty-three, eighty-four, something like that.” “Who did you say he was?” “And drinks like a fish.
He used to be in Congress.” “A politician,” she said. “A real old-school old
guy. A liberal. He seemed out of it. I’m not even sure he knew who I was.” “Out of it how?” “Not totally out of it.
But not totally with it either.” “Didn’t you tell him who
you were?” She looked past his shoulder, though there was nobody behind him.
Tables and chairs were enough to draw her attention away. She’d told him to
meet her here, a downtown bar near her office called B2B, foreign territory
thinly populated with a thinning-haired assortment of older men who sat at
the bar and who were all curiously short. Even the bartender, who spoke into
a phone headset as he handled the beer pulls, stood well under six feet. Nick, on the other hand,
was tall. He had nothing for Liza but meager
anecdotes. “I did tell him who I
was, but I’m not sure it registered,” he said. “He wasn’t making much sense.
He started asking me what I was doing there, and I said I wanted to ask him
about his career, and he blew his nose. That was it, he blew his nose.
Loudly. It was probably the loudest nose blow I’ve ever heard.” Nick tried to make a kind
of foghorn sound, thinking he might get at least a smile out of it, but she
didn’t smile. Nothing. Her lower lip had been subdued by her teeth, her hair
was pinned back: worrisome signs, in someone normally prone to loose strands
and wisecracks. Why had she called? Why was she sitting on her hands? Five months since the
breakup, and they still met every couple of weeks for coffee or drinks,
mostly—always, until today—at Nick’s suggestion. The first time he’d proposed
it, Liza had made him promise he wouldn’t try to
discuss what had gone wrong in their relationship. “Because I really don’t
want us to sit there and regurgitate,” she’d said. “Absolutely not. No
regurgitation.” “Okay, then.” That time and the next
and the time after that, he’d stuck to the rules. He hadn’t mentioned their
past or the possibility of getting back together. He told himself that they
might remain friends, or become friends—since only now that they’d not had
sex for five months did it seem they were beginning to get along. But any further progress
was obstructed by the problem, the well-over-two-hundred-pound impediment, of
Miles. Liza and Miles had moved to Nick wanted to think that
Liza had called him, at last had called him and not
the other way around, because she and Miles were having problems. He wanted
to really talk. He wanted to tell her he’d been thinking about her, but
couldn’t think of how to say it. I’ve
been thinking about you didn’t sound right, but that was just what it
was. He’d been thinking about her, and about a particular pair of yellow
tennis shorts she used to wear, sometimes with turquoise flip-flops, and
about her long legs stretching between those two items—so that when she
showed up at the bar in professional black pants, Nick had felt a ridiculous
pang, which her stiff-armed hug did not exactly relieve. “How’s work?” he asked. The two partners at her
law firm were splitting up, she said; they were competing to hire away the
rest of the staff. One of them had called her into his office that afternoon
to ask whether the other one had offered her a job. “It’s pathetic,” Liza said. “Neither of them wants to hire me, but they
both want to keep the other one from hiring me. All I want is to get out of
there.” “And do what?” “Go work for a different
firm,” Liza said as if it should have been obvious.
It was obvious. She’d graduated from law school in the spring, and now she
was a lawyer. Still, Nick kept expecting her to renounce the law, or at least
corporate law, and go on to something else. He was always expecting she
might do various things she was never going to do. That she would start
liking Vietnamese food, or take an interest in politics: he hadn’t believed
it when she told him it made no difference to her who the president was. You
mean, you think there’s no difference between the candidates? he’d asked, and she’d said no, that wasn’t it. She just
didn’t care. It wasn’t going to affect her life one way or the other. Nick
had tried to argue the point but had soon given up. “How about you?” she
said, sounding as if she might yawn. “How’s the paper?” “Oh, you know. McNally’s
still a pain, and I don’t think he’d be sorry if I quit, but we’re coming to
a sort of understanding.” “McNally’s the new guy?” “Yeah.” McNally had become
editor of the Weekly right before
their breakup. To say that McNally and he were coming to an understanding
was misleading, but not entirely false. McNally had killed his last story;
Nick had been expecting it. When McNally had threatened to reassign him to
the sports section, Nick had pointed out that the Weekly didn’t have a sports section. “That’s correct,” McNally
replied. Whether that meant Nick would be fired, or that he would be forced
to take charge of a new section on sports—about which he knew nothing and
toward which he harbored a certain resentment—Nick
wasn’t altogether sure. “So what else is going
on?” Nick asked. “Why are you whispering?” “I guess it just seems
quiet in here.” “Looking for a house,”
she said. “You’re going to buy a house?” “Our realtor’s this
actress. She was in Coal Miner’s Daughtei~” “The movie?” Our realtor? “No, they did a rock
opera of it here a few years ago.” Before going to law
school Liza had worked for a theater company, and
she still had a hand in the Liza’s phone bleated. “Would you mind if I
took this?” Nick shook his head and
asked whether she wanted anything else to drink. With her fingers wedged
under her thighs, she’d hardly touched her beer. Nick, on the other hand, was
ready for another. “I’d love an ice water.” Though there weren’t more
than a dozen people in the bar, it was as if they’d all decided to buy
another round at the same time: Nick waited for the
bartender, who at long last started toward him but then was interrupted by a
phone call. He held up his index finger to Nick. Nick wanted to show this
guy his own index finger in return—how’s this
for an index finger—but he just waited. He felt like the only person in
the city who was not getting a call. When at last he turned
back to the table with his beer and her water, Liza
was watching him. “You’re too nice,” she
said as he set down the glasses. “You let people tell you what to do.” “I do when I don’t mind
doing it.” “When was the last time
you stood up to someone?” She put an ice cube in her mouth and let her
fingers rest on her lips. Other women described Liza as slutty. Not as “a
slut,” in reference to actual sexual events, but as “slutty,”
because of her predilection for boob-flaunting low-cut tank tops and heavy
eye makeup (the makeup was ironic, she claimed) and maybe also because of the
way she talked to men, like she didn’t really give a shit in general but
liked you well enough and might even sleep with you were the wind to shift in
the right direction. Nick had fallen for that, but not only that. There was,
in addition, her vast bank of disorganized knowledge: though she rarely read
a book, she retained all sorts of weird facts from newspapers and magazines;
she knew every celebrity marriage and recent archaeological discovery and
world leader. Nick had tried to convince her to drop out of law school and
make millions on the game-show circuit, but Liza
said the thought of any of her ex-boyfriends turning on the television and
seeing her on Jeopardy! made her sick to her stomach. She had a lot of exboyfriends. One night at dinner she’d inadvertently
revealed that she remembered blow-by-blow the way everything had played out
in the former “Is that why you called
me here? To tell me what a pushover I am?” His tone was too sharp. He’d never
been able to respond to her banter in the right way. “When I said I thought
maybe we should break up, you never even tried to talk me out of it.” “Maybe I thought it was
the right thing to do.” “Maybe it was.” “Maybe it was,” Nick
said. Christ. Their talent for pushing each other’s buttons was uncanny. He’d
never fully believed it would succeed, their so-called
relationship. She would make plans without consulting him beforehand; he
would retaliate by showing up an hour late. Neither of them had had anything
to say to the other one’s friends. She’d told him he had bad breath—and what
could you say to that, no I don’t have bad breath?
That was exactly what Nick did say. Then they’d argued about it—though from
that day forward, over the year they were together, Nick had chewed more gum
than he ever had before in his life. Sore jaw, sore heart: what he missed, it
seemed, was the misery of her company “Miles and I are
engaged,” she said quietly. “What?” She didn’t repeat it. “But you’re not—” He
stopped himself before finishing the sentence. In love with him was one
possibility. Interested in marriage was another. At least, that was what
she’d always said. “You don’t know me as well as you think
you do,” Liza said. Nick snorted. “What is that supposed to mean?” she
asked. “I wouldn’t say I know you,” he said.
“At all. But congratulations.” She was silent. “When did he propose?”
Nick pictured Miles lowering himself down on one knee and offering her a
satin-lined box that contained, instead of a ring, a large muffin. “I asked him,” she said.
“Two weeks ago. We went out to dinner and I asked him.” “How romantic.” “I guess it was a bad
idea to tell you this,” she said. “I thought you should at least hear it from
me and not someone else.” “You want me to thank
you?” “Is there a chance at
least that you might be happy for me?” ‘‘No.” “I see. In that case. . .“ She
stood up abruptly “Take care.” But wait: it hadn’t
really been misery. For all their quarreling, she’d been his girlfriend.
She’d had his back. When he would complain about some perceived slight, she
would take his side—most of the time—and when he’d had a cold she’d brought
him obscure homeopathic remedies, and when he’d accused her of ignoring him
at parties they went to together, she’d apologized and started paying more
attention. In private she had a silly streak, a fondness for Adam Sandler and fart jokes, and such a humane tolerance for
her neurotic, bitchy friends that Nick had almost started to like them
himself. When he met her she’d
been selling tickets to a play. The theater was in a former warehouse on the
south side, with a crude carnival-style ticket booth out in front of the
loading dock. Liza had been standing in the booth,
her head and chest an animate portrait framed by plywood painted red and
yellow. Her insubordinate hair was half pulled back and her eyelids were
ringed with a thick stripe of green liner; her T-shirt was black and tight.
From the first, it was always fuck you
and fuck me with her, not necessarily in that order. “What’ll you have?”
she asked. “One ticket,” he said. “Just one?” He nodded. “Your date stand you up?” He was about to say
no—the truth was, he’d wanted to see the play, and none of his friends had
been interested in going—but instead he said, “Either that or I got the
night wrong.” “Or the play,” Liza said. Her “enjoy the show” had a sarcastic ring to
it, as if she doubted it were possible. In fact, he did not enjoy it. It was
set in the A week or two later, he’d
gone up to the university campus to do some background research for an
article, and had passed Liza on his way to the library:
she’d had one hand planted in her hair and the other holding a cell phone to
her ear, as if fixing her head in place. “Whatever gets your rocks off, Mom,”
he heard her saying as he walked by He followed her to the lobby of the law
school building, then on down a set of stairs, and through a door that led to
a low-ceilinged hall with a row of dark-blue lockers on either side. There
was no one else around. He couldn’t very well pretend he had an excuse. She
looked right at him. “Are you following me?” she asked. He
hesitated, then answered: “Yes.” She squinted. “I know you from
somewhere.” “You sold me a ticket to a play. A
shitty play, I might add.” “So you want your money back, or what is this?” “Get a coffee with me? It’s the least
you could do.” “Not the very least,” she
said, and was about to say no—her head was already shaking, just as Nick had
expected it to shake. There was every reason for her to say no, but what
she’d said was “You know, I really don’t feel like going to class.” The
reason she’d so much as given him a chance was that his rival for her
affections that day had been Taxation with Professor Wedelbaum. In the beginning she’d
told him she wasn’t up to dating anyone (a polite way of saying she wasn’t
interested in dating him, he assumed), but she’d given him her number. In
the weeks that followed, they’d talked on the phone; they’d met for lunch.
It was at one of their lunches, at a diner near campus where she liked to eat
a cheese omelette before class, that he figured out
(or thought he did) why she kept stringing him along. They were sitting at a
booth near the door, and a couple of dweeby
classmates, a man and a woman in student regalia—law school T-shirts, law
school backpacks, law school caps, and bar-review-course water jugs—had
stopped to say hello to Liza, who that week was
teasing her hair to look like Madonna’s in the era of Desperately Seeking Susan. What struck Nick was how uneasy Liza had seemed—all three of them were oddly formal in the
way they’d greeted one another—and it dawned on him that for all her peacockish splendor, and maybe in part because of it, Liza didn’t exactly have chums at the law school. She
didn’t have any normal friends at all, except for her childhood friend Miles.
Everybody else she knew was semi-exotic: they owned galleries and made films;
they were always leaving to go to In keeping with her moneyed
upbringing, she was a great taker of lessons, and afternoons after her law
classes were over, while her classmates trudged to the library with a hundred
pounds of textbooks harnessed to their backs, Liza
would change into pedal pushers and a pink visor from the Luxor casino and head out to the country club to practice
her golf swing. Nick had gone along once. It was impossible not to observe
that her drives never traveled in the direction of the hole, but she did have
a powerful swing, and she liked to root around in the woods for the errant balls., Better than Civil Procedure, she’d said with
disdain in her voice, as if there were something unsavory about courtrooms.
That was the thing about her becoming a lawyer: she hated to argue and wasn’t
much good at it. Her usual tactic was to concede, sometimes genuinely and
sometimes with a toss of the hair and a “Well, if that’s my fault, then I’m
sorry.” She’d broken up with him all of a sudden, in May, a couple weeks
before graduation, as if the prospect of introducing him to her parents had
driven her to it. On the day of her graduation ceremony, Nick had snuck onto
the golf course with the fifty-dollar bottle of champagne he’d intended to
give her in celebration, and managed to polish it off and collect half a
dozen stray balls before club security escorted him off the premises. * * * Some
hours after Liza delivered the news of her
engagement Nick woke up on the front porch of his house, in the dark, lying
on the sofa that had been passed down from tenant to tenant, a sodden
Salvation Army reject he’d long been meaning to haul off to the landfill. He
didn’t feel well. His tongue lay thick in his dry mouth like a leech in the
sand. A Big Star song bleated in his head: Take
care, oh, take care. . . He
brought his hands to his face; they smelled of dirt and grass, as if he’d
crawled across the front yard. And as he lay there, the desire to move
backward in time rather than forward, though hardly new, hit him more
brutally than ever before, not just nostalgia but nausea, not just regret but
exhaustion. The sofa sank beneath
him. His face burned. He was ashamed of himself. So he had lost her again, he
had lost her months ago. His pants were mysteriously torn, and some
overachieving bird was already squawking like crazy. Texans and Austinites
will savor Waterloo.
The rest of us will enjoy Olsson’s fresh voice. Steve Hopkins,
December 22, 2005 |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times
Archives |
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the January 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Waterloo.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
