Zack & Jill

honk if you love me. oh, i do, i do

Schreiber Cards wanted Jill. Not Zack. Zack smiled and said he was happy for her, and maybe he was, but his beer just went flat.

The pisser was not that Schreiber hated him. Zack knew that. With the help of three or four or six beers, he could live with it. What bugged him was that Schreiber liked Jill. If she was going to be a winner, Zack wasn't sure he could live with her.

Sitting with her at their usual table at the Clammer, hearing her tell all about her meeting with Schreiber, he had to smile. Worse, he had to thank her.

"Bo offered me this fab, fab job," Jill said, "but I stood up for my man."

"Thanks," Zack said.

"I talked about you."

"I said thanks."

Waving her chowder spoon, Jill told him how she had fought. How she had told Schreiber they were a team, Zack and Jill, like love and marriage, soup and sandwich. How she had said there was no deal without Zack. Schreiber had said....

•

"No, no, no, no. I got thirteen scribes, treize. They do good work, too. Fast, lyrical work. Four cards a day and four times treize, I don't have to tell you, love, is fifty-two."

Bo Schreiber sat in his office at Erie and State, twisting a paper clip straight. He had a big corner office with a curved window. Behind him, the city curved out in the snow. He was average-sized and average-faced and, as if to compensate for his indistinction, too groomed. He (continued on page 148)Zack & Jill(continued from page 75) had a pencil mustache and a $100 haircut. His belt, suspenders and tie matched his lavender pants. His shirt was as white as the headlights in his window.

"I know Zack," Schreiber said. "Zack worked here, remember? It was like pulling gold from a tooth. Old One-a-Day we called him. He did one card a day and that was a good day."

"I know," Jill said.

"One times one, love."

"I know."

"Say it was a good one."

"OK."

"Super. Let us say it was a super one. We are still talking a super one."

"Right," Jill said.

"You can give him the money." Schreiber rocked forward in his swivel chair. "If you're worried about his reaction, you can do that," he said. He rummaged in a desk drawer, found a gold lighter and lit a cigarette. He smoked the kind with the little anus in the filter. "What you do at home is not my métier. You're a team; give him the money."

"You get the inventory," Jill said.

"Oui. Sure. We buy Silly Gander, we get the inventory. And we put you in charge of the line. Same geese, same great look. My scribes."

"Zack wrote the inventory."

"Give him the money."

•

Jill told Zack how the smoke from Schreiber's cigarette had crawled up his window. How the greeting cards, memos, pens, pencils and paper clips were arranged on his desk, all straight lines and sharp corners. Schreiber's tie was lavender with gold stripes. His office was bigger than Zack and Jill's living room. In his window were headlights, and cars of all colors, traffic cops in blue parkas, pedestrians in red and green and yellow scarves and stocking caps, how pretty the town was in the snow.

She had a fab memory. Jill could tell you what you wore and what you drank the night she met you. She remembered the colors of college friends' eyes. Her memory had been nothing to hate when he married her in their last year at Northwestern. If it made her a four-point student who was unbeatable in trivia games, who cared then? Zack had strengths of his own. Sitting with her at the Clammer ten years later, under a sign that read Mussel men last longer, he tried to remember one.

Pac-Man. He used to be great at Pac-Man.

Jill waved her spoon and said Schreiber's fingernails were manicured. Not a nick on them, and his thumbnails were maybe a quarter inch longer than the rest. How anyone remembered a detail like that Zack would never know. Schreiber's eyes were fucking hazel.

"He really called you love?"

"Oui." Jill giggled.

She was pudgy, 5'3" and about 130 when she kept her weight down. Red curls down her forehead. She wore jeans, a plain white blouse and purple lipstick. Her blouse was open down to the fourth button, where freckles dotted the tops of her breasts.

Zack wore sweat pants and a Bears jersey. He was 6'1", 160. He was going bald. Every morning, he counted the strands in his comb.

"Bo was nervous," she said. "He lit one cigarette right off the other."

"They called me One-a-Day."

"Oui."

"Will you stop saying that?"

"Nope." That was another thing about Jill. You could only get a straight answer out of her. "Bo says you could still be good," she said, "but you try to make every word the best word since 'In the beginning was the Word.'"

"Nice. He's read a book." Zack watched foam flecks in his beer. They made clouds and spirals, microgalaxies of goose shit. "He wants to give you five K now and six hundred dollars a week," he said.

"Oui."

"You have to do it."

"Yes."

"When are you going to tell him?"

"I did," she said.

"You told him?"

"Yes. I said yes."

•

That night, she had to shop. Got to look smart on my first day, she said. She needed shoes, five blouses, maybe three skirts, a purse and a jug of Compulsion. A smart person would wear what she already had, Zack said. "A smart person would bank her first month as profit. You don't know how long a job is going to last," he said. "But it's your money."

"Our money," Jill said.

"Well, you're spending it."

She skipped down the front steps of their little Bucktown apartment. Zack followed. Jill got into her purple and rust Corolla, buckled up, blew him a kiss and motored up Buck Street, 15 miles an hour. He waved. First with five fingers, then three, then the middle one.

He went to her workroom and touched the button under her light table. Light filled the room. He looked at the card she had been working on the day before. It was a picture of a goose. He stood in her workroom looking at the goose and wondered how he'd got stuck in a Bucktown apartment with a girl and a goose.

Jill had an M.F.A. from NU that meant "shit," she always said. "Any doofus can read up on Monet and Manet and Man Ray and pass tests. It doesn't mean you can make pictures."

She could. Zack used to like to watch her scratch dots and dashes at this cramped light table in this closet of a workroom. Her scribbles made no sense until she was almost done with a card, then in three or four strokes, a picture popped out. It was like watching a Polaroid develop.

Her specialty was geese. She drew fat cartoon geese with huge eyes and stupid grins. Her ganders had thick necks, hairy chests and lewd bulges in their swim trunks. They smoked cigars and chased Jill's girl geese, who wore petticoats, had absurdly long eyelashes and drank parasol drinks.

Zack and Jill launched Silly Gander Cards in their second year together. She drew her geese, he wrote the words. Honk if you love me. Hold me, love me, goose me. He and Jill sold their cards a dozen at a time to shops in the Loop and New Town and on Rush Street. Most months, they sold enough cards to pay the rent. Sometimes, there was money for movies, or for clothes and art supplies for her or a case of beer for him. Zack and Jill spent long mornings in bed telling themselves how happy they were. Even when the cards didn't sell and dinner was popcorn and Shake 'n Bake, they said they were lucky. They stayed up late, slept late, never punched a clock and if they never sold another card, they had each other. She was a cleanliness-godliness freak who would not eat in bed without putting a towel down first, and he was a slob who couldn't read a magazine without getting peanut butter on it, but they seldom argued, and when they did, they sexed it out.

One summer, when the cards didn't sell, Zack got a day job at Schreiber Cards. He wrote 29 cards in eight weeks, 30 if you count Now that our divorce is final...Fuck you, which Bo Schreiber laughed off as "too true" to sell. When Schreiber took him to lunch, Zack thought he might be getting a raise.

"It's not that it sucks," Schreiber said after two drinks. "Some of your stuff is funny. Goose me if you want to get down--I love it. This is not about quality. This is about economies of scale, Zack. But. Do I throw you to the wolves? No. I want to give you forty a card."

"Forty more."

"Forty per. Free-lance. The best thing about it for you is, you get to make your own schedule."

"You're firing me."

"No. Well, yes. If you want to be literal about it, I am firing you, but one second after that, I'm hiring you."

"Fuck you, Bo."

"You can be better this way, Zack. Ten a week at forty per is what? Sixteen hundred a month."

"Fifty," Zack said.

"I can't pay fifty. I never pay fifty."

"Fifty."

"You win," Schreiber said.

In the next three years, Zack did not sell Schreiber Cards one word.

Old women who ran card shops told Jill she was great. You have such a talent, dear. You have such a talent, but you have to remember it's a seasonal business. You can sell cards a dozen at a time sometimes, but you are going to have those months you don't sell any. January, March, August, September. Do you paint, dear? Do you know how much painting people get for one picture?

Silly Gander stayed ahead of the market for a while. Zack and Jill had the usual holiday and birthday cards, but they also sold happy-divorce cards. Honk if you love your freedom. They had a cosmetic-surgery card, Love your New Honker. They had happy-opening-day cards for baseball fans, terrible-twos cards for young parents, salvation announcements for born-agains and Merry 12/25 cards for lapsed Christians. Their happy-40th-birthday card showed a goose in a hospital bed and read You're not getting older, you're dying.

The market caught up. First the New Town and Rush Street shops and later the shops in the Loop and on Michigan Avenue began selling offbeat cards from Hallmark and Schreiber. Zack knew he and Jill were in trouble when he saw Bo Schreiber's secretary, Debi, a bleached blonde in a black-leather skirt and red sweater, buying every Silly Gander card in a Loop shop. Two months later, he saw a window full of Schreiber opening-day cards in a shop on Michigan.

•

"Kiss me," Jill said. She woke up all the time. She woke, got lonely, woke him.

"What time is it?"

"Late," she said. "Kiss me."

Zack remembered. She had gone shopping, he had gotten tired of waiting and crawled into bed. Now her grandma's quilt bunched under his butt and bound his feet. Zack kicked and the knot tightened. He kissed Jill's arm and rolled toward sleep, but she was quick, she kissed him hard on the mouth. "I love you," she said.

"Me, too, you."

"Do you?"

"Sure. What time is it?"

"I hope you do."

He covered her left hand with his and tapped his wedding ring against her ring. "Click," he said.

"Click," she said.

•

Trussed for success in a white blouse, bolo tie, black skirt and No Nonsense control-top panty hose, she twirled a shoe on her finger. "Without heels, I look squatty," she said.

"Good morning."

"Do you think I need the heels? I do," she said. Zack handed her a Pop-Tart. She stuck it into her mouth, leaned on the fridge and jammed her foot into the shoe. "No wy wum wer eel?" she said.

"Say again?"

She extracted the Pop-Tart. "Do you know why women wear heels?"

"To be taller."

"No. They make our butts stick out. Long, long ago, when we were cave women, we used to stick out our butts when we were in heat. Men still like it."

"Where did you hear that?"

"On NPR."

"I guess it's true."

"Wish me luck," she said.

"I do."

"I love you."

"Don't be late."

Jill went to Schreiber. Zack stood on the front steps and waved to her. Then he went inside and tried to work.

He paced the apartment, lugging a pencil and a legal pad.

I think that I will never see, he wrote.

"A what?"

A valentine so good to me. A 'tine so

"Sweet, kind, gentle? Plump?"

fine that she, like thee,

"Mister Interior Rhyme," he said.

Can

"Do what? She, like thee, can skin her knee. She can see. She can pee."

Outbourgeois the bourgeoisie.

"Señor Socialist." He tore the page off the pad, wadded the verse and drop-kicked it into the kitchen. Jill's cat, Mr. Milktoast, a fat orange tabby that spent most of its life hiding, zipped out of nowhere to bat the wad under the stove. The cat looked at Zack as if its toy had vanished into thin air.

"Idiot."

Zack had his legal pad in his right hand and a Blackwing .602 in his left. The Blackwing had an ink-black lead. It was sharp enough to make an incision in the paper if he pushed too hard. According to Lindy, the bookworm in the office-supply store, Steinbeck wrote with a Blackwing. Ditto Thomas Wolfe and Archie MacLeish. Zack paid a dollar apiece, money he had to bum from Jill, for Blackwings.

Love, he wrote.

"Is what?" He crossed it out.

If you love somebody,

He tore the page off the pad. He wadded it, kicked it and followed it to the fridge. He got a cold beer, took it to the living room and sat on Jill's black-leather sofa. He put his beer on the coffee table. The table was black teak and, like everything else in the place, it was Jill's. When he and Jill consolidated apartments and moved here eight years ago, she tossed his Elvis records, orange crates, stereo, softball trophies, bowling ball and beer-can collection and kept her stuff. She said men have no style sense.

He should have argued. He should have said yes we do, it's just inexact, but he was weakened by twice-a-day sex, back rubs and her constant harping about what a fine man he was. He carried his stuff to the Dumpster for her.

Her walls were white as Schreiber's shirt. Her baseboards and ceiling were black. There was a white rug under the coffee table and three pictures in chrome frames on the wall. One was a copy of Dali's Toreador. The others were a painting of a cigarette butt and one of a cube on horseback. The magazines on the coffee table--Grafix, Line Art and Greetings World--were hers. He was supposed to use them as coasters for his beers. He left this beer on the wood, where it was sure to leave a mark.

Yo. Valentine, he wrote.

"Too street." He crossed it out.

You make a world of beauty with yourwarm and loving way.

You make me happy, Valentine, with allthe things you say.

"That's nice."

I feel so lucky, every day,

To think that you are mine.

And that's why I am proud to say

That you're my valentine.

"Hackshit. Bo will love it. Let us go for two."

Roses are red, darling,

Violence blue,

I am me and you are you.

If I die before I wake,

"Ache, bake, cake, quake."

Thanks for all that Shake 'n Bake.

He spent the rest of the day watching soaps on her TV. What he liked about soaps was that each character had a meaning. The people on them were hunks or Heathers, priests or drunks, sluts or corrupt politicians, nice or nasty--always one or the other. Nobody loved his wife and still wanted to put out her eyes, and nobody just sat around watching soaps. Between Light and Restless, he went to the medicine cabinet in the John and got Jill's tranks. They were white, a quarter inch across, with a minus sign in the middle. He ate one and hid three in his pocket.

•

After work, she dropped her keys in the soup bowl on the kitchen counter, where they kept keys, coins, postage stamps, paper clips, pens, pencils and X-Acto knives. She hiked her skirt, stripped off her panty hose and stuffed the wad into the trash. "Never again," she said. "I have creases in my delta."

"Want a Pop-Tart?"

"Did you know in China, long, long ago, they used to tie up little girls' toes to keep them from growing, so their feet would be petite for the men?"

"Everyone knows that," Zack said.

"I didn't. I think it's awful."

She went to the John and showered the workday out of her hair. He could hear her singing. Jill always sang in the shower. Tonight the tune was Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay.

Zack sat at the kitchen table with the sports page and a beer. He tried to read but couldn't help hearing her sing. "I can't do what ten people tell me to do," she sang. Then the water stopped. He heard the shower curtain snap open as she stepped out of the tub.

"Zachary!"

She called him again, then came words he couldn't quite make out. This was her wheedling voice. She pitched it just low enough to make it impossible to decipher at this distance, to make him get up to see what she wanted. He went.

"Oui?"

She was naked except for the white bath-towel turban on her head. Pointing her turban at the toilet, shaking her head, she was an infinitely gentile, infinitely suffering Q-Tip. "What is that?" she said.

"That's the toilet, honey."

"On the seat. What is that on the seat?"

He slipped past her for a closer look and saw yellow drips on the seat. "Is it beer?" he said.

"No."

"Is it Mountain Dew?"

"No," Jill said. "It's urine."

He nodded. "Mine, too."

"Yes."

He wiped the seat with toilet paper. He wadded the paper, dropped it in the bowl and flushed it. Stepping past her on his way out, he felt Jill's stare on the back of his neck. Don't turn around, he thought; if you turn around, you may as well piss on the seat again.

"You don't do dishes," she said. "You don't cook. You don't make the bed. You never do laundry and I don't want you to. You drink out of the milk carton. What do I say when you do that?"

"You say use a glass."

"Wrong. I don't say anything. Most of the time, I don't say anything."

"I appreciate it, too."

"You don't know how many times," she said.

"You don't notice how many times I put the toilet seat up."

"How many?"

"I don't know. One in three."

"That means one in six."

"Probably."

"Maybe it's a boy thing," she said. "You want to mark your territory, so you spray it around. But you know I hate it. I sit on that. Here I am, sitting in urine, and I don't know, but maybe you could give this one thing up."

"You win."

"I don't want to win. I just want you to try to put the seat up."

"Eat these," he said. He gave her the pills.

"What are they?"

"Calcium. These are One-A-Day Plus Calcium. Working women need it," he said. "I saw it on Oprah."

"One-A-Days are orange," she said.

"Not these."

She ate them.

•

"I'm going to read in bed," she said. She had a Grafix under her arm and a toothbrush in her hand.

"It's seven o'clock."

"Bed, bed."

"I'll be in."

He took his time doing the dishes. When they were Zack clean, he stowed them in the cupboard the usual way, under the perfectly clean dishes she had done, to delay discovery. He tightened the faucets on the sink and made sure the fridge door was shut. He locked the front door, killed the lamp in the living room, filled the cat's bowl with brown and yellow pellets and stood outside the john door, listening. Jill was brushing her teeth. She rinsed, gargled and spat. He waited. She always brushed twice. Brusha brusha, rinse, gargle, spit.

He picked the sports page out of the trash. He checked the standings. The Bulls were in first by a game with 30 to go. By the time they lost to Detroit in June, as they always did--Jordan would go for 60, the Pistons would win by two--Zack could be three months gone. He trashed the paper and killed the kitchen light. The bedroom was dark.

"How can you read in the dark?"

"Want to cuddle," Jill said.

He stripped and joined her in bed. She threw the quilt over him and spooned him. Her breasts and thighs pressed his back and his butt.

"Kitchen light?" she said.

"Got it."

"Hall light?"

"Got it."

"The lamp in the living room?"

"Oui."

"I love you," she said.

She wanted to sleep, but it was weird, she said. She could hardly keep her eyes open, she said, but even more than sleep, she wanted to talk, to tell him everything, because he was part of it. They were still a team. "Do you know what Bo did? When I showed up?"

"I don't know."

"He kissed my hand. I get off the elevator and there he is and he bows, says welcome aboard, and he kisses my hand."

Schreiber kissed her hand and walked her around the office. He showed her to his secretary, Debi, the blonde pirate Zack saw buying up Silly Gander cards in the Loop, and to Kate and Gina, "these slutty-looking typesetters," and to Joey Horton, a smirky cartoonist who shook her hand as if it were dirty. Jill wondered why Joey hated her. Two reasons, Schreiber said when Joey was out of earshot. One, he likes gents and, deux, you're getting his office.

How fab her office was. "You have to see it, Zack."

"Tell me."

"Earth tones. All deep-brown carpet and cork walls. Well, from the ceiling to the middle, cork. From the middle to the floor, they're this deep forest green."

"Sounds deep."

"This big window. It looks out at a hedge and the parking lot. Cars, cars. The sun on the cars and, oh, I forgot, I forgot the best. The best, and it's mine, this huge light table. It's pine and it has chrome all around the edges and three lights. Three lights! Two long fluorescents and this one on a long arm you can bend. It comes up like this and you can bend it up here, or there, you can put it right down on the work and you can see the ink on the paper."

"Better than your table here."

"I never got up! Bo asked me to lunch, but I didn't go. I just stayed and drew and drew. I did three."

"Three geese," Zack said.

"Cards," she whispered. "I did." She was going and he hated her for it, for making this easy. "Kiss," she said. He kissed her.

You're not my trouble, he thought. You are not my trouble, but you're close. You smile in your sleep. You go to sleep thinking how lucky you are, with your home and job and love all in place. I wake up sweating and there's the moon in your window. There goes another night's sleep. My eyes adjust to the dark and I see your smile. One night, I hated it so much I tried to shake you awake. I shook you and you opened your eyes. You were asleep, but your eyes were open and you said, "I love you." I got out of bed and got my sweats on and ran around the block 20 times.

"Three lights," Jill said.

Zack kissed the gulley between her breasts, the thin hairs on her belly and the red nettles below. He waited. He waited an hour. Still she tried to talk, but she was gone.

He got out of bed and felt his way to the closet. He dressed in his Bears jersey, sweat pants, Nikes and a windbreaker. Wait, he thought, I need pockets. He peeled off the sweats and got a pair of jeans from the hamper. Pulling the jeans over one leg, he hopped to the kitchen and got his wallet from the soup bowl.

He had $30. He was proud of himself, because he didn't raid her purse. He stuffed the wallet into his pocket, got an X-Acto knife from the bowl, slipped the plastic shield off the blade and sneaked to her workroom.

Her light table here wasn't much. It was plywood with one fluorescent and no chrome. He touched the button under its wooden gutter. There were three spits of light as the bulb switched on. It shaded the pencils and erasers in the gutter. Light fell from there to her chair. The chair was brown tin with a red-vinyl seat, which was dented by the imprint of her butt. Light fell to Zack's shoes to the bookcase behind him and, between the bookcase and the wall, cat eyes.

"What are you looking at?" he asked Milktoast.

Zack sat in Jill's chair. On the table was her work no longer in progress, the card she had drawn yesterday. It was a goose with lampblack under its eyes, with a baseball bat slung over its wing and a Cubs cap on its head, an opening-day card. Zack took one of her pencils and wrote on the goose.

I'll root for the home team.

If she don't win, it's a shame,

But it's one, two, ten years now

And this is how I end the game.

He used the X-Acto to cut Silly Gander's last card out of the onionskin paper on the table. He took the card to Jill.

Her fingers were asleep. He had to pry the thumb and first finger of her left hand apart, then close them on the paper. She stirred and tried to talk. "Not tonight," he said, kissing her mouth shut.

Zack walked. He went into the john, felt for the toilet seat with his shin, found the seat and pissed in the dark, aimless.

On his way out, he left the front door open. If the world wanted in to watch her smile in her sleep, let it. He took the front steps two at a time.

The sky was all stars and the stars buzzed. The buzz could have been the phone lines running up and down Buck Street, but Zack liked thinking it was the stars, hot things in a sky so cold he could see his first free breath.

He sprinted four blocks the first minute, two the next, then one. Stopping to catch his breath, he heard his heartbeat in his ears.

"One of these days, you'll get in shape," he said.

He jogged another mile before he turned back.

Going up, he took the steps one at a time. He locked the front door, went to bed and spooned her. Jill was long gone, but when he touched her, she smiled and said, "Mmm." Zack took Silly Gander's last card from her hand, rolled it into a ball and kicked it at the window.