Somewhere Over the Sun

The following is an excerpt from my manuscript for The Moustache. I was writing this for some guys in L.A and their agent decided to pass so the project is now dead. I thought I may as well share a little bit with some of you. Enjoy.

Chapter 1

When the alarm clock woke Harvey Bellfield at 6:24 a.m every weekday morning, he would immediately pull himself out of bed, stumble toward the bathroom, turn the shower knobs more or less to the ideal water temperature, and strip naked, all before he was fully capable of understanding who he was or what he was doing. Routine preceded consciousness.

Harvey often shampooed twice during those morning showers, not out of an overzealous devotion to hygiene, but simply because he’d forgotten that he had already shampooed once and thus, enough. What usually brought Harvey fully into the waking world was the always too long and too cold moment between shutting off the water and wrapping himself in a towel. Once his upper body was dry, Harvey would tie the towel around his waist and step out of the shower, taking one perfect stride onto the bathmat in front of the faux-granite bathroom counter.

His first thoughts of the day occurred almost invariably during this one perfect stride and they usually consisted, in no particular order of frequency, of one or several of the following: his wife, Emma, and of how much she loved him now, or how much she had loved him a few years ago; a short highlight reel of himself as a high school athlete, in degrees of exaggeration varying from slight to hyperbolic; drafts of articles he wished to write about the previous night’s NFL or NBA games and happenings, almost all of which, in theory, were insightful, moving, accurate, and deserving of high praise from everyone in the sports journalism community; Amy, the coffee shop girl with the deep-set eyes, and sensual, tip-inducing lips, her velveteen laugh, the faint smell of cigarettes that lingered on her fingers when she handed Harvey his drink or his change; details about his life that he would consider to be blessings (forced into Harvey’s head by the self-help book he had been rereading for seven months, which encouraged him to think these thoughts); details about his life that Harvey would want changed, altered, bettered.

 As these thoughts continued, sometimes crossing from one category into another, sometimes leaving the threshold of aforementioned categories and thinking whatever the hell they felt like thinking, Harvey opened his medicine cabinet and removed his shaving cream and his razor.  He applied the shaving cream, which was always foam, not gel, first to his left palm, which curled upward like a beggar’s. Then he brought both hands together, and smacked the big, wasteful heap on to his face, trying to cover up every pinprick hair that had sprouted since the previous day’s shave.

Once the shaving cream was fully applied and the razor began its slow, measured charge across Harvey’s face, one single sentence grabbed hold of Harvey’s thoughts: Take that, Dad.

Harvey’s father had never taught Harvey about shaving technique, had never told him what to do, and, more importantly, what not to do. This parental neglect had cost Harvey’s late-teenage face many painful nicks and embarrassing, blood-freckled strips of gauze. Maybe it was silly, but Harvey saw that avoidance of fatherly duties as the first great failure of the man he had once admired, and he was certain that every great failure that his father had been guilty of (alcoholism, incarceration, abandonment), had stemmed directly from the initial oversight of not teaching his son the proper way to shave. Well, perhaps Harvey couldn’t be certain of it being the root of all problems, but he was certain that it could not be excluded from his dad’s long list of offenses. Now, every time Harvey saw the trail of perfectly smooth skin his razor left behind, he thought: Take that, Dad.

Sometimes, Harvey considered showing off his shaving skills to spite his father. He thought about fancy, well-groomed, goatees, he thought about pencil-thin chin-strap beards. He fantasized about just letting his hair run wild across his face, about going grizzly so that his father would see what could have happened had Harvey not been self-reliant enough to teach himself how to shave. But, that would have been a little more passive-aggressive than Harvey fancied himself capable of, and it would have been unbecoming. Plus, he hadn’t seen his father in six years, so it was somewhat unlikely that the subversive act would get across. So Harvey shaved it all off, every morning, never ceding to his fantasies of insubordinate facial hair.

Click here for Part I.            

    The crowd turned right onto K street and then another right onto Main and town hall came into view, just a couple of blocks away. The rain started falling a little bit faster, the drops a little heavier. Miranda recognized the sound of the Caldwell family walking behind her, the sound of creaking rubber boots unmistakably belonging to eight-year-olds Jenny and Leah.

“If this isn’t nice, what is?” Mr. Caldwell said, and a chorus of others exclaimed or murmured their concurrence.

“This!” Jenny shouted as she broke free from her mother’s hand and jumped into a puddle. She let out a shriek of joy at the resulting splash and was soon joined by her sister.

Miranda wondered how much the twins remembered from what the town used to be like. Would they have little shards of memories left over that would keep coming back and seem incongruent with what they knew about the world as it was? In a few years, when Jenny would be a pretty teenager applying eye-shadow in preparation for her first date, she might suddenly be struck by the image of an American flag at half-mast and not know what it meant, where the image was conjured up from. She’d pause and frown for a moment, finally deciding it must have been her imagination recreating something she’d read in a book. Now the flag in front of town hall was shriveled up, the open book pictured on it hidden between the wet folds. It was never lowered to half mast anymore.

At the entrance to the building a row of coat hangers had been arranged atop a carpet of dry towels.  The lobby reverberated with small-talk. Miranda hung up her coat and set her umbrella down, then walked to the bulletin boards to find which room her meeting would be in. Rather than stay in the lobby and join the chattering, Miranda preferred to take an early seat in the middle of the room and watch people coming in. She liked trying to guess who was loving that week’s book and who was hating it. A good way to tell was to look for the folds of dog-eared pages, the faint glow of highlighted sentences. To see who would be talking the most, Miranda looked for margins heavy with ink, question marks pouring out from the pages.

She walked past the row of copper busts of Vonnegut, Wilde, Hemingway and Murakami in the lobby and made her way up to the second floor, past the pictures of Faulkner, Plath, Garcia Marquez and Atwood. Like everywhere else in the town, quotations from books inscribed in marble or framed like artwork hung on the walls.

It was still early and Miranda expected the room to be empty, but she saw Ethan, the coffee shop waiter sitting on a stool at the front of the room, his back hunched over as he read. She stood at the doorway for a moment, trying to decide whether he was just pretending to be focused or if he hadn’t actually noticed her.  His fingers absent-mindedly ran over the edge of the book as if he were caressing someone’s cheek.

“Hi,” she said, stepping into the room.

He looked up slowly from the book and flashed a smile, then quickly returned his attention to the pages in front of him. Miranda took a seat and watched him read for a while. They had never been in a reading group together, although she often saw him at the coffee shop reading the same book as her. They often said hi, or smiled at each other. Once, he had commented on the square ring she wore on her thumb, and on a different occasion she had asked him about how his weekend had gone.

After a couple of minutes, Ethan placed a cloth bookmark in between the pages and looked up at Miranda. “Hi,” he said, “Sorry, you caught me in the middle of a good scene.”

“No apologies necessary. How far along are you?”

“One-seventy-four,” he said without looking down. “Just finished chapter six.”

Miranda turned to the postcard in her book, “You’re a fast reader. I’m only at page eighty.”

“I have a lot of free time at the coffee shop,” he said. “I did the math once, and I get paid more per page that I read than per cup of coffee I serve.”

“That’s not a bad deal,” she said. Then, after a pause, “Ethan, right?”

“Yes,” he said, “Ethan. And you’re Miranda?”

“We know each other’s names, it’s like we’re already friends,” she said with a nod and a smile, enjoying the sentence as she said it, feeling that it was not merely people talking to each other but dialogue. “Is this your first time leading a meeting?”

“Yes and no. First adult meeting. I’ve lead a few children’s meetings before.”

“How’s that?”

“Reading with kids is a lot less structured. They don’t try to invent metaphors where there are none. They’re better than we are at letting a story be told to them. As grown-ups, I feel we never forget that we’re reading, and I think that sometimes gets in the way of the story. We know that there was a writer, an editor, a publisher, that there’s something beyond the book itself. We know that someone was trying to make this book good, or artistic or marketable. We put ourselves through books  because they’re Books We Have to Read or Classics or New. And we sometimes forget to just listen to the story. Kids don’t do that.” He drummed his fingers on his book, “Plus, they’re a lot more fun to be around.”

They looked at each other across the room. Miranda hadn’t responded at all, but she was nodding her head and smiling, which Ethan seemed to be contented by. “How about you,” he said, “any experience leading?”

“Oh, no. I’m not organized enough. I was in a book club in the old days and we had this rotating scheme where every month it changed and you just couldn’t get away from not leading a discussion. Very aggressively diplomatic like that. At first I was excited to try to steer people to talk about the things I thought were interesting in the book, but when it was finally my turn, I ended up talking the whole hour about how there wasn’t a single mention of hair styles throughout the novel. It struck me as bizarre, not knowing what anyone’s hair looked like. I know that’s a silly thing to focus on, and it definitely wasn’t the only opinion I had on the book—it was actually a pretty fantastic book, if I remember correctly. Beautifully written. But I just couldn’t help myself, I started leafing through during the meeting, reading character descriptions out loud. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not some person that’s obsessed with hair or need everything imagined out for me. I don’t have to know what every secondary character’s hair looks like, not even every main character’s. But not one mention of a single coif? It was bizarre. Like the writer purposely left it out, or is bald and so he doesn’t consider hair to be all that important.” Ethan was leaning forward in his chair with an amused smile which had broken into chuckles a few times during her monologue. “So…no, I don’t lead discussions anymore. I think I’m better off letting someone else take the reins.”

That’s what I have so far, no ending in sight. But I don’t think I’m abandoning it. Just putting it down for now. 

This was going to be included in The Calvin Sky, but I have no idea where the story is going so I figured I’d just share what I have with you. It’s a little long, so this is part I.

Miranda read on, trying to find the strength to reach the end of the page, which conveniently ended on a paragraph. The tricky part was to stay awake enough to understand what the words were trying to say to her, but not so awake that the comfortable tiredness she was feeling would get scared away. Just a few more lines and then she’d be able to lean back in her chair, rest the book against her stomach and close her eyes.

However, she had been thinking about maintaining that delicate balance and when she did reach the end of the page, she hadn’t comprehended a single word of what she had read. She moved her eyes back to the top of the page, but a few sentences later the sun stepped through the clouds and put Miranda to sleep.

 She woke up with a shiver, and the book which had been covering her stomach like a miniature blanket fell to the floor of the porch and landed face down on the planks of wood, its pages crumpled, its spine strained, the postcard which served as a bookmark a foot away, spat out during the fall. Miranda brought her feet down from the railing of the porch and smiled to herself as she picked up the book. She loved accidentally crumpling pages, spilling beverages, scarring books with evidence that someone had read them. She made a half-hearted attempt to smooth out the damaged pages and then looked around her, trying to determine how long she had slept.

Judging from how much the clouds had moved around the sky it couldn’t have been long. But sleep was clinging to her eyelids and her breath, and the temperature had dropped more than could be accounted for by the sun stepping back behind the clouds.

As much as the quality of life had improved in the few years since the town got its independence, as nice as everything was, Miranda still couldn’t find it in her to be content with gray days. She knew many people that loved the rain, the promise of it over the horizon, the smell before and after. But it simply wasn’t for her. Waking up to gray skies was one of the only times when she did not think to herself, If this isn’t nice, what is?

Miranda did not feel particularly guilty about her failure to think about niceness. She believed that, despite the town’s adopted philosophy, it was impossible to adhere to it all the time. For months, she’d been compiling a list, matching up people in town with things they secretly did not think were very nice. Every time a waiter messed up her mother’s order, Miranda could see the unpleasantness flash across her face before her mother forced herself to subdue it. George, the grocer, did not think a bad shipment of vegetables was very nice. Miranda’s friend Annette did not like going to sleep alone, it was obvious. On those nights, laying in exactly half the bed, feeling the coolness of untouched sheets beside her, Annette could not possibly be thinking, If this isn’t nice, what is?

Or rather, she was thinking it. Everyone was constantly thinking it. But Miranda assumed that everyone had an answer. Medium-rare, her mother was thinking. A full bed; crisp, unblemished peppers; blue skies, those were nice.

A gust of wind blew Miranda’s hair into her face and sent her bookmark scurrying across the lawn. She considered letting it get away from her, imagined it getting carried around all over town one gust at a time, finally resting at some young girl’s feet. The girl would pick it up, ask her mother what it was, and although her mother’s response would be, “That’s a postcard, darling. Someone must have dropped it,” the little girl would decide to use it as a placeholder in the book she had just started reading. But the postcard was from someone she no longer saw, so Miranda got up from her seat and walked across the lawn and the day’s gloom to chase it down.

Already, light rain was falling onto her like insects seeking a rest. She brushed away a drop that had landed on her eyelash and picked up her pace. The postcard was tumbling over the blades of grass as if it were just one of the leaves the wind was relocating. Soon, it would land face down in the middle of the street, dirtying the white spaces remaining between her friend’s handwriting. She slowed to a light trot and then caught up to the postcard on the sidewalk, stepping on a corner to keep it from blowing further away.

She picked it up, admiring the mark that the tread of her sandal had left on the postcard. It covered up the postage stamp and came close to reaching Miranda’s name, written in the sloppy, pretty cursive of her friend’s handwriting.

He hadn’t signed his name and maybe that was one of the reasons why she no longer remembered it. Or maybe it was because he had refused to come with her in the first place, had sent this postcard in place of himself. It was incredible how quickly the outside world had faded. It came back only a detail at a time: the cadence of news anchors; the way rain had kept her awake during her childhood, incessantly tapping at her bedroom window; that he had not liked reading.

 Miranda ran inside to get an umbrella and a raincoat and then joined the mass of neighbors who were making their way to the town hall for the weekly meetings. Most people had their books hidden within their coats, or inside their purses, but Miranda kept hers tucked under her arm as she walked. She loved the way water wrinkled a page, but could never bring herself to purposely wet a book. But if it happened to fall onto the road, or if the rain took her gesture as a personal challenge and found a way to make it past her umbrella and onto the paper, well then that was just how things were meant to be.

No matter how long it had been since a car had been driven in the town, several people couldn’t break the habit of walking solely on the sidewalk. Miranda preferred the middle of the road. She loved how it still felt a little taboo, especially at night with the street lights brightening the asphalt as if they were expecting cars to roll through any minute. Instead, what they got was this scattering of people talking softly to each other about their days. When the weather was nice, some of them rode bicycles. Miranda wondered how the streetlights felt about that, whether they missed seeing their reflection in car windshields, whether the asphalt missed the weight of traffic.

To be continued…