Don't Disappoint - Chapter 4
by Martin Van Cooper
We conclude the the third and final week of our second quarterly PILCROW’s Serialized Novel Contest. In the next few days, subscribers (both free and paid) will be invited to vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack. Finalists are awarded $500; the Winner $1,000. Catch up with this quarter’s Finalists below!
Our Finalists are:
Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds
Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney
Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper
While the traditional organs of American letters continue to wither, we recognize the need to forge a new path. If you believe in what we’re doing, PLEASE share and subscribe and spread the word.
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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket
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4
Are you hiding from the turtle? Jason asked, finding her near the back wall of the property during his own solo exploration.
A little much, no? Jessica had perfected smiling with her eyes while frowning with her mouth. He seemed to her like a high school senior basketball player just grown into and not yet comfortable with his body. He was tall, 6’ 6” or 7” she guessed and because she was 6 feet tall in her socks, this placed him from the get go in the very small group of men who might not be intimidated by her size and physicality. His cheeks were red (did he even have to shave?) like he’d just finished running wind sprints or soloing the sunfish around the lighthouse off Nantucket. Every man thinks he needs to lead with wit as a stand in for prowess, but his wit was unaffected. Unrefined. He, to her, an unpolished diamond.
I heard the painting inside used to hang at LAX, he said. Was she objectively hotter than he could objectively justify flirting with? The instinct for comprehensive pairwise analysis of all major sexual phenotypes.
I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t been to a modern art museum in several years, she said. Actually, there’s just fewer people back here, she continued in answer to his original question. These things always make it necessary to talk to other people.
And here I am to prove that point.
It’s ok, I know what it sounded like but it’s not that, I’m just…not talking shop for a while is nice. She was flustered then, one of a handful of times in their entire relationship he would ever register this, for her, most foreign of conditions.
No shop. 10-4.
She had brown thick straight hair past her shoulders and dark skin. She wore no makeup—her complexion was the kind on which it always appears unnatural…the color most women try to tan their skin to be. She was tall and lean with a swimmer’s body he thought to himself, lithe arms and chiseled shoulders and back, high set calf muscles like a long-distance runner or a black woman. He could smell, in addition to her perfume, the slightest body odor that exerted some pheromonal control over him and which he suspected was not inadvertently unmasked.
It was Tuesday, no Wednesday last week. You must have heard about it. You can’t have not…the guy was flying west he was somewhere around Agora Hills or Calabasas and the engine failed or something. It was a single engine plane, like those World War II kind. He put it down right on the 101.
Ball of fire.
You’d think so, she said. But no. The guy walked away.
He didn’t hit any cars? Right in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday?
The cops must’ve seen him coming, he radioed in or whatever and they cleared it out. Lands the thing on the 101 northbound, jumps out and the thing catches fire.
I think I saw something about the fire online.
They shut down the highway for 4 hours or something.
It was the year of crossed red lines and no responses. They had found the back wall of the property and followed the solar powered LEDs along the stone path to the northwest corner of the lot. The second water feature was here on a low flagstone pedestal. He suppressed the urge to make a comment about being in a drought and they sat down on a bench placed in front, ostensibly for contemplation. The feature was in fact a black wall with water pouring over both sides from an unseen exit on the top that looked not unlike the enigmatic monument that appears in 2001 to herald quantum leaps in astral intelligence except for a raised, labial looking protrusion that gave the water’s path some randomness and irreproducibility.
There’s no fucking way I’m getting into one of those things, she replied, as they watched the water meander. Not in self-driving mode anyway. I’ll stay sober and drive, thank you very much.
I don’t think you just, I mean you still have to control, you still drive it. It’s not totally self-driving. I mean you can grab the wheel anytime you want. It’s like a driver assist sort of thing.
I’ll stick with my old-fashioned gas guzzler.
And what is that? he replied, and then immediately regretting it. What did his father say: never ask a woman what kind of car she drives, it makes you seem materialistic.
They were disturbed then by some other guests who had wandered away from the mansion and the patio and the pool and the gardens and so they got up and decided to head back towards the house, drifting apart and into different conversations. When he looked up a while later, she was gone. Back inside the house Ed had installed a Britannica set from the 1960’s as wall decor. Waiting for the bathroom he picked up a random volume, which happened to be Cs, and scrolled to China, which came after Chimney, Chimpanzee, Chin, and before Chios, Chipmunk and Chippewa.
<Hey. Did you want to see the car?>
The text came through two days later with an option from his phone to Report Junk? and they made plans for dinner.
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