Chapter 1 recap:
18-year-old Sam, a high school senior, is dismayed when he finds he’s been accepted to Princeton University. Going to Princeton would interfere with his secret dream of becoming a Sumo wrestler, and it would force him to abandon his 7-year-old sister Priscilla, or ‘Pill,’ who relies on him as a caregiver and as a buffer against their abusive mother Frankie. After an especially bad fight between Priscilla and Frankie, Priscilla says she wants to kill herself. This, combined with Sam’s sense that he has some other destiny in store, brings him to a new and unexamined solution: he and Priscilla will leave home.
Please note: This chapter contains some offensive language and ideas. Sorry to give offense to anyone, but good fiction needs some good bad guys, in my opinion.
2. Lyle the Hammer’s Philosophy on Happiness
Lyle the Hammer danced off the set, punching the air in rhythm with the thumping music, his muscles popping against his sleek shirt, his blood thrumming. This was the best part of the day: three shows taped and finished, music blaring, money flowing, everyone dropping their work and doing this celebration dance. He wove in and out of bodies, moving himself toward an intern in tight red jeans who was working her hips and swinging her arm above her head like she was twirling a lasso. He danced up to her, planning to pay that tight butt a visit, just a little bump from the Hammer, but when he reached for her hips, she whipped around and startled back, tripping over a cable but catching herself, smiling when she realized who it was, showing a mouth full of crooked front teeth and acne spreading across her face. Bad acne, even in this light. Christ. Who hired that? His bad mood dried up instantly. He left all them while they were still dancing, and he went to the elevator, pulling off his earpiece, though it was caught on his diamond stud, the four-grand hunk of gem that was, he had to admit, a pain in the ass.
The elevator rose, squeezing his chest. He breathed in. And out. Center. He wasn’t happy, even though he had written a best-selling book on the subject: Make Yourself Happy. Happiness is a choice, he had said. You can choose happy, or you can let the bad stuff rule you. Lyle chose happy. He played loud music in the studio after every show because it made him happy. He hired good-looking people and only good-looking people because he liked being awash in all that sexiness. He got off the elevator on the top floor and walked to his office, which was filled with light washing in from the windows overlooking downtown Chicago. His wife Yukiko lay on a red sofa in the middle of the office, a book above her face and one leg up, showing just the tiny swell of flesh where he sometimes wished a nice big butt was situated instead. Lyle was an ass man, and for some reason he had married a woman with no ass, and as she aged she became even more sticky and boyish. But he still loved her, as much as ever. He didn’t know why, he just did. She was his and he was hers and it had been that way for a long time, and that was part of his happiness doctrine: love the person you married. Love them like you mean it, and if you don’t love them, get the hell out.
Yukiko sat up and closed her book. Her black and silver hair framed her face in a geometric bob, perfectly straight down the sides and across the top.
“That was fast,” she said. “What happened?”
“I didn’t feel like hanging out,” he said. He turned to the windows, squinting against the glare. A few stories below, on a rooftop patio, two men were dragging a potted tree to the corner of the roof. The tree had a long skinny trunk with a rounded burst of foliage on top, and it reminded him of a lollipop. He admired the spirit of this—buy a goddamned lollipop tree and make a little garden for yourself in March, hundreds of feet above the ground. Why not?
“So the expert on happy isn’t happy,” Yukiko said.
“I was. But then an intern ruined it.” The sadness in his voice surprised him, made him feel small.
Yukiko was behind him now, reaching one hand over his shoulder, the other around his waist, trying to make her hands meet and lock over his chest, but her fingers couldn’t touch.
“Poor Lyle,” she said. “You’re too big and—what do they call it? Blawny?”
“Brawny,” he said. Yukiko had a Ph.D. and knew five languages, but she couldn’t pronounce some words in English. She squeezed him around the waist and it felt good to him, the pressure of her thin arms, her soft flowery scent drifting up.
“I want you to pick up Sophie,” she said.
Christ, not that. “Why don’t you get her?” he said.
“Because you need to bond with her.”
Like Hell. “Did you bring a cage?”
“You don’t need a cage. She’s a good girl. She lies on the seat.”
“I’m not having a dog on my leather.” She didn’t answer him, she just drifted back to the sofa and picked up her book and purse. “Her butt stinks,” he said. “I’m not having a butt-stink dog on my leather.”
She was at the door now, and finally she turned to him, giving him her eyes, which were a little edgy and pissed, but holding some of that softness. Yukiko’s deer eyes. “She’ll smell like a beautiful flower when you pick her up.” She slipped out, barely making a sound.
Lyle pictured the golden retriever in his custom Escalade. She would get nervous and let go of a noxious vapor from her ass that smelled like rusted metal dipped in something rotten, and it would overpower the pristine majesty of his car. It was Yukiko’s fault, the dog’s butt–stink. She insisted on feeding it things an animal shouldn’t eat: blueberry waffles, cheese and pickle sandwiches. At night when he was laying in bed, drifting off to sleep, he could hear them out in the TV room, Sophie's mouth snapping shut as she caught the morsels thrown to her, Yukiko's voice low and velvety: Good girl. Clever girl.
It was unnatural, the way she doted on that dog, but he supposed it was because she didn’t have a kid. Sophie was her kid. Which was better than an actual child, he had to admit. He was fine with no kids—it was what he had always hoped for, that it would be just the two of them. But she had wanted a baby so badly, so after they’d been married a few years she went off the pill, and when she didn’t get pregnant he agreed to do all the testing and treatments, which were humiliating and pointless because she still couldn’t get pregnant. He felt bad for her so he agreed to the whole surrogacy thing, which was so unnatural, taking his sperm and her egg and sticking it in a petri dish and putting that mess in another person, that crazy Frankie woman. Who swelled up, pregnant for sure, but who ran off with the baby still inside her. Which was actually a good thing, in his opinion, though he never said that to Yukiko. In fact, he pretended to search for them, Frankie and the kid. He hired a private detective who, on his orders, did nothing. He told Yukiko that the detective had found Frankie, and that the baby had died. Because that seemed better, more final. But it broke Yukiko’s heart, and she was lonely, so it was kind of a mixed feeling thing, like he was relieved the baby was out of the picture but also sad to see her sad. So he agreed to a dog, and of course she picked an animal that cost five thousand dollars, and when that one died a few years later she got another one, and another. They were on the third dog now, and between the purchase price and the training and the vet bills and the expensive food, they had spent thousands of dollars, probably more than they would have spent on a child. Which is crazy, when you think about it, spending so much on an animal that fills your backyard with shit and makes your car stink. But that was love, right? Doing the little things you didn’t want to do just because you loved that person.
“Janet!” he yelled. His assistant appeared in his office doorway wearing her uniform of black, black, and more black. One Christmas he gave her a scarf with bright swoopy colors, just so he’d have something to look at for once in his life, a little variety for Christ’s sake, and she never wore it, not once. She stood there now with her hand on her hip, chin raised, mouth set. Like she wanted to clock someone.
“I need you to take my car and buy a dog crate. Put it in the back,” he said.
“For Sophia?”
“No, for Clifford, the big red dog. Yes, of course for Soph.”
“Yukiko’s not going to like that.”
“Did I ask you what Yukiko would think? What are you, a marriage counselor?”
“No. I’m an assistant to the chief asshole.” She walked briskly to his side of the desk, ripped open the top drawer, ramming his legs as she reached for his car keys. Her drawer hand was mashed against his thigh, and even though it was Janet, it gave him a little thrill, her hand so close to his package. As she slammed the drawer shut and marched out of the room, he felt the blood flowing to his groin, metal fillings to a magnet, and it felt good. The Hammer was back, and he was happy again, just like that.
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