The Office of Historical Corrections Read online

  The Model/Actress called her marketing people to see if her makeup line could get a volcano-themed fragrance and makeup palette in stores for the fall season. Once they covered the obvious reddish and orangey and brown colors, they rounded things out with a near-black shade called Molten, a light gray called Ash Cloud, and a shimmery white they renamed Rhyolite, after the team decided Pompeii was too morbid.

  The Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife wanted to commiserate and compare notes, and so she reached out to the Long-Suffering Ex-wife, who did not take her calls because in her mind the Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife would always be the Mistress Who Was Dumb Enough to Actually Marry Him and Deserved What She Got.

  The Daughter took the Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife’s call and met her for coffee. The Daughter called Shannon and invited her for a drink at the bar that didn’t card anyone. Shannon didn’t come. The Daughter had many drinks and took a car service to the home of the Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife, so her mother would not see her, and passed out on the couch. Why are you like this? the Daughter wanted to ask everyone involved, but she sensed on some level that the question would be hypocritical, that she too was like something, and just didn’t know what yet.

  The Former Personal Assistant holed up in her penthouse apartment and summoned her own personal assistant to bring her good bourbon and ripe oranges, and wept, and read and read and read her apology, which was in the form of one of those mindless point-and-click phone app games she used to play when she was bored during travel. It gave her a new apology for every hidden object she found. When she was certain she’d found them all, she turned her phone off to resist the temptation to write to everyone who’d ever met her account of him with even a flicker of doubt and say, “Did you see it? Did you see I was telling the truth?” because what was this whole life she’d built if not already a way of telling anyone who’d ever doubted anything about her to fuck off?

  After the first round, the apologies became less extensive but grew in number and degree of precision. He apologized to:

  The Girl He Did Know Was Blackout Drunk Because He Was Actually Mostly Sober

  The Girl Who Was So Stunned by Her Apology That It Sent Her to Therapy Because She Had No Recollection of Meeting Him, Let Alone Having Sex with Him

  The Girl He Knew Was Only Pretending to Like It Rough Because She Wanted to Make Him Happy but Said Nothing to Because He Liked Making Her Pretend to Like It

  The Girl Who Really Did Like It Rough, Who Was Annoyingly Undiminished by Her Pleasure Until He Told Her Nobody Would Ever Really Love Her Because She Was Such a Whore

  The Guy He Made Homophobic Jokes About in College but Still Asked to Suck Him Off Sometimes

  The Closeted Friend He Never Touched but Whose Longing He Nevertheless Made as Much Use of as He Would Have Any Woman’s

  Shannon

  The Intern Who Left the Art World After Their Summer Fling

  The Woman He Asked to Back Out of a Grant They Were Both Up For and Ended Things with as Soon as She Did

  The Model Whose Breast He Grabbed Once as a Joke

  The Girl Who Wondered All Those Years What to Call What Had Happened Between Them Because Yeah She Had Intended to Have Sex with Him but She Hadn’t Intended It to Happen Like That and She Hadn’t Expected Him to Hurt Her but Not Notice or Care or Stop

  After those apologies were done, he doubled back on the first round of apologies, the latest revelations having made necessary some addenda. He was sorry for the year he’d driven the Long-Suffering Ex-wife to experimental therapy for delusional anxiety, after convincing her that her insecurity was making it impossible for him to love her and she’d entirely invented his flings with the Intern and the Girl He Knew Was Only Pretending. He was sorry about the time he told the Former Personal Assistant she was stupid and bad at her job when she correctly accused him of tasking her with calendaring his dates with the Girl Who Really Did Like It Rough and pretending they were work events. He was so sorry.

  He was sorry and he was sorry and he was sorry, and then he was back. Maybe he’d never gone anywhere. No one could remember anymore why they’d all been so certain there had been a deserted island. Now there was a gallery. No one knew quite what was in it. The apologies, they guessed. But what else? The show was called Forgiveness. He invited the critics. He invited everyone he’d apologized to.

  The Long-Suffering Ex-wife felt vindicated by her suspicion that this had been some kind of publicity stunt and refused to participate. The Daughter was embarrassed by the thought of being in a room with her father and a cloud of women he had treated badly, though she couldn’t say for certain whether she was embarrassed by him or for him. The On-Again Off-Again Ex of His Wayward Youth was on her uncanceled vacation in Paris with her lover’s tongue between her legs. The Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife thought it would be embarrassing to go if the first wife wasn’t going to bother. The Model/Actress intended to show up late and make an entrance. The Former Personal Assistant imagined being forced to hug him in front of a crowd and swore not to go, and then imagined the feeling she’d have hugging him, especially if he looked into her eyes and said he was sorry, and thought she might go after all, and RSVP’d, and then, standing in front of the mirror looking at herself in a cocktail dress the day of, remembered that when he’d left her for the last time—brokenhearted and unemployed!—he had left her curled up sobbing in a ball on her kitchen floor, remembered that whole horrid year after, the year before she clawed her way out of that life and into this one. She took off the dress, and called a friend who also remembered that year, and so sat in the Former Personal Assistant’s living room for hours blocking the front door of her apartment in case she got it in her head to change her mind.

  * * *

  —

  The gallery was three large rooms. In the first, the films played, projected against one wall, while the pop-up bar, complete with drinks and bartenders, was reproduced along the wall opposite. In the second room, the app was available on a touchscreen, and pictures of the billboards in their original context had been framed and mounted. In the bathrooms, in case anyone became overwhelmed by their personal apology and needed a minute, there were thoughtful but generic apologies carved into the mirror glass and printed on the tissues.

  The third room contained the mouth of a volcano. It looked to be made of ice but gave off real smoke. There was a short staircase leading to a platform at the volcano’s lip. The artist stood on the platform. The point of the volcano room, said a sign at the entrance, was that if anyone was unsatisfied with his apology, he would keep trying. If anyone came into the room still wanting him inside of a volcano, he would not leave until he got it right. If he made it worse, he should be pushed in.

  There were more critics and arts-and-culture writers in the gallery than apology recipients, and those who bothered to show up had mostly made their peace. The artist stood quietly on the platform near the volcano for nearly an hour. Shannon came into the volcano room and yelled at him and he consoled her; it was easy, he had, after all, known her since she was a child. The Model/Actress’s limo circled the block, waiting for the right moment of entrance while her people debated which angle of entry had the best natural light for her to walk in. The Girl Who Was So Stunned by Her Apology It Sent Her to Therapy walked in and out of the gallery several times, trying to find the right words for her question but never did and left without asking it.

  The Girl Who Had Wondered All These Years What to Call It watched the artist apologize to Shannon, and when Shannon left, she came up to the platform. It took the artist a moment to recognize her, and when he did he was soft with her, but he could not explain what he had done to her and neither could she, and it felt unfair to her that she should have to find the words. He had apologized already for causing her pain. He had apologized already for ignoring her pain when he knew it was there, because he’d been an ass and his pleasure existed independent o
f it. But now he fumbled for what was left to be sorry for. He was sorry he hadn’t been kinder the morning after? He was sorry he’d been too kind the night before and made himself seem like a different type of man? He was sorry she didn’t get what she wanted? What had she wanted? She had the same feeling she’d had when he unceremoniously handed her back her underwear. Like it was a technicality that she hadn’t specifically told him she wanted to be treated like a person. She came closer. She pushed. When he fell, everyone waited for his reemergence. It did not come. Security ushered people out of the gallery. An ambulance came. The volcano had a pit of hot liquid. No one but the artist had known exactly what was inside. It was not literally lava, but might as well have been. They tried to pull him out. It was too late. It had been too late immediately.

  The On-Again Off-Again Ex of His Wayward Youth thought it was carelessness, that the artist had always been more about vision than details, that, truthfully, some of his art was brilliant but much of it had always been sloppy, and he’d probably been more concerned that the lava look right than that it be safe to fall into or give him time to get out. The Long-Suffering Ex-wife and the Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife both thought he’d planned it this way, to go out on his own terms and still make it someone else’s fault. The Girl Who Had Wondered All These Years What to Call It did not know what to think and did not face charges, but she spent the next few years in and out of hospitals. The High School Sweetheart never thought of him again. The Former Personal Assistant thought maybe he’d been supposed to find a grip or foothold on the inside somewhere, but had slipped. The Daughter thought he might have staged it, that there might have been a trick exit somewhere. Quietly she waited years, well into her adulthood, for him to come back and tell her how it worked.

  The Model/Actress knew: the volcano was dangerous because he’d never actually expected to be in it. He had always counted on being good enough in the end. He had counted on absolution. He had counted on love. “Thank you,” he was going to say when everyone was appeased, while he stood on the platform and dramatically revealed the volcano’s violent core. “Your generosity tonight has saved my life again.” He thought the Forgiveness was his to declare. It was right there in the title.

  The Model/Actress called her marketing people about canceling the volcano product launch and figuring out how to repackage and rebrand the makeup that was already in warehouses. Marketing called back and said that preorders were actually up, and they could take the loss if she felt sentimental about it in light of recent events, but as a limited-edition line it was poised to sell out. The Model/Actress went to the memorial service in a tasteful smoky eye. They were going forward with the launch because what better way to honor the man who taught her how to really see color, she said. Plus, marketing said, everyone could see now that the makeup was tear proof.

  It sounded calculated, but she really had cried. Afterward, someone asked the Model/Actress why she’d ever said volcano in the first place, and whether she felt at all responsible for planting the suggestion. The Model/Actress thought she had probably said volcano because sometimes when she thought of him she thought of burning. The local opera had been doing Dido and Aeneas the winter they were last together, and after he left her, and after the after, when she asked him to say sorry, and he said he was sorry they’d ever met, she thought all the time of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and her funeral pyre. For months she dreamed of showing up at one of his shows to light herself on fire and make him clean up the mess.

  The year they were together, back when he was only moderately famous and she was nobody, he had asked her what she wanted out of life and she told him, because she didn’t yet know any better than to say the truth, which was that she wanted everything. He kissed her forehead and said, “My little lady of ruthless ambition.” In the months after that, he would sometimes ask her “How’s conquering the world going, my sweet ruthless girl?” in the delighted dumbed-down tone you would use to tell a house pet it was ferocious. She would nuzzle him, beginning to understand that just because he didn’t see something in her didn’t mean it wasn’t there, knowing there was still some freedom in the way he did not fathom yet how real and how necessary her ruthlessness would be.

  Anything Could Disappear

  Vera was moving to New York on a Greyhound bus, carrying only a duffel bag. The morning she left Missouri, there was a heat advisory and an orange-level terrorism alert. An hour outside of Chicago, there had been an older woman, crying and demanding that the bus pull over to let her off. From Chicago to Cleveland, she had sat next to a perfectly cordial man who had just finished a ten-year prison sentence and was on his way home from Texas with nothing but his bus ticket and twenty dollars in his pocket. Between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, there had been a man who kept trying to get her to share a blanket with him, citing their proximity to the air-conditioning vent, and between Pittsburgh and Philly, a teenage runaway had sat beside her and talked her ear off. And now there was this: a small, wobbly child whose mother had deposited him in the seat beside her with a simple “Keep an eye on him, will ya, hon?”

  Vera tried to catch the eye of another passenger, maybe the woman two seats ahead of her on the other side of the aisle—she looked like the sort of person who would turn around and say, Keep an eye on him your damn self, lady; he’s yours, ain’t he?—but nobody looked up. The boy was around two years old, brown-skinned with a head of curls that someone had taken the time to properly comb. He was dressed in a clean, bright red T-shirt, baby jeans, and sneakers nicer than Vera’s. The mother was a thin, nervous white woman, with wispy hair in three shades of blond. She smelled strongly of cigarette smoke and chocolate milk. She had gotten on the bus with the boy and a girl, about seven, who looked like her in miniature. The little girl was chewing purple bubble gum with the kind of enthusiasm that would have prompted Vera’s own mother to ask, “Are you a young lady or a cow?” The mother had a cell phone pressed to her ear and was having a terse conversation with someone on the other end. She kept the phone cradled between her ear and shoulder, even as she leaned over the baby to kiss him on the forehead before walking farther toward the back of the bus.

  “I feed him, don’t I?” she said into the cell phone. “When was the last time you did?”

  The little boy made Vera nervous. He was a quiet, happy baby. He would occasionally clap his hands together, applauding something only he could appreciate. Still, he was so small. Vera was overcome by the unreasonable belief that he might break if she looked away from him. As she watched him, he seemed to be watching her back. In the window on the other side of the boy, Vera could see her own hazy reflection, nothing to write home about one way or the other. She had been on buses, at that point, for sixteen of the last twenty-one hours. She was wearing jeans and an old T-shirt from the college she’d dropped out of two years earlier. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail that was starting to frizz. Vera was a few months past her twenty-first birthday, which had happened without any of the fanfare and excess people tended to associate with turning twenty-one. Josh and her coworkers at the record store had ordered her a pizza at work and opened a few beers to toast her. That was it.

  Somewhere on the Jersey Turnpike, the bus pulled into one of those rest stops that appeared up and down 95 like punctuation marks. Vera went into the travel plaza to get a cup of coffee. In the women’s restroom, she stretched her arms above her head in the mirror and rolled up on the balls of her feet, then down again. She splashed water on her face, then pulled a small bottle of mouthwash from the duffel bag she’d carried in with her and swirled a capful around in her mouth before spitting into the sink.

  When she got back on the bus, the little boy was still sitting in the seat beside her. Vera felt more charitably toward him now that she had seen how easy it was to walk away. She made faces at him that made him giggle. She tried to engage him in a game of patty-cake, but he seemed more interested in the clapping than the repetition.

 
When the bus finally pulled into Port Authority, Vera squeezed past the boy’s seat to retrieve her duffel bag from the overhead bin. As she scrunched her face at the weight of the bag, the boy began to giggle again. She smiled back at him, then looked over her shoulder for his mother and sister. The people in the back of the bus were walking off one by one, but there was no sign of the blond woman or her daughter. Thinking maybe they’d somehow passed her already, Vera picked up the little boy, balancing him on her hip, and rushed off the bus, into the parking lot. No mother. She put the boy down and watched the rest of the passengers exit the bus, until it sat there, empty. Still no mother.

  “Excuse me,” Vera said to a heavyset older woman. “Did you see a blond woman and a little girl? They were just on the bus with us.”

  “Woman on the cell phone?”

  “Yeah,” said Vera.

  “Think they got off in Jersey. Sounded like someone was supposed to meet her there.” The woman grabbed her suitcase from beside the bus and walked off.

  Vera looked around at the rapidly dispersing passengers, wondering what the hell was wrong with them that none of them had noticed a child being abandoned. But as she unintentionally tightened her grip on his hand, Vera realized that to the crowd it looked like he’d been her little boy all along. In the lazy American vernacular of appearances, Vera, with her color and hair that matched his, looked more like his mother or sister than his own mother and sister did. Had that been why the mother had chosen her? Maybe she’d intended to leave him all along. Or maybe something terrible had happened to her at the rest stop, she’d been dragged off by a stranger and was hoping someone would notice she was missing before it was too late. Or maybe she’d just gotten distracted, smoking a cigarette for too long, and was now frantic because the bus had left without her.