1.

         In front of twenty-five or thirty strangers he stood up and told a story about himself that was true, or almost true.  He had taken to dinner one evening a young woman, Darby, who was, really, out of his league: very pretty, cultivated, and intelligent, and he had been entranced by her soft voice.  Over dinner at the most expensive restaurant in Brazos County, she had made a casual allusion to recycling.  Well, at the point in his life, Julien had never given a thought to recycling, but he realized that, if Darby were ever to take him seriously, he would have to begin recycling plastics, glass, and cardboard, and so he averred that he was a devoted recycler, himself.  On their second date, Julien took Darby to see a play at the university, and between acts, when they went outside for a breath of fresh air, she expressed her disgust with people who used the occasion to smoke.  Now, Julien did not smoke as much as most of his friends did, but, knowing that that smoking disgusted Darby, he determined to quit.  On their third date Julien took Darby on a drive through the hill country, and she showed some surprise and even perhaps betrayed a note of disapproval when he suggested stopping at a Burger King for a snack.  “I don’t eat junk food,” she said. 

“I don’t, either,” he said.  “I just thought you might be hungry.”

And so Julien ceased to patronize Burger King and other fast-food outlets, or, at any rate, patronized them less often.  When he called Darby and asked her to go out with him a fourth time, however, she declined.  “Look,” she said, “I think you’re a very nice guy and all that, but you’re really not my type, to be honest.”

The punchline of the story, though it wasn’t so much a punchline as a coda, was that, though he had lied to her three times and had failed to make a serious assault upon her heart, Darby had improved his life: he persevered in recycling, and after dating her he avoided fast foods (for the most part) and he had not smoked a cigarette since their second date.  In short, lying had made him a better man. 

This almost-true story usually earned him a laugh, or at any rate it did when he slowed down, lingered over the details, and allowed the story to develop at its own rate, but for reasons too numerous and complicated to enumerate, Julien decided to abandon his life in L.A. and his nascent career in standup comedy and return to his home in Inchblade, Texas, one hundred miles northeast of the state capital.  His sister, Simone, who sensed better than anybody else what it must have cost Julien to relinquish his dream, embraced him in the front yard of her home when he arrived, and her husband, Tate, helped to carry Julien’s bags into the house.  Julien and Tate had never liked one another, though each had endeavored to be amicable to the other for Simone’s sake, and now, owing to the depletion of his bank account, Julien was obliged to seek shelter under his brother-in-law’s roof until he could get back onto his own two feet.

Julien was shown to a room that would have belonged to the child that, because of a malformed heart, had died a few days after its birth, a blight that weighed heavily on Simone.  The crib had been dismantled and put away in a public-storage space outside town, but the loss was still too fresh for Simone to contemplate another pregnancy.  The walls of the small bedroom had been painted a pale blue, for the short-lived being, a boy, and the clothes he never wore also were in storage.  In anticipation of Julien’s arrival, Tate and Simone had gone out and purchased a single bed and an inexpensive pinewood dresser, installing both in the bedroom with pale blue walls. 

Simone was a few years older than Julien, and she was as devoted and loyal an older sister as any boy could have had, often shielding him from their father’s wrath and defending him from their mother’s caustic irony.  Julien had not asked their parents for refuge, for he and their father had not been on easy terms for years, their relationship severely compromised by Julien’s decision, after graduating from the University of Texas, to enroll in a graduate program in philosophy instead of one in business.  He had dropped out of the philosophy program after one semester, and he might still have been admitted to a business school, but he had quixotically chosen, first, to work on a daily newspaper in Arkansas and then, abandoning journalism after two years, to run off to L.A., intending to go into the movies.  This last move of Julien’s had finally earned for him the scorn he had always, without being fully conscious of it, hoped to receive from his father, for whom he had represented, as his sole male offspring, a hope for redemption from a life of frustration and failure. 

Julien had always possessed a knack for telling jokes and doing vocal imitations of famous people.  His imitations of Christopher Walken and Woody Allen had been well received by his high school classmates, and his rendition of Robert de Niro’s “Are-you-talking-to-me?” speech from Taxi Driver was considered spot-on.  While an undergraduate in Austin he developed (with untold hours of practice) a facility at giving plausible approximations to Cockney, Irish, French, German, Italian, and Japanese accents.  In the freshman dorm he had been dubbed “The Joker,” an epithet likening him to the character played by Matthew Modine in Full Metal Jacket.  Even then, in his university years, some of his friends had predicted that Julien would end up in Hollywood. 

It didn’t take long, after Julien arrived in L.A., for him to learn, as countless others had before him, that acting is not as easy a profession to break into as is generally imagined.  Julien was reasonably good looking, but his face did not impress anybody in the business, and his lack of acting experience counted heavily against him.  He was sharing a two-bedroom apartment in Highland Park, east of downtown, with an aspiring screenwriter, Reese, when somebody impressed upon him the insight that many successful Hollywood actors had begun as comedians: for example, Steve Martin and Adam Sandler.  At this point Julien was earning a subsistence as a delivery man for a dental lab in Glendale, a job that at least made it possible for him to familiarize himself with the streets and freeways within a ten-mile radius of the dental lab and left his evenings and weekends free.  Responsive to the examples of Steve Martin and Adam Sandler, he began frequenting the comedy clubs in his vicinity, and he soon became a regular at one of these, called Echoes because its premises were close to Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park.  The club was cheaply furnished with folding chairs and a couple floodlights in the performance room and a bar and two decrepit sofas in an adjoining room.  Customers were encouraged to patronize the bar, which was the profit center for the club.  The clientele, which varied greatly from night to night, was youthful, almost entirely under thirty.  After going there two or three times, Julien felt more at home in Echoes than he had felt anywhere since leaving his parents’ home to enter the university.  The proprietor, Ambrose, a Black man who had grown up in San Diego, was in his mid- to late-thirties. 

The other regulars at Echoes were a disparate lot: of several sexes, races, and ethnic backgrounds.  Several of them were younger than Julien, while the eldest, a philosophy professor at UCLA, was in his mid-fifties.  Paige, the prettiest of the female contingent, was about Julien’s age and wore her dark hair in a fashionable cloche cut.  She was petite and looked a little as if she hoped to be cast as Peter Pan.  Her comedy routines sought to overthrow the appearance of feminine delicacy: she spoke frankly (or perhaps boastfully) of her amorous appetite and sprinkled her sets with language that Julien, though he considered himself liberal in such matters, had never expected to hear issuing from a woman’s mouth.  Paul, one of the younger comedians, was not yet old enough to drink alcoholic beverages.  His sets also delved liberally into obscene words and anecdotes.

The other comedians advised him against going up on stage too soon.  “Listen closely to what kind of material gets the best laughs,” he was told, “and listen even more closely to how that material is delivered.”  He learned that a respectable five-minute comedy set generally opens casually, with an anecdote drawn from the comedian’s own experience.  Embarrassing and even humiliating incidents are the Mother Lode of comedy, though it doesn’t hurt to open with an anecdote that establishes you as a normal guy or gal.  Don’t rush your delivery.  You’ll be surprised how long five minutes really is when you are on stage in front of an expectant audience.  Try to give the impression, though, of having all the time in the world.  If you can win the sympathy of the audience, sometimes even rather prosaic material will be rewarded with laughter, because the audience, without being aware of it, wants you to succeed, and they understand that, for you, silence is punishment.  At the same time, don’t let them see that you are anxious to win their sympathy.

Julien observed that Paige effortlessly won the sympathy of men with her piquant looks and defiant sexuality, and she appealed to women with that same defiance; her stories about sex implied a casual contempt for men, who were clueless creatures, blinded by testosterone.  When not in front of strangers, Paige was not the least bit girlish or seductive, and after being introduced to Julien never granted him another smile.  Paul, on the other hand, appealed to the maternal instincts of women with his seeming naiveté and boyish simplicity while disarming the men with those same qualities.  On stage, Paul was almost insanely likeable, while off stage, in so-called “real” life, he struck Julien as a bit of a prick, wasting no attention on anybody who could not, in some way, be useful to him. 

Julien heeded the advice lavished on him and collected comedic material stealthily, freely borrowing and adapting bits from other comedians and practicing before a mirror when Reese was not at home.  Fortunately for Julien, Reese had a girlfriend and spent much of his free time with her, or else he was sitting in a Starbuck’s and working on a screenplay, hunched over his laptop at a small table.  (For some reason, not uncommon among screenwriters, Reese found it nearly impossible to concentrate at home, in his own room.  The bustle of Starbuck’s was conducive to the awakening of his genius, he believed.)  Reese’s absence gave Julien the freedom he needed to practice modulating his voice.  Drawing on his high school experiences, he experimented with dropping lines from movies into his evolving routine, including the “Are-you-talking-to-me?” speech from Taxi Driver, and he would sometimes declaim his lines in a German or Cockney accent, just to hear how that affected their humorous resonance.  He was fully cognizant, though, that performances that had worked so well in Inchblade and in the environs of the University of Texas probably would not go over as well in Echo Park or Hollywood.   

He hung around comedy clubs—especially Echoes—for two months before several of the blooded comedians, who knew he had been working up some material, virtually dragged him up to the microphone, insisting that he perform.  Although he had been preparing himself in private and had imagined this moment hundreds of times, when he actually mounted the four-inch-high wooden platform in Echoes and stood behind the microphone, he froze.  For several seconds he was unable to utter a sound, and he had completely forgotten his routine.  The audience, which on this night comprised mostly comedians, was patient with him.  A few people laughed at his confusion, but their laughter was sympathetic, like the laughter of parents at a child’s embarrassment.  At last, after an agonizing ten or twelve seconds, Julien remembered the anecdote about Darby, and after speaking the first few words he calmed himself, allowing his voice to drop to a lower pitch, and he deliberately took a deep breath as a way of pacing himself.  After that his five minutes flew by, and when his time was up, he still had material he had not touched on.  When he left the stage he was heartily congratulated by David Conlin, a comedian of about his own age who, in real life, was a high school math teacher, and Seth Greenway, an unemployed former fundraiser for liberal causes. 

“You killed!” David assured him. 

Julien knew that he had not “killed.”  He had had the benefit of a supportive audience; his initial confusion still worried him, and it would continue to harass his self-confidence whenever he thought of it, but David’s consoling words were a much-appreciated salve.  With his foray into comedy, Julien hoped that he had proved himself, or at least established his bona fides, like a soldier who has survived his first fire fight without giving way to panic. 

2.

In the autumn—and it was now early November—sand is scattered across Texas Avenue in Inchblade by cold winds sweeping across the prairies to the north.  It should be remembered that there is no mountain range, or even a line of imposing hills, between Saskatchewan and central Texas, and in fact the Rockies act like a funnel, directing the flow of arctic air south, bringing gusting winds and freezing rain to Texas as winter approaches.  Julien, of course, was familiar with the seasonal weather in his hometown, but eighteen months in southern California had spoiled him to some extent, and he was annoyed by the way the chilled wind buffeted his car as he drove along Texas Avenue at night.  The sand sweeping across the road made a hissing sound as it assaulted the side of his car, as if he needed further reminding of his failure. 

Inchblade grew up from a forlorn hamlet to the town it is today on an axis running from northwest to southeast, with a cluster of its oldest buildings—all made of yellow brick—forming a sort of bulb near the northwestern end of the axis and with Texas Avenue the only thoroughfare running the entire length of that axis and holding the whole thing together.  In the old days most of the land south of the downtown had been pastures or wasteland, and the town had grown so rapidly in the closing quarter of the twentieth century that vacant lots on either side of Texas Avenue still represented the wasteland’s claim to what it had lost.  The residential neighborhoods built during the town’s boom years had curving streets with cute names like Sundance Court and Tiffany Circle.  Visitors always get lost along these lanes, all of which look pretty much the same. 

Julien’s parents were out of town when he came home, visiting his mother’s people in Colorado.  His reunion with them, when it occurred, was subdued.  His father, known to his friends simply by his surname, Riley, seemed unwilling to look him in the face, and his mother kept finding excuses for leaving the room while he was talking: she had left her cigarettes in the car, she had put water on the range for coffee, the cat wanted to go outside.  She clearly found it distressing to hear him talk about California, although she herself had followed a lover to San Diego in her reckless youth, before Riley came along. 

Drawing on his experience in Arkansas and the principle of nothing ventured, nothing gained, Julien stopped at the newspaper office one afternoon and filled out an application.  He also applied online for jobs at a public utility, the telephone company, the local radio station, a public relations firm, a state university in a neighboring town, and the office of the Texas Agricultural Service.  Two weeks after coming home from L.A. he received a call from the managing editor of The Sentinel, and the very next day he went in for an interview with this individual, whose name was “Dub” Phelps. 

Dub and the newspaper’s publisher, Einar (“Gus”) Gustafson, met him in the latter’s office and tossed a few perfunctory questions at him.  Then Gus revealed that he had spoken with the managing editor of the newspaper in Arkansas, and this person had evidently—to Julien’s considerable surprise—spoken highly of him.  The surprise showed on his face, and Gus furrowed his brow.  “You are the same person, right?” 

“Yeah,” Julien admitted.  “I am.  Only he and I didn’t get along too well, and I thought he disliked me.”

“What have you been doing since you left Arkansas?”

“I was in L.A.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I was doing standup comedy.”

“Ah.” 

As it turned out, having failed as a comedian in L.A. amounted to, on the whole, as good a recommendation as any as far as Gus was concerned, for he was looking for versatility in his reporters.  Julien was hired on the spot and told to report for work the following morning. 

The drill was familiar.  A small-town daily in central Texas does not differ markedly in its routine from that of a small-town daily in Arkansas.  The Sentinel, like The News-Times in Burdock, Arkansas, was an afternoon newspaper, with a noon deadline and a small, mostly inexperienced staff.  The paper had recently been purchased by a company with headquarters in Dallas, which had installed Gus as publisher, with the intent of completely overhauling it, for it had been languishing for years. 

The city editor, who handed out assignments to reporters each day, was no older than Julien, a graduate of Texas A&M University, and, as he let everyone know, the son of a Methodist minister in Del Rio.  His name was Trent Linsey, and within a week Julien despised him almost as much as he had despised the city editor in Burdock, Arkansas.  Trent would make brief notations of assignments—new condo dev., retiring vp of bank, interview hospital cfo, new parking meters on M St.—and distribute them around the newsroom like party favors.  There were six reporters, including Julien, and they were given a minimum of three assignments per day, which often proved more than they could handle; whenever a given assignment was unfulfilled at the end of the day, it was added to the next day’s debt, and it was bruited about that if any reporter fell too far behind, he or she would be fired.  Trent kept duplicates of his assignments; he scratched a line through them when they were handed in, but the uncancelled assignments, with the initials of the reporters to whom they had been given, built up in a ledger in his desk, locked away in a drawer to which only he had the key.  Working at The Sentinel was a grind, but it was better—though it paid no more—than delivering false teeth to dentists in the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys. 

A month after his return to Inchblade, Julien was able to move out of the baby-blue bedroom in his sister’s house and into an apartment of his own in a large apartment-condo development on the outskirts of town.  His “unit” was one of more than four hundred in the “residential complex.”  It had one bedroom, was unfurnished, and was one half of a yellow-brick duplex.  He parked his car in the space assigned to him; this space was protected by a roof but was otherwise open to the elements, which meant that freezing rain, if blown at a slant from perpendicular, accumulated on his windshield during storms.  His monthly rental, though, was considerably less than what it had been in Highland Park, which itself was cheap by L.A. County standards. 

Julien’s boyhood friends—those who remained—were mostly married now or, if still single, living in small fraternal groups and hanging out on weekends to watch sports on TV.  The brightest graduates in any high school class went away to college or university and came home only at holidays and over the summer.  Eventually they disappeared altogether, to be found (if anybody was interested) in Dallas or Houston or Seattle or Atlanta.  The result of this siphoning off of the best and the brightest, year after year, was, in demographic terms, perfectly predictable.  Nobody with any prospects in life wanted to stay in Inchblade.  Julien’s reunions with these friends from his past were almost always disappointing, for though they initially expressed an interest in his experiences as a standup comedian in L.A., insisting that he tell them all about it, their curiosity was quickly sated, perhaps because his was a tale of failure.  If he had been a success, envy would have whetted their appetite for details.  Quite soon they would ask about the traffic in L.A.: was it as bad as people said it was?  Were there lots of beautiful women there?  Was the air breathable?  People in Texas, Julien found, loved to be told how intolerable life in southern California turned out to be and in fact had little patience for any other kind of report.  When Julien said that the air quality in L.A., though definitely compromised to some degree, was actually much better than he had expected, his interlocutors did not believe him.  Only bad news was credible to them. 

Late one afternoon, after he had spent an hour interviewing the chief financial officer for the community hospital, Julien was accosted in the parking lot by Darby, the woman who, he had told audiences in California, had reformed him.  He had not seen or heard a word about her in almost four years, since leaving home to work on the newspaper in Arkansas.  He failed to recognize her at first because she was, if anything, prettier than when he had dated her, though in a more subdued style.  It was a cold day, with gusts of northerly wind hastening pedestrians to wherever they were going, and Darby was dressed in a snug gray overcoat, stockings, and sensible flat-heeled shoes.  Her hair, which had been short before, was long now, concealing her ears and most of her forehead.  She called Julien’s name from a distance of only about five yards, but because of the wind he almost didn’t hear it.  Turning his head, he saw a woman smiling at him and walking toward him, hair flying about her face.  Even as she approached, he failed to connect that face and voice with the woman he had once loved desperately, futilely. 

They exchanged greetings, and before he could stop himself Julien had blurted out that she was prettier than ever, a declaration she acknowledged with a faint smile but which, he realized at once, she was accustomed to hearing.  The elements were not conducive to expansive discourse, and so, after a few minutes, Darby suggested they go somewhere for a cup of coffee.  As it happened, the Dixie Chicken, a restaurant-bar that had been around forever, was only a few blocks away.  Julien took Darby there in his car, parked on the street in front, and went around the car to open the door for her.  He offered her his hand to help her out. 

He had not been in the Dixie Chicken since approximately the last time he had seen Darby, but the establishment had changed little.  It was generally considered the second- or possibly third-best restaurant in the county, but it remained casual, the kind of place in which, in summer, customers wore shorts, sandals, and T-shirts.  Darby and Julien settled into a booth in the back, as far as possible from the large-screen TV around which other patrons were gathered: some sort of road race was being broadcast. 

Julien had already learned, in the parking lot, that Darby had, in the years since he had last seen her, been married and divorced and was now the mother of an eighteen-month-old daughter, Elyce.  Now, at they sat across from one another in the booth at the Dixie Chicken, Darby seemed to be the first person in Inchblade, aside from his elder sister, who really wanted to hear him talk about his experiences in L.A., and every time he paused, thinking he would ask her a question, she pressed him for more: What were people like in California?  Was it true it never rained there?  Was the cost of living was much higher in L.A.?  Had he met anybody famous?  Did it seem to him that people happier in California than in Texas? 

At last, however, Julien was able to ask a few questions of his own.  In the years since he had dated her, he had often thought of Darby, a fact that was amply established by his having repeatedly told an anecdote about her to gatherings of strangers in a far-off city.  (He decided, however, not to tell Darby about that anecdote, which, after all, was not entirely true.)  She was reluctant to talk about herself, insisting that his life was much more interesting than hers, but Julien was persistent, and so, hesitatingly, Darby began to tell him a few things about herself. 

“I’ve learned one thing about myself, and that is: I don’t know anything at all about men,” she said, gazing down at her hands, which clasped her coffee cup as if it were the Grail.  Julien gazed at her hands, too.  It was wonderful how long and tapered her fingers were, and how exquisitely sensitive they appeared to be. 

“I don’t know much about women, either,” he said by way of encouragement.

“I suppose it’s because my father was always so. . .distant, so closed off from my mother and me, and then he died when I was in the second grade.”

Julien had forgotten this about her.  Darby’s mother had remarried, but Darby had never felt close to her mother’s second husband, and this fact had propelled her out of her home.  While still in high school she had left home and come to Inchblade to live with her maternal grandparents.  Her mother, her mother’s second husband, and both of her younger brothers still lived in Huntsville.  Julien had known all this about her at one time, but somehow, back then, it had not seemed important. 

“I never realized,” he murmured several times.

“I was sort of messed up back then,” she confessed.  “I didn’t have any idea what I wanted from life.  I honestly didn’t know how unhappy I was.”

“You seemed to know exactly what you wanted.”

She shrugged.  “I thought I did.  I was sadly mistaken.” 

“But you know now?” Julien asked.

“Maybe,” Darby said, sighing.  “I love Elyce.  I’m sure of that.”

Julien was about to say that if she was certain of loving one person, she was one up on him, because he wasn’t entirely convinced that he was capable of love.  He stopped himself, though, before putting the thought into words, because, as was so often the case, he wasn’t sure it was true. 

After leaving her husband, Gerald, Darby had lived with her grandparents again, but then she had been hired by the hospital to work in its development office, and she had been able to move into an apartment of her own, across town from Julien’s, and to enroll Elyce in daycare.

“So that’s why I met you in the hospital parking lot.”

“Yes, I was going to do a little Christmas shopping before picking up Elyce.  But I’m having a cup of coffee with you, instead.”

As he listened to her, Julien remembered thinking, while dating her, that Darby was too good for him, a more refined and sophisticated creature than himself.  What had impressed him four years ago, her tasteful clothes and the softness of her voice, had not changed, and her face was no less expressive than before, but somehow, despite all this, she was not as intimidating as she had been. 

“Are you seeing with anybody now?” Julien asked.  He felt a little ashamed of himself for asking, and the verb he used was, he knew, discordant in some way. 

Darby smiled in a way that made him regret having asked such an awkward question.  “In a way, I am,” she said, choosing her words carefully.

“It’s none of my business,” Julien threw in hastily. 

“I am seeing somebody,” she said, “but. . . .”  She didn’t finish the sentence. 

“What does working in the ‘development office’ entail?”

“Raising money.  That’s what development means.  Mostly it entails filling out forms in order to apply for grants or writing letters to possible donors.”

“Ah.”

“I know,” she said, smiling again.  “It’s even more boring than it sounds.”  She abruptly changed the subject: “So tell me about standup comedy.  Weren’t you a little scared, at first, to get up in front of people and tell jokes?”

“Not just at first,” Julien admitted.  “I was scared out of my mind every time I did it.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Well, because it’s a tremendous rush when people actually laugh, and for half an hour afterward you feel like a god.”

“So it’s like a drug?”

“Yes, I guess.  I mean, I don’t generally use drugs.”

“Not ‘generally’?” she asked.  “But occasionally?”

“Okay, but not. . .”  Why did he want so desperately for her to approve of him?  “Not as a regular thing,” he said. 

They sat in silence for a few seconds.  Darby turned her head to look out the picture window at the street in front of the Dixie Chicken.  Julien sensed that she was about to ask him to take her back to her car in the hospital parking lot, but then she returned her gaze to the coffee cup in front of her, and a tentative smile worked at the corners of her lips. 

“To be honest,” she said, “you never impressed me as very funny.”

“I’m not,” he readily agreed.  “I mean, it doesn’t come natural to me.”

“But that’s what doesn’t make sense to me,” Darby continued.  “Why try to be something you’re not?”

“What else is there to do in life?” he asked.