Flakes of Milk-Colored Shame
Pod+Excerpt from Matthew Binder's novel 'Pure Cosmos Club'
Writer Matthew Binder joined the pod this week to discuss his latest novel ‘Pure Cosmos Club,’ as well as the value of humor, sincerity vs. absurdism, his writing routine, cults, and the presence of men in the women-dominated fiction world. Check out the pod episode and an excerpt from his book below.
Eleven months ago, I walked into a meeting at my job to discuss plans for expanding a digital media campaign to new markets. I’d come armed with a number of talking points scribbled on a napkin from the nearby bodega, where I’d just picked up lunch. I was in a tremendous mood after an event that I’d believed was a fortuitous omen.
For lunch, I’d got a falafel sandwich, a Dr. Pepper, and a bag of pistachios. No sooner had I left the place than I dropped the bag of pistachios into a puddle. There was a hole in the packaging, and my pistachios were ruined. I became enraged, certain this tragedy would mar my day. It was then that I remembered I suffer from a terrible pistachio allergy. The last time I ate them my throat had swelled completely shut. The only reason I’m still here, actually, is the kindness of the stranger who stuck me with his EpiPen. Now, once again, I realized, my life had been spared, I was overcome with joy and stood laughing in the crosswalk while drivers honked and shouted. I couldn’t understand why it had been so long since I’d last felt this free.
My father was fifty-four when I was born, the product of an ill-conceived fling. Three years prior, despite having never ridden a motorcycle, he bought one on impulse after watching an old Peter Fonda movie, then taught himself to ride in the backyard. A few days later his wife came out to call him for dinner only to see him lose control of the motorcycle and drive it straight into her. The paramedics rushed her to the hospital for a series of radical procedures, but they all failed, and she died three weeks later.
The only thing that kept my father going was his work as a low-level bureaucrat for the municipal agency that managed the city’s telephone lines. That was where he met my mother, a thirty-nine-year-old, multiple divorcée who worked part-time as a receptionist. She once told me that what she first noticed about my father was his “tireless appetite for drudgery.”
They went out on a handful of dates before my mother broke it off with him because he chewed his fingernails incessantly. A month later, she learned she was pregnant, the outcome of their one sexual encounter—five minutes, she told me, of passionless sex after too many tequila sodas at a happy-hour function. Out of a sense of duty, they married.
More than fifteen years later, I spent my birthday watching reruns of the classic television show CHiPs in which two California Highway Patrol motorcycle officers cruised the freeways of Los Angeles solving crimes. My father came home from work that night to microwave a frozen Salisbury steak. While he waited, he started a letter to the local paper, rebuking them for advertising women’s underwear. But before he could finish, the sound of my high-pitched chortle, which he’d repeatedly complained gave him migraines, interrupted him. Only children and perverts laughed, he shouted, nobody else. Now that I was fifteen, he said, my laughter was forbidden.
After all these years, thanks to my mishap with the pistachios, this gift of laughter had been restored, so that when I stepped into the conference room for my meeting, my spirits were high. But instead of the marketing team, I was met by my somber-faced boss and a lady from HR. My boss repeated that though I was a well-liked member of the team, my performance had never met even the minimum expectations. The nice woman from HR handed me a copy of the termination paperwork and said she hoped the two-month severance package they were offering would soften the blow.
It’s true I’d never reached my revenue targets. It’s difficult even now to explain where I’d gone wrong. Every day, I donned the business casual attire Janie had so meticulously selected, battled my way through rush-hour commutes, spent countless hours managing my pipeline, and suffered the endless tiresome meetings. No one else worked longer hours, and I’d accrued multiple expense reports full of costly client dinners and bar tabs. In many respects, I was a model account executive. Yet, while my colleagues closed deal after deal, I was subject to an interminable succession of losses.
In today’s economy, where hyper-specialization is the key to success, a man in his mid-thirties has little chance to pursue new skills. I was convinced Janie would leave me when she learned I’d been fired. This was the fourth job I’d lost in as many years. My luck had been no better selling solar panels, commercial real estate, or fancy water machines. While all our friends scaled their respective corporate ladders and bought delightful homes, I had nothing to show for my decade in the city but a scroll of failure.
I didn’t tell Janie I’d been fired again. Instead, I got up every morning, read the news with my grapefruit and espresso, donned my work attire, and headed cheerfully off to “work.” But really, I was making art in Danny’s studio. For years, I’d struggled with the idea I was nothing more than a dilettante. I hadn’t jumped through any of the hoops required of a contemporary artist. I considered it undignified to pursue an MFA, and other than my friendship with Danny, I had no relations with anyone in the artistic community. This, too, frustrated Janie to no end.
“If you want to be an artist,” she’d say, “you must do the things artists do!”
But her encouragement always rang false. Like all people who make a career of memorizing scientific facts and figures, Janie had little interest in the creative life. Her singular passion was to build a lucrative career that entrenched her as a respected member of the community, and afforded her a wardrobe of designer clothing and an apartment filled with luxury goods. And by her mid-thirties, but for one thing, her dreams had been fulfilled. Now she wanted to build a family.
“Let’s make a baby!” she said one night, over our pad thai.
“Now may not be the best time,” I said.
Janie couldn’t understand. As a couple, she believed, we were doing better than most. She said that lately I’d seemed happier and more steadfast than ever. Somehow, I must have learned to find joy in corporate work, she reasoned. Her misconception, I knew, was due to my having ceased complaining about my job. She was right about my improved attitude. My days in the studio had proven a wonderful panacea. The real problem was, after months of unemployment, my resources were exhausted.
But just as things had turned for the worst, I tagged along with Danny to the racetrack. It took no more than a couple of races to see I had a psychic connection to the action. I needed only study how a horse approached the gate to know if it was a winner. After watching Danny burn through tens of thousands of dollars, I implored him to wager on a gelding named Bruno. The racing form told us Bruno had been running abysmally and was destined for the dog food factory. On this day, however, his stride was as smooth and easy as Denzel on the big screen, so I insisted. When Bruno won by six lengths, Danny gifted me twenty thousand dollars, money, I knew, that would sustain me for months.
This good fortune inspired me to tell Janie I’d quit my job to pursue art full-time. To prove my commitment, I brought her to the studio to view the series of sculptures I’d built out of lawn chairs and PVC piping. Her support evaporated on the spot. I was a derelict, Janie said, with no regard for her wishes or, most importantly, our future family.
Janie is nothing if not decisive, and she left that very night. I was so bereft that I went out drinking alone, telling myself Janie was merely trying to scare me. But the apartment when I got back was empty, as was my faith in the future. I had always sought new adventure, variety, novelty, but now all I wanted was the comfort and security I’d had with Janie.
To win her back, I spent my nights picking flowers that I lovingly placed at the door of her friend’s apartment, where Janie was staying. Every day I’d hide behind a bush, waiting for her to leave for work, only to watch in dismay as she passed my offerings without so much as a glance. Finally, undeterred, I resorted to a most underhanded scheme: in a letter, I pleaded to let me give her a baby. I barred not a single hold. I detailed the sacrifices I’d make for our child, including learning the Chinese I’d someday teach him or her, knowing it to be a soft skill that could leverage tremendous advantages. But nothing I said would penetrate. Janie had made up her mind.
I started rifling through her things, letters from past boyfriends, photos from destinations foreign and remote, all these strange and arcane objects that now revealed the complete mystery Janie had been. I placed her underwear over my face, then masturbated on a stack of her cashmere sweaters. The next day, I woke in a pile on the bathroom floor, the underwear thick with vomit. I spent the morning writing a list of requests in my notebook, what I would pray for God to grant me. Why not resort to faith if it could be of some use?
That afternoon, I brought the sweaters to the dry cleaner. Seeing the stains, a little man with crooked teeth laughed so hard he knocked over a pile of folded clothes. A hunched woman whose face revealed decades of toil came out to click her tongue and pick at the stains with a dirty fingernail. Tiny flakes of milk-colored shame drifted to the floor. The sweaters, the man said, would be ready on Friday.
The day Janie came to pack her things, I worked in the studio on a painting of a dead boy in a coffin. At sunset, I shuffled home thinking Janie would be gone, but she hadn’t finished. She handed me a check for her share of the rent for the remainder of the lease, and I presented her with a watercolor in which she was nude on a tropical beach, with the vague shape of an angel overhead.
Matthew Binder is the author of the novels Pure Cosmos Club, The Absolved, and High in the Streets. He is also a primary member of the recording project Bang Bang Jet Away. Follow him on IG @matthew_p_binder and on Twitter @mbinder711
Order your copy of Pure Cosmos Club here.
You might also want to check out my interviews with other novelists like Sean Thor Conroe, Jordan Castro, Andre Aciman, and Junot Diaz.
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