Killer Move

“Exhibition, not exposition, dear,” Steph said around a mouthful of high-spec granola. “And no. Sarasota has come a long way, but it ain’t New York. Or even Tallahassee. The art-porn market still falls outside what local folks will countenance in a public gallery.”

I frowned down at the Amazon delivery note. “Well, that’s weird.”

“Does it say it’s a gift?”

“No. It was bought on my account.”

“Hon,” Steph said, “it’s okay.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you ordered this, I don’t mind.”

I stared at her. “Why would I even open the package in front of you if I had something to hide?”

She shrugged. “You’re cruising around the site, see the book, accidentally click BUY IT NOW instead of ADD TO BASKET. Forget all about it and then bang, here it is. And in front of the wife. Whoops. No biggie.”

I spoke slowly. “I did not order this book.”

“So send it back,” she said, grabbing her car keys. “I got to go, hon. Big day of prep for the Maxwinn Saunders powwow tomorrow.”

“Steph, listen. I didn’t buy this.”

“I believe you,” she said with a wink, and then she was gone.

First thing I did when I got to work was to e-mail Amazon, briskly requesting the procedure for returning a book sent in error. I’d already checked the shipping notification e-mail I’d received the day before. Paying more attention when it came in wouldn’t have achieved much—by then the book had already been on its way. It was Steph’s response that was nettling me most. It wasn’t as if the book was hard-core. Two seconds with a search engine would have flooded my screen with pictures that would have made Henrik Myerson (creator of the images in the book stowed in the trunk of my car) blanch. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that the book’s arrival had made me look like the kind of person who wanted to own this kind of thing. I have dedicated a lot of time and effort to assuming control of my personal brand. I’m not going to stand for random misinformation muddying the waters.

That was the first point, anyhow. The second was a broader one. I grew up in Pennsylvania. My mother’s sister lived in South Carolina, and from time to time the family would migrate down to spend a week. Aunt Lynn was a recovering hippie and big on producing her own food. This included a series of impressive chili plants that grew along a fence in the backyard. The fruits of these were fascinating to me. There’s something so ripe and eye-catching about a chili when it’s ready to pick, a plumpness that bellows “eat me” to the untrained eye. My parents had firmly instructed me not to do any such thing, and I was in general a well-behaved kid.

Imagine their surprise, therefore, at coming out into the yard one afternoon to discover that the eight-year-old child they’d left peaceably playing was now in paroxysms of agony, unable even to come indoors, apparently caused by having eaten one of these chilies.

They were comforting, and supportive, and fed me ice cream to dull the burn, all the time managing to refrain from saying they’d told me so. I said I hadn’t eaten a chili, and they didn’t explicitly call me on it, but smiled when they thought I wasn’t looking. But the thing is . . .

I hadn’t eaten a damned chili.

All I’d done—and this hadn’t been explicitly disallowed, and children need explicit instruction because they are not good at expanding from the specific to the general—was to reach up and touch one of the swollen, bright red chilies. I’d marveled at how hard it was, how powerful and fecund, then turned my back on the forbidden fruit and got on with something else. I’d evidently also accidentally brushed those same fingers across my lips, however, bringing the freakish power of a Scotch Bonnet to bear upon skin that still thought of American mustard as wantonly aggressive.

The pain eventually subsided. What did not fade was the sense of injustice—the injustice wrought by someone being kind and forgiving over a sin that had not been committed. Steph shrugging off the book’s arrival this morning felt the same way—and the worst of it was that there was no way back. I could go home at the end of the day clutching proof that I’d returned the book, and she could interpret this as me going out of my way to maintain the pretense of not having ordered it in the first place. Even if she eventually believed me, the instant in which she’d thought otherwise remained alive in time.

I was still fulminating over this when there was a ping to indicate I’d received an e-mail. It was the Amazon help desk, with guidelines for returning a book if you had ordered it in error.

Suddenly I was even more angry. I hadn’t ordered it in error. Their computer had fucked up. I knew the response I’d just received was itself computer generated, and that made it worse: a computer telling a human how to unscrew an error made by another computer, making me a pawn in some ludicrous glitch-generated scenario I hadn’t asked for in the first place.