Amateurs by Dylan Hicks Page A

“spills his seed, because he doesn’t like the idea of giving it in some magical way to his dead brother.” Sara didn’t understand why Archer felt the skeevy need to look at her during this part of his lecture, or why he wouldn’t let the subject be changed. People were always misreading the clearly marked maps of conversation. In fairness, she had drawn him out on his essay (of course he would never send it to her). Once prompted, though, he had proceeded as ifhe were sitting down for a half-hour interview with Leonard Lopate. “God kills him for failing to honor the rules of levigate marriage,” he said. She silently reiterated the new-to-her word; later that night, she saw that he’d meant levirate, with an r . “Only way later was Onan’s coitus interruptus conflated with masturbation.”
    â€œBut don’t you think,” John started to say, then faltered. “Don’t you think that when he pulls out he jerks it a little to come?”
    â€œCharming,” Gemma said.
    â€œI actually think it’s a good point,” Lucas said.
    Archer: “Genesis is, um . . .”
    â€œSilent on that particular question?” Sara filled in. John could say the dumbest things, but now she was contemplating the matter, picturing Onan by some dusty pillared house, bearded, she guessed, like John, whose beard bothered her face but felt good on her thighs. It was unusual but possible, she could testify, for a grown man to come without much direct genital stimulation, for instance—
    â€œYes, completely silent,” Archer said, interrupting Sara’s thought and finally moving the discussion in another direction, away from himself but not explicitly toward anyone else. He wasn’t a great asker of questions. Sara—big on civility, insecure about her current status—disapproved of this but liked not having to answer the customary questions. As a confident man with a putatively Croesan net worth, he was probably used to being the center of attention, even if he wasn’t someone you’d necessarily notice on the subway, or for that matter on an airport shuttle bus with many available seats. His strongest feature, if something below the chin can be called a feature, was his very pronounced Adam’s apple, almost ugly, though again, not to such a Tom Pettyish extreme that you’d necessarily notice it. He was jowly and his hairline was receding, but unlike most of his young-and-balding peers, Lucas for one, he wasn’t keeping his hair cropped, was in fact showing what she hoped was an inadvertent comb-over. His face, in contrast, was wide and innocent, a BoyScout’s face; looking at him could yield the sort of chronometric confusion one might get before a neo-Gothic building. Maybe a tendency to arouse such confusion united Archer and John? Archer could have found more interesting companions than John, Sara thought, though maybe Archer didn’t want interesting companions; maybe John put him at ease like he nearly did with Sara, or maybe Archer saw John—legitimately working class: his father a pipefitter, his mother a part-time church secretary, his brother reportedly the kind of guy who blows marijuana smoke into the mouths of dogs—as a sartorially assimilationist exotic. The check arrived.
    Gemma and Lucas had been getting more tactile over the past hour and decided to return early to the apartment, while Sara, John, and Archer shared a cab to the art gallery. John paid the fare and tipped with what Archer implied was a yokel’s munificence. Archer laughed about the tip as they slalomed through the millers and smokers outside the gallery, John accepting the teasing as if it held only affection. Archer’s full smile was strange and gummy, like an angry horse, and that ugliness probably made his teasing seem crueler than he meant it to be. “It’s no crime to send a taxi driver back to Queens with a few extra