Microeconomics
Short fiction
[Continuing the story of Constance. This should probably be read after the previous entry. All the Constance-related warnings about violence of various kinds are still in place. No lifeguard on duty, swim at own risk.]
Constance had never been responsible for preparing a banquet on his own before, even a small one. The Moores had all the social life of an ingrown toenail, and when Marcus Gould threw a party there were ranks of subs to order everyone around. Constance had been a napkin-carrier and mouth-wiper at best, a party favor at worst. Constance explained all this to his superior (without using phrases like “ingrown toenail”) but Cesar Chamberland just shrugged.
“It doesn’t matter what the food is like,” he said. “You’re the main event.”
This did not reassure Constance in the slightest.
Five minutes before the guests were set to arrive Chamberland was lounging on a barstool by the kitchen counter, watching with contentment as Constance scurried around the kitchen checking recipes and muttering to himself. The stovetop and much of the floor were covered with a fine film of grease. Tendrils of smoke drifted ominously at the door of the oven.
“‘Strip the spines off the cactus paddles,’ I’ve done that,” Constance muttered. His fingers were studded with pale burn-blisters like miniature Parker House rolls, and he had cactus spines stuck to his smock. “‘Slash the skin,’ yes, okay. ‘Constantly stirring.’ Oops.”
“Connie,” Julio said from the dining room. “Come here right now!”
“‘And let rest fifteen minutes.’ At least something’s getting rest around here.”
“Connie!”
“Yes, sir,” Constance said, hurrying to the threshold between the kitchen and the dining room. Julio had set up a mountain rescue scene, which he explained in detail as Constance tried to look attentive, instead of looking like someone with congealing risotto on his mind. Chamberland turned around on the barstool to watch them.
“This is the cliff,” Julio said, indicating the chair at the head of the table, “and this is where the rescue helicopters go. Signs are an important part of mountain safety. This sign says, ‘NO FALLING ROCKS.’”
Constance cocked his head and looked at the child. “Do the rocks read the sign, sir,” he asked, “and say, ‘Oh, we’ll have to go and fall somewhere else’?”
“No, they don’t have mouths,” Julio explained. “And they can’t understand.”
He mimicked and enlarged his father’s shrug: an elaborate gesture with elbows bent, palms raised, face quirking. It looked ironic and insouciant on an adult but on a child it was earnest, sweetened by the child’s belief that he was acting as he ought to rather than getting away with something. Constance smoothed the boy’s fine hair, stroked one blistered finger along his soft round cheek.
“So it’s really more, ‘NO DROPPING ROCKS,’” he pointed out, still petting the boy.
“Yes,” Julio said, looking up at him, “‘NO DROPPING ROCKS.’”
Then with a mischievous grin he added, “And ‘NO OBEYING THIS SIGN’!”
And Constance fell all over himself with exhausted laughter, and barely managed to say, “Oh, sir, that’s very difficult to do!”
Chamberland, watching all this, smiled with complete self-satisfaction. He approved every decision he’d made in the last four years of his life.
The doorbell rang.
Constance began the work of greeting the guests, taking their coats, kneeling to remove their shoes, pointing their subs toward the kitchen. Chamberland cleared the mountain rescue away and took his seat at the head of the table. Julio protested, but Cesar picked him up, settled him on his knee, and explained that he was going to be the mountain now. The boy was unconvinced until his father said that he’d get to stay up for the whole banquet as long as he could behave like a member of the household.
His friends began to settle around the table. He found himself paying unwonted attention to them, as if he hadn’t seen them in a long time: Lucien, with his broad ironic nose, his prominent lips always parting to insert some comment into the conversation at an unexpected surgical angle, a trick Cesar had often tried to learn. Fabio, effusive and volatile, who had worked in politics for a while but was now a restaurateur who would be considered successful if he weren’t constantly embroiled in disputes with his creditors and ex-wives; a man with laugh lines, salt-and-pepper curls, and hands as quick to strike a cook as to shake a pan. Neil, the token conservative, a skeptic and a supply-chain executive from the Iowa side of Winnebago land, with the melody of Indian country in his voice and long black hair in a cloud around his shoulders—like a vision of what Lucien could be if he were well-intentioned.
A small banquet. But he liked to see them settling in at the special banquet plates, each with their own color scheme, flame-red or peacock or faux black cracks against pure white. It had been so long since he had a sub get out the banquet glasses. He’d watched as Connie fetched them from the basement, the rakishly tilting ones and the fluted ones and the rippled ones and the beaded ones. (He noted with relief that Constance had not set out the two glasses he and Cecy had always used, whose stems could intertwine.) He thought with pleasure of the platters Connie had scrubbed with a toothbrush until every tendril of the porcelain grapevines and every ceramic lobster’s eyestalks gleamed. He’d even brought out the thing Cesar always thought of as “the creepy platter,” the gift from his mother-in-law that depicted the punishment of Marsyas in lurid reds and blacks. The creepy platter didn’t show the violence, just Apollo advancing on a muscled flutist with a knife; but the rippling tree trunks on the left-hand side of the scene reminded Cesar queasily of ribbons of flayed skin. This was the platter Constance was using for the nachos.
Cesar was not a passionately sensual man. Like all superiors in this society, he had plenty of feelings and little hesitation to share them, but his were domestic feelings relating primarily to loyalty, comfort, gratitude, the pleasures of the familiar. It pleased him to turn his attention to his friends’ faces, to feel his own approval for them and theirs for him. He had known these men for more than twenty years, but tonight they seemed new to him, and the pleasure they gave him was the pleasure of mystery, discovery, even awe.
He gave Julio a sip of his wine, from a dark green beaded goblet, and the grownups laughed as the kid tried to figure out how to enjoy it. He thought about the hard times with Julio after Cecy died; now, with a sub in the house, the kid’s character was starting to shine through again. It was easy to imagine who his son would be. Gregarious like Cecy, but precise and pedantic like himself. And indisputably dominant. Cesar had no reason to worry that either of his sons would be subordinated.
But at the beginning of this banquet, with Constance in the background curtsying and murmuring apologies for the situation with the cheese, with the other subs tucking a napkin into a superior’s shirtfront or wiping a stray crumb from a chin, Cesar was struck by a thought he’d had now and then since his wife’s death. A voice like his own voice, but grimmer, reminded Cesar that perhaps his son’s future wouldn’t be determined solely by his personal character. There could be things waiting up ahead and neither intelligence nor strength of will, nor even friendship, wealth, and reputation would spare the boy. He held Julio closer; the boy squirmed free, slipped down from his knees and darted off to be underfoot in the kitchen. Through the door Cesar heard a faint, harassed murmur.
Fabio was complaining about one of his ex-wives again. This time the problem was that she’d filed a request to have their son assessed for dominance or submission early. “Too many children,” he groaned. “You, you, and you,” pointing at his friends, “don’t have more children than you got. Children are like money. More children, more problems.”
Lucien said, “Perhaps if all of the children were with the same woman, though.”
“Is this Tori?” Cesar asked.
“Tori, Tori, who else would it be?” Fabio asked, although his friends exchanged glances suggesting that this was not as rhetorical a question as he’d intended. “She’s murdering me in my finances—she’s murdering me in my heart.” His crossed hands slapped his chest above the threatened organ.
“Why not have it done?” Neil asked. “Better to know sooner than later.”
“I got to have it done. No choice. The judge said to me,” and his friends were already laughing as he began to wag his finger at them—Fabio loathed authority figures, which was why his friends so enjoyed his impressions of them—“‘Fabio, Fabio, she’s got the law on her side. Whichever parent wants the children assessed first wins,’ like I don’t know this, like I’m not begging her to find some loophole in this law that I know. ‘If you don’t open your wallet, Fabio, by the time I get done with you you won’t have custody of a goldfish.’ What can I do? So I might lose my son in a week, forever. And what does Tori care? If he’s subordinated she has three more!”
“So do you,” Lucien noted.
“Yeah, but she doesn’t have to pay for the assessment. I do. And you know,” with a sudden uncharacteristic seriousness, “what if the science is not good now? What if they say, ‘Your son is a such-and-such percentile submissive,’ and it’s right on the borderline, it’s eighty-six or eighty-seven, and in a year they come out with a new test and he would have been okay?”
“He could find someone to sponsor a plea for reassessment,” Cesar said uneasily. Fabio leaned back hard in his chair and blew air between his lips like a balloon deflating. Cesar had to admit that was an appropriate response.
“I believe in science, I believe in progress,” Fabio said, and although Lucien murmured, “First I’ve heard of it,” they all believed him. “But ever since the AMES Act—no, don’t start, of course it was a good thing, but you have to admit, if they can change the criteria that radically, if they can say, ‘We were wrong, we took children away from their parents and made them pretty much slaves—’”
Everyone around the table shifted in their seats. Forks clinked against plates. This was not a word often spoken in their society outside of narrowly historical contexts.
“Everybody likes the AMES Act because it made subordination fair,” Fabio said. “No more subordinating somebody just because he grew up poor, or had violence in the home, or, what are the other things, depression, which I still think is bullshit, by the way, we’ve just decided that depression means you’re not really submissive instead of saying maybe depression makes you a real submissive. But whatever you think, every year we have more studies and more knowledge. So isn’t it our responsibility as parents to wait until the very last minute to have our kids assessed?”
Neil said, mildly, “We had our oldest assessed last year, and he was only thirteen.”
“Yeah, but he came out neutral,” Fabio said.
“You think yours won’t,” Cesar said. Everyone looked at him. They would have expected that if someone at the banquet broke the taboo on stating the possibility of a child’s subordination in front of the parent, it would have been Lucien, or Fabio himself.
“He’s such a good kid,” Fabio said softly. “He’s my heart,” putting his hands on his chest again. “Do I have a submissive heart? Maybe I do. Maybe anytime you think of a person as like a part of your body, this person is my right hand, this person is my big toe—” pointing, wiggling his foot in its house slipper, Fabio spoke with his entire body or not at all—“this person is my heart—maybe anytime you think like that, it means the person is submissive. But everything in me says I don’t want to find out.”
There was a long pause. The friends addressed themselves to the risotto, which had roughly the consistency and flavor of wallpaper paste.
“Hey, kitchen,” Fabio called. “We need wine up in here. More wine!”
Constance hurried out with the Marsyas nachos. He handed off the platter to Fabio’s sub and went around with the wine, reaching over the guests’ shoulders while they tried to dodge the jug and made vocal and accurate guesses about how he’d been used at banquets in his previous households.
Fabio jabbed his fork into the nachos as Constance cleared the risotto bowls. “Hey, you,” he said, spilling tortilla crumbs and nuclear orange cheese down his chin, “c’mere.”
Constance set the bowls on the sideboard, went over to him and curtsied very low, like a sub who knows what’s about to happen to him.
“You know what salt is?”
“Yes, sir—”
“Salt. Ssssaaaallllltt. Pff!”, and Fabio made a gesture like he was flinging something into Constance’s eyes; Constance flinched. “Go and get it, and next time, put it in before you serve the meal. Yeah?”
“Yes, sir.”
When Constance had gone back into the kitchen, Fabio said, “I’ll sell you one of my kitchen subs. At cost price, for you. You deserve better than this,” making his fork travel in a swift and winding path through the limp nachos to reveal Apollo’s sharp-toothed, gleeful grin.
“The nopales are good,” Cesar said. And then, correcting himself, “The nopales are fine.”
Fabio laughed. “How much you pay for that,” jerking his thumb at the kitchen.
Cesar gave the price he’d paid for Constance, and Fabio wasn’t the only one who laughed out loud; Neil whistled. Unnoticed in their places along the walls, the three friends’ subs lifted their eyebrows and exchanged sardonic glances.
“You’d think there was a shortage,” Lucien said.
“It’s funny you say that,” Neil said, plucking the salt shaker from Constance’s hand as he came in. And he launched into one of his interminable Neil thoughts, in this case about the steady rise in the price of the highest-percentile subordinates, with no obvious disruption in the supply chain or problem in the pricing mechanism. His friends heard the phrase “supply chain” and began to groan, to wave their hands and call for more wine.
“I’m only saying that it looks like there is a shortage, and there shouldn’t be,” Neil said. Fabio made as if to pour wine on him.
“Well, he was worth every penny,” Cesar said. “In fact, I wanted to have you all over for a reason.”
He had wondered exactly how much wine they should have before he introduced his purpose. A minute ago he would have said they’d drunk too little, but the stultifying effect of Neil’s market analysis (and the fact that they’d all drained their glasses twice while he was talking) made him think maybe now they’d had too much. Still—
“Constance,” he said, turning to his sub with an awkward flourish, “tell these men about your vision.”
Groans and howls broke out again around the table. Julio wandered in from the kitchen and stood in the doorway, meditatively chewing on a whisk.
“I told you!” Fabio said. “I told you when he bought this walking odor that he was going to get weird about it!”
“Neil, tell us more about adverse selection,” Lucien said.
But Constance had just brought out the duck breasts, which everyone admitted would have been tasty had they not been accompanied by splintery rice and what appeared to be strawberry jam. They scraped red goo off their portion, or with a sigh relinquished the skin altogether (Julio went around the table eating the skins and putting his chubby hands in the goo), and settled back to allow Constance to entertain them.
Constance told the story of his vision on the mammoth. The friends leaned back in their chairs and waited until they could laugh. At one point Constance mentioned that the mammoth-jewelers had been arguing about some kind of technological innovation that would “keep the fossils alive while they were jeweled,” and he overheard himself and said, “—That can’t be right,” and the guests did laugh then.
Neil prompted him, “So what were they really arguing about?”, but Lucien and Fabio and even Cesar shouted him down, “No one cares!”, “This isn’t the important part, Neil,” and the story moved on.
Their subs stood silently in the corners of the room; Constance didn’t glance at them, his attention entirely on the dominants at the banquet table. Julio licked goo off his fingers, and Constance knelt down and used his smock to wipe the boy’s face and hands, still explaining. When he had finished there was a pause.
“It works!” Chamberland said. “You guys have to try it. I didn’t believe it, but everything he says is true. Look, I’ll show you—”
And he got out of his chair, almost knocking it over—each of them by this point had polished off at least one bottle—and began to crawl around the table on hands and knees, picking up crumbs with his bare hands.
“Cesar,” Neil said. “You’ve had a few too many. Here, let me help you up—”
But Cesar made evasive maneuvers on all fours. He snatched a napkin from the table, dunked it in his water glass (which had received far less attention than the wineglass), and began to scrub the floor. Neil’s sub made a quick derisive sidestep to dodge the roving napkin.
“No, no,” Fabio groaned, putting one hand over his eyes and waving the other helplessly in front of him. “In front of your own child—no, man, for shame.”
Julio made a small, unhappy, confused noise. Constance hugged him and said, “It’s all right, sir. Your father is doing this completely by his own choice.”
“Connie, you’re not helping,” Cesar said. “Tell me to do something, give me an order.”
“This isn’t a philosophy,” Lucien said, “it’s a psychological problem.”
Constance, with an expression of deep confusi
on, stood and then curtsied and then said, “Please pick up that fork and bring it to the sink.”
“‘Please’?” Chamberland objected, but he began to crawl with slewing enthusiasm toward the fallen utensil. His friends and their subs watched this display with identical expressions of pity and disgust.
Cesar’s knees were starting to hurt as he clumped across the floor. His friends had pelted him with laughter and were now urging him sincerely to get up, to pull himself together. The laughter had been better, he thought—to be clownish, to be absurd, here he had felt close to the mystery again. It seemed to hum in the air around him. His heart was light, he was laughing too, rejoicing, something gooey smearing on one leg of his pants, rapt and soiled. He picked up the fork and held it in a fist, pressing his knuckles against the floor. He crawled over to Constance and, panting, pressed his lips to his sub’s bare right foot.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Fabio said, getting up from the table at last.
Chamberland’s lips were burning.
Fabio helped him stand. A shudder of relief went through the spectators. Chamberland’s face was hot—and looking over, he could see that Constance had also flushed bright red from his cheeks all the way across his ears. He could feel the grease and grit still on his lips. He remembered the burns across the tops of Constance’s feet, old scars he had never noticed before.
Fabio gently plucked the fork from his grip and set it back on the table. Then took three steps toward Constance and backhanded him across the face. He hit the door to the kitchen and fell. Julio screamed.
“Hey,” Chamberland said, grabbing Fabio’s arm. “That’s my prerogative.”
Julio ran up to Fabio and started hitting him, small fists against Fabio’s thighs. Fabio freed his arm, scooped the boy up and began to soothe him. “It’s okay, little friend,” he murmured. “You have to hit them sometimes. I know tonight has been scary.”
“It’s getting late,” Lucien said, rising, and Neil stood up as well.
Constance, sprawled on the floor, protested, “Oh, but you haven’t even tried my tarte Tatin!”
There was the usual business with getting coats and shoes back on. All the subs got in one another’s way, and got kicked for it. Lucien had turned, while his sub was still helping his right arm into his coat sleeve, and said to everyone, “And so we bid a firm farewell to the Teeny-Tiny Banquet of Extreme Social Awkwardness. A tradition never to be remembered.”
But then, turning to Cesar, had said, “Of course you’ll come to my New Year’s banquet,” and grabbed his arm, pulling him close before letting him go.
The door opened, superiors made noises about the cold, the door closed; the friends made it to their cars, their shoes skidding on the icy pavement as they leaned on subs whose bare feet kept them upright—and after all that, Chamberland strolled into the kitchen, holding Julio, and leaned against the counter with stains on his pants and a drunken self-approving smile on his face. Constance cut him a piece of tart without being asked, and brought a children’s fork as well as an adult one. The mark of Fabio’s knuckles still showed along his cheekbone.
“I thought that went well,” Chamberland said—and then, tasting the tart, in genuine surprise said, “This is good!”
“I hope so, sir,” Constance said.
“I thought Fabio—he didn’t get it all at once, but you could tell that it made an impression on him,” Chamberland said, helping his son fork up dessert while Constance filled a bucket with hot water. “He’s gonna go home and think about it.”
Constance began to mop.
“Can I help in some way?” Chamberland asked, waving his fork to indicate the state of the kitchen. The gesture shook a chunk of tarte tatin onto the floor. He looked down at it.
“That’s all right, sir,” Constance said, “the other subs did most of it while I was serving.”
“You sound surprised.”
Constance laughed. Chamberland grinned at him. Constance bent over the mop and started to work on the grease, and said, “After the way they looked while I was talking about my vision—and also the, uh, everything that happened after that—I thought I’d be lucky if they didn’t smear that tart all over the walls while I was tying their superiors’ shoes, sir.”
“No, they were into it,” Chamberland said. “I looked at their faces! They’re on board.”
Constance wordlessly steered the mop toward his superior’s feet. He bent over, picked up the fallen chunk of tart, and put it in the trash.
“Oh, you could have eaten that,” Chamberland said. “I forgot to tell you, you can eat off the plates. Anything you want.”
Constance glanced at him sidelong, reached into the garbage, pulled out the chunk of apple and crust, and put it in his mouth. Only after he went back to mopping did he say, “Thank you, sir.”
“Wow, okay,” Chamberland said. “You’re getting feisty. Good—that’s good, I think. If I’m doing it right.”
Julio sighed, turned away from the tart, and burrowed into his father.
“Lemme take the little guy upstairs,” Chamberland said.
“Yes, sir,” Constance said, “it’s been a very long evening.”
“I want Connie to take me!” the boy cried.
Constance grinned ruefully, leaned the mop against the stove, and came over to put his arms around the child. As Chamberland handed him over, he and Constance shared a commiserating glance over the boy’s head. Constance kissed Julio on the top of his head, where his soft black hair began to swirl, and carried him up to the master bedroom.
Chamberland finished the slice of tart, then took a quick sip of milk, and considered the acceptable ways to look at subs. That commiserating glance over the child’s head was familiar to him—his old sub, whom he’d named Fidel, had often shared that look with him when Aurelio was being difficult. The way he’d looked at his friends’ subs tonight was different. He knew what Neil’s sub looked like, of course, Neil’d had him forever, but Chamberland had always thought of him as “the low-percentile one Neil picked up cheap at an estate sale right after college.” He wasn’t sure of the sub’s name—he thought maybe Bingo? something from Neil’s college fight song, anyway—but tonight he’d noticed the sub’s startling blue eyes, and the scar on his cheek like somebody long ago took a bite out of him. He’d known that Lucien liked his subs to grow their hair long and do it up in elaborate coils, which Chamberland thought couldn’t be hygienic; but only tonight had he noticed that this sub had a long nose, and streaks of gray already in his twining hair even though he was quite young.
Cesar polished off the slice of tart as he drew up a mental list of the questions he’d ask Constance once his sub returned from putting Julio to bed. What did it mean that he’d noticed the faces? Why did the laughter help?
He ran his hands over the mystery and the vision like they were a new-bought car. He’d spend happy hours, he felt, finding out what all the buttons did.
The next morning Neil called Fabio and, crunching on a Tylenol, floated a theory about what the mammoth-jewelers had been arguing about.
“I don’t care that you ‘looked into it’!” Fabio said. “It’s weird that you looked into it! I don’t want to know more weird things from this already too weird banquet!”
But when it came time to raid the house of the secret bone-jeweler, he was there.
Bust of Marsyas by Balthasar Permoser; in the Met, photo used under a Creative Commons license.