Good Kids: A Novel (12 page)

She placed a hand on my shoulder, for a moment. “More acceptability! See, there aren’t that many kinds of dresses I feel are better suited to my figure than the figure of a really modely girl, but this is one of those kinds. I saw this woman who played Nell in
Endgame
at this Beckett festival in London wearing a dress like this after the show, and she basically looked like a water bug, her whole torso was just a swelling at the end of a bunch of legs. I’m being mean. I’m not mean. I’m working on not talking the way I’m talking right now.”

“I wasn’t thinking about that,” I said. “I was thinking about how you were talking about a Beckett festival.”

She looked alarmed. “I was in London and I knew some actors that were in some of the productions there. I would have normally been attending
Legally Blonde: The Musical
.”

“You’re pretending you like these things you say you like, but you couldn’t name a Destiny’s Child album. You know that Nell is a character in
Endgame
. I bet you couldn’t sing a song from
Legally Blonde: The Musical
. Maybe you could sing a couple bars,
but you wouldn’t know a whole song. You play this girlie-girl person but really you’re a”—I didn’t know what phrase to use, and the one I went with embarrassed me—“connoisseur of the arts. I like it, but you’re a total actor.”

I thought she’d probably stamp her foot and say something to the effect of
What are you talking about, weirdo?
I thought she’d sustain playfulness. Instead, she became serious.

She turned from the boutique window and looked me in the eye. Instead of lowering her brow in challenge, as she had when she’d described her taste in music, she looked into the middle distance.

“I’m a Republican,” she said. “I come from a Republican family.”

“You voted for Bush?”

She shook her head. “I’m just really conservative in a lot of ways.”

“Do you think gay people shouldn’t be allowed to get married and abortion should be illegal?”

“I don’t think either of those things. I’ve never actually
voted
for a Republican. But I think there’s nothing wrong with somebody like Giuliani. And I really support the death penalty.” She was standing with her legs spread slightly farther apart than usual, as if there was a crowd of people behind her she was ready to defend from me, if necessary.

“Hillary Clinton’s pro death penalty,” I said. “I love Hillary Clinton. She reminds me of a benign stepmom.”

“I like Hillary Clinton too,” she conceded. Only now did I realize that I had probably been looking as tense as she did. The words “I’m a Republican” had triggered a fight-or-flight instinct. The knowledge that somebody who was even sort of a Republican might kiss me was enchanting and noxious at the same time, cocaine-like.

I had the sense Julie might believe that if your parents were Republican you had to say you were Republican or you were a traitor. It was an ethnicity. Hence the wide-legged, defensive, samurai-like stance. This was a way of thinking easy for me to recognize,
because it was my own. My blood-and-soil identity was liberal Democrat. I felt that in declaring her partisanship Julie had confessed she was a spy from a country at war with my own tiny, highly militant, perpetually threatened, essentially Israel-like, generally anti-Israel, nation-state: the Republic of Wattsbury/Cambridge/Burlington/Brooklyn/Eugene/Berkeley/Santa Cruz/Madison/Portland. I had been born one of its citizens. Thinking of myself differently because of a trifle like my views on a government policy was inconceivable. I was ready to slip behind Julie and drag her to one of my bases for questioning.

Spy vs. spy,
I thought. I felt suspicion and desire flow between the Republican-not-Republican and me.

“I went to grad school in bio for a little while,” said Julie. “Bio’s a hippie-kid, jam-band field of inquiry. I know people from places like Wattsbury who’ve barely ever met anyone conservative. You need to know I’m different from you.”

I put my hand in my pocket. It had been on her elbow, and then it had been hovering in the air halfway between us, after she turned to confront me, and gradually slipped back to my side. The date had been pointed kissward. But we’d had a different kind of collision, both more and less intimate than a kiss.

“Sorry.” She looked at the boutique window again. “I’m being completely inappropriate. But now you know.”

“I think I’m going to go to my car,” I said, after a moment, because this felt like the end of the night. Not in an utterly disagreeable way. I felt that what she had said might allow us to be candid. I just couldn’t think of what to say next. “I’d like to do this again,” I continued. “Is it okay if I call you?”

She nodded and put a hand on her cheek. “I can’t believe I gave you a speech about how I’m a Republican.”

“I can’t believe I gave you a speech about who your true self is, like I’d figured you out.”

I put a gun to my head and exhaled as I pulled the trigger. I felt wretchedly lame as soon as I’d done it. But she did the same thing; only after she’d pulled the trigger, she tumbled the gun into a wave—good-bye.

• • •

Our second date was dessert at a bistro on Fountain lit by tiny purple lights embedded in the floor and ceiling. Because of our first date’s kisslessness, the second was overwarm, do-or-die. A spotlight shone on each of us.

“Remind me,” I said to Julie, when we were trying to get the conversation airborne. “What are your parents’ names again?”

“My dad is Samson, my mom is Vanda. He’s the Armenian, she’s the Persian.”

I asked her if they were still together. In Wattsbury or New York or Los Angeles this was a normal follow-up question, but I wasn’t sure about Glendale.

“Yup,” she said, “still married. I don’t remember—are your parents?”

“Absolutely not.”

“What was it like for you when they got divorced?”

The arm of a waitress, tattooed with a shy deer in a prospect of flowers, placed a scotch before me and withdrew.

“Formative. I think I’m here, who I am, a bass player, because of it. So good and bad. It was like, before the divorce, when I was fifteen, I was an overachiever, and after, I was an angry teen, musician material.”

“Why were you angry?” She was, I noticed, good at questions.

“My dad was not that into me. You know that dating advice book?
He’s Just Not That Into You
? It says, you need to stop coming up with reasons why the guy you went on a date with isn’t calling you, you need to stop interpreting his behavior, and just accept he’s not that smitten? I needed to do what that book says you need to do, just stop trying to read him and come up with elaborate explanations for his behavior, and accept that he didn’t want to date me and my sister, as it were.” I downed some scotch. The waitress brought us tiramisu. “But also still be able to cobble all the best parts of him together into this dad I carry around with me in mind, that I imagine saying dad-like things to me. Does that make sense?” I drank some more. “I mean, God, sorry.
My dad just wasn’t that into me
.” I said it in the pretentious-guy voice
that Julie and I had established between us the other night. “I’m a horrible person—I just said ‘My dad just wasn’t that into me’ over tiramisu.”

Julie put a finger to her mouth and tapped it against her lips, thinking.

When she eventually replied, she addressed not the joke at the end of my speech but the speech itself. “I don’t know what that’s like, having a parent who’s not that into you. My parents always liked me. I was scared shitless of my mom, but I think it was in a good way. She was this presence that was like a god until I was eighteen. Then I got into Pomona and we became friends.”

Her face became solemn, lending both poignancy and absurdity to the cheerfulness of her outfit: a black cardigan with a silver thread, a T-shirt with columns of silver clamshells. “I didn’t think about what would go down if I didn’t obey her,” she continued. “I just knew that I didn’t ever want to displease her.”

After the tiramisu, I proposed another walk. We went two abreast down the side streets south of Santa Monica Boulevard. In her heels, she was almost my height. Her body was a field-hockey player’s, broad-shouldered, for a girl. But she’d been a science nerd, inept at soccer, she said, with a thatch of hair she hadn’t yet learned to verticalize. It now fell Pocahontas-like down her back.

“My band was more familial than my biological family,” I said. “In a family-family, the parents can get divorced, everyone can stop caring overly much about everyone else, it can go . . .” I made my hands into birds, fluttering away from each other and floating on different sides of my head. “But in a band, you’re all each other’s livelihood. You have to have your drummer. You have to have your singer. It’s like medieval Greenland or something, where if you don’t have the one person who herds the sheep, and the other who churns the butter, and the other who milks the oxen, the whole economic animal keels over. A band’s better than a family.”

“But my family’s like that,” she said. “Like the band, like the medieval family. My parents aren’t from this country originally. They came here from really different places and met each other
and had to start their careers over and they had me right away and neither of them could have survived without the other. And so much of it was, ‘We can have a kid who can do good in ways she wouldn’t be able to in Iran or Soviet Armenia.’ They needed me to be doing well to feel good about their lives. We needed each other.” The self-professed hoister of feminine-coded drinks was gone. Her family was in a keep she protected from frivolity. “I mean,” she said, “also, no offense or anything, but didn’t your band break up?”

“I guess it did,” I said. “So that’s why it’s kind of a quandary, what I’m supposed to be doing now.”

“That doesn’t change what you were saying about families, though. That sounds bad. I’d heard stories of superwhite families being like how you just said your family was, and I didn’t believe them.”

I was silent for a while. I knew this silence might make it seem like I was offended, but I had been moved by what she said. I also had the sense that now was the time to kiss her. I was terrified.

My Volvo had once been half of Shapeshifter’s caravan. Its guts were even leakier than they’d been eight years ago, but I kept it clean. It was parked at the corner of Romaine and Seward, nearby, and I proposed I give her a ride in it to her car. In the Volvo, I thought, with music, that’s when the kiss will feel right.

The locks had stopped working two years ago, so I grabbed the passenger-side door and opened it, with great casualness, for Julie. When I saw what was inside, I shouted and leapt back.

Sprawled across the backseat was a dozing androgyne. Usually, I found the presence of homeless drug users sad but invigorating. I fraternized with people who made their addictive behaviors look like progressive lifestyle choices, so I felt there was much to be said for people who reminded me that debauchery presaged ruin. But I was unhappy to find a cautionary tale sleeping in my vehicle. The still, lanky person, his or her face wrapped in rank blond hair, kicked to life before me.

“Hi,” I said.

“Cut you,” said the recumbent person.

“How are you doing tonight?”

“All my friends are coming,” he/she warned. “Back up.” The voice was approximately masculine now. The feet were sockless, in Brand X white canvas sneakers that could have been worn by a woman or a man.

“If you just need to sleep for a while, tell me,” I said. “We’ll find another way to get ourselves home—if you’re in a bad situation and you need to stay here. But if you have another place to stay, maybe you should stay there instead.”

“My car now.” The guest snuffled contentedly. The voice was even lower, more mannish.

There was a tap on my shoulder. “Excuse me,” said Julie. She cleared her throat behind me. I moved aside.

She popped her telegenic head into the threshold of the passenger seat. Her face was only a few feet from the slothful animal.

“You can’t stay here,” she said. “You have to move.”

There was a pause. “Who is this?” the person replied. I was less inclined to believe it was a man now; the needle ticked back toward genderlessness.

“My name is Julie. This isn’t your car. If you don’t get out of it, then we have to call the police to get you out. That means it’s not safe for you to be in here, because if the cops put you in jail, you might not be safe.”

“That is another way of looking at it.” The voice was awake now, and verging into feminine territory.

“You need a hand?” Julie asked the person. “We’re going to open the door.”

“No trouble” went the more or less ladylike reply. The lanky body flipped over. The door opened, and it climbed out, never looking at us, never showing its face. It wrapped its arms over its chest and stalked off into the dark. In the glow of the generators, I could just discern the outlines of the thick blond hair, weighted with sweat and grime but abundant, an asset, hair meant to be viewed under lights.

In the recaptured Volvo, I drove Julie to her car. We were quiet. I thought I could detect the smell of my gym clothes wafting
from my South By Southwest tote bag in the backseat. But it might have been a trace of the androgyne’s sweat.

“You handled that well,” I said, calming down. My tone was flat, because I wasn’t saying what I meant. What I meant was: I know I was a pushover, please forgive me, I’ll be more assertive next time. I had passed the window-shopping tests, but this test I had failed.

“No,” she said, with equal flatness. “You handled it beautifully.”

Shaky ground for kissing. Next time, I thought. But I was losing her; I could see life drain from her face.

I asked if I could call her again.

“Sure,” she said. “Good night.” She got out of the decrepit station wagon and slid into her white Volkswagen. As I pulled away, her large, beautiful head was lit by the candle-size glow of her phone.

I waited until I was on the side streets of Echo Park, my neighborhood, no longer a threat to other freeway drivers, to call Gordon and disclose my error.