Good Kids: A Novel (16 page)

“I never want to hurt you,” she said, and I was frightened. She let herself slump into the couch.

I squared my shoulders. “You’re not going to hurt me. I promise.”

“Today I met with Jeremy and his guys, and Jeremy and I were being super buddy-buddy because we both knew what you saw last night and we wanted to show things were cool. So I tried to be so gentle. I was like, ‘Good cuff links. Did you burn all your fleece when you left Palo Alto?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah,’ and I was like, ‘Nice, I’m new money too.’ And he was like, ‘Is anybody old money anymore?’ and I was like, ‘Josh’s family acts that way,’ and he was like, ‘Josh acts poor.’ And he said that thing you said at the cookout about your disposable contact lenses, how you made them last a year instead of a month. And it just turned into this thing. This science guy was like, ‘Julie’s man’s so poor he goes fishing in Venice for catfish,’ and then the Stanford Business School guy was like, ‘Julie’s man’s so poor he’s got a chicken coop in her garage,’ and then the PR guy was like, ‘Julie’s man sells ices on Temple.’” She walked back to the kitchen as she spoke, and ripped a paper towel off the roll that stood on the island to blow her nose. “But I don’t give a shit. I don’t care what they think.”

“Of course Jeremy’s being mean. I’d be mean about a man who’d seen me lose a boner,” I said. “Besides, they’re clearly resentful because I’m a rock musician. All men secretly wish they were rock musicians. Sometimes when shit like this happens I have to remind myself of that.”

“These men don’t secretly wish they were rock musicians. These men are nerds from Northern California. They secretly wish there was a Pixar movie of Norse folklore. They secretly wish they had wineries. They secretly wish I would quit so they could hire a twenty-two-year-old with wet-looking blond hair who looks like a barbarian queen; that’s what it’s actually about, probably.”

“It’s just disbelief. You’re this . . .” I arranged my arms into a cradle. “This
goddess
carrying around a baby retard.”

“Did you just compare yourself to a baby retard?” She looked
me over carefully as she opened a box of sea salt caramels..

“I did,” I said, with righteousness.

She put three pieces in her mouth, chewed them thoughtfully, like a baseball player with tobacco, sprinkled Comet on the remainder of the licorice in the bag, and threw the bag in the trash. “Don’t talk about yourself like that. If people at work are telling me I’m supposed to be ashamed of you, and you’re agreeing that I’m supposed to be ashamed of you, what am I supposed to do with that?”

She pulled her laptop from the cloth tangerine-colored case with zebra stickers that a fan in Singapore had made her and took it to the living room. Finally she said: “I can’t believe I’m affected by this. They’re idiots. I can’t believe I’m affected by this. Fuck
me,
if I’m
that
girl, who actually cares about this.”

“I wasn’t supposed to turn out this way,” I said, still sitting in the kitchen. We were descending into something, unable to stop. I pictured two ants swirling down a drain. “I wasn’t supposed to turn out this way at all. I was going to be a classics major. Do these guys at work even care what the Athenians would have thought of them? Because in Athens, they would have been condemned. I wrote a paper about the
Symposium
before I dropped out of NYU, and when the TA gave it back to me, he looked at me, and he said, ‘Your reading of Plato is terminal.’ That was the word he used. He was amazed by me.”

I was scratching my scalp, and I was ashamed that I was doing this, and I was ashamed of my thoughts and the words that were jumping out of my mouth, so I didn’t let Julie see me. I sat on the far kitchen counter, concealed from the living room, by myself. I heard her turn on the television. Baltimore detectives conducted surveillance on a mafia brothel.

I found the most prestigious object in the house, Robert Bresson’s
Notes on Cinematography,
under the master bed, brushed a dead spider off it, and pretended to read, within view of the couch where Julie had settled, to make her feel bad about watching
The Wire
to avoid conflict and, by extension, about flourishing
in television, and being a happy, prosperous person. Julie kept her eyes on the flat screen. It had the word ELITE printed across the bottom in golden capitals and was connected through the walls to an R2-D2-like tower of electronics in a closet off the guest room, so that the consoles by which it functioned would not mar the living room’s design. This “smart house” arrangement seemed tremendously, importantly dishonest to me right now. Neither of us spoke.

When, after ten minutes, she went to the bathroom, I crept to the couch and awoke her laptop. One window was open on
NYTimes.com
. The other was open on the official website of Marc Jacobs. Sweatshirts floated across a Marc Jacobsness–infused winter wonderland, in which swans pulled sleighs whisking naughty-faced maidens in white Zorro masks through exuberantly billowing snow.

Sitting on the couch, I peeled a cobweb off the spine of the Bresson. The cobweb adhered to my fingers. My hand looked to me like the hand of an undead, reaching up through the soil and grass to pull a living victim down into my earthen lair. This was, in retrospect, a clear signal that the odds of carrying on a productive, healing conversation were, for the evening, small. But hoping that Julie and I could have the kind of fight that led to cathartic sex, and believing that if we could fuck with abandon tonight it would prove that the mockery at Tusk had not gotten to our heads, had not successfully shamed us, had not victimized us, I hurried to the bathroom to engage her in another round of fighting.

I found her applying toner to her face with a cotton ball.

“Did you find a Marc Jacobs sweater you wanted to buy yourself?” I asked.

“I didn’t see anything so awesome I should spend the money.” She finished her forehead. “Did you look at my laptop?”

“The website was just, like, on there. Do you wish I could buy you sweaters from Marc Jacobs? Is that rough for you, that I can’t?”

She shoved the plastic CVS bag of cotton balls back in its place
beneath the sinks. “No, baby, I don’t care. One of the makeup women today told me to look at a Marc Jacobs ad she worked on. I hope you can come home from work with a Marc T-shirt for me someday. But I’m okay with the bridge line. I’m okay with a fake from Vietnam.”

“How do you imagine that I’ll ever be in a situation where I come home from work? How do you think it would ever happen? What is the path that will take me from here to having a job where I come home from work every day, sometimes with a Marc T-shirt?”

She planted her hands on the sink. “Uh, I don’t know, Josh, isn’t that kind of what you’re supposed to figure out for yourself?”

Once I had brought up my own future, I was in real danger. Palpitations began, and a moment later, it felt as if the palpitations were everywhere, up to my ears. Of course I had a plan for making money. Julie and I had agreed that her income would dwarf mine during this
time of transition,
the post-Shapeshifter years. Eventually, our positions would reverse themselves; she would retire from television by fifty, if not by forty-five; I would become a producer and sound-track composer in demand, a fixture. My job was to patiently stalk clients, build a reliable revenue stream, before we had children. But it was a spiderweb, like most show business plans, intricate, pretty, built out of a thin, bright hope you could see only from the correct angle. There was no quantifiable reason I would ever attract more bands and TV shows than anyone else, no superior business model, no diploma. If I allowed myself to look at it skeptically, it was no kind of plan at all. I felt incapable of having sex, let alone persuading Julie to have sex with me. But if I terminated the conversation now, everything would still be okay; I would be able to get to sleep tonight, I would wake up tomorrow morning ready to face the dawn. I decided to put myself to bed. I didn’t speak. I turned on the water in my sink, and squirted face wash into my hand.

“Jesus,” she said, looking at me closely. “Don’t freak out. I don’t want us to ever be affected by this. Those guys are fucking stupid.”

“And yet you are,” I said. “Say to me you’re not affected.”

“I don’t want to be affected. But now you’re affected, so even if I was only slightly barely affected before, now I am affected.”

It was when I looked in the mirror, to apply the wash, that I came face-to-face with terror: Tom, Myra, Julie 2, staring at me from their perch. I took in the hopeful little dots of their eyes, and the evidence of their talents: Bunsen burner, leotard, cello. I had always known my plans for the future were wisps. But the prospect of taking care of a child with a wisp had not felt as absurd, as obscene, as it felt now, beneath the doll-like figures on the napkins.

“How am I supposed to be a father to our children?” I demanded of Julie. “I actually just want to know how I’m going to be providing in five years. I can’t see it.”

“When we have kids, you can’t make that face in front of them.”

Indeed, the expression on my face reminded me of the face in an anti-meth ad, only with face wash on it. “How did I get to this point where I promised something I can’t deliver? How can I give you this? Draw me a diagram.” I sat on the floor, the face wash still foaming on my cheeks. “How am I supposed to do this?” I pointed at the children.

If I continued on my present course, the children on the napkins would be raised by a resentful, embittered, flight-obsessed father, a man ashamed of joblessness, a man who half-believed he should have found another band and lived on the road, a man who considered his life the wrong life, a man with one eye ever on the door: a Dad. In running from my father’s professional compromises, I had failed to give adequate consideration to conventional success. I had spent my postvow life running from my father only to inscribe a circle in the ground, so that now, staring in the battle station mirror, I stood mere inches from a familiar pair of restless, Dadsian eyes.

“I wish I could go back in time,” I said. “Start over from high school.”

“Thanks, Josh,” said Julie. “Meeting your high school sweetheart is going to be really fun.” She got into bed, and turned out the light.

The future-kids looked at me.

H
alfway through the night, I woke up calm and sorry. Julie was half asleep, stretching her legs to full length, a hand behind her head, gripping the headboard. I put her in the crook of my arm and kissed her neck. “We’re not affected by them,” I said.

“Not affected,” she muttered into her pillow. This was just convincing enough, just final enough, to send us both to sleep. An important function, because Julie had to catch a flight to the Everglades at 7:00 a.m.

In each of our calendar applications, on our phones, there sat a rectangle with rounded corners: a reminder of our dinner with Khadijah and Todd, the weekend after next. If the dinner had been scheduled for sooner I might have canceled, citing work, because Julie and I had been fighting, and seeing Khadijah at a vulnerable time seemed dangerous. But Julie and I had ample time to restore normalcy before we faced Khadijah. So the rectangles remained.

And it is impossible to overstate the zeal with which normalcy was courted, starting on Julie’s return from Florida three days later. More important than sex were the things we said to each other immediately before sex. Julie asked me to go to a therapist, and I agreed to go as soon as I could afford nonemergency health insurance. (My current plan, Toniq, was youth-marketed.) I recited the Five-Year Plan by which I would parlay my Shapeshifter
credentials into a lucrative business career, building wealthy Angelenos highly soundproofed home recording studios in their garages, guest rooms, and Joshua Tree country houses, even as I continued to pursue sound-track work in television. I wrote old acquaintances, asking if they needed a studio built or a sound track composed; I established a Web presence. It was progress toward my ultimate end: to become an adequate father. The key to not becoming my own father was to become somebody worthy of my own regard, and to thereby rid myself of the resentment and restlessness that would make me want to run as my father had run. I restuck the future-kids to the bathroom mirror, with fresh tape.

The day of the dinner with Todd and Khadijah, I spent much of the afternoon chatting with a music supervisor about a new, haunting tack-piano interlude for
The Spirits of New Orleans
. It was late afternoon when Todd’s name appeared on my phone.

“What are you doing right now?” he asked.

“Random correspondence,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Would you be up for rescuing Khadijah in South Central?”

My first thought was, What will be the Relationship Impact of this decision? And then an urgent countervailing thought: You’re being asked to rescue a person. Julie wouldn’t want you to not rescue a person.

“Wait, really?” I said. It occurred to me he might be kidding. “That sounds so Wesley Snipes movie.”

“I told her not to take public transportation,” he said. “But her mom is obsessed with the Watts Towers. They’re both art historians, and her mom is all into outsider art and shit. Her mom told her she wanted a picture of her next to the Watts Towers, because they’re apparently the Parthenon of retard civilization, and she
went
. By
subway
. The Watts Towers are in
Watts
.”

“Is she okay?”

He seemed not to hear this question. “She’s so Bostonian, it pisses me off. She just called me like, ‘I took the bus to the Blue Line and now I’m on a Hundred and Third Street. How come there are no pedestrian walkways between here and the Watts Towers Center?’ And it’s like, I’m at work. Even if they let me
off early, I can’t get there for an hour and it’s five-forty right now so we’d be screwed for seven-fifteen reservations anyway, which I can’t change.”

“I’m in Miracle Mile,” I said. “I’ll do side streets.”