Good Kids: A Novel (23 page)

When the place mats were done, I looked up. Hours had passed. Outside, rainy Fairfax was clogged with lowing rush-hour traffic. If I had written lyrics, as I’d intended, expressing the same sentiments as the drawings, I might have called it a productive morning and gone home to find some chords on the guitar. But these floor plans, and the zeal with which I had composed them, made me pause and contemplate the condition of my mind.

Cruelty manifests in confidence and clean lines, I decided. It’s sanity that resists architecture. I had not been aware of how mean I had become until I found a way to express my meanness.

I had been living in the belief that I could choose between lives, and that these lives were paths with calculable ends. I bit down on the fleshy base of my thumb, moved by the hugeness of my own stupidity. I felt like I had when one day, at age eleven, I turned and knelt on the floor, pants down, before a full-length mirror, in my grandparents’ basement, in order to see, for the first time, what my own bare ass looked like. That seeing-one’s-own-ass-cheeks sensation of
I am as soft and absurdly constructed as everyone else
.

I
t was 2:30 p.m. when, in the process of ordering business cards for my studio design venture, I received a phone call from Julie. “Where are you?” she asked. “Can you come home?” She spoke in exactly the tones I’d hoped to hear, tones of reconciliation, clemency.

I pulled into the driveway and found her sitting on the front step, her maroon flats on the walk.

I sat down beside her. “I really don’t want you to break up with me,” I said.

“You’re not going to feel that way in two minutes.” She began to cry.

A vision came to me, complete. An office, trembling. A Peabody Award trophy toppling off a windowsill.

“You cheated on me. You slept with a guy from work who made fun of me,” I said. “Or you slept with Simon, because he was the one who liked me.”

I waited for her to correct me. She looked at me.

I knew her well enough that I could feel her reasons for doing it, as if I were the one who had done it. She was not to be mocked by her colleagues. I was not the only one with options. She was part of a palm-shadowed world of which I knew nothing.

She shook her head. “I kissed Gordon.”

“In his garage, right?” Before I knew I was moving, I was walking up and down the lawn. My hands were taking turns scratching each other, as if I had mosquito bites on my fingers. I could
hear the crack of snail shells under my boots. “Where I was supposed to build his studio.”

“No, we went to the Peninsula.”

“Do people go to the Peninsula to make out? Is that a thing?” I’d always pictured old, rich people going to the Peninsula to get drunk and revive their marriages.

She looked at her flats. “First we went to get a drink in the middle of the day. I played hooky from starfish editing. Couldn’t do it. You can understand that, after what happened. Then we were at the bar at the Peninsula, because I wanted to go someplace so stupid and fancy it was going to suck me out of my head. And then we were at the bar and it was like, People are looking at us, they’ll get the wrong idea, let’s get a room and eat cake there.” She paused. “Then we got in the room and we started kissing. And then I freaked out and left.”

“You both started kissing?” I asked. “Like a spontaneous explosion?”

Julie said nothing.

“Just two wildly successful TV people finding each other?”

I knew she would not let this go unanswered. She didn’t.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she said. “But there are things you don’t totally understand. It’s not your fault you haven’t experienced them.” Through my rage, I could see her trying not to be cruel.

“I’m sorry for the things I’m saying,” she said, “but look, you know what you did. I just don’t envision myself being treated like that. It’s just not the way I pictured my life when I was fourteen: ‘I’m going to have a fiancé who flirts with his high school crush and then we’ll have this massive fight in front of my dad, and everyone will be embarrassed for me and I’ll marry him anyway.’”

“Gordon has a wife.” I half-swallowed the end of the sentence, quieting down. “She’s having a baby.” I recalled that I had wished Cora’s pregnancy would disappear, last night, when I viewed it as an obstruction to Gordon’s home studio, but now I was the baby’s committed champion. “This isn’t just about us.”

“We can’t do anything for them at this point,” she said slowly. “It’s just us we have to worry about.”

I lay down among the snails, on my back. A crow was loping through the sky between two trees.

“You were my dream-girl princess,” I said. “Remember? The night of Authentic Korean? Why did we go to Authentic Korean? Why did we let him— I should have known from the way he wanted to make your babies.”

We both fell silent. I closed my eyes; there was an evil green pulse inside my brain, and I needed to make it stop. It reminded me of something: the last days of Shapeshifter, when the wheels began to separate from the chassis, when things went numb.

A band, I thought, can only play well if it’s a happy family, whereas a family can soldier on as a shell of itself without anybody outside it noticing. A family doesn’t perform for anybody but itself; a band performs for a crowd, and so cannot hide its unhappiness. Its unhappiness rots its music from within.

Or maybe it was a matter not of happiness versus unhappiness but of passion versus blandness. A band had to be an
impassioned
family. I never envied happy families. Instead, I looked back, with nostalgia, to the time before the divorce, when my parents drew blood from each other. There was the night I sat awake, six years old, upright in bed, as I listened to the rattling of doors in their frames, the clatter of silverware drawers overturned. My father’s short, declarative sentence:
You stabbed me
. The melody in his voice. And the counterpoint in my mother’s apologies, her sobs. They were a band; I didn’t sleep on nights of fighting, I twisted my sheets into ropes and looked up at the glow-in-the-dark constellation stickers that still adhered to my ceiling. I was at the age where I could lie safe beneath fading green comets and yet understand and love the way my mother and father attacked each other. I loved the Band-Aid on my father’s thumb at breakfast. After the divorce the essence that we lost, it wasn’t happiness. What we lost was being a band.

I remembered this too: There was one night in Shapeshifter when Deke was doing yoga backstage at Mercury Lounge, and our guitarist was so angry at him for doing yoga before he went in front of our paying customers and sang about wanting to kill
himself that he poured his can of beer down Deke’s pants while Deke was in Downward-Facing Dog. And Deke leapt up like an eel had bitten his leg and they threw each other onto the couch and Deke’s face was in the ice bucket with the beer cans in it, and we were a family, and we played like a family that night, a family that hadn’t yet lost itself.

“We can just throw them out, the last three days,” Julie said when she finally spoke. “We both were dumb.”

I nodded. “I’ve been cruel.”

But how can I begin to describe the feeling that came over me? I felt like a mule being harnessed to a tank and instructed to pull. A strong breeze carried a hint of sulfur from the tar pits three blocks away. I could feel that forgiveness would be like a tar pit, for both of us—a pit into which neither of us could bring ourselves to descend. Forgiveness—the word sounded lofty, but it was a willingness to be soiled. A sinking down to how things were. We could do many things, Julie and I, but accept degradation? Tear down the billboards for ourselves we carried in our heads?

“Let’s walk,” she said.

We rose, and moved quickly, going in no particular direction, two abreast, down the sidewalk.

The neighborhood was not West Hollywood, nor really Miracle Mile, but a no-man’s-land in between. Without a car, you could still eat. By foot you could reach the Whole Foods, the tar pits, the boutiques and brunch restaurants on Third, Mäni’s Café, the Farmers Market. You could walk to the Grove, the fountain that sprayed jets of water in rhythm to the Sinatra that played on hidden speakers. Fifteen minutes on foot brought you to Ukrainian delis—in an anomalous week of anorexic behavior, I’d once awoken so hungry in the middle of the night that I’d gotten in my car and driven to one that was open all night and devoured a Reuben sandwich outside on the sidewalk as homeless men and women slept in apparent tranquillity at my feet.

The neighborhood didn’t have the green acidic smell of the Silver Lake hills (“Really healthy cat pee” is how Julie had
described the smell of Silver Lake’s highlands to me once). Nor did it have the salty ocean air of Malibu and Santa Monica. The sulfur from the tar pits was overpowering at Sixth and La Brea but died almost completely outside its ring, like a spell. There was only the late-fall bouquet of exhaust and cloud, general to the flatlands of the city. The houses were large but not grand, and the ones that were two stories tall had been converted into apartments. It was densely populated; it had been safe for at least ten years. But 1992—the flames and helicopters and transparent shields and bricks and stones in the air—it lingered like a pestilence. You could see it in the slicked face of a dead squirrel. You could imagine you tasted the smoke near colossal Samy’s Camera, which had been burned, whose great, lens-like windows had been cracked.

“I’m sorry I threw something, I’m sorry I made out with Gordon,” she said. “It was childish, it was fucked. But my inclination is to go utterly apeshit on you when you hide shit from me that jeopardizes my entire fucking vision of my life from this point forward, do you understand?”

“When you act violently hostile toward me, my inclination is going to be to look toward some source of familiarity and home and trustworthiness,” I said. “Someone who represents where I come from, when I feel this.”

“Feel what?”

“Like you’re someone I love, like in the sense of I’ll always want to make love to you and talk about movies with you but not in the sense, right now, of, like, you’re the person I could have a marriage with and depend on to be the mother of my children.”

We stood in the dry gray afternoon on one of the side streets near the Farmers Market. Lying down on the pavement, curling into a fetal position, Julie cried into her hands. It was something about her I’d always found lovable, her sense that the public space was her stage. I was filled with horror by what I’d said. I knelt beside her on the ground.

“Just go,” she said.

“I had no idea that I was going to say something like that.”

“That’s the whole point of you, to be the man I marry and be the father of my children. That’s who you are.”

“The point of me?”

“Aren’t I a fool? Look at me.” She laughed through her tears. “It’s over. Just go. It’s over, okay?”

I shook my head and dabbed at my eyes. “Let’s keep walking. Let’s not have it be like this.”

We turned right on Beverly. Just after we passed Design Within Reach, its trio of adjacent parlors lit like a circus, I noticed shapes that moved low to the pavement. I followed them down an alley to a parking lot and saw they were cats. I couldn’t tell if they were a social gathering or a litter. But they were lean and small, not much bigger than rats, and they writhed like snakes by a hedge at the lot’s far end.

We approached but kept our distance. “We wouldn’t be able to get some cat food around here, would we?” she asked. “That’s crazy, right?”

“The store on the corner of La Cienega,” I said, “I’m pretty sure has tuna.” We bent our steps to the mini-mart, a crowded yellow box where a man in a turban opened three cans for us behind the counter, a service he must have performed regularly for the homeless.

All we had to do was lay the cans on the asphalt near the place where the cats swirled around each other. They ran from beneath the bush, more than we had seen before, and ate.

The cats turned into piranhas, for those cans. I could see the muscles in their threadbare backs work hard as they chewed. They weren’t looking at us, only the gift.

“Julie Two,” she said, pointing into the mass. I didn’t know which one she had in mind, so I picked one with a hooked tail.

“Tom,” I said, pointing to one whose face fur went in all directions.

“Myra.” She pointed to one that was pushed back from the central squall, maybe starving. We stood side by side with our arms crossed. “That’s all three.”

“Good-bye,” she said conclusively. We embraced. The weight
of her head lay one last moment on my chest. I could hear the cats, eating. By the time she lifted her head, teeth scraped at the bottoms of cans.

• • •

I texted Khadijah when I arrived at the motel on Franklin where I’d stayed my first night in town, a new college dropout. Deke had required one more night of privacy with his girlfriend before I moved into his room.

“Engagement no more no residence. Have falafel with me?”

“Last night here,” Khadijah answered. “Then I’m going back to Boston for two weeks.”

“Falafel in Boston?” A pause of several minutes followed.

“Ok.”

Tucked in a fuzzy orange blanket, beneath a marbled mirror, I failed to sleep. I woke up early, and drove to Julie’s empty house. The sun was barely up, but she’d left for work. I emptied my bureau and my bookshelf and dumped my papers in recycling bags. I snapped shut the clasps on my guitar case. I never looked up—not at the kitchen, or its island, or the bedroom, or the mirror. I slapped my key on the coffee table. In the bathroom, I took the three napkins taped to the mirror—Tom, Myra, and Julie 2—folded them sharply in four, and tucked them in my wallet.

Once I’d packed my possessions in the Volvo, I parked it on a dead-end street in Atwater Village, by the Los Angeles River. At an Armenian coffee shop on Hyperion I booked an evening flight out of Burbank. To do something, I walked beside the water. There was a concrete trench, broad as a freeway, covered in white birds, bisected by a thin mercurial stream. It trickled close along the 5, the sigh of the water amplified by man-made banks, and it was in that noisy confluence, in California’s major-key morning, that I said good-bye to my discarded world.