Seeing Off the Johns (22 page)

He went out with a co-worker after work. He picked up a girl and took her back to his apartment. Araceli came home that night, and it was all over. She told him she would never forgive him. He decided this was not only fair, but just—as right as things get.

When she left, he realized that he hadn't had it in him to hurt the queen of his adult life. And he didn't want to hurt her, but he had to do something with their relationship. So what he did was load a gun and rest it gently on the temple of all they had together. He pulled the trigger on them, not on her. He did it because he couldn't
stand wondering, worrying, dreading when the hammer would fall. It was an act of cowardice and self-preservation—Araceli was collateral damage.

She slammed the door. Chon politely asked the girl he'd brought home to leave. He fell to the ground crying before she even gathered her things. He wept and pounded the floor and pounded his chest and cursed himself, sobbing, to sleep. He woke in the morning with a throbbing pain behind his eyes. On his phone, he had seven missed calls from Henry.

That was in the summer before their second year of college. Their relationship hadn't lasted two years. She came over and got her things and asked Chon for an explanation. He had nothing to say. It required more honesty of him than he was ready or able to give. He apologized. She punched him in the face and asked him please to stay out of her life.

Araceli stood in front of Chon in the tight crowd. What could he do with his hands? He could raise them up in a flail-dance, Michael Stipe sort of way, but he couldn't do that. He couldn't further obscure the view of those behind him. He was already too tall.

It would have been natural to move his hands up into Araceli's personal space, as one tends to do with the only person they know in a crowd, former lovers or not. That didn't feel right either. He kept them at his sides, standing in an awkward Frankenstein stance that he figured was just one of many punishments he would suffer in life for having let Araceli go.

This song or that would start, and Araceli would look up over her shoulder at Chon behind her and smile. During a song about drinking and lying to someone, she looked up as if to shame him, but in a way that indicated parts of their past had stopped hurting. When a song they had listened to with Henry, prompting him to call it, “Hippy,
faggy, Austin shit,” was played, it made them both laugh, and she slapped at his lap behind her. Then the opening chords for a song, their song, made her turn full around and look up at Chon, who couldn't help but to smile. She wrapped her arms around the small of his back and rested her face on his chest like she used to do in the fifteen-minute increments that would pass between a morning's alarm clock sounding and its snooze-bar re-up.

Chon grabbed her in his arms and held her tight, like if he let go she would fall away from him forever. For just the under-three minutes of song time, the two of them had never hurt each other. They had never left Greenton. They were back home, parked in back of the Pachanga, dancing to Araceli's dad's Suburban playing the tune they decided then to be theirs. On stage, the cellist gave the song a somber undertone and Bob Schneider sang about the world exploding into love all around him, but Chon and Araceli didn't see any of it because they were dancing with their eyes closed.

The song's end brought them back. Bob Schneider made small talk with the audience while tuning his guitar. Araceli looked up at Chon with regret no longer borne of anger, but now of disappointment. How could you have this and build it into something beautiful, and then squander it and tear it all down? She gave Chon the lightest of slaps on the face, but her hand lingered and he wanted to fall into it, out of Austin and out of the reality he had made for them.

“So,” Schneider said from the stage. Araceli turned around to face the show. “I recorded this song we're about to play in 1998, as a kind of hypothetical thing. Like, in 2002, I'll have fucked everything up and I'll write you this letter catching up with you.” He pointed a hand toward the audience, making everyone the recipient of his hypothetical letter. “But now, it is 2002, and I realize that there will be people in every audience I play it for who think that I had to write an actual letter, and that the song is
about something different than it is.” He said the last part in a funny, mock-frustrated voice. The audience laughed. “Oh well,” he said. “You'll know. Austin'll know.”

Then he sang the words, “The year's 2002. I'm doing exactly what I wanted to.”

The song he sang had always come off as pretty brilliant, although too twangy for Chon's taste. But tonight it was an indictment of him. It was a prophesy, foretold in the speakers of Araceli's father's truck, on the independent release of the album, fulfilled here at Antone's three years after the fact. Chon listened to the words of the song—catching up with an old love, recapping a personal downfall, revealing that the narrator's not okay—and they had an effect on him that made him shed himself for a minute. He wrapped his arms around Araceli at her shoulders and crossed them in front of her. As the song played on, Chon could feel tears falling from her face onto his bare arms, them, along with the words of the song, serving as a welcome kind of torture, a purgative burning, one that didn't absolve Chon of all he'd done wrong but made him feel cleaner in his guilt than he'd felt in close to two years.

The band played a three-hour set. After the show, Chon waited for Araceli to use the restroom and walked her out to the street.

“That was so much fun,” she said. “I can't believe they played that long.”

“I know,” Chon said. “I'm tired, I can only imagine how they're feeling.”

Araceli pulled a phone from her pocket and looked at its backlit display.

“Whoa,” she said. “It's late.”

“I know. I'm starving. Do you want to go get food?”

“I would—” she started, but Chon cut her off.

“Hey, it's fine. I totally get it. It's later than I thought it would be.”

“Really, Chon, I would, but I promised someone I'd meet them after the show. He probably thinks I ran off with the band or something.”

Chon had expected, wanted, nothing more than a greasy omelet at an all-night diner in the company of someone he had missed so much for so long, of his only friend in town. Still, the word
he
in Araceli's sentence cut him. He knew he had no right to be wounded, so he moved on. “Okay,” he said. “Well, let me walk you to your car. Where are you parked?”

Araceli smiled and gave a bit of a laugh.

“Right here. Someone pulled out when I got here. I figured it was my lucky day.”

Chon nodded. “Was it?”

“It was a good one,” she said. “I'll call you. I promise. We'll catch up.”

Chon nodded.

She pulled him in for a tight hug and gave him a slow, tender kiss on the cheek. Her lips still on his face, Chon regretted again not moving to kiss her. Nothing would have been regained. In fact, he may well have lost what ground he'd made back up that night in reconnecting with a friend. Just trying—trying and being rejected or trying and connecting and reopening old wounds more than they already were—would have been worth it.

Chon wasn't done loving Araceli. As she got in her car and pulled away, not waiting until she was out of sight to call the
he
she was driving towards, Chon knew he would never be done loving her.

Walking to his own car, not even thinking of joining his friends on Sixth, Chon understood that Araceli's love had shaped him, made him who he was and how he would love for the rest of his life. Every woman he would ever meet would be measured against Araceli. Even when he was done missing her outright, when he would come to forget the things they talked about and the movies they saw together, she would be the standard by which he loved. He would remember to love better than he loved her, to be
better than he was with her, to her. She was the foundation for how he would treat the world, and so of who he was.

Years from then, after loves gained and lost, after years of marriage, one of his kids will find a picture of Chon and Araceli holding hands, kissing—a picture Chon had long since shown his wife and forgotten he had—and will feel a cold jolt of panic: could there ever have been a reality in which they did not exist, in which Mom and Dad didn't exist, in which their father was happy with another woman—a beautiful woman?

The panic will be so real and tactile that Chon's kid will hold off asking him about it until he grows old and gray and forgetful. Chon will smile when he sees the photo. Araceli will no longer be a person in a picture, or even that old picture, so real and true a representation of a moment in time, in that old box of useless souvenirs. She will be the dust that covers the glass in the frame, the Vaseline on the lens separating the now from the then, giving it a patina of nostalgia and all the hopes and fears the past held for the present.

If he forgot everything—his past, his childrens' faces, his name, though he will still have the sounds of his breath and his heart beating steady inside his chest—she will have affected every part of who he was.

When he is done considering the picture his son or daughter holds before him, he will tell them a story about a beautiful girl and teenage boy who was filled with lust. They are only bit players in a larger tale about leaving home and falling in love and growing up to learn from so many mistakes and embarrassing insecurities. He will tell them the story of how he became who he is, and that story will begin with two boys named John leaving town on a trip that was destined to end with them dying.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you Wag-a-Bag and La Jolla Village Mobil.

Thank you Hebbronville and Corpus Christi.

Thank you Uncle Mike and Austin.

Thank you Moody.

Thank you Ulyana.