What We Never Had Read online

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  Copyright © 2016 by Zach Wyner

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address: A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302,

  Los Angeles, CA 90013.

  Cover art by Daniel Kalal

  Book design by starling

  Set in Minion

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-942600-91-6

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Wyner, Zach, author.

  Title: What we never had : a novel / by Zach Wyner.

  Description: First Trade Paperback Original Edition. | New York, NY ; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2016.

  Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-942600-68-8

  Subjects: LCSH Bildungsromans. | Friendship—Fiction. | Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. | Man-woman relationships—Fiction. | BISAC FICTION/General.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.Y646 W43 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  “We consume ourselves in the beloved woman, we consume ourselves in the idea we believe, we burn in the landscape we are moved by.”

  —Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  Contents

  What We Never Had

  Acknowledgments

  What We Never Had

  You sat at one of three study-room tables in The Homework Club with Adrienne, a fifteen-year-old recently-gone-goth student of yours with green hair, bad skin, and zero patience for stupidity. She was the last student left and was deeply absorbed in The Great Gatsby. For five hours, a steady trickle of teenagers had come and had gone—agitated, medicated, hormonal vessels of their parents’ projected insecurities. Now it was cool and quiet. Just you, Adrienne, the stuffed bookshelves, and trace scents of Axe Body Spray and bubble gum. You yawned decadently, leaned back in your seat and stared at the periodic table of elements tacked to the wall. Every minute or so a turning book page cut through the hum of the air conditioner.

  “Josh?”

  “What’s up, Aid?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Drienne,” you said. “Adrienne.”

  She dog-eared the page she’d been reading. “My English teacher said that this is a perfect book.”

  Your cell phone rang. You took it out of your pocket and glanced down: June, calling for the first time in just over three months. A moth in your belly beat its wings.

  “You all right?”

  “Huh?” You shut the phone off and stuffed it deep inside your pocket. “Of course. Why?”

  “Your face. You just looked like me when I get a geometry test back.”

  “I’m fine,” you said, trying not to sound defensive. She looked down at her book. You followed her gaze to the cover of Gatsby—an indelible pair of eyes, irises transformed into reclining female nudes. “‘Perfect,’ eh?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your teacher. Gatsby.”

  “Right.”

  “Maybe, for your teacher, it perfectly demonstrates the myth of the American dream. Maybe that’s what he meant.”

  She scrunched her eyebrows together. “Why do you assume that my English teacher is a he?”

  You smiled, no comment safe from her scrutiny. “I don’t.”

  “You said ‘maybe that’s what he meant.’”

  You shrugged. “Why would I assume that your teacher is a he?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I was…” She squinted suspiciously. “You’re trying to confuse me.”

  You put up your hands, palms out. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Aid.”

  She frowned.

  “Drienne. Adrienne.”

  “When was the last time you read this?”

  “I don’t know. Eleventh grade?”

  “What, like twenty years ago?”

  You made a face, rolled your eyes. If she’d been two years older you would’ve given her the finger or made a comment about her hair, but Adrienne was a bit fragile, the type of kid who held her breath after doling out an insult.

  “Look,” you said. “I don’t want to knock your teacher, but ‘perfect’ is kind of a ridiculous thing to say about any work of art.”

  “Right!” she said. “It’s completely subjective.”

  “It’s kind of like he’s implying that there’s something wrong with you if you don’t get as much out of it as he does.”

  “That’s what I… Wait! You did it again! You said ‘he’!”

  You waved your hand dismissively.

  “You did!”

  You sighed. “Well he is, isn’t he?”

  “Well…yeah.”

  “Your English teacher’s ‘perfect’ book isn’t The Bluest Eye, right?”

  “Not everyone fits those kind of stereotypes, Josh.”

  “You’re right. Not everyone does. But not everyone doesn’t, either. A tenth grade English teacher whose perfect book is Gatsby? I’d go with male, between forty and fifty years old, on the scruffy side, lots of beige clothing.”

  “And you’d be wrong because he wears mostly denim.”

  You chuckled and scratched your prematurely thinning hair. “My point is that people only declare a piece of art to be perfect if they’re trying to prove something. That statement sounds to me like a kind of justification. And women don’t do that, at least not female high school teachers. They tend to be too secure to use words like ‘perfect’ when the topic of discussion is, as you said, something as subjective as literature.”

  Adrienne chewed her lip. The air conditioning switched off and in the new quiet, the whine of the florescent lights was audible.

  “I can never tell when you’re being serious.”

  “I’m always serious.”

  She snorted. “Yeah. And I’m a cheerleader.”

  You laughed. Adrienne smiled victoriously and returned to her reading.

  You were one of three study room tutors at The Homework Club, there to serve all non-private students who came in search of the three S’s: Support, Structure, and Studiousness. You took your job seriously. You had to. It was 2003, eight years since you’d graduated high school, and it wasn’t as though you’d mastered the material the first time around. You’d been a good student. The kind of student who got mostly Bs and who was somewhat justified in claiming to your college friends that you could have gotten mostly As if you’d really applied yourself, if that’s where your priorities had been. But you didn’t have any real priorities in high school—not beyond drinking beer, playing music with your buddies, and pining for Rachel Schwartzman and her superior tits. You’d realized that people had ideas about you, about what you should be wanting and how you should be going about getting it, so you did just enough to mollify them, to relegate their expectations, to demonstrate that you were going to work at your own pace. You put energy into friendships, acting, and music; you didn’t have the kind of reserves that would allow you to put the same energy into chemistry, too. Maybe that’s why you remembered the time fondly.

  Adrienne had priorities, too, but you weren’t certain to whom they belonged. At this point in time, her primary focus seemed to be survival. Her parents used The Homework Club like an extravagant babysitting service, instructing their chauffeur to drop her off after school and leave her there until the place shut do
wn at nine. Adrienne filled those hours fluctuating between rage—litanies of injustices suffered at the hands of jocks, twits, and ineffectual teachers—despair—near tears over a math test she was certain to fail—and placid acceptance—reading, drawing comics, ordering take-out from the falafel place next door, painting her nails various shades of discontent, and counting the minutes until college.

  “You get that Emerson essay back yet?” you asked.

  She kept her eyes fixed on Gatsby. “I got an A.”

  You smacked the tabletop. “I told you. I freaking told you.”

  She smiled. “You told me that transcendentalism was a bunch of crap.”

  You chuckled.

  “What?” she said.

  “You’re dangerous.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you remember all the crap that comes out of my mouth.”

  Shortly after nine o’clock, the chauffeur pulled up to the curb outside and honked. Adrienne hefted her onerous backpack and headed for the door, bent at the waist like an Egyptian slave toting a stone up the pyramid steps.

  “See you tomorrow?” you said.

  “I’m leaving early tomorrow. I have animation class and violin.”

  “It’s a busy life,” you said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Hey, Adrienne.”

  She stood in the open doorway. In rushed street noise, car exhaust, thick gusts of sticky September air.

  “Nothing,” you said. “Have a good night.”

  She squinted, suspicious of adult words that went unsaid. “Such a weirdo,” she said, and left it at that. The door swung shut, returning you to the air-conditioner and the fluorescent lights, the whine and hum of your everyday.

  *

  You bypassed your North Hollywood apartment and drove straight for The Burrow. You felt somewhat guilty. You had houseguests, Bill and Amare, two friends who’d recently moved down to LA from Olympia, Washington, and had been crashing in your living/dining room for the past two weeks. What had been intended to be a stopgap was beginning to resemble permanence. They knew that the current arrangement—three guys in their mid-twenties, crammed into a junior one-bedroom apartment—was untenable, but knowledge was only half the battle. It was all a matter of inertia, and Bill and Amare at rest tended to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. You were having a hard time exerting that force.

  That didn’t mean that you were going to go out of your way to invite them to a bar. Yes, they needed to get out of the apartment, and yes, you were having difficulty identifying where their asses ended and your couch began, but The Burrow wasn’t the kind of place they needed to go. The Burrow was a recuperative environment for people with jobs, where drinks were stiff and the jukebox had an abundance of tunes that reached back further than Los Angeles’ collective memory of two-to-three months. For the likes of Bill and Amare, guys who, on any given day, had nowhere in the world they needed to be, The Burrow was a trap even more perilous than that television they’d planted themselves in front of two weeks ago.

  You exited the freeway at Los Feliz Boulevard, squeezed into The Burrow’s narrow, poorly lit parking lot and found Harrison James-Deaning against the red brick exterior wall. Having fled his parents’ Inland Empire home and his job as a substitute teacher a week ago, Harrison was renting a cheap, by-the-week motel room around the corner while he studied for the LSATs. Freshly shaven, he looked gaunt and ashen, as though it had been a while since he had seen the sun and/or consorted with a diurnal species. He nodded when he saw you and expelled twin jets of smoke from his nostrils. The fact that he didn’t hug you indicated that he hadn’t been there long, probably just long enough for a single round. Two whiskey and ginger ales from The Burrow had a way of ushering one abruptly into a state of physical affection.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “You hanging in there?”

  “I called you to cancel. Your phone went straight to voicemail.”

  You took your phone out of your pocket. You’d forgotten to turn it back on after the June call. “And yet here you stand.”

  Harrison pinched his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and took a final drag. “I couldn’t reach you. What choice did I have?” He dropped the cigarette and ground it into the asphalt with the sole of his shoe. The three-hundred-pound doorman with the words Mama’s Boy tattooed on his neck stared at him. Harrison picked up the butt and tossed it in the ashtray.

  You entered the dimly lit room, its row of stained glass windows near the ceiling keeping the street light at a comfortable remove; freshly popped popcorn masked the mildewy bar smell, so pungent during the daytime. You spotted a pair of vacant stools.

  “So many haters,” said Harrison.

  “The doorman?”

  “He can suck a bag of dicks.”

  “I wouldn’t take it personally,” you said.

  “Of course you wouldn’t. We’re not talking about you. You work with children for chrissakes.”

  “Teenagers.”

  “Even worse.”

  You sat down and signaled Leanne, a five-foot, ninety-pound Vietnamese woman, who imparted warmth and kindness with her strong drinks but made little in the way of chitchat. You appreciated her circumspection. You disliked a chatty bartender who thought that years spent absorbing hard-luck tales and doomed-before-they-hatched stratagems made them qualified analysts.

  “Nice to see you again,” she said to Harrison. “You becoming my most best customer.”

  “Medicine please, nurse.”

  She smiled and planted a couple seven-parts whiskey, one-splash ginger ales on the bar. Harrison took a long drink and stared at his reflection in the mirror behind the liquor bottles. He had a well-earned reputation for rapid transformations so you let him be. Once adequately lubricated his mood would brighten. In the meantime, you had to do something about the state of your stomach. The smell of popcorn was inducing a sound akin to a bleating goat.

  Harrison interrupted your internal debate—whether to fill up on popcorn or run next door to the Del Taco—with a clandestine elbow to your ribs. At the end of the bar two conspicuously attractive girls were sipping brimming liquid from martini glasses.

  “Now there’s the kind of distraction I could justify,” he said.

  You winced.

  He stood up and gave your arm a little tug. “Come on. Take the stick out of your ass and come talk to the pretty girls.”

  “Let me at least get some popcorn in my stomach.”

  “Joshua.”

  “I’m really not in the proper headspace.”

  He tugged harder. “C’mon.”

  “Dude!” you said. “Can’t you just sit down and talk to me for a minute?”

  He studied your face and chewed his lip pensively, as if estimating the amount of time it would take for you to adequately unburden yourself and whether or not the girls would still be without suitors after this interval had elapsed.

  “Sure.” He sat down. “Shit. Of course we can talk.” He took a sip of his drink, glanced at the girls out of the corner of his eye and put his hand on your shoulder. “You all right? Everything okay?”

  “Fine. It’s fine. They’re cute…the girls. I get it.”

  “Forget about the girls,” he said. “I could give a fuck about those girls. Tell me what’s going on.”

  You sipped your drink. “You ever hear of a lancet liver fluke?”

  “They make that with vodka or gin?”

  “Ha ha.”

  “Go on.”

  “A lancet liver fluke is a parasite.”

  “Sure.”

  “It gets inside an ant and manipulates its nerves so that, at dusk, instead of returning to the ant hill with the colony, the ant climbs a blade of grass.” You placed your drink on a bar napkin; beads of condensation tumbled down th
e sides of the glass, transforming the stiff paper into something delicate and easily torn. “Anyway, it screws with the ant’s nerves because it wants to get back into its host, which is a cow.”

  “Right on,” he said.

  “So, the fluke compels the ant to climb a blade of grass at dusk and then clamp its jaws down on the blade. Then, when the cow, its desired host, goes for its morning graze, it eats the ant.”

  He stroked his gaunt cheeks. “And then it lives in the cow?”

  “In its liver.”

  “Why does it leave the cow in the first place?”

  “Because it lays its eggs in the cow’s shit.”

  “That’s wild.”

  You reached for your drinks at the same time and downed them like synchronized swimmers.

  “I’m missing something,” he said.

  You shook your head. “I thought you were a sharp guy.”

  He laughed. “So did I.”

  “I’m the ant.”

  “Come again?”

  “I’m the fucking ant, climbing the blade of grass.” You ran a cigarette lengthwise between your upper lip and your nose and inhaled fresh tobacco. “June called tonight.”

  Harrison’s eyebrows raised but he didn’t say a word. You peered down into your glass and rattled the ice cubes.

  “I didn’t answer.”

  “No?”

  “It’s why my phone was turned off.”

  “Well that’s a fucking relief.”

  You shrugged.

  “She leave a message?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ah,” said Harrison. “Then you’re not the ant yet, man.” He wagged his finger at you. “The message is the what-do-you-call-it.”

  “Lancet liver fluke.”

  “Right. June is the fucking cow.”

  “Just knowing that she called, that a message may be there.” You pointed at your head. “I feel like she’s in here already, leading me away from the ant hill, overriding my instincts to function as a member of the colony.”

  “I don’t think ants have instincts. They’re all about the pheromones.”

  “That’s true.” You chuckled. “Maybe that would have made a better analogy.”