What We Never Had Read online

  “It’s okay. I like the what-do-you-call-it story.” He put his hand on the back of your neck and massaged it. “But Josh, dude, if I were your lawyer, this would be about the time that I reminded you of the existence of some rather infamous legislation in this state, pertaining to repeat offenders.”

  He kept massaging; you squirmed a bit in your seat and signaled Leanne for a refill.

  His hand moved to your shoulder and squeezed. “Right now you’ve got a bulls-eye on your chest. It doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily going to prison, but statistics suggest that the likelihood of your spending some time behind bars is much greater than mine.”

  “I can’t go back there,” you said.

  Harrison sipped his fresh drink. Then he looked you in the eyes and said, “Change your phone number.”

  “That’s it?”

  “It’s the obvious solution. If you don’t want her to contact you, change your fucking phone number. It’s both a practical and symbolic gesture. I’d say change your email address too, but you never check that anyway.”

  There was a lengthy pause. The girls at the end of the bar, who’d been pushing buttons on the electronic dartboard for a couple of minutes without success, threw up their exasperated arms and turned toward the booths, then the bar, in search of qualified assistance. “And hey, since I’m in a generous mood here, I’m gonna dole out one more piece of advice.”

  You chuckled. “You think I should talk to the pretty girls?”

  “Man’s gotta eat, man’s gotta live,” he said, mischief blazing in his eyes like those incandescent city lights on the Gatsby cover. “Leanne, darlin’. Can I get some change for your dartboard?”

  Leanne placed two more whiskey gingers on the bar for which you tipped generously. You felt for a moment as though you were standing in that yellow wood on which two roads diverged.

  “I’m a man,” you said.

  “Attaboy.”

  *

  You left the bar around midnight with a pretty girl named Julia’s phone number and a borderline-legal blood alcohol level. You made it home and opened the front door of your apartment to the smell of dirty socks and Bill, supine on the carpet in front of the television, both hands tucked behind his bald dome. Amare, sprawled on the couch like a listless house cat, lifted his head from the arm of the faux leather long enough to convey utter existential exhaustion before returning it to its resting place with a thud. The dining/living room area sagged under the weight of lowered expectations and a melatonin deficiency. You put your keys and wallet on top of your bookshelf and stood next to the couch like an asshole, waiting for Amare to sit up and make room.

  “The Sox blew it,” said Bill. Fanatical Boston sports fans had raised both you and Bill. Given the circumstances, your shared allegiance to the Red Sox was at an all-time premium. “We’re never beating the Yankees with this bullpen. Grady’s trying out a new closer every fucking night. How are we supposed to make a playoff push when these guys don’t know their roles?”

  You stretched your arms above your head and yawned. “It’s a valid concern.”

  Amare scratched his burgeoning potbelly. “The Sox bullpen is like the US Senate,” he said. “The game gets turned over to them and they can’t throw strikes. They just stall until the bed is officially crapped and your starters take no decisions.”

  “Anyway,” said Bill, “They’re on ESPN tomorrow. Last series of the season in the Bronx.”

  You fought the impulse to grab a beer from the fridge, succumb to lethargy and sink into the unoccupied cushion by Amare’s pungent feet. You couldn’t sit just yet. Even slightly buzzed you needed the contrast between his kind of weariness and yours to be clear, at least to you, at least for a few more minutes.

  “You guys eat?” you said.

  “Don’t even mention food,” said Bill.

  Amare wagged a condemnatory finger at Bill. “Bubba Gump over here ate two orders of fried shrimp and chips.”

  “Ugh,” groaned Bill. “Don’t talk about it.”

  You stepped up into the designated bedroom area, a single-step and a curtain insinuating a separation between itself and the designated living room area. Multi-level living, you called it, a literal step up from a studio, but drawing that curtain was a daily reminder that you had yet to elevate yourself to the station in life that put plaster between you and your houseguests. You retreated to the bathroom and turned on the fan. The toilet seat was up. Thick droplets of yellow dehydrated piss sprinkled the rim of the bowl. The bath mat squished under your feet and water soaked through your socks. You peeled off your clothes and showered. You sucked down steam like it was vaporized Prozac. The hum of the ceiling fan obliterated the voices from the television and you remembered what it was like to be all alone—just you and a modest, clean, quiet multi-level room that the outside world was content to ignore.

  For two weeks you’d been returning home, heavy-limbed and brain weary, from The Homework Club—following hours of helping teenagers with their geometric proofs and instructing them on the insipid art of the college application essay—only to find Bill and Amare in roughly the same positions as when you’d left. And yet, there was something about their lifestyle that you admired, something about their influence that you weren’t so eager to jettison. The truth was that, up until a couple of weeks ago, you hadn’t known them all that well—at least in terms of total hours logged. You’d met them a few years before on a trip up north to visit a group of high school buddies at Evergreen College. Throughout a week of drinking in dive bars and eating at greasy spoons, Bill and Amare had proven to be championship-caliber partiers, disappearing only to work the occasional shift at the Olympia Food Co-op or change their underwear. By week’s end, bolstered by a foundation of laughter and communally nursed hangovers, your mutual love-at-first-wisecrack was cemented in eternal friendship. Those seven days might as well have been seven years. When the boys migrated to Los Angeles and discovered their hostel was infested with rats, you’d been more than happy to offer shelter.

  That first night, the three of you got drunk on whiskey, ordered take-out, and watched hours of reality television. Ordinarily, watching reality TV took you to a dark place; it sucked your life force, invigorated your latent cynicism. But watching Temptation Island and Who Wants To Marry My Dad with Bill and Amare produced the opposite feelings. It was cathartic and joyful; like a close brush with death, it reaffirmed just how alive you were. The next night, when you’d been tempted to do it all over again, it occurred to you that the line between you and your friends was not so clearly defined; it was a simple matter of resources and shame.

  *

  Sleep eluded you. Amare’s deviated septum endowed his snoring with the unruly chortle of a diesel engine and Bill talked in his sleep in an eerily casual way, as if he were ordering dinner. You got up, pulled aside the curtain that separated the bedroom area from the living room area and observed their sprawled carcasses, marveling at their ability to sleep soundly under any circumstance. Your cigarettes accompanied you to the narrow balcony where you stood shirtless in eighty sultry degrees. Up above, tangled telephone lines buzzed like radioactive blood vessels, while, across the narrow alleyway, the blue light of insomniac television screens illuminated your neighbors’ curtains.

  You were getting to a certain age, one disconcertingly beyond the original age you’d set for yourself to quit smoking. A few years removed from college, you had a job that sounded serious enough to provoke approving nods from your elders, suggest that you didn’t entirely lack ambition. But you’d taken the tutoring gig like you’d taken every other job before it—as a means to pay the bills while you worked on becoming whatever the fuck you were supposed to become. Ten months later, there was no denying that the job had taken its hammer and begun to chisel away superfluous pieces of rock, until what had once been an amorphous slab began to resemble something like an adult. And yet you
r habits set you firmly amongst a group of peers that other adults presumed you’d outgrown. The truth was, you didn’t want to leave them behind any more than you wanted to leave behind your cigarettes. They were trusted companions. They made you happy. And they were brilliant. They were better at doing nothing than you’d ever been at anything.

  You extinguished your cigarette in the giant ceramic ashtray that contained the butts of two, maybe three months. You rooted amongst them, pushing the pile this way and that until you got to the bottom and uncovered the fossil you’d been digging for: a lipstick-tipped Parliament. It was strange to think that not so long ago, June had been a constant in your life, a real person who left behind tangible proof of her existence, not just those psychic scars that, like a low-grade ringing in your ears, sank beneath the noise of the day only to resurface when all went dark and silent and still. There was a danger in talking about her like you had with Harrison, in creating analogies—it transformed her into an abstraction. The lipstick-tipped Parliament was a sobering reminder. Symbols don’t smoke.

  About six months after you and June had moved in together, she tried to organize a party for your twenty-fourth birthday. But, as so often happened when the two of you made plans requiring engagement with the outside world, tragedy struck in the form of botched reservation, an attempt by June to reschedule the whole affair, and your insistence that everything was cool, you should all just go for beers and burgers at that pub with the big patio on Sunset. Apparently, beers and burgers were not what June had in mind. Your cavalier attitude was also not what she had in mind. Transforming her unjustified, bad-news reputation by organizing a nice night out—this was what she had in mind. With this dream dashed, June locked herself in your bedroom and you sat in front of the television, nursing a glass of bourbon and chewing on a dilemma—if you went out and met up with your friends, June might be gone when you returned. According to her, there were any number of guys she could call who would drop whatever they were doing to come rescue her. Given the fact that you had once been one of those guys, you had no reason to doubt her. On the other hand, if you stayed, you’d lose face with your friends, and likely be forced to debase yourself with the kind of transparent lie that prompted people to avert their eyes for the duration of the telling. In the end you flaked on your friends and stayed home, wondering how many body blows your dignity could absorb and if this public acknowledgement of her power over you was the sort of push you needed to end it all.

  The truth was that you’d never officially ended things. Your relationship with June was like the Korean War—left hanging. You’d leveraged a threat of eviction, made like it was as an opportunity. It wasn’t a breakup, you’d said; it was a rewrite. Because you’d drafted it on loose scraps of paper, the story of the two of you had lost its thread. Sure, there might have been points in time when you could lay all the individual pieces out on the floor and recognize an architecture, but you lived in a goddamned wind tunnel, and daily your story was blown apart, reduced to a meaningless jumble of sentence fragments and disconnected words. At some point, tired of arranging and rearranging those disparate scraps, exhaustion won out.

  Each of you needed to work on each of you before there could be any collective we. You needed a job; she needed her degree. And neither of those things were going to happen as long as you were both sleeping until two in the afternoon—sometimes later. Christ, there’d been more than a few dim winter days when you’d brewed your morning coffee just in time to watch the sunset. The thought still made you shudder.

  This year you spent your birthday sans June and surrounded by friends. It was a joyous occasion filled with bonhomie and laughter and yet, at one late point in the evening, you were ambushed by the type of loneliness that preys upon unsuspecting birthday-boys in the midst of their most gregarious hour. In an instant, you knew that while you might have aged a year, you had not grown into the man whose self-respect would have demanded that he walk out on June’s bullshit. Yes, you had physically separated, but the fact that a single phone call from her could trigger such distress suggested that you were still that same coward who had weaseled out on a technicality.

  On your way back to bed, you accidentally kicked one of Bill’s legs.

  “Ow,” he said in his sleep. “Sorry, Josh,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry.”

  Your heart ached. You almost dropped to your knees and hugged him. Instead you went to the bathroom and rinsed ash from your hands. You brushed your teeth in the dark, switched the air conditioner to a lower, quieter setting and crawled back into bed.

  *

  It was the first week of September, the hottest week of the year in the San Fernando Valley. After slogging through traffic for an hour, you showed up early at The Homework Club and cooled off beneath a steady stream of conditioned air that frosted the quarter-sized bald spot on the top of your head. You studied an atlas, leafed through an algebra textbook and factored polynomials, pulled Howard Zinn off the shelf and read about the enslavement and slaughter of Indians that had taken place in California five hundred years before your arrival. Your gums, swollen from the morning’s dental visit, a plaque-mining mission that your dental hygienist had referred to as “unusually bloody,” throbbed as you sipped saccharine iced coffee from the Starbucks next door.

  Your bosses, Tim Meeks and Eric Hubrisson, showed up just before 3:00 p.m. and disappeared into their shared office space. A few minutes later, Adrienne arrived, unburdened herself of her backpack, and sank into the nearest chair.

  “Can I swear?” she asked.

  “Permission granted.”

  “I fucking hate high school.”

  “Less than three years to go,” you said. “You’ll be outta there before you know it.”

  “I got a D on my geometry test. I’m going to be stuck in the tenth grade forever.”

  “It’s one test, darlin’. Not the end of the world.”

  She moaned, leaned forward and thumped her forehead against the table. Her long, unruly green hair unraveled like yarn. You let her be.

  At a quarter past four, the official commencement of study room hours, Sophie glided through the front door. A willowy seventeen-year-old backstroke champion with a gift for rendering even your most audacious male students mute, Sophie possessed a pair of eyes the precise shade of blue that caused oxygen to involuntarily evacuate lungs. She sat next to you, her damp hair still fragrant with post-swim-practice conditioner, and extricated from her backpack her notorious modeling portfolio. She opened it, planted it on the table between you and Adrienne, opened it and leaned back in her chair.

  “Sophie!” said Adrienne. “Oh my god. I can totally see your…” Adrienne looked at you, covered her mouth, and blushed.

  “What do you think, Josh?” said Sophie. “Too slutty?”

  What could you do? Averting your eyes and thrusting your hands between you and the photo would only give her more power. So you looked. There, staring back at you like a couple plugs of red licorice behind a layer of sheer nylon, were Sophie’s nipples. You took a moment, nodded, scratched your chin, faced her and fixed your gaze directly on those blue eyes.

  “Soph,” you said, “I think that you’re more than a pretty face. I think that you’re a good writer and that you should go to college someplace far far away from Los Angeles.”

  Sophie rolled her eyes and closed the book. “Whatever. That’s such a Josh thing to say.”

  “She’s right,” said Adrienne. “That was very Josh.”

  You shrugged. What else were you supposed to tell her? The truth? That if you were seventeen, you would have given up smoking, rock and roll, and your driver’s license to nail her? The truth was that Sophie was a crappy writer, but her level of crappiness was in no way exceptional. The vast majority of your students were crappy writers. Raised by a generation of parents who had convinced them that their every doodle was an impressionistic masterpiece, how could they be any
thing else?

  “I like it, Sophie,” said Adrienne. “You look real pretty.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Duh.”

  “Thanks, Dri.”

  At five o’clock, Alexis and Caspian crashed through the door, faces flushed, their cell phones pressed their against their ears as avalanches of gossip fell from their mouths.

  “No phones!” you said.

  They rolled their eyes, dropped their bags in the middle of the room where they might inflict maximum damage on unsuspecting ankles, and headed back outside, their dialogues continuing unabated.

  After an hour or so of actual study time, an assembly concerning boys, Sophie’s modeling career, and the proper application of lip gloss formed in the rear of the study room. You went next door to Pita Time! and picked up shawarma wraps for Tim and Eric and a Greek salad for yourself. You returned to work, hefting a bulging, greasy sack, and four teenage heads turned as one.

  “Hey, Josh,” cooed Sophie. “How’s June? We haven’t seen her for a while.”

  “Who’s June?” said another girl.

  “Josh’s girlfriend, duh.”

  A few months before summer vacation had started, June picked you up from work and a feeding frenzy had ensued: “Is Josh your boyfriend? Have you kissed him? Met his parents? Oh my god, have you slept over at his apartment? Does he correct your grammar? Does he try to talk about parabolas and subordinating conjunctions when you’re on a date?” You were surprised to discover that these girls appeared to have never considered the reality of your social life. The Homework Club wasn’t school. You weren’t a teacher. You were young; you shared cultural reference points. You’d been certain that your fluency in The Chapelle Show and Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim humanized you. But judging by their wide-eyed astonishment, it seemed that there was something about the role you played in their lives that was difficult to reconcile with a girlfriend.

  “Give me a minute, girls,” you said, heading for Tim and Eric’s office.