What We Never Had Read online

  “Josh is too busy for us.”

  “Josh has important things to do.”

  “Yeah. Like get Tim and Eric their dinners.”

  You closed your eyes. You inhaled deeply. You knocked on your bosses’ door.

  “Did you see that?”

  “We made him mad.”

  “Josh is angry with us.”

  “Josh doesn’t like us anymore.”

  You chuckled.

  “Yay! Josh loves us!”

  “Josh is totally in love with us.”

  The office door swung open. Tim and Eric, men in their early forties with potbellies, stress-wrinkled foreheads, graying hair, and impeccable SAT scores, reached for the food as if they’d been locked in there starving for days. Tim bit off a hunk of shawarma the size of your fist and handed you a five and what appeared to be six or seven crumpled ones.

  “Keep the change,” he said through a mouthful of tahini-smothered lamb.

  The wraps were eight bucks apiece. It didn’t take a perfect math score on your SAT’s to calculate that you’d been hosed.

  “Hey, Josh,” said Eric, his eyes averted as he busied himself with the meticulous task of peeling back the tin foil from his wrap. “Sophie show you any pictures today?” He took a bite and stared into the wrap’s glistening innards as he chewed.

  You sighed. “The portfolio made an appearance. I tried to defuse the situation.”

  Eric put his food on the desk, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and made eye contact. He liberated his ponytail from the collar of his shirt.

  “I need you to not look at those pictures, okay?”

  “Okay,” you said, your belly beginning to tingle. “It’s not as if I asked to see them.”

  Tim interjected, his mouth full. “Kevin’s dad complained.” He held up his index finger while he chewed his food and swallowed. “He said he overheard Kevin on the phone, telling his friend that a girl who studied here showed him naked pictures of herself.”

  “Okay,” you said.

  “I realize this may be somewhat awkward,” said Eric, raising his eyebrows and looking at Tim.

  “No,” you said. “Wait. You realize what is awkward?”

  “Just don’t look at the pictures anymore, okay Josh?”

  Electric currents radiated from your gut and shot through your appendages. You clenched your fists. You couldn’t argue. Getting defensive would only make you sound guilty of whatever Eric was implying.

  “What would you like me to do next time?”

  “You know what?” he said. “Never mind. Maybe I better tell her myself to leave the portfolio at home.”

  You stood there a moment. He took another massive bite of shawarma. You waited a few beats. “You mean later?” you said.

  He swallowed. “Obviously.”

  “Because she’s out there right now.”

  “Well, I can’t talk to her while I’m eating, can I?”

  He punctuated the t in “talk” and a small piece of gnarled lamb rocketed from his mouth and landed on the floor. He pretended not to notice, turned back to his desk and shuffled paperwork.

  “Thanks for getting the food, Josh,” said Tim. “One of us will talk to her before she leaves.”

  You nodded in agreement and bolted before suggesting what they might do with their shawarmas.

  There were times when it was clear that students were finished studying, when efforts made to keep them on track would result only in you doing their work for them. You walked out of Tim and Eric’s office and recognized that Sophie and co. had crossed this threshold. With only a few minutes left of their study block, you succumbed to their chattiness and let the inevitable interrogation commence. The truth was, you were self-absorbed. When your students showed interest in your life, you divulged. It’s up to every authority figure to draw a line in the sand, preserve their privacy. Your line could not withstand your desire to share. You regaled them with life experiences—nothing R rated, but definitely some PG-13 material. You did it because it made your students like you; you did it because sometimes, in a setting like The Homework Club, where maintaining order wasn’t such a struggle, being liked was useful; you did it because you couldn’t help yourself. Your life fascinated you. It seemed only natural that others might be fascinated by it as well.

  Eric never emerged that night to talk to Sophie. He and Tim received their private students in the seclusion of their office and let you deal with the study room. At 6:30, Sophie’s mom pulled up to the curb and honked. You broke off from the rest of the girls and followed Sophie to the door.

  “Aw. You gonna open the door for me, Josh? What a gentleman.”

  “Look, Soph,” you said. “I gotta say something before you go.”

  Sophie peered through the glass door and signaled to her mom to wait. She readjusted her grip on the portfolio. You knew that you didn’t need to do this, but you thought that it might make you feel older somehow. This was about power after all and you’d had enough of it being wielded over you by both your bosses and your students.

  You pointed. “It’s about this.”

  Sophie looked down. She smiled coyly. “What about it?”

  “I think that it might be best if you left it in your bag from now on.”

  She frowned, shifted her weight. She looked out the window at her mom’s car. Then she looked back at you.

  “Why?” she said. Her blue eyes flashed; your pulse quickened.

  “It’s becoming a distraction.”

  “Oh,” she said. She lowered her head. You fought an impulse to give her a paternal pat on the back. “But talking about your ex-girlfriend isn’t a distraction?”

  “Excuse me?”

  She raised her head and sneered. “How is talking about June for an hour not a distraction?”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. First of all, Sophie, that was fifteen minutes, not an hour. And secondly, you asked me about June. I just answered questions.”

  “And Caspian asked me to bring my portfolio.”

  “It’s not the…look. Sophie.” All of a sudden you had a tremendous craving for a cigarette. “I don’t think that those pictures are appropriate for the study room, okay?”

  “Not appropriate?”

  “They’re good pictures, and they look really professional and all, but they’re a little risqué. Don’t you think?”

  “Risqué?”

  “Revealing. Too much so for this crowd.”

  Her mom honked twice. Sophie hiked her backpack and adjusted her grip on the portfolio.

  “Look, Josh. My mom’s waiting. I really gotta go.”

  You put your hand on the door to prevent her from leaving. She took a step backwards and her eyes widened as though you’d touched her as opposed to the door.

  “Just promise me you’ll leave the photos at home from now on.”

  “Josh!” she said. “I really need to go.” Water flooded her blue eyes.

  “Sophie,” you pleaded.

  “Please!”

  You took your hand off the door and she charged outside, clutching her portfolio to her chest. The little bell affixed to the doorframe jingled meekly. She climbed into the back seat of her mother’s SUV. You prayed the tears had just been a warning, that she wasn’t sobbing to her mother about what a horrible person you were and how she was never going back to that awful place.

  “What was that all about?” called a voice from the back of the room.

  “What’s wrong with Sophie?” said another.

  “Nothing,” you said. “Get to work.”

  “What’s he talking about?”

  “Work!” you said. “Homework! The thing you come here to do! The thing I get paid to help you with!”

  They made faces that indicated they smelled something rotten or you’d sprouted a
second head. You sat down in the nearest chair and took a series of deep breaths. The room was quiet except for their whispering, but you made no attempt to hear what they were saying. You could imagine its content well enough.

  *

  You entered your apartment bearing gifts—a large pepperoni pizza and a twelve pack—and noted an atmospheric shift: the distinct absence of foot funk, the burnt hair scent of your vacuum’s tired motor, and the citrusy scent of laundry detergent. You switched on the lights. The trash had been emptied, the recycling cleared out; grooves in the carpet betrayed the vacuum cleaner’s path around the table and chairs. Overstuffed bags, presumably containing Bill and Amare’s freshly laundered clothing, were tucked in the corner of the room. You didn’t know what to make of it. You thought back to the only other time in the past two weeks that you’d returned home to find the apartment empty. There’d been an arcane note on the dining/living room table that read, Off to see the Wizard. You couldn’t imagine a visit with a wizard taking less than a couple of hours, but you hadn’t even had the time to drop your drawers and tug one out before they’d returned with microwave burritos and French Roast coffee from 7-Eleven. When you’d inquired about the note, Amare had looked at you curiously.

  “You don’t know Ozzie?”

  “Ozzie.”

  “He lives at the 7-Eleven around the corner.”

  “I didn’t realize they were leasing.”

  “The Wizard stands in front of the monitor every night for a couple of hours playing Super Lotto. One night Bill bet him ten bucks he couldn’t eat two bacon cheeseburger dogs without yakking.”

  “What do you mean he stands there for a couple of hours?”

  “It’s Super Lotto Hot Spot.”

  “New draws every four minutes!” said Bill in his best approximation of a radio broadcaster.

  “And…” You paused. “Did he do it?”

  “Do what?” said Bill.

  “Eat the dogs.”

  Amare smiled. “The Wizard can’t refuse a wager.”

  “Did he yak?”

  “Of course not. Dude’s not called ‘Wizard’ for nothing.”

  You dropped the pepperoni pizza on the dining/living room table, cracked a beer, and ventured onto your balcony. Minus the boys and their detritus, your junior one-bedroom felt suddenly expansive. You had the curious realization that the amount of personal space that you required was diminishing by the day. You had expected the opposite would be true.

  Growing up, your bedroom was your refuge, but it was not a sovereign state. It existed within the borders of a host nation and, at any moment, could be invaded. Then came college, its co-ed halls and bathrooms thwarting any modicum of privacy. But your individual freedoms expanded—walls and the privacy afforded by them no longer had the same bearing on behavior. You were free to do as you pleased—and you did, altogether too often. Then you graduated, moved back into your parents’ home and discovered that every square inch of those two stories oppressed you. It wasn’t the relics in your bedroom—the basketball trophies on the shelf or the Metallica posters you’d hung in the eighth grade that still covered the walls—so much as it was the unspoken questions, fastened like millstones to every conversational pause. Your parents didn’t lack tact; they knew what not to ask. But their consideration made those silences all the more degrading. You knew what they wanted to know. What was worse, you knew that they were too goddamned polite to ask because they sensed, correctly, that you didn’t know the answers. Most nights, after dinner, you fled to friends’ homes, preferring the carpeted floors, dog-hair-upholstered couches and one particularly spacious walk-in closet to the comforts of your own bed—anything to avoid the tacit disapproval provoked by your habitual oversleeping.

  Eventually you found a shitty job and a shitty apartment to call your own. At the time, your understanding of the social contract led you to believe that you could expect the size of your apartment to grow in proportion with your waistline as you aged. But that was three years ago. And while you’d demonstrated upward mobility—rising from a file clerk to an academic tutor—you were still without a barrier between your bed and a refrigerator, so that its implacable drone permeated your every thought, mood, dream, fantasy. Now, here you were, indulging in a rare moment of solitude.

  What you figured you had in common with Bill and Amare was that you were wary of participating in a society that gave so readily to some yet withheld from others. In fact, “withhold” wasn’t strong enough a word. It had to scapegoat and stigmatize those others, label them “moochers” and “drains” that would bleed us all dry if they had their way. You realized that the more you took from an inequitable system, the more you’d end up defending it. And this proposition scared you. It was the paradox of privilege—take what you need to survive until what you need to survive takes you.

  What if, like Bill and Amare, you considered the things people sacrificed in order to align their identities with their desires—integrity, empathy, humility, humanity, time—too precious? What if you were to say: No. No, I will not participate in that. No, I do not want what you want. No, even at the risk of going childless and penniless through this cruel world and dying alone, no. No, even at the risk of being judged a failure by my peers, no. Because we all die alone. And while you weren’t exactly at peace with that, at least you didn’t deny it.

  You extinguished your cigarette and thought: I deny it. I deny the hell out of it. You were selfish, entitled, sanctimonious, naïve. And recognizing these facts didn’t make them any less true. Maybe what you needed, what all of you needed, was an ultimatum: accomplish goal A by time B or face penalty C. And the punishment had to be something worse than living in a junior one-bedroom apartment with adequate discretionary income to afford cable television. It had to be worse than occasionally needing to take a few drinks in order to get some sleep. It had to be worse than the sneaking suspicion that you were wasting valuable time.

  Your cell phone vibrated in your pocket. June again. You let it go to voicemail. Survival was possible through avoidance. At that moment, the mere thought of slipping once again on her slope was all the motivation you needed to take a step forward.

  You called Julia.

  The conversation was halting and awkward, the two of you struggling to rediscover whatever common ground you’d found in the bar, but it ended with the arrangement of what sounded like a date—albeit one with a built-in fail-safe. Julia had two friends. She wondered if you did too.

  “Of course!” you said. But this request was unfamiliar territory. In the brief history of your prosaic dating life, such a scenario had never arisen. You didn’t know whether to take it as a vote of confidence (she really liked you and was betting that you were a well worth tapping), or a vote of ambivalence (she was uncertain about you, was a little drunk when she met you, and wanted the assistance of a second and third pair of eyes to help determine whether or not to give you a shot).

  Per Julia’s suggestion, you arranged a rendezvous for the next night at 4100 Bar, a Sunset Boulevard meat market that you hadn’t patronized since 2001, during the post-college, pre-June days of testosterone-laced booty recon, nights when 12:30 would roll around and you, Harrison, and your buzzes would abandon whatever dive you’d been posted in so that you might have a chance to lay claim to some unattached beer-goggle beauty who was beginning to fear that she’d worn the sexy underwear for nothing.

  You hung up and began a mental inventory of your friends, calculating which ones would allow you to shine and ruling out those whose personalities and/or good looks might outshine your own. When Bill and Amare returned a few minutes later from the store bearing groceries, you were so carried away by the gesture of generosity that you suggested they clip their fingernails, iron their nicest shirts, and come meet some pretty girls.

  “You’re serious?” said Bill.

  Amare laughed. “One of your students drop a t
extbook on your head?”

  “I thought you’d be stoked.”

  “Is that pizza communal?” said Bill.

  “Eat!” you said.

  They grabbed slices, disregarded the paper towels you’d left out, and, with the grace and fluidity of gymnasts dismounting a pair of balance beams, kicked off their shoes, flipped on the television and planted their asses on the couch.

  “I mean, don’t get me wrong, Josh,” said Bill through a mouthful of cheese and dough. “I’m grateful for the vote of confidence. But I’d sooner subject myself to a rectal examination than the disappointed face of some aspiring actress who’s hoping to get paired up with a handsome studio executive and winds up sitting across from me.”

  “You feel this way too?” you said to Amare.

  “I get enough disappointment when I call home.”

  You felt like you were trying to convince them to join you at a Howard Dean rally—it was probably the right thing to do, but being right didn’t assuage the embarrassment caused by such a public acknowledgment of desperation.

  “I think that you shouldn’t wait for your life to look a certain way before you start looking for some companionship,” you said. “Who knows what’s waiting for us out there? You might meet the person that inspires you to change your life; you might meet the person that helps you make peace with the life you have.”

  The boys chewed pensively, their eyes lost in the images of ice-cold beer and scantily clad women that paraded across the muted television screen.

  “Talk to girls,” said Amare.

  “That’s all you’ll have to do!” you said. “We’re getting back on the horse! We don’t need to get laid, we just need to put ourselves in situations where the possibility, however remote, exists!”

  Bill retrieved a second slice of pizza. “Do you mind if I grab one of these beers?”

  “Drink!” you said.

  “Now there’s a cause I can get behind.”

  *

  The next day was a slow one at The Homework Club. The study room was sparsely populated. With no Adrienne present you felt less necessary, a brain in possession of fleetingly coveted information. Tim received his private students in his office while Eric, on location with Haley Joel Osmont, waited like a kept woman in his trailer to lavish an LA Unified–approved tenth grade curriculum upon his movie-star client. You helped two boys—the son of the man who had taken issue with Sophie’s salacious photo, a seventh-grader prone to staring blankly from behind long black bangs and making strange clicking sounds with his tongue, and another middle-schooler who smelled of burnt hair and had ravaged his fingernails down to jagged nubs—with their pre-algebra homework. In between problems you watched the clock, pressed your fist into the ever-tightening knot in your gut, and anxiously awaited Sophie’s arrival. In the past, you would have backed off the stance you’d taken yesterday, made some crack about a lack of sleep and caffeine, assured her that you didn’t care what she brought into the study room as long as she didn’t distract the other kids from their work. Today you intended to do the opposite. How could you face a triple-date on the same day that you’d backed down from a seventeen-year-old girl, regardless of the way her hair smelled or the color of her eyes?