Good Kids: A Novel (15 page)

“They’d better be. And a drink of water. I never saw them give that tiger one drink of water. Maybe they don’t want it pissing in their little gilded cage, the fucktards.” It was the second time in the course of the evening that somebody had said
fucktard.
I thought of how beautifully the word had formed in Julie’s mouth. Where was she? My wistful reaction to the name of an old crush from high school made me feel I had betrayed Julie, in a small way. I wanted to be near her. I needed an excuse to end the male bonding and track her down.

“I have to take a dump myself,” I said to Todd. He thumped me on the back, our bond solidified, and I went in search of my fiancée.

I meandered through the house, dark save for the spotlight, which cast white domes on the walls. Soon I was in a neo-Victorian living room. Realistic paintings of rappers hung from the walls, lit from below. There was elaborate lace on the arms of a purple and green sofa. I heard a woman’s voice, from behind a closed door. It was Julie, speaking loudly enough for me to hear, but not loudly enough for me to make out her words.

There was something about the conversational music I didn’t like. Julie was speaking in a low, deliberate tone, blending restraint with amusement, coy. Whomever she flirted with remained inaudible.

This is my fiancée, I thought. I’m entitled to come in. I knocked softly, three times. Julie continued speaking. The nice thing to do, I supposed, was to knock louder. I turned the knob and, in what I hoped was a casual, unhurried manner, pushed on the door.

The first thing I saw was the source of Julie’s voice: a flat-screen television, fixed to a wall, turned up loud. It was tuned to Tusk, a
Julie vs. Animals
episode about crows, originally aired last year. The second thing I saw was Jeremy, Tusk’s new Silicon Valley–bred owner, kneeling on a queen-size bed, his plum-colored suit discarded, his stallion hair wild. He straddled a woman who was not one of the women who had been floating in the pool; there were two piles of clothes on the floor, one the plum-colored suit, the other what appeared to be gray pants and a jacket, meaning she had discarded a complete outfit rather than a bathing suit. They were in missionary position, her back arched, his back hunched. His belly hung, her toes curled. He was struggling to force his hesitant penis into a condom, but it was soft. The third thing I saw was the tiger, still crammed in a cage. It was tucked into a corner of the room on the far side of the television. It stared into space with Olympian indifference. It was as if the humans on the bed weren’t even there.

“Oh my lord,” yelled Jeremy, so shocked at my appearance, I surmised, that he forgot to talk like the Hollywood-executive characters in movies and use profanity. It had been only a second I’d been tarrying in the doorway, but he might have thought I’d been watching for minutes. He put his fist in his mouth. The woman screamed and sat up.

I apologized. As I shut the door, I said, “I was just looking for the bathroom, so.”

In the Victorian living room, I spun 180 degrees. I walked very fast. Out of the house, down the lawn, from one circle of conversations
to another, never speaking. Finally, I made for the hedge and, hiding my face from the partygoers, threw up. I wiped the vomit from my face and wandered. I didn’t see Julie anywhere.

I hadn’t been able to see Jeremy’s face well, because of his hair. But I understood the drama he was staging: Look, woman, upon this cable channel that is mine. He’d put his star on the TV and had the tiger brought in to show what he could have done. He’d told a story about who he was. The story was not really for the woman (she was part of the story) but for himself. And the self responded. The soft dick was the self saying, I don’t believe you.

I want to see my wife, I thought, and corrected myself: fiancée. Instead I saw Todd, squinting at me from the bar. He homed in on me and took hold of my arm.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “You look like a ghoul.”

I plopped down on the grass. I told him what I’d seen, and he put a hand to his brow, and said, “Oh fuck,” and gave me cinnamon gum for my breath.

“That’s a pig,” observed Todd. He took a pen from his jeans, and a white notebook from his jacket.

“True.”

“This is an article.” Todd paced, never touching pen to notebook. “Industry people abusing animals the way they abuse interns. What you just gave me is all I need. That plus some background quotes, some animal rights people, an anonymous animal handler who’s seen some shit. It’s a potential
feature
. I mean, somebody had to finagle the tiger to the bedroom, right? Who’s the tiger finagler? We’re going to do to that douche bag what he did to the tiger. I mean, it might be illegal. Can you put an animal-show pig in jail for abusing an animal? Maybe you potentially can.”

I saw Julie. A young red-haired woman from Tusk’s sustainability division was walking her out of the garden, speaking rapidly. People grew manic around Julie sometimes, kept her in conversations. Julie was rubbing her arms. A native Southern Californian, she became cold when it became “cold.” I wanted to tell her what I’d seen while we ate crackers in our warm bed.

To the tiger, I envisioned myself saying to Julie, once we were back at our battle stations, washing our faces, they would have looked like a two-headed monster. They would look to the tiger like this creature with two enraged faces, four active arms, the bottom face upside down.

I realized, as I watched Julie among her colleagues, that if Todd wrote an article in which Jeremy was described using the tiger as a captive audience, Jeremy would know I’d divulged what I’d seen. Jeremy knew I was Julie’s fiancé; Jeremy would not like Julie, would regard her as an enemy and a threat. Even if the article was never published, even if it was never written, even if all that happened was that Todd called him and asked him to confirm or deny what his anonymous source had said.

Our job here was to secure the future of
Julie vs. Animals,
to endear ourselves to Jeremy. Not to fuck with him.

“Leave Jeremy alone,” I said to Todd. “You can’t write it.”

“You’ll be completely left out of it. You can blame it on me.” Todd pressed his notebook to his heart with his fingers spread. “I’ll tell him I promised you not to utter a word to anyone and I just broke my promise. I’ll be the asshole.”

“If you do it,” I said, “I’ll burn your house down.” I looked at him until I felt sure he’d understood. We knew the same collection of people who ran independent labels and studios out of homes and low-end real estate in the Valley, and conducted business with them, such as it was. If Todd wrote the article, no matter how worthy, I would tell them he was a thief and a liar.

Todd closed his eyes. He picked up a beer can that was lying on the ground and threw it at the house. It tapped the wall and fell to the grass. He needs the money, I thought. I knew what it was like, how it made you perform your brokenness by throwing things.

But what could I do? Being in love, I thought, is being half a two-headed monster. There’s a reason a creature with two heads is horrifying. You can take Big Bird, and give Big Bird two heads, and Big Bird’s a raptor from the abyss, a nightmare. It’s not pretty, two brains fused into one thing. Sometimes you get
to be the self you’ve always been, but to be loyal to someone you must be willing to stop being the rebel you used to be. You give up being always the truth teller, smashing windows.

That was the difference between being in love and being young together, the way Khadijah and I had been young together, thirteen years ago. I’d thought maybe the recent change in my life was that I was with someone people recognized from TV, but now I knew it was that I had never been in love before, in this way. It was clear to me now that I could see the ugly side of it.

Todd sat down beside me on the grass again. “I’m engaged too,” he said. “I would be the same way in your position.”

I tried to wave to Julie, but she was mired in a dialogue with two gray-haired men in blinding white blazers. Todd threw an arm around my shoulder.

“Have dinner with us,” he said. “You and Julie, me and Khadijah. Deej’ll be here the weekend after next. If you and Julie could come, she’d be tripping out. One blast from the past, one person from TV.”

I had doubts, grave ones, about arranging a reunion between Khadijah and myself. I looked Todd squarely in the eye and told him I would be stoked for it.

He asked me if “Deej” and I had stayed in touch.

“My dad cheated with her mom. Did she tell you that?”

He shook his head.

“Her parents split up, and so did mine. She moved with her mom to Cambridge, I stayed in Wattsbury. We didn’t have any reason to see each other except that my dad had done it with her mom. I couldn’t just be like, Bye, Mom, I’m going to see Dad’s ho’s daughter.”

Todd was looking at me carefully. He sensed, I could tell, that there were many things I was leaving out. Perhaps he had already come to regret the dinner invitation. I wanted to let him know he could withdraw it, but I didn’t know how.

O
n the way home, I told Julie about Jeremy. She rocked in her seat and cursed. She put her hands behind her head, somewhere in the depths of her hair, which appeared to calm her down. “It’s not the worst thing in the world,” she said. “What’s he going to do? Fire me and wait to see if the tiger-observing-sex thing gets on Gawker? You might have just done the show a favor, honestly.”

I told her about Todd and Khadijah, the dinner invitation. She remained unfazed. There would be some awkwardness, we agreed, a ghost from the past floating in the air above our food, at dinner. But nothing worse than that.

“You told me about that vow on our third date, and I was like, I owe her,” said Julie. “I need to send that girl a thank-you note and some scones.”

“It doesn’t freak you out?”

“I’d be jealous of an attractive awning, if you stood under it, but relative to other people, no. I’m not jealous of Khadijah. I mean, tell me if I should be. But it was thirteen years ago.”

I was taking downhill curves in her white Volkswagen, a light and obedient car. I was the one who liked to drive.

“Khadijah’s the last person you would ever need to be jealous of,” I said. An exaggeration, but one meant to convey affection. I was bleary from the pomegranate vodka, and from puking, so we
bought coffee with cinnamon from a taco truck on La Cienega. That was all I needed to steer us home through the flats. Back at Julie’s house, in Miracle Mile, we fell to our battle stations, brushed our teeth, and had drunken sex. We lay under her down comforter, patterned with green birds, safe, nesting.

The hungover morning passed quickly. I sat on the study floor, my guitar in my lap, a Beatle in India. No “Dear Prudence” descended. I talked myself into falling in love with a meaningless chord progression, a limp melody, until I took a break to smoke a cigarette and walk to Miracle Mile’s Gaia Foods. By the time I let myself back in and turned off the alarm and put down my grocery bags on the kitchen island and put the groceries in the fridge and took two Advil, I’d forgotten the song.

That evening, Julie came home from work at 11:00 p.m., which was normal, and bore down on the single bottle of wine we kept in the kitchen, beside the cartons of organic soup, which was unusual. Neither of us ever drank at home. We drank at parties, where we got drunk.

“Would you open this for me, please?” she asked.

Sitting with the bottle wedged between my stocking feet, I went to work with the corkscrew. She watched me.

“How was your day?” She clamped two wineglasses on the counter.

“Besides the songwriting failures, kind of awesome.” I grunted, and the cork popped out. “The mail came, and I got this weird ‘This Is Just Wrong’ check from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It was taxed as a performance royalty, so I guess they played it at a kingdom event? The first Bank of America I went to, the teller was a dick about the foreign currency thing, but at the second one I found this teller who was nice.”

“How are your eyes?” she asked. “Did you ever get new contacts?”

“Last week I went to this optician in Little Ethiopia that has everything cheaper. They had these new disposables, with this weird generic packaging with stains on it, like when you get illegal
batteries from China? The world looks, not bad, or even blurry—I wouldn’t want to place a value judgment on it—just a little shimmery. The big thing is that they never slide up my eyeballs, like the old ones did, so that’s good.” I poured her a glass.

As I gave it to her, I was surprised to see tears glide down her cheeks. I asked her what was wrong. She shook her head and smiled. I wrapped an arm around her; she kissed me and slipped away, holding her wine close to her body with both hands, and crossed to the other side of the cavernous kitchen.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m just being a stressed-out weirdo. I didn’t get to really have dinner.”

“Did something happen?”

“Everybody can eat a bowl of dicks.”

I waited.

“Fiancé,” she sang. “Come watch TV with me.” She took my hand and led me to the living room.

“What happened?”

She placed her glass on the coffee table, appropriating a
Gladiator
-themed bar mitzvah invitation as a coaster in order to pick up both remotes at once.

“It’s really nothing. The Silicon Valley guys that came in with Jeremy can just be supershallow. I don’t need to want to marry them, they’re just my co-workers, and it’s not even all of them. There are just a few of them that are douches, and I get mad.”

“What did they say?”

“Not important.” The TV flashed on and flashed off. A fleeting glimpse of jocular heroin dealers.

“Tell me.”

She shook her head.

I stood in front of the television. “Was it about me? I just want to know. I don’t care what they said about me, if it was about me.”

She shook her head emphatically.

“Who cares? I only care if you feel like I’m so fragile you have to keep a secret from me. That’s more insulting than anything they could say.”