Sweet Nothing (10 page)

ON TUESDAY, AFTER
we put Eve to bed, Julie asks me to go down with her to her car and help her carry up a new coffee table she bought at Ikea. We ride the elevator to the garage and pull the box out of the back of the Jetta. Julie takes one end, and I grab the other. The alarm on a Land Rover goes off as we pass by, and my guts jump. I don't like being down here with all that concrete and steel above me and the unquiet earth below.

“If you don't go slower, I'm going to drop it,” Julie says.

I hold my finger on the call button until the elevator car arrives. The Land Rover's alarm is still echoing through the garage when the doors close.

We set the box down in the middle of the living room, and Julie opens one end and slides out the pieces of the table.

“Relax,” I say. “I'll put it together.”

“I want to do it,” she says. “Read me the directions.”

“Oh, boy,” I say. “I better get another drink.”

Julie frowns but doesn't reply. Her dad is a drunk, so she's touchy about booze. If I have more than the one G&T after work, she gets weird. Not to be rude, but she should mind her own fucking business.

I go into the kitchen and pour myself a tall one. Julie is already screwing stuff together when I return. I sit on the couch and, after consulting the assembly instructions, tell her what comes next.

“This can't be right,” she says at one point.

I lean over to show her the diagram. “You have to turn that end around,” I say.

“Yuck,” she says, waving a hand in front of her face. “You stink.”

It won't be difficult to sneak the money for Sophie out of our account. When we were first married, Julie ran the household, paying the bills and overseeing our finances, but when Eve was born, she asked me to take over. Now, as long as the ATM spits out cash when she sticks her card in, she's happy.

And that wasn't the only change the baby brought about. Julie was a loan officer when I met her, at a bank in Beverly Hills, and she kept working right up until she had Eve. She never complained, seemed to enjoy the job even, so I was shocked when she told me that she didn't plan to go back.

“I only want to be a wife and mother,” she said. “My mom worked, and I always felt slighted. I want to devote myself to you and Eve.”

I went from one life to another in just one year. I hooked up with Julie; she got pregnant three months later; we married, bought the condo, and had Eve. Truthfully, I was a bit disoriented, but when I tried to talk to Julie about it, she came on strong about my having to accept my new responsibilities the way she had to accept hers.

“I don't feel like I had much choice is all,” I said.

“Sometimes adults don't get much choice,” she said.

She tightens the last screw and flips the completed table right-side up.

“Ta-da.”

I help her move the old table into the hallway and position the new one in front of the couch. We didn't need a new table, she just got bored with the old one. That's the kind of people we are now.

She picks up my empty glass, takes it into the kitchen, rinses it, and puts it into the dishwasher.

“I'm going to read in bed for a while,” she says.

“I want to watch the news,” I say.

I wait for her to close the bedroom door, then go into the kitchen, get a fresh glass from the cupboard, and make another drink. It's nice out on the balcony, warm, but with a breeze coming off the ocean. I stand with my forearms on the rail and watch the traffic. A car cruises past with its windows down, radio blaring. You can hear the kids inside singing along to whatever song is playing.

Have fun, boys and girls,
I think.
Let this be the best night of your lives.

VINCE CALLS ME
at work, wants to know if I'm still on for Cal and Esther's party.

“Why wouldn't I be?” I reply, wondering if he knows something. I've been paranoid since meeting Sophie at Starbucks. That guy she was with made me uneasy.

“Come on,” Vince says. “You flake all the time.”

It's true. I say yes on Monday, but when Friday rolls around I'm so beat that all I want to do is stumble home and coast through the weekend on routine.

“I'm going, I'm going, I swear,” I say. I lean back in my chair and pick up a photo of me and Julie and Eve at Christmas. It could be a picture of anybody. I don't even remember Christmas.

“Do you know any jokes?” Vince says.

“Jokes?”

“The dude in the mailroom here tells me a joke every day, and I thought I'd tell him one back, freak him out. I looked online, but they're all about having sex with babies and sick shit like that.”

“That'd freak him out for sure.”

“Yeah, and also get me fired.”

Vince has been married to Kaylee for two years, and they were together for three before that. They're putting off having a kid because they want to travel. They went to Machu Picchu last year, and Vietnam is next. Julie doesn't like Kaylee; she says she needs to grow up. Vince, though, he loves her. He started crying one time telling me how much. We were in a bar, having some beers, and all this love came pouring out of him. I hoped he couldn't see how uncomfortable it made me.

“I have to go,” I say into the phone.

“Knock-knock,” Vince says.

“Who's there?”

“9/11.”

“9/11 who?”

“Hey, you said you'd never forget.”

The octopus on the ceiling is getting bigger, expanding like an incriminating bloodstain. I should call building maintenance about it. There may be a leak somewhere.

ON MY WAY
home on Friday I pass by the spot where that bum shit on the grass, and I think that if I see him again, I'll kill him. An instant later I'm like,
What the fuck is wrong with you? Where did that come from?
It must have been a misfire or crossed wires. Or maybe it was somebody else speaking through me, maybe everybody else, the whole city.

Julie asked me to pick up a pizza at Scalo's. I place the order and get a beer for the wait. It's mostly a take-out and delivery joint, and I'm the only customer. I sit at a table in front of the window. The gas station on the corner is a mess. Cars are backed up into the street, trying to get to the pumps. And this is a regular day. What if something really goes wrong?

A girl running past the window startles me. She pushes on the door to Scalo's once, twice, again, until the guys behind the counter all yell “Pull!” at once. Stepping quickly into the restaurant, she turns and presses her face to the glass and looks back up the street in the direction she came from.

“You have bathroom?” she asks breathlessly, with some kind of accent.

“For customers only,” Joseph, the owner, says.

The girl grimaces in disgust. She's nineteen, twenty, Russian, Iranian, something. Her mascara is smeared like she's been crying, and she keeps wiping at her nose. She gathers her bleached-blond hair in one hand and uses an elastic band that she takes from her pocket to make a ponytail, all the while staring out the window.

I swivel to follow her gaze, fighting the urge to duck. You've got all these guns and all these hotheads, guys who don't care who gets in the way when they lose it. But the only person I see is an old woman waiting at a bus stop half a block away.

“What's going on?” Joseph says.

The girl whips off her jacket, turns it inside out—from white to black—and slips it back on. She opens the door and sticks her head out for a better view of the street.

“You want me to call the police?” Joseph says.

The girl disappears, is suddenly gone, running again.

Joseph shakes his head.

“Gypsies,” he says to me.

I nod like I know and sip my beer. But I don't know anything. Joseph is from Lebanon. His brother was killed by a sniper one morning while walking home from the store with a loaf of bread and some eggs. His father was blown to pieces by a rocket.

“They are both making a long vacation, beautiful holidays,” he said to me once. “That is what I tell myself to keep from going crazy.”

CAL AND ESTHER
live out in Highland Park, a neighborhood that used to be mostly working-class Latinos but is now filling up with young white couples who want affordable houses and yards for their dogs. Vince says he'll drive. We take freeways and streets I've never heard of to get there, and when we do, taco stands and pawnshops alternate with art galleries and cupcake bakeries. It's confusing.

The house is a tiny stucco box on a street lined with the kind of big, old trees you rarely see in L.A. Elms and things. We park down the block in front of a duplex with a Tinker Bell bounce house set up in the yard. Mexican music blares out of a pair of speakers in the bed of a pickup parked at the curb, and dozens of kids dart about in unison like flocking birds.

“That's the party we should be going to,” Vince says. “Teach them youngsters how to do the ice cream and cake and cake.”

A sign on the front door of Cal and Esther's house directs guests to the backyard. Music and the sound of voices grow louder as we pass through a gate in the wooden fence and walk down a narrow passage past the garbage cans and a wheelbarrow. We brush by a guy smoking in the shadows and pop out into the party, and I'm glad to see there's a crowd. I worried we'd be the only ones.

The yard is much larger than the house, with a covered patio and a vegetable garden. Candy-colored Christmas lights are twined through the branches of the lemon trees and dangle from the eaves of a toolshed. I brought a bottle of wine as a gift for Cal and Esther, and Vince got them a book on home repairs. A girl Vince knows but I don't shows us where to put them and points us toward the bar, which is set up on a picnic table.

Vince pumps the keg while I pour some Maker's over ice. Cal appears out of the crowd. He has a beard now. He greets Vince with a slap on the back and picks up a corkscrew.

“How's tricks?” I say to him.

His smile flickers, and he squints like he's having trouble placing me.

“Danny?” he says.

He must be joking. We worked at the campus library together, took mushrooms in Disneyland with a bunch of people, went to Radiohead. He knows who I am.

“I heard you and Esther got married,” I say. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” he says, then looks past me. “Hey, Esther,” he calls out. “Did you see who's here?”

“Oh my God,” she says and comes over to join us. I can tell she also has only a vague recollection of who I am, and I feel as if I'm disappearing from the past and the present at the same time, like an old photograph in which the people have faded into ghostly blurs. It's not right. These two weren't special enough to have forgotten me.

I tell them about Julie and Eve and my job, making everything sound better than it is. They nod and smile and say, “That's great,” but they're only being polite. Cal makes his escape first, then Esther, tossing “Keep in touch” over her shoulder as she walks away.

I finish my bourbon and pour myself another and decide to hide out in the bathroom. There are two women with babies in the kitchen. I tell them where I want to go, and they point me down the hall.

I lock myself in and sit on the edge of the tub with my head in my hands. After a while I get up and check the medicine cabinet and pocket a bottle of Xanax prescribed for Cal. Someone knocks, and I pretend to wash my hands, then let the girl in.

A handwritten sign on a door at the end of the hall catches my eye:
Keep Out.
I open the door and find myself in Cal and Esther's bedroom. The walls are painted a funny color, like everyone was doing a few years ago, and a big blowup of that famous photo of a couple kissing in Paris hangs over the bed.

I walk to the dresser and lift the lid of a jewelry box sitting on top. I pick one pearl earring out of all the junk and hope Esther will go crazy trying to figure out where it went when she wants to wear it someday.

The door opens, and Cal is standing there, looking confused. “Hey,” he says. “This room is kind of off-limits.”

“Sorry,” I say. “There was someone in the bathroom, so I was looking for another.”

“There's only one,” he says. “You'll have to wait.”

I flush the earring down the toilet when I get into the bathroom again, then go out and tell Vince I'm not feeling well. And it's true. I roll down the window and let the wind blow in my face as we race down the freeway, but no matter how much air I gulp, it isn't enough. I want to turn myself inside out and shake myself clean. I want to sleep for years and wake with this life behind me.

THE CEILING OF
my office collapses over the weekend. I come in on Monday morning to find the soggy panels lying on my desk and chair, and dirty water soaking the carpet. A broken pipe, the man from building maintenance says.

“You didn't notice anything?” he asks.

“Nope,” I say, not mentioning the octopus.

Juan the IT guy moves my computer to an empty desk in a cubicle in the hall so I can keep working while they do repairs. I spend most of the morning updating the website, but people keep poking their heads in to ask what happened.

The councilman himself stops by around noon. He and Bob are just back from a press conference where the police announced the capture of some nut who'd been setting cars on fire in the district. The councilman is exuberant. He loves being in front of the cameras.

“I hear the sky is falling,” he says.

“It's not a big deal,” I say. “They should be done fixing everything by three.”

“Good, good. You going to Taco Bell for lunch?”

“Maybe.”

He pulls a twenty out of his pocket.

“I saw a commercial for a new thing there,” he says. “The Beefy Crunch Burrito or something. Would you mind bringing me one back?”