What We Never Had

by Zach Wyner

  You glanced at Bill. He didn’t appear to be doing much better. The lush was peering at him like she’d just walked into a dark room after being out in the noonday sun and was having a difficult time identifying him as human or coat rack. His nose pointed straight down at the table and she frowned at his bald dome like a shit-smeared shoe sole.

  Julia sighed, looked at her watch.

  “Anyway,” you said. “Tutoring. I don’t know what you’ve imagined, but it’s not exactly noble work. My students are mostly privileged private school kids who’re too lazy do their homework.”

  She looked past you, at something on the wall or a better-looking guy walking by. “Every kid deserves an education, right? Just because they’ve got money doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have good teachers.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a rare day that I leave work feeling like I’ve made any kind of difference.”

  She smiled with the left side of her mouth. “You’re an idealist,” she said.

  “Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe. They say that’s a symptom of youth. They say I’ll be outgrowing that soon.”

  “What do you want me to say? Do you want me to agree that you’re relatively unimpressive? Is that why you brought these two?”

  You stiffened, crossed your arms over your chest. The Commodores were still blasting away and you were certain that Bill and Amare couldn’t have heard anything, but you leaned in anyway.

  “These are my guys,” you said. “They’re magnificent people.”

  She took the straws out of her drink and took a large swallow.

  “I’m serious,” you said.

  “I’m not saying they’re not great guys.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Hey Julia!” yelled the lush. “You hungry?”

  “Kinda,” said Julia.

  “You want to try another venue?” you said. You raised your voice and addressed the table. “You guys want to go get something to eat?”

  The women exchanged glances. Bill and Amare sipped the dregs of their drinks and fiddled with cocktail straws.

  “Where should we go?” said Julia.

  “What do you feel like eating?”

  “I want a cheeseburger!” yelled the Amazon.

  “Ugh,” piped Bill. “I can’t eat another cheeseburger.”

  “Are you serious?” yelled Amare.

  “Can’t do it.”

  “You’ve ingested like three quarters of a cow in the last week.”

  “I’ve reached my threshold.”

  “So we’ll go to a fucking diner,” yelled Amare. “You can go to a fucking diner, right? You can eat a fucking salad.”

  “We’ll go to Mel’s,” you yelled. “They’ve got whatever you want…burgers, fries, salads. I think they even sell beer.”

  Julia put her hand on your thigh. Either she liked your decisiveness or the booze had created a craving for onion rings.

  You settled up with the bartender. The girls insisted on paying for their own drinks and you didn’t argue. As they waited for the bartender to make change, they engaged in an animated discussion with plenty of head shaking. Bill and Amare had their work cut out for them.

  *

  You slogged through Hollywood Boulevard traffic toward the restaurant—four cars transporting six passengers—determined not to let the girls’ insistence on driving themselves discourage you. That bar had been all wrong. Bill and Amare had no chance in a setting like that with girls like these. Irony and sarcasm were their stock-in-trade, and the music in that place had been too damn loud for them to utilize these weapons effectively.

  You cut the AC and rolled down your window. Warm air lapped your face. The car next to you boomed an apocalyptic bass track through a sub-woofer that seemed eminently capable of penetrating the earth’s crust and initiating the big one that would finally crumble California into the Pacific. You cranked up the volume on your own stereo, drowning the noise with Ben Webster’s lascivious baritone.

  Bill and Amare pulled up behind you at a red light. You watched them in your rearview mirror. Bill’s forehead pressed against the passenger window like an overheated child trying to cool himself on the glass. Amare’s hands danced above the steering wheel as though he were trying to shoo away a bee. He pointed to his head, smacked the side of it with the base of his palm. Bill’s lips moved but his head didn’t. You imagined his response—a weary and futile explanation that vanished as softly as it was spoken.

  Your phone vibrated. You fished it from your pocket and discovered two missed calls, two new voicemails, both from June. Bill and Amare pulled up alongside you. Amare leaned his head out the window. “Dude. We’re thinking of bailing on the diner.”

  “What?”

  “Bill’s girl hates him.”

  Bill jerked his head from the window, sat upright. “Hey, don’t put this all on me,” he said. “You’re the one who said your date thought that a filibuster was some kind of abdominal exercise.”

  “He told his girl that the band on her tee shirt sucks.”

  “What?”

  “Bill told the girl that the band on her tee shirt sucks.”

  The light turned green. “Why did you do that, Bill?”

  The engine of the mammoth pick-up truck behind you growled.

  “Because it’s the truth!” yelled Bill.

  Its driver leaned on the horn. Amare didn’t so much as glance, just increased his volume. “We’re thinking of picking up a bottle!”

  More car horns joined in a symphony of outrage.

  “No fucking way!” you yelled. “Please. I can’t show up there alone!”

  Angry voices punctuated the horn symphony with staccato bursts of profanity.

  “Trust me,” yelled Amare. “They’ll be relieved.”

  “Fuck that!” you yelled. “Don’t fucking do this to me!”

  You hit the gas and swerved into the lane ahead of them. They followed obediently, resuming the crawl. A thump came from the rear of your car. At the next light, as you came to a halt, there was another thump and you realized it was your basketball, careening around your trunk. You hadn’t played in your regular Wednesday night pick-up game since the Homework Club had extended your hours. In fact, since Bill and Amare had started staying at your place, you’d avoided your dad’s 8:00 a.m. wake-up calls and skipped the Saturday morning game too. Still balling twice a week in his late fifties, your dad was becoming a rarity. There was no telling how many opportunities you had left to run together. Dad didn’t play the most physical game, but one wrong step and he’d be shopping for golf clubs.

  You picked up your phone and called voicemail. The first message was nothing, a hang up. The second began with a pause, followed by an, “Oh, hi.” Then another pause. As if you were the one that had called her and caught her at an inopportune time. “Well,” she said. “It finally happened. Reno hit me. I can’t go home because my stepdad is staying with my mom again so my sister is driving me to a hostel in Hollywood. I have enough money for two nights. After that I guess I’ll start whoring myself out on Santa Monica Boulevard. I love you. Call me.”

  You stuffed the phone into the cup holder filled with receipts and the cardboard sleeves from take-out coffee cups. The stream of cars crossing in your path thinned out. You stared into the empty intersection, your mind thick with car exhaust and the flagging will to make sound decisions.

  June was an ineluctable force. She was the rain that seeped through the cracks in your ceiling. She was the small damp circle that rapidly devolved into a dozen steady trickles and a home littered with brimming pots and pans. This message was the lightning flash before the thunderclap, the first storm after a protracted draught. You knew from experience that it would soon expose those holes that you’d been too busy, too distracted to repair during the dry time.

  You should ha
ve deleted the voicemail without listening, or at least waited until tomorrow, with the possibility of new romance to steel you against temptation. Instead you’d once again demonstrated that, like alcohol and caution or Bill’s mouth and his libido, June and logic existed in direct opposition to one another. And there were some things you could not un-hear. June was nearly broke and homeless. The subtext—that it was only a matter of time before she showed up on your doorstep—was easy enough to glean. Your life was a Greek tragedy; your most laudable quality, your compassion, would be the instrument of your demise. Two paths lay before you. The first was full retreat—a mad dash through the Hollywood Hills to the safety of a Valley, a couch, a bottle, and unabashed shit-talking. You’d lost sight of Julia’s Audi anyway. Perhaps this was merely the path of fate’s acceptance. Down the second was Mel’s Diner and whatever promise was conveyed in that small but significant gesture—Julia’s fingertips tracing circles on your thigh. It was not lost on you that sex might be a powerful inoculation against June’s lure.

  You stayed the course.

  *

  You were somewhat embarrassed for having suggested Mel’s Diner, a crowded and cacophonous eatery plagued by tourists and high school students. You prided yourself on your knowledge of off-the-beaten-path restaurants and dive bars, and yet you’d chosen this tacky, run-of-the-mill chain smack in the heart of Hollywood. What was worse, its patrons’ affinity for Tommy Hilfiger accentuated Bill and Amare’s otherness, their lack of conventional effort.

  You spotted an empty table near the back, navigated the churning cauldron of douche bags—whose busy hands shoveled curly fries into their meticulously manicured faces or plunged beneath tabletops to grope the exposed thighs of their dates—and seated yourselves. The lush and the Amazon continued a debate that must have started in the car about Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant and whether or not they would have stood by him after he allegedly raped a hotel employee in Denver.

  “Kobe Bryant,” muttered Bill, as if the words themselves were acid on his tongue.

  “Excuse me?” said the lush. “Did you say something?”

  “A portrait of a gentleman if I ever saw one.”

  Amare chuckled. “That team is chock full of assholes, from the coach on down.”

  “What are you talking about?” said the Amazon. “Phil Jackson is like the best coach in the history of the NBA.”

  You and Amare scoffed. Julia looked at you sideways.

  “Hasn’t he won the most championships?” she said. “Doesn’t that make him the best?”

  You shrugged. “That’s a little like saying the richest man in the room is also the smartest.”

  The Amazon snorted. “Well if that rich man owned a basketball team, he’d be an idiot not to hire Phil fregging Jackson.”

  The lush laughed. “Nice,” she said, holding up her hand. The Amazon gave her a vigorous high-five.

  A harried waitress, looking either ten years too old or thirty years too young to be working the late shift at a chain diner, surfaced beside your table, the dull tip of her pencil poised just above her order pad. The girls ordered fries and Diet Cokes. You went with a beer. Amare ogled the beer and wine list and then asked for water.

  Bill scratched his whiskered cheeks. “Does the grilled cheese come with a salad?”

  “Fries, fruit, or side salad,” said the waitress.

  “Can I get the goat cheese and walnut salad with the grilled cheese, or is that extra?”

  The waitress raised her eyes from her order pad to Bill. “That’s not a side salad.”

  Bill held the menu with one hand and rubbed his bald dome with the other. “How much would you charge me if I got the grilled cheese with the walnut salad?”

  She peered at him over the rim of her reading glasses. “I wouldn’t charge you anything, but the restaurant would charge you the full price of the grilled cheese plus the full price of the salad.”

  Bill sighed. “Forget it.” He dropped the menu and scanned the table. He rifled through the artificial sweeteners. “Don’t you guys have any crackers or anything? I’d be fine with some crackers and an ice water.”

  The waitress frowned. “I’’ll be right back with your drinks,” she said and headed off toward the kitchen.

  “For fuck’s sake,” said Amare.

  “What?” said Bill. “My blood sugar is low. You want me to go into diabetic shock over here?”

  Amare laughed.

  “Jesus,” said the lush. “Do you guys even like each other?”

  Julia and the Amazon snickered. “Seriously,” she said. “All they do is bicker. They’re worse than my parents.”

  “Look, sweetheart,” said Amare. “This is a good man. I love this man. I’ve just seen an awful lot of him lately.”

  Bill stared sheepishly at the table, his cheeks tinged red.

  “Did you guys move here together?” said Julia.

  “Amare came first,” said Bill. “People were bailing out of Olympia like a sinking ship and I couldn’t think of anything better to do. All I knew was that any place was better than there.”

  The lush’s lips curled in disgust. “That’s a pretty stupid reason for moving.”

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t mean to give anyone the impression that I was anything other than stupid. Josh over there is the teacher. I was just hoping to look halfway intelligent by proxy.”

  The waitress brought your beer. Amare licked his lips.

  “I think we’re gonna need two more of these,” you said.

  Amare patted your shoulder. “Bless you.”

  “Do you have whiskey?” said Bill.

  “Only beer and wine,” said the waitress.

  Bill scanned the beer and wine list as though it might belie the waitress’ claim. “I’d kiss Kobe Bryant’s feet for a glass of whiskey.”

  The lush sneered. “You’re full of shit.”

  The waitress brightened and looked back and forth from the lush to Bill, her lips slightly parted.

  Bill looked up from the wine list; his eyebrows climbed his forehead. “Excuse me?”

  The lush sat straight as a rod. “You act like you don’t give a shit but you do. You just want to look like you’re not trying so you can look down your nose at anybody who is.”

  Bill smiled. “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. If you want to think that…”

  “I do!” she said, smacking the table. “That’s exactly what I think.”

  Now the waitress looked at you. You shrugged. A smile spread across her face like a sunrise across a meadow. “I’ll be right back with your drinks.”

  Bill sighed. He tossed the wine list toward the center of the table. “Look,” he said. “I’m sorry I insulted your tee shirt.”

  “I don’t care about the fucking tee shirt!” said the lush. “I want to know why I’m wasting an evening with a guy who doesn’t seem to have anything positive to say about anything. I mean, don’t you have dreams? Isn’t there anything at all that you want to do with your life?”

  Bill shrugged. “I don’t know.” An impish grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Work at a grocery store?”

  You and Amare erupted into laughter. The lush’s wan cheeks burned scarlet. Julia turned her head, as if averting her gaze from a gruesome car accident. You wiped tears from your eyes.

  *

  After the meal you lingered outside Mel’s with Julia, shuffling your feet. Highland Avenue bustled with late night traffic. Car horns honked, people whistled, the heads of drunken teenagers popped out of overstuffed cars to harass girls in neighboring cars. Julia’s friends motored off down the sidewalk, high-heels clicking defiantly against concrete; Amare and Bill vanished in search of liquor. You surprised Julia by going in for a hug. You put you arms around her and she stood there stiffly for a beat before slowly, reluctantly, raising her arms halfwa
y up your back. When you let go, she was wearing the kind of plastered-on smile that people wear when they’ve been cornered by a TV reporter and a question they really don’t want to answer.

  “This was fun,” you said.

  She looked at you like you’d just belched beer breath in her face.

  “Seriously,” you said.

  She patted your arm. “Drive safe, Josh.”

  You lit a cigarette and strolled to your car, exhaling languid clouds that engulfed your head in the lazy heat. You slumped into the driver’s seat, rolled down the window and flicked the butt onto the asphalt. You dialed June. She answered on the first ring.

  “Hey, love.”

  *

  Looking back, you couldn’t remember making too many decisions when it came to June. Your rational brain had been marginalized the moment you slept with her and recognized you had something to which you would go to great lengths to preserve. This recognition led to a series of ultimatums. Move in with me or we’re finished, was one of many in a catalog that included: if you leave now to go play basketball, I’ll burn your books; if you touch me, I’ll scream; if you call my brother, I’ll hurt you; if you call my mother, I’ll hurt myself.

  Move out now or we will evict you, was the ultimatum that finally saved you, or at least saved your duodenum from those precocious peptic ulcers that, at the tender age of twenty-three, were beginning to wreak havoc on your digestive system. The threat to evict followed a couple of months in which June’s sister April had illicitly taken up residence at your apartment. A sweet, skinny nineteen-year-old photography student at Santa Monica City College, April was a seemingly innocuous addition to the apartment—she slept late, listened to reggae, and ate cereal three times a day. Eager to help her out of June’s dysfunctional family home—and hopeful that April’s presence might mitigate some of the tension in your own—you had offered her a room. But April was nearly broke and contributed very little financially. Unable to afford the bump in rent that would result from adding a third person to the lease, you and June tried to keep her presence a secret. Unfortunately, loud arguments at all hours of the night had not endeared the two of you to anyone attempting to sleep in close proximity. The neighbors ratted you out and the managers gave you a month to vacate the building. June was ready to fight; you were ready to flee.