What We Never Had

by Zach Wyner

  “Stop!” she said. “Don’t be dirty.”

  Smiles tugged at the corners of the studious teenaged faces. You stood up and walked to the door. Sophie sensed you and held out an open palm, signaling for you to wait.

  “Sophie,” you said.

  She thrust an index finger at you, indicating this would only take a second.

  “Not until later!” she yelled. “My parents will be gone by eight.”

  “In or out?” you said.

  “Huh?” said Sophie.

  “That door is closing. I need you in or out.”

  “Just…ugh!” She went outside and the door swung closed. You resisted the urge to do exactly what she wanted you to do and ogle what you imagined was some quarterback hunk in the new BMW convertible his parents gave him for his sixteenth birthday. Your study-room students had lost interest and were again facedown in their textbooks. You didn’t know where their powers of concentration came from, but you were somewhere between impressed and disturbed. C’mon guys, you thought. A little bit of curiosity is a healthy thing. Was she too predictable for them? Maybe these kids had already realized that pretty people call attention to themselves for the sole reason that they don’t know who they are when no one is looking. Still, Sophie was a peer, and as a peer, they had a right to be intrigued by her shenanigans. Shouldn’t they at least be shaking their heads or rolling their eyes in joint disapproval of the frivolity of it all? Now that you were thinking of it, their immersion in their studies was downright creepy. You wanted to yell: Life is happening all around you, kids! I love to read too, but sometimes I learn more when I pick my head up. At some point you’re going to need to know how to balance your social and academic lives. Practice. Now. Stop being such fucking nerds and engage a little bit. Ask me questions about girls, about life. Make me feel sage. Make me feel useful.

  The door opened and Sophie walked inside. Behind her was a well-built guy, about 5’9” with black-rimmed glasses, the strap from a canvas courier bag lashed diagonally across his chest like a seatbelt.

  “Josh, this is Cameron.”

  “Hey,” said Cameron, making brief, sheepish eye contact before finding a bookshelf to stare at.

  “How’s it going, man?” you said.

  “Okay,” he said. “She said to come inside. I don’t know why.”

  “Cameron,” she said, nestling up beside him and tucking her arms under his bicep. “Don’t be like that. I told you I wanted to show you off.”

  “You lookin’ for a place to study?” you said.

  “I’m okay.”

  “How about a tutor?”

  “No thanks, sir. Thanks though.”

  “Cameron’s like a total genius,” said Sophie.

  “Oh yeah?”

  Cameron shook his head. “I’m not a genius,” he said. “I’m just good at school.”

  “What’s the difference?” she said.

  Cameron looked at you and shrugged as if to say, There’s some folks that if they don’t already know, you can’t tell ’em.

  “Is it okay if he stays here with me for a little while?” she said.

  You sucked air through your closed teeth. “Soph, you know that’s not really how we operate.”

  “C’mon Josh. His older sister is picking him up in a few minutes. And it’s like a hundred bazillion degrees outside.”

  Cameron slipped out of Sophie’s grasp and walked over to the bookshelf. He removed a book of Mary Oliver poems.

  “You like her?” you said.

  “She’s my sister’s favorite. I like her voice. It’s clear. She’s not trying to show off all the time, you know?”

  “I agree,” you said. “She’s very clear.”

  “Some poets,” he said, “when I read them, I feel like I’m picking through a junk pile, like if I examined each item, I could make sense of it, but it’s not worth the effort.”

  Sophie beamed.

  “He can stay,” you said.

  Cameron held up the book. “Mind if I read this?”

  “Knock yourself out.” You turned to Sophie. “How about we take a look at that geometry homework?”

  “Thank you! Cameron tried to help me, but he kept going too fast. You move at the right pace, Josh. When you explain this stuff to me, I don’t feel stupid.”

  “Aw,” you said, feeling the red rush to your cheeks. “Thanks, Soph. But I have to say…”

  “And you don’t have to give any speeches today,” she said. “I know I’m not stupid. It just feels that way when I keep making the same mistakes over and over again.”

  “No speeches,” you said.

  She smiled, dropped her heavy backpack on the table and took a seat.

  *

  The morning arrived that Bill and June had designated to go to Whole Foods for job applications, and June struggled to get out of bed. You weren’t surprised; she’d been up and down all night. At three in the morning, you’d awoken to an orange glow leaking out from beneath the bathroom door. An hour or so later you’d gotten up to take a piss and discovered her still in the bathroom, sitting, in the dark, on the edge of the tub. She got up immediately, slipped wordlessly by and retreated, with your cigarettes, to the balcony. If she was trying to avoid you because she feared interrogation, there was something fundamental she was failing to grasp. Things had changed. Your adult life, while fluid and inchoate, was officially underway. You would no longer allow yourself to be lured into her well of worry. And besides, time spent apart had helped you recognize some things you’d previously been too close to see. Like the way nighttime transformed that well into a hole as depthless as it was dark. Given time to reflect, you could not recall, amongst countless sleepless hours, the illumination of a single, lasting resolution.

  At some point in the late morning, you and Bill strolled to 7-Eleven for coffee. The oppressive heat had broken and, in the relative cool, rejuvenated trees stretched their limbs and straightened their trunks as if reemerging, unburdened, from productive therapy sessions. Light traffic breezed down the streets like the first fallen leaves of autumn. As you returned home, tendrils of steam escaping through the sip holes of your twenty-four-ounce French Roasts, you encountered an elderly couple, walking arm in arm. The man tipped his newsboy cap. You froze for a moment, startled by the old-world courtesy of the gesture.

  “How you folks doing today?” said Bill.

  “Just fine, young man,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” said Bill.

  “That heat was just too much,” said the woman.

  “It wasn’t civilized,” said Bill.

  The elderly couple smiled. “That’s a funny way of putting it,” said the woman, “but I suppose you’re right. This weather, this is what we moved here for in the first place.”

  “I hear you,” said Bill. “You folks enjoy it.”

  “Thank you!” The couple beamed as they walked past, as if, in exchanging platitudes, Bill had granted them temporary access to a world growing more and more elusive and incomprehensible.

  “You practicing?” you said.

  “Shut up.”

  “Hey, I don’t blame you. Making conversation with strangers is hard. It’s a muscle. You’ve got to exercise it.”

  “If I don’t force myself be social, it gets so the simplest greeting can be a completely humiliating experience.”

  You patted him on the back. “You’re like a big league pitcher, working his way back from injury.”

  He kicked at a pebble in his path but his shoe sailed clean over it. He chuckled mirthlessly. “I don’t know. A farm-system rookie could charm a co-ed wearing a Coldplay tee shirt.”

  “C’mon now, man. That was a bad pairing. That’s all. It’s not like you didn’t have the guts to be yourself.”

  “It’s just that my ‘self
’ was completely abhorrent to her.”

  “Always better to be honest.”

  “That how you snagged June?”

  You sipped your too-hot coffee, scalding your tongue, and spit it onto the sidewalk. “Ouch. Fuck. I didn’t… That’s different.”

  “Because she’s beautiful?”

  “I don’t know,” you said. But you did know. You wiped your mouth and shook drops of French Roast from your hand. “I fucking hope not.”

  Bill touched your elbow. “You’d have no reason to be ashamed if it were.”

  “But I would. I would be deeply fucking ashamed.”

  “What can you do, man? Our values, the ones that define us, are mostly based on personal experience, right? They can’t be based on experiences we haven’t had yet. Out of the blue something or someone comes along that we never imagined or hadn’t accounted for.”

  “In this case, a girl way hotter than I thought I could get.”

  “So you bend a little bit.”

  “You lie.”

  “To yourself…yeah. So that when you’re lying to her, it’s the truth according to the big lie.”

  “The big lie.”

  “The one you tell yourself.”

  He’d nailed you. In the only way that Bill could nail a person. Just speaking extemporaneously—no harm intended. And yet he’d unveiled something you’d never had the guts to recognize. You tried not to show it, took a cautious sip of coffee, nodded your head, sucked on your top teeth.

  Your big lie had been that you were just being you. That was the reason you were better than those others—the ones who tried so hard to be what they thought she wanted. That you weren’t trying anything—that was the big lie. Because underneath that confidence, you’d collected ample evidence that you weren’t shit. That you were somehow defective. Why else would all the good ones have run for the hills the moment you’d expressed those big feelings of yours?

  You were at the glass door to your building now, staring through it into the empty lobby. You dug your keys out of your pocket. “I think I hear what you’re saying,” you said. “You’re saying that the trick to avoiding ulcers is believing your own bullshit.”

  “As far as I know, that’s the trick to everything, from getting a girl to getting a job to buying a new sweater at The Gap.”

  You laughed.

  “Seriously.” Bill patted his chest. “What right do I have to waltz into The Gap and buy a new sweater? I’ve got plenty of clothing. I don’t need that sweater. I certainly don’t deserve that sweater. I should buy that sweater and take it directly to some homeless guy on the street. But I don’t because I’ve lied to myself. I’ve told myself: ‘I need this’ or ‘I deserve this.’ It’s bullshit.”

  “Bill,” you said, holding open the door. “There’s nothing that you can imagine for yourself that you don’t deserve.”

  Bill smiled. “Yeah, well. Right now my imagination is the exclusive domain of Pedro Martinez. At least until baseball season’s over.”

  You laughed, pretending that the comment didn’t make you just a little sad.

  Back in the apartment, you headed straight for the balcony. That word—imagination—had been stirring your guts since the moment you’d said it. Even more so because it seemed to be gaining prominence in your functional vocabulary. You’d said something to Julia—that being a tutor wasn’t what you’d imagined yourself becoming. You’d dropped that statement so casually, like letting go of the future you’d imagined for yourself had been equivalent to letting go of a toy that hadn’t held your attention since childhood. Like it wasn’t a big deal that your indecisions were just as potent as your decisions.

  There had been a time when imagination was all you were—and it’s not as if you hadn’t tried to align it with reality. You’d kept acting after college, joining a scene-study group and honing your craft. You’d tried to get an agent. But a couple of nos went a long way toward undermining your confidence. Then there was that time you’d paid four hundred dollars to that service that advertised an 80 percent success rate in gaining representation for aspiring actors. They’d identify which agencies might be interested in someone like you, address all the envelopes, and help you craft a cover letter. When they’d done their job, you and your parents made piles on the living room floor and stuffed two hundred headshots—one smoldering, one sweet—into a hundred envelopes along with a cover letter containing words like irreverent and sardonic that you were certain would make you stand out from the pack. A hundred agencies responded with absolute silence.

  You tried to shake it off, blame the service, blame your own credulity; you reminded yourself that getting started was hard work. But that silence had crushed something deep within, something you failed to rebuild. Recently, during an idle moment at The Homework Club, you’d read that astronomers had discovered sound waves coming from a massive black hole 250 million light years from earth. They’d detected a note—a B-flat, playing fifty-seven octaves lower than middle C. You’d wanted to invite the astronomers to point their equipment at Hollywood, see if B-flat was the precise pitch at which the industry smothered a billion cries of love me.

  *

  You navigated the Whole Foods parking lot with caution; sparkling Lexuses and hulking Escalades circled like hawks, their owners frantic to return to vacant work stations or little children, left in the charge of the some matronly, woefully underpaid housekeeper. Amare denounced the drivers as either yuppie, fascist, or liberal scum depending upon their vehicle’s miles per gallon. Your car, a mid-nineties Toyota Corolla that got about twenty miles per gallon, was exempt from judgment. One of the benefits of a sub-middling income was that of accountability: your choices were a reflection of your bankroll, not your ethics.

  Your gaze lingered longingly on a brand new midnight-blue Prius with a bumper sticker stating Let Us Not Become The Evil We Deplore. The sentiment seemed beyond even Amare’s reproach. You couldn’t help pointing it out.

  He grunted. “Too late for that.”

  You swerved your car into an empty spot. “Yeah, well, better that than Support Our Troops.”

  “Some of those people have relatives over there,” said Bill.

  Amare unbuckled his seatbelt and stared out the rear window. “That doesn’t mean they’re not missing the point.”

  June, still half asleep and all but invisible during the ride over, faced the backseat.

  “The point,” said Bill, “is that they want their loved ones, who are risking getting blown to a million fregging pieces, to feel supported if they make it home.”

  “I completely disagree with that,” countered Amare. “A Support Our Troops bumper sticker is purely antagonistic. It challenges anyone who knows better to point out that this war is bullshit.”

  “My brother is in Iraq,” said June.

  Amare didn’t blink. “Shit. That sucks for him.”

  “His pool cleaning business went under. The Army said his tour would only be a year. His wife and kid would get health care and everything.”

  “How long has he been there?”

  “Four months.”

  “Sometimes I think I should just go back to Providence,” said Bill, “live with my parents and wait for the world to end.”

  “That’s stupid,” you said, preferring to address Bill’s fatalism to June’s brother’s situation. June’s brother was the first person from your generation that you’d known to go to war. When you and June had been a real couple, you’d seen him with some frequency. The two of you had gotten along well, shot hoops at the park down the street from his apartment; he’d even been your guest a couple of times at the Wednesday night pick-up game. It embarrassed you that June had withheld something so big.

  “You’re not moving home and the world’s not going to end. Not today. Today we’re picking up some job applications. That’s it. Let’s not make the
little things harder than they need to be.”

  “I don’t know if I can stomach this,” said Amare.

  “No one asked you to come in,” said Bill. “I don’t want you coming in there with us if you’re gonna shit all over everything.”

  Amare scratched his stubbly cheek; translucent flakes of skin, illuminated by the sunlight, floated through the stuffy air. “They got a salad bar?”

  “It’s good,” you said brightly. “They’ve got marinated artichokes, roasted bell peppers, beets.”

  “My colon could sure use a scraping,” he said. “But I’m not paying ten bucks for a fucking salad though, if that’s what it costs.”

  “Christ!” said Bill. He got out of the car, slammed the door and headed toward the entrance. June, taking up as little room as possible in the passenger seat, picked her ravaged nails, the only visible physical manifestation, other than the slight discoloration beneath her left eye, of a life in turmoil.

  “You ready?” you said.

  She exhaled. “So I’m supposed to go in there and beg some girl you used to sleep with for a job, is that the idea?”

  A surge of electric current passed through your veins. You wrung the steering wheel like a boa constrictor squeezing the last drop of life from a mouse. June was surgical. No one could open you up and prick your nerves faster or more efficiently. Now you had to flee. Anything said in anger would be filed away for later, exhumed when she needed evidence of your cruelty. You opened the car door but didn’t move from your seat. You opened your mouth to speak but found no words.

  “I’ll stay with you, June,” said Amare. Your mouth snapped shut in surprise. The two of them rarely engaged in direct conversation; Bill was the conduit through which June and the boys communicated. In fact, you weren’t certain you’d ever heard Amare say her name.

  She looked up from her nails, caught his reflection in the rear view mirror. “You will?”

  “This place looks like a fucking nightmare.”

  “Didn’t you have Whole Foods in Olympia?” she said.

  “Sure, but I got my groceries at work…the Olympia Food Co-op. None of this corporate bullshit.”