What We Never Had

by Zach Wyner

  “See you soon, Josh?” called Sadie, an unmistakable question mark affixed to your name.

  You stopped, carts and their impatient captains piling up behind you. “Yeah,” you said. “Definitely.”

  In a daze, you stepped in front of a hulking Land Rover and it came to a lurching halt. The incredulous driver, an orange-skinned woman with platinum blond hair, raised her hands in the universal what-the-fuck gesture of exasperation. You smiled and waved. “Hey,” you said, to which she scowled. You walked the one residential block to your car, thinking about Sadie. About how she didn’t so neatly fit into any of the categories you’d identified for people your age: those who put their careers first, those who put humanity first, those who put art first, and those without agency, who put nothing first unless it was put there by someone else. Sadie was an outlier. You wanted to know more—what motivated her, what scared her, where she wanted to go, whether she still bit the tip of her thumb during sex.

  Leaves blew down June’s old street. On the sidewalk, a black and white spotted cat lounged in a splash of sunshine. You approached it steadily, its eyes gray and lazy, the sunshine having lulled it into languorous inertia. You took a knee and it rolled onto its side, allowing you to stroke its soft belly fur. You hoped you’d never be too preoccupied to see the sunshine splashes in the landscape of each waking day. Suddenly, without warning, the cat struck out with a precise paw. You yanked your hand back, but a jagged claw caught your flesh, leaving behind angry pink slash. Droplets of blood quickly appeared. You sucked on the wound and spit, as the still supine cat watched, its paw poised for another strike should you have the gall to pet it again.

  “I thought we were friends,” you said.

  The cat yawned and looked away.

  You drove to The Homework Club, thinking of a night about a year before in a sleazy nightclub with Harrison—women and their sweat-glistened flesh; drunken men drooling like overheated boys, facing an array of ice cream flavors without the protective pane of glass. The room was sticky and humid—a viscous secretion on the tip of Hollywood’s erect cock. You’d told Harrison that you didn’t know what you were doing there. When he said that you were still a man and a man was allowed to look, you just laughed, confessed that looking did nothing for you. These women had nothing on your girl.

  “You’re hopeless,” he said.

  You agreed, happily, so privileged to be beyond the reach of sultry strangers, to have all your desire funneled towards a single living and breathing person whom you could cradle in your arms.

  You drove home that night, eager to demonstrate your passion, but June was nowhere to be found. Ever since Harrison had witnessed her temper, she’d thrown fits when the two of you hung out, convinced that the majority of your time together was spent plotting ways to leave her. At four in the morning, she staggered inside dead drunk, stripped and collapsed into bed. Your heart pounded in your chest while you waited for her to say something. You got out of bed, put on your robe and ventured downstairs for a smoke, took a slug of whiskey for good measure. By the time you returned to bed, you’d calmed down. Hurt people hurt people. June couldn’t be blamed for fearing you’d desert her like everyone else.

  You nestled up beside her, skin against skin, and put your arm around her stomach. Her head moved ever so slightly and her hand found your wrist. “You reek,” she said and threw your arm off of her.

  You moved to the other side of the bed and watched her naked back rise and fall in feigned sleep. Her nudity mocked you. Dangled tantalizingly close, she dared you to take her by force, to make yourself the villain, to demonstrate that you were as wretched and vulgar as the rest of them. It made you so deeply sad, for you and for her, that she wouldn’t let you share what was in your heart.

  *

  In the meager shade provided by the Homework Club awning, Adrienne, the other woman in your life, leisurely read a paperback. You watched from your car as she lifted her head and stared out into space from behind a pair of pink-rimmed Ray-Bans, contemplating whatever nugget of wisdom she’d just absorbed. Apparently she hadn’t seen you pull up to the curb. You had dichotomous urges to either jump out of the car and give her a hug, or drive to the coast, sit on an isolated beach and let the waves usher you into the type of trance that your worries could not infiltrate. Your head ached. It was going to take a good long nap or a gallon of coffee to get you through the day.

  Still tingling your extremities was the residue of Sadie’s flirtations. But even if you were interested, what could you do? Your ex-ish girlfriend was sleeping in your bed and there was no good explanation for it. In your gut, helping June made sense, but your gut had a lousy fucking memory.

  You got out of the car and threw your arms wide. “All the world’s a stage!” you bellowed over the street noise. “And all the Joshes and Adriennes merely players.”

  She peered over the top of her sunglasses, looking at you as though you were a circus clown or some other childhood relic long since outgrown.

  You unlocked the door to the Homework Club and held it open. “‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends.’”

  “I can’t believe I asked for this.”

  “Relax. That’s the extent of my Shakespeare.”

  “That’s it? I thought you were an actor.”

  “I was.” The room was stuffy. You switched on the air conditioning and began taking the chairs down from the table nearest the window. “An aspiring film actor. I did a lot of theater in college but Hollywood has no patience for substance.”

  “That sounds like a cop out.”

  “It’s the truth.” You lowered yourself into a chair and rubbed the bridge of your nose. “I took some classes after I came home, wanted to stay sharp. My teacher assigned me a scintillating scene study of Feeling Minnesota before I gave it all up to write my own crappy screenplays and tutor the likes of you.”

  “Feeling Minnesota? That’s a movie?”

  “What they call in the industry a ‘rom com’, featuring the comedic stylings of Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz.”

  “Jesus Christ. That sounds torturous.”

  “No. Torture was having to watch a duo in my class workshop a series of Miller Light commercials.”

  “Now you are joking.”

  “I wouldn’t do that to you, Adrienne. I have too much respect for you. Best that you know the ugly truth about this profession from the start. It’s positively soul-crushing to discover such things after years of harboring grand illusions about meaning and truth.”

  “That’s not gonna happen to me,” she said. “If I decide to be an actor, I’m going to be a stage actor. I don’t care about money and fame.”

  You bit your lip. “Fair enough.”

  Her tone informed you that you’d arrived at that moment when, as a teacher, you needed to jettison the sarcasm and let the obvious contradictions in her statement slide. Ushered around in a luxury SUV by a man in a tuxedo, attending a private school with an annual tuition of at least thirty thousand dollars, the beneficiary of daily tutoring for the better part of high school, and the soon-to-be applicant at a number of liberal arts colleges that would cost an easy quarter million, Adrienne managed to say that she didn’t care about money with a straight face. Maybe it was true. Maybe she would have given it all up to go to public school, live in a modest Valley apartment, and eat dinner with her parents every night. Only time would tell. But eschewing capitalism after twenty-two some-odd years of suckling at its teat was easier said than done.

  The two of you rehearsed a scene that had been giving her a lot of trouble, a difficult scene for a tenth grader because of the homoerotic subtext. The scene, between two housewives, purported to be about gardening techniques. Adrienne didn’t get it. She thought it was a useless piece of dialogue and could not for the life of her decipher any source of tension. You could see why the director had cast her in the part; the problem was t
hat she couldn’t. She resorted to trying to find drama in the text and performed the lines as though the meaning was on the surface.

  “You need to write another set of dialogue,” you said.

  “What do you mean?”

  You tapped the script. “An unspoken line of dialogue for each spoken one. These words have a literal meaning, but what else is your character trying to express?”

  She frowned. “I don’t know.”

  “We, people, all of us, we’re always after something, right? Otherwise, what use would we have for language?”

  “Language was created so we could exchange ideas.”

  “Ideas that would help us get our greedy hands on what we wanted but didn’t have. Whether that’s admiration, food, power, sex, or inner peace, desire is at the root of all communication.”

  Adrienne blushed.

  “I’m sorry,” you said. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “You think this scene is about sex?”

  You shrugged. “Maybe. At least partially.”

  Her eyes opened wide. She looked accusingly at the script and then back at you. “My character is like, in love with her friend. That’s it, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But they’re both married.”

  “True.”

  “To men.”

  You bit your tongue. She inhaled loudly through her flared nostrils, brought the script within a few inches of her face and squinted, as though the words, if viewed through a magnifying lens, might reveal their true intent.

  You leaned back in your chair. “You could make it be about something else if you wanted to—just as long as this scene isn’t a conversation about the virtues of tomatoes over cucumbers. You don’t want to subject your audience to that.”

  “Dammit!” she said and slammed her elbows into the table before dropping her head into her hands. “I’m so stupid!”

  “C’mon now. None of that.”

  “My stupid drama teacher thinks I’m a lesbian just because I like poetry and I don’t dress like a slut.”

  You patted her back. “Maybe your drama teacher just thinks that it’s adult subject matter and that you can handle it.”

  “He thinks I’m a lesbian!”

  You searched the room for a conversation piece that would allow you to gracefully change the subject. Out the window, you spied the neighboring falafel place. “You want to go next door. Get a soda?”

  “Everybody thinks it!” she said, folding her arms on the table in front of her, burying her face in them and convulsing with a series of jagged sobs.

  “Adrienne,” you said, wanting desperately to put an arm around her. But The Homework Club was empty, and you had strict rules about physical contact with students you were alone with.

  She raised her face from the table, wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her red and black checkered shirt. “I’m not a lesbian.”

  “Okay,” you said, folding your hands in your lap and trying, with your tone and your eyes, to convey as much compassion as humanly possible. “I believe you. But if you were, it wouldn’t matter.”

  “Would you please listen to me? I’m in love with someone! And he’s not a girl. He’s older than me and he’s sensitive and smart and beautiful.”

  The emptiness inside the Homework Club, the absence of teenagers and bosses and tutors, expanded around you like the silence that follows an ill-timed joke. Your stomach dropped as Adrienne’s eyes beseeched you to believe.

  “Adrienne.”

  “His name is Corey. He’s the lead in the play and he plays the guitar and sings and he probably thinks I’m a lesbian too!”

  You closed your eyes and thanked whatever there was to thank that you weren’t the smart, sensitive, older guy.

  “Josh?”

  “Seriously,” you said. “Soda time.” You stood up and put on your baseball cap. “You gonna join me?”

  “Soda has corn syrup.”

  “Adrienne.”

  “Corn syrup causes cirrhosis.”

  You frowned. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. It can’t be metabolized. Your liver needs to filter it out of your body.”

  “One soda?”

  She huffed. “Fine.”

  You opened the door to Pita Time! and the smell of the shawarma you’d ingested daily for months hit you like a left hook. Your stomach, like Amare subjected to mainstream media or Bill subjected to the Red Sox bullpen, struggled to maintain its composure. You ordered a ginger ale and bought Adrienne a Dr. Pepper. The two of you sat at the counter, quietly sipping as the saccharine liquid lacquered your respective worries and poisoned your essential organs.

  “I need a vacation,” she said.

  “I hear you.”

  “Really. If it weren’t for the play, I think I’d just stop turning in homework until my school threatened to expel me and my parents sent me away to some kind of boarding school.”

  You didn’t know how to respond. As an employee of her parents, your duty here was clearly to encourage her to stay the course. But you didn’t even know her parents, they never took the time to come down and talk about their daughter, and if you were being honest, her idea didn’t sound so misguided. If anyone needed to get away from home, it was Adrienne. As small of a window as two-and-a-half years might sound to an adult, it’s a lifetime to a fifteen year old. Who knew how much counseling she’d have to undergo to undo two-and-a-half years of damage inflicted by callous peers?

  “I think that you should keep working hard. Giving up is a tough habit to break.”

  Adrienne pondered this for a minute, chewing on her soda straw. “It smells like cat vomit in here,” she said.

  You laughed. “You want to go for a walk?”

  “What, and suck car exhaust? No thanks. Let’s just go back and work on the scene. You can teach me all about the virtues of boobs…I mean tomatoes.”

  “Adrienne!” You widened your eyes in faux shock.

  She giggled, covering her mouth with her hand.

  “How much time do we have?” she said. “Could you stay an extra thirty minutes? I have some geometry proofs that I have no idea how to do.”

  “Nothing would bring me greater pleasure.”

  “Well that’s the saddest thing I’ve heard all day.”

  “Hey!” you said, putting your hand on her shoulder. “We’re pals, aren’t we? I missed you these last couple of weeks.”

  She grinned and slurped her soda.

  *

  The diner where you retrieved June was little more than a mile from home, but upon glimpsing that onerous bag, you understood why she’d waited for a ride. Either she’d intended to disappear, or she’d wanted the bulk of her bag to convey the intention. She hoisted it into car and sank wordlessly into the passenger seat, refusing to make eye contact.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “Talk about what? How I’ve been sitting at that diner for hours, waiting for you to pick me up?”

  You rolled down your window, took a deep breath and tuned the radio to a jazz station playing early-sixties Coltrane. As you drove, she picked and bit the jagged edges of her fingernails and repeatedly cleared her throat, an old tic that made it impossible for you to be spared a single moment of her discontent. A couple blocks from the apartment, you pulled the car off the road alongside the park.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” you said.

  “Ugh.”

  “We can’t just go on acting like nothing’s changed.”

  She spun her head toward you, fixed you with her coal black stare. “Nothing has changed. Except that you went out last night with Harrison to talk shit about me and avoid my phone calls.”

  “Phone calls?”

  “I could tell that you were directing me right to voice mail.”

>   “That’s not even remotely true.” You dug into your pocket for your phone. “Look!” You scrolled through the index of missed and received calls. “There’s not a single missed call from you here.”

  “Aren’t you even going to ask me where I went last night?” She faced you and raised her eyebrows.

  You looked out the window and took a very deep breath. “It doesn’t matter, June. We’re not… This is not…”

  “He said he was doing anger management classes; he begged me to stay.”

  You gripped the steering wheel. “Please don’t do this.”

  She laughed. “You’re pathetic.” Then she got out of the car, walked to a bench about ten yards away and sat down.

  You opened your door and stood, one leg still inside the car. Traffic sailed by, lashing your back with gusts of warm, dusty air. “June,” you said. She lit a cigarette and showed no sign of having heard you. “June!” A middle-aged woman in a red tracksuit squinted at you as she power-walked the dirt path. It took all your strength not to tell her to fuck off. You pulled her bag out of the back seat, marched over to the bench and dumped it at her feet.

  “I’m done.”

  She glanced down, snickered and stared off into the foliage.

  “You think this is funny?”

  “I think it’s fucking hilarious.”

  You pointed your finger at her. “You’re not coming back to my place until you stop fucking lying. You insist on creating these alternate realities in which I’m the bad guy, I’m responsible for your fucked-up life. It’s bullshit! What have I done wrong, June? What have I done besides give you food and shelter and try be a good friend?”

  “A good friend who fucks me and then threatens to throw me out.”

  You clutched your stomach. June had knocked the wind out of you many times, but this went deeper. “I never fucking want to see you again!” you screamed, trying to smother the pain in your gut with volume. “Do you hear me? I’m fucking done with this!” June didn’t so much as flinch. As if swallowed by the breeze, your words elicited no reaction. She just sat there, spine steeled, ears plugged with stony recalcitrance. Her only response to your rage—a slight tremor in the hand that brought the cigarette to her lips. No matter the context, June’s pride, like a giant redwood, was a humbling thing to behold.