Lomita For Ever

by Trevor Eve

  Which is what you pay for.

  At least what she was paying for.

  *

  The separation had been a long drawn-out event.

  He presumed they usually were, when the truth of his marital partnership and the reality of the birth father of his son, who was now almost three, became apparent.

  They had been married for twelve months when she became pregnant. His delight and enthusiasm for the whole process was unquestioned and being conventional, a reaction, he always thought, to the lack of organisation in his parents’ life; he desired it and believed it to be the correct thing to do. Marriage and the creation of a family. He felt it would consolidate what was proving to be increasingly difficult.

  The marriage, although he was convinced he was in love, lacked a closeness. It was as if his wife did not understand the concept of love anymore, of caring, or indeed of being a mother, so his relationship with his boy, Jacob, became consuming in a way that was both paternal and maternal. He wondered, on an almost permanent basis, why she ever married him in the first place, even though at the time it seemed inevitably perfect, but the cruel blow of angry truth was revealed on a Wednesday night as he was bathing Jacob – his customary way to spend an evening after he had prepared his food – when father and son played together for half an hour before the first little signs of grumpiness intimated the start of bedtime tiredness. He always looked forward to telling Jacob a little story, and hoped that in return Jacob looked forward to those moments as much.

  It was then, towelling Jacob dry with the happy sounds uttering from his mouth, forming the words in the relentlessly adorable way that makes each one a gem, that his wife, after a day of yet more friction, opened the door of the bathroom and in the tradition of continuing a row that he assumed was over, told him that he was not the baby’s father.

  *

  The moment froze; his love, he was aware, did not change towards his son for the slightest of seconds, his disbelief at her words was solid in conviction, and his first reaction was that she was just trying to say the thing that she knew would hurt him the most.

  He continued the towelling-down, picked up his son and carried him to what he considered to be the safety of the boy’s bedroom. He wanted him to hear no more, anxiety was spreading across the little boy’s face as his concern for his mother’s now increasing rage became clear. Her concern for Jacob was non-existent. She followed Ever into the room with a force and determination that disturbed.

  ‘You think I’m fucking with you, don’t you? That it’s not the truth, but it is. It fucking is. I’m telling you.’

  It seemed to be an anger growing out of her own guilt.

  Jacob started to cry, probably not out of understanding but just from the tone of his mother’s voice. Ever didn’t have a response, save a quiet:

  ‘I’m going to read Jacob a story, you can stay if you like but, please, he needs to be calm before he goes to sleep.’

  ‘Fuck you!’

  Came the reply and the door shut firmly, with a positive close, but not, he noticed, a slam. The temper was worn out and he thought the words had been calculated to punish and cause a temporary pain. Which of course they did.

  He couldn’t now remember what had brought this extreme revelation to the proceedings save that it was about the usual why didn’t she carry on doing her job, it would bring her some satisfaction, and her consistent response of why should she. She’d married him, he was a successful lawyer, why the fuck did she need to work. It was her choice and she didn’t want to do it anymore.

  Because, love-of-my-life-wife, if you don’t want to work, then maybe when I get back in the evenings and I’m tired, as much as I love doing all the domestic things, just once, just fucking once, it would be great if a meal was cooked or Jacob had been bathed, so I could, you know, relax.

  But he never put voice to those thoughts, he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, not quite like that. Close to it, but no, when he did, when he had spoken out, it was with just a little more fucking tact, for God’s sake.

  It made no difference.

  He was tired of it all, in his own way, but had never considered the end of the marriage, let alone the thought that he might hear those words.

  Not the cruellest words he could hear.

  He continued with the bedtime process, told Jacob his story. A story that was not from a book but one that continued over the months to pour effortlessly out of his head, about Billy and Pete and Rosie, the redheaded beauty who joined the two boys in their endless adventures and who they both adored, and Mr Magee who always got them out of trouble. Jacob’s little sobs had quieted now, and his eyes started to close as Ever reflected on the possibility of the truth having been spoken.

  His eyes too closed, lying next to the bundle that he loved more than anything. And he wondered behind his closed eyes why the idea of divorce never came into his mind.

  *

  The repeated question started with:

  ‘Hey, where the fuck have you gone?’

  Rising to a shout—

  ‘Hey! Hey!’

  Then the discussion of occupation and intentions in life continued and the not always inevitable exchange of contact information was begun.

  ‘So, email is always the easiest way to get hold of me,’

  She was saying, but he was not fully in her world.

  ‘And the address is A Tracy, that’s A – T – R – A – C – Y @—’

  He stopped her right there with a white-faced exhalation that contained the word:

  ‘What?’

  Somewhere during the last ounce of pouring out breath.

  ‘Tracy.’

  She said.

  ‘My name is Anne Tracy, why so dumb-shit shocked? Simple enough name.’

  Ever said nothing and did a lot. Like getting dressed, no polite ‘sorry’, or ‘have to go’. Just a silence that left Anne Tracy with a look of bewildered sadness and a feeling of being revolting.

  ‘What the fuck – what the—?’

  ‘I am going. Have to go. Go.’

  And the door was his only aim and he shot straight through it, down the stairs to the parking lot, drove for ten minutes till he pulled up at the start of El Paseo, and wound down the window.

  Thought he was going to vomit and then opened the door.

  And did.

  *

  He felt at that moment that his luck with women was not the strongest card in his pack.

  The psychic had said not to sleep with a girl who would want to sleep with him by the name of Tracy, as she carried HIV, and this person would change his life. He had this mantra in his head. She also predicted that he would find a solitary card – the Ace of Hearts.

  He had left the psychic’s apartment, a block to the east of Park Lane in London, he was walking along and saw on the pavement a playing card – the Ace of Hearts – just lying face up, he picked it up, his hand shook a little. So, she talked sense: this authenticated her prediction, in his mind at any rate. Hence his dedication to the mantra – just make sure then you don’t fuck a Tracy. Make sure you make sure you don’t fuck a Tracy.

  He just had.

  He just had.

  But he didn’t know if she had HIV.

  His second thought was to drive back and ask her, his first thought was to get drunk. How could he ask her, and if she had, would she say? And if she said she had, would he want to hear it? And if she said she was on medication, that her viral load was undetectable, what would he do then?

  Better to live in a state of his familiar disbelieving denial.

  It wouldn’t necessarily mean that he could get it, that he would die. Not with modern antiretrovirals.

  Did it?

  What did the psychic say?

  That he would get it. No, that she had it. Change his life. Oh God. That was all. All? Of course – he could get checked. What is the percentage chance?

  No, stop it, get drunk.

  Forget.

  He drove back
to his hotel and with the spirit of Einstein, started the process that leads to drunkenness. Made the resolve in the light of the possibility of looming death to avenge his father and fell asleep. The next morning, he checked out of the hotel, and also made the decision to get himself checked after the dreaded incubation period that the virus required to take hold.

  Three weeks, he researched, was the time frame.

  He started the drive back to Los Angeles.

  His reason for the journey to Palm Springs on his arrival in California, apart from astrological advice, had been to play a round of golf at the Monterey Country Club in Palm Desert in honour and memory of his father. The round of golf that had never got beyond that first tear-soaked tee. They had played there from when Ever was an eight-year-old and they were the moments he treasured the most. His father taught him everything he knew about the game, Ever was a scratch player by the time he was sixteen. He was saddened that he hadn’t managed to fulfil the tribute.

  But it was not to be, and now he was pulling into the gas station to be aided by the friendly South Asian man before the drive back to the business end of his journey.

  And Interstate 10.

  Chapter Eleven

  Ever had been born in Los Angeles.

  Well Santa Monica to be precise, at St John’s Hospital. His life was a yo-yo, a peripatetic existence, back and forth to Los Angeles and the shocking gloom of the West Midlands. This depended on the whim of his father and the mental state of his mother.

  His father was born in the Midlands and had a small house there, that looked like the original design for a Barratt Home. An easy construction to replicate, like the typical child’s drawing, front door in the middle, windows up and down either side, and a garage, for the emerging popularity of the car in the 1950s, on the side.

  Ever always thought it was out of proportion, that there was too much space for the car. He worked it out one day, pacing, and was disturbed to realise that the car had more room than he did to sleep.

  Ever’s father had been left the house by his father, and as an artist he was grateful, to have a base, at least.

  A free base.

  His mother and father separated when he was fourteen, his mother taking the house in England where he followed, for his education, leaving his father in Los Angeles, and Ever then made the frequent trips, typical of the child of divorce, back and forth. It was not a bad way, Ever soon realised, to spend your teenage years.

  So his walk into Beverly Hills that morning was to go past the doctor’s office on Bedford Drive, three blocks west of Rodeo, with the intention not of going in, but just to be comforted by the knowledge of its presence. A doctor who had known him all his life and who he knew in three weeks he was going to need. He received that comfort, seeing the name of the practice on the board displaying the occupants of 420 Bedford Drive.

  *

  But this fresh day, with Lomita and a hangover in his head, brought about a journey to a different venue.

  To the lawyer’s office on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley.

  An easy car ride, it was just off Highway 101, and after travelling a block past the exit he was pulling up in the parking lot looking for a shaft of shade in which to park his Utah-plated rental. A good deal he had crafted through Hotwire on a new-model Land Rover Discovery, so he felt he was moving around this familiar, but nonetheless foreign country in a little haven of the old country. He had picked it up at the Sixt rental company on La Cienega.

  ‘It came in from Utah. That’s got to be seven hundred miles I guess. Salt Lake City. Never been myself.’

  The rental man spoke with deliberation and pride. Either in the achievement of the car or his country. It was his country, of course, thought Ever. This is America after all. It was a pride in his country.

  *

  Ever just saw it as a lucky escape from Salt Lake City, a place where it was hard to get a drink, so he didn’t much care for it, and neither, he was sure, did the car; its main concern was to be put in some shade. A tree was all there was but the sun would move and he knew he would return to an oven. An English oven, built in Liverpool, and owned by India.

  The elevator released him on the third floor. He had spruced himself up and put on the grey suit jacket that he had neatly hung on the little hook supplied by the rear seat grab handle.

  Ron Riley Associates, Attorney at Law, the plaque said, printed on plastic. He thought that it needed the gravitas of brass.

  Ever was standing in front of a blank-faced receptionist, one he’d never seen there before, she was listening with a vagueness that seemed to place her elsewhere, he was in the process of spelling his name. A man he had known his whole life arrived to interrupt at double LL. This man who had named his son Everett. Not out of any kind of admiration for Ever as a person, he was only two at the time, but just because he liked the name. Everett.

  They gave each other that tentative hug that familiar males do, although the Americans have a greater reticence towards male intimacy than the Europeans, where a kiss is sometimes offered to the cheek. So, a little bit awkward, but meant with a genuine warmth, he then offered Everett his condolences at the tragic circumstances of his father’s death.

  Ron looked, of course, older; his eyes betrayed the look of a man who had spent the last thirty-five years staring at paperwork and the computer’s arrival had in no way dimmed the strain that produced a shade of grey around their sockets.

  The death had happened two weeks ago.

  The burial had taken place after a perfunctory police investigation.

  His father was found, having apparently been bending down to mend a leaking pipe that had continued to leak. He was found two days later floating in the flow of water that had now alerted neighbours as it seeped out of the house and down the path.

  He was bloated and unrecognisable, still holding the spanner in his hand, having suffered a heart attack.

  His heart had broken.

  His life reduced to nothing.

  The leaking pipe remaining untended, bleeding its purpose away. His talent had finally been drowned. The police ruled out any suggestion of foul play, the scene seemed to reveal its own clarity, and their immediate decision presupposed laziness rather than any sense of conviction, or indeed much interest on their part.

  Paperwork is such a curse. Ain’t it?

  Ever organised the funeral from England with the express intention of not being there himself. He was, he realised, having booked his flight, actually incapable of being there. He had no desire to witness the funeral parlour’s attempt at making the body presentable and cried the whole day long while the funeral took place 6,000 miles away.

  His heart ached, the relentless implanted pain of an increasing agony, and he longed for his father to be alive. To be alive as he remembered him, before disillusionment scuppered his take on life. His father’s two friends, one, his old canvas maker from Culver City, and the other, his drinking partner from Chez Jay’s on Ocean Avenue, and of course dear Ron and surprisingly Everett, his namesake, were the only ones in attendance. So, an Everett was there, not with the same intense emotional connection but with a physical presence and a name that matched. After the ceremony at the Larson Family Crematorium on Broadway in Santa Monica his ashes were scattered off the Santa Monica Pier in memory of his hazy, drunken walks from Chez Jay’s on his way home to Chautauqua Boulevard that led down to the ocean. The surfer’s shack he ended up in, one of the few on that road, was at the bottom end of the hill, so he could still hear the sound of the ocean that rolled with him to sleep at night.

  Ever could not go through so much pain again in so short a time.

  *

  It had been confirmed only three months earlier, after a DNA test.

  His son was indeed not his.

  And the tragedy was, he supposed, that he never really questioned that his wife shouldn’t have custody of the child; in the absence of divorce proceedings, he hadn’t even contested it, he still felt
that he was his baby boy.

  She was living in their marital home, but he knew, in his heart he knew, but denied himself the cerebral acknowledgement, who the father of the child was.

  His love did not diminish in the slightest, but he felt a pain in his guts all the time knowing that the boy would grow up calling that man father and he would, he presumed, be known as Uncle Ever.

  A remote, but ever-loving figure, in the distance of his growing boy’s life.

  He missed him with the pain of an absent limb.

  Ron presented Ever with the documentation, his father’s accounts and assets which according to the will were transferring to him. He signed with a sadness for his father, knowing that the business end of his life had amounted, in the final tally, to nothing.

  ‘I hope I see you again. I mean, please keep in touch.’

  A surprising expression of sentiment from Ron, but this time he avoided the embrace with an extended hand.

  *

  The further lack of successful cards in the pack of females that were dealt to Ever came in the form of his mother. She also failed to make an appearance at her ex-husband’s funeral.

  She was a wonderful, fun-loving, gin-drinking party animal, who Ever adored and indeed she adored him, but she had never really understood the concept of being a mother. A party she understood, emotion she understood, when it related and connected to her, and those emotions were like a roller coaster, up and down, and without the benefit of medication, understandable in the absence of a professional diagnosis; she was tossed about like a boat on an ever-changing sea and you never knew what ocean you were going to be sailing on. The happy, becalmed, or the viciously white-capped, aggrieved, and sadly churning waters.