Lomita For Ever

by Trevor Eve

  It was vetoed, in spite of the cold, beige besuited woman saying that it would be the most effective and quickest treatment to get him back on the road to recovery, and Ever was there in the room, but you must remember he was considered a nutter, so no acknowledgement of his presence from the moment he entered was ever proffered.

  He was institutionalised for four weeks; his workplace was initially told it was a bad case of flu, but with thanks to his doctor, who he also considered to be a friend, it had developed into a more serious and credible-sounding debilitating condition called pericarditis, which did not carry the same scary prejudice that clings to those with mental conditions. But it has the seriousness of being an inflammation of the lining of the heart.

  Good one, eh?

  Any questioning relating to his absence was effectively dealt with.

  No further questions asked; just sympathy pouring forth.

  *

  So you see, Ever did not have the best medical history to buy a gun.

  Yet as it was never recorded on his medical files and took place in England, he was in the clear.

  God help the world he was wandering through.

  But it was understandable that his thoughts of suicide were often and intense. The psychiatrist who has the power to fry the brain of another human being, claiming to understand the channels that run in this glutinous mass of grey and smelly blancmange that is the brain, is in Ever’s mind an absurdity, but it is, of course, questionable whether his mind is capable of that assessment.

  It was for the avoidance of the ECT, the major thing, that Ever bore an enormous gratitude towards his wife. His brain did not get cooked by the cold impersonality of the beige woman, who he remembers amidst the confusion and breakdown of the connections, the failure of the synapses to allow the neurotransmitters to dump their serotonin and dopamine into the synapse gap thus producing, through their connectivity, the process that is known as logical and positive thought.

  For three weeks with these drugs, with escorted walks around the grounds, in his down time, in his room, he could only face the banality of morning television, the simpler it was, the better, and when it was over he would draw.

  The same drawing, time after time.

  Of a house, a driveway, and a garage.

  That garage, bigger than his bedroom.

  He never thought he would be the same person again.

  *

  Ever was staring at the In-N-Out Burger drive-thru entrance.

  Twenty-seven.

  The number or the eventuality of that number wouldn’t leave, would go nowhere but with him.

  Clung to him twenty and seven.

  Two.

  Seven.

  It was there – twenty-seven paintings sold.

  That was good, wasn’t it?

  His father never knew. Would that have helped him? He never knew – the twenty-seven.

  Two and seven is nine. The trinity of trinities.

  That was good, wasn’t it? He was an artist who sold. Someone wanted him.

  Dad!

  Ever screamed, silent, in the car.

  Dad, can you hear? You were wanted 272727272727272727. I love you. Twenty-seven times you were loved. Weren’t you?

  Where are they?

  The magnificent twenty-seven. Where are they, those twenty-seven paintings? Are they glorious or miserable now? Wherever they are.

  Who’s watching them now?

  The horns of the cars behind, honking, unaware that a man had frozen. A man had stopped his life, or rather his life had just stopped.

  It was involuntary.

  It was not his choice. There was a man, a boy really, with an electronic order pad who was at first suggesting he make an order or move on and drive out, then telling him to order or move out, and the suggestion in his tone was that the next command would be quite simply, get the fuck out of here if you’re not going to order, but Ever, hearing, yes, and grasping the order of the words but not comprehending, could not move.

  A security man arrived and ordered him out of the car; he stepped out without objection, with the customary, ‘I hope you have no objection, sir, but I am obliged to remove your car from this property as you are causing a hold up and contravening…’

  The rest drifted into a significance he cared not for and there was no complaint from Ever as he was handed back the keys to his car, which now stood on the roadside, securely off In-N-Out Burger property, and he was no longer receiving abuse from the waiting customers. He was given a free bottle of water, and with,

  ‘You take care now.’

  From the security man, Ever climbed back in his car and just sat there.

  Blank, wondering whether his soul had ever really come back into him as a foetus and what was he doing leaving his wife, taking four weeks annual leave in one go, buying a gun, lying to an art gallery and including a woman he barely knew in a deception involving a collection of artwork, justifiably but heartlessly bought by a gallery owner.

  Who he hated.

  His thoughts, however, were not in that sequential order but came darting in a jumble of words and in varying intensity, with worry being the dominant emotion.

  What had he done?

  Who was he?

  Was he about to break again?

  He had taken himself off his pills six months ago, because he felt he could cope and because he had lost all sexual desire, something that he felt drove his wife away, well, further away than she already was, she was never too close.

  And the frames of the film had started to miss.

  There were bits that jumped, he missed the continuity from moment to moment. A jump like a turn of the head, then the head was back without the completed movement having happened in his brain, without the time experience that made it a continuous movement.

  That had happened again, while he was considering going for the full burger and fries at the In-N-Out.

  The frames leapt, he didn’t feel like him. He didn’t know who he felt like because he had no term of reference to feel like anyone else. But it was another person, another feeling, the feeling that he could do things that he wouldn’t want to tell anybody else about, through shame.

  Shame, that was it, it was a shame to be him at that time.

  He felt the overwhelming sadness and fear that he would lose control and be back, back in an institution with all that he wanted to achieve gone.

  It wasn’t that he wanted to live long anyway, just live to make a little mark.

  To live and to feel love and tell people he loved them, really loved them, he thought, and that he was not full of anything bad.

  He wasn’t bad.

  He just didn’t feel too good.

  *

  Ever sat in the car and reflected with the warmth of wanting to love his wife.

  Clarissa.

  That was her name, he had allowed it to come into his brain for the first time. He had written her off. He had always felt that her decision to have a child with another man, with Adam the violinist, was an act of abandonment, and, he supposed, cruelty. But she had taken him through his breakdown, helped him, and what if, through his developing sexual incapacity, she had decided to have the child with another man and was never going to tell him and they would have grown up as a happy family unit? What if it was done with love, out of love?

  He had driven her away, she had never offered to leave, she was happy to remain, she just had at times found his behaviour intolerable, but then if he was insane, imbalanced, whatever they wanted to classify it as, and as far as she or anybody else knew, that was going to be it, forever, maybe she understandably wanted a child, and maybe this was her way of showering them with a love.

  As the thoughts were formulating in a brain operating at a low level of intensity that would have been on a control button at a point on the scale of two out of ten, even he was aware that there were a lot of what ifs, and buts, and suppositions. A family who had never got close to this perception of love in their relat
ionship, and he had just reacted in a primal way. A first base reaction. Aware that she could have been steps ahead, what if, in another way, she had got it all sussed, what if she wanted him still, with Jacob?

  Was it him who was incapable of realising it, of sensing the love between them? Had he got it so very upside down and back to front?

  A man who had misunderstood a situation.

  Rare.

  But would she return to the man who had given her the child? All his loving, his kindness seemed to disappear out of the window that he now wound down for air. Cracked, to allow the stream of hot evening air, full of toxic fumes as a million cars travelled home from where they’d come eight hours earlier, to fill his lungs and oxygenate his brain.

  His poor brain.

  He sometimes felt so sorry for his brain and wondered if he was responsible for it all going wrong or whether it was a progression of the predisposed genetic condition that could’ve been inherited, now that he was focusing, from either side of the family.

  Because there was his mother. God bless her, but she was still around and suffering from what she wouldn’t get diagnosis or treatment for. Ever remained convinced she was bipolar and a narcissist. She just claimed life’s unhappiness and drank her way through. The result, either way, was just disinterest.

  And either way tomorrow was Lomita Nairn day, and at that moment he wanted her to hear his words of love.

  And only her.

  To be the first one, with this moment of illumination. Would the lights stay on? Should he tell her he was mental? He felt a pang of hunger, but didn’t have the courage to rejoin the In-N-Out Burger line.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sushi.

  Simple, no car drive-thru involved, hopefully no line of any kind, and a straightforward process of ordering, and sake. God bless sake, but he didn’t bless the sake drinker. At least not in the morning.

  He drove then, slowly, very slowly to a little sushi bar in Beverly Hills, Shiki on Canon Drive.

  It was empty. Fine. It often was, not a good advertisement but he found the food to be delicious.

  He always sat at the counter in a sushi bar, he supposed in memory of his father, who first introduced him to the food. When his father first came to Los Angeles in 1980, having decided to change completely his style of painting, and life, coming, like so many before him, for the light. He had stayed at the Chateau Marmont Hotel, in the days before there was a restaurant in the evening, and he would go around the corner to a ramshackle building known as the Imperial Gardens – now a nightclub that was forever changing ownership, but was currently painted a hideous shade of pink, and called, he supposed appropriately, Pink Taco.

  There, in the old days, his father would sit at the bar and the food would arrive without ordering, then at the end of the night he and the chef, with whom he had struck up this silent rapport, would relocate to another room; it was a building of many rooms, closed off by dusty old curtains, and no one ever asked what went on behind some of the curtains. It was owned and run by an unsmiling old Japanese lady, with, one imagined, a ruthless control, and there they would sit with a bottle of vodka and play, at the now old-fashioned Pac-Man tables, getting pleasantly inebriated or totally trashed depending on mood and who was winning.

  So Ever always sat at the bar and tried, not always successfully, to create a relationship with the chef, to get suggestions of the delicacies of the day. A sushi bar is the one place that lends itself to eating alone. You have no self-consciousness about being Billy-no-mates, it just feels a perfectly natural thing to do. He felt at home. Comfortable.

  The counter at Shiki was always, for some reason, a bit greasy, and he wondered why they didn’t give it the same scrubbing attention they gave the preparation surface, just the other side of the glass.

  At the same time as ordering jalapeño yellowtail sashimi with ponzu sauce, and halibut sashimi, and some cooked yellowtail collar, he ordered, of course, a large Asahi beer, and some sake. Fashion has changed, it used to be always served hot, but now as the appreciation of the finer sakes has increased, cold is the order of the fashion aware. Ever didn’t count himself as one of those, and ordered it hot.

  He also asked for a pen and paper.

  If you pour the sake in the beer it is a faster high, but tonight he wanted to stay calm and sober. He was grateful for the calm, that the terror had decreased, that he could see and feel and sense, in his way, his concept of what he knew to be normal. The food was being prepared, something he always enjoyed, like a theatrical experience, to watch, having ordered the two dishes from the chef, the drinks and collar, being a hot dish, from the waitress. That was the tradition, although his collar order was passed immediately to the chef. Who cooked it in a little Belling-type electric grill. Simple, basic, but produces nectar. He was feeling a little more himself now, a little more of the soul he recognised was returning to his body. And after the first intake of beer, having asked the waitress if she wouldn’t mind pouring his sake, which of course she understood, it was considered bad luck to pour your own, at least he was told that once and had stuck to it, he ordered a beer for the chef and started to write.

  Dear Lomita,

  I came to Los Angeles with the singular intention of sorting out my father’s estate. He died nearly four weeks ago. I met you and had no intention of looking for any kind of liaison with anyone, it just happened, and I feel we like each other. I certainly do. And very much look forward to seeing you again tomorrow or today depending on when you read this. But I have a lot of explaining to do about my life and what has happened in it so far. Albeit it has been a short one, which I intend to do, the explaining I mean. To you, as our relationship develops, and I sincerely hope it will. But I have a confession to make. I went to see the gallery that bought my father’s entire collection of work ten years ago and said I wished to view it. They informed me that some of the paintings had been sold (something, sadly, my father never knew). They said that the remaining collection was warehoused out of town and before they could hang it for a viewing, understandably they would require references in terms of financial credibility in light of potential purchase. I couldn’t give my name as I am the son (for reasons that I can explain later) and secondly, I can in no way satisfy any kind of financial investigation. Although I have no idea what the price of purchase of these works would be, and only really just wanted to see them, I know what the gallery paid (will also go through that later). Here comes the embarrassing bit. I gave your name, in terms of you being the interested party as the collector and that I was acting for you. If you don’t want to see me tomorrow when I come round at six o’clock just send Manita to the door, tell me to go away and I will completely understand. The gallery has no info on you as I said you would be responsible for contacting them directly, so we can forget the whole thing. If you want. Please forgive me. I have had a bit of a bad day today in other ways and would be happy to explain that too, which might throw some light on my behaviour. If I don’t see you again (and I so don’t want that to be the case, even if it’s only to apologise for what I have done and then you can kick me out) it has been a privilege and an honour to meet someone so garlanded in beauty, intelligence, and finesse as you. Thank you for your company.

  With love, I think,

  Ever.

  p.s. Sorry if this is garbled and confusing I am drinking a little sake. Sorry.

  x

  He thought long and hard about putting the kiss at the bottom, but did so because the length of the thought process took him through another order of both the beer and the sake, so by that time, he needed to summon the discipline for just the one kiss.

  He asked for the bill, the check, and also if they had an envelope.

  They brought the first request, understandably, but failed on the second so he asked for another piece of paper and fashioned it into an envelope-y kind of thing, a memory from school days, wrote the name Lomita on the front, realising he still wasn’t sure of the spelling of Nairn,
especially after the beers, and didn’t want to get it wrong, securing the letter inside. Done. Good evening’s work. He hoped. Not that he was wishing to exploit her at all, but he felt genuinely stupid for what he had done and would be happy to continue their relationship whether she could help or not.

  Who knows, she might be broke too, although something in her manner seemed to suggest an ease with money, at least either past or present.

  He guessed he would soon find out.

  As he got up to leave, four girls rushed in and shouted across the restaurant, oblivious to whoever was in there, which as it happened, was only him.

  ‘Food to go, we’ve come to pick up our food.’

  Almost in a chorus, the last word food had the extended vowels that put it into a singing context; they were obviously regulars as the waitress smiled and no names were asked for in exchange. No one seemed to take offence at what Ever perceived as a rudeness, so if the staff didn’t, why should he? They looked at him as if he was sizing them up, which he wasn’t, and they blocked the exit, being pack cool. He politely said,

  ‘Excuse me please.’

  That seemed cue enough to prompt the mockery that only the hunting pack have the courage to engage in.

  ‘Oh, he’s British, a Brit, oh, an English man.’

  In the worst take on an English accent possible. Two were apple pie, pure blonde Americans and two were of mixed ethnicity, with an extract of Middle Eastern blood, that gave an even skin tone and smoothness of colour lending a natural and un-made-up glamour to their faces. All about sixteen or seventeen, products of the rich and living their own reality show. Ever smiled, they moved aside, as he hit the sidewalk, there was a white convertible BMW, with another girl sitting at the wheel as the car’s engine revved and then was put silently to rest.