by Kyra Davis
“But dancing in a cage—”
“Rocks,” I say definitively. “Dancing in a cage rocks.”
He lets out a rich laugh and it’s so . . . wonderful. Like his daughter is wonderful, and the rhythms he creates with his drums are wonderful. I’m sitting here in the middle of a world of wonderful.
And again, I absolutely don’t belong. I pick up my bagel from where I dropped it on the table and start to cover it with the sweet cream cheese. “What made you want to be the leader of the free world?”
“I think I could have made a difference,” he says as he opens the sun-dried tomato cream cheese. “The most important thing a president can do is surround himself with the best people. The best economists, the best military strategists, the best minds for education, agriculture, and so on. I am extremely good at recognizing the talents of others. I would have had the most impressive, efficient, and effective cabinet in history, and we would have helped shape this country’s legacy for the twenty-first century in ways we could all really feel proud of.”
I wipe my fingers off on a paper napkin, lean over, place my hands on his scalp, and proceed to move them around his head.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Checking for swelling.”
He chuckles and takes my hands in his with the intent of moving them away. But then something happens and he just . . . holds them. The backs of my hands are against his palms, and my own hands are supported and open. His eyes move over my lifeline, then up the length of my fingers, caressing my calluses with this invisible touch.
My teasing smile is gone.
Pull away, pull away . . .
But I don’t. I can’t. And when his thumb moves over my palm there’s a little chill. It starts at my shoulder blade and spreads across my back, down my spine. My lips part just a little, and when he looks up my heart just . . . stops.
You don’t belong here, you don’t belong here.
I press my lips back together, force myself to smile, and then, reaching deep inside myself, I find the discipline to remove my hands from his, bring them back to my plate, my eyes now turned away.
“So you think you could build a good team,” I say, careful to keep my voice completely casual, refusing to acknowledge that anything happened. Because it didn’t . . . not really. “Tell me about the motivations that you couldn’t put in a campaign speech.”
I don’t have to look up to know that Brad is still looking at me. I take a large bite of my bagel and reach for my coffee.
“When you were a kid,” he says, finally relaxing back into the sofa, “did people tell you that if you worked hard enough you could be president one day?”
I nearly spit out my bagel. “No,” I say, my mouth still partially full. “They told me that if I shut up and did what I was told I could marry a politician one day. You know, a successful one, just maybe not the most powerful man on earth. Then as I got older they altered the message and told me that if I shut up I might avoid expulsion.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
Brad laughs. “Well, they told me I could be president, but when people say that they don’t mean it. It’s one of those things patronizing adults say to kids to fool them into believing the world is a more equitable place than it is. But as a kid of five or six, all I got was the patronizing part. And I remember thinking, I’ll show these condescending SOBs, I will become president!”
I tuck a strand of pink hair behind my ear, take a sip of coffee. “That’s what you thought . . . at five or six?”
“Yes.” He shrugs, a small admission that he knows he’s weird.
“Huh.” I chew on that for a second. “So I take it you were not a just-playin’-with-my-Hot-Wheels-and-watching-Barney kind of kid.”
“I was more into Legos and the Discovery Channel.”
“Discovery? Racy,” I say as I take another bite. “Lots of crocodile-on-crocodile action. So did you tell people about your presidential ambitions?”
“Sure, why not? When I was a kid I believed I could do the things I put my mind to. I just needed to be disciplined, thoughtful, creative. I assumed that if I could master those talents the world would open up for me.”
“And now?”
“Now I know it’s not that simple.”
I hesitate, staring down at my half-eaten bagel. I lift my eyes to the side table, where June’s picture is prominently displayed. “Do you want to tell me about her mom?”
“Do you want to hear about her?” he asks, a note of surprise in his voice.
“Oh, I don’t know.” I shrug. Then after a few seconds I shake my head. “I take it back. I do know. I’d really like to know about June’s mom.”
He checks my expression, making sure that I mean it. And then slowly, he proceeds. “I met June’s mom at a party in San Francisco in the last weeks of summer before my senior year at Stanford,” he continues in a slightly more conversational tone. “She was about to enter Berkeley as a junior after studying at UCSB for two years, that’s where her family lived. At the time I thought she was the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen.”
I flash back to the photo in the sweater drawer. Suddenly I’m not so sure I want to hear about her, but I can’t think of a way to tell him I’ve changed my mind without sounding petty.
“So there I was, plotting my approach,” he says, looking up as a small bird thumps against the window and then departs. “But before I had it figured out she approached me and said, ‘You look like you have good genes.’ ”
“Excuse me?”
He laughs and shakes his head, as if still mystified by the encounter. “Do you know how many times I’ve replayed that scene in my mind? Particularly in light of what happened? But I don’t think she had any plans to get herself knocked up; in fact I’m sure of it. She was a genetics major and she was trying to be funny.”
“Right,” I say with a nod, “she just wanted to let you know that you looked like a master-race kinda guy. Funny.”
“I don’t think she meant it like that, either,” he says with a pacifying smile. “Whatever the case may be, it started us off. We began talking and I told her that I wanted to go to law school because, well, it’s important that the future president of the United States know the law, and she told me that she was going to cure cancer. I proposed marriage right then and there.”
“Did you.”
“She understandably didn’t take it seriously, but yes. I simply couldn’t see how anyone could vote against the guy who was married to the woman who cured cancer. With those kinds of bragging rights I figured they’d have to just hand over the keys to the Oval Office on my thirty-fifth birthday.”
I smile but keep my gaze on the bagel. He’s right, of course. Having a cancer-curing wife would be an asset to any politician. Having a cage-dancing wife would not.
“The point is, we clicked. I took her back to my dorm that very night. We dated for almost three months.”
“And then what? You just decided she wasn’t so great after all?”
“No, she’s the one who broke up with me. I was heartbroken,” he admits. “I was convinced I was in love.”
Fuck! I am so not liking this story!
“Why did she break up with you?” I ask, trying really, really hard not to sound bitter.
“She wasn’t ready to commit.” He shifts his position as if trying to get comfortable and takes a long sip of his coffee. “She wanted to get her PhD from Cambridge. Work in the best labs in Switzerland. Being tied down to a man at such a young age . . . she thought it would hold her back.”
“Yeah, you know what else can do that? Pregnancy.”
God, I’m such a bitch.
He doesn’t respond. His silence makes me feel worse. “I’m sorry,” I mutter. “I didn’t mean . . . Sometimes I just say stupid shit. I . . .” I throw up my hands, not sure how to redeem myself.
“It’s okay,” he says quietly. “I’ve said worse. When she asked to see me less than a month
after our breakup, I assumed she was coming back to me and I let it be known that I was more than ready for that. But that’s not what she wanted. And when she told me the real reason why she was there . . . I got angry. And I got scared. And my pride was hurt. I said things to her that I may never forgive myself for.”
I put my coffee down, finally lifting my eyes to him. “It was a bad situation,” I remind him. “She took you off guard and she was kinda telling you that you were going to have to trash every one of the plans you had made for yourself. I don’t know if anyone would have handled that well.”
“She wasn’t asking me to change my plans,” he corrects. “She calmly told me she should have been stronger and said no when I pressured her to have sex without a condom.”
The way he says the word pressured makes it clear that he doesn’t think there was any pressuring involved.
“She suggested that I lacked a certain self-awareness.” His jaw is positively rigid. “She said I needed to understand that I could be manipulative, and that the extensive amount of time I spent strength training was indicative of a latent misogynistic aggression. She said that while I probably wasn’t fully conscious of it, I could be physically intimidating, particularly during intimate encounters.”
“Are . . .” I sit back, shake my head. “I’m sorry, but are you fucking kidding me?”
“No,” he says with a humorless smile. “And then she told me that all my issues were simply an inevitable result of my upbringing as well as being raised in a patriarchal society that was obsessed with social Darwinism. But she was certain I could get it all worked out in therapy—oh, and by the way, would this be a good time for me to write her a check to cover half the cost of next week’s abortion, or would it be easier for me to just pay her back next month.”
“Wow.” I shake my head. “That’s . . . I . . . wow.”
“She was twenty years old, on her own for the first time and pregnant,” he says quietly, his demeanor morphing into something more brooding. “She was embarrassed, she was angry, and most of all she was scared. If I had been able to put aside my hurt feelings and pride, if I had reached out to her at all, everything might have ended up differently.”
“But you didn’t,” I fill in.
“No. Instead I told her to go find the real father and have him pay for the fucking abortion. I called her a whore and a liar. I called her . . .” He hesitates and scratches at his light stubble. It’s a nervous gesture that seems totally incongruous to his normal state of cool confidence. “I used words that I have never used before or since about a woman. I kicked her out of my place and then I trashed it. Almost a thousand dollars in damages, all caused by me.”
He’s looking at me now like he assumes I must be appalled. I actually check behind me to see if there’s some sort of church lady over my shoulder to give him the reaction he expects. “Oh,” I finally reply, “are you waiting for my judgment? When I was sixteen my married, drug-dealing fuck buddy stopped returning my calls and I reacted by beating the shit out of his Corvette with a baseball bat. So it sucks that you broke a few light fixtures and called your pseudointellectual ex a whoring cunt, but if you’re trying to freak me out you’re gonna have to do a little better than that.”
He laughs. “I have never met anyone like you.”
I reach forward and squeeze his hand and say in a hushed voice, “That’s a good thing.”
He glances down at my hand and now I immediately move to take it away, but he stops me, sandwiching my hand between his. “Let’s go somewhere.”
“What?” I say with a slightly shocked laugh. “You mean, like, for breakfast? We just got bagels.”
“No. June’s going home with a friend from school today. Let’s go somewhere.”
“I . . . I don’t understand.”
“Have you ever been to the LACMA?” he asks.
“No.”
“It’s the best art museum in LA County. It has some really interesting multicultural exhibits and—”
“You are avoiding telling me the rest of this story,” I interrupt as the realization hits me. It actually surprises me. Brad doesn’t avoid things. He doesn’t have to because he’s so insanely together . . . right?
His grip tightens on my hand, and for several seconds he doesn’t say anything at all. “Stanford made me go to counseling.”
“Um, okay. Been there, done that. Did it help?” I ask skeptically.
“Oddly enough it did.” He finally lets go of my hand, scratches at his stubble again. “And I took responsibility for my part in things. I called her at least a dozen times trying to apologize, but she wouldn’t take my calls. I sent her a check. She sent it back. Months went by, I applied to Harvard, dated a few other people, but, still, I knew I had unfinished business. People told me to let it go but I needed some kind of closure. I needed to prove to her that I wasn’t the Neanderthal she had made me out to be.”
“How were you going to do that?” I ask warily.
“I don’t know, but I knew it started with a face-to-face apology. Maybe it ended there, too. So I drove up to Berkeley and I went to her favorite coffee shop.” Outside there’s the sound of small children laughing in the courtyard. Brad glances in that direction, but I get the feeling that whatever he’s seeing happened a long time ago. “I was about to call and ask her to meet me, and swear that if she gave me three minutes I would never bother her again. But then she walked in.”
“And she hadn’t gotten the abortion,” I say, wincing just a little.
“She was very pregnant, and she had already found a family to give my child to.”
“Wait,” I say, putting my hand over my heart, “can she do that?”
“She told the adoption agency that she had gotten drunk at a house party and passed out. She told them that at least one man, maybe more, had taken advantage of the situation. Since she couldn’t identify anyone she decided not to go through the trauma of reporting it. It was the perfect catch-22. If I didn’t come forward I would never see my child. If I did I would have to prove that I wasn’t a rapist.”
“Wait,” I say again as I’m hit with the image of Brad sitting across from this woman who was using all the things that make Brad Brad against him. His strength, his honor, his plans for his future, all carved up into a weapon that she aimed at his heart. “What was this woman’s name again?” I ask tensely. “Satan? Was it Satan?”
“Her name’s Nalla, and the truth was I didn’t want to be a parent at twenty-one. I wanted to go to Harvard. I wanted to run for office. But I also didn’t want to live my entire life knowing that someone else was raising my child and that the child might be led to believe that her father was a rapist. That”—he takes a deep breath—“that would have destroyed me. I wasn’t capable of enabling that lie. I came forward.”
I shake my head. “So . . . what did she do?”
“It was touch and go for a few days there. She didn’t want to admit she lied, but in the end that’s what she did. Deep down she didn’t want to slander me. But when she initially told me she was pregnant I had not acted like a man who had any interest in being a father. I think she thought she was protecting me.”
Bullshit. But I keep the thought to myself.
“She wanted to bring this little girl into the world,” he continues, “and to give her to people who could love and care for her.”
“And she was cool with you being that person?”
“No,” he says with a laugh. “She did all she could to talk me out of it. She even sent the couple she had selected to adopt our daughter to Stanford to prove to me that they were the better option. And you know what? For a while I thought they might be.”
“But why? Why was she so intent on keeping you away from your kid?”
“She didn’t think I would be able to give June everything she deserved,” he says simply. “But she also thought that being a parent at such a young age would ruin my life. She thought I was giving up too much and I thought . . . I thought
she was giving up everything. But I . . . I wanted to be willing to give up everything, too, if it was the right thing to do. I visited the home of this couple, I saw the nursery they had already set up. They wanted this child, they had planned for this child. They were in their thirties, lived in a great school district, financially secure, had lots of family support all lined up. It was everything a kid could want or need. I”—he clears his throat—“I told them they could have her.” He looks away abruptly and it occurs to me that he’s hiding a tear. “I told them they could have my daughter.”
“But . . . but you didn’t give her up,” I say, as if he needs to be reminded.
He takes a deep, shaky breath. “Nalla asked that I be in the delivery room with her. She needed a partner she knew and trusted and she . . . we had grown a little closer. Not dating, but we were sharing this . . . this loss. And so I saw the birth of my daughter. I held her in my arms and then . . .” He pauses for a moment before adding in a voice just above a whisper, “The world changed. I held my infant daughter in my arms and it triggered some kind of explosion that blasted me into a completely different reality than the one I’d been living in only seconds before. And I couldn’t do it.” His shoulders slump under the weight of the memory. “I couldn’t just give her away. I could barely stand to put her down. Out in the lobby were two people, good people, thinking they were about to become parents based on promises I had made, and I couldn’t keep my word!”
I put my hand over my heart. The scene is too brutal, too unfair to everyone . . . well everyone except the bitch giving birth. The whole thing makes me feel ill. I reach out my hands to hold him, but with his head still turned away, I withdraw them, unsure if my touch would be welcome.
“What I did,” he continues, his voice even lower than normal, “it was reprehensible. I devastated those people. If you could have seen them when I broke the news . . . The woman didn’t just cry. It was . . . it was almost a howl of grief and . . . you know, it’s entirely possible that they’ll never get over it. And I didn’t do it for June, because I do believe they would have been good parents; they were certainly more prepared for the job than I was. It was a completely selfish act on my part. I destroyed those people because I wanted June, not because I thought she needed me.”