Sweet Nothing

by RICHARD LANGE

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  For Kim Turner:

  “You never washed away

  You stained something awful”

  “Now, gods, stand up for bastards.”

  William Shakespeare, King Lear

  Must Come Down

  I’M PUSHING THE CART out of the supermarket, rolling through the automatic doors, when I decide I want a cigarette. Need a cigarette. I’ve been a good boy for six months, ever since Claire’s EPT came up positive. If she couldn’t drink or smoke, I wouldn’t either. The deal seemed like one a husband should make when his wife is carrying their baby, but suddenly, here in the Vons parking lot, I’m all, Forget that, got to get me one of those coffin nails.

  The problem is, no one smokes in L.A. I’m there five minutes waiting for somebody to come out of the store and light up so I can bum one, and I finally end up paying a homeless guy fifty cents for a generic. He strikes a match with his filthy hands, and we talk about spy satellites as I lean on my cart, puffing away. He tells me they have this technology now that allows them to look inside your mailbox and peek into your windows from way out in space, and I’m wondering, Should I care about this? Because I don’t.

  The cigarette gives me a headache, and the weather makes it worse. The kind of hot we’re having sucks the sweat out of you even if you’re only going to the mailbox. Walk down the hill to 7-Eleven, and you’re risking dehydration and death.

  Also, Claire’s parents are coming. David and Marjorie. For the weekend. That’s why Claire sent me here in the first place, to buy all sorts of expensive stuff that we never spring for when it’s just us. Lox, shrimp, organic blueberries, fancy coffee. I didn’t put up a fight. I could see how nervous she was when I helped her spread clean sheets on the foldout couch this morning. And she’s so big these days, so unsteady on her feet with all that added girth. She always looks like she’s about to cry, like she’s shocked at how gravity has turned against her.

  Because of this I find myself agreeing to things we’d definitely have gone toe to toe over before she got pregnant, even though a buddy of mine warned me against such retrenchments. He said that once you give up ground, getting it back is a bitch. But I’m not sure I trust his advice. He and his wife divorced three months after their baby was born, and everything is war to him now.

  I smoke the cigarette to the filter, drop it to the pavement, and twist it out. Then, reaching into one of the grocery bags, I grab whatever comes to hand first.

  “You like pâté?” I ask the homeless guy.

  He grimaces. “Pâté?”

  “It’s good,” I say, “here,” and give him the can.

  “Don’t you have any beer?” he says.

  “DON’T YOU HAVE any beer?”

  This is from David, Claire’s dad, a couple of hours later. He and Marjorie have just arrived, and I’ve walked them out of the sweltering apartment and onto our little deck overlooking Echo Park. Claire has brought champagne for the two of them and sparkling cider for us. Truthfully, I’m with Dad. I’d kill for a beer right now, and another cigarette, but I laugh with Claire when Marjorie whispers, “David!” and I lift my glass of cider and smile when David makes a toast to family.

  We sit at the table on the deck and dig into the imported crackers and twenty-dollar cheese that Claire has arranged ever so carefully on a silver serving platter that we argued about for three days when I happened upon the receipt. The conversation goes pretty smoothly, considering that this is only the second time I’ve met David and Marjorie, the first being at our wedding, a year ago. I don’t know much about them except that they’re rich and constantly on the move. Paris, New York, Singapore. Right now they’re en route to Hong Kong.

  “So how are you feeling?” Marjorie asks Claire, reaching over to brush aside a lock of hair that has fallen across her daughter’s forehead.

  “Fat. Ugly. Stupid,” Claire replies.

  “What a thing to say,” David snaps. “Don’t you know how blessed you are?” He turns to me. “What a thing for her to say.”

  I shrug and try to make a joke. “Well, she sure is hungry. A whole pint of Ben and Jerry’s in one sitting. This kid’s going to come out looking like a sumo wrestler.”

  David ignores me, turns back to Claire.

  “You’re not fat, and you’re not ugly,” he says. “You’re blessed.”

  Back when Claire and I were first going out, I asked her what her dad did, and she said, “Something with diamonds, some kind of broker.” How he put it at the rehearsal dinner was “I’m a middleman, a person who knows lots of people. If you have a gem you want to sell, you come to me. If you want to buy a gem, I can also help you there. Nothing too exciting.”

  This seemed sketchy to me, but then so do half the jobs our friends have: consultant, aggregator, brander. Not that I have any room to talk. I still tell people I work in production when all I ever did was PA on a couple of commercials right after I got out of film school. What I really am is a part-time substitute teacher. And Claire, for the record, is not in wardrobe; she owns a little thrift store on Sunset that would have gone out of business ages ago if David didn’t send a check every month.

  “What are you going to do when the baby comes?” David says.

  “What do you mean?” Claire replies.

  He gestures toward the apartment. “There’s only one bedroom. You need a nursery.”

  “The baby will sleep in our room. It’ll be fine.”

  David turns to me and raises a wise finger. “Buy yourself some earplugs,” he says. “You don’t even know.”

  My dad cut out before I was walking, moved to Dallas, halfway across the country. I saw him maybe five or six times growing up—a day here, a weekend there—and not at all in the past ten years. And my stepfather, he was the quiet type, let my mom do the raising. What I’m saying is, if this is an example of fatherly wisdom—buy earplugs—I guess I didn’t miss out on much. I don’t even like his tone. How does he know what I know? And talking about the size of a person’s home right in front of him—there must be a rule against that somewhere.

  LUCIFER, CLAIRE’S CAT, won’t leave me alone. I’m on my iPad in the living room, playing this game I’m hooked on, where you maneuver a soap bubble through a narrow cavern studded with stalactites and stalagmites, and the goddamned kitty keeps butting me with his big black head and purring so loudly that he seems to be doing it just to be annoying.

  The bubble pops again, and I give up and lie down on the couch. Lucifer sits on my chest and does that strange kneading thing with his paws. Claire and her mom are at Ikea, and David is napping in the bedroom. I can hear his snores over the noise of the fan I’ve got trained on me.

  Okay, so this place is kind of a dump. The plaster walls are cracked, the floor feels spongy beneath your feet, and when the guy in the next unit takes a leak, he sounds like he’s using our toilet. But we’ve got the hills. We’ve got the trees and the lake and the park. I tried to explain this to David earlier, and he laughed and said, “And the gangs and the graffiti and the midnight gunshots.” That made me wonder what Claire had been telling him behind my back. I mean, having a baby was her idea, and so was the idea to have it here.

  But I don’t want to be that k
ind of person anymore—blamers, Claire calls them—so I push the cat off and go into the kitchen. Maybe some dishes need washing. Sometimes giving myself over to ritual is helpful.

  I’m up to my elbows in soapy water when David strolls in wearing boxers and a wife-beater and carrying a joint.

  “Do you get stoned?” he says.

  I back away from the sink, confused. I could answer his question in a couple of ways, and I want to choose the right one.

  “Not in a while,” I say as I grope for a towel to dry my hands.

  “I’ve got a prescription. Migraines,” he says. “But I hate to smoke alone. Come have a puff.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I say, but at the same time I’m excited, like I’m in high school again, cutting shop with the cool kids to weed up under the bleachers.

  “Who are you worried about?” David says. “Claire? Marjorie? Get with it, guy.”

  You didn’t convince me. That’s what I want to tell David as I follow him out onto the deck. I decided on my own. That’s what I want him to understand, but no nice way to say it comes to mind.

  He lights the joint with a green plastic disposable and takes a long drag. He’s about sixty, a little taller than me, a lot heavier. Not fat. Beefy. He still has muscle. He passes me the joint, then reaches up to smooth his fringe of white hair, lips pursed as he holds in the smoke. His already ruddy face flushes even redder.

  I go easy, take in a lot of air, but still double over coughing.

  David exhales with a loud whoosh and shakes his head. “You’re kidding, right?” he says.

  My wife’s father egging me on. And just the other day I told myself that everything strange that was ever going to happen to me probably already had. David makes me hit the joint again before he’ll take it back. I feel the high in my feet first, then it begins to move up my legs.

  “The Respighi tonight should be something,” David says.

  We’re going to the Hollywood Bowl, a box down in front courtesy of one of Marjorie’s old sorority sisters from UCLA. I’ve only been once before, with a group of friends from a bar I used to haunt. We sat in the cheap seats and drank too much wine. The ushers kept shushing us, and Mikey B puked in the bushes on our way down the hill. I woke up embarrassed the next morning and swore again that I was going to change my life.

  Respighi. Pines of Rome. With fireworks. “I’m looking forward to it,” I say to David, as if I know something about classical music.

  Without consulting each other, we sit at the same time at the little table on the deck. The heat isn’t bad here, tucked away in the shade as we are, but my body is running slightly behind my brain. I know this because I think about taking my pulse for a good five seconds before my right hand actually moves over to discreetly grasp my left wrist.

  I needn’t be so stealthy. David has forgotten all about me. He’s staring down at the park, at the paddleboats on the lake, humming a four-note tune over and over. My fingers locate a throb, but I have no idea how many beats per minute are normal.

  “This is good stuff,” David says.

  I nod, then wonder if he saw me. “Great,” I say, to make sure.

  A noisy black bug flies in out of nowhere and circles us twice. David pops up out of his chair to swat at it.

  “What’s that?” he says, his voice rising toward panic. “A bumblebee? A cockroach?”

  The bug veers off into the bushes. David smooths his hair again and says, “Let’s go for a walk. I’m claustrophobic.”

  I glance at my watch. Two p.m. I last checked at 1:55, what seems like an hour ago. A walk. Sure. We need to get things moving again.

  THE LAKE IN Echo Park isn’t a real lake, but on the right days it’s as pretty as one. Today isn’t one of those days, however. Today the water lies there, black and viscous, not a sparkle, not a ripple, and McDonald’s cups and Doritos bags founder in the shallows, where a few greasy ducks make gagging sounds as they struggle to stay afloat. The tall palms scattered around the park sport more dead fronds than live ones, and the downtown skyscrapers in the distance have been eaten up by the smog.

  David and I sit on a bench and suck Mexican popsicles. Watermelon, with seeds and everything. The vendor who sold them to us was a short, round man with a cowboy hat and gold bridgework. A puff of cold air escaped from his pushcart when he opened the lid, and I wanted to crawl inside and never come out.

  The initial jolt of the weed has passed, and now I’m just plain stoned, so the popsicle tastes great, but I’m still paranoid that everyone knows we’re wasted. I sit up straight and make sure I don’t stare at anything too long. David obviously doesn’t have the same worries. He slouches on the bench and keeps removing his sunglasses to reveal his bloodshot blue eyes.

  The park is crowded with people in search of a respite from the heat. Women push strollers, drunks snooze openmouthed on the grass, and teenage couples in black hoodies and spiked belts work joylessly at giving each other hickeys. The song blaring from the nearest radio is a ballad in Spanish about a man who misses a river.

  “It’s like Tijuana down here,” David says. “Like Mexico City.”

  “You’ll probably see more Guatemalans,” I say. “Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Filipinos.”

  David waves away this comment. “You know what I mean,” he says.

  I do, but I enjoy busting his balls.

  “Talking about Guatemala, I was there once,” he continues. “I drove an RV from Phoenix to Costa Rica back in the seventies, passed through all those Central American hellholes. The police pulled me over in Guatemala for driving without a shirt on.”

  “Without a shirt?” I say.

  “Apparently it’s against the law there, or at least it was that day. One of the bastards wrote $20 on a scrap of newspaper and handed it to me, and I went nuts. ‘Fuck you!’ I said. ‘I’m not giving you anything.’ I started the RV, put the pedal to the metal, and left them standing there with their dicks in their hands. Last I saw, they were laughing so hard they could barely stand up.”

  I don’t say Liar, liar, but I’m thinking it. Or maybe the dude is actually crazy, pulling a stunt like that. I start laughing because I can’t think of anything else to do. David laughs too.

  “I had hair down to my ass back then,” he says between guffaws.

  What the hell, let the man spin a few yarns. That check of his hits the mailbox like clockwork the first of every month, and Claire and I would be sunk without it. I only worked five days in June, barely enough to pay the interest on our Visa.

  I bite down on my popsicle, tear off a big chunk. A toddler breaks free from his mom and makes a bowlegged dash for the lake. Stand up, I tell myself, do something, but David is already there. He grabs the kid’s arm just as he’s about to tumble into the water and then swings him up into the air.

  “Careful, Panchito,” he says.

  The boy’s mother is more upset than she should be. She’s gasping for air, practically weeping, when David hands the kid back to her. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she says.

  “De nada,” David replies, patting the kid on the head and returning to the bench.

  He’s looking at me and wondering what kind of father I’m going to be if I couldn’t even rouse myself to stop that kid. I don’t blame him. I worry all the time that parenting is an instinct some people have and some don’t, and because my dad didn’t, I might not either. Claire tells me I’m being ridiculous, assures me that I’ll do fine, but that’s only because she’s so unsure of herself. Look around you: parents fail every day, and half the people you meet were ruined by the time they were twelve.

  “Koreatown is near here, isn’t it?” David says.

  “Not too far,” I say, happy to move on to something else.

  “I’m supposed to have a drink with a friend. He’d probably get a kick out of meeting my son-in-law.”

  “You mean now?” I say. “I’m kind of—” I put my fingers to my lips and mime a joint.

  “You’re ok
ay,” he says. “A drink will straighten you out.”

  A church bell rings somewhere, and I lift my foot to warn away a strutting pigeon that’s getting too close. This is the first time David has referred to me as his son-in-law, and I feel I owe him something. It’s a feeling I’m not sure I like, but nonetheless I say, “Yeah, cool, let’s go.”

  I WAS NERVOUS about meeting David and Marjorie that first time, at our wedding. They were Jewish; I wasn’t. They had money; I didn’t. Claire had gone to Yale; I hadn’t. “Relax,” Claire said. “They’re not like that.” She and I had been dating for a year, and she’d visited her parents only once, flying over to spend a week in Switzerland with them. I hadn’t seen my own mother in ages, but I’d always thought rich families were different.

  Marjorie was great, a little ditzy but sweet. As long as Claire was happy, she was happy, and will someone please bring me one of those crab things being served right now, and another glass of wine while you’re at it?

  David, however, was a different matter. I sensed disapproval, but he didn’t actually say anything disapproving; I don’t know if he’d been told to keep it to himself or if he’d decided on his own that he shouldn’t comment on his daughter screwing up her life when he’d pretty much checked out of it years earlier, when she’d left home for college.

  Our one extended conversation was about Clint Eastwood. David had met him at a golf tournament and been very impressed. “You should make a film with him,” he said. When I went to shake his hand after Claire and I exchanged vows in a friend’s backyard, he put his arms around me, hugged me tightly, and said, “Give love to get love.”

  “Is that a song?” I asked Claire later.

  “A sucky one, if so,” Claire said.

  I went over it in my head for weeks, wondering if that was the best he could do or if he wasn’t even trying.