Shatter (Club Grit Trilogy)

by Brooke Jaxsen

  “It’s been too long,” he only half joked: he’d seen me earlier that week for coffee but we hadn’t had a proper date before, with business and graduation going on.

  “It’s always too long,” I said, taking his cheek and pressing my unglossed, unstained, unpainted lips against his, feeling the five-o-clock shadow. A graceful hostess seated us inside, without a reservation, although our waitress seemed to be rather...new, at her job. She reminded me a lot of the pledges back at Omega Mu...or rather, back when I was at Omega Mu. It had both already and only been a month since I’d last been at the sorority house, and the memories, both good and bad, haunted my every daydream.

  Now that I had graduated, the main topic of conversation for us was what I was planning on doing with the rest of my life. Lawrence wanted me to go to graduate school because the way I talked about my classes, well, he decided that was a sign that being a career academic would be a good fit for me. Even though my time at UCBH hadn’t always been ideal, in terms of academics, their sociology department was top-notch and it wasn’t like graduate schools had a Greek life anyway, so I wouldn’t fall back into old habits. Plus, now, I had Lawrence for support. We could easily make long distance work if I went into academia: he would visit me whenever possible and we could do fun vacations together, or long weekends, or fuck it, even short weekends. What was important was that, for the first time, I felt like things were actually going to be okay.

  I’d been afraid that dating Lawrence would mean we were swamped by the paparazzi, but that wasn’t the case. There were few photos of Lawrence on the Internet, not that it would be hard to take one, but Lawrence wasn’t the kind of man whose lifestyle would draw readers to a website. Nobody cared what Lawrence was doing except investors and other business men, who would sometimes try and approach us on dates, and Lawrence would just tell them to phone “the office” to arrange for a meeting. His time with me was time that he kept special and didn’t let get interrupted, even if it was just another meeting at a café during his lunchtime.

  Au Pomme, though, was different. There were other couples that looked like us, a wealthy older man with a young woman like myself, as well as some pairings in the reverse: a wealthy older woman with a handsome young man. There were couples where both were the same age, young or old, but were oozing understated wealth. The aura was extremely romantic, with soft ivory lighting over the natural wooden furniture, resplendent with accents of brass and cushions of plush burgundy velvet.

  Finally, it felt like things were starting to become more normal. Nothing was really all that normal about dating a man who made more in a week than most people made in their lifetimes, a man who was asking me not what foreign countries I want to go to, but which ones I wanted him to take me to, and nothing was normal about a restaurant where the mixed drinks are over fifty dollars and the entrees more than triple that price. What was normal was the fact that I finally had somebody in my life I could open up to, that I could share and explore my feelings and worries and dreams and nightmares with, and who I could trust to help me no matter what happened...as long as my final secret stayed safe, stayed a secret. I knew that it couldn’t, forever, but it was a secret Lawrence didn’t even know I had, and as I watched him jovially explain to me all the dishes on the menu and their significance, culturally, from ratatouille to bouillabaisse, I wondered to myself what I’d done to deserve a man like Lawrence, a man who could love someone like me.

  I let him order for me because he knew French food better than I did, and he ordered us lots of small tapas so we could order more of dishes that I enjoyed. I didn’t see that option on the menu, no tasting courses, but given the nature of Au Pomme, I knew that exceptions would be made. This was the kind of restaurant that could make someone a gluten-free organic vegan steak if they asked: no order was too difficult for them, not at the prices being paid. After we ordered, though, I got a phone call, from the one number I always answer. I looked at the number, wishing it would go away, before looking back up. “Sorry, I have to take this,” I apologized to Lawrence.

  He gave me a soft smile. “I understand.” Lawrence had never pried or asked about the calls. I knew he’d noticed them but he’d never brought them up with me before. I knew that most guys would be more invasive but Lawrence allowed me privacy regarding my secrets and rarely pried or pushed, and he knew that if I wanted him to know about the calls from the one caller whose calls I always answered, I would have already told him, and, because I hadn’t, I didn’t.

  “Hello?” I answered, pressing the phone to my ear and my free hand to my other ear.

  “H-hello, sweetie,” slurred the voice. Not tonight, not tonight, not tonight.

  “Are you okay? It’s only eight,” I said, concerned.

  “I juuuust wanted to hear y-your...voice, sweetie...” continued the voice, not answering my question. Not tonight, not tonight, not tonight.

  “Do you need me to come over?” I waited, and there was no answer. “Hello? Are you okay?” And, after minutes, there was no answer. “Hello? Hello?”

  The waitress that had served us earlier returned to our table and tapped me on the shoulder. “Excuse me, but you’re going to need to take your phone conversation outside,” said the waitress. “We have a strict anti-cellphone policy.”

  Not tonight, not tonight, not tonight. I ignored her, listening to the phone for signs that there was at least breathing, but she tapped on my shoulder again.

  “Damn it, do you know how to read a table?” growled Lawrence. “Don’t touch her.”

  “Excuse me?” asked the waitress, shocked. “We have a very strict –”

  Lawrence interrupted her. “Anti-cellphone policy, yes, I’m aware, but damn it, can’t you see she’s upset? Obviously this is not the sort of situation that the policy refers to.”

  The waitress blushed and I still listened for breathing. “I’m so sorry sir, it’s just that we have a – ”

  “I’ll tell you what you don’t have any more, a job,” threatened Lawrence but I knew the threat wasn’t empty. I’d never heard him fire anyone before but I knew he didn’t get to where he was in life by fucking around.

  “W-what?” asked the waitress, startled. “You can’t do that!”

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” she admitted.

  “I’m Lawrence Lamont, and I own this restaurant.” Of course. Of course Lawrence owned it! Why else would we be at the nicest table, without need for a reservation? I checked the phone: the call was still connected but there wasn’t any sound coming out. I hadn’t muted the phone, and I checked, the volume was turned all the way up.

  Not tonight, not tonight, not tonight. “Hello?” I asked one more time as Lawrence continued to argue with the waitress. I hung up and called the number of my caller again and there was no answer, and by the fifth time I redialed, the manager was out, apologizing to Lawrence, but it was too late. I was already walking out the door by the time Lawrence noticed I’d left the table.

  “Where are you going?” he said, pulling me into his embrace from behind, but I resisted and he let me go.

  I turned and looked at him, not wanting to make a scene, not here, not anywhere, because the part of my life that could described as having scenes was supposed to be behind me, but apparently, it wasn’t. Apparently, I couldn’t have nice things and I couldn’t have Lawrence or any semblance of a normal relationship. “Where I have to go, Lawrence. I can’t be here with you, not now, not yet. I...I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Wait!” he said, reaching his hand out, and I took it and turned once more, pulling him closer to me. We were on the streets of Los Angeles, roaring with cars and with lights and with things passing by, the way that what we had could only be as fleeting and as ephemeral as blinking cars and billboards, good for a season here, not forever, not for us.

  I rubbed his hand and looked back up at him. “For what? For things to get better? No, there are things I have to do, Lawrence, things that
are dirty, that are shameful, that you have no idea about and that I can never let you know about. I lied to you, Lawrence, when I said I had no secrets with you. I have one, and it’s gotten to the stage where I can either reveal it to you, and surely lose you, or I can just cut this relationship off, saving what remains of my pride, because you and I both know I damn well don’t have my dignity any more.”

  “Kim, whatever it is, I’m sure it’s not as big of a deal as you think it is,” he pleaded, and I knew he meant well, but I let go of his hand.

  I shook my head and let out a small exasperated half-sigh, half-laugh. He had no idea. He had no fucking idea what I was dealing with and he was about to tell me that? That line? “Not as big of a deal? What’s your problem, Lawrence, you don’t trust my judgment now? I can’t do this anymore. I can’t just let you trivialize what’s going on my life, things you don’t know about, that I can’t even let you know about. If I can’t even tell you about it, what makes you think that my secret isn’t a big deal? Fuck you!” I screamed, and I didn’t care who looked. In that moment, the entire world shattered again, as I suddenly hated the body-con dress, as I suddenly despised the real Chanel cross body that, as loosely as it hung on my shoulders, felt like it was choking me. I wanted to rip them off but knew how much they’d cost Lawrence, expensive clothes for his expensive pet, and I just turned, entered the car, and asked his driver to take off.

  Instead, he lowered the window, and asked Lawrence whether it was okay or not, as everyone does: everyone talks to Lawrence about me, everything I do requires Lawrence’s money or connections, everything is made possible only with Lawrence’s permission, a permission he always gives but that he isn’t obligated to give at all.

  Lawrence told him to take me wherever I asked, to be under my service as long as I needed a driver, and the driver raised the window and started down the street slowly. Maybe he was hoping I’d change my mind and ask him to turn around so I could apologize to Lawrence like I had on that dreadful night at Club Grit, a night that seemed both far in the past as well as all-too recent, a memory I couldn’t cleanse from my brain although it’d been soaked in cleansing, burning alcohol that very night, but after a few blocks, he drove faster. We didn’t talk, except for when he needed directions, but what was there to say?

  Nothing. Not tonight, not tonight, not tonight.

  Chapter Fourteen:

  THE HOUSE SMELLED OF ALCOHOL AND VOMIT, as usual, and they were the first things to enter my nose as I woke up Sunday morning. I knew to expect it, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t care about the smell, but the source of it.

  Before putting on rubber gloves to go clean up the inevitable mess, I went to my mom’s room. There she was, holding one of my dad’s now threadbare shirts wrapped around a pillow. I was starting to hate those shirts, starting to hate the fact that my dad had died and not let the mine just fucking explode. He’d saved Lawrence, but now, my mom had nobody, and she was always clinging to these relics of my dad.

  The drinking had started when he died. She’d drink with her friends to deal with the pain, and then, to feel like maybe, my dad was around. She could trick herself into thinking my dad was still alive when she was drunk. She’d put on the TV, pretend he was watching it while she cooked, pretend to talk to him, pretend he was there. She wasn’t crazy, she just...liked to play a really fucked up game which involved her drinking, to cope, and even drinking the drinks she’d set out for “him”, a “him” that no longer existed.

  The character of my father, the character that didn’t exist, was more vividly etched in my brain now than my actual father’s memory, because of how messed up the situation was. Every time, it was the same: my mom would put the damn TV on, cook my dad’s favorite foods or snacks, and drink, and drink, and drink, until she threw up, and she’d use that as an excuse to drink some more, and it would keep repeating until she either fell asleep or had to be taken to bed.

  On the worst nights, the nights where she had a diet cola or some coffee or a cigarette or a damn carton of cigarettes with her drinks, my mom would drink even more, and if she had caffeine, she would be up in the morning in a stupor. She’d hit me once, in one of these, just once, and never again, when I was sixteen, and she’d apologized and said she’d thought I was someone else, but whom, I never wanted to ask. I’d help her into bed on those mornings. Last night, I’d had to help her into bed, and when I’d come over, she had luckily just fallen asleep on the couch, on her stomach, the phone rolled under the coffee table. She hadn’t injured herself or had a heart attack, but still, I’d had to come out and see what had happened

  The nights where she had too much nicotine were the worst. I know what nicotine dreams are, the dreams that are vivid and lucid and messed up, to the point that my mother would swear she saw my father in her dreams, that maybe, he was really still alive, and those were the worst because they gave her false hope and she’d end up spending money at some random fortune teller’s, hoping that the answers about my father that they gave her through leading questions held some truth, hoping that everything would just revert to the way it was before my father died.

  But, today, my mom was just asleep, with that damned pillow, so I went to the sink, crouched down, and got the rubber gloves out, and the cleaning supplies to clean up the vomit. We didn’t have any sawdust left, just sponges, so I’d have to go buy those today: the vomit would ruin the sponges but the stuff had to get cleaned up somehow. I put on some light classical music on Pandora as I cleaned, but changed it within minutes. Usually, I liked it as background noise, but right now, everything musical reminded of Lawrence, the man who I knew I couldn’t be with anymore, because I couldn’t expect him to understand or deal with this.

  The doorbell rang and I went to answer it without checking the peephole. There, in the same clothes as he’d had the night before, was Lawrence, and me? I was in a pair of ugly beater jeans, an old apron I used just for cleaning these kinds of messes, rubber gloves, and my hair up, no makeup, stray locks held back with chipped bobby pins. “What do you want?” I said coldly.

  “Can I come in?” he asked.

  “No. You can’t.” I said. He didn’t leave the stoop so I said, “How did you find me?”

  “You took my driver. Obviously, he’s going to tell me where you went, Kim.” Lawrence didn’t sound haughty or arrogant: he was just stating what were, to him, plain facts, but to me, seemed almost like an invasion of privacy.

  “Well, come in,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I’m cleaning and I guess you can help or watch.”

  “I’d love to help,” said Lawrence, rolling up his sleeves and getting on the floor next to me, and he watched me clean the vomit using the sponge, so he took the other spare sponge and tried to help, but only managed to make his shirt disgusting and make the stains worse, so I had him stop.

  “So...I take it this isn’t your vomit, Kim?” he asked quietly.

  “No. No, it’s not.”

  “And this is your house, so...”

  “It’s my mom’s, obviously.”

  “And this is why you get calls from your mom? Because she gets drunk?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How often do you get them?”

  “The calls? Maybe...once a month. But this happens almost on a weekly basis now. She binge drinks on weekends, when the store is closed, on her own supply, no doubt, and ends up wasted, the house a wreck, and when I’m on vacation, or I have free time, I try to help out, but it was hard with school in session. I can’t go to a graduate school away from the area because I know that things will get worse for her if I leave her. Even UCBH was too far.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Kim?” said Lawrence, washing his hands and coming back to me as I cleaned up the last of the vomit and started to put the cleaning supplies away.

  I thought about my answer before I got up from the floor. “You have no idea what I have to deal with, Lawrence. You don’t know what it’s like to have to deal with someone like my mom, some
one who is toxic, somebody who sucks the life out of you, who requires so much maintenance,” I said, shaking my head and resisting the urge to just curl up into a ball and rock back and forth.

  “I don’t? Then you don’t know me as well as you thought, and you definitely don’t know yourself. I love you, Kim, but I can’t help you with the problems in your life if you don’t let me in. The first time, after the rape at Club Grit, you shut me out and didn’t let me in. I was left wondering about what had happened between us and how we should move on, how we could heal. Then, you shut me out again by bottling in your problems and not telling me about your problems, about your insecurities about dating me. And now, when there’s something I can actually help you with, you still want to shut me out. What am I supposed to do, Kim?”

  “Nothing, Lawrence, nothing, because there’s nothing you can do,” I hissed, walking over to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of water. The sink was full of dirty dishes, some still caked with stale rice and kim chi. I hadn’t been coming home as often this last semester, with the drama at the sorority, so I hadn’t been able to cleanup after my mom as much as I had before. It wasn’t like her drinking got any better when I cleaned the house and was around for her, but it made my stays with her more tolerable. As I drank at the cup slowly, wincing at the taste of the tap water, used to bottled water and filtered water, the kind I’d had at Omega Mu,

  “Nothing I can do? Are you serious, Kim? As you yourself keep mentioning, I am a billionaire. I have money, more than I could possibly spend on my own, and you know what I can do with that?” He took me by the shoulders gently. “Do you know, Kim? Do you?”

  I pushed him off and took a step back. “Why don’t you just fucking tell me, Lawrence? Why do you need me to answer back as if I’m like you? As if I’ve had the privileges you’ve had in life, the privileges that have allowed you the ultimate luxury, a lifestyle free of worries?”