by Paloma Meir
“People don’t say no to me Serge.” He screamed out as he crawled on his hands and knees far from where the keys were.
“If you keep talking to him eventually he’s going to figure out that the quickest way out of here is to hitch a ride up on the highway. Keep him moving. He’ll tire out soon and probably pass out.”
And with that I passed out.
…
My eyes opened, causing me immense pain and worry that my brain had shrunk and would rattle against the sides of my skull until the day of my death, which if this was the way I was going to feel couldn’t come soon enough. I felt an arm across my back and accepted it to be Brendan’s. I didn’t want to take a chance on the pain it would cause to move my war torn body to confirm.
My eyes focused on what I thought was a pile of warm sand beside me, but turned out to be Danny’s face coated in sand from the night before. His blue eyes opened with alarm. He shook me off, making me feel as if a car had just hit me. He stripped off his clothes and walked towards the sound of the ocean.
I sat up, a mistake, and reached across my legs to where our food supply laid in an overturned mess. I grabbed a bottle of water, of which I knew would never be enough to satisfy my unquenchable thirst. Finished in one gulp I stood, another mistake, but an unavoidable one. I looked up to the road above the cliffs that surrounded us to make sure of our privacy. I didn’t know the traffic patterns of this part of PCH, and I really didn’t care. I took off my clothes and followed Danny into the ocean to wash away the harsh stink and sweat that covered my body.
At the shore I stood and let the icy water swirl around my feet. I didn’t know if dunking my head into the freezing water would correct my brain placement or shrink it further causing more pain. I didn’t want to take a chance.
“Water won’t do it. Drink this.” I tilted my head slightly, mindful of the pain jerky movements would cause, to see a nude Brendan standing at my side. I looked down at his flaccid penis and imagined Celena going at it. I laughed at the thought, another mistake. The convulsions hurt. He forced the sports drink into my hand. I drank it down in one gulp and jumped into the liquid ice of what looked to be an angry foaming sea.
Brendan followed. We swam out to Danny and floated on our backs past the lines of waves. Our heads and bodies numb, we swam back to shore, quiet, only making grunting sounds and hand gestures to get our point across. We staggered back to our campsite.
Danny and I sat down next to the blanket and ate the leftover food from the night before. Brendan walked straight over to the rocks where he had thrown the keys and picked them up and held them over his head. It looked like he wanted to shout out victory or some other sports related word that consumed his vocabulary. I wondered for a moment if he spoke that way in court, or if it was now just a dialect he used with his oldest friends in the way I did.
Finished with the grotesque processed food we had picked up the night before, we stood up in unison and put our clothes on. We cleaned up the embarrassing mess we had made that stunk of Brendan’s vomit and headed up to the car in silence. Danny and I left the heavy lifting of the case of Vodka to Brendan.
“Waste of $49.95,” I said as I put the unused sleeping bag into Danny’s trunk.
“Cheap fucks, that’s us.” Danny held his hand half-way up for a high five. I touched it lightly instead of the hard slap we always liked. He looked grateful for my choice.
Brendan intruded on our moment of appreciation by squeezing between us and dropping the case loudly into the trunk and slamming it shut. If I hadn’t loved him like a brother I would have knocked him down and slammed my foot on his head.
Brendan climbed into the backseat with me, which wasn’t what I wanted but my body and mind were too pained, too tired to protest. He slammed the door as if he were immune to the effects of what could only be our hangovers or a nuclear bomb that had gone off overnight causing us to suffer from radiation poisoning. Nothing would have surprised me at this point in our trip. “We’re not going to drive home in silence.” He said.
“Dude, I haven’t even started the car yet. Indoor voice buddy.” Danny said with a rub of his head as he turned the key in the ignition.
“You just made an ass out of yourself. We’ll ignore that. Seriously dude. How long were you crawling out on the beach like a dog hunting for his lost bone?” He hit his knee, which you wouldn’t think had an auditory decibel capable of pain, but it did.
“I’m not mad at you, like you said half a lifetime ago. Please quiet, I need quiet.” I put my hands around my head thinking that the pressure would help. It did. “Danny you good? We don’t have to talk about anything right?”
He held up his hand in a peace sign, because he was a considerate person, unlike Brendan.
“I don’t know. That poured out of you like a deep dark secret. Fifteen minutes of Zelda? A lot of detail packed in, but even in your own little fantasy that you couldn’t fuck her.”
“What’s the word Serge used last night to describe you?” Danny interrupted.
“Dumb fuck, weasel, psychopath?” Brendan yelled out almost making me laugh at the pride in his voice.
“Crass. Don’t be so crass.”
“Fuuuck, we can’t say fuck? I’m not even going to try." He waved Danny away and turned to me. “All teenage boys want to fu… have sex with all teenage girls. Weren’t you by my side in the locker room? Didn’t you ever listen to what they were talking about? Normal dude. Fuck, who didn’t want to... do that to her, or even better one of her friends.”
“My sister was her best friend.” I held my head tighter and laughed at his unneeded pep talk.
“I was thinking more Veronica or Theodora, but sure your sister why not? I’m sure I thought about it.” He took my hands off my head and rubbed my shoulders roughly. I wanted to push him away, but it was helping.
“You don’t need to say this. I don’t know where that came from. Vodka is not a truth serum. Veronica...” I couldn’t finish my thought, so I closed my eyes as the muscles in my neck loosened, expanding my brain to fit back into my skull. “How did Cara feel about your inner life of the constant objectification of all the girls around you?”
“Passing thoughts dude. Didn’t take up any time. I didn’t brood like you with all your secrets.”
“We’re done here, Brendan.” I shook him loose, “Don’t take your guilty conscience out on me. I forgive you. You don’t owe me an emotional fix. We’re good okay?”
“He’s chill as fuck. Leave him alone.” He looked in the rearview mirror and suddenly smiled, “Marianne had huge perfect tits, and I liked when Cara would bend over to pick things up off the ground. Happy now, Brendan?”
“Yes.” He paused for a moment, the confidence drained from him, “Celena, forgive me or not, I need to tell you what happened.”
“No you don’t,” I held up my hand because this conversation was not going to happen, “I know what happened. You said enough last night. I get it. Kids, like you said.”
“I barely touched on it. Bare bones, you don’t know.”
“I know both of you. I can piece it together. We’re not doing this.”
“She found me at the party, hunted me down, not that I knew it at the time...”
“I’ll tell you what happened because I don’t want the details. It won’t change the real...”
“Arrow of time buddy.” Danny mumbled up front surprising me, almost healing me.
“Arrow of time,” I mumbled back to Danny, and turned to face Brendan who looked a little paler than usual. His eyes drooped. I decided to go easy on him. “She broke up with me for the millionth time the last day of school. She started calling me the next day. I was sick of it, and needed time for the Prism project. I ignored her, always a bad thing to do. Her scrambled mind came up with a plan, probably not well organized, if she were manic. She was definitely manic to have torn you apart like this.” I looked out the window not wanting to meet his eye.
“She found you at the party
, drunk. Easy prey, hurt two people at once, even better for her. She did what she did. You woke up the next day devastated from the look on your face.” I wished I hadn’t looked over at him, “You probably called Cara, probably cried because you’re not a psychopath, sorry about that. Cara being Cara, she worried about everyone else, not mad at you. Here’s your big mistake.” A wave of nausea hit me. I ignored it.
“You went to her alone. You must have made her summer with that move since I was going to play with her. She could never keep her thoughts straight in that condition. She probably blamed you, and at the same time told you she always had feelings for you. Then she would cry about me. Am I right Brendan?”
“Yes.”
“There wasn’t a problem she didn’t think she could fix with sex. What was it you said last night? Things happened? Probably not much. Just enough to make you feel more guilty?”
He nodded his head.
“Celena’s last psycho ride with you feeding it. You wanted to tell me, but you couldn’t? She was mentally unbalanced, and you were just a kid... I’m going to jump to the end here because it sounds like it went on all summer.”
He nodded his head again, shame all over his face.
“You played lacrosse like nobody else. It was to the death. You were a warrior. She picked at you, fed off your guilt, found all your vulnerabilities, I would put Cara into that category. Your loyalty to your friends even more... Pushed into the corner, you snapped, found her weak spots. You must have annihilated her to get her on the medicine. It must have been very dark, shook you up, because you weren’t ever dark. Victor, champion that’s what you were.” I nodded my head and crossed my arms done with the conversation.
“Cara...”
“Cara had a crush on her? Celena must have loved that, premium triangle for her. Kid stuff Brendan, half the girls at our school liked to experiment. I know it’s a big deal to you... Leave it for now. If you have to tell me every detail, do it tomorrow, but know it’s for you and not me. We’re good buddy.” I pulled his head down onto my shoulder and held it there affectionately.
Danny’s hand came through the center console and patted Brendan’s knee. “Dude, the girls were like that.” He took a deep breath. “Zelda and Theodora, they kissed once. One of my favorite stories. I’m not telling it to either of you.” He laughed, releasing the thick tension in the car. “You go Zelda,” I thought but did not say.
“Brendan, you must be more hung over than you appear to have missed the big question in your rundown of the night’s events.” I laughed hard, giggling like one of the many girls we had just been talking about. “What if Danny had found the keys? What if they let him on the plane because “People don’t say no to me”? What if he had “come to” this morning at the airport in Madrid?” I felt Brendan’s body convulsing with what felt like laughter but didn’t hear the sound.
“Yeah, Danny. What would you have done then?”
“Easy. Cab to her apartment. Knock on her door. She would be happy to see me. Take me to a hotel, probably down the street. I would make sweet, sweet love to her, and she would walk away like it was just a fuck. That’s the way it is with us now.” He shrugged, and I had my answer to what had gone on during their meet-up the summer before. Before I could ponder that bit of information, and I really should have, he laughed again, “Doesn’t matter. I still love her, but, you know what? I think I’m ready to move on.”
And he did too. Our times were golden after that. I would never say he was a warm guy, always considerate, very respectful, but still an emotionally reserved person. His monthly quest to seek out female company, always tall willowy blondes, preferably very busy which in Malibu meant actresses and models, and send them away after a few days claiming he didn’t have time for a relationship, relaxed.
After our little road trip he would interact with them, and almost take an interest. At the very least he would maintain eye contact instead of always looking away as if for a door. His relationships usually lasted a month, never more than six weeks. But we were young, and I wasn’t making any real commitments either.
BOOK THREE
Chapter Fifteen
Then this happened.
I pulled up to our house late on a Friday night after Shabbat dinner with my very good friend from law school Rachel. We had just graduated, hooray? We were presumably studying for the Bar Exam which was a little over a month away.
I had not been studying, and I had no plans to study. The end of my schooling and the start of my plan to go hard in law to the exclusion of everything else had come far too soon.
I contacted one of the partners in the top-tier Big Law firms I had been hired into, thanks to graduating number one in my class. I told him I planned to also take the Patent Law exam, and I would rather start after passing the test. He didn’t seem too happy with my decision, but accepted it and suggested a different start date. I respectfully declined two, three and finally four months ahead. He laughed, telling me he understood and picked March 1st of the following year. I said yes very gratefully.
He then launched into a discussion of South American soccer. His favorite national team was Brazil. I had showed myself well in playing against them during the Copa America even though we lost in the end. He was aware of me even before I had met him on my interview. I hadn’t realized what a die-hard fan he was of the sport.
As he spoke, I knew that I hadn’t needed to be number one in my class to have been offered the position. I probably could have attended a third tier school at night. I got a little giddy talking to him, seeing how the world really worked, cronyism, nepotism, all the isms. Still, I didn’t regret my decision to work hard. I would be prepared , that much quicker to my end goal that was still undefined in my head.
I walked to the front door and noticed the front light was out and felt guilty because changing the lights and bringing in the mail were my only real chores. We had a housekeeper come in twice a week to take care of the cleaning. Danny’s chore was taking out the garbage. It seemed fair enough, but I had slacked off again.
So I didn’t notice Danny girlfriend, Shelly, of close to two months standing by the front door whimpering until I practically stepped on her foot. “Hey Shelly, did you get locked out?” A stupid question because she could have just knocked on the door to have Danny let her in. But I was tired and didn’t want to have to deal with the issue of consoling a brokenhearted girl.
She threw herself at me, crying into my shoulder, mumbling, and not making any sense. Something about Ella, phone sex, and Danny shooing her out of the house. She didn't understand how everything had gone so wrong. My emphatic nature came out, and I did what I was good at automatically without thought.
As my mouth chattered away saying all the right things, telling her she would be all right, this was just Danny’s way, and she deserved better. My mind drifted to a different place. I didn’t understand how she had been treated so callously by my good friend who always tried to be respectful, and to leave the women with pride.
Even more, I wondered about Ella. Who was she? Who had he had gone into the bathroom to have phone sex with? Danny wasn’t a cheater. It wasn’t in him. He didn’t seem like the phone sex type either, but who really knows what goes in another’s head about sex.
“Dude, what happened? I’ve been stuck outside with a crying Shelly for the past half an hour. You need to work on your exit strategies. Big fail, bro.” I opened the door to find him sitting on the sofa staring out the window into the ocean.
“You won’t have any more problems with that. I’m going to Paris to bring Zelda back home.” He held up his hand for a high five, making me think he had lost his mind.
“You’re high dude.”
“She called me. She wants me to come out as soon as possible. Her words. I’m going to go pick up my prize. I’ve waited long enough... Dude.”
“Shelly mentioned you were locked in a bathroom talking to someone. Dude, you know she has a baby and a boyfriend that she’s ha
d for like I don’t know six or seven years?”
“They’re over. Done. She wants me.” A slight tremor ran through his body. I worried for a moment he was having neurological problems.
“You okay? Let me get you a beer.” I went into the kitchen to get the beer and try to make sense of what he was saying. I sat down beside him and handed him the bottle. I was more confused than he appeared to be. “Drink it.” He held the drink in his hand but did not take a sip.
“I talked to Carolina a few days ago. She said Zelda was happy and planning Louisa’s birthday party. No mention of any problems.” I patted his shoulder and decided to humor him. He must have misunderstood the intent of her phone call. “Have you considered her baby in your plan? The father might not be too crazy about her being raised eight thousand miles away.”
“He let her leave and take the baby to Paris...”