Good Kids

by Benjamin Nugent

  It seemed almost not to matter, sometimes, because the Khadijah in my imagination remained my confidante and adviser. For all my whorishness in the realm of work, I was puritanical in matters of love and sex. I kept the vow Khadijah and I had signed against the rusting wheel; I never cheated on anyone. All of my six and a half years in Shapeshifter, I moved from one steady girlfriend to another, each relationship lasting three to nine months. I was on tour, for much of this time, sleeping on couches, and when I wasn’t, I shared a tiny room with Deke in Koreatown. Because I could have no sustained domestic life with anyone who wasn’t a dude in Shapeshifter, my dating pattern was a lush four-week romance followed by a gradual onset of frost once I boarded the two-station-wagon caravan for a slog across North America. If I had cheated, it would have surprised no one. But the bag of cookies bursting from the pocket of my father’s quilted barn jacket—the memory was a whip my sense of loyalty wielded to subjugate my disloyal imagination. Whenever I was in danger with a woman not my girlfriend, once in the silver, Bacardi-sponsored tour van of a more famous band, once late at night in the Oregon summer house of a friend who’d just told me about a fight with her mother, the crumbs in the corduroy always saved me, tamed my desire. That and the shock audible in Khadijah’s breathing beneath the table in Gaia Foods. And a little Khadijah I kept in my head, asking: Who are you, in the end, anyway? Will you grow into a man? Or ferment into a Dad?

  3.

  Again, Acceptable

  I met Julie Oenervian on a blind date, insofar as it’s possible to go on a blind date with a person you’ve watched on TV at the Laundromat explaining to a wildlife biologist why she should be allowed to craft a Komodo dragon into a hat. For Julie the date really was blind. If she’d had the inclination to Google Shapeshifter, to see what I looked like, she hadn’t had the time. I could see her eyes pass over me as they scanned the bistro, in which an angry, talkative couple and a masticating, living-dead couple sat parallel in black wooden booths in the back, and a waiter in an apron stood by a Swiss resort poster from the twenties swaddling silverware in napkins. I was surprised at how tall Julie was, because I’d thought people who worked on camera were short. I stood and introduced myself.

  Julie teased off thin green gloves. She looked at our fingers as we shook, avoiding my eyes. I sensed trepidation. I’d been drinking a glass of wine at the bar because I thought this was what people always did when they were waiting at restaurants. She would tell me later that something about my posture as I held the glass to my lips, slumped forward on the barstool, made me look old and bedraggled. It wasn’t until we faced each other across the dark, shiny table, with a dim beam of light falling between us, that she found out I had only a year on her. I was twenty-seven then. She was twenty-six. She’d been the host of an animal show on cable television for about six months.

  “So you play music? When Gordon was like, ‘I have a guy for you,’ which is such a Gordon way of saying it, I was like, ‘As long as he’s not just someone you think I should date because we’re both darkish people.’ He said you were a white guy who played white music.”

  I quaffed the rest of my wine, hoping it made me look haunted. “My band’s barely functional anymore. We’re just going to be playing in the background of junk food ads from now on, if we’re lucky. Fostering childhood obesity is our legacy.”

  “Well, Gordon says you’re indie rock. You should know: I’m not into that. Everybody’s like, ‘Neutral Milk Hotel. Fuckin’ Wilco.’ Ich. I like Jennifer Lopez and Destiny’s Child.” She lowered her chin, issuing this challenge, as if she might head-butt me.

  “Which Destiny’s Child album do you like the best?”

  She hesitated. “I couldn’t tell you which one. But in general, I’m more, grab your girls and get out on the dance floor. Hoist a feminine-coded drink. Say ‘woo.’ Pop R and B is my favorite genre.”

  “What pop R and B albums do you like?”

  She was silent. It occurred to me she didn’t actually know any. She was putting on a show to amuse me and/or herself.

  Her short, rounded fingers played with each other around the base of her wineglass. “You’re laughing at me,” she said.

  “I was laughing at myself for thinking something dumb,” I muttered, shaking my head. Saying it aloud would have been a questionable dating tack. But I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I decided to be honest. “I was thinking, you look like a moon goddess in that silvery dress.” I sensed, from the way a muscle in her neck twitched, that I was becoming, to Julie, a person who was too nauseously cheesy to be in the same room with again. I repeated the words, “You look like a moon goddess in that silvery dress” in a bovine, phony-artiste voice. In this way, each playing a caricature of the person we feared the other would view us as, we became slightly vulnerable to each other.

  Julie’s professional innovation was to be the TV safari guide who responded to animals with comic detachment, rather than the infantile enthusiasm of the industry leader, Steve Irwin. The Times had called her “a real former wildlife biology grad student who occasionally speaks like Jon Stewart on the savannah,” and the analogy was apt. Julie was nowhere near as famous as Jon Stewart—Julie vs. Animals appeared on a science channel—but there was Stewart/Colbert in the gaze she trained on the natural world. (“This tree sloth hasn’t moved from his branch for forty-eight hours, and it’s like in college, when I dated theater majors who struggled with depression: You can hit him with a frying pan and you still won’t be able to make him get up and fight with you.”) Julie vs. Animals had begun as a serious, if youth-targeted, wildlife program, but since securing her place as a reasonably popular host, Julie had worked in more and more jokes, as if her ambition all along had been to transcend the demimonde of nature shows. This much the Internet had taught me.

  “Do you want kids?” she asked. This was fifteen minutes later, as her fork approached the escargot. The snails bubbled in a metal plate that resembled a painter’s palette, each creature a pigment in a hole. “I want an infinite number of girls,” she continued, “and for them all to stay in my house when they grow up and spend my money.”

  “I want to adopt two Ethiopians or something,” I improvised. I hadn’t really thought about it.

  We ate steaks and sorbet and drained the bottle, and I paid, pretending I could afford to, and we strolled a block from Vermont Avenue to Hillhurst. She paused before a boutique.

  The boutiques here in Los Feliz, east of Hollywood, weren’t like the designer-brand flagships on the west side. There, an air of secrecy prevailed, with chrome racks dispersed across concrete floors. The clerks nodded gravely at you, like you were a CIA agent summoned to their hangar to train with new weaponry. This was just a crowded storefront with white wooden floors, and the dress in the window was no extravaganza of Parisian silk. It was high-waisted, white, with red tulips climbing from the hem, hanging close beside a bare-breasted mannequin in a blue and green hippie skirt.

  “What do you think of these?” Julie asked. “This is a test. You’ll find I’m very into tests.”

  I was so pleased she’d implied there was a future between us that I was able to persuade myself I had a substantive comment to make.

  “I’m absolutely pro this dress,” I said. “The tulips say, ‘If you water and nurture me, I’ll be bright and sweet-smelling.’”

  “Acceptable answer. How about the one on the right?”

  “It’s a little Pre-Raphaelite,” I said, digging in my past for a critical vocabulary. “It’s, ‘I’m that girl on the cover of Reviving Ophelia,’ but that’s cool.”

  “Again, acceptable.”

  On the next block of Hillhurst, we passed another midpriced boutique. “How about this one?” she asked.

  It was a cerulean dress I intuited you could call a jumper if you wanted to, though I had only a foggy notion of what a jumper was. “It’s good,” I said. “It would make you look like a hot bluebird.”

  She placed a hand on my shoulder, for a
moment. “More acceptability! See, there aren’t that many kinds of dresses I feel are better suited to my figure than the figure of a really modely girl, but this is one of those kinds. I saw this woman who played Nell in Endgame at this Beckett festival in London wearing a dress like this after the show, and she basically looked like a water bug, her whole torso was just a swelling at the end of a bunch of legs. I’m being mean. I’m not mean. I’m working on not talking the way I’m talking right now.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about that,” I said. “I was thinking about how you were talking about a Beckett festival.”

  She looked alarmed. “I was in London and I knew some actors that were in some of the productions there. I would have normally been attending Legally Blonde: The Musical.”

  “You’re pretending you like these things you say you like, but you couldn’t name a Destiny’s Child album. You know that Nell is a character in Endgame. I bet you couldn’t sing a song from Legally Blonde: The Musical. Maybe you could sing a couple bars, but you wouldn’t know a whole song. You play this girlie-girl person but really you’re a”—I didn’t know what phrase to use, and the one I went with embarrassed me—“connoisseur of the arts. I like it, but you’re a total actor.”

  I thought she’d probably stamp her foot and say something to the effect of What are you talking about, weirdo? I thought she’d sustain playfulness. Instead, she became serious.

  She turned from the boutique window and looked me in the eye. Instead of lowering her brow in challenge, as she had when she’d described her taste in music, she looked into the middle distance.

  “I’m a Republican,” she said. “I come from a Republican family.”

  “You voted for Bush?”

  She shook her head. “I’m just really conservative in a lot of ways.”

  “Do you think gay people shouldn’t be allowed to get married and abortion should be illegal?”

  “I don’t think either of those things. I’ve never actually voted for a Republican. But I think there’s nothing wrong with somebody like Giuliani. And I really support the death penalty.” She was standing with her legs spread slightly farther apart than usual, as if there was a crowd of people behind her she was ready to defend from me, if necessary.

  “Hillary Clinton’s pro death penalty,” I said. “I love Hillary Clinton. She reminds me of a benign stepmom.”

  “I like Hillary Clinton too,” she conceded. Only now did I realize that I had probably been looking as tense as she did. The words “I’m a Republican” had triggered a fight-or-flight instinct. The knowledge that somebody who was even sort of a Republican might kiss me was enchanting and noxious at the same time, cocaine-like.

  I had the sense Julie might believe that if your parents were Republican you had to say you were Republican or you were a traitor. It was an ethnicity. Hence the wide-legged, defensive, samurai-like stance. This was a way of thinking easy for me to recognize, because it was my own. My blood-and-soil identity was liberal Democrat. I felt that in declaring her partisanship Julie had confessed she was a spy from a country at war with my own tiny, highly militant, perpetually threatened, essentially Israel-like, generally anti-Israel, nation-state: the Republic of Wattsbury/Cambridge/Burlington/Brooklyn/Eugene/Berkeley/Santa Cruz/Madison/Portland. I had been born one of its citizens. Thinking of myself differently because of a trifle like my views on a government policy was inconceivable. I was ready to slip behind Julie and drag her to one of my bases for questioning.

  Spy vs. spy, I thought. I felt suspicion and desire flow between the Republican-not-Republican and me.

  “I went to grad school in bio for a little while,” said Julie. “Bio’s a hippie-kid, jam-band field of inquiry. I know people from places like Wattsbury who’ve barely ever met anyone conservative. You need to know I’m different from you.”

  I put my hand in my pocket. It had been on her elbow, and then it had been hovering in the air halfway between us, after she turned to confront me, and gradually slipped back to my side. The date had been pointed kissward. But we’d had a different kind of collision, both more and less intimate than a kiss.

  “Sorry.” She looked at the boutique window again. “I’m being completely inappropriate. But now you know.”

  “I think I’m going to go to my car,” I said, after a moment, because this felt like the end of the night. Not in an utterly disagreeable way. I felt that what she had said might allow us to be candid. I just couldn’t think of what to say next. “I’d like to do this again,” I continued. “Is it okay if I call you?”

  She nodded and put a hand on her cheek. “I can’t believe I gave you a speech about how I’m a Republican.”

  “I can’t believe I gave you a speech about who your true self is, like I’d figured you out.”

  I put a gun to my head and exhaled as I pulled the trigger. I felt wretchedly lame as soon as I’d done it. But she did the same thing; only after she’d pulled the trigger, she tumbled the gun into a wave—good-bye.

  • • •

  Our second date was dessert at a bistro on Fountain lit by tiny purple lights embedded in the floor and ceiling. Because of our first date’s kisslessness, the second was overwarm, do-or-die. A spotlight shone on each of us.

  “Remind me,” I said to Julie, when we were trying to get the conversation airborne. “What are your parents’ names again?”

  “My dad is Samson, my mom is Vanda. He’s the Armenian, she’s the Persian.”

  I asked her if they were still together. In Wattsbury or New York or Los Angeles this was a normal follow-up question, but I wasn’t sure about Glendale.

  “Yup,” she said, “still married. I don’t remember—are your parents?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “What was it like for you when they got divorced?”

  The arm of a waitress, tattooed with a shy deer in a prospect of flowers, placed a scotch before me and withdrew.

  “Formative. I think I’m here, who I am, a bass player, because of it. So good and bad. It was like, before the divorce, when I was fifteen, I was an overachiever, and after, I was an angry teen, musician material.”

  “Why were you angry?” She was, I noticed, good at questions.

  “My dad was not that into me. You know that dating advice book? He’s Just Not That Into You? It says, you need to stop coming up with reasons why the guy you went on a date with isn’t calling you, you need to stop interpreting his behavior, and just accept he’s not that smitten? I needed to do what that book says you need to do, just stop trying to read him and come up with elaborate explanations for his behavior, and accept that he didn’t want to date me and my sister, as it were.” I downed some scotch. The waitress brought us tiramisu. “But also still be able to cobble all the best parts of him together into this dad I carry around with me in mind, that I imagine saying dad-like things to me. Does that make sense?” I drank some more. “I mean, God, sorry. My dad just wasn’t that into me.” I said it in the pretentious-guy voice that Julie and I had established between us the other night. “I’m a horrible person—I just said ‘My dad just wasn’t that into me’ over tiramisu.”

  Julie put a finger to her mouth and tapped it against her lips, thinking.

  When she eventually replied, she addressed not the joke at the end of my speech but the speech itself. “I don’t know what that’s like, having a parent who’s not that into you. My parents always liked me. I was scared shitless of my mom, but I think it was in a good way. She was this presence that was like a god until I was eighteen. Then I got into Pomona and we became friends.”

  Her face became solemn, lending both poignancy and absurdity to the cheerfulness of her outfit: a black cardigan with a silver thread, a T-shirt with columns of silver clamshells. “I didn’t think about what would go down if I didn’t obey her,” she continued. “I just knew that I didn’t ever want to displease her.”

  After the tiramisu, I proposed another walk. We went two abreast down the side streets south o
f Santa Monica Boulevard. In her heels, she was almost my height. Her body was a field-hockey player’s, broad-shouldered, for a girl. But she’d been a science nerd, inept at soccer, she said, with a thatch of hair she hadn’t yet learned to verticalize. It now fell Pocahontas-like down her back.

  “My band was more familial than my biological family,” I said. “In a family-family, the parents can get divorced, everyone can stop caring overly much about everyone else, it can go . . .” I made my hands into birds, fluttering away from each other and floating on different sides of my head. “But in a band, you’re all each other’s livelihood. You have to have your drummer. You have to have your singer. It’s like medieval Greenland or something, where if you don’t have the one person who herds the sheep, and the other who churns the butter, and the other who milks the oxen, the whole economic animal keels over. A band’s better than a family.”

  “But my family’s like that,” she said. “Like the band, like the medieval family. My parents aren’t from this country originally. They came here from really different places and met each other and had to start their careers over and they had me right away and neither of them could have survived without the other. And so much of it was, ‘We can have a kid who can do good in ways she wouldn’t be able to in Iran or Soviet Armenia.’ They needed me to be doing well to feel good about their lives. We needed each other.” The self-professed hoister of feminine-coded drinks was gone. Her family was in a keep she protected from frivolity. “I mean,” she said, “also, no offense or anything, but didn’t your band break up?”

  “I guess it did,” I said. “So that’s why it’s kind of a quandary, what I’m supposed to be doing now.”

  “That doesn’t change what you were saying about families, though. That sounds bad. I’d heard stories of superwhite families being like how you just said your family was, and I didn’t believe them.”