Good Kids

by Benjamin Nugent

  I was silent for a while. I knew this silence might make it seem like I was offended, but I had been moved by what she said. I also had the sense that now was the time to kiss her. I was terrified.

  My Volvo had once been half of Shapeshifter’s caravan. Its guts were even leakier than they’d been eight years ago, but I kept it clean. It was parked at the corner of Romaine and Seward, nearby, and I proposed I give her a ride in it to her car. In the Volvo, I thought, with music, that’s when the kiss will feel right.

  The locks had stopped working two years ago, so I grabbed the passenger-side door and opened it, with great casualness, for Julie. When I saw what was inside, I shouted and leapt back.

  Sprawled across the backseat was a dozing androgyne. Usually, I found the presence of homeless drug users sad but invigorating. I fraternized with people who made their addictive behaviors look like progressive lifestyle choices, so I felt there was much to be said for people who reminded me that debauchery presaged ruin. But I was unhappy to find a cautionary tale sleeping in my vehicle. The still, lanky person, his or her face wrapped in rank blond hair, kicked to life before me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Cut you,” said the recumbent person.

  “How are you doing tonight?”

  “All my friends are coming,” he/she warned. “Back up.” The voice was approximately masculine now. The feet were sockless, in Brand X white canvas sneakers that could have been worn by a woman or a man.

  “If you just need to sleep for a while, tell me,” I said. “We’ll find another way to get ourselves home—if you’re in a bad situation and you need to stay here. But if you have another place to stay, maybe you should stay there instead.”

  “My car now.” The guest snuffled contentedly. The voice was even lower, more mannish.

  There was a tap on my shoulder. “Excuse me,” said Julie. She cleared her throat behind me. I moved aside.

  She popped her telegenic head into the threshold of the passenger seat. Her face was only a few feet from the slothful animal.

  “You can’t stay here,” she said. “You have to move.”

  There was a pause. “Who is this?” the person replied. I was less inclined to believe it was a man now; the needle ticked back toward genderlessness.

  “My name is Julie. This isn’t your car. If you don’t get out of it, then we have to call the police to get you out. That means it’s not safe for you to be in here, because if the cops put you in jail, you might not be safe.”

  “That is another way of looking at it.” The voice was awake now, and verging into feminine territory.

  “You need a hand?” Julie asked the person. “We’re going to open the door.”

  “No trouble” went the more or less ladylike reply. The lanky body flipped over. The door opened, and it climbed out, never looking at us, never showing its face. It wrapped its arms over its chest and stalked off into the dark. In the glow of the generators, I could just discern the outlines of the thick blond hair, weighted with sweat and grime but abundant, an asset, hair meant to be viewed under lights.

  In the recaptured Volvo, I drove Julie to her car. We were quiet. I thought I could detect the smell of my gym clothes wafting from my South By Southwest tote bag in the backseat. But it might have been a trace of the androgyne’s sweat.

  “You handled that well,” I said, calming down. My tone was flat, because I wasn’t saying what I meant. What I meant was: I know I was a pushover, please forgive me, I’ll be more assertive next time. I had passed the window-shopping tests, but this test I had failed.

  “No,” she said, with equal flatness. “You handled it beautifully.”

  Shaky ground for kissing. Next time, I thought. But I was losing her; I could see life drain from her face.

  I asked if I could call her again.

  “Sure,” she said. “Good night.” She got out of the decrepit station wagon and slid into her white Volkswagen. As I pulled away, her large, beautiful head was lit by the candle-size glow of her phone.

  I waited until I was on the side streets of Echo Park, my neighborhood, no longer a threat to other freeway drivers, to call Gordon and disclose my error.

  “I fucked up, dude,” I said.

  “How so?” He sounded unsurprised.

  “I should have been bringing things to a warm, fun place. But then I started making her talk about her family. And I wouldn’t throw this homeless guy, or woman, out of my car. It was like, That one guy, the one you had a satisfactory first date with? Turns out, that guy was your school psychologist, disguised as a bass player.”

  “Hang up,” said Gordon.

  “I’m pissing you off too? I’m just an offensive person. Like, to everyone. I’m getting really depressed.”

  “Hang up and wait twenty seconds.”

  I hung up. I parked. I paced my hillside street. The room I rented was in a slowly imploding yellow house on a summit in the Echo Park hills, an old structure, for L.A., built in the twenties. It was owned and occupied by a semideaf hippie aunt of Deke’s. I had access to the piano in the living room, and could play guitar as loud as I wanted, which, admittedly, was not very loud. The views of Chavez Ravine from the back porch were magnificent; on winter days, distant palms were green puffs suspended in a milk shake sky, their trunks sequestered by fog. Sometimes the prospect of going into my room and looking at this view consoled me, but just now my room humiliated me with its cheapness.

  “One forwarded voice mail from Gordon,” the screen of my cell phone read.

  “Gordon, you walleyed cunt, pick up your phone.” It was Julie’s voice. “Do you think I have time for you to be setting me up on dates with fucking faggots? He didn’t kiss me. He had me walk with him eight miles in the cold in my heels and then I threw this homeless guy out of his car and he stopped even looking at me like he was thinking about kissing me. He didn’t kiss me. It was date number two, and nothing. You think I want to have a nice chat with a gay man on my Thursday night? Am I a sexual being to you anymore, now that I’m no longer twenty-three and asking you for advice about agents? Call me back.”

  I had a text from Gordon. “Her address is 257 glynnis off labrea.”

  I pulled a 180 in the Volvo, gunning back to the 101, brakes squealing, right-rear wheel clipping a neighbor’s lawn.

  Before I could change my mind, I strode up the walk of 257 Glynnis, noting the small snail problem at my feet. A white Spanish fountain burbled softly at my right. I registered the unassuming stucco niceness of the extensive one-story house, and rang the bell.

  Peeking through one of the long, thin rectangular windows bracketing the front door, I saw a succession of lights come on, starting in a far-off hallway and moving through a living room toward the foyer. I pulled away from the window and stood directly in front of the door.

  Julie opened the door three inches. Her hair, eyes, and nose peeked from behind. She took me in and finally threw the door open wide, blinking rapidly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wanted to kiss you, but I got nervous.” She was wearing a Wilco T-shirt and red pajama pants with candy canes on them.

  “That thing I said about white families,” she said. “It was offensive.”

  I shook my head. “It’s just true.”

  I kissed her. We stood with the door open, in the threshold. We patted each other’s hair. I felt that there was a similar power growing in each of us; we had each demonstrated an ability to calm the other’s fear.

  “You look like the shy deer from the waitress’s tattoo,” she said, when we ended the kiss.

  Shy deer. This was the name we used for each other, in the years that followed, when one of us was nervous about a performance of some kind, or paranoid about a person we thought hated us, or felt an everyday dread of being sweaty and eager, being seen as a person who drinks too much wine and pushes jokes.

  “Come inside,” she said.

  We kissed frenetically on the couch and talked about the androgyne. “You
were so much cooler than me about it,” she said. “I was a douche bag and you were a lady. You were like Mother Teresa.”

  “I was a pussy and you were the firm but reasonable one,” I said. “You were Atticus Finch.”

  The sun went down over the fountain, whose splashing was barely audible from the bedroom, and sounded like rain. The security system issued a copacetic beep.

  “Opposites attract,” she murmured.

  “I like your house,” I told her. I was half lying down, half seated, propped on one of the couch’s four throw cushions. She was curled in my arms. She pinched my ear as I took in the living room. A chrome and glass coffee table with Swedish modern lines shimmered on a faded crimson rug. A grandfather clock ticked beside a chart of Darwin’s voyages. On a dark bureau stood six photographs of parents and extended family. In the dim light, I could see only the glint of Oenervian smiles and irises.

  “It feels like a home,” I said.

  2007

  1.

  Tom, Myra, Julie 2

  One night Julie and I got smashed at Authentic Korean and told Gordon and his wife, Cora, we were engaged. We’d made the decision a week ago. We were going to test marriage, Julie explained to them, like a new pharmaceutical, for side effects like weight gain and sexual dysfunction, and if everything was under control after three or four years, we were going to have three children. We’d been dating nineteen months.

  We made a disclosure that both shamed and delighted us: For the past six of those months, we’d been speculating about what our children would be like. We’d invented elaborate personalities for all three, given them names. As we described them, Gordon produced a black pen from the pouch of his yellow hoodie. “You guys are awesome,” he said, and began to draw, dedicating one paper napkin to each child. An animator, he knew what he was doing, and it was hard not to believe in what he drew. It might have been the first grave error of the evening, letting Gordon draw our kids. It’s a principle from Islam, and Protestantism: There are some beings you just don’t make images of.

  There was Tom, our eldest, whom we imagined Julie birthing in 2011. He looked ten. He stood beside a chemistry set consisting of a Bunsen burner and a single flaming tube. His sweater was V-necked, his mouth a small, vaguely anus-like vertical line. The second napkin was devoted to Myra, our middle child. She wore a leotard and held a parasol. In lieu of a burner, she came with a swan. On the third napkin was Julie 2, named for her mother, but a musician, like me. She sat in a cubical playpen, playing the cello.

  With real children, once they’re born, you love them even if they were a bad idea. With these children, it was like that too; we couldn’t help but love them once they’d been permitted to exist. I pounded Gordon on the shoulder. Julie yanked off his baseball cap and threw it at his head. These were gestures of gratitude. We stood behind him, looking at our offspring spread on the table by the empty glasses. Julie folded them and slipped them in her purple bag.

  An hour later, we stood side by side in our bedroom and taped the triptych to the pale green wall. It would have been embarrassing to tape the napkins to the fridge, as if we were showing off, but we decided we liked them here, where no one could look at them but us. Beneath the three new members of our family, we kissed.

  Then we did something strange: We linked hands and speed-walked to the bathroom. We’d never had sex in the bathroom before. But we both knew that we didn’t want to do it in front of the kids, where the eyes on the napkins could see us. It was shocking to me, and I think to Julie too, how real to us the children were.

  • • •

  Over the course of a year and a half, Julie and I had kept performing for each other, but the performances had become play. Being onstage or on camera, making strangers like watching us better than they liked watching other people, this was the joy we’d spent much of life pursuing. But now we could perform for each other without worrying if the performance was original or distinguished. A day came on which I realized, and confirmed, and reconfirmed, that my moments of greatest happiness in the past twelve hours had been: when we’d mixed a whey shake in the early morning before going to the gym and spat it into the kitchen sink, pretending to vomit; and after dinner, when she’d let me smell a minor dreadlock that had formed unbidden in her hair.

  One weekend not much later, at a farm stand in Oxnard, a stiff Pacific wind had lifted her hair into a bower over her head, and she’d talked about how badly she wanted to be a different kind of celebrity from the kind she was. She wanted to be somebody who said things that were made up, to leave behind the guileless world of animal documentarians, and debut in the shrewder society of scripted entertainment. Steve Irwin had been killed by a stingray, but she didn’t want his throne. The comic remove from which she approached nature was all part of a five-year plan: build a following, build ratings; be credited with the crossover appeal of Julie vs. Animals; quietly go on auditions; wait for the right offer; leave Animals for a drama series. I could hear both the exhilaration and the fear of failure in her voice, above the wind.

  I liked her ambition. But I didn’t want to be taken care of by a rich person. It was the confession itself that crowned the romance for me, the dropping of her guard. A week later, I woke her up in the middle of the night and proposed, and she cried, and then she wore a ring I’d borrowed money to buy.

  After we had sex on the bathroom floor, Julie removed the napkins from the bedroom wall, so that, in the future, we would be able to have sex in bed, and placed them high on the bathroom mirror, reinforcing the new arrangement with extra tape. Then we had to get ready to go to a party. The party was being hosted by the new owner of the science channel that broadcast Julie vs. Animals.

  Ratings had lately been adequate but unspectacular. The very notion of Julie vs. Animals being canceled, after two seasons, was too dark for us to discuss. Julie had been making payments on this house for only twenty months, and I still hadn’t managed to find a steady, non-Shapeshifter source of income. It came down to this: Our mission, for the evening, was to charm Jeremy, the science channel’s new owner.

  We were still drunk from Authentic Korean, but we tried to refresh ourselves by splashing cold water on our faces. We flicked water at each other, Julie starting it, I retaliating, to prove, I think, that we were fun people, that despite the weirdness of our recent behavior, we were not becoming one of those cute but disconcerting couples that live, like schizophrenic individuals, in their own tiny worlds with their own points of reference, loyal to their own inscrutable codes. That we were not only the awkward, self-conscious, overly performative ex-dweebs we knew ourselves to be, but also enchanters.

  The master bathroom of Julie’s house—I still thought of it as Julie’s house—had two sinks, side by side. We could wash our faces and brush our teeth at the same time and console each other about how we looked. We called the sinks the battle stations, because of the Star Trek/Battlestar Galactica feeling we derived from speaking to each other while standing parallel. And tonight’s party would be a scene of battle. In addition to the new owner, there would be people who, in the darkest sanctums of our souls, we considered cool. These people could not be allowed to suspect we thought about them in bathrooms.

  In the wide mirror, beneath our imaginary kids, I could see excitement and dread in our reflections. I saw a twenty-eight-year-old and a twenty-nine-year-old assessing the persistence of youth’s afterglow in their faces. I saw a couple calculating its worth in the eyes of the world.

  I could not say this, so I said: “My cheeks look fat tonight. I feel like when God designed me, he was like, ‘I’ll concentrate fat in his face.’ I feel like that’s what He does with Jews in general, to make them look like giant babies, so you don’t want to kill them.”

  “You look skinny,” said Julie. “If you have cheeks it means you won’t look like a skull person when you’re old.” She tamped her lipstick on a yellow Post-it that bore her notes from an interview with a game warden.

  “And it
’s not just Jews people hate,” she continued. “One of my great-great-uncles was slaughtered by the Turks. We’re a two-genocide couple.”

  “Your boobs look really beautiful,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “They’re like these magical glowing orbs.”

  “You know what’s magic?” She sat on the toilet and lifted her silver smock above her belly. “My fat can sing Louis Armstrong songs.” She squeezed two folds of stomach fat into a mouth and made it move while she sang “What a Wonderful World.”

  “I can do that too,” I said.

  “That’s absurd.” She shook her head. “Your fat can’t sing Armstrong.”

  “No, but it can sing James Taylor.” If her stomach fat, dark, hairless, was Louis Armstrong’s mouth when squeezed into motion, my stomach fat, pale, covered in short black hairs, was James Taylor’s mouth. I made my fat sing “Carolina in My Mind.”

  Julie reached for her laptop, which sat on the floor by the toilet. Googling each other before we went out was one of our gearing-up-for-battle rituals. If people were going to look us up when they got home, we wanted to know what they’d see. We wanted to know who, outside our two-person world, we actually were.

  Julie typed and waited for the screen to load. “I’m sorry, sweetie. That fucktard article about you is still at the top.” She spoke mournfully, pronouncing fucktard with gentleness, as if mindful of the French suffix.

  The feature on the decline and breakup of Shapeshifter, published last week on the most respectable music-review site in America, in which I said things that made me sound like a commerce-minded, maniacal whore, which, compared to my former bandmates, I was, had become a widely read, blogged-about fable. The story it told was that even though Shapeshifter had possessed the winning combination of a cynical, hit-obsessed bass player (myself); a pure-hearted singer with a choirboy voice; and a surefire, radio-friendly anthem written chiefly by the singer but partly by the avaricious bassist, we had been indifferently marketed, and our sales had been derailed by shifting radio-promotion laws and the growth of online piracy. It concluded we were victims of the industry.