Good Kids

by Benjamin Nugent

  “Jesus,” she said, looking at me closely. “Don’t freak out. I don’t want us to ever be affected by this. Those guys are fucking stupid.”

  “And yet you are,” I said. “Say to me you’re not affected.”

  “I don’t want to be affected. But now you’re affected, so even if I was only slightly barely affected before, now I am affected.”

  It was when I looked in the mirror, to apply the wash, that I came face-to-face with terror: Tom, Myra, Julie 2, staring at me from their perch. I took in the hopeful little dots of their eyes, and the evidence of their talents: Bunsen burner, leotard, cello. I had always known my plans for the future were wisps. But the prospect of taking care of a child with a wisp had not felt as absurd, as obscene, as it felt now, beneath the doll-like figures on the napkins.

  “How am I supposed to be a father to our children?” I demanded of Julie. “I actually just want to know how I’m going to be providing in five years. I can’t see it.”

  “When we have kids, you can’t make that face in front of them.”

  Indeed, the expression on my face reminded me of the face in an anti-meth ad, only with face wash on it. “How did I get to this point where I promised something I can’t deliver? How can I give you this? Draw me a diagram.” I sat on the floor, the face wash still foaming on my cheeks. “How am I supposed to do this?” I pointed at the children.

  If I continued on my present course, the children on the napkins would be raised by a resentful, embittered, flight-obsessed father, a man ashamed of joblessness, a man who half-believed he should have found another band and lived on the road, a man who considered his life the wrong life, a man with one eye ever on the door: a Dad. In running from my father’s professional compromises, I had failed to give adequate consideration to conventional success. I had spent my postvow life running from my father only to inscribe a circle in the ground, so that now, staring in the battle station mirror, I stood mere inches from a familiar pair of restless, Dadsian eyes.

  “I wish I could go back in time,” I said. “Start over from high school.”

  “Thanks, Josh,” said Julie. “Meeting your high school sweetheart is going to be really fun.” She got into bed, and turned out the light.

  The future-kids looked at me.

  4.

  I Feel Like I’m Looking at Two of You

  Halfway through the night, I woke up calm and sorry. Julie was half asleep, stretching her legs to full length, a hand behind her head, gripping the headboard. I put her in the crook of my arm and kissed her neck. “We’re not affected by them,” I said.

  “Not affected,” she muttered into her pillow. This was just convincing enough, just final enough, to send us both to sleep. An important function, because Julie had to catch a flight to the Everglades at 7:00 a.m.

  In each of our calendar applications, on our phones, there sat a rectangle with rounded corners: a reminder of our dinner with Khadijah and Todd, the weekend after next. If the dinner had been scheduled for sooner I might have canceled, citing work, because Julie and I had been fighting, and seeing Khadijah at a vulnerable time seemed dangerous. But Julie and I had ample time to restore normalcy before we faced Khadijah. So the rectangles remained.

  And it is impossible to overstate the zeal with which normalcy was courted, starting on Julie’s return from Florida three days later. More important than sex were the things we said to each other immediately before sex. Julie asked me to go to a therapist, and I agreed to go as soon as I could afford nonemergency health insurance. (My current plan, Toniq, was youth-marketed.) I recited the Five-Year Plan by which I would parlay my Shapeshifter credentials into a lucrative business career, building wealthy Angelenos highly soundproofed home recording studios in their garages, guest rooms, and Joshua Tree country houses, even as I continued to pursue sound-track work in television. I wrote old acquaintances, asking if they needed a studio built or a sound track composed; I established a Web presence. It was progress toward my ultimate end: to become an adequate father. The key to not becoming my own father was to become somebody worthy of my own regard, and to thereby rid myself of the resentment and restlessness that would make me want to run as my father had run. I restuck the future-kids to the bathroom mirror, with fresh tape.

  The day of the dinner with Todd and Khadijah, I spent much of the afternoon chatting with a music supervisor about a new, haunting tack-piano interlude for The Spirits of New Orleans. It was late afternoon when Todd’s name appeared on my phone.

  “What are you doing right now?” he asked.

  “Random correspondence,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Would you be up for rescuing Khadijah in South Central?”

  My first thought was, What will be the Relationship Impact of this decision? And then an urgent countervailing thought: You’re being asked to rescue a person. Julie wouldn’t want you to not rescue a person.

  “Wait, really?” I said. It occurred to me he might be kidding. “That sounds so Wesley Snipes movie.”

  “I told her not to take public transportation,” he said. “But her mom is obsessed with the Watts Towers. They’re both art historians, and her mom is all into outsider art and shit. Her mom told her she wanted a picture of her next to the Watts Towers, because they’re apparently the Parthenon of retard civilization, and she went. By subway. The Watts Towers are in Watts.”

  “Is she okay?”

  He seemed not to hear this question. “She’s so Bostonian, it pisses me off. She just called me like, ‘I took the bus to the Blue Line and now I’m on a Hundred and Third Street. How come there are no pedestrian walkways between here and the Watts Towers Center?’ And it’s like, I’m at work. Even if they let me off early, I can’t get there for an hour and it’s five-forty right now so we’d be screwed for seven-fifteen reservations anyway, which I can’t change.”

  “I’m in Miracle Mile,” I said. “I’ll do side streets.”

  “Oh my god, really? Dude, you are a dude. I’m a teensy bit stressed about her being alone.”

  We agreed that Todd would text me Khadijah’s location and I would convey her to safety. Khadijah and I would then meet him and Julie for dinner. I drove my Volvo backward down the driveway and toward the first major knot of traffic, which I knew would be La Brea and Olympic.

  It was gelatinously slow. I called Julie and told her what I was doing.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said, “she just doesn’t understand California, and it’s part of our culture, not driving.”

  “That doesn’t correspond to what I’ve heard,” said Julie. “Your culture is: lavish birthdays during puberty, usury, providing excellent boyfriends, talking about yourself.”

  “I mean Wattsbury is kind of my real ethnicity.”

  “If you’re late, and Todd and I are stuck together waiting for you guys, will he and I hit it off?”

  “I will make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  After we hung up, I got Todd’s text: Watts Coffee Shop.

  The Watts Coffee Shop was housed in a squat concrete building that looked like one of the community centers built just after the riots of ’66. A plaque by the door confirmed that this in fact was what it had once been. You could see the anxiety in the design. It was a government saying “We are your friend, here is a place to gather,” even as the government projected strength, nailing its name to a wedge of concrete with railings of rectangular metal slats, a fortress of the state. Its location was a sunny, tree-lined street of four-unit apartment buildings that also exuded governmental anxiety. They were built with what looked like an effort at cheer; they were painted the red of Arizona earth, but with peaked roofs, as if awaiting blankets of snow.

  Inside, the coffee shop was decorated with memorabilia: posters of Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, Jesse Jackson. It was a place where tourists were expected. I saw Khadijah at a table by the far wall, bent over a stack of papers. I had a strange impulse to remain invisible. I murmured to the hostess that my friend was in the ba
ck and crossed the room. Finally, I planted my hand on her shoulder.

  “The Anarchist,” I said. She yelped.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she croaked to the hostess as she ran over. Her knobby, small hand was on her heart.

  Thirteen years had hardened Khadijah, distilled her. There were lines under her eyes and a wiltedness in the way the stray locks of her hair lit out from behind her ears. But so much of what’s pretty about youth is the way it promises to expire. Seeing Khadijah at the end of our youth, the two of us clinging to it by our fingernails—I had an impulse to kiss her splayed fingers. I wish you well, I thought, no matter who you are now.

  “If it isn’t the bassist from Shapeshifter.”

  We didn’t embrace, as would have been normal. I stood gawking. She was, for me, doubly there. A ghost from the past and a real person, one layered over the other.

  “I feel like I’m looking at two of you,” I said. “Old Khadijah, New Khadijah.”

  “Likewise,” she said. “It’s like double vision. Like being drunk.”

  I fell into a chair. “We kind of have to get going.”

  “It’s six-fifteen.” She squinted at me. “Dinner’s at seven-fifteen.”

  I explained traffic. She gestured to a waiter, who went to the register. “The only thing is this,” she said. “We have to pop by the Watts Towers and take a picture of me standing in front of them. My mom will flay me if I don’t.”

  I thought of reminding her that the last time I’d seen her and Nancy in the same room, in the Wattsbury police station, rote obedience to Nancy’s program had not been the rule. But Khadijah stared at me the way she had when she’d said Give me the stone. She was going to obey her mother now, and nothing I said was going to sway her.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Is that totally impossible? You should go. I’ll catch a cab.”

  “A cab will cost eighty dollars,” I said. “We’re cool for time.”

  The part about the cab was true. The part about our being cool for time was not. Khadijah might have been able to tell we were late from the agressiveness with which I drove to the towers. But she only asked, “How’s your dad?”

  “Oh, I don’t honestly know. Still remarried. Happily, maybe? We talk, but we don’t talk. Things have always been”—I waggled my hand in the air—“fraught.”

  “Oh, it’s fraught between my mom and me too. I do what she says, and then I grind my teeth.” It was strange, the level of familiarity. That double vision, remembering the kid in the adult you were speaking to, it disarmed you.

  I spun into a parking space, and we took in the not-that-towering towers. They were encrusted with pieces of broken glass that had been embedded in the cement coating their iron frames as it dried.

  “Why is outsider art always so underwhelming?” She sighed, digging through her patchwork bag. “It’s like you’re supposed to react as if your kid did it.”

  I thought I detected an invitation to open a can of worms.

  “Is your mom underwhelmed by your work, Deej?”

  She squinted up at the towers.

  “I mean,” I continued, “you’re both art historians, right?”

  “Well,” she said, “I’m not sure my mother would respond to these towers so enthusiastically, if I had built them. I’m not an outsider. My mother’s not easily impressed, by me.”

  She waved to a man eating an enchilada off a paper plate by a taco truck and extended her iPhone with a plaintive face. She pointed to me and the towers. He took the phone and nodded.

  We stood hands on hips before the towers, as if they were whales we had harpooned together. The enchilada-eating man gestured for us to squeeze into frame, and we drew closer. As our arms made contact, and then the backs of our hands, I realized that this was one of those moments in which I might have to remember the cookies falling from my father’s barn jacket in order to behave like a loyal fiancé. I had to preserve the vow. But in this circumstance in which, unlike the others, the person with whom I wanted to break the vow was the person with whom I had sworn the vow, the mnemonic exercise was not as effective. I was very much awake. I was attentive. I saw wind scratch the bases of the monument with dust. I saw a burrito wrapper crawl like a crab across the shadows.

  I realized that my exhilaration at Khadijah’s reappearance was delusional, evil, and not unlike my father’s feelings for women other than my mother, over which I had exhausted maybe 35 percent of life frothing myself into self-righteous outrage. In other words, my father’s disloyalty might have felt to him the way I was feeling now. It had been an act of weakness and selfishness on his part to disregard my mother’s child rearing, postponement of career goals, her sacrifice of relationships with men from whom it was a simpler matter to extract empathy than from him. But it was confusing to me, to discover, at twenty-eight, that temptation could feel not at all like temptation but like a battle cry. Go forth, temptation said. Have courage. How uncanny that out of nothing, a face from the distant past, a ghost, imagination could build a battering ram against loyalty.

  “What is it with my dad and your mom?” she asked, as we smiled our death’s-head smiles at the man taking a picture of us with her phone. “This underwhelmed-with-us thing they both have going?”

  “To put it brutally,” I said, “they were in love with each other. We were in the way.”

  The phone’s camera began to flash. Squares of light zigzagged like Space Invaders before my eyes.

  “They resented us,” I continued, “because we stood between them and the person they loved. You were the one who figured that out.”

  The man with Khadijah’s iPhone looked at the screen and shook his head at the result. He motioned for us to be patient; he’d try again.

  “I’ve done a lot of work trying not to judge my mom,” she said. “So I had kind of forgotten about . . .” With her index finger, she wrote the words “they hate us” in the air and said them, softly.

  This was when our hands slipped together and our fingers linked—it was a pose, for the camera; I knew we were telling ourselves that, but after half a second we couldn’t make ourselves believe anything so flimsy anymore. We weren’t looking at each other. Blinding squares continued to materialize in the air. Her hand stole away from mine, and the horrifying moment ended.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was weird. I wasn’t trying to be weird.” She ran over to the man and retrieved her iPhone. The pictures showed two people staring into something they didn’t understand.

  I drove us north through the sludge of cars. Neither of us spoke.

  “That was awk ha-ha,” she said.

  “Yeah, it’s like, of all people to have strangeness with—”

  She cut me off with another burst of ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. “It’s terribly nice to see you, Josh. But let’s just make a few rules.”

  I nodded emphatically. “Let’s be the good kind of friends, not the constant is-this-going-to-get-fucked-up kind of friends.”

  She looked out the window at the lake of chrome and rubber in which we sat. “So, yeah. First rule: No more hand stuff.”

  “No one-on-one dinner.”

  “Falafel,” she said, swaying her shoulders side to side, the gesture people make to show they are easing into a groove.

  “Falafel’s what it’s all about.” I, too, swayed my shoulders.

  “Have you kept the vow?” She looked me in the eye and said, “Ha, ha-ha. The Vow Never to Cheat on Anybody?”

  “Yeah. It’s weird, I have,” I said. “I wouldn’t hold it against you if you haven’t. When we made it we were infants.”

  “I kept it. I plan to keep keeping it.”

  A beep let me know that Julie had sent me an urgent text. “Where are you guys am pretending to know what noise jazz is Todd is weird I’m sending this from the bathroom please tell me you are close.” I cared, notionally, that we were late and that Julie was having a poor social experience. But I was high. Between Julie and me, there were miles and mile
s of sprawl.

  5.

  Their Whole Actual House

  Khadijah and I were forty minutes late, in the end. Dinner might have been torture, except that Todd and Khadijah turned out to have an artful and mesmerizing couple-shtick, a routine developed unconsciously over years of get-togethers, a performance of themselves. There was a thrill in watching them coordinate comments and gestures. It was like RUN-DMC.

  “We’re collaborating,” said Todd, “on this thing where you smash your own house.”

  Khadijah’s turn to speak came next: “The deal is, there are these miniatures we make of people’s houses—I make the miniatures and Todd is composing a score he’ll play live while people smash them.”

  “You smash your own house,” Todd repeated, “if you’re one of the rich people who’s hired us to do the performance.”

  “We come to their house and we give them the miniatures of their houses—they can put themselves in them if they want, I can make figurines if they want them—and they can—”

  “They can choose how they want to destroy it,” said Todd. “They can use this lighter we made.” He turned to me and spoke to me particularly, to share information of significance to men: “It’s shockingly easy to make a lighter, bro.” He returned to addressing both Julie and me: “They burn the little houses, while Deej stands there with a fire extinguisher . . .”

  “So they don’t burn down their whole actual house. Or—”

  “Or there’s also a crowbar.”

  “Todd’s playing the score on a guitar usually, or an organ, but he keeps a fair distance back so they can smash with abandon.”

  “We were going to call it Homewreckers, originally, but that was too on-the-nose. So now it’s the Homelessness Initiative.”

  “Who’s doing it?” asked Julie. “I mean, that’s so amazing, it’s a fucking awesome idea, but who’s— Do you have customers?”