Good Kids

by Benjamin Nugent

  “We can’t know,” said Rachel, “whether it’s possible for any given person.” She was slightly wide-eyed. She kept her tone of voice on a very short leash.

  Julie cleared her throat. “Maybe what my dad means—correct me if I’m wrong, Dad—is that his parents were Armenians living in exile. They came here when he was a teenager. English wasn’t his first language. He didn’t have the world served up to him. He worked hard.”

  Rachel smiled. “I’m looking at your father, and he seems like a smart, hardworking, really nice, cool guy, but he does appear to be a guy.”

  “Therefore?” asked Julie, smiling.

  “Therefore he benefits, like my father, from being a guy. Just because that’s how things are, not because he did anything wrong or he didn’t work or something.”

  “How do you feel about it, Samson?” asked my mother. “Do you feel that has been your experience?”

  Samson chuckled. “Oh yes,” he said, “if you are a little boy, a big light comes down and shines on you.” He chuckled again and looked at me, hoping for camaraderie. “What do you say, Josh?”

  I returned a meek smile. I had discussed gender with my mother and sister before, and felt that, while it was possible to hold a productive conversation with one of them at a time, to speak with both about gender simultaneously was to subject yourself to a good cop/bad cop. It went like this: My mother asked you in an amused voice to describe your experience of male privilege in an uninhibited fashion; you did so; she withdrew into shadows; Rachel yelled at you in response to the feelings about male privilege you had uninhibitedly expressed.

  “Well, in any case,” said Julie, “I think it’s awesome to keep teenage girls out of shelters.”

  “Thank you,” said Rachel. She pushed back her chair. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Did I say something wrong?” asked Samson, once she was out of earshot.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “It’s probably not the conversation, Samson,” my mother said. “Rachel gets terrible cramps, and then she takes aspirin for the pain, and the aspirin gives her these unimaginable stomach pains. I worry about her stomach lining.” Her voice was flat. We took up our menus. My mother’s was open in front of her face, with only her eyes visible. She removed her crooked glasses, to better read. Now that her eyes were finally unadorned, I could see that they were dull with indignation.

  This wouldn’t have happened if Julie had Wattsbury parents, like Khadijah, I reflected. Even with Nancy, it would have been fraught, but there could have been debate in a common language. The thought was so evil that I dropped it and ignored it, let it scurry like a cockroach in the dark.

  • • •

  After lunch, the Oenervians went to Bed Bath & Beyond, and the Paquette/Beckermans repaired to Julie’s house in Miracle Mile. My mother locked herself in the guest bedroom and did her prostrations. I could tell from the soft thumps of her palms on the floor.

  “It’s weird you never taught us how to do those,” I said, when she was done.

  “You can easily find out,” she said, her face flushed, her hair held back with a tortoiseshell clamp. “You’ll come to Buddhism if you need it.”

  • • •

  The third-season premiere party took place at a Japanese restaurant in Century City. As Julie received congratulations from acquaintances, I watched a man with cheek implants wander the room, looking lonely, cranially impaled.

  “So unnatural, right?” said a tall, red-haired man my age, wearing a cardigan and a green tie with yellow skulls on it. “It makes the rest of us look puffy.”

  “If women grade our cheekbones on a curve, he fucks the curve,” I agreed. We were now better able to understand, we agreed, what it meant to be female in our contemporary, media-saturated culture. His name was Simon. A producer on Julie’s show who was really a writer, but for complicated guild-related reasons couldn’t be described as such, he’d grown up in Maryland, outside D.C., worshiping Scream and Fugazi. He pinched the freckled bridge of his nose and drummed on it with his index finger as he spoke of Le Tigre, and Le Tigre’s ruinous loss of Sadie Benning. He seemed non-evil. I reconsidered my across-the-board hatred of Julie’s co-workers.

  He asked me what I did.

  “You were in Shapeshifter?” His mouth fell open just slightly. “I saw you guys at the Echo. You were tight. Some fat, drunk guy got onstage, and your guitarist was playing some kind of seventies synth, and he just ducked over and tackled the guy, just fucking ran him off, like it was all in a day’s work, and then went right back to the synth and picked up the riff. It was fucking pro.”

  I thanked him. “Let me guess,” I said. “You wrote that line where she says lobster is the gangsta rap of seafood, once considered low-class and disgusting, now considered festive?”

  He blushed. “I originated that, yeah.”

  Soon, Simon and I committed to a hike in Runyon Canyon, and held our feet side by side, to confirm that we were really wearing the same Tiger sneakers with the same brown and orange color scheme. Julie disentangled herself from a news crew across the room and threw her arms around both our shoulders. “Protect me, entourage,” she said. “Put your matching sneakers up that anchorwoman’s ass.” She tilted her head backward toward her tormentor, a brunette, angular as a microphone stand, who appeared now to be summarizing the night’s footage with one hand on her hip, the other on her Channel 7 KATV microphone.

  I was feeling good about the party and, by extension, the future. Julie’s world was cosmopolitan and well-informed about my band, and I was a necessary part of a retinue. But we left, so that Julie wouldn’t be prodded into further mandatory extemporizing for news cameras. I grabbed a half-empty bottle of gin standing on a table—when Julie was walking next to me, I’d learned long ago, this was sometimes acceptable at catered events. The four of us—Julie, Rachel, my mother, and me—piled into the Volvo, and I drove us to the Holiday Inn in Silver Lake, where Rachel and my mother were staying. There, I hoped, Julie and Rachel would have the opportunity to drink together and female-bond.

  Back at the room, it quickly became clear this had been a fine idea. When my mother went into the bathroom to take out her contacts and wash her face, Julie and Rachel, without prompting, poured the gin into glasses and lay on the bed side by side to watch Rihanna videos on Rachel’s laptop.

  “She’s grinding the hedge,” observed Rachel. “I feel like not even M.I.A. would be grinding up on a hedge.”

  “But if you’re in a video, your job is to commit frottage with any object that’s placed in front of you, or behind you,” said Julie. “Be it Will Smith or like an Easter Island head.”

  “If you’re a girl, can you technically commit frottage?” Rachel wondered. “Is there a dictionary here?”

  “Just Google; see ‘Frottage: A method of making a design by placing a piece of paper on top of an object and then rubbing over it, as with a pencil or charcoal.’ What? This dictionary is bullshit.”

  “But that means if you were to put a charcoal crayon in Rihanna’s vagina, you could get a rendering of hedge with superincredible verisimilitude.”

  “Yeah, if you were like, Excuse me, I’m just going to put this piece of paper here.” Julie drank her gin.

  “And this charcoal up in here.” Rachel sipped, keeping up.

  Julie thought about it. “That would be money in the bank, charcoal-drawing plants with your vagina, if you were an artist, and you wanted a grant or something? ‘I will use my female orifice not merely as inspiration for my work but as the implement itself.’”

  Rachel nodded. “Cunt charcoal.” On screen, Rihanna writhed obliviously. I looked at these women lying peacefully together, drinking, and felt sleepy with happiness, an overwhelming contentment with the women life had given me. The desire I’d had to add Khadijah seemed obscene, a barbaric invasion of this sweet idyll.

  “Rachel, you have to do it, you’re such Whitney Biennial material. Especially if you do the frottage on
people live in the museum.”

  “I’ll try it out at Art Basel. It seems more sanitary if there’s just rich people around.”

  “I’ll do Basel Miami,” said Julie. “My exhibition will be called ‘Eighteen Studies of Viggo Mortensen’s Face,’ by Julie Oenervian.”

  My mother emerged from the bathroom. “What are you two talking about?” she asked. She was in her askew golden spectacles again. Her hair was down, and she wore a turquoise bathrobe. “Josh, do you understand what the hell they’re saying?”

  “Dirty jokes, Mom.”

  “I don’t mind dirty jokes if they’re not degrading anybody. Sometimes I still like them if they’re degrading the right person.”

  “It would take too long to explain,” said Rachel. “How are you doing? Do you want us to stop being noisy, so you can go to bed?”

  “No, that’s fine, thanks, you two are very cute.” My mother smiled. “What I would love to do is turn on the television for just a second, and check the weather. If we’re going to do Joshua Tree tomorrow, Rachel, I want to make sure this rain that’s supposed to start tomorrow night doesn’t really get going until after we get home.” She picked up the remote and studied it.

  “We can look it up online,” said Julie. “Believe me, we’re not doing anything important.”

  “That’ll take too long,” said my mother, with an authority born of deep, generational ignorance of the Internet, and turned on the TV. As local news buzzed to life, I joined Julie and Rachel on the bed to see if we could YouTube people drawing with their genitals. We were finding them surprisingly elusive when my mother took a sharp breath.

  “Look, look,” she said. “It’s Julie, where we just were.”

  “Oh my god,” Julie said. “We really don’t have to watch this, you guys.” It was the skinny newscaster from the party, shoving her mic in Julie’s face.

  “What do you think you would do,” the woman asked Julie, “if this turned out to be the last season, as some have speculated?” Be funny or colorful screamed the woman’s eyes.

  “You look so pretty,” said Rachel. “I could never be so poised on camera.”

  “Oh God, please change it,” said Julie. “Please.” She sounded genuinely distressed.

  “Well, hmmm,” her television image said, stalling.

  Rachel put her hand on Julie’s arm. “It’s cool,” she said, “we can just turn it off, if you don’t—”

  Then something horrible happened.

  “I think it could be nice to be homeless. There’s this law they’re going to pass in Massachusetts . . .” said the Julie on the television. The Julie in the hotel room with us covered her face with her hands as we watched the TV version of Julie describe Rachel’s program.

  “And it says that if you’re about to be homeless you can just call the state of Massachusetts, and they’ll pay your rent. Which I think is an awesome policy.”

  “Massachusetts, of course!” said the newscaster.

  “Right? So, if we get canceled I’m going to buy six hundred Dean and Deluca to-go meals and a Netflix account, check into the Boston Ritz-Carlton, and be homeless in Massachusetts.”

  “Thank you for that,” the newscaster said. “Julie Oenervian, informed and hilarious.”

  My mother clicked the remote, and the picture flickered away, just as the serene, corpse-like face of a meteorologist appeared. There followed about two seconds of silence.

  “There’s nothing wrong with what you said,” my mother said. “It was slightly weird because you sounded so enthusiastic over dinner, so, I thought, Why watch? Who cares, is what I mean.”

  “I’m so ridiculous,” said Julie. “Sorry, oh my god, I was just looking down at a microphone trying to think of something funny to say. Silliness came out of me. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “It’s okay,” said Rachel. “I get it. I mean I don’t totally understand why you were so into it before and then . . . Or actually, I do understand, you were being nice. Which is cool.”

  “I meant what I said when I was being nice, it was just I had to say something spur of the moment, when the microphone was, you know, in my face.”

  I felt an urgent need to defend somebody. But I didn’t know who I was supposed to defend.

  “I am so so sorry, I suck,” said Julie.

  “Let’s just not talk about it anymore,” said Rachel. “It doesn’t bear discussing, it doesn’t bother me.” She rose from the bed, walked to the sink with her glass, and tipped her gin into the basin.

  Once Julie and I were in the car on the way home, she was the first to speak.

  “I was extemporizing.”

  “Exactly.” This wouldn’t have happened with Khadijah, I thought, and dropped the thought.

  “What?” She threw up her hands. “You want me to be tactful about your sister’s welfare thing when I’m trying to make up a joke about what I’d do if we got canceled? I’m sorry, stuff comes out. It’s part of my job.”

  “The truth comes out when you need to be funny.”

  “As I just explained fifteen minutes ago, I didn’t mean it as a criticism of your sister. It was bullshit for a reporter.” She clutched her seat belt with both hands, as if to brace for a crash.

  “Yeah, I mean, everyone gets that, so, hey. It was just, whoops, awkward, change of tune.”

  “WHEN YOU MEET YOUR BOYFRIEND’S FAMILY, YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE SUPERNICE TO THEM. I WAS BEING NICE. And later, it was, What kind of honesty do you think is going to come out of me, after what she said about my dad? She was looking at him like she was going to bite him in the neck.”

  “He denied the existence of male privilege. You don’t do that around Rachel.”

  “He downplayed its significance in his particular, very difficult life. That’s different.”

  “It’s just what every bourgeois libertarian does, discount their own particular privileges as irrelevant to their success.”

  “‘Bourgeois libertarian.’ Would that be me, for example?”

  “You’re a dark-skinned woman, so I never think of you that way, I just think of you as really good. You’re excused.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry, it’s just been a rough visit. I didn’t eat enough at the premiere. I’m really hungry.”

  Some strangeness worse than fighting bubbled up beneath us. We rode the rest of the way home in silence.

  We were back before the battle stations when we started to speak again. “You clearly don’t—you don’t see us, my family, very well,” she said. “I don’t get your mother and your sister either.”

  “I’ll try to get your parents better,” I said. “I’m just trying to be loyal. My dad picked women he loved over his family. I can’t be like that.”

  “Do you like my parents?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah.”

  “I don’t want to be your Khadijah’s mom,” said Julie. She slammed the door.

  I flossed, alone at my battle station.

  7.

  The Opera

  Two and a half days later, Rachel and my mother had left Los Angeles, and a cold peace prevailed in the house. But Julie and I weren’t touching each other.

  As dust particles swam in brutal morning sunbeams, I sat at the desk in the study and sent two e-mails to my manager: one checking on a Portuguese hedge fund that wanted to license an instrumental remix of “This Is Just Wrong” for its website, another checking on a Ukrainian cell phone commercial, which was going to play “This Is Just Wrong” as gendered cell phones freak-danced each other. Sending them made me feel that the way I supported myself shared a common ancestor with employment. I so enjoyed this sensation, the warmth of purpose, that I wrote a third business e-mail to Gordon, whom I was going to see that night; he and Cora and Julie and I had a long-standing date to see Joanna Newsom at Disney Concert Hall.

  “This is a wild proposition,” I wrote. “But would you ever be interested in having me build you a home stud
io? In that big-ass garage of yours?” This was entrepreneurial initiative. “I’d give you the bro rate.”

  The response was swift, festooned at beginning and end with garlands of exclamation points. “Yes,” wrote Gordon. “How can we make this happen quickly? I have SO MANY SONGS IN MY HEAD AND SOON CORA IS (Cora and I are) GOING TO GENERATE A BABY.”

  We resolved to explore specifics at the concert. I hid my laptop and my cell phone from myself, under the covers of the bed, and took out my acoustic guitar. I was still waiting for notes on the Spirits of New Orleans score. It was the time of day Julie had encouraged me to set aside for songwriting. Since our evening with Khadijah a week ago, I had known—how I loathed this knowledge—whom the song must be about. TV could show us wish fulfillment, but pop songs were for longing. Replacing the woman with a song about the woman—surely, this was adulthood.

  I slung the guitar strap over my shoulders and whipped around a corner and aimed the guitar like an M16 at the block of machinery in the hall closet, the brain of the smart house, with its red veins flowing to the DVR, the AC, the alarm system, the sprinklers. I charged out of the closet and down the hall in bare feet. A white swath of kitchen spread open before me.

  I swung the guitar onto my back, hoisted myself up onto the kitchen island, and sat cross-legged beneath the hanging pans.

  “Good evening,” I said, addressing the track lighting. I strummed an open chord and waited for a song to come. I stared at the ceiling and hoped to hear a melody reverberate around the kitchen like a bird.

  Instead I saw, reflected in the side of a hanging pot, the distorted bust of a twenty-eight-year-old man: the expanding forehead, the thickening neck. The person on the side of the pot could not with credibility write any song I would want to write, so I stood on the island and gingerly removed the pots, the insidious, face-fattening wok. I dismounted the island, found a photo in a bedroom drawer, the one our Australian label had taken of me three years earlier, and placed it in the island’s sink. Looking at it as I played, I searched for a loop of four high minor chords, the song the boy in the picture would write about a sad-eyed girl he loved.