Good Kids

by Benjamin Nugent

  Khadijah cast aside the broom. She didn’t throw it; she only gave up on it, letting it fall to the ground. She went back to the closet, hauled out a black, new-looking, Earth Vac vacuum cleaner, and plugged it into a socket in the kitchen wall.

  “Please go,” she said. She switched on the vacuum cleaner, giving herself a force field of noise.

  It was when I was back in my rental car, driving into the first blue suggestions of daylight, south of New Haven, that I was able to formulate what I had done. It had felt to me as if the person who was at the core of my life—Julie—was dispensable. And the person who had felt like the real core—Khadijah—had turned out to be someone who could only walk around the margins.

  For a long time I pounded on the steering wheel and cursed. But this could last only so long; after forty-five minutes, there was an oasis. A brief moment when reflection overcame confusion and self-flagellation.

  When a band is good, I thought, it doesn’t sound like music somebody composed. You don’t get a good band by hearing music in your head and making that music real. Maybe a good painting or a good poem can be the realized vision of an individual; Joanna Newsom’s a vision made real, and she’s good, but she’s not a band. A good band happens because two or more people play music together and, either immediately or over time, surprise each other with a sound conceived jointly. The music is sovereign over its players. Nobody’s in control, and you can hear it.

  The same is true of true love. True love being understood here to mean sustained love. It’s better if you don’t place your faith in a vision of how things are going to be. The shock of what happens can be superior to any concept you had in your head at the start. But you have to listen carefully to the other person; you can’t imitate the other person; you can’t drown out the other person; you can’t be drowned. If you forget these precautions, you will think your concept was flawed; you’ll forget that not having a concept, being surprised, was the point. You’ll start acting like dicks to each other. There will be fights, and boredom. The music will go flaccid. Like a band in decline, you will become a joke or break up.

  At the tollbooth guarding Queens and Brooklyn, the boroughs where I had places to crash, I reached into my wallet for $6.50 and found only napkins: Tom, Myra, Julie 2. The ink had begun to bleed. Tom’s nose had melted, and merged with his mouth. Myra’s flower now sprouted from her head. Julie 2’s hand was reduced to a blot, but her cello, creased in two places, was still a workable instrument. There was a mile-long line of cars behind me. I folded the napkins, put them back inside, and turned to face the brooding man in uniform.

  12.

  The Spanish Show

  A month later, I walked west on Canal from the Q train, with a carpetbagger’s gait, the Great Black Bag slung over one shoulder, my guitar case strapped around my back. Ominously encumbered like this, I’d have to turn on the charm if I wanted my father and Allison to put me up for a night. But I didn’t dislike my burdens, on this particular afternoon. Seven years of experience hauling amps from vehicle to stage to vehicle made my load light. It was time to be in a band again. The lifting, the plugging in. The taping of microphones to half-broken boom stands. The elbowing through a crowd toward the bar with your drink tickets in your hand. The living noise of electricity before a drummer counts 4/4 on rim-bitten sticks.

  I was on my way to meet Rachel for dumplings in Chinatown before we descended on Allison’s loft together; my father had summoned us for an announcement. Rachel had just taken the Amtrak down this morning, and I hoped she might be persuaded to put me up in Somerville. I had envisioned myself potentially couch-surfing for a matter of years. But being homeless turned out to produce yet more of the already dominant feeling in my life: that of being a bassist without a band. After a month I was in awe of its depressive power—I felt not so much a surfer as a horse thrown off a ship, paddling in the center of an ocean. I was tired of baleful looks from old half friends’ girlfriends, who had long grown sick of asking me about my breakup with Julie Oenervian. I was tired of trying to obtain the modest royalty checks that were inevitably sent to the apartment where I’d camped the week before. I was sick of e-mailing Julie from Internet cafés, writing page-long treatises on why we should have a phone conversation. If I could crash at Rachel’s for a solid fortnight, I would have time to balance, attain dry land, find true north. I imagined sitting at her clean, circular kitchen table, a hand-me-down from the long-ago-vacated house in Wattsbury, recently showered, wearing a clean sweater, eating oatmeal with sliced bananas.

  Rachel was late for dumplings, red-cheeked and slightly wild-haired from the rush downtown from her belated train. She threw her purple L.L.Bean backpack on the Great Black Bag and looked at me with something just short of revulsion.

  “Jesus, Josh. You look like one of those old men outside the Stop and Shop who feed cans to the recycling monster.”

  “Mmmrghmh,” I said.

  “Seriously, where are you living, what’s happened to you?”

  “I’m living here, right now.” I kicked the bag. This was melodramatic. But I had just been ejected from a Vice editorial assistant’s couch in Bushwick for being the suspected source of a bedbug infestation. Petulance was my due.

  “I assumed— Are Dad and Allison being dicks about letting you crash there?”

  “They’ve got some secret shit going on. For a month they’ve been telling me they, like, can’t make provisions for visitors right now. I feel like they’re making a Frankenstein monster.”

  A waitress came, and Rachel ordered two teas. “They’re probably on the rocks,” she said. “I think today’s announcement is going to be divorce.”

  “Maybe. But he said something to me in the car last month about her wanting kids, so maybe they’re fucking all the time, to get her pregnant? So if I was crashing there it’d be like . . .” I made the descending hand gesture and melancholy dive-bomb sound that in concert signify boner death. “And now she’s going to tell us she’s having a kid.”

  Rachel considered. “It’s either breakup or pregnancy. Their relationship can go one of two ways.”

  Our tea came, and Rachel ordered us each a pile of fried dumplings stuffed with shrimp. I promised to pay her back once I obtained a new check for a royalty payment from Argentina that had been mailed to Julie’s and had never been forwarded. From Chinatown, we pushed south to Allison’s loft, the two extant Paquette/Beckerman siblings. Fog slurped at Manhattan from its perch above the river. Trickles of black water took ninety-degree turns in the sidewalk, leaking from flowerpots set before a furniture store. They made me think of Julie’s tears, flowing down the streets of West Hollywood. Tears I had drawn from those beast-stilling eyes. Julie would be happier now, I decided to decide. She’d find a man who would come home from work an hour before her, at 8:00, to help Samson with their babies. A man who would sling down his laptop bag, roll up his sleeves, and take his children in his arms, another Wednesday done. He would pay their teenagers’ tuition fees at a wonderful school when she became too old to be a star. If nothing else, Khadijah and I had made this possible. We had weaned Julie off of me.

  Funny, how after dire events you could simultaneously rise and fall in your own estimation. Maybe this was how you moved through adulthood—always walking both directions at once, toward redemption and hell.

  “It’s for the best, bluebird,” I said.

  “What?” said Rachel.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Just talking to somebody who isn’t there.”

  Rachel studied me a moment, worried, before she pretended to laugh. “Have you thought of crashing with Mom?” she asked.

  “This new guy she met at meditation is living there now. He was on one of their dathün retreat things with his guru. And then he didn’t have a place to stay—everybody’s losing their jobs up there, it’s weird—so now he and the guru guy are both in her house.”

  “You can hang out at my place a few days, I don’t care.”

  “You shoul
d know,” I said, “I might have bedbugs on me. I’m not sure.”

  “Oh, then, no. Sorry.” We walked in silence for a moment.

  “It’s supposed to be hard for a person to carry them,” I said. “Like, it’s usually furniture.”

  “Then how do people get them, then? It’s people coming into their houses. I know people who got them without buying furniture or going to a thrift store or anything.”

  I allowed myself to stagger ever so slightly, under the weight of my bags, to dramatize my plight. “How is your work going, with that homelessness elimination campaign?”

  “Oh God, fuck me, man, fine. You can stay, but you can’t take your bags inside, we can figure out a storage-space situation. You can shower at the Y and I’ll buy you some new clothes.”

  She had sounded so much like my father when she’d said fuck me, man. The family still had some juice in it.

  • • •

  When we stood before the door to Allison’s loft, I took a deep breath and pushed—unlocked again. No sooner had I thrown down my bags than Miles skittered around the corner, from Allison’s closet. A herder, by genetic predisposition, he twisted his sausage-like body as he took the curve, to flank me and usher Rachel and me farther inside. Or so I first believed. But Miles was in fact the one herded.

  His pursuers were two little girls, about five years old. They caught him, briefly, stroked his fur with both hands before he redoubled his efforts to reach me. The girls gave chase, but stopped when they came under our shadows. My father and Allison strolled in from the kitchen, until they realized, simultaneously, that strolling wasn’t the right mode, and jogged to the children. My father put his hands on one pair of little shoulders, Allison her hands on the other.

  “See, this is the reason we didn’t want to have you stay indefinitely, Josh, it wasn’t a judgment on you, it’s only the contingency of the . . .” Allison indicated the two squirming creatures.

  “Rachel, Joshua,” said my father, “this is Lucia.”

  “And this is Victoria,” said Allison. She peered closely at the girl after she said her name, as if she would have appreciated some confirmation of her reality. “This is their second day in their new home, and we’re still getting used to things a little around here.”

  I introduced myself. Lucia said hello almost inaudibly, with her hands over her eyes. Victoria hopped slightly with each syllable: “Hell-o.”

  Allison was calm. “Josh and Rachel are your half brother and half sister,” she said, kneeling between them, her hands in her lap. “They’re New Daddy’s kids, but they have a different mommy.” The girls studied us. I studied them back, these children whose sense of the possible had over a period of days been made to expand and expand. But in an instant they were in motion, resuming their hunt for Miles.

  My forehead was tight from the chill outside, my hands drawn into my sleeves. But soon I was warmed by the embrace of my father, who, though he didn’t smell like weed, seemed softened, eroded by some natural force.

  “We decided to adopt last year,” he said, as he enveloped me. “We wanted to make an announcement to everyone at the same time, sorry, once everything had gone through. It really hits you a flake, when they arrive. That’s an Irishism, ‘to hit him a flake.’ It means to strike somebody violently.”

  My father’s need to swathe emotional confessions within the sharing of information was tolerable to me, just now. I put my arms around him. “Congratulations, dude,” I said into his beard.

  “And Boston? Did you and Khadijah dine on falafel?”

  “It was kind of a fail. We chewed each other up a little.”

  Somewhere in a distant corner, Miles, finding no sanctuary, yowled. “I know what that’s like,” my father said. “It can be fun. Looking back? Right now? That sounds surpassingly fucking fun.”

  “Where are they going to sleep?” I watched the children pursuing the dog. “I mean it’s awesome.” It might take me a few moments, I decided, to ingest that the Dad who had been so eager for Rachel and me to grow up and release him had signed on for a second tour of duty. But I suspected that his old restlessness, so uncongenial to fatherhood, had fallen on its embers. He might have less energy for the new children, but they would have more space, more silence.

  “Sleep? I’m not aware that they sleep.”

  It was at this point that Lucia and Victoria stripped the cushions off the couch and placed them on the living room floor.

  “This is a ritual they’ve developed in the last twenty-four hours,” my father said. “It’s called the Spanish Show. They’re both used to Spanish in the home—they’re from a family in Washington Heights—and they do a kind of performance in Spanish for us. The rule, apparently, is that when you put the cushions on the floor, Spanish comes over you. It’s like speaking in tongues.”

  “The Spanish Show begin,” said Victoria, who seemed to be the director. Lucia took up the call.

  “It’s just one of life’s minor surprises,” my father mused.

  Sure enough, Victoria and Lucia, evidently by mutual decree, returned to the language they shared and we did not. They commanded Rachel, in this language, to stand on the cushions and impersonate a full cabinet of wonders: monkey, bear, snake, sea horse, dolphin. The Spanish Show was improvisatory. Just as the past came to your mouth unbidden, so did the roles that consumed your body. The girls stumbled across the soft landscape in their white dresses, shapeshifting. I came to see in them something essential: that which remained constant as the poses changed.

  “New Daddy has a house in the country where they real bears,” Lucia told me, once we’d jumped up and down, hands in armpits, monkeys, perhaps fifteen times. This was the first full sentence that had passed between us. “It not even a house. It a castle. He make it himself.” She spun around in a circle with her arms open to signify vastness.

  My father leaned against a wall with his eyes closed.

  “Dad,” Rachel barked. She snapped her fingers in front of his face, and he blinked back to life.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Two kids is a bit of a project. But so far, they make us”—he scanned the ceiling for a description—“too tired for bitterness and depression.”

  He made his way to a battered coffee table supporting a splendor of liquor options, and one of his bowls of frozen yogurt, the frozen yogurt half consumed. He poured himself a substantial vodka tonic and put ice cubes from a little bucket into his mouth. Chewing ice was a habit of his I had almost forgotten. It was what he did, when compelled into child care, to wake himself up.

  “I mean how do you start to make amends,” he pondered to me, “if the way you were raised to think of yourself, it’s all become sin? This is one thing you do, maybe.” With his free hand, he indicated his children. “I’m going to be working,” he said, “till they put me in the ground.”

  “New Daddy,” shouted Lucia. She pointed to my father. “You an animal.”

  “Quite astute, darling.” He put the drink beside a neo-Cubist bust of Allison’s father, Bruce, commissioned from a nearby sculptor. He knelt beside Lucia suddenly, so stiff, quite old; he dropped. He put his hands on the floor. “What kind of animal,” he asked, “do you want me to be?”

  Curious to see how the apartment had been modified for children, I ambled from the living room into what would have been the dining room but now, covered in toys, looked like a tornado-buffeted playground. A puffy sticker of a fire truck adhered to the cheek of an eighty-year-old African mask, which had been torn off the wall and thrown on the floor. Moving on to the kitchen, I pulled myself a glass of water from the dispenser and leaned against the fridge, drinking deep, enjoying the pure martyrdom of homelessness. This theatrical display—the vagabond, slaking his thirst, quivering by the Sub-Zero—would have drawn some attention a month earlier. But my father had other children now. And Julie and Khadijah were, for the foreseeable future, unavailable. So I stood erect, and fixed my hair in the little tin-framed mirror that hung above the sink.
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  Rachel joined me in the kitchen. “I got the scoop from Allison,” she murmured. “It’s just so fucking batshit this is actually happening. Allison wanted white international newborns. But Dad held out for local, probably traumatized, nonwhite non-newborns. I mean, hey.”

  “What about the essays? I mean, Dad used to dream.”

  “That’s what he likes to do. He’s given himself to dreams. He’s liberated.”

  “What are you talking about? Liberated how?”

  Rachel tapped her cowboy boot against the floor. “I mean from acting on them.”

  “Linus, stop with the vodka, just do me that favor, okay?” This was Allison’s voice, rising from the other side of the Japanese screen that divided the kitchen from the central living space. “If you can be sober when it’s cleanup time,” she said, “that’ll be extremely helpful to me.”

  “Do you truly believe the janitors of this nation keep it clean in a state of sobriety?” I heard my father ask Allison. “Have you ever spoken to a janitor? Are you so alienated from the masses that this is your notion of how cleaning takes place? Sober?”

  “Remember last week, when you cleaned the tub? Maybe I should talk to a janitor, because maybe he would clean up without doing ten thousand dollars’ worth of water damage, even if he was wasted.”

  “Maybe you should find a man like your dad, who can just throw out ten thousand dollars and not have it be a thing. Because that’s actually what you’re saying to me right now, right?”

  “You could hear a lark singing in a meadow and you would think the lark was implying that you were poor. You could hear a dog barking and you’d think it was implying, ‘Linus, you’re a poor loser. Linus, you’re a poor loser.’”

  “That’s what you hear when a dog barks. I gave you children—what do you want from me? Am I not an adequate father, despite my unsatisfactory income?”

  The sounds of falling silverware and shattering plates issued from the parlor, where the children were, and their parents rushed to see what had happened.