“What’s wrong?” he asked. “You look like a ghoul.”
I plopped down on the grass. I told him what I’d seen, and he put a hand to his brow, and said, “Oh fuck,” and gave me cinnamon gum for my breath.
“That’s a pig,” observed Todd. He took a pen from his jeans, and a white notebook from his jacket.
“True.”
“This is an article.” Todd paced, never touching pen to notebook. “Industry people abusing animals the way they abuse interns. What you just gave me is all I need. That plus some background quotes, some animal rights people, an anonymous animal handler who’s seen some shit. It’s a potential feature. I mean, somebody had to finagle the tiger to the bedroom, right? Who’s the tiger finagler? We’re going to do to that douche bag what he did to the tiger. I mean, it might be illegal. Can you put an animal-show pig in jail for abusing an animal? Maybe you potentially can.”
I saw Julie. A young red-haired woman from Tusk’s sustainability division was walking her out of the garden, speaking rapidly. People grew manic around Julie sometimes, kept her in conversations. Julie was rubbing her arms. A native Southern Californian, she became cold when it became “cold.” I wanted to tell her what I’d seen while we ate crackers in our warm bed.
To the tiger, I envisioned myself saying to Julie, once we were back at our battle stations, washing our faces, they would have looked like a two-headed monster. They would look to the tiger like this creature with two enraged faces, four active arms, the bottom face upside down.
I realized, as I watched Julie among her colleagues, that if Todd wrote an article in which Jeremy was described using the tiger as a captive audience, Jeremy would know I’d divulged what I’d seen. Jeremy knew I was Julie’s fiancé; Jeremy would not like Julie, would regard her as an enemy and a threat. Even if the article was never published, even if it was never written, even if all that happened was that Todd called him and asked him to confirm or deny what his anonymous source had said.
Our job here was to secure the future of Julie vs. Animals, to endear ourselves to Jeremy. Not to fuck with him.
“Leave Jeremy alone,” I said to Todd. “You can’t write it.”
“You’ll be completely left out of it. You can blame it on me.” Todd pressed his notebook to his heart with his fingers spread. “I’ll tell him I promised you not to utter a word to anyone and I just broke my promise. I’ll be the asshole.”
“If you do it,” I said, “I’ll burn your house down.” I looked at him until I felt sure he’d understood. We knew the same collection of people who ran independent labels and studios out of homes and low-end real estate in the Valley, and conducted business with them, such as it was. If Todd wrote the article, no matter how worthy, I would tell them he was a thief and a liar.
Todd closed his eyes. He picked up a beer can that was lying on the ground and threw it at the house. It tapped the wall and fell to the grass. He needs the money, I thought. I knew what it was like, how it made you perform your brokenness by throwing things.
But what could I do? Being in love, I thought, is being half a two-headed monster. There’s a reason a creature with two heads is horrifying. You can take Big Bird, and give Big Bird two heads, and Big Bird’s a raptor from the abyss, a nightmare. It’s not pretty, two brains fused into one thing. Sometimes you get to be the self you’ve always been, but to be loyal to someone you must be willing to stop being the rebel you used to be. You give up being always the truth teller, smashing windows.
That was the difference between being in love and being young together, the way Khadijah and I had been young together, thirteen years ago. I’d thought maybe the recent change in my life was that I was with someone people recognized from TV, but now I knew it was that I had never been in love before, in this way. It was clear to me now that I could see the ugly side of it.
Todd sat down beside me on the grass again. “I’m engaged too,” he said. “I would be the same way in your position.”
I tried to wave to Julie, but she was mired in a dialogue with two gray-haired men in blinding white blazers. Todd threw an arm around my shoulder.
“Have dinner with us,” he said. “You and Julie, me and Khadijah. Deej’ll be here the weekend after next. If you and Julie could come, she’d be tripping out. One blast from the past, one person from TV.”
I had doubts, grave ones, about arranging a reunion between Khadijah and myself. I looked Todd squarely in the eye and told him I would be stoked for it.
He asked me if “Deej” and I had stayed in touch.
“My dad cheated with her mom. Did she tell you that?”
He shook his head.
“Her parents split up, and so did mine. She moved with her mom to Cambridge, I stayed in Wattsbury. We didn’t have any reason to see each other except that my dad had done it with her mom. I couldn’t just be like, Bye, Mom, I’m going to see Dad’s ho’s daughter.”
Todd was looking at me carefully. He sensed, I could tell, that there were many things I was leaving out. Perhaps he had already come to regret the dinner invitation. I wanted to let him know he could withdraw it, but I didn’t know how.
3.
I Have to Remind Myself of That
On the way home, I told Julie about Jeremy. She rocked in her seat and cursed. She put her hands behind her head, somewhere in the depths of her hair, which appeared to calm her down. “It’s not the worst thing in the world,” she said. “What’s he going to do? Fire me and wait to see if the tiger-observing-sex thing gets on Gawker? You might have just done the show a favor, honestly.”
I told her about Todd and Khadijah, the dinner invitation. She remained unfazed. There would be some awkwardness, we agreed, a ghost from the past floating in the air above our food, at dinner. But nothing worse than that.
“You told me about that vow on our third date, and I was like, I owe her,” said Julie. “I need to send that girl a thank-you note and some scones.”
“It doesn’t freak you out?”
“I’d be jealous of an attractive awning, if you stood under it, but relative to other people, no. I’m not jealous of Khadijah. I mean, tell me if I should be. But it was thirteen years ago.”
I was taking downhill curves in her white Volkswagen, a light and obedient car. I was the one who liked to drive.
“Khadijah’s the last person you would ever need to be jealous of,” I said. An exaggeration, but one meant to convey affection. I was bleary from the pomegranate vodka, and from puking, so we bought coffee with cinnamon from a taco truck on La Cienega. That was all I needed to steer us home through the flats. Back at Julie’s house, in Miracle Mile, we fell to our battle stations, brushed our teeth, and had drunken sex. We lay under her down comforter, patterned with green birds, safe, nesting.
The hungover morning passed quickly. I sat on the study floor, my guitar in my lap, a Beatle in India. No “Dear Prudence” descended. I talked myself into falling in love with a meaningless chord progression, a limp melody, until I took a break to smoke a cigarette and walk to Miracle Mile’s Gaia Foods. By the time I let myself back in and turned off the alarm and put down my grocery bags on the kitchen island and put the groceries in the fridge and took two Advil, I’d forgotten the song.
That evening, Julie came home from work at 11:00 p.m., which was normal, and bore down on the single bottle of wine we kept in the kitchen, beside the cartons of organic soup, which was unusual. Neither of us ever drank at home. We drank at parties, where we got drunk.
“Would you open this for me, please?” she asked.
Sitting with the bottle wedged between my stocking feet, I went to work with the corkscrew. She watched me.
“How was your day?” She clamped two wineglasses on the counter.
“Besides the songwriting failures, kind of awesome.” I grunted, and the cork popped out. “The mail came, and I got this weird ‘This Is Just Wrong’ check from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It was taxed as a performance royalty, so I guess they playe
d it at a kingdom event? The first Bank of America I went to, the teller was a dick about the foreign currency thing, but at the second one I found this teller who was nice.”
“How are your eyes?” she asked. “Did you ever get new contacts?”
“Last week I went to this optician in Little Ethiopia that has everything cheaper. They had these new disposables, with this weird generic packaging with stains on it, like when you get illegal batteries from China? The world looks, not bad, or even blurry—I wouldn’t want to place a value judgment on it—just a little shimmery. The big thing is that they never slide up my eyeballs, like the old ones did, so that’s good.” I poured her a glass.
As I gave it to her, I was surprised to see tears glide down her cheeks. I asked her what was wrong. She shook her head and smiled. I wrapped an arm around her; she kissed me and slipped away, holding her wine close to her body with both hands, and crossed to the other side of the cavernous kitchen.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m just being a stressed-out weirdo. I didn’t get to really have dinner.”
“Did something happen?”
“Everybody can eat a bowl of dicks.”
I waited.
“Fiancé,” she sang. “Come watch TV with me.” She took my hand and led me to the living room.
“What happened?”
She placed her glass on the coffee table, appropriating a Gladiator-themed bar mitzvah invitation as a coaster in order to pick up both remotes at once.
“It’s really nothing. The Silicon Valley guys that came in with Jeremy can just be supershallow. I don’t need to want to marry them, they’re just my co-workers, and it’s not even all of them. There are just a few of them that are douches, and I get mad.”
“What did they say?”
“Not important.” The TV flashed on and flashed off. A fleeting glimpse of jocular heroin dealers.
“Tell me.”
She shook her head.
I stood in front of the television. “Was it about me? I just want to know. I don’t care what they said about me, if it was about me.”
She shook her head emphatically.
“Who cares? I only care if you feel like I’m so fragile you have to keep a secret from me. That’s more insulting than anything they could say.”
“I never want to hurt you,” she said, and I was frightened. She let herself slump into the couch.
I squared my shoulders. “You’re not going to hurt me. I promise.”
“Today I met with Jeremy and his guys, and Jeremy and I were being super buddy-buddy because we both knew what you saw last night and we wanted to show things were cool. So I tried to be so gentle. I was like, ‘Good cuff links. Did you burn all your fleece when you left Palo Alto?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah,’ and I was like, ‘Nice, I’m new money too.’ And he was like, ‘Is anybody old money anymore?’ and I was like, ‘Josh’s family acts that way,’ and he was like, ‘Josh acts poor.’ And he said that thing you said at the cookout about your disposable contact lenses, how you made them last a year instead of a month. And it just turned into this thing. This science guy was like, ‘Julie’s man’s so poor he goes fishing in Venice for catfish,’ and then the Stanford Business School guy was like, ‘Julie’s man’s so poor he’s got a chicken coop in her garage,’ and then the PR guy was like, ‘Julie’s man sells ices on Temple.’” She walked back to the kitchen as she spoke, and ripped a paper towel off the roll that stood on the island to blow her nose. “But I don’t give a shit. I don’t care what they think.”
“Of course Jeremy’s being mean. I’d be mean about a man who’d seen me lose a boner,” I said. “Besides, they’re clearly resentful because I’m a rock musician. All men secretly wish they were rock musicians. Sometimes when shit like this happens I have to remind myself of that.”
“These men don’t secretly wish they were rock musicians. These men are nerds from Northern California. They secretly wish there was a Pixar movie of Norse folklore. They secretly wish they had wineries. They secretly wish I would quit so they could hire a twenty-two-year-old with wet-looking blond hair who looks like a barbarian queen; that’s what it’s actually about, probably.”
“It’s just disbelief. You’re this . . .” I arranged my arms into a cradle. “This goddess carrying around a baby retard.”
“Did you just compare yourself to a baby retard?” She looked me over carefully as she opened a box of sea salt caramels..
“I did,” I said, with righteousness.
She put three pieces in her mouth, chewed them thoughtfully, like a baseball player with tobacco, sprinkled Comet on the remainder of the licorice in the bag, and threw the bag in the trash. “Don’t talk about yourself like that. If people at work are telling me I’m supposed to be ashamed of you, and you’re agreeing that I’m supposed to be ashamed of you, what am I supposed to do with that?”
She pulled her laptop from the cloth tangerine-colored case with zebra stickers that a fan in Singapore had made her and took it to the living room. Finally she said: “I can’t believe I’m affected by this. They’re idiots. I can’t believe I’m affected by this. Fuck me, if I’m that girl, who actually cares about this.”
“I wasn’t supposed to turn out this way,” I said, still sitting in the kitchen. We were descending into something, unable to stop. I pictured two ants swirling down a drain. “I wasn’t supposed to turn out this way at all. I was going to be a classics major. Do these guys at work even care what the Athenians would have thought of them? Because in Athens, they would have been condemned. I wrote a paper about the Symposium before I dropped out of NYU, and when the TA gave it back to me, he looked at me, and he said, ‘Your reading of Plato is terminal.’ That was the word he used. He was amazed by me.”
I was scratching my scalp, and I was ashamed that I was doing this, and I was ashamed of my thoughts and the words that were jumping out of my mouth, so I didn’t let Julie see me. I sat on the far kitchen counter, concealed from the living room, by myself. I heard her turn on the television. Baltimore detectives conducted surveillance on a mafia brothel.
I found the most prestigious object in the house, Robert Bresson’s Notes on Cinematography, under the master bed, brushed a dead spider off it, and pretended to read, within view of the couch where Julie had settled, to make her feel bad about watching The Wire to avoid conflict and, by extension, about flourishing in television, and being a happy, prosperous person. Julie kept her eyes on the flat screen. It had the word ELITE printed across the bottom in golden capitals and was connected through the walls to an R2-D2-like tower of electronics in a closet off the guest room, so that the consoles by which it functioned would not mar the living room’s design. This “smart house” arrangement seemed tremendously, importantly dishonest to me right now. Neither of us spoke.
When, after ten minutes, she went to the bathroom, I crept to the couch and awoke her laptop. One window was open on NYTimes.com. The other was open on the official website of Marc Jacobs. Sweatshirts floated across a Marc Jacobsness–infused winter wonderland, in which swans pulled sleighs whisking naughty-faced maidens in white Zorro masks through exuberantly billowing snow.
Sitting on the couch, I peeled a cobweb off the spine of the Bresson. The cobweb adhered to my fingers. My hand looked to me like the hand of an undead, reaching up through the soil and grass to pull a living victim down into my earthen lair. This was, in retrospect, a clear signal that the odds of carrying on a productive, healing conversation were, for the evening, small. But hoping that Julie and I could have the kind of fight that led to cathartic sex, and believing that if we could fuck with abandon tonight it would prove that the mockery at Tusk had not gotten to our heads, had not successfully shamed us, had not victimized us, I hurried to the bathroom to engage her in another round of fighting.
I found her applying toner to her face with a cotton ball.
“Did you find a Marc Jacobs sweater you wanted to buy yourself?” I asked.
“I didn�
��t see anything so awesome I should spend the money.” She finished her forehead. “Did you look at my laptop?”
“The website was just, like, on there. Do you wish I could buy you sweaters from Marc Jacobs? Is that rough for you, that I can’t?”
She shoved the plastic CVS bag of cotton balls back in its place beneath the sinks. “No, baby, I don’t care. One of the makeup women today told me to look at a Marc Jacobs ad she worked on. I hope you can come home from work with a Marc T-shirt for me someday. But I’m okay with the bridge line. I’m okay with a fake from Vietnam.”
“How do you imagine that I’ll ever be in a situation where I come home from work? How do you think it would ever happen? What is the path that will take me from here to having a job where I come home from work every day, sometimes with a Marc T-shirt?”
She planted her hands on the sink. “Uh, I don’t know, Josh, isn’t that kind of what you’re supposed to figure out for yourself?”
Once I had brought up my own future, I was in real danger. Palpitations began, and a moment later, it felt as if the palpitations were everywhere, up to my ears. Of course I had a plan for making money. Julie and I had agreed that her income would dwarf mine during this time of transition, the post-Shapeshifter years. Eventually, our positions would reverse themselves; she would retire from television by fifty, if not by forty-five; I would become a producer and sound-track composer in demand, a fixture. My job was to patiently stalk clients, build a reliable revenue stream, before we had children. But it was a spiderweb, like most show business plans, intricate, pretty, built out of a thin, bright hope you could see only from the correct angle. There was no quantifiable reason I would ever attract more bands and TV shows than anyone else, no superior business model, no diploma. If I allowed myself to look at it skeptically, it was no kind of plan at all. I felt incapable of having sex, let alone persuading Julie to have sex with me. But if I terminated the conversation now, everything would still be okay; I would be able to get to sleep tonight, I would wake up tomorrow morning ready to face the dawn. I decided to put myself to bed. I didn’t speak. I turned on the water in my sink, and squirted face wash into my hand.
Good Kids: A Novel Page 12