Aha! That’s it. This is his new strategy: appear decent, show kindness to Layla, quit alienating the blood relatives, and the bloodless one will be easier to let go. It’s brilliant, coming as it does during the holidays, when most people’s emotions are spinning just a bit out of their normal orbit and meltdowns are peering around every corner like kids trying to catch a glimpse of Santa Claus.
A minute later, Brett walks in with a strange look on his face. It’s a look I don’t recognize, and I feel like I’m pretty well versed in the many expressions of Brett. He stands in the doorway and stares at me.
“Layla?” he says. “I got you something extra-special. Something I know you weren’t expecting, yet something I think you’ll appreciate.”
“Wow,” I say. “Quite a preamble.”
“Well, it’s quite a gift,” he says.
“Way to blow up her expectations.” Scott laughs. “This thing better be pretty freakin’ good.”
Brett steps out of our line of sight and then reappears a few seconds later with that same look on his face. “Layla,” he says, “I know how important family is to you, so I present to you … your father.”
Everything feels like it’s moving in slow motion. I feel my heartbeat, and I think I can even hear it. I wonder if anyone else can. Is this really happening? I see Brett stepping aside, but is my father going to materialize in his place? My father? Whom I haven’t seen in more than twenty-five years?
Sure enough, in walks a man who I guess is my father. I haven’t seen him since God knows when. I don’t have any memories of a relationship with him, and can only recognize him from pictures my mom had. He’s aged but not too terribly. He’s older for sure. I look at his face, the wrinkles, his lips, his eyes. I look to see if I see myself in this strange person who was once my dad, but I can’t look too long. I don’t want to look too long. He doesn’t deserve that long a look. He doesn’t deserve anything. I think a million things and feel even more. The conflicting emotions are short-circuiting my brain.
“Layla?” the man says.
I can’t say a thing. I’m speechless. I’m angry. At him. At Brett. At Christmas. I look at Ginny and Bill. I look at Trish and Scott. I can’t look at Brett, and I’m loath to look at Heather—how dare he allow her to be in the mix when he thrusts my long-lost father before me? I turn to my father to sneak one last look, then run out the back door and drive away.
• • •
I spend Christmas Day in bed, ignoring all phone calls from the Fosters. The holiday has been ruined forever.
I got Brett a signed Troy Aikman football jersey. His hero. Number eight. I hate myself for going above and beyond and getting kicked in the gut in return. Why did I feel the need to still get him something so nice? If I wasn’t at my wits’ end when I ran out of there, I’d have grabbed the gift bag and taken it back. And then donated it to some charity. Maybe he didn’t open it.
Though I wouldn’t have admitted it before—in fact, I’d have sworn the opposite, that it was meant to shame him with my goodness—I put a lot of thought, and dare I say love, into that gift. That’s evaporated like snow on Santa Monica Boulevard. I hate Brett Foster.
Wow. I’ve never felt that before. Maybe that was what I needed to get past this, to get past him. Maybe he did me a favor? If the inspiration to stay inside for the better part of a week and gain four pounds in the process is a favor.
New Year’s Eve I stay home. Brooke, who’s back six weeks early from Vancouver, due to some complications on set that apparently involved a megaphone, Mountain Dew, and the director, tries to get me to go out with her, but there’s no way I’m going out to ring in the New Year (curious as I am to hear what fresh hell she’d gotten into). This is the first time I haven’t spent New Year’s Eve with Brett since I was sixteen. I watch a bunch of bad television, and also Forrest Gump, which always makes me cry. Brett hates the movie, and so it seems fitting that it’s on and I’m enjoying it.
Ginny calls my cell phone at 12:01. I look at her name on my caller ID and almost don’t answer. But I can’t ignore her calls anymore. We haven’t even spoken since Christmas.
“Hi, honey,” she says. “Happy New Year!”
“What’s so happy about it?” I reply.
“Oh, come on now. Where are you?”
“I’m home, Ginny,” I say.
“Oh, dear …”
“What?”
“I’m used to catching you out having fun with Brett in some loud place.”
“Well,” I answer, “I’m sure there’s a good possibility that Brett is out having fun in some loud place. Just not with me.”
“This isn’t right,” Ginny says. “It’s just not … Bill?”
I hear her shuffling, and the phone sounds like she’s covering it with her hand.
“Hello?” I say.
“Honey, do you want me to come over?” she asks.
“No, no, I think it’s time I separate.”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“I just think …” I pause to gather my thoughts. I haven’t really thought it through at all; it’s just sort of coming to me as I say it, but it feels right. “I think it’s time I move on. Tomorrow is the first day of a new year. And I think it’s time I actually … well … change out of the pajamas I’ve been wearing for three days, but also, you know. I think you know.”
“I do,” she says. “And I don’t like it one bit.”
“I don’t, either, Ginny,” I say. “But after what he did—”
“Would you believe I think he meant well?”
“I would believe that you believe it, but I don’t believe that he did.”
We sit in silence on the phone for a long while.
“I love you, Ginny,” I say, and I start to cry because it feels like I’m ending more than the phone call.
“I love you, too, Angel,” she says. “I’m here for you always.”
“I know,” I say. And I hang up. I don’t say the word good-bye. I can’t.
brett
New Year’s Eve. Amateur night. The pressure is unbearable. I’ve never liked being around idiot drunk people under any circumstances, and it just so happens that about seventy percent of the populace is idiot drunk people on New Year’s Eve, making beer-goggled bad decisions before resolving to stop making bad decisions in the following year.
You’re trying way too hard to have fun, spending absurd amounts of money to get into places you otherwise would never want to go, drinking far more than you would on any other night, pretending that Ryan Seacrest is entertaining—and if that wasn’t depressing enough, you have to listen to drunken, slurred renditions of “Auld Lang Syne” and “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).”
If you’re married, you have to spend a fortune on the night so that you and your wife can swear that next year you’re staying home. Just like you swore you’d do last year. If you’re single, you run the very real risk of waking up in a bed with a person of the opposite sex who may or may not have been a first or even fifteenth choice, had you not been drunk, a person of the same sex who may have jump-started your experimentation phase—one that you’d never even considered before and now unfortunately can’t remember, or a person of indeterminate sex, which, well, that’s just not good news for anyone. (I won’t tell you which of my friends has passed along these stories of single New Year’s Eves. Because Jared would hate me for that.) Anyway, New Year’s Eve is a bad, bad night.
When I was a kid I loved it, of course. It was an excuse to party. Then the good times were far outweighed by the bad. Like the year my hangover lasted two full days, during which time I was unable to get out of bed except to clamber to the bathroom, eyes still shut, hoping my aim was decent, begging to be shot in the head. Or the time I lost my car in Tijuana. Or of course the time Scotty had the bright idea to mix Jägermeister and Goldschläger, a combination that inspired the “wet T-shirt contests are sexist” wet T-shirt contest that involved Scott, his friends, my friends, and
myself (all male) climbing up onto a bar for an impromptu wet T-shirt contest, resulting in not one but two people slipping off the bar, onto the floor, and breaking limbs—an arm for young Scotty and a leg for Duane Gustovsen, who coincidentally never hung out with us again.
But now I couldn’t give a shit. Now it’s just another day of the week. Yet this one reminds me that another year is ending, I’ve gotten a year older, and I’ve accomplished much less than I wanted to.
But of course Heather asks me what we’re doing, so the pressure is on. Fucking New Year’s. Which brings up another point. I wonder if she’s expecting that our big “third-date” night will happen then.
“What do you want to do?” I ask, trying to put it back on her. “Go out,” she says. “Have fun … drink way too much …” I search her face for a hint of irony, hoping against hope that she’s kidding and she’ll say so any second. Nope. Nothing.
“Cool,” I say. “Have you heard about anything fun happening? Anywhere specific you’d like to go?” Where I can spend hundreds of dollars on mediocre food and, even worse, give my credit card in advance so they can fuck me starting rightthissecond?
“I have some friends who are going to the Viceroy,” she says. “That sounds fun.”
“We haven’t really commingled the friends yet,” I say, half kidding. “Are you sure New Year’s is the best time to do this?”
“Why not?”
And that’s how I find myself at the Viceroy, having spent one hundred ninety-five dollars per person to get in, fifteen dollars on parking, and then to my astonishment learn that none of this includes the dinner that we apparently signed up for: a two-hundred-fifty-dollar-per-person four-course dinner that includes a champagne toast and entrance to the New Year’s Eve celebration at nine-thirty p.m. Turns out what I paid for in advance was the “celebration,” which is nonrefundable and would have been included in the dinner package. But now I’m out nine hundred five dollars.
This alone starts the evening off on the wrong foot, because of course I can’t complain—I’m not an asshole, nor am trying to be one—but this is a predicament Layla and I would never have found ourselves in. Layla hates things like this. And the idea of spending that kind of money for one meal and the privilege to celebrate somewhere would make her as sick as it makes me.
But Heather isn’t Layla.
“This is Krista,” Heather says, as she introduces me to one of her girlfriends. “Hi, Krista,” I say.
“And this is Kelly and Stacia,” she says, with regard to the two other girls who are with us.
What Heather didn’t tell me was that I would essentially be attending girls’ night out with her and her three friends, who would talk incessantly about bad dates, online sample sales, and weight gain. Did these girls scare off all their boyfriends? How are all of them single? Why are all of them single? Were they hoping I’d help them attract other men?
I sit and force smiles through all four courses, checking my watch constantly, praying for time to move faster. Heather doesn’t include me in much of the conversation, or if she does, it’s to explain who this person is in this story that they are telling—a person I will never meet and a story that can’t end fast enough.
I sit next to Heather and really take her in. I’m usually so involved in the time we spend together, be it in conversation or activity, that I haven’t had a lot of time to sit back and assess all that is Heather. She’s pretty. She’s very pretty. And she has a fairly good sense of humor. Most of the time. But her laugh kind of bothers me. It’s not totally annoying, it’s just not Layla’s laugh. And she doesn’t laugh at my dad’s jokes the way Layla does. And it used to bug the shit out of me when Layla would humor my dad, because I felt like it encouraged him, but when Heather didn’t laugh at my dad’s jokes it really bummed me out.
“What do you get when you put together a brown chicken and a brown cow?” her friend Stacia asks when the ladies have clearly had a lot to drink.
“I don’t know,” they all say.
“You get a brownchickenbrowncow,” Stacia says, but she says it in the onomatopoeic imitation of the generic porn riff: bown-chicka-wow-wow.
I admit I have told this joke before, and I do get a kick out of it, but for the rest of the night I’m surrounded by four drunk women who think it is just high-larious to yell brownchickenbrowncow over and over. And over and over. It’s no longer funny. Or cute. And unless it’s going to lead to a fivesome upstairs in one of the hotel rooms, it is seriously working my last nerve.
The “celebration” part of the evening consists of me watching Heather dance with her friends, me losing Heather for the good part of an hour, and Krista drunk-dialing her ex-boyfriend. When he refuses to meet her there, she melts down, resulting in Heather deciding that she should go home with Krista to be a good friend. And I should go home alone.
On my way home, some drunk idiot bumps into my car at a red light. Of course he does.
“I thought it was turning green,” he says.
“They all do eventually,” I reply, lacking the energy to throttle him.
After all is said and done I get home at three a.m. And I’m pretty clear in my head that I don’t want to go out with Heather again. I wrestle with whether or not to call her and end things tonight or wait until tomorrow to do it. Which is less assholeish? Ruining her New Year’s Eve? I mean, this way she can really bond with poor Krista. Or New Year’s Day? That seems worse somehow: It starts her year off on a bad note. I pick up the phone to call her.
“Heather?” I say.
“Hey, you …” she slurs.
“How’s Krista?”
“She’s okay,” she says. “You know, men are jerks.”
Funny you should mention that, I think, but out loud I say, “That they are.”
“But not you.” She giggles.
“No, I’m one, too,” I correct.
“No, you’re not, you sillysilly,” she says.
Layla never would have called me a sillysilly. I feel even more strongly about what I need to do.
“Oh, but I am,” I say. “I can prove it.”
“How?” she asks.
“Well,” I say, “I think that maybe it’s too soon for me to be dating. And you’re such a great girl, you don’t want to be a rebound. You deserve better.”
“Oh my God, are you breaking up with me? On New Year’s Eve?”
“I did debate whether to do it tonight or tomorrow. I thought this was the lesser of two evils.”
“There’s only one evil on this phone call, and it’s you!” Heather shouts.
“Good one!” Krista screams in the background.
“Well,” I say, “okay, I’ll take that.”
“I can’t believe you, Brett,” she says. “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. I already feel guilty enough about Layla. This is the last thing I need. I don’t say this to her, of course.
“Whatever,” she says, and hangs up. And I think it’s over. But then she and Krista prank-call me until six a.m. Which would have been much more effective if they’d been sober enough to use the code that blocks caller ID.
I’m woken by another call at seven a.m. on New Year’s Day. I’m certain it won’t be the Drunk-Dialing Duo, because the lull in calls for the past hour leads me to believe that they’ve finally passed out, so I answer.
“Top o’ the year to ya,” a chipper, unfamiliar male voice says.
“And to you?” I reply, my pitch raised to suggest I have no idea who I’m talking to.
“It’s Nick,” he clarifies. “Foxx. Layla’s—”
“Hi,” I cut him off. “Happy New Year.”
“Yes, it will be,” he says. “Listen—you got a business plan for that idea of yours?”
“Not a plan plan,” I say. “Not in writing or anything.”
“Get one,” he says. “And have it ready in a week for a meeting with a buddy of mine.”
“Okay,” I say, an
d we hang up.
I’m not sure why he’s taken such an interest in me and my idea, and if he wants a piece of it or if he’s really just trying to help his friend out. I do need something, anyway, some sort of business plan. I just hadn’t gotten that far. I make a mental note to put a call in to a buddy when it’s not seven a.m. to enlist his help in rushing together a design package and a little market analysis, and to also get some basic financials from Katie Hu—Ms. Manziere—so it sounds like I actually know what I’m talking about.
• • •
Twenty minutes later there’s a pounding on my front door. I’m convinced that I was wrong about them having passed out and it’s going to be Heather and Krista, unable to sleep, still drunk, and pissed off. I open the door and to my surprise find Layla, with two cups of coffee in her hands and a bag from Western Bagels.
Western Bagels are an L. A. staple. There are actually eleven Western Bagel stores in L.A. but only one is open twenty-four hours. You can go there anytime, day or night, and their bagels are fresh out of the oven. I’d say at least once or twice a month we’d have bagels and a shmear from Western.
“This is a nice surprise,” I say.
Layla hands me the bag and one of the coffees.
“You want to come in?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “I’m sure you have company, and I don’t want to …I just wanted to say something to you, and I wanted to do it in person.”
“I don’t have company,” I say.
“I still don’t want to come in.”
“Okay.”
“Happy New Year,” she says. “You, too,” I answer.
Layla looks past me into my apartment and then back at me. “I want a divorce,” she says. “Yeah,” I say, confused. “We’re getting one.”
“No, I mean, I want it now. I want the divorce. From you, your family … everything.”
Family Affair Page 25