“I don’t love him!”
“No, I know, I’m saying if you did. If you loved him, would it still be just the one shot?”
She studies the menu as well, mulling this thought. “You mean, if I loved him, like, was reallyin love with him when I caught him?”
“Yeah.”
“No…if I loved him, I would have fought for him, I think. If I loved him, I would do everything in my power to protect that love and I would have fought for him.”
He looks at her, into her swollen, child-like face. She looks up at him and he sees it, then. “Did you? Did you fight for the guy before Anthony?”
A small, fluttering sad smile wobbles across her lips, she looks away. “Oh, Julian. You think you know so much. Not everything ends in happy ways. It’s not the movies.”
They pull up to the speaker. “Hi, how are you tonight?”
Julian narrows his eyes at the menu, completely at a loss. She leans over him. “Give us a minute.”
“Sure, let me know when you’re ready.”
“What do you want?” he asks.
“A water. A big water.”
“That’s it? You said you were hungry.”
“I know…I feel sick though, I just want water,” she sighs, flopping dramatically back into her seat.
“You feel sick because you need to eat. I’m going to get you food,” he mumbles, reading over the menu again.“Hello?”
“Hi, what can I get you?”
“Uh…two waters and…Jesus, do you have some kind of salad?”
“You’re ordering salad in a Jack in the Box?” Alice snickers.
“We have a garden salad-,” a young female voice answers.
“Yeah, give me that. No dressing.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
“I’ll have your total at the window.”
He puts the car in gear and moves up. “Why didn’t you eat at the bar-b-que? There was so much food. Angie didn’t make you eat?”
“I was too busy helping set up and shit. I didn’t have anytime. And I wasn’t really hungry. I should have, I just never got around to it,” she says.
“Hey, why did Angie keeping calling you Alicía? Is that your real name?”
She frowns and swats him.“Duh! You didn’t know that…all this time?”
“You told me your name was Alice! How would I know? Why do you go by Alice?”
“It’s from one of my favorite movies. You ever see‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore?’”
“…No.”
“No!? What? Harvey Keitel is the shit in that movie! Scorsese in his youth, when he was still cutting his teeth? How haven’t you seen it?”
“I don’t know! I just haven’t. Keitel, huh? I love him…”
“You’re such a snob about movies, I’m shocked you haven’t seen it.”
“I’m not-why does everybody keep saying that?”
She laughs and unwinds her hair, shaking it loose again. “Who else said that?”
“Sharleen. She kept making comments about how I only watched‘films’, not movies.”
“You mean you don’t watch crap like‘Darkest Days.’ God, that was so, so very bad,”
“I know,” he winces, sucking his teeth. “It’s painful bad.”
They reach the window and he digs for his wallet.
“Here’s your waters,” the cute, young cashier says.
“Thanks,” he says, handing her money and grabbing the drinks.
She blinks, her mouth dropping. “Oh my god! Are you Julian Russell?”
He smiles and nods. “Yeah.”
“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my GOD! I love you! Oh my god, Samantha! Come here!”
Another girl rushes up to the window with the salad and squeals. “Julian Russell!”
“Oh god!” Alice sighs.“Can we just go? Fuck the food. I am not in the mood for this.”
“Here you go!” The cashier hands him the salad while the other quickly snaps a picture of them.
“Wait! Did you just take our picture?” Alice scowls.
“It’s okay,” he says, placing a gentle hand on her,“Thanks, ladies. Have a good night.”
“Bye! I love you!”
“It’s not okay! I look like shit!” Alice growls as they drive away.
Alice sits cross-legged on the hood of his car near Dodger stadium, picking through the salad like a bird. Julian leans on the hood next to her staring up at the flickering, fluorescent light above their heads. He replays the night, watching her move to his car in front of a blur of white headlights, speeding by, her hair twisting around her face. How long had she been out there? At least a half hour. On the freeway, alone, unseen, in danger. He studies her, a pile of tulle and polka dots, her hair twisted away from the food in her lap. Tough tattoos, hard eyes. And yet completely vulnerable. He knows, if he sees Anthony again in any context, the exchange will be a very violent and bloody one.
“Feel better?”
“Yeah, a little. I don’t want to talk about it anymore,‘kay? Enough about me and my woes. Tell me all about you. How was your night? How was dinner?”
He shrugs. “Okay. We went to a party afterwards…it was kind of fun. Lots of pretty people and pretty toys. But I was just bored the whole time, really. Same conversations over and over…I guess I’m just not really in a place to be real social right now.”
“What are talking about? You went to two parties and a fancy-town dinner tonight. That’s pretty much the definition of‘social.’”
“Yeah, but I didn’t really feel like doing any of it,” he says.
“You didn’t have fun at the bar-b-que?”
“No…that was the most fun I’ve had in a long, long time. I’m really glad I went. But…if I hadn’t promised you I would go, I don’t think I would have, you know?”
She nods and flicks carrot shreds to the ground. “Because of how badly you felt over destroying CeCe’sphone.”
He winces and shakes his head once.“You really are too blunt sometimes, you know that?”
“But in a good way, right? Not in the‘I wannasock you in the teeth when you open your mouth too big’ kind of way, or‘leave you on the freeway in the middle of the night’ kind of way, right?”
“A little of both, I guess,” he grins.
“Yeah, I get that a lot. Seriously. What’s happening? Why’d you freak out this morning?”
He stretches his shoulders and cracks his neck. “I wouldn’t call it a freak out.”
“You cracked a mirror and shattered her phone.”
“I know…I don’t know….Ijust…the more I work with Nathan, the more I realize I might not be able to pull this off. It means so much to him, and to me, really. Like, when we started, I thought doing the ride-alongsand the bereavement training would get me in the right mind set.”
“It didn’t?”
“It did. That’s the problem. I don’t really feel like myself anymore. I feel like I’m looking through everyone, straight into their suffering and fakeness. Right past their façade. And I just feel like I’m surrounded by this fucking hellish circus nightmare nobody knows they’re participating in.”
He cracks open his water and chugs it. She dusts her hands and leaps off the car onto the pavement. With a quick motion, she tugs off her fishnets and tosses them to the side. He raises his eyebrows at her, still drinking.
“They’re shredded and done,” she dismisses,“So, let me get this straight. You have to play this guy who is completely aware of the suffering everybody goes through, including his own, and it is making you, what, do it in real life?”
“Yeah, sort of. Like, I read the script, which is great, it really is, but it’s still a script. And I can’t get past that. The lines-as soon as I try to say them, I feel myself as the character, realizing he’s a character…realizing I’m a character, too, and nothing I say will ever be real enough.”
“But that’s the whole point of the script. He’s a character, created specifically to act a
round the absence, right? He’s not supposeto be real, he’s suppose to be exaggerated.”
He sighs, frustrated at her inability to understand. “You don’t get it. Yeah, the guy lives in this world where everybody is ignoring a huge, huge absence-”
“His dad.”
“Right, his dad. And he begins to realize in all the different ways that that plays out, in all of their lives. His obsession with order and justice, with control and dominance, all stems from that absence. He, at a crucial moment, begins to become aware of his character and the illusion of himself. And it drives him insane. I mean, doyou get it? It’s making me feelinsane…like I just-stop and feel trapped and pointless and I want to scream or hit something…”
She is quiet for a long time, standing before him, rocking slowly back and forth on the cold pavement, testing the hardness of the gravel. “His loss is the same as yours, in real life. You really are him. That’s what you’re saying, right?”
He cannot respond. His brow furrows and he stares off towards the city lights.
“Remember when you asked me if I fought for him? Earlier, at the drive-thru?” she asks quietly.
“Yeah.”
“I never told anyone this…but…my…” she stops and smiles, fighting to get the words out.“When I was a teenager, my mom kicked my dad out. My dad was a very quiet, sad man, I think. We didn’t do any family things together, he never went to any of our school things or anything…he was gone a lot. He spent all his time working and going back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico‘cuzwe have tons of family there. The only thing he loved to do was watch TV. He would just watch it for hours. He didn’t even speak English very well but he didn’t care, he would just leave it on forever. We would sit and watch it in silence, me and him, everything and anything that came on. I think that was the extent of our family time. Anyways…when my mom decided to leave him, he went to live with my uncle in the south bay. We were supposeto like, visit him and shit, it’s less than an hour away. And we did, for a few months, on the weekends. Me and my big sister would show up and sit in his tiny, little garage room with him, doing nothing. He had a hot plate,he’d make us top ramen and tapatío, or left-overs from the front house. I didn’t really want to be there, I hated it. I think we all did. It was cramped and cold, the TV only got one station poorly. There was no place to sleep, just sleeping bags on the floor. We didn’t do anything but sit around in this horrible silence, watching this broke ass TV. So, me and my sisterstopped going. We just stopped showing up. And my dad, he didn’t try and get us to go over, he didn’t call or anything, so we figured it was fine. Then one day, my uncle and aunt were visiting, and my mom asked how my dad was. And my uncle said,‘He’s good. He went back to his wife and kids in Mexico because he had no more reasons to stay here.’ And me and my sister were like, whaaat?...My mom just froze. The look on her face, like a mac truck had hit it. She didn’t say anything else and later, when everyone went home, I asked her about it. She just shrugged and said all casually that, yeah, he was married to someone in Mexico, too. They had four kids,two of them were me and my sister’s ages. She knew about it the whole time. No big deal.”
“Jesus…” he whispers.
She tucks her hair behind her ears. “It was pretty awful. I kept thinking about the brothers and sisters I had I would never know. I always wondered if they got the good, happy version of him, maybe that’s why he was so sad and miserable, because he missed them so much, and we were the bad versions he was stuck with‘cuzthe money’s in the states. I wondered if we were the fake family, the one on TV he had to watch because his real one was back home, waiting for him. And I wonder if me and my sisterhad been more entertaining or valuable in some way, more real for him, maybe he would have stayed, you know? Realized we weren’t so bad. If we were good enough, maybe he would have chose us instead, and we would have been the real family he wanted.”
“You can’t say that, you can’t guess what his reality was like,” he says.
“You have to guess. It’s all you can do when someone you love is gone for good and you can’t do anything about it and you’ll never know for sure.”
She leans against the car with him. “So, you want to tell me, now that you know my deepest, darkest secret? What happened to your dad, Julian.”
He smiles sadly.“Yeah...yeah, I guess I have to, right?…”
He wraps a hand around his bicep and squeezes, feeling himself slip into character. Only, just as soon as the words began to leave his mouth, he realized it had happened, all of it. It had been real. No one had written it for him, he didn’t need to learn the lines. It had happened. He blinked, stunned at the realization, no longer pretending to remember but actually remembering. “My-My dad was in the army. He was a lieutenant. We were stationed everywhere, all across the US and in Germany until I was about 8. Then we were suddenly in Pennsylvania, which is where my dad was originally from. And he wasn’t stationed anywhere, he was in a VA hospital, only I didn’t know that until his cancer was stage 4. I thought he was just on base or deployed or something. My mom took my brother and me to see him one day, not telling us until we got to the door, that he was very sick. She told us he was sick and that we needed to tell him we loved him. So, she opened the door and I saw this emaciated skeleton that had my dad’s eyes, staring at me like he’d seen a ghost. He smiled and I wanted to scream. But my mom shoved me and my brother in, and we stood by his bedside…staring at all the tubes and shit blinking, not knowing what to do. He whispered my name and held out his hand. My dad, he was always a very strong, quiet man,…very strong, big, you know? Didn’t ever show any kind of emotion, really. He wasn’t mean or anything, just very reserved. The man lying in the bed looked terrified and shrunken. And then, all of a sudden, he started-” Julian catches his breath at a memory he hadn’t realized existed. He starts to shut down, redirect, fight. Alice gently unwraps his hand from his bicep and takes it in her own. He frowns and clears his throat. “He started crying out, howling in pain, just, all of a sudden, out of nowhere. They rushed us out but left the door open and gave him more morphine. I watched him writhing on the bed for a few minutes before going very still, staring up at the ceiling. A few days later, he was dead.”
He sniffs and tosses the empty water bottle to the ground. It hits and bounces, rolling away into the night. He squeezes and relaxes his hand in hers without realizing it. “At the funeral, I didn’t understand what was happening. I knew he was dead and they were burying him, but it didn’t really set in, you don’t know what forever is as a kid. It was so fucking hot, all I could think about was how much I wanted it to be over so I could get out of that suit. We were standing at the grave, waiting for them to lower the casket and my brother leaned over and whispered,‘I bet you ten bucks you cry.’ And I whispered, ‘I’ll bet you ten bucks youcry.’ He said,‘you’re on’, and I felt like we were playing a little game. I started panicking, thinking about all the things that might make me cry. I thought about my dad in the hospital, making that horrible screaming sound, and I almost did. But I thought,if I just act like everything’s fine, like how my dad would act, the dad I remembered, I won’t cry. And I felt like almost smiling, you know? And then I looked up at my brother…he was staring at my mom across from us with my uncles, tears rolling down his cheeks, sucking his lip. I didn’t-I knew I shouldn’t look but I couldn’t stop myself. I looked and saw her wailing and weak, just crumbled in their arms. They were holding her and they were all crying. Grown men, big men like my dad, balling like kids. I didn’t even know they could do that until then.”
He blows out steadily, feeling himself closing in. There was a calm that took him, even as he riddled with the anguish this memory stirred. “I started getting that tight feeling you get in your throat when you’re trying not to cry. I looked down at the casket and kept staring at the shiny, silver lid…it was so shiny. I didn’t look up again, didn’t look any direction at all, except at the lid. My aunt rushed over to us when she saw my brother a
nd started hugging us, crying just like my mom. But I was fine. The tightness was gone, I just felt numb…calm…”
She wraps herself around his arm, hugging her head into his chest as she cries softly. He strokes her hair, staring far off, imagining it is he comforting her even as the frantic need to escape overwhelms him. She looks up at him, drawing his face to hers, imploring him to stand firm. He looks down, stunned to see her openly crying, and gently brushes tears from her great, doe eyes with his thumb in amazement. Her forefingers touch his dry, smooth cheeks where tears should be. He smiles and closes his eyes and kisses her fingers. He does not open his eyes again, finding her lips instinctively, kissing her softly and lightly as he embraces her, lifting her from the ground in his grasp. She kisses him back without fear or softness, strong and passionate, wrapping her arms around his neck and drawing her into him, imploring him to feel. He has never known such a surge, such a relief, such ultimate desire for another human, yet he still feels himself detach. She is smaller than him, lighter than him, but an equal nonetheless, and he is suddenly terrified of his vulnerability in her presence. It’s not the memory,it’s not him sharing it. It is her, listening, understanding, blatantly sympathetic. He pins her down to the hood of his car, his mind detached, the memories gone, leaving a blatant, raw pain in their wake. She clings to him, struggling to breath under his great weight as he shoves against her in an animalistic craze to block the anguish, kissing her madly while he pulls up her dress and wraps her leg around him, holding her while he pushes into her. She cries out as he bites into her neck, his hands reaching between her legs.
“Wait, stop!” she says, shoving him away.
He stops, panting against her throat, slowly returning to his senses.
“Julian, I can’t-this isn’t…”
“I know,” he says, instantly regaining his composure, pulling himself off of her. She rises off the hood and straightens her dress. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m so sorry.”
“No…it’s okay. It’sjust-you can’t just fuckme, that’s not what I wanted-”
Gazelle Page 16