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 played 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. F*ck 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 f*ck 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.
“Jesus,” she said, looking at me closely. “Don’t freak out. I don’t want us to ever be affected by this. Those guys are f*cking stupid.”
“And yet you are,” I said. “Say to me you’re not affected.”
“I don’t want to be affected. But now you’re affected, so even if I was only slightly barely affected before, now I am affected.”
It was when I looked in the mirror, to apply the wash, that I came face-to-face with terror: Tom, Myra, Julie 2, staring at me from their perch. I took in the hopeful little dots of their eyes, and the evidence of their talents: Bunsen burner, leotard, cello. I had always known my plans for the future were wisps. But the prospect of taking care of a child with a wisp had not felt as absurd, as obscene, as it felt now, beneath the doll-like figures on the napkins.
“How am I supposed to be a father to our children?” I demanded of Julie. “I actually just want to know how I’m going to be providing in five years. I can’t see it.”
“When we have kids, you can’t make that face in front of them.”
Indeed, the expression on my face reminded me of the face in an anti-meth ad, only with face wash on it. “How did I get to this point where I promised something I can’t deliver? How can I give you this? Draw me a diagram.” I sat on the floor, the face wash still foaming on my cheeks. “How am I supposed to do this?” I pointed at the children.
If I continued on my present course, the children on the napkins would be raised by a resentful, embittered, flight-obsessed father, a man ashamed of joblessness, a man who half-believed he should have found another band and lived on the road, a man who considered his life the wrong life, a man with one eye ever on the door: a Dad. In running from my father’s professional compromises, I had failed to give adequate consideration to conventional success. I had spent my postvow life running from my father only to inscribe a circle in the ground, so that now, staring in the battle station mirror, I stood mere inches from a familiar pair of restless, Dadsian eyes.
“I wish I could go back in time,” I said. “Start over from high school.”
“Thanks, Josh,” said Julie. “Meeting your high school sweetheart is going to be really fun.” She got into bed, and turned out the light.
The future-kids looked at me.