“Mine aren’t.” He was drinking much too fast, he knew it, but if ever a person had earned the right to pour booze down his throat, it was him, and the moment was now. “They’re like children, both of them. My mother, Jesus, this afternoon she was congratulating me on my happiness with Van, how we both finally seemed so happy and seeing me so happy made her happy and it was the best day of her whole life. This was, oh, four hours ago.”
Dennis simply shrugged at this news. “If you don’t tell them anything about what’s actually going on, how are they supposed to know any better?” He swung himself out of his one good chair and headed back to the kitchen. It wasn’t actually a kitchen; it was a kind of old-fashioned kitchenette space that boasted a tiny refrigerator and the smallest four-burner stove imaginable. Dennis’s little apartment was both sparse and suffocating. Next to the charms of the sprawling Victorian mansion Kyle shared with Van and the girls, it looked pathetic.
But Dennis considered his singular ice cube tray with the focused confidence of an aristocrat. “Well, I’m sorry if my little foray into the truth got you in the shithouse with Van. But for fuck’s sake, Kyle, the woman is a nightmare. I would say if she wants a divorce you should be celebrating. Do not pass go, just get out of jail free.”
“It’s hardly that simple.”
“Stop being such a *. You’ve been miserable for years. You never had the balls to just take what you want. Catholicism is stupid. Everybody else knows this; why don’t you? You’re supposed to be so smart, the doctor, start acting like it!” This last bit was delivered with a flash of mean pleasure. It moved quickly, but it was startling in its sneering superiority. Something in Dennis had begun to edge into bitterness; he was turning into the definition of a nasty drunk. The clinician in Kyle recognized the signs and behaviors of the toxicity, how thoroughly the alcohol was taking hold of the organism. Dennis needed months in rehab. He needed his family to step in, not that they would. His father had washed his hands of him years ago. Can you do that? Can you wash away your children? The sacrament of baptism, the washing away of sins. Can you wash away your life?
I need to get out of here. Kyle stood, swayed briefly as the oxygen hit his brain. He needed to find an all-night diner, and get four or five cups of bad coffee into him.
“Where are you going?” Dennis asked. “Kyle! Where are you going?” What’s he so pissed about? Kyle’s bad brain seemed to finally have gone to sleep. Why, he couldn’t say. Maybe it was the sight of Dennis, drunk, proud, withered, old. “Are you going to New York, to finally do it with your long-lost love? Let me tell you. You haven’t missed that much. Seriously! She’s still not giving out. Not to the likes of us, anyway.”
What was he saying? Kyle knew he was trying to get a rise out of him. He knew, also, that Dennis was a liar, that he had told Van whatever he could, that he had thrown bombs into his marriage, that Dennis was every bit the man he claimed to be—charming, dangerous, completely and utterly destructive in every way. He reached for the doorknob behind him.
“Yeah, you heard me!” Dennis jeered. He sounded like a kid in a schoolyard, daring Kyle to punch him. “I went to New York, I saw her!” Kyle turned back and looked at him. “She’s totally sold out. She’s fucking some director, she’s fucking anyone. Anyone except you and me! She is what she always was, Kyle. She’s nothing but a whore.”
“Stop.” Kyle was exhausted by the breakage. The breakage of everything. Dennis wove in and out of focus. He was wearing a dirty plaid robe—what an affectation—over a T-shirt and sweats. His face was full-on purple, the color of someone about to have a heart attack. How had this happened?
“Did you even hear what I said?”
“You should go back to AA, Dennis,” Kyle told him. “You’re not well.”
“That’s hilarious, coming from you.”
Kyle turned the doorknob, swung the door open.
Can you wash away your life?
twenty-two
MOVIES WERE FUN. The makeup trailer was boring, and it was a drag to have to get out of bed at four in morning all the time, and everybody obsessing about your hair was boring, and having your picture taken and talking to reporters all the time was also dead boring. But the rest was a blast.