by Garth Stein
“Are you Japanese?” Dean asks Mica.
“I’m half, ” Mica says.“My mother is Japanese.”
“So you can speak Japanese?”
“Yeah. My mother made me learn it when I was a kid. My father was a jazz musician who died when I was little. He was black. That’s not really a good combination in America. I’m pretty much the epitome of a minority: a black Japanese woman.”
Evan laughs.
“After my father died, my mother remarried a rich Japanese man who owns this place. I would call it a restaurant, but it’s more than that. It’s an entertainment center, I guess. Anyway, ” she says, “free food.”
“I like that part, ” Lars whispers to Dean.
A slight woman in a kimono appears with their drinks. She serves everyone and kneels down between Evan and Mica.
“You guys don’t mind if I order for you, do you?”Mica asks.
They all look at each other and shrug. Mica speaks to the waitress who’s waiting quietly at her side, and the woman leaves.
They chat about the recording session while they wait for their food. Mica tells them what she thinks Billy sees in them: the songs are pretty good, but it’s the clean execution, she believes, that Billy likes. Songs and sound can be fixed; sloppiness never goes away.
“What about you?” Lars asks.“Working on anything big?”
“I have to go down to Jamaica soon to engineer a single for a movie soundtrack.”
“Whose?”
“I can’t say. It’s part of the deal. They’re kind of paranoid about publicity. You know.”
“The Stones?”
Mica smiles and shakes her head.“There’s a nondisclosure clause in my contract that says that if I leak a word about anything, even just a hint about anything, then I’m fired, and they’ll sue me for damages. It’s not that I don’t want to tell you, Lars, it’s that I can’t.”
“It’s the Stones, isn’t it?”
“No, Lars, it’s not the Stones.”
The food arrives. For Dean, a big plate of tempura. For Lars, chicken teriyaki. For Mica and Evan, a huge platter covered with countless pieces of sushi of every imaginable color, shape, and size. Mica directs Evan though the meal—try this, taste that, you’ll like this one—and Lars and Dean look very contented with what they’re eating, until everyone is stuffed.
“More?” Mica asks.
Lars laughs. “I have to pee, ” he says.
“That way, ” Mica points.
“So do you, ” Lars says as he stands, sticking his sweat-socked toe in Dean’s ribs.
“No I don’t.”
“Pee with me, Dean.”
“I don’t have to.”
Lars places a large hand on Dean’s shoulder.
“Pee with me, or die.”
Dean looks up at Lars the Hulk and realizes that it’s not an invitation, it’s a command, so he follows Lars out of the room.
Evan and Mica drift about in the wake of their departure. Evan knows they’ll be gone a while; this is Lars’s way of giving Evan and Mica a moment to get things started . . . or not. Where to begin? Or to begin at all? Evan is too nervous to speak. He looks up at Mica. She’s watching him, smiling at him. She picks up a piece of pickled ginger with her fingers and eats it silently.
“I don’t get it, ” she says.
“Get what?”
“Just about every guy who walks into The Sound Factory hits on me. And the one guy I might actually be interested in, apparently has no interest in me.”
“Who’s that?” Evan asks reflexively, before he thinks about what she’s said. Before he realizes that she’s talking about him.
She shrugs and sighs, almost melodramatically. “I guess I read it all wrong. My mistake.”
“No—” Evan starts.
“No?”
“But . . . aren’t you and Billy? . . .”
She waits for more.
“Aren’t Billy and I . . . what?” she asks.
“You know. Dating.”
“Dating?”
“You know, going out. Boyfriend and girlfriend?”
Mica blushes and laughs. She has a sweet laugh. It starts with her mouth, then moves up to her eyes, and then takes over her whole face.
“No, Evan. Billy and I aren’t dating. Billy’s like my brother.”
“But . . . the Lucky Strike show.”
“We go to shows together all the time. That doesn’t mean we’re dating.”
“So, you’re single?” Evan asks.
“Yes, I’m single.”
“Well, in that case . . .”
He takes a deep breath and touches her hand, so soft and warm; he picks it up and holds it. He looks into her eyes.
“Will you marry me?” he asks.
Mica laughs again.
“I hate you, ” she says.
“Why?”
“You’re skipping all the fun stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Like this, ” she says, leaning forward and kissing Evan. Warm bubbles of flesh pressing against his lips, soft slippery tongue, a hand on the back of his neck, another on his arm. She tastes like ginger. Like thin strips of ginger, shaved and piled on a plate, sweet but with a bite. She pulls away.
“Wow, ” he says.
“What are you doing tonight?” she asks.
Tonight? Well, if he stays up any later, tonight he’ll be having a seizure.
“I have to get Dean home and put him to bed, ” he says.
“And then?”
“And then I have to go to bed.”
“You’re not going to invite me over for a nightcap?”
“Oh, I’d love to, ” Evan says. “But . . . I’m not sure it’s a good example to set. You know. For Dean.”
Which is a lie. But Mica takes him at face value. She nods and pinches her lips together.
“I wasn’t even thinking. I’m sorry.”
“No, I didn’t mean to imply—”
“But you’re absolutely right, ” Mica says. “I was thinking about myself, and you were thinking about you, and ‘you’ is you and Dean. That just shows what a good father you are, and what a horrible, horrible wench I am.”
“Please, ” he says, and it’s his turn to kiss her, so he does, and for a minute they stay like that, making out in a tatami room in a strange Japanese restaurant where the staff doesn’t speak English.
“What are you doing tomorrow, then?” Mica asks through their lip clench.
“I was going to take Dean to the Center and let him spin his brains around all day on the brain-spinning rides.”
“Sounds like fun. Can I come?”
“I wish you would.”
And then several deliberate footsteps and a throat clearing signal the imminent arrival of Dean and Lars. Evan and Mica quickly pull away from each other and try to compose themselves, but it doesn’t work. When Dean and Lars enter, they are smiling broadly—Evan’s sure they’ve been lurking just outside the door for a while—and when Lars sits back down next to Evan, he leans over and whispers into Evan’s ear.
“You dog, ” he says.“You dog, run.”
Evan blushes, and Mica laughs, and Dean says, “Can I go to sleep now?”
EVAN SITS ON his bed and waits for Dean to finish brushing his teeth. He picks up his acoustic guitar and plucks at the strings. A good father. Ha. He sure has her fooled. Like he’s ever thought of Dean first in his entire life. Little does she know the real reason he put her off: that he was afraid that if she came over they might get naked together, and if they got naked together, they might feel some kind of compulsion to have sex, and if they decided to have sex—and he somehow survived the minefield of exhaustion-induced seizures along the way—she would discover the true depths of his problems: the sun also rises, but Evan and Jake Barnes don’t, if you catch my drift.
His fingers move on their own, it seems. They play things while he’s thinking of something else entirely. And soon he is lightly strumming a m
elancholy Led Zeppelin song—you know, the one that starts off slow and then gets faster. Har, har. (Sometimes he cracks himself up!)
It may not be too late for him to be a good father, even though he was never a good son. Does that matter? Do you have to be a good son to become a good father? Or can you suck as a son and turn it all around when it’s showtime? It wasn’t like his own father was any good. He never set a good example, at least. To this day, he doesn’t try to hide his true feelings. His father can’t be in the same room with Evan without expressing his profound disappointment in him. He’s allergic to Evan; he can barely look Evan in the eye. He can hardly sit at a dinner table alone with Evan. But is his father really a rotten father, or did Evan make him turn rotten? Maybe everything is Evan’s fault. He’s managed to ruin his father’s life and his son’s life in a couple of pretty effortless steps. (First, step in front of a car. Second, step away from your child.) Almost amusing. Here comes the fast part. And a pocketful of soul.
He looks up as he plays and there’s Dean, standing there watching him. Evan stops.
“Sorry, ” he says, and puts his guitar down.“I got a little carried away.”
Dean shrugs and leaves the bedroom. Evan follows him.
“Did you have fun tonight?”
“It was okay, ” Dean says, sitting on the pull-out couch and taking off his socks.
“I figured we’d go to the Center tomorrow. Mica said she wants to come, too. We can go on rides. The Science Center. EMP.”
Dean doesn’t respond. He pulls off his pants and climbs under the covers.
“It’s what dads and sons do together, I’ve heard. And I thought, you know, me being a father and you being a son . . .”
“And Mica being a dad’s girlfriend, ” Dean says.
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“You want her to be.”
“Well—” He couldn’t very well deny that, could he? “You want me to tell her not to come?”
“No.” Dean pauses a moment, then says, “You don’t have to take me anywhere, you know. I could go back to that arcade tomorrow so you and Mica could go have a date or something.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s you and me tomorrow, bub. She asked if she could come, but I can tell her no. I’ll call her now—”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Evan turns out the light and makes a move toward his bedroom.
“Hey, Evan?” Dean asks.
“Yeah?”
He stops and looks at the shape of Dean, a dark mound on a pathetic foam mattress, the lights of Wallingford sparkling in the distance. No shades on the windows. And it gets light early. It’s clear: he’s a rotten father.
“How long did it take you to learn to play like that?”
Evan thinks about it a minute.
“I started when I was a little younger than you, I guess.”
“But how long did it take until you could play that song you were just playing?”
“That? That took a while, I guess. You have to learn chords first, then you learn finger work. Then you learn Zeppelin. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
The mound rolls over and snuggles in. Evan watches it for a moment.
“Goodnight, kid, ” he says.
“Frum-frumpf, ” the mound says back. And Evan goes into his room and closes the door.
A DO-IT-YOURSELF banner had been laced together with multicolored letters: WELCOME HOME EVAN! Quite a bit of his extended family was there, as were a few friends. There was cake and food. Some kind of “punch” mixed by his Uncle Bob, which meant it was way too alcoholic for the ladies, but they slugged it down anyway and smiled doing it. There were presents. There were the standard Swedish meatballs of which his mother was so proud (“All from scratch, ” she would say to anyone she saw eating one). There was even a thimbleful of caviar dwarfed by disproportionately large piles of egg, onion and Melba toast—a foreshadowing of the financial freedom Evan’s father would achieve a few years later, when he would indulge himself by eating massive amounts of caviar out of a six-ounce tin. Everything was there that was usually there for major family celebrations, which were commonly held in honor of a graduation or an engagement or a significant anniversary, or, in this case, a homecoming. Everything was there but Evan’s father.
“He got beeped this morning, ” Louise whispered to those who were meant to hear.“A donor heart flew in an hour ago. He has to take it. He’s the only one who knows the history. He’ll be out all night. I hope Evan understands.”
Evan didn’t understand, really. But, frankly, he didn’t care, either. It was almost better this way.
The house looked different than it had weeks earlier. It was whiter. Oddly, it felt more sterile than the hospital room in which Evan had stayed for the month since the accident. Things had shifted slightly in his time away from home. A painting in the living room had moved, replaced by something new and more colorful. New photographs had replaced old in some of his mother’s fabled silver picture frames which she kept on the entry hall table. (She’d been talking about updating those photos for a year.) The umbrella stand that used to be by the front door was gone. Where did it go?
“Glad to get home and get some of that good home cooking, eh, Evan?”
It was Uncle Bob and his red, puckered face. He’d sampled too much of his own punch, obviously. He should carry a spit cup like a sommelier.
“That hospital food is crap, isn’t it? Like army food. I don’t know how anyone can eat that crap.”
Bob leaned in and breathed heavily on Evan’s neck.
“Lemme have a peek, son. I want to see . . .”
Evan, who felt strangely detached from the scene, obliged, and pulled off the knitted cotton skullcap he was wearing, thus exposing his partially shaved head, a third of which was covered with a thin layer of fuzzy hair that did little to mask a gruesome red welt that started at the back of his neck, looped over the crown of his head, and dove toward his ear, stopping just above his hairline.
“Mother of God, ” Bob rasped, shocked at the brutality of the scar. Not that the scar was brutal by itself. No. It was just a scar. But it stood for something greater, something that was both brutal and offensive to anyone who stands by the Whole Skull Theory: the theory that holds, that a skull, to be truly effective, should always remain intact. For it was not simply a scar, it was a map, and by reading it, one was easily able to understand exactly what had happened. The flesh had been cut, the scalp peeled back. Drills or saws or both had cracked open the brittle bone casing. The brain had been exposed to the world, touched and fingered and fondled by people wearing rubber gloves. And then it had all been slapped back together hastily, as if the doctors had heard footsteps and were about to be caught doing something they ought not be doing, so they quickly shoved it all back in, sewed it up and hoped that no one would notice.
“Mother of God.”
“Bob? Evan?” Evan’s mother approached. “What are you two?—”
She stopped, appalled.
“Evan! What on earth? What are you?—Bob?”
“Oh, I—”
“Evan, come here.”
Uncle Bob shuffled off toward the punch bowl, leaving Evan with a consoling grasp of the upper arm as he passed and grunting his refrain for the evening, “Mother of God.”
“Put your hat back on, ” Louise whispered as she led him into the living room. “Don’t take it off again. It upsets people.” Evan knew that the person it upset most was her.
The living room was full of people talking and laughing. Evan was given an honorary seat on the couch, and he soon realized that little would be asked of him. Foods would be offered to him. Conversation would be directed toward him, carried on in his behalf. Drinks, forced laughter, strained good cheer. All he really wanted was to suck on a glass of crushed ice—never a dearth of ice chips in a hospital—but he didn’t ask for it. His head hurt. All he really want
ed was for all the people to go away. But he didn’t ask for that, either. A plate of cake was set in his lap. People talked and grinned. He tried to grin back. He didn’t bother trying to talk. . . .
He stood up quickly. He heard a soft bump and looked down. He’d forgotten about the cake. It lay, face down, on the carpet. But he didn’t care. He felt nauseous. He rushed to the bathroom off the hallway, flung himself inside and vomited into the toilet.
Oh, god. The vomit kept coming until there was nothing but hacking dry heaves. His body felt awful, sick and drained, like it wasn’t even a body anymore. It didn’t measure up to minimum standards. They should send it back and he’ll wait for the next available body. He slumped against the wall, half-wedged next to the toilet bowl. He noticed his mother standing at the closed bathroom door, lips pursed, holding a glass of water.
“It’s the medication, ” she said quietly. “That’s what made you sick. They said it might happen for a while, until you adjust.”
He started to say something, but when he opened his mouth, more heaving came. Bile came. The smell of vomit wafted up from the toilet and made him sicker. He reached to flush, but couldn’t find the handle. His mother leaned in and flushed for him.
“It’s the medication, ” she repeated.“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
She led him up to his room and helped him climb into bed. The sheets were cold and good. The room was dark.
“When’s Dad going to be home?” he asked.
“I don’t know, ” she said. She stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the light in the hallway, one hand on the doorknob, the other on the jamb.
“He’ll be home when he’s finished with the operation. He’s saving someone’s life. You understand, don’t you, honey?”
Evan didn’t answer because he felt sick again and he thought that if he opened his mouth, vomit would fly out, and he didn’t want any more vomit flying out of his mouth.
“I’ll get back to the party, ” Louise said. “I’ll tell them you still feel tired and you need your rest, okay? If you need to throw up again, I put your wastebasket next to your bed, just lean over. I’ll check in in a little bit. I love you, honey.”
“I love you, ” he said in reply, but he kept his lips closed because he was afraid of the vomit, so it didn’t sound like “I love you.” It sounded something like “I frumpf fru.”
