by JD Hawkins
Even Teo gets in on the act, bringing the whole crew to hysterics as he tells Jenny the story of how he and Eli first met while skiing in Germany, both of them falling down almost an entire black diamond trail after Eli tried to pull off some insane stunt turn, all the while cursing the air blue at each other the whole way down. They ended up spending the rest of the afternoon drinking the pain of their bruises away in a beer hall and finding out they actually had a lot in common.
Most of all, though, Eli opens up in a way that’s rare for any actor—least of all the most infamously guarded one.
“Hollywood needs you to act off-screen just as much as on it… If you pretend to be someone long enough, you start to forget who you were in the first place…” This is gold.
The interview only ends when Teo finishes the tattoo, and even then Jenny and Eli continue on for another quarter-hour after Jenny’s made her final remarks and the cameras have turned off.
At around four in the morning, Eli leaves, embracing all of us warmly, and taking his time over goodbyes. In particular Jenny, whom he pulls aside to have a private word with before leaving, whispering something in her ear that has her blushing all over again. Vince rounds up the crew and they break everything down and then take the equipment back to the studio, and Teo cleans up at Mandala, leaving Jenny and me outside, breathing in the cool air and trying to regain some sense of reality, still coming down from the high of what just happened.
“God…”
“I know…”
I turn to her with a sly smile. “What did Eli say to you? When he was leaving?”
“Oh, nothing…” she says casually. “He just invited me out for coffee.”
“Seriously?!” I grab Jenny by the shoulders and we just laugh.
“What was that, two hours?” she asks.
“Nearly three.”
“I don’t know how you’re going to edit that down to fifteen minutes.”
“I’m not,” I say. “I’m gonna run it for the whole hour of the show.”
“What?” Jenny says, dubiously. “They’ll never allow it.”
“Who’s ‘they’? The show’s mine now.” I put my arm around her shoulder and pull her in for a buddy-hug. “Ours.”
Three days after the interview airs, people are still talking about it. About Eli’s charisma, about where the hell Jenny came from, about how Hollywood Night is so much better than they’d previously thought. The Candace-Carlos story is old news now—but it couldn’t have come at a better time, the scandal bringing in even more new viewers for the show. The network decides to air the interview again at a primetime slot on the weekend, and numerous shows and blogs are now approaching Jenny herself for an interview. Teo half-jokingly complains about how many new people are now coming into his shop for tattoos, and I keep a running list of the dozen or so actors virtually begging me to be interviewed by Hollywood Night, hoping to emulate the organic, open charm that Eli gave off.
Jenny even meets Eli for drinks a few times before he jets off to Europe to do an indie film with a hot new avant-garde director, and she tells me that Eli said as soon as the interview aired, he was offered more roles than he had even before he first broke out.
Somehow I even find it in me to talk to Grace about what happened, about my father and Teo, about the past and all the things that still hurt to think about. We spend hours on the phone, Grace sympathizing, and struggling to believe it about our own father almost as much as I do. I tell her I’m done, that I don’t ever want to see him again, but Grace resolves to fix things, to talk to him, to bring our family back together again. Ever the diplomat.
But even all of that seems unimportant, incidental. The real news happens on a Sunday morning, when Teo, Duke and I are finishing off a run at Runyon Canyon.
I rub Duke under his chin, making him waggle his tail and get a funny kind of loose-lipped, toothy smile when I do.
“Should we stop at a store on the way back and get some dog food?” I say, pulling faces at Duke. “Since you’re both probably coming back to mine.”
“I have some at my place,” Teo says.
I glance up at him.
“No offense, but that’s pretty much all you have. I don’t think I can handle another lunch of beer and whatever frozen burritos you picked up at the mini-mart.”
Teo laughs as I stand up in front of him.
“How would you feel about fixing that?”
“Fixing what?”
Teo looks away like he’s struggling with something, then speaks slowly, as if having to reach for the words.
“I was just thinking… With you staying over all the time, you’re hardly ever at the place you’re renting…and me with this big, empty luxury condo that I don’t even know what to do with… I mean…it kinda seems a little silly, right?”
I shoot him a playful look.
“You’re asking me to move in with you?”
“What would you think if I was?”
I laugh gently.
“You sure? Think you can stand a woman’s touch? Fresh flowers on the kitchen table, framed photos in the hallway, throws. I always kinda figured you liked having your own space. Lone wolf, fortress of solitude, all that.”
Teo half-smiles but he puts his hands around my waist and pulls our sweaty, sun-soaked bodies together, and I know he’s serious.
“Yeah, fuck all that,” he says. “I don’t just want you—I want you. Everything. I want to live somewhere that feels like you even when you’re not around. I wanna come home to you, have you come home to me. I wanna make a home.” He pauses, but only to kiss me softly for a second. “I can’t promise I’ll be good at it—shit, I ain’t had much practice—but I want it more than anything, and I want it with you. In fact, if you want, we can go shopping for throws together.”
I gaze up at him, squinting a little in the sun.
“How can I refuse an offer like that?”
27
Teo
It’s a kind of magic, what Ash does for me, and it makes everything that came before seem irrelevant, so long ago, as if it were only half a life, a preparation for her.
Even my dad can’t get to me anymore. He calls me from a payphone in Arizona, and I almost don’t recognize him for the fragility and humility in his voice. Even more so when I tell him about me and Ash. He doesn’t say much, and I can tell he wants to ask for help but doesn’t know how. Once we get off the phone I tell Ash, and she somehow convinces me to try and help him, repeating my own words back to me, you can’t fix your parents, and at some point you’ve just got to accept them.
Before she even starts moving her things over, Ash has me painting the house with her, turning the anonymous grey siding different shades of duck blue, mint green, and pastel red. Then, after a lot of cute begging, I finally give in and allow her to convince me to put my artistic talent to good use and paint a couple of murals. Moonlit trees against one wall of the bedroom, a watercolor landscape in the breakfast nook, a flock of birds in the bathroom.
The place starts to fill up as she brings over her stuff, and buys plenty more. Furniture and ornaments, newer, more stylish appliances for the kitchen and lounge chairs in the yard. For a while I freak out a little, start getting uncomfortable, as if the place isn’t mine anymore, as if a place this alive and stimulating couldn’t possibly be my own. Then Ash does something amazing.
It’s an off-hand suggestion. One I made while we were drifting away in bed, to the smell of paint and freshly bought flowers, the moon visible beyond the windows at the foot of the bed, beyond our heavy eyelids. I’d always wanted my own place to make art.
When I get home from work at the end of the week, the spare room has been transformed into an art studio. I’d almost forgotten the spare room—a locked door I never opened. But it’s perfect, with those big windows facing the Pacific Ocean. Ash covers my eyes and leads me there, pulling her hands away so I can take in the canvases against the wall, the work bench stacked with paints and brushes. A ch
aise-lounge for portraits, stools and stands. She even got Ginger and Kayla in on it, to come and help tear up the carpet and put hard flooring down, with shelves along the walls for any other art supplies I want to add to the mix. I make love to her right then, up against the window, unable to express how much it means to me in words alone.
But it’s not just the objects and colors—it’s as if the place has a soul now. The record player always turning, spilling our favorite music through every room, the smell of pasta sauce simmering in the kitchen, and more than anything, the sound of other people stopping in, of family coming over to visit. Jenny starts dropping by for brunch on the weekends—bringing Eli with her every once in a while. Barbecues with Kayla, talking about how she’s finally planning to go back to Seattle and start her own tattoo shop, where Ginger and I finally build Duke that kennel in the yard, taking way longer than we should over it because it’s kinda fun. Isabel crashes when she’s in L.A. for a weekend and plays some songs as Ash and I watch from the couch. It’s almost perfect.
Almost…but there’s still one thing we need to get around to.
“You ready?” I say, taking Ash’s hand as I get off the bike and lead her through the back door of Mandala.
“No,” she says. “I think waiting so long’s just made me more nervous.”
We move through the shop to the chairs and I turn to the table to get my equipment ready.
“What do I do?” Ash asks, as she settles in one of the chairs.
“Take your shirt off and try to relax,” I say, then look back over my shoulder. “I can help with the shirt if you’d like.”
Ash laughs.
“I can manage.”
Gloves on, everything ready, I move the wheeled stool beside her and start preparing her arm. I glance up and find her looking at me with a little trepidation in her eyes, and surprise her by darting in for a kiss. Then I begin.
Ash and I have spent hours talking it over, and this time, this is what we’ve come up with: A blooming purple nightshade. Her mother’s favorite flower—the one her garden had always been full of, the kind Ash would help her plant, the kind Ash still plants wherever she lives to remind her of her mother.
After completing the outline, the familiar soothing buzz of the needle cutting through the tracks of Ash’s favorite album set up on my mp3 player, I take a break to let her see my work and to ask how she’s feeling.
“It’s looks amazing,” she says, settling a little. “And I’m fine. Go on.”
“Just tell me if you start getting uncomfortable.”
She looks up at the ceiling again and I continue, filling in the details, finalizing lines, taking my time over the shading.
“You know,” she says, when I’m pretty much done, adding a few last touches to set it off just right, “I didn’t realize getting a tattoo was so intimate.”
I laugh gently. Moving my head back to look at the tattoo and see if it needs anything else.
“Uh-huh. You’ve got to trust someone completely.”
“And I do,” she says.
I kiss her slow and deep, then pull away and gesture to her arm. “You’re done.”
Comfortable enough to take her eyes from the ceiling now and look at the finished tattoo, adjusting her arm as I clean up my equipment and look for the ointment. She casts a smile in my direction and says, “Is that why you like them? You like feeling that trust?”
I lean back to her arm, dabbing a little. She hisses through her teeth gently.
“Not really.”
“What is it then?” she asks.
I take off my gloves and look at her directly.
“I’ve thought about that a lot. It’s the permanence. I think…you get a tattoo and it lasts forever. A single moment in time—a decision, a memory or a feeling, or some version of who you are or what you stand for—and you make it something eternal. You force yourself to live with it, to see it when you look in the mirror, to stick to you like a shadow.” Ash smiles at me, and the air between us seems to cloud, dream-like and ethereal.
“Humans…there’s not much about us that’s permanent, you know? We break promises, we change our minds, life throws you curveballs... So the idea of taking something, something you weren’t born with, an expression of yourself, something or someone you love, a decision you made, and turning it into something that endures…I think that’s rare. Unique. Something only tattoos really do…”
She’s glowing now, face soft as if exposing herself, a tenderness in both of us connecting. I reach into my pocket for the small box I’ve carried around for days.
“Well,” I say, getting up off the stool and down on one knee in front of the chair, “tattoos, and maybe one other thing.”
Ash gasps and sits upright on the end of the chair now, hands covering her mouth, eyes wide.
“Marry me, Ash. I want to make this happiness as permanent as anything. I want you in my life for eternity.”
I flip the box open, revealing the white gold custom ring I designed, inset with a halo of diamonds surrounding the shiniest, most light-catching version of her birthstone I could find in the city.
She lets out an involuntary sob behind her hands, then shrieks a ‘yes,’ and leaps off the chair at me. I stand up just enough to catch her embrace.
“Ow!” she wails, remembering the tattoo, then laughs.
“You ok?”
“Yeah,” she says, voice still wavering with shock.
I take her hand and slowly slide the ring onto her finger as she watches in wonder.
“Always a little pain at the start of something beautiful,” I say, and she raises her eyes from the ring to my face.
We kiss, and it feels as good as the first time, as good as any other, as good as it’ll be until we’re old together. A kind of perfection that was meant to be, that even the universe seems to want.
Me and Ash. A love so strong nothing could tear it apart. Not the mistakes I made, not the years we spent apart, the parents who didn’t want us together, or the fact that we came from different sides of the tracks. All of it just obstacles, just a bumpy road that was always going to lead us here.
Us against the world.
Epilogue
Ash
It’s a small, well-kept farmhouse in northern California. So clean and white it seems to glow in the sun, the walls broken by giant oak beams. Around it the fields are a verdant green, lilting softly, the hills undulating like a calm ocean. A few big, powerful horses grazing contentedly among them, and the smell of coastal pines and cedar and lavender intoxicating to the point where you really feel like it might all just be a dream.
I know the place as well as anyone—I picked it, and spent months preparing it, but here and now, in the back of my father’s classic Rolls Royce, it feels like I’m heading into a place unknown.
I turn to look at him, and find that he’s already looking at me with that subtle, proud smile he’s had all morning.
“You look beautiful,” he says, for the twentieth time today.
I look down bashfully at the bouquet in my hands.
It was rough at the start. Real bad. Knowing what my dad had done, and confronting him about it was hard and messy. I filled Grace’s house with shouted rage, and though my father had some shame when I articulated how betrayed and disrespected I felt at what he had done, he still stood his ground firmly. He told me everything Teo had—that I was meant for so much more, that he couldn’t in good faith accept Teo.
I was ready to cut the cord, to remove my father from my life entirely. And then Teo did something amazing. He told me not to blame my dad, that he was only doing what he thought was best for me, that it was from a place of love that my father had done all these terrible things to us. He came with me to see him once again, and as we spoke—Teo calm and confident, my dad sounding petulant and arrogant in comparison—we somehow managed to gain some peace, a first building block toward a proper relationship, toward where we are now.
“Here we are,”
my dad says, sounding about as anxious as I feel.
He steps out and comes to my side of the car, opening the door and offering his hand. I take it and step out onto the carpet, laid out on the grass, lavender and rose petals scattered across it. It goes all the way up between the rows of chairs, the guests turning to look at me, all the way up to the wooden, canopied arbor, decorated with sunflowers and orange marigolds, where the man I love stands nobly.
Isabel starts playing, plucking on the country guitar in her bridesmaid’s dress. An old, soft ballad Teo and I had listened to in the woods, a song I used to play to remind me of him, a song he told me he played to remember me. I take my father’s arm, and start to walk.
I hear some gasps and murmurs, and turn to look at faces I’ve never seen so earnestly kind. When I finally get to the arched arbor, I barely have time to acknowledge the others, Kayla, Grace, Ginger, Jenny—it’s like I can’t pull my eyes from Teo. In his suit, and with his face so free of sadness, it’s almost like seeing him for the first time, and I can’t bear even to look at the minister as he speaks. Teo takes my hands and we look at each other, frozen in perfection.
Duke barks from Ginger’s side and there’s good-natured laughter, then the minister continues, and finally asks the question.
“I do,” Teo says, in that strong, confident voice, loud enough for everyone to hear.
Again.
“I do,” I say, whispering it meaningfully, just for Teo.
Teo’s dad steps forward, bearing the rings on a small white cushion. He looks good now, since he’s been going to the rehab Teo arranged for him. Clean shaven and nicely-dressed, you can see where Teo got his looks from. He sniffs a little, wipes an eye, then holds the rings toward us. We take them and place them on each other’s fingers, then don’t even wait for the minister to say it. Teo pulls me into his lips, into a kiss that feels like it could last a thousand years. I barely hear the whistles and applause, so lost in this moment with the man I love, will always love.
