Goodnight Sometimes Means Goodbye (Wrong Flight Home, #2)

by Noel J. Hadley

  Leah seemed interested. She placed her chin on a hand and leaned in, as if to posture a listening pose. So I continued. “Take for example infants and young children. As such, we continually digest a complete sensory experience of our surroundings and this shapes not only our own future culture, but our very perception of normalcy. I could be misquoting the field of psychological research, but if one's father is a lying, cheating bastard of a man, then this could be subconsciously perceived as normal in our future relationships, even if we despise them for it.”

  “Huh,” Leah said, chin resting on her fist. If she was impressed, or even agreed with me for that matter, I couldn't be sure.

  “Wow.” Miranda nudged my arm again, breathing close enough to my face to hint at intimacy later on, as were my suspicions. “And what makes you Dr. Phil?”

  “My wife,” I caught myself, making sure to observe Leah's response in my peripheral vision (both the rabbi and old woman eyed me). She opened her mouth a little, but was otherwise expressionless. “My estranged wife is studying for her doctorate. I guess some of it stuck over the years. Elise, she used to talk about this concept called Father Hunger, coined by an eating-disorder expert, I think his name was Maine; whereas the absence or neglect of the father on his subject daughter may lead to narcissism or the lifelong search for external resources of self-esteem. Sexuality obviously comes into it. But it should be no surprise that our generation is starting to become known amongst experts as the most narcissistic generation in American history.”

  “Is that why you're traveling the country as a photographer, Chamberlain?” Miranda smiled. “Are you on a quest for something, like the Holy Grail of mirrors? Or perhaps you're searching for someone.... and sexuality.” She seemed to be enjoying herself.

  “Sorry, Father Hunger only works on women.” I smiled back at her.

  “As a man, I'll second that.” Richie.

  Leah said: “Richie, he's only referring to people who don't like penis, which excludes you. You're practically the woman in every relationship.”

  Richie held his chin up in protest. “If you weren't the president's wife...”

  “Leah here tells me your grandfather is the most recognized war photographer of the twentieth century, and you're trying to tell me you aren't chasing after anyone? Let me guess, he died in your formative years, and now you're trying to recapture his patriarch influences through your own experiences.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but Leah beat me to it. “Joshua grew up in a parsonage, on church property, and his father's a Baptist preacher.”

  “A-ha!” Miranda erected a single finger. “A piece of the puzzle emerges.”

  “I confess.” I held two hands up. “You found me out. He's as Baptist as they come. Outside-the-box thinking isn't readily accepted as the norm among many Baptists. At least not in my own childhood experiences.”

  “Now that right there would give me daddy issues.” Richie said.

  I said: “My father was physically present, but emotionally unavailable.”

  “I think you just described everyone here.” Richie again. “We can thank emotionally unavailable fathers for comedians and actors....and photographers.”

  “And let me guess.” Miranda seemed to lean in further. Her leg brushed up against mine. “As the black sheep, you can't run far enough away from fundamental claustrophobia, being an open-minded but tortured artist and all. Yet somehow you keep finding yourself purchasing a return ticket home.”

  “How much do I owe you....for the therapy?” I said as an acknowledgement.

  “I have a payment in mind,” she grinned (again with the leg against my own). “Let's go to the party first, and if all goes well, I might have you cash it in later. That's where the imagination comes in, which shouldn't be a problem for an abstract thinker like you.”

  Leah fidgeted her eyes between the two of us. I had absolutely no emotional attraction to Miranda, despite her spotlight looks. This wasn't how I wanted my evening to go. Why is it that the only women who ever seem to come on to me are the wrong ones at the most inappropriate times?

  The train connected us to our platform with a screeching halt.

  “That's us,” Leah said, and immediately stood.

  “Girl, so long as I've known you,” Richie spoke to Miranda, “it has to go awfully bad, like setting the bar really low, before you reject patient payment.”

  “Stop it! That's not true!” She slapped his arm as we passed through the open doors.

  “Like I said,” he beamed at me from the platform, “that girl's got daddy issues.”

  Miranda slapped Richie several times now, all in the spirit of play, but each palm came repeatedly with the command to Stop it, or That's not true, and all Richie could do was hold up both hands to shield himself from her blows.

  26

  JOREL SEEGER WAS AN ABSTRACT painter, mostly of wall sized canvasses, all exceptional in quality. Tall, skinny, handsome, and approaching middle-age, with a silver head of hair to show for it (I thought he had that Andy Warhol look going for him), his spacious Williamsburg apartment spoke magnificently of commercial success. Just recently he'd headlined a gallery at the New York Museum of Contemporary Art, and his paintings were apparently in the ballpark of thirty or forty grand.

  “Leah!” Seeger was static to see Broadway's headliner arrive in the ten o'clock hour of his party, better late than never. He immediately apprehended Leah by helping himself to one of her hands, bending down in a hundred-and-twenty degree angle to peck at it, swift and handsomely planted. “Well, if it isn't the president's wife, as I stand here and breathe, in my humble studio.”

  “Jorel,” she blushed the second his lips touched her hand. Richie gazed at the host with the wide doe-like eyes of a schoolboy on Christmas morning.

  “I'm so thrilled that you could make it, my dear. Come.” He led her now by the hand. “There's someone I want you to meet.”

  “I was hoping to introduce you to a couple of my friends.” Leah's sentence trailed off into the whispered void of nothingness as she said it, and I thought she began to announce my name with the pronunciation of the J sound, but decided almost just as quickly not to put the effort into its other two syllables.

  “Yes, welcome.” He cut her off with a fly-like swat in his voice, never bothering to give her roommates or me the slightest courtesy of a glance, and led her into the crowd.

  I started to follow, feeling incredibly self-conscious. Richie came after. Only then, halfway through the studio, did Seger turn around to recognize our presence. “Help yourself to the bar.” He smiled in an unfriendly manner, never offering the courtesy of his eyes. I spotted the bar. It was in the opposite direction of his intended path. A massive canvas-piece, which harkened to the school of Jackson Pollock, dictated wall-space behind it. “Now if you don't mind, I'd like to borrow your roommate for a little while.”

  “She's not my....” I started to say, but his second attempt to cart her away and into the arms of his friends proved a wild success.

  “Greenberg!” I overheard Leah saying to one of them, despite the typical party noise that dared to compete with the growl of a Tom Waits record.

  This Greenberg fellow was short and stubby but not fat. And he wasn't unattractive looking either, but not someone you'd probably look twice at if you didn't know what he did for a living. What he didn't offer physically was corrected and made up for in Hollywood personality.

  Greenberg threw his arms around Leah and kissed her. Leah offered the same enthusiasm in return. “How could I not be at the party of my favorite east coast girl! When Jorel here told me there was the slightest chance that you'd be stopping by, I simply had to be here!”

  I quickly imagined a justified scenario where I was Al Pacino in that climatic scene from Scarface. I'd show Seeger and his friends my fully loaded AR-15, complete with a grenade launcher, and claim Pacino's classic quote as my own: You wanna play rough? Say hello to my little friend! I left that scene in the
safe deposit box of my head, however, and headed for the bar, feeling totally defeated, while Richie cried Hey, girl to some other recognized patron (I didn't turn to see who it was) and maneuvered in that direction. Miranda had already apprehended friends of her own. I'd have to survive the rest of the night unassisted; normally what I was best at, just not what I came prepared for, and certainly not what I wanted for my life anymore.

  The party was mostly a mixed bag of actors and artists and those who fit the description of the hoity-toity type, lots of booze and an indiscreet dosage of drugs, which actually wasn't so mixed of a bag, now that I thought about it. I helped myself to some booze but kept away from the drugs, and recognized a couple of character actors from various movies dispersed throughout the crowd. All three members of the punk band Green Day were present too. And there may have been some other stage veterans. They had the look of familiarity, like so many faces in the crowd; I just couldn't recall where they were from. I did eventually recognize someone formerly of SNL fame. But really, now that the loneliness was really settling in, what did it matter if I recognized them or not?

  In my defense I didn't actually bump into the elegantly dressed and very important looking woman, eye glasses too large for her nose. She bumped into me. Actually, she was talking to some tall skinny guy with bleached hair, dressed head-to-toe in leather, and scooted back without the courtesy of a forklift beeper or turn signal, clunking her rear into my glass of Johnnie Walker as I made my way back across the open floor. It was the blue label, the highest grade of Scotch imaginable for a shot of Johnnie Walker. I'd never had a taste before, and much of it ended up on the woman's purse despite my eagerness to taste it. I apologized and returned to the bar with what was left of the Scotch.

  “So, a little birdie tells me you came into the party with Isla Elliot,” a big-boned woman, of African-American descent and enormously tall with a broad nose and cheeks too shadowy for comfort slid up to the bar at my side. “Oh, and good job pissing off that woman back there; never mind the man she was conversing with, Billy Gordon.” Her voice was too deep for comfort too. “Chelsea Cox is one of the most powerful clothing designers in the world.”

  “You don't say.”

  I wasn't really interested in picking up a conversation with this stranger, but studied the clothing designer anyhow, just to be polite. Chelsea Cox, if that was her name, was busy talking now to another gentleman (the human couch had already moved on), and apparently flustered by the little ass who had just run her over at autobahn speeds, or so her claim went. Susan probably knew her. I'd have to remember to bring her up during our next conversation. Cox raised her voice about the asshole who just tried to run her over, probably so that several people at a time might overhear, and could someone find the balls to remove him from the party? She looked at me in disgust. I quickly shifted my eyes away, as though I'd never been staring her down at all, and caught a full frontal glimpse of the woman standing at my side. I had the uncomfortable thought that she had been a he in another life, or far more importantly, in this one.

  “Not the sort of person you want to spill a drink on,” she or he said.

  “I get the impression that most of the people here are the sorts you don't want to spill a drink on.” I coolly sipped on what was left of my Johnnie Walker Blue Label, as smooth as butter.

  That Cox lady was still unnerved by my presence, despite there being at least three dozen people between us, and still squawking about me. It grabbed the attention of Seeger and that Greenberg fellow. Leah was still lapping up their attention. She turned to stare at me briefly from across the room, I thought I might have detected a hint of sympathy, then returned to her two items of interest, smiling with the sort of one-on-one reservation that I'd personally fantasized about. Seeger and Greenberg stared at me too, only menacingly. I figured the sole reason I was still present in Seeger's studio, however unwelcome, was strictly on the basis that I'd walked in with NYC's adopted sweetheart.

  “Very true,” she or he laughed, I still wasn't sure of which, “Some of them, anyways. All of the others are just leaches hoping to get noticed.”

  “I imagine there's a little bit of leaching in everyone.”

  “Again, very true, much like your friend over there,” she nudged her masculine chin towards Leah. I thought there might have had a five o'clock shadow on it. “See that man she's talking to?”

  “The painter?”

  “No, the other one; the short little pig of a man whose trying to convince everyone that he's a Williamsburg hipster at heart; Lawrence Greenberg. Another little birdie says he's a Hollywood producer, and that he's come out from way yonder to court her into making his next movie.”

  Actually, his name sounded very familiar. I'd read about him on Latino Review or Ain’t It Cool News, and a few movie titles sprung to mind.

  “Which is?”

  “Come now. You haven't heard? REPUBLICAN BLUE, of course. Movie musicals are all the rage again, with Chicago and now Mamma Mia this summer. He had her practically wrapped around her finger last night.”

  “You know a lot of little birds.”

  “You've got that right, baby. In this rooster house, I'm the top hen.” Her laugh became a sort of masculine cluck. “But the question I'm dying to have answered is what about you? Are you a leech or aren't you?”

  “I'm hoping not to get noticed.”

  “So far so good,” she laughed at the irony of Chelsea Cox. Actually, I did too. “And what a shame, for someone so handsomely good looking.”

  I choked on my whiskey.

  “I'm Shangay Divine.” She extended a hand. I took it. “And you are?”

  “Joshua. Is that your birth name, or.....”

  “Oh, come now, honey. Everyone has two or three births in their lifetime.” This much is true. “I get this feeling that you're in the waiting room, just waiting for your reincarnation number to show.”

  “If it’s anything like waiting at the DMV, then forget about it.”

  “There's something else. I feel like I know you from somewhere. Joshua.”

  “Probably not, I'm just passing through.”

  “No. I've seen you before.” She snapped a finger. “Joshua. Joshua. Give me a second.” She gave it another second. “Weren’t you on Conan?”

  I told her I wasn’t.

  “Letterman, then?”

  Nope again.

  When next I caught sight of Leah, Jorel Seeger and Lawrence Greenberg were leading her towards a table where another acquaintance was spreading out helpings of laundry detergent on a silver platter. Leah bent over to slurp up a row through a single nostril, apparently at their encouragement. Seeing as how I couldn't find dirty laundry or French Toast anywhere, it definitely wasn't detergent or powdered sugar. I recalled the words of my mother a few weeks earlier: That's the girl who gave you drugs in high school, wasn't it? Technically, she never did offer me drugs. She knew I was clean. But I'd always known she'd participated in them. My heart sank.

  “I know!” Divine's eyes lit up with a simultaneous click of two fingers. “You're that man from the news.”

  “It's okay; people mistake me for Larry King all the time, despite the fact that I've never worn a pair of suspenders.” I kept my eyes on Leah as I said it. The effects of cocaine are swift and immediate. She was trying to regain her balance after the upsweep of her head, already stoned as hell. From somewhere nearby I detected what might have been Miranda's laugh as she responded to a potential bed partners joke.

  “You're friends with that guy who killed his wife.... the mob bosses daughter. I've seen you on the television This has all the makings of the next Scott Peterson trial.”

  “Strange,” I rolled my eyes, “since I haven't been watching television lately.”

  I sipped from my glass of J. Walker Blue Label, as if I hadn't a care in the world, only what was left of the whiskey dribbled down one corner of my lips to my chin stubble, and all I ended up with was a mouthful of air. From across the room, L
eah was standing in a rather dreamy pose, and rubbing a single finger across her nose.

  “Everyone's looking for you.” Divine's tone relaxed now as she leaned back further into the bar and smiled. “And yet here you are, a little lost puppy, whiskey all over your chin. People don't come to Jorel's parties hoping not to get noticed.”

  “Sorry to disappoint.”

  Divine lit up again at yet another revelation. She was apparently having a lot of them that night. “I know! You came not for Seeger’s love, but a woman's. And dare I say a popular one at that. She's a big fish in this pond, honey. What body of water did you come out from?”

  I said: “Scott Person’s, apparently.”

  Divine let out a masculine masturbatory cluck, but I wasn’t amused.

  “If you'll excuse me,” I forced a politicians grin and made my way for the nearest bathroom (I had to maneuver my way through a maze of a dozen stoned or drunken shoulders and feel my way along the wall for a door or hallway), wishing so very desperately for a fresh heaping of food poisoning, or death if that came first, any excuse to justify leaving this party permanently.

  27

  JOREL'S BATHROOM WAS CURRENTLY employed by two party animals, a man and a woman. The woman was hunched over the sink, ten fingers suction-cupped to the mirror, strapless top of her dress pulled down to her naval, no bra, and her skirt was pulled up above the waistline so that her naval was well protected and covered, if that's the fashionable look she was going for, and the man was wearing his pants and tighty-whities around his ankles. The party patron was behind her so that I got a full broadside view of his bubbled rear, vertical smile and all, and when I say behind her, well, you get the point.

  “Hey, get your own room!” The man said.

  The woman, of course, didn't stop her Yes, yes, yes! mantra, and may have even magnified her performance at my unscheduled arrival. Nirvana.

  “I could say the same of you.” I closed the door.