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

by Noel J. Hadley

  “I didn’t need a place to stay.”

  “No, apparently not.”

  “Why do you have a constant habit of making me feel so alone?”

  “Joshua, just tell me what you want.”

  I thought about my answer, but in the end chose silence.

  She said: “I haven’t forgotten how far I’ve come, and that you started the journey at my side. You want that blow-job that you didn’t get seven years ago? Is that what you want? You sure as hell were quick to bring it up in Boston.” Another pedestrian couple passed us on the street, straining faces forward so as not to express their obvious discomfort over Leah’s suggestion. “If that’s what its gonna take to make you happy, I’ll follow you into the bathroom right now, and…”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.” I interrupted her.

  Leah strained her face into repulsive contortions, only she couldn’t become unattractive no matter which direction she wrapped or bow-tied the dimensions of her nose, mouth, or eyebrows.

  “Maybe this was a bad idea.” I turned around to leave. “Maybe I should spend the rest of my weekend alone on a park bench.”

  “Self-pity is not flattering,” she said.

  “I don't want to give self-pity.”

  “And I don't want it.”

  And then I started on my way, wherever that was.

  “Don’t go.” Leah's voice said. I’d only taken a couple of steps, and stopped almost as suddenly as I'd started. “I’m sorry.”

  I turned around to face her again. “Sorry for what, Leah?”

  “I’ve been a bitch.”

  “No. You’re anything but that.”

  “You can say it, Bitch.”

  “If anyone called you that I’d accuse them of being a lobcock fartleberry and challenge them to a duel.”

  It took her some effort, but she eventually reached out and touched my hand, which quickly became an embracive grip, with all five fingers firmly roping mine into a sailor knot. I couldn't even begin to fathom how difficult that must have been for her. Ira and Great-Uncle Homer probably had an easier time running up the beaches of Normandy. If only they'd been stoned.

  “Come back to the party with me. We can talk about this later.”

  “I know this sounds pathetic, and I know self-pity is as misleading to one's own image as a funhouse mirror, but I really was alone up there.”

  “Yes, you were.” Leah extended her effort by wrapping both arms around me, just as she had in Boston, and her cheek rested on my shoulder. I couldn't help but question her intentions though, since her recent physical contact with Greenberg hadn't looked at all genuine, at least not from where I was standing. “But you’re not pathetic. You need someone to talk to, and I should have been that someone.”

  She kissed my cheek and almost just as quickly backed away.

  “Wow. Is this how you treat your friends?”

  Leah laughed, “Some of them.”

  “Leah, you’re stoned.”

  “If by stoned you mean everyone looks like a Muppet right now, then yeah, I'm stoned.”

  I looked over both shoulders, somewhat confused as to where all the Muppets were, and spotted another couple, non-Muppets, walking a Havanese in our direction, also not a Muppet, however much it sort of looked like one.

  '“Muppets? You mean like Bunsen and Beaker and Sam the Eagle?”

  “Mm-hmm, only you're looking a lot like Rowlf right now. Now that I think about it, you sort of talk like him too.”

  “The piano playing dog?”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “The fact that you're seeing Muppets everywhere, which is awesome, or the fact that you had to get stoned to accomplish this?”

  I chose not to answer my own question. She was after all a wild card. I knew that much going into this. It was a simultaneous source of uncultivated attraction and un-attraction butting heads. Everything about Leah was a whodunit question, the fact that she could be so emotionally cold and distant one moment and so entirely embracive the next. Even this entire altered course in our conversation seemed to be the simple result of drawing a joker from the deck, and as anyone who plays games knows, there's only so many wild cards in any given stack to be drawn. Go fish.

  “It bothers you, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t want it to; maybe only a little.”

  Leah kept her gaze steadily fixed on me.

  “Okay, it bothers me.”

  “Tell me how you really feel.” She smiled.

  “I don't want to be judgmental.”

  “I'm an actress, and a big city girl. Do you think I would have invited you out here if you were judgmental?”

  “Good, because you’re not just some casual acquaintance or cocktail party friend, Leah; you’re special to me. In the several years that we've been apart, I've often thought about you.”

  “You've crossed my mind too.”

  “I know this is forward, but if nothing else, I want to be a part of your life, if you’ll have me.”

  “I want that too. We keep starting out on the wrong foot.”

  I wiped away a threat of tears as it penetrated my sockets and clawed at my eyes. I didn't want to cry in front of her, but the floodwaters of Elise and Gracie Parker and Penny and Delilah, and now Leah, had too long pushed upon them.

  “Are you crying?” She said.

  “No.” I rubbed a second hand across my eyes.

  “I can't imagine going through what you've experienced. There's a lot built up in there, and if you don't cry once in a while to let it out, then you're not human.”

  “No, apparently not, since I'm also a Muppet.”

  “Yes, and I think I have something that you could use.”

  “What?”

  “A shoulder to cry on,” She held her arms out.

  I hesitated.

  “It's okay. I may be seeing Muppet-Vision, but I won't bite.”

  I leaned into her arm, but by the time I reached the open area between her neck and shoulder bone, I'd managed to fall into it. I finally had my shoulder to lean on. Or as both Susan Leah had put it, cry on. I did a little bit of that too, silently.

  “I’m glad I chased you out to the street. I’m glad we had this conversation. And if you come back up to the party with me I won’t let you out of my sight for a second. Just dry those eyes before we go back, because crying isn't very party-like.”

  “I'm not crying.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I don’t want to get in the way of you and what’s-his-face.”

  “Jorel?”

  “Jorel. And that Hollywood producer.”

  “Lawrence?”

  “Yes, Lawrence; you need that part in his movie.”

  “I’m not going home with him tonight, silly.” She touched my nose. “I’m going back up there to have some fun, and afterwards I’m going home with you.”

  “But what about that movie?”

  “I'm good enough that I won’t have to sleep with him tonight to get the part.”

  The thought that she'd slept with him period on nights prior to get the part wasn't very comforting. “Does that mean I’ve been demoted to the tub again?”

  “Yes.” She pulled at my hand. “It does. And you know what else?”

  “What?” We maneuvered into the lobby.

  “Rowlf was always my favorite.”

  THE PRESIDENT'S WIFE

  1

  NIGHT NUMBER TWO IN BROWNSTONE, I decided to skip the tub, fun as a pillow fort might prove to be, and slept on the other half of Richie's couch. He wore boxers that depicted a series of green lightsabers from Star Wars. Despite the temptation to find a pair of boxers depicting red lightsabers and challenge him to a duel I kept to my jogging shorts. I recall being especially disturbed by my dream that night because I was jogging through the streets of Manhattan without any clothes on.

  They say naked nightmares highlight our fear of exposure, but however many pedestrians I passed (many faces in the crowd I was in
timately familiar with), nobody seemed to notice my predicament, which is often how these sort of dreams unfold, and exactly how I hoped it would actually go down if I ever really found myself slimmed down to the clothing that God introduced me to the world in.

  Details are few, they usually are seconds after waking, but Shaggy was there, Elise's once-imaginary Oz friend. I remember that much because he was warming his gloved hands over one of those trashcans sprouting a flickering bush of flames. That's when I crossed the street to finally speak with him. No sooner had the otherworldly homeless man detected my presence when he formed those wild cartoon-like eyes and made a dash for it. Then again, I would have run away from me if I were naked too.

  All the same I pursued him, and must have done so down several streets and twice that many corners without ever tackling my cosmic stalker. I seem to recall Shania Twain crying out, Man! I feel like a woman on one of those corners. Then out of nowhere the blinding beams of a monstrous headlight shined directly on me, matched simultaneously by the roar of an engine, and soon the pursuer (that's me) became the pursued. First Shaggy lead the way, then me following in his shadow, and finally a ferocious gas guzzler chomping at my heels. It was all so horrible and endless, and my eyes fluttered from the high beams, but the most disturbing part came when the homeless man rounded a corner that revealed a chain-link fence and cranes with skyscraper-sized necks. I immediately recognized the construction zone. Ground Zero; hollowed earth where the Twin Towers once stood. My dreams, and this bumbling fellow from the pages of Elise's childhood, had tricked me into yet another repeat visit.

  The sensation of death overcame me and, despite the roar of Mr. High-Beams engine, I fell to my knees in a hit the deck sort of pose. The homeless man (I suspected he had me exactly where he wanted me), he turned around, held his arms out like two batons, and lifted the monstrous car into the air seconds before it could swallow me whole. He simply suspended it over my head, held it in place, and then effortlessly crushed the entire thing into one metallic heap as if he were the maestro and everything else were his symphony. Disposing of it over the fence-line and into the construction zone was as simple as making a trashcan rim shot with a wadded piece of paper.

  GO DOGGY, GO, he said, THE CHILD MUST WAKEN TO BE SAVED!

  When I awoke I was panting of breath.

  Richie sat there on his side of the crib holding a single sheet up over his naked chest so that his nipples were discreetly covered. “Just watching you dream was enough of a nightmare for one lifetime, Chamberlain,” he said. “I could have sworn the dead had woken.”

  I used one of Richie's patented lines. “If only you knew.”

  “No thank you.” He turned over. “The next time I want to be scared, I'll simply watch an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.”

  I had absolutely no clue what time of day it was, but the sun was up. I laid there anyways with my eyes closed pretending to sleep so as to not disturb Brownstone's nocturnal inhabitants, trying to remember everything about my dream, trying to understand what it all meant, and perhaps just as importantly, adding a new cliffhanging conundrum to the unsolved mysteries of my life. Who the heck were the Kardashians?

  2

  MORNING NUMBER TWO WITH LEAH BISHOP and New York's adopted sweetheart arose from bed dressed somewhat more conservatively, pajama bottoms and a t-shirt that hid her hourglass figure rather than the boy shorts and spaghetti strap that she'd recently modeled in yesterday’s experiment, but otherwise the president's wife looked like she'd just spent the night wrestling with a barracuda in the crapper. It was a Saturday, almost 10am, and her eyelids had gained about ten pounds each. I wondered if Laura Bush ever felt this way on the morning after one of her state dinners, probably not.

  “I feel like shit,” she said, eyes barely opened, and probably hoped to relieve the tension in her head by holding a hand to it.

  “Cocaine has the wonderful promise of making you feel great for about fifteen minutes and then feeding you to the repeated kick of a mule for the next several hours,” I said.

  She scooted out a stool and sat in it, slumping her head and arms over the island countertop. “The only way to stop it is with more cocaine. And stop shouting.”

  “Here, drink this.” I slid a glass her way. Its liquid content was sort of orange in color, and fizzled, with hints of sodium. “And I'm not shouting.”

  “It's a hangover drink.” Richie propped his head over the couch cushions of his pull-out bed.

  “Is it safe?” Leah said.

  “Safer than cocaine.”

  Leah shrugged.

  “It's a recipe that's been passed down by my uncles. They practically raised me, as you know. I couldn't find all the ingredients but it does involve Alka Seltzer, a raw egg, juice with vitamin c, milk, ground coffee beans, and if you think you taste horseradish and Chinese mustard in there, it's probably not your imagination.”

  “He went to the store this morning,” Richie said.

  “You went to the store this morning?”

  I told her I did.

  Leah studied the glass with uncertainty, holding it up to her eyes and turned it around in a complete three-sixty.

  “This particular recipe comes from my great-uncle Milhous.”

  “Isn't he the brother that boxed?”

  “The guy took more punches in his lifetime than breaths of oxygen. He knew something about pain remedies for the head.”

  “He still alive?” Leah sniffed at it and reeled her head away, repelled by its smell.

  “My grandfather Ira and three of his brothers, Percy, Roland, and Homer, have all been buried. He and Jack are all that's left of the war generation.”

  “The P.I.?” Leah worked a smile into the emotionless sting of her skull. “He still saving hookers from sleazy pimps and busting crooked politicians”

  “Pretty much, so long as the pimping and political scandals happen in Leisure World. Take a drink; believe me, you'll start to feel better.”

  Leah shelved the glass on her lips, gave it a good tip and stole a single sip. She gagged on that little bit, and its taste scrunched her face up into the look of an inflamed muscle, but she managed to take a little more down on a second try, and I gathered it wasn't nearly as bad as she'd first made it out to be, especially since she finished off the entire glass with little to no complaint. Only then did she notice the food set out on the countertop.

  “What’s this?” She studied the various dishes.

  “Generally in the US it’s called breakfast, though I know it’s a foreign concept to you theater types. In French it’s called petit déjeuner, I learned that one from Elise, and the Swedish lovingly refer to it as frukost.”

  “Shut up. You made this?”

  I told her I did.

  Richie propped his head over the couch cushions. “And girl, you should have been here. The wedding photographer's been at it all night.”

  Leah pushed me with a sudden spiel of playfulness.

  “Shut up.” Her eyes widened as she said it.

  “And after Frühstück, that’s German, I thought we could hold a conference call with Miss Manners on the usage of the phrase shut up. Is she a 212 or 646 area code?”

  “I’ve never had a man cook me breakfast before.”

  Richie dropped his jaw from the couch and exhumed a long draw of hot air for show. “Excuse me, beauty queen.”

  “It doesn’t count when all of my roommates like penis, Richie,” she said.

  “Well, no man’s ever made me breakfast either. I guess I’m just jealous. Where did you find this man and are there more?” He dropped his head back under the couch with an added dosage of flare.

  Leah bit her lower lip as she studied each dish. She asked: “What are these?”

  “It’s a strawberry and blueberry parfait with a little bit of granola on top. You already had the yogurt, though I’ll warn you that the granola might be a little stale since nobody apparently keeps the lid on food around here. I had to go
to the store this morning for the fruit.”

  “Are stores even open this early?”

  “It’s nine am, girl.” Richie said, buried in the couch cushions. “If this were a weekday, Wall Street would probably already be closing shop.”

  “And what’s going on over here with this one?”

  “It’s morning after French toast.”

  Leah twisted her face. “Did it get knocked up or something?”

  “It just means I soaked the bread in the eggs, milk, brown sugar and bananas overnight. I couldn’t find all the right ingredients, so I had to get a little creative, and the bananas were a little too black for my liking.”

  “You started cooking for me last night.....after the party.”

  “If only you knew girl,” Richie said from behind the couch.

  “Give me a few minutes and I'll cook up some bacon.”

  “Thank God. Most of the men I know or date only eat tofu. Are you…um…. are you coming back to New York anytime soon?” Leah looked adorable as she said it.

  “I’m here several times a year.”

  “Jeez, that’s more often than I see the city, and I live here.” Richie propped his head over the couch again. “You might as well pay rent on a place.”

  “Richie, you haven’t paid me rent in months,” said Leah.

  Richie dropped his head back under the cushions again with just as must flare.

  I said: “Why do you ask?”

  “Because you’re a keeper, as guys from my past are concerned” she picked at the French toast without actually taking a bite, “you and the bacon. Now get cooking while I get ready.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you for the last twenty-four hours, girl,” said Richie. “Can’t he just move in already?”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in long distance relationships,” I said.

  “I spoke no such thing.” Leah bit into the toast.

  “Oh girl,” Richie sighed from the couch.

  3

  WITH ONLY A FEW HOURS to hit up the town (we'd agreed to do the “touristy stuff”), Leah and I were stopped at the fourth floor staircase by Mahoney, who was apparently waiting for us. He popped his head through a crack in 401 to say: “Hey, you guys coming to my party tonight?”