Sweet Nothing

by RICHARD LANGE

  Tonight that means letting Eve crawl all over me and tickle me with a big pink feather. She learned this from a cartoon, tickling someone with a feather. I pretend to laugh as she attacks the bottoms of my feet, my nose, my chin. When she sees how much fun I’m having, she gives me the feather and demands that I tickle her so she can pretend to laugh too.

  “Don’t rile her,” Julie says. “Dinner’s ready.”

  We’ve started saying grace before we eat because Julie wants Eve to have traditions.

  “What are we, fucking Amish?” I said when she first came up with this.

  “It’s important,” she said.

  Julie and I grew up in regular families, families that ate dinner in front of the TV and talked about going to church on Christmas but somehow never made it. I used to fetch my dad beers from the fridge for quarter tips. The rules are different now. We’re supposed to raise Eve to be one of those kids who weren’t allowed to drink soda or play with toy guns, which is fine, I guess, if all the other kids are like that too. I want her to fit in. I want her to be happy.

  I clean up the kitchen after we eat, load the dishwasher, and Julie gets Eve ready for bed. We tuck her in and kiss her good night together, then settle on the couch. Julie flips through a magazine while we watch our shows. Other nights she messes around on her iPad or works a crossword puzzle. What this means is that she’s always so distracted that she can’t follow the plot of even the dumbest sitcom.

  “Who’s he again?” she asks.

  “The blond girl’s uncle,” I say.

  My mind wanders too. I find myself thinking about little adventures I had as a kid, songs I used to be able to play on the guitar. My fingers twitch as I try to pick out the chords to “Under the Bridge.” Julie laughs at me.

  “What are you doing?” she says.

  I feel fat sitting there on the couch with my wife in the watery light from the TV five stories above Wilshire Boulevard. Bloated. Like a greedy mosquito too full of blood to fly.

  THE COUNCILMAN STOPS by the staff meeting to tell us what a great job we’re doing. I write his press releases, help with his speeches, and take care of his website. He’s okay. He’s got more personality than brains, but what politician doesn’t? He also has this way of talking down to you sometimes. He knows three things about me—that I went to UCLA, that I have a little girl, and that I sometimes eat Taco Bell for lunch—and that’s enough for him. Every conversation we’ve ever had has revolved around one of those subjects.

  Later we all gather in the break room for Maria the receptionist’s birthday, cake and everything. I show up because you have to in a small office like this. I eat some ice cream and tell a funny story about Eve, but what I really want to talk about is what happened on my way to work this morning, that guy taking a shit in front of me.

  I was waiting at a long red light, and a bum squatted on the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street, dropped his pants, and let go. I tried to turn my head but couldn’t. It was as if a bully had grabbed the back of my neck and was making me watch. I want to talk about how seeing that made me feel. Like everything was about to fall apart. Like pretty soon we’d all be shitting in the street.

  The rest of the day slips away from me. I stare at the ceiling of my office mostly, at a water stain that looks like an octopus. My cell rings as I’m getting ready to go home. I don’t recognize the number.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “This is Sophie.”

  My lungs seize up. I force a breath.

  “Remember me?”

  A couple of months ago Julie took Eve to her parents’ place in Oxnard for the weekend. I stayed behind to catch up on some stuff, and Saturday night Vince and I went to dinner, had a few drinks. I felt pretty good driving back to the condo, a little drunk, a little high. The music on the radio was the perfect sound track for the movie I was in. The streetlights played their part, the cars, the buildings pulsing to the beat.

  I passed a club I’d heard about, a place people went. Sometimes it hits you how long it’s been since you had that kind of fun. I wasn’t tired, nobody was waiting on me at home, so I turned around and parked. If there was a line or a cover charge—any kind of hassle at all—I was ready to leave, but I wound up breezing right in and even found a seat at the bar. It turned out to be next to this girl, Sophie, the one who’s saying to me now, “We need to talk. And not on the phone.”

  THEY’RE SHOOTING SOMETHING around the corner, in one of the big houses in Hancock Park. Equipment trucks and portable dressing rooms line the street, and huge lights set up on the lawn stand in for the sun.

  Julie and I are walking Eve, pushing her in her stroller. We go this way every Sunday morning, bring our coffee along. The kid waves at birds and has to pet all the friendly dogs we pass. Meanwhile, Julie plays games with her: Do you see a mailbox? Do you see a trash can? Sometimes I want to say, Jesus, leave her alone. She’ll be in school soon enough, and people will pick her brain all day long.

  Some guy with a walkie-talkie steps onto the sidewalk and blocks our way.

  “Could I get you to cross the street?” he says.

  “Why?” Julie says,

  “We’re filming here.”

  “So?”

  “So you have to cross the street.”

  Julie’s jaw tightens. She beat up a girl in junior high. The girl called her a slut, and Julie broke her nose. She’s not proud of it, but she did it.

  “We don’t have to cross,” she says. “You don’t have any authority.”

  “Come on,” the guy says. “Please.”

  Julie pushes the stroller toward him. He has to jump out of her way.

  “Really?” he says as she rolls by.

  I trail after her and give him a shrug and a smile.

  We pass the cameras and craft services and a man holding a microphone on the end of a pole. A girl carrying a clipboard yells “Hey!” but Julie ignores her too. The rent-a-cop hired to stop traffic is lounging on his motorcycle. He gives us a sarcastic salute and chirps, “Thanks for your cooperation.”

  Julie fumes all the way into Larchmont Village. Who do they think they are? We’ve got as much right to the sidewalk as they do. I quit listening when she starts talking about writing a letter to the newspaper. I haven’t slept in two days, and it feels like bugs are crawling on my eyeballs.

  “Do you see a fire engine?” I say to Eve. It’s a test; there is no fire engine.

  “There,” Eve says. She points at a car driving by. The sky is milky white, and nothing has a shadow. Julie goes into the bakery for bread, and I wait outside with Eve. We watch an old man cross against the signal and someone in a silver Mercedes give him hell.

  I SPEND THE morning drafting an op-ed piece on the redistricting proposal. The councilman is against it because the new map will put more Latinos in his area, and he’s afraid they won’t vote for a gringo. He can’t come out and say that, of course, so he gave me a few useless notes and asked me to turn them into an acceptable counterargument.

  Bob is breathing down my neck, but I can’t build up any steam. Something’s wrong with my chair. It’s not quite right, like maybe the cleaning crew bumped the height knob over the weekend. I get down on my hands and knees three times to fiddle with it but keep making things worse.

  My excuse for taking a long lunch is a doctor’s appointment. Bob looks like he wants to squawk, but I tell him not to worry, I’ll be back this afternoon and stay until I finish the piece. I drive into Hollywood and find the Starbucks where I’m meeting Sophie. It’s in a shitty strip mall between a RadioShack and a Panda Express. I park in back, next to a padlocked dumpster.

  I’m nervous walking in that I won’t remember her. She had dark hair and dark eyes that I said something stupid about that night, how a man could get lost in them and never find his way home.

  “Wow,” she said. “The big guns already?”

  That was the moment, me stammering and faking chagrin, her laughing and saying, “Just ki
dding.” That was the last exit, and I sped past it. Even though it had been a while since I’d been out and about, since I’d done any flirting, I knew right then where we were headed.

  Turns out she’s easy to spot, the prettiest girl in the place. She’s smaller than I recall, maybe older. She’s wearing a white blouse and gray slacks, work clothes. She looks up from her phone as I approach, frowns, and I see the beauty mark on her upper lip, where I first kissed her.

  “Should I sit?” I say.

  “Sure,” she replies.

  The chair scrapes loudly across the floor as I pull it out. Everybody stares at us, our awkwardness palpable. I sit and put my hands in my lap, then on the table, then back in my lap.

  She’s pregnant.

  Even if you’re prepared for something like that, the actual words can still lay you out. I tilt my head back, close my eyes, and exhale through pursed lips.

  “Okay,” I say. “What do we do about it?”

  “Don’t worry,” she scoffs. “I don’t plan on being a mommy right now, but the problem is, I don’t have insurance.”

  This is one of the scenarios I’ve been playing out ever since I got her call, trying to be ready for anything.

  “Whatever you need,” I say.

  “I need money,” she says.

  “How much?” I say.

  She gazes past me, running numbers in her head. I find this charming. I would’ve already had a figure in mind.

  “Fifteen hundred?” she says, as if asking if the amount is acceptable.

  “All right,” I say. “Give me a week.”

  My easy acquiescence seems to take her by surprise. Her eyes well up with tears, and I’m suddenly filled with tenderness toward her. I have to admit that for two seconds after we climbed out of the backseat of my car that night, after we kissed good-bye, I was in some kind of love with her. And in spite of all the guilt, remorse, and penitence that came later, the memory of her reaching up to pull me down on top of her is one I’ve often lingered over.

  She shifts and sniffles and uses her napkin to wipe up a coffee spill on the table. Someone has etched a tag into the glass of the window behind her, and when the sun hits the scratches, they sparkle with a diamond’s soulless brilliance.

  “I guess I should have been more careful,” she says. “But so should you.”

  “Absolutely,” I say. “I totally blame myself.”

  “You’re married?” she says, pointing at my ring.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Why weren’t you wearing it that night?”

  “I took it off.”

  She draws back her head and squints down her nose at me.

  “That’s fucked up,” she says.

  “I know,” I say.

  “It’s disgusting.”

  I’m glad she’s saying this. It’s good for me. I need to hear what a rotten bastard I am because part of me still isn’t convinced.

  I realize I’ve had my sunglasses on since I got here. I reach up and take them off.

  “Are you okay for now?” I say. “Do you need anything?”

  “Give me twenty dollars,” she says.

  I reach for my wallet, slide the bill out.

  “Wait,” she says. “Give me forty. No, sixty. I don’t even need it. I just want to take something from you.”

  “I only have forty,” I say, and hand the money over.

  A woman at the counter is trying to use a coupon to pay for her coffee. She gets loud when the cashier tells her it’s expired, keeps asking the girl if she speaks English. I have to get back to the office.

  “So, I’ll text you,” I say as I stand.

  “Okay,” Sophie says. She stands too.

  “And I’ll see you in a week. Here?”

  “Here’s good. I work close by.”

  We shake hands like it’s business. I walk out the door, then think I’ll get a coffee for the road. When I turn to go back inside, I see Sophie hugging some guy who’d been sitting at another table, watching us the whole time. Long hair, ponytail, beard. Her back is to me, but he and I lock eyes over her shoulder. I decide I don’t need any coffee. I walk to my car, get in, and drive away.

  ON TUESDAY, AFTER we put Eve to bed, Julie asks me to go down with her to her car and help her carry up a new coffee table she bought at Ikea. We ride the elevator to the garage and pull the box out of the back of the Jetta. Julie takes one end, and I grab the other. The alarm on a Land Rover goes off as we pass by, and my guts jump. I don’t like being down here with all that concrete and steel above me and the unquiet earth below.

  “If you don’t go slower, I’m going to drop it,” Julie says.

  I hold my finger on the call button until the elevator car arrives. The Land Rover’s alarm is still echoing through the garage when the doors close.

  We set the box down in the middle of the living room, and Julie opens one end and slides out the pieces of the table.

  “Relax,” I say. “I’ll put it together.”

  “I want to do it,” she says. “Read me the directions.”

  “Oh, boy,” I say. “I better get another drink.”

  Julie frowns but doesn’t reply. Her dad is a drunk, so she’s touchy about booze. If I have more than the one G&T after work, she gets weird. Not to be rude, but she should mind her own fucking business.

  I go into the kitchen and pour myself a tall one. Julie is already screwing stuff together when I return. I sit on the couch and, after consulting the assembly instructions, tell her what comes next.

  “This can’t be right,” she says at one point.

  I lean over to show her the diagram. “You have to turn that end around,” I say.

  “Yuck,” she says, waving a hand in front of her face. “You stink.”

  It won’t be difficult to sneak the money for Sophie out of our account. When we were first married, Julie ran the household, paying the bills and overseeing our finances, but when Eve was born, she asked me to take over. Now, as long as the ATM spits out cash when she sticks her card in, she’s happy.

  And that wasn’t the only change the baby brought about. Julie was a loan officer when I met her, at a bank in Beverly Hills, and she kept working right up until she had Eve. She never complained, seemed to enjoy the job even, so I was shocked when she told me that she didn’t plan to go back.

  “I only want to be a wife and mother,” she said. “My mom worked, and I always felt slighted. I want to devote myself to you and Eve.”

  I went from one life to another in just one year. I hooked up with Julie; she got pregnant three months later; we married, bought the condo, and had Eve. Truthfully, I was a bit disoriented, but when I tried to talk to Julie about it, she came on strong about my having to accept my new responsibilities the way she had to accept hers.

  “I don’t feel like I had much choice is all,” I said.

  “Sometimes adults don’t get much choice,” she said.

  She tightens the last screw and flips the completed table right-side up.

  “Ta-da.”

  I help her move the old table into the hallway and position the new one in front of the couch. We didn’t need a new table, she just got bored with the old one. That’s the kind of people we are now.

  She picks up my empty glass, takes it into the kitchen, rinses it, and puts it into the dishwasher.

  “I’m going to read in bed for a while,” she says.

  “I want to watch the news,” I say.

  I wait for her to close the bedroom door, then go into the kitchen, get a fresh glass from the cupboard, and make another drink. It’s nice out on the balcony, warm, but with a breeze coming off the ocean. I stand with my forearms on the rail and watch the traffic. A car cruises past with its windows down, radio blaring. You can hear the kids inside singing along to whatever song is playing.

  Have fun, boys and girls, I think. Let this be the best night of your lives.

  VINCE CALLS ME at work, wants to know if I’m still on for Cal and Esthe
r’s party.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” I reply, wondering if he knows something. I’ve been paranoid since meeting Sophie at Starbucks. That guy she was with made me uneasy.

  “Come on,” Vince says. “You flake all the time.”

  It’s true. I say yes on Monday, but when Friday rolls around I’m so beat that all I want to do is stumble home and coast through the weekend on routine.

  “I’m going, I’m going, I swear,” I say. I lean back in my chair and pick up a photo of me and Julie and Eve at Christmas. It could be a picture of anybody. I don’t even remember Christmas.

  “Do you know any jokes?” Vince says.

  “Jokes?”

  “The dude in the mailroom here tells me a joke every day, and I thought I’d tell him one back, freak him out. I looked online, but they’re all about having sex with babies and sick shit like that.”

  “That’d freak him out for sure.”

  “Yeah, and also get me fired.”

  Vince has been married to Kaylee for two years, and they were together for three before that. They’re putting off having a kid because they want to travel. They went to Machu Picchu last year, and Vietnam is next. Julie doesn’t like Kaylee; she says she needs to grow up. Vince, though, he loves her. He started crying one time telling me how much. We were in a bar, having some beers, and all this love came pouring out of him. I hoped he couldn’t see how uncomfortable it made me.

  “I have to go,” I say into the phone.

  “Knock-knock,” Vince says.

  “Who’s there?”

  “9/11.”

  “9/11 who?”

  “Hey, you said you’d never forget.”

  The octopus on the ceiling is getting bigger, expanding like an incriminating bloodstain. I should call building maintenance about it. There may be a leak somewhere.

  ON MY WAY home on Friday I pass by the spot where that bum shit on the grass, and I think that if I see him again, I’ll kill him. An instant later I’m like, What the fuck is wrong with you? Where did that come from? It must have been a misfire or crossed wires. Or maybe it was somebody else speaking through me, maybe everybody else, the whole city.