by Emily Bishop
As I spoke, Quintin leaned heavily against the brick wall, gazing at me. His face changed several times—from one of distrust, to one of interest, of true appreciation. I finally turned my eyes to him, knowing I needed to reckon with what I’d done to his sister.
“Listen, man. I’ve been a fuck-up. I know that. But I want to fix everything with her. Ask her to be my real wife, man. She’s been the only stable part of my life for the past fifteen years.” I paused, my eyes switching between the two of them. “Any idea where the hell she might have gone?”
Quintin volunteered to close up the bar for the night and take Connie back to her hotel. Not wanting to leave Maria with her drunken mom, he opted to take her back to his apartment, telling me he’d order a pizza, show her some cartoons. “Kids are easy, man. Good thing, huh? Cause you’re about to have two of them.”
I had no room to chuckle at his jokes. No energy, besides what I was pushing toward finding Rem. I watched as Quintin slid into my car, tossing me the keys to his bike. With a wink, he said, “Man, I know you know how hard it is to lend my bike out. But you gotta find her, OK? Bring her back. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Sorry I’m always making such a goddamn mess,” I told him, giving him a slight smile.
“I’m used to it, man,” Quintin said. “Just be better. For all of us. And for your son.”
I sped out on Quintin’s bike toward Remy’s apartment. As I suspected, her car wasn’t parked anywhere near. When I smacked my fist against the door, it produced no answer. And a call to Sam brought me just an earful of hatred. “No, I’m not going to tell you where she is. If she hasn’t told you where she is, she doesn’t want to be found.”
“Sam. I mean it this time. It’s like, life or death that I find her,” I said back, pleading. “If you know where she is, you have to tell me. OK?”
After a long pause, Sam admitted that she didn’t know. That she hadn’t seen her since the previous night and was nursing a hefty hangover. “Jesus. Did you know Gwen could drink so much?” she sighed to me, in a moment of strange clarity. “To be sixty-something, without a care in the world.”
“I have to go, Sam. Goodbye.”
Just before slipping my leg over Quintin’s bike once more—going over a wide variety of places she might be—I received a text from Quintin himself.
“I’ve never seen you so sure of yourself about Remy, Wes,” it read. “I think I’m actually finally ready to accept that you’re going to be with her for good. I believe you, man. Don’t fuck this up.”
I held the phone up, gazing out over the Mission. As I did, I felt a wave of memory, making the Mission look different, like the one of my teenage years. I could almost visualize Remy in those little jean shorts she’d so often worn, her thin legs snaking across the road as she’d strutted away from me. “You can’t treat me like that!” she’d howled to me, making me spin with rage. I’d chased after her so many times, whirling her into me and kissing her angrily, recklessly. Always, the anger had been tinged with sexual energy. My cock had pulsed up against my jeans, grazing against her perfect thigh. I’d tossed her against my motorbike, inhaling her.
“Come to Los Angeles with me,” she’d cooed so often, first in a teasing way, and then with more purpose. “We can make love on the beach. We can bicker while swimming in the waves. Come with me, Wesley. I so want us to be together. Beneath the sun.”
25
Remy
12 Years Earlier
Quintin’s CD player blared down the hall. I knocked at his door, scrunching my nose at the noise rock, the grunge. He was going through a Nirvana phase, and it was making our house feel like a strange, gritty bar. Dad was often not home, and if Mom had been alive, she wouldn’t have stood for it.
Quintin strode from his room, staring at me. He’d begun to grow his eighteen-year-old beard out, making it scraggly against his crooked, sharp chin. He glared down at me. “Don’t suppose you’ve heard from Wesley, have you?”
“I just need you to turn the music down. I can’t hear myself think,” I said to him, pouting.
“Did you and Wesley get into another goddamn fight?” Quintin asked. He didn’t turn down the music, and his voice was loud and wild over it, finding the gaps in the notes.
“Jesus, Quintin, do you have to know all of my business?”
“Why can’t you just find someone else to fuck, Rem? I mean, does it have to be my best friend?”
“I’m in love with him, Quintin,” I screamed back, suddenly feeling volatile. “And he’s such a big idiot, he thinks he can just leave me after school’s out? Drive across the country on his motorbike? I wonder where he got that idea from, huh?”
“As if I told him to leave,” Quintin scoffed. “I want him here just as much as you do.”
“Fuck you. I’m going to Los Angeles, and I’m going to be something,” I said. “In fact, I’m going to go today.”
“Remy, we don't graduate for another six weeks. Good luck telling them you aren’t coming back,” Quintin snickered.
“Whatever.” I tossed my long curls behind my back and stormed down the steps, into the mushy grass outside our three-bedroom house, a few blocks from the gritty Mission District. I’d lived in San Francisco my entire life, a place of apparent “free love,” of music. But I felt stifled, uncreative within its boundaries. Unable to breathe.
A few blocks down, I found myself at the pay phone near the liquor store. I slipped some quarters in and dialed Wesley’s number. His father picked up on the second ring, sounding sour, fatigued. He was continuously harried, trying to “make his billions” in the tech industry.
“Sure. I’ll go grab him,” he grunted.
I waited, tapping my foot wildly against the pavement. The air was filled with smells of Mexican food, of baking tortillas. My stomach quaked with hunger.
Wesley’s voice on the other end sizzled in my ear. I brought my leg to one side, feeling my heartbeat begin to pattern wildly. This man. He was my everything.
Yet, he was angry. We’d burned one another with harsh words during the hour after school, both of us filled with rage and zealous fire, each of us wanting a life the other didn’t. “You’ll find someone else when you get to LA,” Sam, my best friend, always told me. “You’ll figure out that a silly high school romance is nothing more than that. Silly. Especially with someone as groundless as Wesley.”
“What is it?” Wesley demanded over the phone. “I can’t really talk right now, Rem. I’m in the middle of something.”
“Why don’t we just run away together right now?” I sputtered back. I still stirred with anger yet wanted to demand something of this world. I felt I could feel it turning too swiftly toward a reality I hadn’t chosen.
* * *
“What the hell are you talking about?” Wesley asked. I felt intrigue sparkling behind his voice. “Jesus, Rem, I can never really handle what you’re going to say next.”
“Take me out of this city, Wesley, or I swear to God I’ll burn it down,” I said. Tears slid down my cheeks.
Wesley paused for a long time. Tension made the air taut around me. At the liquor store door, an old man ripped the cap off a large vodka bottle and tilted it up, over his mouth. He basically doused himself with it. It felt like a moment of clarity.
“All right. Where are you?” Wesley finally asked me.
I told him.
“Stand right there. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. You got cash?”
“Maybe twenty bucks,” I said. “You better take something from your dad’s desk. A few hundreds?”
“He’ll notice.”
“He’ll notice you’re gone, too.”
Wesley knew I had a point. After hanging up, I shuffled toward the gas station on the far edge of the corner and bought a soda. It fizzled against my tongue, making me alert, alive. It was a harsh May evening, one that produced droplets of sweat along my neck. The man from the liquor store hadn’t budged much more than a few feet and continued to s
ip his vodka straight, staring at me.
Wesley rolled up on the motorbike minutes later, his dark blonde hair long and curled along his shoulders. Immediately, my heart burst with lust for him. Memory of our fight from the afternoon dissipated as I fell into him, wrapping my thin arms around his neck and diving against him. I felt his muscled chest against my breasts, his lips curling over mine. Love. This. This was love, I reminded myself. And maybe, like Sam said, it wasn’t going to last forever. But all we had was now. Kurt Cobain had died, Quintin had told me. But he’d loved and loved hard. “And it doesn’t matter how long you’re here,” Quintin had said. “Just that you really fucking feel while you are.”
“Where do you want me to take you?” Wesley asked, his eyes dewy, gazing at me after our kiss broke. “I’ll take you anywhere in the world.”
“Come to Los Angeles with me. We can make love on the beach. We can bicker while swimming in the waves. Come with me, Wesley. I so want us to be together. Beneath the sun.”
We whipped down the road, tearing toward Los Angeles as the sun filtered down over the ocean. I held onto him firmly, pressing my cheek into his back and gazing out at the waves as they lapped the shore. I knew that soon Quintin would notice I was gone, that I hadn’t settled in for the night. Wesley’s older brother, Hank, who still lived in the family’s large mansion, would surely notice that Wesley wasn’t at breakfast. We were sneaking away from the world that had been laid out for us, ready to charge forth on our own.
When we arrived at the beach in Santa Monica, Wesley parked the bike along the sand. We stripped our clothes from our backs and sped toward the waves, pink from sunrise. Charging into them, we held onto one another tightly, my arms wrapped tightly around Wesley’s shoulders, clinging to him. We kissed as the waves banged against us, pressing me into Wesley’s thighs.
I pressed my nose against his nose, and my heart beat wildly. I knew there was no possible way to speak of what came after this. To know if we’d return for high school graduation, or if we’d find a way to stitch together our relationship in the wake of that final ceremony.
“It doesn’t matter what happens,” I whispered to him, my eyes burning with salt. My hair dripped on either side of my shoulder, curling beneath the sun. “Because I love you right now. And right now feels a lot like forever.”
26
Remy
I awoke early, before dawn, in my Venice Beach hotel. As I lay back, my eyes adjusting to the grey, I heard the little village awake around me—bikes bumbling past, neighbors greeting one another. Venice Beach had always been a favorite safe haven, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, stretched along the water. And unconsciously, when I’d fled San Francisco the night before, I’d parked there—getting a room to think, to read, to cultivate my next steps. Now that I had to create a new reality for my son and me.
He doesn’t want you, I told myself over and over again. He’s got Connie, he’s got Maria. He’s built a life with another family. And your son and you are null and void, just a memory he cannot escape. I wondered how often, throughout filming the movie, Wes had actively hid his affair with Connie from me. Counting back, I remembered the last time we’d fucked had been about two weeks before, after a particularly grueling night of shooting. I’d collapsed into him, kissing him as the last of the crew had fled the scene. Nothing in his eyes had shown me that he wanted to flee as well, that he had another life brewing elsewhere.
But we were all actors in this, I reminded myself. Including myself. I’d been playacting that I’d wanted nothing else but the film and our child. Rather, I wanted Wesley and me to put our misunderstandings aside. To become what I’d always longed for, as a younger girl.
Smile because it happened. These words echoed through my brain, something I’d told myself continually in the months, and even years, after I moved to Los Angeles. Wesley was now a part of two very big times of my life. He was something I was bouncing off of, continually. As if we were scientific chemicals, that simply caused an explosion whenever we mixed.
Tyler had grown wild, excited, via text the previous night. Explaining that he could meet as early as lunchtime the following day. That he couldn’t wait to see me. But with each message, my heart grew increasingly sour. I brought my hand over my stomach in bed, pondering the events of the day.
Could I possibly find myself at lunch with him—nibbling at a piece of avocado toast, trying to look him in the eyes past his aviator glasses? Always, he dressed so primly, as if he were cut from the pages of GQ, perpetually ready for the next spontaneous shoot. This had irritated me often. I’d wanted the spontaneity of Wesley. I’d yearned for the madness of blasting down the road, our arms wide to the excitement of living life, rather than photographing it.
I stood up and wandered out to the balcony to watch as the sun eased its first light across the waves. Venice Beach Boulevard darted just beneath my window, where a selection of performers, street vendors, and con artists had already begun to join together, analyzing how they could make their funds for the day. They’d rob, thieve from tourists. They’d hunt them. They eyed me from below, one of their potential victims. Wanting to appear brave, I gave them a small wave.
Tyler sent me another text while I was in the shower, arranging for our lunch in Santa Monica, around one. Again, his message stated how excited he was to “get back on track,” and to see what kind of movie I’d made. “I always knew you were so talented, and that maybe you just needed to get out of the city to get past whatever was blocking you here. Now, you’ve done it. And I’ll help you get it out to the masses. We’ll do it together.”
The walk from Venice Beach to Santa Monica was several miles, but it was doable. I strode down the beach, gazing out at the waves and counting the minutes till this lunch. It felt very much like walking the plank, finding myself with nowhere else to turn except the frothing waves below. I remembered, with a pang in my stomach, the strange, sour taste in my mouth that remained after my and Tyler’s first kiss. “Well, he’s not Wesley. But he’ll have to do,” had been the strange, otherworldly message in my brain.
When Wesley and I were eighteen years old, we ran away for a few days—skipping school, avoiding our families, choosing to be with one another, wholly, even when faced with high school graduation and all that came with it just six weeks later. We tore down the highway, toward Los Angeles, and made love against the sand on a beach towel immediately upon arriving. Our skin had tasted like salt, like waves, like freedom. I bit into his neck and loved the way he’d moaned against me. “You’re a force,” he whispered. “You’re so fucking strong, Remy. You’re different than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“Then don’t leave me,” I’d whispered into his ear, all the while knowing that was impossible. He had to go. And we had to part, to see what we could become, alone.
Eventually, one of our ragged fights had sputtered out between us, over a beach picnic. I lit into him, telling him that he wasn’t up for the kind of life I craved. And he admitted that he wanted to be a “lone wolf” for the rest of his life. That it was the kind of poetic existence he’d always seen for himself.
At first, he’d jumped onto his bike alone, tearing away from Santa Monica. I fallen back on the sand, sobbing and screaming out at the waves. But a half hour later he’d returned, helping me onto the back of the bike. We rode back to San Francisco that afternoon, crumpling into our homes separately and not answering our fathers about what we’d been up to. “I’m about to leave anyway,” I told my dad. “It’s not like it matters.” And, surprisingly, there’d been very little retribution from school. They’d let us walk on graduation day, in our swishing green robes. We’d taken a typical photograph together, neither of us smiling.
* * *
I remembered it so simply, so purely. And now, as I neared Santa Monica beach, where it had all happened, I felt my limbs turning into jelly. I’d avoided Santa Monica often, throughout my many years of living in Los Angeles, if only because it brought back anxious and burn
ing thoughts of Wesley. Of what we could have done together, had we not decided to separate.
But now that Wesley had made up his mind to be with Connie and with Maria—taking the kind of life I so craved with him—it was like it was over. I could look at the beaches of Santa Monica, gleaming beneath the late morning sun, with a kind of distance. I was a thirty-year-old almost-mother, a baby growing beneath my dress. Someday soon, his needs would outweigh my own in nearly every capacity. My memories would have to take the wayside.
I collapsed near the pier and sat for a long moment, gazing out. Minutes ticked forward, inching toward one in the afternoon. Tyler sent a text asking why he hadn’t heard from me, saying he was on his way. I left it read but unanswered. Being so close to a potential life with him made images of our first life together flash across my brain. Him telling me that I would never be a screenwriter. That I didn’t have the snuff for it. That even my typing wasn’t fast enough. Any insult he could throw at me, he did. And he belittled me, until I was scraping at the bottom and eager to return to San Francisco. To regroup.
“You can come here,” Quintin had said over the phone. “You can work the bar and write the rest of your screenplay. You can breathe, for once. Ever since I can remember, you’ve been running yourself ragged, trying to be with Wesley. Trying to be an actress. Trying to make Los Angeles work. And now, trying to please this asshole, Tyler. Jesus, Rem. Just pull up a stool and sit a while.”
* * *
But it hadn't quite worked out. Life had continued on, tearing into me. I’d fallen into pregnancy, into love with Wes. And now, I was at the end of my rope, preparing for a baby I would never be fully ready for.
One in the afternoon came and went, leaving me stretched out across the sand, my feet digging deeper into it. Tyler’s messages grew angry, filled with vitriol. “I should have fucking known you wouldn’t come. I should have fucking known that you would yank me around like this. Well, you know what, Remy? Fuck you. You coming back would have been the biggest mistake of my life. Thank you for doing me a favor. And you know what? I bet your movie sucks. I bet it’s the biggest waste of film and time and acting in the world.”
