Lot Six

by David Adjmi

  But now I was thinking about it, and my thoughts left me with a queasy feeling. And there, in the quad, under the Tommy Trojan statue, in the shadow of his unsheathed sword, in a sudden flash of banal clarity, I could see the truth: I was not expiated. I was not a refined or moral human being. One couldn’t simply make a series of moral compromises, as I’d done, and then be clean again—I’d signed a devil’s contract with my father; I’d fused my helplessness and his need for control into a single indissoluble molecule, and now I was more bound to him than ever. He owned me: my car and school and luxury apartment: those were his ghosts, they carried his presence. Not only did I not escape him, he was everywhere now, like a pair of traveling eyes. I wasn’t morally superior to my brother: I was more my father’s son than he would ever be. I was built for scamming and conning—I was moral slime!

  My thoughts pinballed from one grim association to the next for what seemed like hours, until I ended up in a parking lot staring at a bunch of SUVs. I was exhausted. My calves ached. Richie was standing alongside me, hand cocked on his hip. “I’m starvin’ like Marvin,” he said. His mouth was curled into the tiniest of smiles, but he seemed slightly dazed or dehydrated, like he’d been wandering around in a desert. “Wanna eat something, brother Dave?”

  I took him to Senor Sushi, a Mexican Japanese fusion restaurant in University Village. I felt my thoughts spilling compulsively over lunch and I couldn’t seem to collect them, like I was stanching a dam with my fingers and toes. When we were finished, I paid the bill with my credit card, the one my father gave me, but the credit card felt dirty. I felt dirty driving back home in my shiny new Honda. I felt assaulted by its gray metallic nothingness. Everything I said and did felt like spitting in the face of my brother. All that night I was drowning in guilt and self-loathing, but at the same time I could feel myself psychically clutching onto whatever possessions and entitlements I had. I wouldn’t let go of my ill-gained possessions, not for something so abstract as a moral principle. Not once did it occur to me to ask my father to stop paying my bills. I needed that money; I wasn’t strong enough to build a life without it. I’d always despised Dad for being a salesman, I thought he was vulgar. But I had to sell myself too, just like he did—just like everyone. It was how you survived.

  On his last night, Leslie and Mike had to attend Mike’s parents’ anniversary in Camarillo, so it was just the two of us. I took Richie to El Coyote in West Hollywood. We had dinner outside on the patio overlooking Beverly Boulevard. The sun was going down. My brother’s eyes were drenched with sunlight. His face was pink and shiny. His skin had an almost floral delicacy. “I don’t want to go back,” Richie said, smiling that same goofy smile he had scrawled across his face all week. “I want to stay here forever.”

  I took a sip of my Jarritos and grabbed a handful of chips. “You should stay a little longer.”

  “Nah, I gotta get back to work.”

  “How’s work going?” I asked, thinking I was making bland conversation—but apparently I’d come across an unexploded land mine. The instant I uttered the question his eyes became glassy and distant. The warmth of his smile mineralized into stone.

  “How’s work?” he said, echoing my question with a cold shred of a laugh. “Work sucks. That’s how work is.”

  I could sense it was a mistake to keep probing, but it felt impolite to simply drop the subject altogether. “Well . . . what’s the matter?” I said. “Is the store losing money?”

  “What store? We shut it down.”

  “You did?”

  “David, what planet are you on?”

  “No one said anything to me!”

  “We shouldn’t have to chase after you,” he said. He downed the rest of his margarita and set the empty glass on the table, the salt rim eerily intact like some kind of deathly exoskeleton. He then launched into a lurid story about my family: about how Stevie had ruined everything—how in the beginning it was alright and they were getting along, but he increasingly felt that Stevie (who hadn’t invested a cent in the business, Richie made him a partner to be brotherly and bury the hatchet between them) wasn’t pulling his weight. The store was hemorrhaging money, and Richie was forced to shut down. He was flat broke, having invested his entire life savings, so he went to my father (who, for reasons that remained unclear to me, owed Richie tens of thousands of dollars) and asked if Dad could pay some of that money back. Dad claimed he was broke—but then turned around and gave Stevie thirty thousand dollars to start some new business—only Stevie never ended up opening his store, and Richie was forced to get a new horrible job in Jersey, and now everyone was screwed over and fucked up and broke and miserable!

  When the food came, Richie ate quietly, taking giant mouthfuls—as if eating would force out the bitterness he felt toward Stevie and my father. It was dark outside now, and the waiters brought out little candles. Outside in the air, my fears began to condense. As I sipped my Jarritos and picked at my guacamole, I began to feel sick with worry for Richie. He told me how shitty his apartment was, and how all his appliances were breaking. He told me about his horrible job, and how the commute was awful, and he was working for some SY everyone hated who docked him for snow days, and forced him to work weekends and holidays, and he was in total hell, but no one gave a shit, because life sucks and then you die!

  As Richie went on about his life and how rotten it all was, his face grew more pinched and angry, his misery more reverberant, his stories increasingly bleak until I was six years old again, lying in bed and drained by those same invisible psychic transfusions. But now his misery fanned my compulsion to save him. Maybe I could pull out the sick ideas implanted in him by my father and replace them with new healthy ones. Something loosened in him over the past week—we’d become close—maybe he’d be susceptible to my influence! I started making suggestions: what if he moved to the West Coast and started over? Maybe he could go back to school for music. He still had his equipment from the Musique Magnifique days—maybe he could be an engineer or a producer!

  He rolled his eyes. “You know how hard it is to get that kinda job?”

  “It doesn’t have to be music,” I said, maintaining my cheery tone, “You could go to Kingsborough. You could get your degree.”

  He scraped a lone fingernail against the edge of the table. “Daddy wants to start a new business,” he said. “He wants to make me a partner.”

  “You think that’s a good idea?”

  “It’s better than the shit job I got now.”

  “What if you went back to school?”

  “I’m not going back to school.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not realistic. That’s why.” He dipped a bunch of tortilla chips in a grayish-green paste.

  “You could take night classes.”

  “David,” he said, “I’m thirty years old.”

  “Lots of people change careers.”

  “What am I gonna do, study for tests when I’m fuckin thirty-five?”

  “Thirty is not old.”

  “And how am I supposed to support myself?”

  “You can go part-time!”

  “You think my shit boss is gonna let me work part-time?”

  We went on like this, with me lobbing idea after idea, and him swatting off each one like it was some nettlesome insect, but I felt a sense of mission. I wasn’t going to let him leave the restaurant until my brother saw what I did: that he could be free, that his life could be good. The more I suggested options, though, the more frustrated and clipped and turgid Richie got, as if my relentless optimism was a kind of violence, as if by chipping away at his ideas about life I was smashing him to pieces. He attacked me with one battering assertion after another until I couldn’t stand it: “Richie,” I cried. “You don’t have to be so goddamn miserable!” I was so loud, people at adjacent tables turned their heads.

  My brother glared coldly at me. “You have no right to talk to me this way,” he said. “You have someone paying your bil
ls. I don’t have that.”

  “But you don’t have to do a job you hate.”

  “Oh really? You think you know about how life works?”

  “Yes,” I said, now feeling cornered into giving reductive answers.

  “So how does it work? You tell me, big shot!” My brother’s face was aimed at me like a bullet. “You think you’re a big shot now? With your car and your fancy college and your freakin condo? So then tell me! What am I supposed to do?!”

  “Leave that shitty job! You can get something better!”

  “That’s not reality. It’s not so easy like you think.”

  “I know it’s not easy but—”

  “No, you don’t know shit! You don’t know shit!” He gnashed his teeth at me like a small frightened dog, a small wounded thing whose every encounter was nerve-fraying and paralyzing. He couldn’t try a new thing: a new thing was a bad thing. The present was intolerable but any movement would only make it worse.

  Richie left for New York the next day and I was pulled into that awful black hole of childhood. I slept a lot. I barely left the apartment. His repeated insistence that certain things were not “realistic”—a refrain heard frequently all through my childhood—wedged itself inside my head like some infernal piece of music, and I couldn’t get it out. I used to dismiss him as provincial and limited, but maybe Richie was right: maybe I didn’t know shit. Maybe I didn’t understand reality. He had actual experience of life; he didn’t have someone paying his bills. I’d been holding on to the idea that if I worked hard in time my molecules would be replaced and I could be completely new—but what if this belief was delusional? What if Leslie was wrong, and I couldn’t learn from my failures and just move on? What if with all my running from the past I was like one of those protagonists from a Greek tragedy—like Oedipus, whose fate was unavoidable, who only got more trapped the more he tried to wrest himself from it? What if, like these tragic figures from literature, and like Richie, I too was programmed to self-destruct?

  Mike dragged me to Gorky’s late one night in an attempt to pull me out of my slump. I got a bowl of kasha and mushroom barley soup—it was the kind of food Howie’s mother used to cook for us on Friday nights. The kasha had a ferrous taste I liked. “You know what I think, Dread?” said Mike. “I think you miss your brother.” I nodded, but felt a strange feeling in my throat, like I might break out crying. I stayed quiet for much of the meal. That night I went to sleep and had a dream Richie was hanging from a cliff; when I reached out to save him, he refused to take my hand and plunged to his death.

  I knew I had to cut myself off from my brother. I needed to cut the love I felt for him out of me, because it was hurting me. I couldn’t force him to save himself. He didn’t want to be saved, and that was his choice—and I believed then that you could choose to be saved. You could choose to be successful and happy, you could choose the kind of life you wanted. I knew I needed to exert my will and every last ounce of strength to forge my own success, but it could happen—it was already happening. I was building a stable and healthy foundation for my life with Mike and Leslie. I was creating the basis for some future happiness my family could never give me.

  Santa Monica College was awash in anodyne pastels, pinks and seafoams—strangely out of joint with the rest of California, which had moved on from pastel. The warmth felt slightly creepy to me, though. The school reminded me of images of state fairs from the encyclopedia, places whose surface warmth belied their essential municipal coldness. Since our summer class schedules were compatible, Leslie and I would carpool from downtown. The car rides made the tedium of gridlock bearable. We’d have long, involved conversations in which we plumbed unsoundable depths—deep, important subjects to twenty-year-olds. Leslie would unwind in expansive leisure around me. The ashtray in her Volvo brimmed with cigarette butts glossed with red lipstick. I was driving on a freeway to Santa Monica with a chain-smoker; it felt desultory and glamorous.

  A few weeks into the summer semester, Leslie confessed that she and Mike were having problems. Mike was jealous of me, she said. He worried Leslie and I were having some kind of affair—why else would we be spending so much time together? How else could he account for our easy banter, our volubility, the deep conversations of which she’d apprised him?

  I was secretly thrilled that Mike could suspect me capable of sex with Leslie but put on a good act of dismay and regret. “How could he accuse us of that?” I said. “It’s crazy.”

  “Dread,” she replied, “I love Mike, but sometimes he can be impossible.”

  Days later, Leslie conceded to Mike’s demand, which was that we each take separate cars to school—which was absurd, as we had practically identical schedules and left and arrived home at exactly the same times. I reluctantly agreed to his condition but never actually spoke about it with him, and when we were in the apartment watching television or cooking dinner Mike would act like everything was fine. But there was an undercurrent of tension. Casual conversation felt forced and inelegant. Leslie and Mike started to make displays of their cuddling in public areas in the apartment. The cuddling in itself was not offensive to me, it was more the inveteracy and frequency of it. No one cuddled that much. They were always in a pietà: on the sofa, the floor. When she chopped lettuce he massaged her shoulders. When she folded clothes he hugged her.

  I felt less and less flattered by Mike’s imagined rivalry. To forestall more awkward moments and give them space for cynosural cuddling, I would retreat to my room and study my astronomy and anthropology. It was awkward, but Leslie wanted to save her relationship. I could understand that. Then, just prior to the beginning of the fall semester, Leslie sat me down. Again, she’d been delegated to administer bad news: a one-bedroom was going to become available in the complex and she and Mike wanted to take it. This wouldn’t be for months, she hastened to add, there was still time, but she wanted me to know. I made a visible pretense of being upset but I was relieved. Things had gotten too weird living with them, and I wanted to preserve our friendship.

  I’d never rented an apartment on my own, so the following morning I called a bunch of real estate agents to get started and learn the ropes. That night, I found a bunch of moving boxes littering the living room. “So, Dread,” said Leslie, her lisp edged with bitterness, “since you’ve decided to start looking for apartments right away, we’ve decided to move tonight.” One of the agents, it seemed, left a voice mail on our answering machine and Mike and Leslie upon hearing it assumed that I’d planned to bail on them. She talked to the landlord, signed a new contract, and now we all had to be out by midnight—including me. I wanted to explain that I was merely learning about renting an apartment, that I’d never rented one on my own and didn’t know how to do it, but it was too late. Mike was packing avidly. He and Leslie were now mutually fortified by a new and enhanced dyadic closeness—a closeness obtained in large part by excluding me and making me the enemy. They had that certainty and unflappable energy in their box-packing couples get when they feel reciprocally galvanized in an assumption: I was a threat to their survival, I would sunder their relationship. I would threaten their shelter, their most primal needs.

  I had no idea where I was going to go—or even sleep for the night. Mike was still mired in his preemptive, useless jealousy, but Leslie was capable of reason. I thought I might try to speak to her. I went to their bedroom, knocked lightly on the open door, and, when no one answered, peeked in. The room had been completely emptied out. The bed was gone, the cherrywood dresser. It was just carpet and louvered metal vents. The breeze from the ceiling fan made the vertical blinds clatter against the window. I saw Leslie inside the bathroom packing up toiletries and I knocked on the open door. “Hi,” I said. “I just wanted to have a chance to explain things.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “Leslie,” I entreated gently, “this is so last-minute, and I don’t have anywhere to go.”

  “Well,” she said, zippering Neutrogena products into a tiny vi
nyl case, “if you need a place to stay, you can sleep on the floor of our new apartment.” Leslie’s tiny armored smile horrified me, the frigid chill of her indifference. I knew instantly there was nothing to be done, that whatever bond we had was permanently severed.

  I nearly broke out sobbing, right there, right in front of Leslie and all her toiletries, but I restrained myself. I left the room, packed my books and clothes as quickly as I could and shoved everything into the trunk of my Honda.

  Leslie and Mike made a makeshift bed for me in their hall closet from a sheet and sack-like pillow. The new prefab apartment bore a superficial, eerie resemblance to the apartment we’d just left. It was like a wormhole in the universe, an upside-down mirror existence. Leslie blow-dried her hair. She and Mike laughed and canoodled, now with unforced enjoyment of each other—not a spectacle to ward me off; it was for themselves. They stayed up late talking and hugging as I lay on the floor, my head in the closet, fetal and unwanted. The carpet brushed against my cheek, its artificial poly fibers tickling my nostrils.

  I thought families could be easily re-created, that I could pick the people I wanted in my life just as I picked my outfits for the day, and bonds would automatically form. I thought I was building a foundation for my life, but the foundation was quicksand. My heart was broken. I’d never experienced a breakup before, but I imagined it felt a little like this.

  When Barbara Stanwyck’s heart breaks in The Lady Eve, she experiences it as a death. Henry Fonda finds out she’s a grifter and breaks off their relationship. She’s never made herself vulnerable to another person, she’s never exposed herself to love, and the rejection obliterates her.* She rushes to her cabin and falls apart completely. Sturges’s camera holds on Stanwyck’s sobbing over an agonizingly slow fade. The next time we see her, the cruise ship is about to dock; the warm flow of tears has congealed into a stiff wounded fury. Jean is wearing a funeral veil. She’s been destroyed and killed, but has no time for grief. Stanwyck is reviving her noir persona here: she’s a black-veiled statue of icy ressentiment. She’s back at her father’s side, back to hating humanity. “When I think we let that sucker off scot-free,” she says, scowling, “it makes my blood boil.” If she’s been a victim, now she will become a predator.