Bad People (24 page)

He rolled past the theater, and suddenly slammed his breaks. He heard the screech of other breaks behind him and then a loud, remonstrative horn blast. He glanced in the mirror but otherwise ignored the sedan and its driver behind him. He put his car in park and got out, leaving the door open. The sedan driver blew her angry horn again, and at the same time pulled out of the lane, flooring it to get around Barry’s car. Barry walked around the front of his car, and back to the sidewalk, where his abandoned underwear, shirt, and cummerbund still lay, undisturbed in the quiet night. He gathered them up, went back to the car, threw it all onto the passenger side floor, got back in and closed the door. He shoved the car in gear and drove home.

Chapter 26: S/D, Kim

Afterward was awkward. S/D felt like he should talk, or that Kim Abbot should, but they didn’t. They left the dark little guest bedroom and sat in the well-lit living room like before. Not too long after, Morse and Jane joined them. After that the other couple returned, holding hands. Other than that it was as if nothing had happened in the interim, in the dark, at all.

Especially Kim Abbot’s weird
your father was murdered
jag.

What was that about, huh?

This was not S/D’s first time doing something sexual, nor his second. His third. The other times hadn’t been much different. The first had been closest to what he’d imagined it would be: a night someone who was almost his girlfriend, at least up until that point.

And there might have been something afterwards, but she heard a noise, from deeper in the trees, they got dressed and ran from the park. For some reason things were never the same between him and this girl ever again.

The second time was with someone else, just at a party like this. And just like this there was no feeling of connection afterwards.

One more year of high school and he could get away. To college, and be around adults and have his own space of sorts. It wouldn’t always be like this. It wouldn’t always be teenagers.

He desperately wanted to meet someone his own age, but the age he
felt
—not his real age. He never felt his age. He had always felt like a full adult, a grown man of twenty-one or two. And the closer he got to it, the harder day-to-day living seemed. The Mountain Goats had a song about that, with a line about making it through the last year of high school if it kills him.

But the songwriter, John Darnielle, had real things to sing about: a cruel stepfather, and a real life growing up in California, and a girlfriend, an ally in his world. No song ever got S/D’s banal situation quite right, nor any book. The creations of others only imperfectly mirrored his imperfect own life.

S/D thought he should be speaking to Kim Abbot now, not just floating in his own head. But he wanted to be in his head, since he had to be somewhere.

That was it, he realized. That was the problem with any kind of sex, the necessity to be anywhere right after it.

He thought about leaving, but he would have to ask Kim Abbot if she wanted to go to…or did he? What was the expectation?

The other boys, Morse and the other one, looked content enough, and the girls too. Why was it only himself who never knew how to behave or what to do next in life, like he had missed orientation or something? That was the essence of his emotional life; the feeling that he had come to it late, blundered onto an advanced level having the practice game where everyone learned the rules and how to move their characters.

He turned to Kim Abbot and was speaking, on impulse, before he even knew it. “Do you want to get out of here?” he said.

Her eyes widened, as if she were surprised he was even speaking to her at all. She reddened and nodded. He became angry with himself. She wanted nothing from him; her response indicated that certainly. He could have left alone; that was what he really wanted to do. Thinking this just made him feel worse about the way he was treating Kim Abbot.

Sometimes he couldn’t stand himself.

The exchange had caught Morse’s attention: he raised his eyebrow to show bemusement. S/D tried to have no reaction, to appear to not notice Morse’s noticing, or the others—Jane turned her face away in displeasure—at all. He would have rather had it that way—to not really care about their not-so-subtle peer pressure, but he couldn’t, so he faked it.

Surprisingly, faking it worked, as neither Morse nor Jane made an overt challenge to he and Kim leaving. He would have to learn to fake more, though ironically he was only faking an indifference that he deep down really wanted to have. He was faking being his true self.

He took Kim Abbot by the wrist. She grabbed her phone and other things, which were on the floor in front of the couch, and let herself be dragged out. They went outside, and in the dark switched out of wrist-holding into hand-holding. Then he thought of something: she probably had a car, which meant he might have to bring her back here after going wherever…well, where were they going. He had only focused on getting away from there, but he wasn’t away, he was still here. No real way to get away really existed, because he was always with himself. That was the curse.

“Do you ever feel…?” He started to ask Kim Abbot in the driveway.

When it became evident to her that he wasn’t going to complete the question, she asked him to. “Ever feel what?”

Do you ever feel sick of yourself?
he had been about to ask. But a question like that had no point. Even if she answered yes, what did that help? Self-sickness had no solution.

She persisted. “Do I ever feel what?”

As they walked toward his car, the discussion of her car or not, still not coming up, he failed to find an acceptable substitute question. Why not ask the real question then?

“What do you do when you get sick of yourself?”

“Me?” He voice was suddenly weak. She faltered in her steps and she touched her collarbone with hesitation. “Are you sick of me?”

“No,” he said. Frustrated, he wondered what pile of doo he had stepped into. “No. When
you
—when
anybody
—gets sick of
themselves
what do they do. What do you think they do?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Just like that.

He unlocked his car, as they neared it. “You don’t know,” he said. “I guess it never happens to you then.” That’s great.

They got in. Before Kim Abbot got her door all the way shut, he started the engine and pull out into the dark streets.

“Where are we going,” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. It came out harsh. He had meant it to, but he didn’t like himself for doing it.

He drove.

After a minute or two the silence must have gotten to her (he himself didn’t care anymore) so she spoke. “Is this a hybrid?” she asked.

He nodded.

“It’s quiet,” she said.

He found himself taking particular turns, absently. He soon found himself driving down his old block, then stopping and idling. The street was pretty dead. His old house was dark of course, then he realized several houses on the block were dark and vacant. He remembered his mom saying something about how the housing crisis had hit hard up there, in the new construction neighborhood..

“Where are we?” she asked.

“I heard there were a lot of foreclosures up in here…” he said.

“There’s even bobcats living in them.”

“Bobcats?” They roamed the hills above, he knew. It made sense that they moved down, now that the formerly rich had moved out.

“This close to the tree line. Yep. And homeless people,” said Kim.

The last street before the developed world bled off into the wild. He’d seen raccoons, families of them before, moving through his own backyard once or twice a year. But if there were raccoons would there be bobcats? Then again, maybe the bobcats came for the raccoons.

“Bobcats and homeless people…” S/D repeated.

“I didn’t mean it like that—” she said quickly. “Not that they are the same. I’m not Republican or anything.”

He shook his head. He just wanted to indicate he did want to think about what she was trying to explain, whatever it was, but she likely mistook the gesture for disapproval, so she kept stammering something, until he added, as kindly as he could make it sound, “No, I know what you mean.”

She sighed, and they went back to staring at the house.

“That’s were it happened, isn’t it? That’s where you used to live.”

That’s where
it
happened
, he repeated in his mind.
It
. As if the happening of
it
erased every other thing that had happened in the house, which meant, in effect,
it
erased every other thing is his life.

He felt her hand fall upon his. “Do you want to go in?”

“I think so,” he said. He should go in.

She slid her hand onto his thigh. “You should,” she said. “I’ll go with you.”

He broke his gaze away from the house and looked at her hand, and then at her. “No.”

“Or you can go alone, and I’ll wait for you. Whatever you want to do. Whatever you want.”

“No one has every said anything like that to me before.” And it had the overwhelming effect of making him want nothing.

“I get it. I’m dark too,” she said, squeezing.

To do nothing at all. He put the car in gear.

“I’ll take you home,” he said.

Chapter 27: Connie, Luke

In the morning they still had the problem of the cat. Actually maybe the cat was
preventing
problems. It gave them something to focus on rather than the obnoxiousness of two near-strangers, one much older than the other, waking into sunlight in a hotel room. Hotel rooms, even upscale ones like this, in supposedly stylish locals, were hideous the morning after, she discovered. This, she realized, was the first time she’d had something that qualified as a one-night stand. There were hook-ups when she was on the streets as a kid—hook-ups and worse.

A time existed (she was sure it had) when she’d assumed she and Robb would be together forever. Him a decade older than her, maybe she had thought she might be widowed early, but never this early. Now she realized that that fantasy had
always been
a fantasy.

It was never going to be Robb and her forever. Never going to be her and
anyone
forever. It didn’t work that way. Not for her.

She’d merely traveled a rather long way with one partner for the past two decades. They had a son, but in one year he would be off to school and his own path would diverge more quickly and more decisively than it already had. So what did it matter how this morning looks, or if the night had rubbed away the make-up hiding her crow’s feet. This morning, just another day; Luke just another person. During her marriage she had come to think of her bad adolescence as another life. That wasn’t so. This was her life now. That marriage that intervened for a span? That was the other life, the lost one. She was the same thing as before: Connie Wexler. What she’d always been.

Still there was the cat. She couldn’t take it home, because of Stephen-David’s allergies. She could leave it with the hotel staff, but who knows what would happen then. They could call the city or something and what would happen then? Did people go to the city for their kittens? Or would the city put her to sleep?

Luke was showering. She was grateful he didn’t ask her to share the shower, and she wanted her own familiar shower and bathroom now anyway, so she had skipped. He was taking a long time, indulging himself, and even the luggage and closet alcove outside the bathroom was getting misty with steam. The kitten was dozing on a pillow, without a care in the world. That was what it was to be an animal: naked, possessionless, without the slightest hint of concern where her next meal would come from, and still at peace with the world in that sleep. Had she ever slept like that? Ever once in her four decades?

Luke’s shower stopped. Technically this wasn’t a one-night stand she reminded herself; they had had a date before. But it would end now; she had already determined as much. She stood, fully dressed, waiting for him to come out. If it
had
been a one-night stand she could reasonably have bolted while he was still in the bathroom; it would have been rude, but even he would have found it easier. Instead they already had a bit of history together, so she couldn’t. Besides, he had her phone number.

The bathroom door opened, releasing a greater steam cloud.

“Luke stepped from the mist, skin raw after the torture he had given it under that long hot shower. His towel was open in the front, he was wrapping it around himself. The hotel room blinds were open (Connie had been trying to bake away her morning haze) and he looked gorgeous in the sunlight. Chiseled. The vein pulsing past his hipbone down the length of his groin was sublime. He was like a living David: albeit one that’s creator had gifted more generously.