A Stranger Like You (18 page)

Two weeks before the end of his tour he got shot. They tell you it’s going to hurt, but this was medieval pain, this was the pain of the rack, stretching your flesh into something else. It was like nothing he’d ever experienced. You couldn’t compare it to anything. Maybe like a train running into you. Something to that effect. And he could remember lying there thinking, please God, just take me. Take me out. He was in a hospital for a while, and then they sent him home, an honorable discharge, but he couldn’t get his mind around the honorable part. That was almost a year ago, and now all he had to do was wait for his benefits to come through. He just had to put it all behind him. He had to move on. He had to.

That same Thursday night, after his shift, he met up with Javier and his girlfriend at a bar in Hollywood, a pool hall. It was the night that changed his life. There was this girl there, Daisy. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, she even looked like a Daisy with her slender white petals. Denny didn’t know how to talk to girls. For most of the night he just watched her floating around the room. She kept going outside with different people. He could see her standing on the curb, smoking, watching the cars. When she came back in, Javier made him go up and talk to her. She shook her blond hair off her shoulder and asked him about his limp and he told her he’d just come home. “What was it like over there?” she asked, and he used his stock answer, “Hot.”

“You’re a hero, I guess.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, you deserve a medal.” She smiled.

“I don’t know. I don’t think I deserve anything.”

“I can tell just by looking at you.”

“Tell what?”

But the music came on too loud to hear her answer. She led him onto the dance floor and they danced—basically
she
danced and he sort of stood there trying to move a little bit. She didn’t care. She took his hand and moved it back and forth and he watched her hips, her little badminton tits going back and forth inside her shirt.

They shot a rack together and she wasn’t any good at pool. She let him buy her a drink. The four of them took Javier’s car and drove to Venice and walked along the beach. They went into a bar and he took her hand under the table and held it tight. The girl asked him about Iraq and he made himself sound like a hero. She put her hand on his arm, and then he took her hand and held it under the table. It was sweaty, they were both nervous. Later they walked on the beach, putting their feet in the water, and he tried to kiss her. “Where’d you come from?” he asked her.

“You dreamed me up.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. It scared the shit out of him. They made out on the beach and her mouth tasted like cherry cough syrup. Her breasts were small and pointy. She told him she was sixteen. He was twenty-one, not much older, but still, he could get in trouble. “You look older.”

“I know. People tell me that all the time.”

“Can I see you again?”

She took his hand and wrote her cell phone number on it and gave him a big, juicy smile. “Bye, bye, sailor boy.”

If you kill for Allah you get virgins in the afterlife—it’s a big selling point to a common Islamist terrorist. They make it sound so great. He found himself thinking about it that night on the bus, wondering if the girl, Daisy, was a virgin. Maybe she was, he thought. His first girlfriend had been a virgin, but he didn’t remember anything all that great about it. Her name had been Christina, a red-haired girl from his high school who smoked menthol cigarettes and had pimples—he’d had acne too. Even though he’d practiced, the condom was tricky to put on and it broke, finally. The girl had been upset and called him a pathetic excuse for a man. Now that he thought about it, screwing a virgin was overrated. If he had his pick, he’d rather have someone experienced in the afterlife. Somebody really hot like a porn star who knew what she was doing. Come to think of it, he’d never really had anyone who was great in bed. No, he decided, when it came to sex he’d only had amateurs. Well, that was all right; he wasn’t complaining. He took whatever he could get.

When he finally got back to his aunt and uncle’s house, he took off his clothes and got into the shower. It was still like a gift to stand, unhurried, in the shower. He realized he was crying. It was maybe two a.m. and he felt scared. The windows were black, he pulled the shades. Anyone could be watching the house, he thought. Wrapped in his towel, he stood in the hall for a minute, listening, but the only thing he heard was his uncle snoring. It was an endearing sound, and again his eyes welled with fresh tears. Before the war, he had taken all that shit for granted. Not now. Now he cried over stuff like that, because he realized how much it mattered to him. They had always fought, him and his uncle, and his uncle was always right. For a long time, Denny couldn’t get his shit together. He didn’t know; he felt bad about everything. He had just wanted them to be proud of him, to do something that made them feel like raising somebody else’s kid had been worth it.

In his room, he sat on the edge of the bed, shaking. He felt the presence of someone there, a spirit. Maybe it was his mother. He could still remember his aunt leading him down the hospital corridor on the day he’d said good-bye to her for the last time. How she’d held him and apologized for being so sick. For leaving him behind.

It came to him now that he’d never forgiven her.

He had not been born destined for nice things. Everything was secondhand, even his girlfriends. It wasn’t his looks, because he
had
looks, he was good-looking—his mother had been white—his father, Marie’s brother, had looked just like his aunt, strong Mexican faces, dark eyes. He had those eyes too, and feathery lashes that made all the girls jealous, but he had his mother’s fine skin, her good teeth and wide lips. But not everybody could put up with his jumpy manner, Attention Deficit poster boy—he’d spent a lot of time watching recess from the classroom windows, which was pretty stupid when you thought about it, just about the last thing he’d needed. So yeah, now he was bitter. Maybe that’s why he’d enlisted in the first place: to get the fuck out. He wanted to make use of himself. He wanted to prove that he could be something.

He went to sleep and in his dream the girl was there, the one. She came this close to his face. She was about to bite him when he woke up.

He cried and hated himself some more. What kind of fucking faggot cries like this? They had been right; he was a fucking pussy.

Next morning, his day off, he slept in. Somewhere around noon he woke up to the sound of the doorbell. Nobody ever rang the doorbell in their neighborhood. Weddings and funerals, maybe, but not regular social calls. He glanced out the window and saw a police cruiser. The house smelled of coffee and his aunt’s tamales. He could hear her heels clacking on the tiles as she walked to the door. This was it, he realized, they were here for him.

Denny shuffled into his clothes, old tennis sneakers, a jacket, and was out the back door. He was a skilled athlete—a magnificent warrior—and the stretched-out yards behind the neighboring houses became the broken hovels of Baghdad—in his head, through his eyes, he was
right there
—the sounds and smells, the vivid white light. His heart was beating in his chest and he felt light, agile, as he slalomed through swing sets and fallen bicycles, the holy Jesus statues, climbed the chain-link fence, hit the pavement and kept running.

There were the usuals at the bus shelter. They looked at him sideways, turned away. Maybe on account of the sweat; he wiped his brow. The bus pulled up and he got on, dropped his money in, took a seat in the back. He had a
don’t fuck with me
look on his face. At any second, he might take the whole bus out. That’s what he would do if anyone messed with him. The bus went along, stopping every couple of blocks to pick people up. He got off at the airport and walked up to the lot. It was almost three. Luckily, Javier wasn’t working yet, only May Lee and he avoided her, and two other people he hadn’t met, but knew by sight. The sky turned pearly, the clouds pushing down. Maybe it would rain. The lot was pretty full. The car was still there. It was waiting for him. He got into it like it was his and started it up. The engine responded with a lusty roar and he shifted, hit the gas. He wound around toward the exit and stopped at the gate furthest from his. The girl took his ticket; she didn’t recognize him. “Fourteen dollars.”

He paid her and smiled and she raised the gate and he drove through it.

It was a swell car. He thought he could smell roses. He hadn’t bothered to check the registration or to look in the trunk. There was something inside of it, he thought, rolling around. Later, he would check. Now he had two things on his mind. Buying a gun and finding Daisy.

On Saturday morning Hugh woke in the motel room. The sounds of the boulevard filled his room, somebody whistling, a woman’s shrill laughter, the beeping of a horn, a siren, a crying baby. It began to rain. Hugh sat there for a few minutes with his hands pressed together in his lap as if in prayer. Suddenly, the whole sky was full of rain. He sat there watching it.

He had made his peace with himself about the incident with Hedda Chase. It was over and done with and out of his hands.

On the whole, it was a confusing time for him. On the one hand, he wanted to leave his wife. On the other, he was afraid to cut the ties to his old life. He called himself a writer, but what did he have to show for it? Here he was in this stinking motel room. He’d gotten this far, he realized, he could not go home now. Empowered, he called his wife’s cell phone. When she finally picked up, he could hear a lawn mower in the background. “They’re mowing their lawn again,” she explained. The neighbors were neurotic about their grass—there wasn’t a single dandelion on it. As much as Hugh complained and made fun of them, Marion seemed to admire them. “I’m making a garden for us,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m outside. I’m making a garden. We’re going to have beautiful tomatoes this summer.”

He could tell she was back on her antidepressants. “Marion,” he said. “I’m not coming home.”

“What? The mower—I can’t hear you, Hughie.
What?”

He shouted into the phone. “I’m not coming home.”

“What? I can’t—
what did you say?”

He hung up. What was the point? He sat there for a moment. He opened his briefcase and riffled through his papers and pulled out a copy of his screenplay,
The Adjuster.
He thought it might be salvageable in some way. Perhaps if he just told his own story. Perhaps if he simply told the truth. Would people be interested in a story about a man like him—misplaced—working in the wrong job, married to the wrong woman, living in the wrong house? Everything wrong. Once you bought into that life, how did you escape it? Of course you could not. You were stuck. Vulnerable to the judgment of strangers, people you didn’t care about and yet you cared what they thought. And, once you admitted to failure, like savage crows they feasted on your remains.

When he called Ida, her voice sounded groggy. “I need a favor,” she said, and asked if he’d be willing to come over and read her script, she was having trouble with the ending and wanted another opinion. She had a deadline. “I’ve been up all night.”

“I happen to be good at endings,” he told her.

Ida lived in Westwood, on Roebling Avenue. The neighborhood catered to people from the university. She lived in a white stucco duplex with black shutters. He found a parking space down the street and ran through the rain all the way to her door. Ida’s neighbor, an opera singer with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was singing in her apartment—whatever it was sounded familiar to him—it was Italian, he knew that.

“La Bohème,”
Ida told him, letting him in. The place smelled of coffee. “I always cry when I hear it.”

“Has she broken any glasses yet?”

“No, silly.” She gave him a hug.

“You’re not going to cry, are you?”

“I’ll try not to.” She smiled up at him. “It’s good to see you.”

“You too.”

She made him breakfast, a cheese omelet, and they drank coffee by the big picture window, watching the rain. Then they went into her den to read her script. They drank a pot of coffee as they turned the pages. They sat on adjacent couches, the same sort of setup as his therapist had, but in this case it was conducive to reading the script out loud and he liked the way her face looked when she read, like a third grader giving a school presentation, a mixture of pride and a little fear. The script was about a boxer struggling with Lou Gehrig’s disease. In the beginning, the man is an asshole and a drunk; in the end, just before he dies, he’s practically a saint. The story was based on her father’s life. It was the sort of script Hedda Chase would have loved, he thought. “You’ve underestimated yourself,” he told her. “It’s very powerful.”

Ida smiled as if she were relieved. “That means a lot to me, coming from you.”

“You don’t know me very well, Ida,” he said grimly. “I’m not who you think I am.”

“No?” She tilted her head, thoughtfully appraising him. “Who are you?”

He shrugged. “I guess I’m trying to figure that out.”

She looked dissatisfied with his answer.

“With you? I feel like I’m myself,” he tried to explain. “But before, back in New York, back with my wife, it was like being somebody else. Someone I didn’t like. Does that make any sense?”

“We’re all imposters to some degree.”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s true.”

“Who are you pretending to be?”

“Me?” She hesitated and frowned. “I’m not pretending.”

“I don’t believe you.” His smile leaked out.

She laughed nervously.

“You’re a big fucking faker and I know it,” he said. “Come over here.”

She came over to him and sat down on the couch and let him kiss her. “We’ve barely opened my suitcase,” she admitted.