Breakers (3 page)

Walt found himself cold and half-lost in Central Park. He bought a soft pretzel, chewed down half, tossed the rest in bits to pigeons. Was she already gone? Then what the fuck did it matter what he did? He could propose to her, burn down her apartment, hold her mom at knifepoint. It wouldn't matter. She was gone.

He sat down in the grass. The dew seeped into his jeans. If he had a box with a button that could erase his existence, he would have pushed it.

This same park had been the start. In another sense, the year and a half of NYU classrooms and dorm rooms and Village bars where he'd dogged her had been the start, but
the
start, the start that had launched their first movie together, their first night of moany, eye-buzzing sex together, their first morning-after when he'd descended to a gray and silent Sunday AM in a city so empty it could have been built just for the two of them—all that had sprung from this park.

How had he talked her into coming here? He could no longer remember. He suspected it wasn't the particular words that had finally convinced her to a date with him, but rather his steady, undaunted presence. His persistence. So on that cool Saturday afternoon in spring, spurred, perhaps, by the dying of her last shreds of respect for the future electrician, she'd agreed to hop the train up to the park, where they walked around the paths before lying down in the grass on a quiet hill where she rested her head in his lap and he touched her hair above her ear and felt he'd never need to be anywhere else. They didn't move for an hour. It probably wouldn't sound that special to tell someone about. Everyone, at some point, sits in the grass with the person they love.

But after a year and a half of fruitless and corrosive pursuit, fueled by a desire his roommate Ajit kept calling "obsessive," it had been perfect. How often do you get to realize a dream? To put your hands on the exact thing you've always wanted?

Now that he was losing it, what wouldn't he do to keep it?

As if it had always been there, he had his answer. Stolen right out of
The Royal Tenenbaums
, which she'd seen, too, but tweaked just enough to elude notice. Smiling the unweighted smile of a man who's staked everything on the turn of one last card, he went back to the subway station, rode home to their apartment in the Village, and practiced his worried-face in the mirror. When Vanessa got home, it took her two minutes of how-was-your-day talk until she noticed.

"Everything okay?"

"The doctor called."

"What've you got? The flu?"

"There's a problem." He looked down at the carpet. It was a nice carpet, so thick your toes could get lost in it. He'd miss it if she kicked him out. "With my heart."

She reached for his shoulder, gaping, horrified. Her fingers never felt so good. "Your
heart
? Are you going to be okay?"

"I don't know. They want me back tomorrow." He covered his eyes with his hand, shoulders shrinking. "I'm scared."

3

Across the desk from Raymond, Lana Englund turned from her monitor, the wrinkles around her eyes highlit by the Santa Monica sunshine spilling through her great glass window. "We have a problem here. Our ad specifically asked for a
degree
in Communications."

"I minored in it."

"And maybe if you'd minored in English you'd know words have meanings."

He cocked his head. "The ad said experience would be the key factor."

"So it is. Your resume mentioned web work. Can you elaborate?"

"I've designed graphics for a half dozen different sites. I've been designing and writing my own blogs since before there was a word for them. I had a popular one that covered art supplies—pens, brush brands. I think that will carry over here."

She frowned, round cheeks puffing. "Traffic?"

"For my site?"

"No, for the 405. I was thinking of running out for some tapas."

"Before I moved on, I was drawing about 1500 unique visitors a month." Raymond's mouth twitched as Lana literally rolled her eyes. He'd been trying to keep things pro. "Is something the matter?"

"Something? No. Some
things
? Take your pick." She ticked off her points on her fingers, bending them back until the knuckles cracked. "You don't have a BA in the field. No direct experience writing copy. The best you can muster is a website that wasn't even a blip on the screen and has been dead for years. What I'm not understanding is who cleared you for an interview in the first place."

"I know my resume isn't a knockout. That's because I'm the only guy in LA County who doesn't lie on it. That's what I'm offering: honesty. I can do this job."

"I don't need a guy who'll tell me when my ass is looking big. I need a guy who can write me crisp, compelling copy. You're not that guy."

Raymond stood. "Fuck you."

"Excuse me?" She drew back in her chair, chin disappearing inside her high collar.

"You're talking to me like you never expect to see me again. So fuck off."

"Security's going to squash you like a toad." She reached for the phone and they probably would have, but he'd already left, walking down the sidewalk in a wrap of sunshine, smelling salt from the shore and grilled carne asada from the truck down the block. He hadn't told her to fuck off out of anger, but more out of the conviction that if you don't make a habit of standing up for yourself in the small moments, you'll never be able to do it when the big ones rolled around. Well, that and some anger. Anyway, it would make a better story for Mia.

Mia, when he'd told her they were out of money, that unless something changed, within two months they'd be living out of his car or, with luck, a spare room at one of his siblings', had been exactly the woman he'd married: concerned but forgiving, miles from petty, focused on nothing but making it together. She'd reached across the table and taken his hand and said they'd be okay.

He'd fully resolved to put his graphics career, if he could use the word without stringing quotes around it, on hiatus. A man on a mission, he'd replied to every feasible want ad on Craigslist. Most hadn't replied. A handful scheduled interviews. Lana Englund had been his first.

Mia smiled when he relayed his day. "Nowhere to go but up."

"Or postal."

"It's one interview."

"Maybe I should stop wasting time on the ambitious positions. I can worry about liking my job after I've stopped worrying about starving to death."

"You know what?" She grabbed his waist, shaking him like the beautiful thing you're compelled to destroy. "We should do something fun."

"You look like you already are," he said, voice rattling as she shook him.

"We should go live on the beach this weekend. I mean with tents and vodka-canteens and public urination."

"All of that is illegal."

"Who cares?" She released him, tugged open the crumbling curtain that overlooked their wild backyard, the lemon trees and wildflowers and the fifty-foot magnolia tree with its red, corn-cobby buds. "If we have to leave soon, why not have some fun? Enjoy the damn place? This is Southern California. Let's love it while we can."

He had to smile. "Of all the things you have to choose from, you want to go camping three blocks from your house?"

She put up her dukes, hopped forward, and tapped him in the gut with a fist. "It's free, isn't it?"

He couldn't argue with that. In between emailing his resume around and clipping coupons, he went down to the basement, a half-finished space cluttered to the point of unnavigability by books, tools, jars of screws, camera lenses and developing fluid, and half-painted, rough-sawn wood scraps from his dad's old projects. Decades ago, before his birth when they too had been too poor to do much else, his parents had been campers. Between two sawhorses and beneath a layer of dust thick enough to write your name in, Raymond dug up a tent, metal stakes, some tarps, canteens, and a tackle box that still smelled like bait, plasticky and fishy.

Saturday morning, they drove to the beach. He left most of the gear in the trunk until dark. They made up some rules: no leaving the beach unless a) the bathrooms were closed or b) to stow the tent in the mornings. When smoking weed, make sure no one could see the fire. Bag up all their trash. And absolutely no talk of money.

The sun bounced off the water and the sand; within an hour, Raymond had to break the first rule to go buy stronger sunscreen. It was late March and he knew the water in the bay had carried down the coast from Alaska, but he waded to his knees, coaxing Mia out into the curling surf until the soles of their feet went numb. They combed for shells, smelling salt and kelp and warm sand. On the rocks at the south end of the bay, where the mansions of Palos Verdes clung to the cliffs on eighty-foot stilts, small black flies swarmed in thousands over brown mats of drying kelp. He overturned stones, searching for crabs.

"I've been down here two dozen times and I've never seen a single fish," he said. "How hard can it be to find a fish in an
ocean
?"

"Maybe they just don't like you," she smiled. They'd been swigging warm vodka from a metal flask.

"Then they must know something you don't."

"Or vice versa. I've seen you naked."

"Maybe we should educate them."

After midnight, drunk and grinning, they carried two towels down to the tideline, laid one beneath them and one over them, and made love amidst the sand, the moon, the waves. Once they finished and Raymond had caught his breath, he popped up, naked, and faced the sea.

"Get a good look, fish. One night only." He plopped down on the towels, pawing in the moonlight for his underwear. "Why can't I shake the feeling this is a trial run for how we'll be living a few weeks from now?"

She waggled a finger in his face. "No money-talk, remember?"

"Who said anything about money? I'm talking about bindles and cans of beans."

"We'll have to memorize the train schedules."

"I think a barrel with two straps would look very flattering on you."

"We can't go homeless when we have a home, can we? Maybe we can get a thing. A lien."

"No money talk!" She sprung from the sand, a pale flash speckled with the darker spots of her nipples, belly button, and the gap between her legs, and tackled him on his back, smushing a towel into his face. "Gonna follow the rules? Or do I have to smother you?"

They woke sticky-mouthed and sunburnt, hungry and hungover. Between a couple covert puffs, packing the tent in the trunk, and a walk through the not-quite-cold morning, the fog lifted from their heads, the poison washed from their flesh. Just past the breakers, dolphins paralleled the shore, sleek gray fins shedding seawater.

When they drove the half mile home on Sunday afternoon, Raymond felt no less charged and refreshed than if they were on their way back from a trip across the Pacific. An interview request waited in his inbox. Wednesday morning, a video store just a few blocks up the street. Part-time clerk position. He didn't care. Low stress and more time to build his freelance career.

"Good luck," Mia kissed him. "You'll do great."

He walked, meaning to save gas and pick up some exercise. Besides, the weather, as usual, was glorious, a clear-blue day with the typical breeze tousling the towering palms. He, like everyone, had heard about Los Angeles weather before moving here, but after living through a fall, winter, and the early part of spring without feeling any temperature below 42 degrees, he still had a hard time believing that on any given day he could walk outside in a t-shirt—that in the middle of November, it had been too hot to do anything but jump in the ocean. Cars grunted down the PCH. A young Hispanic woman with a smooth belly trotted after a gasping dachshund. By the time he reached the video store, a light sweat filmed his back.

He nailed his interview. He was roughly the same age as the long-haired guy who questioned him and was able to make him laugh repeatedly, finding common ground over the greatness of
Dead Alive
and
Repo Man
. When they discussed Raymond's post-college two years with a UPS store, the guy had flat-out said it sounded harder than his own job. He promised to let Raymond know by the end of the week.

Raymond walked out feeling good. Like he had a chance. He knew he shouldn't count on it until he walked in for his first day, and that it was almost certainly a tedious job, one he'd be sick of six months in and ready to quit two years later, but it meant he'd be okay. He'd eat. He and Mia would sleep and wake in their own house. Miles from rich, but in exchange for five hours of his day, five days a week, he could continue a reasonable approximation of an American existence. Strange how fast everything changed. A couple weeks ago, he'd been concerned about their very ability to go on eating from non-Dumpster sources, and sending out dozens of resumes and getting back virtually nothing in response had done nothing to dam his rising tide of fears. Yet an hour at a video store had reduced those worries to a placid ebb.

Up the block, a beefy bald man in a blue suit spilled out of a Thai restaurant, clamped his hands to his knees, and vomited into a strip of grass.

Raymond jogged forward. "Hey, you okay?"

The man heaved again, yellow noodles mingled with bright red fluid—curry sauce? Raymond held up a few feet away, reached for his cell. The man straightened, pale as a page, swaying like a palm in a coastal storm. Red tears dribbled from his eyes.

"Sir?"

The man waved one thick hand, groping for something that wasn't there. Viscous reddish drool gleamed from his chin. He panted in shallow hitches, head bobbing with each breath, as if he were slamming it to a punk show beneath the stage of the Whisky A Go-Go and not puking, mid-afternoon, on the sidewalk of Redondo Beach.

"Run," the man said. Blood trickled from his eyes. Without warning, he fell straight backwards, stiffly awkward, head cracking the sidewalk like a bottle wrapped in a blanket.

Raymond took a step backward. A siren shrieked up the PCH. Under the warm California sun, the stranger's blood sunk into the sidewalk's spidery cracks.