Illusions Complete Series (86 page)

I can’t give up hope.

But that night, Nick and I shared a couple of bottles of wine after Dalilah went to bed. I could feel my resolve lowering just being near him, and the wine wasn’t helping matters any.

Nick had actually been drinking before we opened up the bottle of wine. I could tell that he was quite intoxicated.

“You know, Iris, having you and Dalilah here these past few weeks has been a godsend to me. I don’t think that I’ve told you this.”

“Well, you taking us in has been a godsend to us, too. It goes both ways. If you didn’t take us in, I literally don’t know where we would be. I mean, we all couldn’t have stayed at my mother’s, which means that Ryan would probably still be at that hospital, which I don’t want to think about.” I shuddered my shoulders a little at that thought, then took another sip of wine. “And there really is no place for us to go, except for my parents’ house. And god knows they don’t have the room for us, even for just Dalilah and me. So, really, you are the one who saved us.”

“Well, maybe we saved each other.” He stoked the fire a little bit with his poker. “You know, about the hospital situation. Do you think that maybe you overreacted just a teensy, teensy bit?”

I laughed a little. “Maybe just a bit,” I said, making a gesture with my thumb and index finger that was the universal symbol for “little bit.” I looked at my wine glass, and Nick poured me another. “But I don’t know, Nick. I was on autopilot when I did that. All that I knew was that Ryan had attempted suicide, and I couldn’t stand having him someplace other than right where I was. Looking back, I think that was the real reason why I had him pulled out of the hospital. I feel that I need to protect him, like he has always protected me. I mean, I was angry with the hospital for not telling me things, and really angry with the doctor for overmedicating him, but that wasn’t the real reason why I had him taken out of there.”

Nick just stared at me for a few seconds, sipping his wine. My heart quickened a little. Then a lot.
Is it getting warm in here, or is it just me?

Then he looked away and shook his head. I heard him mumbling a little under his breath, although I couldn’t make out any words.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, concerned.

“Nothing, nothing. It’s just that, all my life, I’ve met exactly one kind of woman. The gold-digger. I don’t think that I’ve ever been with a woman who could give a rat’s ass about my well-being. The only thing that they’ve ever cared about was about was my black MasterCard. Do you know that I once dated a woman for about a month, and she already was pouting because I wouldn’t buy her a Beemer. I bought her a new Toyota Camry. Good little car, sporty. She didn’t have a car, because she was a grad student, so I figured that I was doing a great thing.” He shook his head. “When I gave it to her, she didn’t say thank you. She just said ‘that’s great, but what I really wanted was a black BMW.’”

I had to suppress a smile. I didn’t think that it was funny that Nick has had such bad luck with good women. But I did think that he was stupid if he kept falling for the same type every time, then get angry when it doesn’t work out. He obviously hadn’t heard the definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.

“Nick, just out of curiosity. How do you choose these women?”

He looked at his glass, then looked at the wall. “I admit, I only date the hotties.”

“Well, here is my theory about hot women. Do you want to hear it?”

“Sure, why not.”

“There are nice hot women out there. I’ve met them. But they’re all currently in a relationship. So, you’re looking at hot women who are either not in a relationship or are willing to cheat on their current relationship. That narrows down your prospects right there.”

“So, you’re saying that all the good hot women are already taken, so the ones that I meet are the bottom of the barrel.”

“Something like that. They’re the ones who are single for a reason, you know?”

He fingered his glass lightly, then looked up at me with those blue, blue eyes. “So, what do you suggest I do?”

I shrugged. “Broaden your horizons. Find some woman who’s not a ten, and give her a chance. You got nothing to lose. Who knows? There might be chemistry there, and you’ll be a very happy guy. The point is, if you are only looking at women who look like Alexis and Tessa, then you’re limiting yourself.”

Then he looked away. “Well, I’ve had my eye on a non-hot woman for awhile now, but I don’t think that she’s interested. I mean, she’s cute, but not a supermodel.”

“There you go,” I said, lightly punching his arm. “Go for it! She’ll probably make you very happy.”

“One problem. She’s married to my best friend.”

I wanted to say that I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about.
Perhaps he has another best friend?
I felt extremely uncomfortable, suddenly, so I decided to change the subject. “I, uh, I always wanted to ask you something. I hope that it isn’t too personal.”

“What’s that?”

“How, when did you know that you were bisexual?”

“Geez, Iris, I don’t know. When did you know that you were heterosexual?”

“I know, I know. Dumb question. Um…”

“No, no, it’s ok. Actually, when I was 13. I was in the Boy Scouts, and an older boy of 17 sucked me off. And I liked it. It was very confusing for me, to be honest with you. I mean, I’ve always loved girls. Always. And I always had a ton of girlfriends. Yet, I found out that I also liked guys. For the longest time, I didn’t quite know where I fit in. I wasn’t quite gay, and I wasn’t quite straight. Although I’ve always been more straight than gay. So, my adolescence and young adulthood was even more confusing than most people’s were, I think.”

“How did you learn to accept that part of yourself?”

“I don’t know, exactly. I just woke up one day and decided that I had to live my life without giving a good goddamned about what people thought about me and my lifestyle. So, I decided to do just that. I thought for sure that I would lose friends, but that didn’t happen. And the funny thing is, I found that I wasn’t alone. Not by a long shot. You’d be surprised to know how many men are just like me, even if they would never, ever admit to it.”

“Oh, I would be less surprised than you might think,” I said. “I did the research after finding out about you and Ryan, and it turns out that there are a good percentage of men who are into men and women. I’ve always known that there were lots of women like that – I met quite a few women like that in college, for instance. I never thought the same about men, though. Now, I know differently.”

“What about you?” he asked. “Do you like girls?”

“Well, no. I mean, I’ve never experimented or anything like that. I’ve thought about it, though.”

“And what keeps you from pursuing it?”

I shrugged. “The temptation was just never that strong with me.”

He looked at the fire, then took a sip of his wine. Then he sighed.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just…”

“Just what?”

And then he said something that stunned me.

“I think I’m falling in love with you.”

Chapter Seventeen

Ryan

As I sat on my private plane, sipping a glass of Scotch, I tried my very hardest not to think about what was ahead. There was a nagging voice in my head that told me that this was all a huge mistake that was going to have bad consequences. Consequences that I could never comprehend. Why I thought this, I knew not. I thought that perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I just left Iris without a word. I mean, I did write her a letter explaining things, albeit in a very cryptic way. But would she understand? Could she? Why was I treating the most important person in my life in such a way?

I knew why I was treating her this way, deep down, however. It was the old cliché – you can’t love somebody until you love yourself. And right then, because of all the negative thinking I had been doing as I have reviewed my life, I loathed myself. Despised myself. The way that I acted during my college years was beyond reprehensible. Why did Natalie and everybody always think that I was a great guy? I treated her like shit, along with many other people, yet she always had me up on a pedestal, as she does still today. Not to mention Nick, the faceless bimbos, and, especially, Rachael.

There was very little that I could do about a lot of my actions in the past. I mean, I could apologize to Nick profusely, as I never had really apologized to him before. That’s one thing, and I will do that when I get back into town. I could go and see Natalie while I’m in the New York City area and do the same. The other people I hurt – the endless stream of women – I couldn’t apologize to them even if I wanted to, because there was just no way that I could remember who all they were.

But Rachael’s parents – that was another story. I could explain to them what happened, and hopefully help them find peace in her death. I could never be redeemed for what I did to Rachael, and for how much her parents were, no doubt, devastated by her death, but what I could do would be to try to help them come to terms with what happened to her. And maybe that would give them some modicum of closure.

But the nagging voice inside of me just wouldn’t be quiet. The voice told me that I was only doing this for myself, not for them. That I was only doing this to make myself feel better, and, really, all that I would be doing for Rachael’s parents, thirteen years after the fact, would be reopening old wounds that might have already healed. That was really the more likely scenario, but, then again, I would never know unless I tried.

So, the upshot of this was that I was finding myself on my plane heading to La Guardia early on a Thursday morning. I left when Iris and everybody was fast asleep. I knew that Iris would never let me go on this trip, because I had been out of the ICU for only a few weeks. There were any number of things that could go wrong while I’m traveling, and I researched all the risks. The biggest risk was that I simply wasn’t ready to be doing this. I wasn’t taking care of myself, I knew, because I wasn’t eating right and getting very little exercise. I spent all my days staring at the television set blankly, instead of trying to help myself get better. So, I probably wasn’t ready for this trip. And Iris would’ve done everything in her power to prevent me from taking the trip. Hell, she probably would’ve gotten the handcuffs out, like Nick did all those years ago. She could be so strong-willed when she really wants to be, and I knew that she absolutely would’ve prevented me from leaving.

Yet, I was compelled to leave. I had to do it. I was spinning so much into my depression and negativity that I became virtually obsessed with the issue of what could have been. It became all that I thought about, once I allowed myself to actually think about it. And what triggered it? It was the journaling that I was doing, and it was the appearance on television of somebody who resembled Rachael a great deal. It was also, as trivial as this might sound, an episode of one of the shows that came on – not sure which, they all blended together after a little while – that dealt with the issue of a college student who died from acute alcohol poisoning. I was immediately tripped into what had happened, and, once I journaled it out, the inescapable conclusion was that I caused Rachael’s death.

Me. Nobody else. Just me.

So, at the point when I came to terms with my absolute role in her death – when I had my epiphany, if you will – I knew that I had to leave. If I didn’t leave, then I would continue on my dark path, and I knew what would happen next. I would have snuck my dealer into Nick’s house and got back into using. The one thing, outside of painting, that always helped quell the negative thoughts in my head. Well, that wasn’t entirely true – being around Iris and my daughter helped, as well, but I wasn’t ready to accept their love again just yet.

If I put it to Iris that it was either visiting Rachael’s parents or getting back into dope, perhaps she would’ve understood. But that still didn’t mean that she would’ve allowed me to leave. She always had my best interests at heart, I knew, and I knew that, from the outsider’s perspective, my leaving was absolutely not in my best interest.

I took a deep breath as the plane started to descend. Below me, I saw squares of land and then tiny people, cars and buildings. I got on my cell to call for a limo to meet me, so, when the plane finally landed, there was the car waiting for me with a driver in a limo cap.

“Mr. Gallagher?” the limo driver asked when I got off the plane.

“Yes,” I said. “I need you to take me to Brooklyn.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

Throughout the ride, the limo driver, John, tried to make small talk. I tried, as politely as I could, to discourage his talk. I wasn’t in the mood for talking. I was too busy rehearsing what it was that I had to say to Rachael’s parents.

“So, this your first time to New York?” he asked.

“No. Been here before.”

“You here for business or pleasure?”

“Neither.”

“Nice weather we’re having here right now.”

“Yeah.”

“You going to catch a Yankee’s game while you’re here?”

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

“What do you think about that A. Rod business?”

“Not surprised.”

And on it went. I wanted to tell the guy that I wasn’t interested in talking to him, at all, because he just wasn’t getting the hint.

Finally, I got out my headphones. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to listen to a podcast for the job I’m going for out here.”

“Oh, sure. Sure.” And John, mercifully, said nothing more.

I put the headphones in and listened to dead air. I couldn’t listen to music or anything else. I had to concentrate on what I would say to the Smyths.

Finally, the limo arrived at the brownstone. “Please wait here,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” Then I went to the door and rang the doorbell. However, because I was appearing on their doorstep unannounced, there was no guarantee that I would be admitted entrance into their home. Maybe nobody was home, and maybe the person who answered the door would slam it in my face. So, the limo driver had to cool his heels until I gave him the signal to go on.