The Ramblers (15 page)

Her peach is bald, juicy, spread open.

He unbuckles his jeans.

A crashing sound comes from the other room. Tate startles.

“Shit. What was that?” she says, shooting up, pulling covers up over her, tucking her long, bleached hair behind her ears.

He jogs into the other room. The photograph of Olivia has toppled over, to the floor. Shattered. Shards of glass glisten everywhere. He kneels down. Glass pierces his palm, but he doesn't stop picking up the pieces. Even in the darkness, he can see the blood on his hand. He tastes it. Keeps going.

She stands behind him now, the nameless girl. Naked. Ready.

“Come,” she says. “Do that later.”

“You should go,” he says abruptly, his voice firm, without looking up at her. He can see her face without seeing it. Humiliated. Confused.

Tate stays right where he is, hunched on the hardwood floor, frozen in place next to the broken picture of his pretty cunt of a wife—she's still technically his wife—his hands splintered with glass. He stays there until the front door slams, until it's clear he's alone. The guilt is immediate, a tidal wave. He feels sorry for this girl with her happy blond hair and black clothes and sweet body who had the shit luck of walking into that bar, of stumbling into him, his life,
this.

He tells himself a little story: That she will be fine. She will get over this, this strange run-in with a fucked-up fuckup. She will meet her pretty little friends for pretty little brunch salads tomorrow and they will find a way to make it funny. And then she will do it all over again tomorrow night and the next. She will meet another guy. And another and another until one sticks and stays. And then he will marry her, this guy, and love her deeply and desperately, forget himself and follow her wherever she wants to go.

They will settle into a home, a life, a capital-F Future.

One day, she will turn to him and she will fucking say it as if she is saying something mundane like “We are out of milk”:
I am not happy. I have not been happy. I want to be happy.

And the guy, the foolish guy, will panic. He will promise to change, will promise to do anything, anything at all, to give her what she wants. But it will be too fucking late. What she wants, it will turn out, is something else, someone else. A brand-new life. She will move on to the Better Man, start over on page one. And the first guy will drink and drown and try but fail to fuck pretty girls, and get all cut up by shit like life and broken glass.

Fuck, he's a mess.

In the darkness, Tate stands. Through his drunken fog, he gazes
down at the shards, shining like tears. He decides to leave them there. He pulls the photo from its matting, takes one last look, and rips it to confetti shreds. Sprinkles them, like ashes, over the hardwood floor.

In the bathroom, he blots the blood with the old Yale T-shirt she used to sleep in. He wraps his hand in photo-matting tape because it's all he has. He reaches down and grabs himself. He's no longer hard, but it doesn't take much and he's stiff again. He stands in the dark bathroom and strokes himself and thinks of her tonight. Shy in her bathrobe, her long legs crossed, traces of fear in her eyes.

He comes. He comes hard and fast.

Fuck it.

“I'm a grown man, Mom.”

T
ate shoots up in bed.

Dregs of his dream linger. In it, he stood naked in an endless cornfield just like the ones near his childhood home. The corn was high, flesh toned and phallic, ready to be harvested, and all he could see was the blue sky above. He heard a commotion, someone calling his name, and suddenly she was with him. She was a giant, all tits, twenty feet tall. She bent down to pick him up in her palm, stroked his head, his chest, his cock. He trembled, exploded, looked up and her face was a fitful hologram, old and new and old and new. Back and forth between Olivia and Smith. Both of them. Neither of them.

He lies back down. Stares up at the ceiling.

His head throbs. It occurs to him that he's probably still drunk.

He sits up, swings his legs over the side of the mattress, looks toward the window. It's light out. Morning. The bedside clock confirms this. It's not just morning but late morning. Almost ten.

Next to the clock, a Heineken bottle lies sideways, glowing green. Tate reaches out to feel the sticky surface, peers down its nose, decides there is a little left, one final drop. He holds the bottle up to his mouth. There is indeed a mini-swig remaining, enough to coat his tongue. The beer is sour now, punishingly warm.

He scans the room. He's lived here for a few months now and it looks as it did when he moved in. The walls are still bare, gray-white in hue. There are tiny holes in these walls, from the previous owner. Tate's real estate broker said they could make a fuss about this, have the walls patched before closing, but Tate told her he didn't really care. He just wanted to get on with his life.

He stands now, walks to the window, and peers out. There's still some snow on the streets. Shit, maybe he shouldn't have left California. Snow in November? His place is on the second floor, just above the ground. So close that he can see the tops of people's heads as they shuffle by, on their way to the coffee shop, on their way to work. Close enough that he can read the sinister headlines of their newspapers, see the bald spots beginning to come.

Tate turns around, peers back into his room. The bed floats in the center, a wide white square topped with a tangle of sheets he hasn't washed in weeks. On the other bedside table, he spots another beer, his bottle's twin, this one upright and full next to his little black leather bowl, a bowl full of matchbooks, names of bars printed on their backs. Relics of all the nights he's pissed away in the last few months.

She smoked sometimes. Said it was because she was anxious. Everything made her anxious—her work at the law firm, the nightly news, standard doctor's appointments, the traffic on the freeway. She kept a pack of Camel Lights tucked in her pocket at all times and Tate knew when she pulled one out that it was time to ask her what was going on. And he did this. He did this every fucking time. He asked. He
listened. He talked her off a litany of ledges. And she seemed so genuinely thankful for him in these moments, these moments when she was crumbling and going dark. Maybe this is odd, but he found her most irresistible when her face was twisted with worry, when she really needed him.

After she passed the California bar exam, they traveled to Thailand and there was this one night where she started talking in her sleep. Just sat up, eyes closed, and started mumbling shit. That she never felt pretty enough, that her mother said it was a good thing she was smart. And she remembered none of it the next day, but it was the most brilliant clue, he thought, to what she needed, and so he told her all the time how beautiful she was. It was never a lie.

She was beautiful.

Is.

Was.

Fuck, that word again. The past tense haunts him. She never believed him when he told her this. She'd argue with him, tell him to stop lying, point to the evidence—pockets of cellulite on her thighs, the small bump on the bridge of her nose—but he wouldn't have it. She was not perfect, but she was stunning. He did all that he could to convince her of this, but in the end it wasn't enough. It seems she needed a different kind of affirmation in the form of an older, more powerful man. A knight in shining corporate armor to ride on into her desolate, document-strewn office and say:
You've been working so hard. Let's grab a drink.

She told him exactly how it happened because he asked her to. Every detail, a dagger.

The phone rings now, sparing Tate from going further down the rabbit hole. The landline. This means one thing: it's his mother.

“Hello?” Tate says, finding a pair of pajama pants on the floor.

“Morning,” she says. She calls every morning at this hour. He suspects it's because she's worried about him, wants to make sure he is awake and okay.

“Morning, Mom,” he says.

“What's on tap today?”

“More of the same. I'll take some photos.”

He doesn't mention shopping with Smith. His mother wouldn't approve. She's still holding out hope that he and Olivia will mend things.

“Do you think you should maybe find work, honey? To keep busy? I don't like the idea of you having all of this time on your hands.”

“I'm pursuing photography, Mom. I consider it work.”

The word grates.
Pursuing.
What the fuck does this even mean? It means showing up at B&H Photo and buying thousands of dollars' worth of cameras and lenses, most of which still sits in boxes and bags in the other room. His first camera, a Polaroid and an eleventh-birthday gift from his parents, sits on his bedside table.

“How was yesterday?” she asks.

“Like the days before it, Mom.”

“Did you get my package?” she asks. She sends “care packages” every few weeks.

Her question jars his memory and he recalls the white package by the door downstairs, his name bold on the front. He brought it up but didn't open it.

“You can stop sending me underwear. I'm a grown man, Mom.”

“Nonsense. You're more of a boy than ever. Just because you have money in the bank doesn't mean you're taking any better care of yourself. I bet you're still living out of a suitcase. I bet there is no food in your fridge. I bet you haven't done laundry in eons.”

She knows him. She knows him well. And he bristles under the weight of this knowing.

He walks slowly toward the door, adjusts himself, feels that the cotton of his boxer-briefs is stiff. Shame fills him, but why the fuck should it? Tate stares at the mountain of laundry in the corner of the room.

“Why don't you let me come for Thanksgiving? I will spend a few days getting you settled and we can catch up. I want to lay eyes on you, son. And that fancy new place of yours.”

“You and Dad are leaving for the cruise tomorrow. It's too late to cancel. And besides, you've been looking forward to it all year. You deserve it. Next year, Emily and Todd will be back from London and the baby will be here and we will all be together. This is your off year. And I need to try to do a thing or two on my own,” Tate says. “Don't worry about me, Mom.”

It's a foolish thing to say because he knows she worries, that she has always worried, that she's probably more worried now than ever. Just a year ago, his life was—
seemed
—settled. His company had been acquired and the money was due to come in, and he told his mother they'd probably have kids soon because this is what he hoped for. His mother was desperate for grandchildren. And it made him happy to make her so hopeful, her and his dad both. They were nothing but good parents, contented individuals who had an uncomplicated view of the world, a world that has been very good to them, giving them a son and a daughter both, hardworking kids who never caused much trouble. His sister, Emily, two years younger, lives in London with her husband. She is four months pregnant with their first child.

Olivia always loved Tate's mother, how she was always calling, always visiting, always sending packages. She said that when she became a mom, she wanted to be like Tate's mother. Her mother was okay but selfish, and she preferred Mrs. Pennington.

“Okay, but I just want you to be happy again, Tate,” she says. She's been saying this at the end of every phone call.

“I know, Mom. And I will be.”

It's what she deserves to hear. In truth, the words have him thinking. He was happy before, at least he thought he was, but maybe he took it for granted. He never came home from work at the start-up and said,
I am a happy guy
. He and Olivia never curled up in bed, kissed each other good night and said,
We're so happy, aren't we?
It doesn't seem like happiness is something you really talk about or think consciously about until it is threatened, slipping.

What would it take to be happy again? Tate's not so sure. He's
bought this apartment. That's a step. A place of his own. A place he can transform as he likes. He can have lots of furniture or none at all. He can leave his dirty socks on the floor because there's no one to bug him. He can fill his fridge with alcohol and sausage. He can do whatever the fuck he wants. It is all up to him. But the thing that surprises him most, and maybe it shouldn't, is that the money doesn't seem to be making him happy. He became
rich
overnight and he figured this would cheer him up, but what were the fucking chances this would happen at the exact time that he lost his marriage? His hope is that it will just take some time to settle into this new normal, this life with funds and without Olivia, to embrace this Life 2.0, but even the thought of his new freedom is disconcerting. Olivia ran a tight ship. She had her ways of doing things and her ways organically became his. It took a while, but he learned to turn the water off as he was brushing his teeth, how to fold the towels the way she liked, how she liked her coffee.

He's stopped waiting for her to call, to write, to appear at the door of this apartment she doesn't even know about, to start gliding around tidying things up, mock-chastising him for his messes, for his temporary slip back into bachelorhood. And it hits him, finally, and hard: this isn't temporary.

After he hangs up with his mom, the day stretches before him. He will meet Smith in the afternoon at a tiny suit shop not far from here. Until then he will take his camera out and walk the streets in search of interesting people. He's gotten pretty good at approaching strangers and sneaking a shot or even sometimes asking them if he can take their photograph. It surprises him how many people are game; sure, some people say no and turn away, but many are willing to offer themselves, who they are, who they are striving to be, why they are here in this city that is so wonderful and so hard.

Tate pulls on a fresh pair of underwear and yesterday's jeans, which were still on the floor, then carries the beer bottles into his small kitchen. He places the bottles on the counter but then picks the full one back up, studies it. He sees lipstick. Takes a sip.

The living room is still dark, the shades drawn tight. Tate flips on the light and walks toward the mess. The shreds. The picture is gone, decomposed, in remnant bits, but he can still see it in his mind. There she is. Olivia. Looking back at him over her shoulder. It is their wedding day. They are in San Francisco at her parents' yacht club. They are in the suite where they got ready and would spend their first night as husband and wife. She said she didn't want to see him before the ceremony, that it was bad luck, but Tate convinced her that he needed to see her before everyone else saw her, that he wanted to take her picture while she was just his, that he needed a few moments alone with her, in that room. Without family, without makeup and hair people, without the hired photographer and video guy, without the world. And Olivia acquiesced. Humored him, and they had their time. She wore a big white dress. She wore her dark hair pinned back, swept off her face. He snapped the shot and it became his favorite.

He framed the photo and hung it up in their hallway. She hated it. Pointed out all the things that were wrong with it. One eye was smaller than the other, her nose looked big, she thought she had a double chin. But he didn't see these things. Even after she pointed them out, he didn't see them. He just saw a gorgeous, happy girl.

But was she ever happy? Was she even happy on that day? She was stressed, anxious about being the center of attention, eager for the whole thing to be over. There was fear in her chocolate eyes, in the shaky half smile she wore on her face. She was nervous. She was scared of something.

It's just you and me
,
Liv,
he said to her, trying to calm her down. Did she know even then that it wouldn't work? That things would fall apart the way they did? That one day he would cry like a baby and cling to her, hold on for dear life?

He studies the shreds. Considers taping them back together but sweeps them up and floats them into the trash.

He sees the package by the door, walks toward it. He really doesn't need more underwear, but he knows his mom needs to send them. He
feels a punch when he sees the return address. It's not from his mother. His stomach knots. Her lawyer. The papers. They're finally here.

He sits to open it. Two sets of paper, flagged for him to sign.

Part of him wants to grab a pen and just fucking do it. Be done. But, thankfully, he decides to read.

Mr. Pennington,

My client is eager to settle this matter as I know you are too. As we have heretofore agreed upon, pursuant to California law, my client is entitled to half of the community property, including, but not limited to, the proceeds of your sale of your company PhotoPoet Inc. in the fall of 2012. You built the company during your marriage to my client and she supported you and, more importantly, contributed her legal expertise and services during its establishment, and as such the company is considered marital property and should be divided as such. It should be noted that my client is additionally seeking 50% of the value of the stock options in Twitter (“Parent Company”) that are at the present moment unvested. The valuation of said options will be calculated by a mutually arrived-upon method.