“It will,” I say. “Don’t forget that she’s yours. You made her…” Same way I made my son. “And you’re right to trust the day. Nights make everything worse.”
You tell me I’d be a good dad and I am a good dad and you laugh. “Wait… is this song on repeat?”
You love me so much you didn’t notice the music until now and I tell you I’m weird and you tell me I’m passionate.
The song ends and it begins again, and the audience cheers and it sounds like a hundred candles lit in the dark and the solo twang of the instrument leads to more cheers and the people in the audience sing along and we sing along too, in our own way, with our bodies, our bodies that we already know by heart.
29
We are three and a half weeks into our show: The Office: NC-17. XXX. I am on my hands and knees and I am wiping down the Red Bed and you are ten feet away, clothed. Tights on. Professional. But that’s not how you were last night!
Oh, Mary Kay, I read about this kind of sex and I thought I had had this kind of sex but I was wrong. Your Murakami is my favorite place on the planet. Your buns have given way to ponytails—you had to do something to express the new love in your life—and we are a secret for now and there is nothing more fun in this world than a really good, juicy fucking secret.
I walk outside to go to Starbucks and Oliver is on my tail. A buzzkill. A housefly.
“FYI,” he says. “It’s illegal to fornicate in a public library.”
I don’t kiss and tell and I don’t fuck and tell but Oliver is no dummy. We all know when our friends are getting laid. “So call the cops, Oliver. Or arrest me. Can you do that? Or is that just some Police Academy bullshit?”
He stops walking. “She has a husband.”
“And he slept with her best friend.” Oliver is an Angeleno so this doesn’t land the way it should. “He slept with her for ten-plus years.”
“Yikes,” he says. “And the kid? Does the kid know?”
“About the affair? Hell no. Oliver, it’s fine. They’ve had problems for years. The kid’s on her way to college…” It’s really hitting me, Mary Kay. Spring has sprung—it’s drizzling but the rain has purpose, flowers are blooming, and we really are on our way.
“If he loses his shit and kills you…”
“He’s not that type of guy. And the woman he had the affair with… well, you’ve seen her. Sort of.”
Once in a while I like to remind Oliver that he knows where a woman is buried and it’s like those cartoons where you can see his blood pressure rising and then he coughs. He shifts. He tries to be the boss of me. “You say this, but I listened to this Sacriphil stuff, my friend, and there’s a lotta violence in there.”
“Exactly, he’s a musician. He has drug issues. He beats himself up, not anyone else.”
Oliver yawns. “All right,” he says. “I sent you some Eames chairs.”
“How many fucking chairs can you fit in that place?”
He’s placated and I carry on to Starbucks and I buy his stupid chairs and I buy myself a Frappufuckingccino because it’s all finally happening. Your rat has moved into your junk room, where he sleeps on a futon—he doesn’t even get a mattress but then he did fuck your best friend—and we have to take baby steps because of the Meerkat but soon you and the rat will be like Billy Joel’s Brenda and Eddie: divorced!
You really are getting a divorce as a matter of course and it begins with an indoor separation, behind closed doors so that Nomi can get used to the idea of you two moving apart. You’re feeling good about it because Nomi is doing better—She says she saw it coming and I guess in a way she’s lucky because with my parents, I was floored—and I’m so happy for you and the Meerkat, for us.
Naturally, Phil isn’t being a very good sport. You told him that you can’t forgive him for bailing on you that night and he’s Philin’ the Blues in a major way. Last night, he spent the whole show ranting about how Courtney Love should be behind bars because she murdered Kurt Cobain because he knows better than to lash out at you and even the Philistans who called in were annoyed.
Phil, man, just play some damn music.
Phil man, you know you’d be up there with Nirvana if the world was a fair place. Can you play “Sharp Six”？
Phil, man, when are we gonna get a new album?
He ignored the requests and degraded himself further, accosting Eric Crapton for writing about “Tears in Heaven” as if the only hell on Earth is losing a child, as if the pansy’s ever been to heaven. Oh, you should have heard him, Mary Kay. “I have a daughter, man, and don’t get me wrong. I’d die if something happened to my kid, man, if someone harmed her… but Eric Clapton walks around like he cornered the market on sorrow and no he didn’t… the guy’s still going! Still living! Got a wife and a big rehab resort in the Bahamas or some shit and let me tell you a little something about the blues, man. The blues are blue. Not blue as in the Bahamas. They’re midnight, man. Real blues shut you down and shut you up. Trust me, I know.”
Obviously if he really was in a Springsteen kind of blue, in the grave of his mind, he wouldn’t have the energy to pontificate. He’s just in whiny dick mode. “Jay” texted him to check in and he was rude to “Jay”： No offense man, but someday if you have a family you’ll understand that family shit eats up the time. Peace out. I’m in the zone writing.
It worries me to think of you under the same roof as him, but you’re right. He’s the father of your Meerkat and these things do take time. And I didn’t kill him, Mary Kay. You love me so much that I don’t have to kill him. You chose to end it with him, and that’s why I’m lying low, why I just have to be patient and listen to you, to the sweet things you say to me all day. You’re selling your house and you’re talking to real estate agents and you’re using the D-word on a regular basis.
The irony is that Melanda was sort of right. We were holding each other back and who knows? If she never left… maybe I never would have gone through with a divorce.
I spoke to an attorney in the city. He thinks it’s gonna be quicker than that other woman I spoke to, and he had good candy.
I am yours and you brought me candy from the divorce attorney’s office and you left it in my backpack because once again, it’s a secret. All of it. Us. I pop the red-and-white old-school candy into my mouth and I don’t have a jacket—it’s getting warmer all the time, as if Mother Nature is so excited that she can’t sleep—and I head out the door and we have the night off—you have to see your Friends—but it’s a small island and I’m a restless man. With great sex comes energy so I go for a walk and I pass by Eleven and it’s not my fault that the place is all windows and it’s not my fault that our attraction is the invention of electricity and you see me. You catch my eye and wave and I wave and we don’t text—we are too good in person and we know what we have is special—so you have to wait until the next day to see me, to tell me what I did to you. You lean over your desk in your office.