Chapter 10
10
W e stared at one another for what felt like an eternity, daring the other to be the first to say whatever needed to be said between us. I was about to call a truce and ask him to leave the pool—let’s not forget we were in February and that’s technically also winter in perennially sunny SoCal—and go to my place. I was still craving a shower, a fuck, and a siesta, not necessarily in that order.
But, of course, as it was always the case with my and David’s story—and the reason why I had wanted to keep things as non-verbal as possible those last few months—he got a call. A work call.
In the past, he would have walked away from me under the pretense of not wanting to disturb me, even if I knew what he wanted was for me not to overhear his conversation. But he didn’t do it this time. He remained exactly where he’d been and answered his phone, a pained look of apology on his face.
“Hi. I’m sending it in the next hour, but it’s short and mostly speculative,” he said to who I assumed was his editor. “If we had more time, I’d prefer to wait. But I know we don’t.”
It had to be bad if David was thinking of bylining something he had qualified as speculative .
But every local, state, and national big outlet and minor blog had been reporting nonstop about Henry’s death since that morning. So even I understood that David would want to write something about it too. He’d been the reporter who had uncovered Dashing Henry and had gotten him canceled. David had probably had something, or a lot, to do with getting Henry finally fired. And he was there when the body was found.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have used that adjective...” he continued as if trying to make a point with his editor.
Did he look tense or frustrated? He was so annoyingly calm and balanced all the time that I hadn’t learned to recognize the signs of stress in him. He didn’t appreciate that and had probably added it to our extensive list of grievances and differences.
In my defense, it’s just so difficult to tell. He doesn’t sweat, he doesn’t fidget, he doesn’t pace restlessly. He doesn’t stutter, avoid eye contact, or become irritable. You can only tell he’s not happy by the clench of his jaw. And since I happen to be partial to his sharp jawline, sometimes I find myself not recognizing that he’s not trying to be sexy but mad.
I realized something must be wrong with David that afternoon when his jawline started looking sharper than Matt Bomer’s and Henry Cavill’s combined.
“I know I’m not impartial. Nobody expects me to be in this case. They want me to write about it precisely because I’m not impartial—and the body was found at my building.”
The blade from the fancy Japanese mandoline that my dad had gotten for me the previous Christmas looked duller than David’s mandibles at the moment, yet his voice was perfectly measured. I’d probably be screaming if I was in his situation—or simply not saying a word.
He hung up after that and I thought I perceived the slightest trace of frustration in his eyes.
“Everything okay?” I asked. For some reason, I wanted him to know I had perceived his unhappiness this time.
“My editor doesn’t think I should be writing about Dashing Henry’s death. He’s passing me for another reporter.”
“What? That’s bullshit!”
“I know. That’s why I’m going to ignore him and keep doing my job. There’s no way I’m not reporting this story.” I knew that, as a not-so-young-anymore reporter, he kept an inner checklist of grievances against past and present editors.
“What editor is that? John Diaz at the LA Gazette ?”
“Michael Townsend from the Los Angeles Voice ,” he said, referring to the Gazette ’s main competitor. “The Gazette fired me after the big Dashing Henry article, when the actor sued me and pretended he’d never coerced sexual favors from his staffers.”
“Right, I knew about the LA Gazette being done with you. I always thought they were a bunch of self-centered idiots,” I said.
“John Diaz is actually a nice guy. His hands were tied when they got rid of me.” I couldn’t avoid rolling my eyes. I’d never been a fan of Diaz, even though David adored him. Too many late-night deadlines, weekend assignments, and endless rounds of editions.
“So you’re working with the Voice now?” I asked.
If we’d been talking for the last few months, I wouldn’t have to ask such basic questions. Those were the kinds of things you were supposed to know about someone you... cared about. But we hadn’t been on speaking terms, and I’d been actively avoiding him online as well. Not only his social media but all of his writing. It reminded me too much of him.
“I’m only freelancing for the Voice ,” he said, and I thought he was about to tell me something else, but he didn’t because my cell phone rang.
Chances are that, if you phone me, your call will go straight to voicemail. Same happens with any other unknown number. Same with most of my friends and acquaintances, same with Victor, same with my agent even. I do pick up the phone at least half the times my dad calls because he’s threatened to write me out of the will if I don’t. My mother never calls—I’m told she’s a very busy woman—so that doesn’t count.
But there’s one person for whom I’m always telephonically available—unless I’m flying or seriously undisposed. She even gets her own personalized ringtone (Chvrches’ “The Mother We Share”): my little sister Marta.
And that was exactly the identity of the caller that wretched Thursday of February when me and David were still inexplicably by the swimming pool of the Eastern Columbia.
“It’s Marta,” I told him before picking up the call.
“I recognize the ringtone,” he said, and it dawned on me that we had so much history together, even if I wanted to keep pretending we didn’t.
“Hola,” I answered the call. Most of the conversations between me and my sister happen in the best kind of Spanglish. We always understand one another and never find strange the need to keep mixing languages.
“Oh, dios mío. ?Hola!” she said. “Are you okay? I saw there was a murder in your building!”
“News travels fast, but yes,” I said. “Estoy entera.”
“Oye, I don’t actually have time to talk right now,” she said. “I’m driving and my copyright law class starts in less than twenty minutes. ?Llego muy tarde!”
She’d come home from Berkeley the previous summer—to the relief of the whole family; we never understood the Northern California allure—to follow in my dad’s steps and study the same branch of law as him after a stint as a theater fellow at Berkeley Rep. She’d been temporarily living at my parents’ property since her return, and no one seemed to be pretending any longer that she wanted to find her own place and move out of their guest house.
I can’t blame her. My parents’ cabanita de la piscina is a 1,500 square feet bungalow outfitted with its own kitchen and full bathroom. It has a separate entrance, full access to the swimming pool and the main house’s cooking services—a.k.a. breakfast, lunch, and dinner are included and delicious—and is regularly cleaned and maintained.
If it wasn’t because I have this thing going with one of the residents at the Eastern Columbia—and I’m a mess to live with anyway, and my sister has expressed her desire never to share a house with me again—I’d probably move in with Marta.
“I’m calling because I overheard Mamá having a sneaky conversation when I went to the house to grab my merienda,” Marta continued, referring to her afternoon snack. She was twenty-four, had a Bachelor of Arts in Theater and Performing Studies, had been an exchange intern for a year at Teatre Lliure in Barcelona, and was currently enrolled in the law program at UCLA. But she could still sound like a little girl sometimes. “Mamá was meeting Victor and the whole PR crew over Zoom. Ha sido todo muy raro.”
“What do you mean raro?” I asked her.
“They’re having issues with the rogue councilmen again,” she said, referring to the two council members, with the same party affiliation as my mother, who’d been recently accused of having made sexist comments about one of their female colleagues from the opposite party. “There’s a new insensitive text message from one of them or something like that.”
“Okay, are you calling me to gossip about the latest city council telenovela occurrence?” I said, confused.
“Of course not, tonta.” I could hear her honking viciously. Marta was one hundred percent Californian mellow vibes in all but one thing: her driving instincts. She was all Mediterranean intensity when it came to her skills behind the wheel. “The PR peeps and Mamá don’t want any more headlines about dysfunctionality at city hall. They’re gonna leak to the LA Gazette the fact that the police are working under the assumption that David is Dashing Henry’s killer. They’re building a case against him.”
“What?” I yelled.
“David doesn’t have many friends at city hall. Everyone is still mad at him because of the article he wrote six months ago uncovering Henry just when they’d hired the actor to promote the city’s image,” Marta said. Just as David’s article was published, the whole of Los Angeles had been covered in billboards with Henry’s creepy face on them paired with the Los Angeles city logo. No wonder no one at city hall had a soft spot for my ex.
“They can’t throw David under the bus!” I protested. David looked at me and raised a questioning eyebrow. Did he really need to look so sexy while doing it?
“You know they don’t have many qualms when it comes to distracting the press. They hope that by giving them David’s story, they won’t give that much space or attention to the one about the council’s sexist members,” she said.
Even if I didn’t want to admit it, being the daughter of a politician, I understood the bizarre logic behind that way of acting.
“I need to go now,” my sister said.
“Okay. Talk later?”
“Yes. Will you do me a favor?” she asked. “Will you let David know about all this? He still has friends at the Gazette and maybe he can talk to them and get this stalled.”
“Why not let him know yourself?” I asked, even if David was currently in front of me and watching me with interrogating eyes. I was very aware that my sister still had David’s number memorized among her favorite contacts, and they kept in touch regularly. But I knew she’d called me and not him because she was looking for not-so-subtle ways of forcing me to get in touch with him.
“You do it,” she said.
As I hung up and looked at David, I was reminded of another moment in our past. A very different one. Probably the opposite circumstance to the one we presently found ourselves in.
It had been four years before. I had just gotten my job as a staff writer at LA Misconducts . He’d been offered a contractor position at the LA Gazette with the option of becoming a permanent staffer. It looked as if things had started working our way and we’d finally managed to figure out our careers. But, of course, that moment was actually the beginning of the end of our story together.