Chapter 11
Angus’s Heinie…is crowding my icebox, and I wonder if I’ll ever see Mooney again, or my dad, the real one who doesn’t know where I live.
I am lost. You are lost. Out in the night alone.
You thought you’d be watching your sitcom with your hot new boyfriend, but I fucked up, royally, and Angus digs a couple of Heinies out of the TV stand.
He opens one of the bottles with his teeth and spits the cap on the floor.
I won’t give up on us. You’re gone to God knows where and the thing with feathers is dying, but it ain’t dead yet. There is hope.
You winked.
I hold on to my Nokia, the actual lifeboat, my only connection to you. “I should probably check on Vail.”
“Why? She’s a big girl…. Actually, no, she’s pretty short.”
THE WORD IS PETITE, YOU FUCKWAD, and he pours cocaine on the jewel case and sighs. “Did I ever tell you about my ex? Kelly Damon. Demon. Now she was something…. Dead ringer for Carolyn Bessette.”
No time for this shit. It’s my turn to save you.
But Angus is getting higher by the second, replacing the Frampton CD with Purple Rain.
He kicks at invisible Kelly Demons and I could make a run for it, but I can’t do that because of his fucking gun.
I need to keep my job at Mooney’s. I need to get my own fucking apartment, my own fucking butter and leather.
On this goes for what feels like hours, Angus retelling his self-aggrandizing fake fucking tragedy while I sit in a wingback chair pretending to sip my Heinie that isn’t even open.
I have to call you. I need to know you’re safe and I need to hear your voice before you tell Cynthia about this fiasco or some nightcrawler sinks his teeth into your skin and tears off your tights. Mine.
“Jacob,” he snaps.
What choice do I have? I answer. “What’s up, Angus?”
He tosses a first edition of Beloved into the fireplace. That’s Toni Fucking Morrison and could I steal the gun and kill him? No. I can’t even kill the mice that sneak into the fucking shop. I squirm. I suck. Will I ever feel your lips again?
“Angus, I gotta take a leak.”
Normally, he says to piss in the fireplace, and usually, I’m okay to hold it.
I don’t want to catch a disease off the toilet, the hand towels, the air.
But he’s in outer space, trying to bite his toenails.
I rise out of the chair while he thrashes like a fish that just turned into a human, and I’m down the hall.
I close the bathroom door and I call you and it rings.
Is it over? Are we dead?
Then…“Joe?”
There is noise in the background. Life. Men. “Vail, thank God. Are you okay?”
You laugh and you’ve had a drink, maybe two. “I’m great. I met up with Cynthia at Jake’s Dilemma and I ran into a friend….”
Is that friend a guy? Does he have a dick? You drop your phone and thank a guy for picking it up and my Portnoy didn’t like that, and you groan. “Fuck.”
“Vail, are you okay? I’m getting out of here any second….”
“Babe! I’m so dumb.”
“You are not.”
“No, I mean…I left my scarf. It’s red…I think. Or maybe I didn’t wear it? Omigod, I’m so fucked up…. I can’t do shots. Or cosmos…” A man calls out to you. Gundylocks! From the sound of it, you tell him to shhh. And then you come back to me. “Anyway, grab it if you see it!”
The end.
Hearing your voice did wonders for me, even though you were drunk.
I see the positives now. I didn’t steal anything, and you’re not physically hurt.
You’re self-medicating; that’s natural. And you didn’t send me to voicemail.
You still want me. You got out. You used your feminine wiles.
I don’t have those—I don’t think guys have wiles—but I have other stuff.
I splash cold water on my face and slap my cheeks the way you slap a new baby’s ass.
I will get your scarf and there will be frozen hot chocolate. And sex.
I return to the living room, and there he is, fucking floating in our leather and our butter as he picks at a Band-Aid on his nipple.
I ditch my Heinie on the coffee table and scan the room for your scarf. “So, Angus, my man, I’m gonna head out.”
He laughs and picks at another Band-Aid on his belly. “She’s not even hot, Joe.”
Now he knows my name, and I grunt. “Angus, buddy, I’m sorry, but I really gotta split.”
“Aw, the boy said he’s sorry.”
I don’t want to die in here—the smoke, the farts—and Angus picks up his pipe. “You don’t get it,” he sneers. “You’re not the victim, Jamie. I’m the victim.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake, and I bob my ’70s head. “You’re right. And I’m sorry.”
He trades his gun for a lighter and poof. More smoke. I don’t know how he does it, how he stays the fuck alive. Worse still, the idea of you at Jake’s without me. Who was calling you Gundylocks?
Angus peels off the Band-Aid on his nipple. He chews on it. “I have cameras, Joe. All buildings like this…you might not know this, but they have cameras.”
That’s a threat, and could I do it? Could I pick up the gun and shoot him? Cut him up in pieces and toss him in the fireplace? If you could see me, if you knew what I was thinking, would you still want me to rescue your scarf?
“See,” he says. “I bet you’ve never been to therapy.”
It’s more expensive than Spain and Costa Rica. “Not yet.”
“Well, my mother made me go to sailing camp, Jerry. Can you imagine that? A kid like me…a certified genius learning to tie knots like some…” He shakes his fat head, and I can’t kill him.
If I blew his brains out, his mother who hates him would come back to life like a zombie in pearls just to preserve the family image.
She would find his killer and hire someone to write some ridiculous obituary about how much her precious, sensitive son loved to sail.
“It’s the doves. Do you hear them, Jack? ”
I hear them. I pray for them.
“I’m just like my mother,” he says. “And I’m just like my father too…. Did I ever tell you what he said about my first novel….”
It’s not a novel if you don’t finish writing it, and time is passing.
You are out there, in the wild, and Angus moves in a circle, from his mother to Kelly Demon, back to his mother.
The doves aren’t helping, the way they peter out and then return, unknowingly egging him on.
He swats at them, at his mother, at his father, at all his Kelly Demons, but he won’t be alone.
I can’t lose you because of him. I have to kill the doves.
Distract him. He lights a Marlboro Red that he found in the butter and the leather, and he wants something from me, but I don’t have wiles or drugs or money and then it hits me…
. Franzen. Sometimes you lie so much that you forget you’re lying.
I always tell Angus what Mooney wants me to tell him, that we don’t have a galley of The Twenty-Seventh City.
But we do. And it’s the white whale, the one he sees as the reason he never finished his own fucking opus.
I cut him off in the middle of some sob story about his dad’s Porsches. “Hey, did I tell you we got a galley of The Twenty-Seventh City?”
He drops his cigarette on the shag carpet and plants his bare foot on the butt. Sizzling skin. No pain, yet no gain, literally. “A galley? Are you sure, Jerry?”
I got him, Vail, hook, line, and sinker. You would be proud of me, Mama, and he’s rolling a joint (it’s not crack, yay!) and I’m kicking the gun under the coffee table. Safe.
“See,” I begin. “Truth is, I was telling my girlfriend how that galley is the reason we don’t have your novel….” Feed the ego, stuff it. “She worships your ex, Carolyn Bessette, and she wanted to see your place….”
“And drink my wine….”
I laugh like the Cusack to his Piven and let that one slide. Eyes on the prize. “Ain’t that the way? Anyway, like I said, we’re buddies, yeah?”
“Course,” he says. He offers me a warm new Heinie. A can this time. “Buddies.”
I take the Heinie and pop it. I tell him the good news again, so it doesn’t fall through the crack pipe.
“I wanted you to be the first to know, buddy. Before Mooney lists it. We have a signed galley of The Twenty-Seventh City. And unlike Mooney…Angus, come on. How many times have we hung out in here? I’ll sell you the book.
You know me. You know I don’t give a fuck what you do with the books. ”
The weird thing is, it’s true, Vail. I really don’t care about the galley.
You come first—that happened fast—and what’s a thought compared to a feeling?
What’s a galley compared to a girl? I barely know you, but already I give a little bit less of a fuck about the world.
Already I know that I would and will do anything for you.
Angus rubs his belly. “I like a fire.”
I’d like to set him on fire, and I smile. “So, let’s do it. Let me sell you the white whale.”
“Impossible. Mooney would never sell me that galley.”
“Fuck Mooney. We do this on our own. Just you and me and the big white whale.”
“Correction,” he says. “ ‘You and I and the big white whale.’ ”
I guess I’m no different from all the girls who don’t like to be corrected, and I nod.
“Well, this is aces, Jimbo. Actual aces.”
Only assholes say aces, and I sip from my can of warm Dutch urine. I wish I’d brought a toothbrush, but I didn’t. “Aces,” I say. “And you know the drill. Cash or check. Twenty-four hundred bucks.”
He takes a deep pull on that joint and rubs his stomach and why is there a Band-Aid on his belly button? He pulls a scarf out of the sofa. Red. Yours. He ties it around his neck in this way where you know he will never love or be loved.
“So,” he says. “How you gonna do it?”
I’ll rip that scarf out of his cold dead hands. “Don’t worry about Mooney. I got him.”
“No,” he says. “How are you gonna get the money?”
He must be high. Dazed and Confused. “I’m not the one buying it…” I remind him.
But he’s not laughing, Vail. He’s staring at me, smelling your scarf and licking your scarf. “Wait,” he says. “You think I’m going to pay for the galley?”