Chapter 37 #2
He says you don’t love him and he says he doesn’t love you, and I get in his face. I make direct fucking eye contact, Frascatore-in-the-guidance-office level of direct.
“If you realize you’re the luckiest man alive, you walk out of here and you get the only thing that matters. You get the girl.”
His eyes aren’t eyes. They’re TVs in Poltergeist. “Joe, you need help.”
“You did it, Dick. You used me as a jealousy trap and it…it worked. She’s yours.”
He sticks his tongue out and laughs and you think I’m the child? I smack him.
“Dick, come on. Guy to guy. We know the deal. Love is the path to glory. If you would get with Vail for real…Harvey Weinstein would probably show up on your doorstep the next fucking day. The right girl, the girl who chooses you no matter what you do…You get that girl and everything falls into place…. Women make men, Dick. Literally.”
For a minute there, I think I got him. But then he wants more crack.
A movie, even an indie, takes years to come together and every baby, even those nowhere Serendipity brats in their Polo shirts who are gonna end up doing the same thing as their dull dads, every baby needs months in the womb before coming into the warehouse of the world.
Life is precious. And the man you love is throwing it away to avoid being with you.
That wannabe Shining grin again and I can’t believe you love him. “This shit is good.”
I rub my forehead. The fumes. The pain. “So, I took her to Serendipity.”
“To what?”
Idiot. “We went to this place we’ve always wanted to go and we were happy. I mean, to me, that was us at our best. But then she left me. She left me to go call you. Do you know how that feels? You’ve got a hold on her and you don’t care.”
He laughs. I don’t. He’s not a boy, not yet a man, and I feel older than him, wiser. Like Britney at the end of Crossroads. He barks: “Gimme that rock.”
Two hits of crack and it’s rock. I load his pipe.
“And you’re so lucky, Dick. You’re so fucking lucky that she hangs on to you, and you…
Do you know what I would do to have her love me like that?
Do you get that I actually…I meant every fucking word I ever said to you.
And you had her, you could have her right now, and I’m not that guy who is gonna blame it on her.
I am not that guy who says, ‘If I can’t have her, nobody can.
’ I am not a fucking sicko and I would never help you hurt her and… Can’t you just be good to her?”
He licks the bulb of the pipe and I am trembling.
On the edge of the cliff. No one pushed me.
I slide off the mountain and my fingertips are raw.
I meant what I said. I would let him have you and I would let you have him and is that what love is?
You above me. Him above me. Everyone above me on their feet while I grope falling rocks and hold on for dear life?
I see it now. He’s gonna have his come-to-Jesus moment and I’m gonna let him out of here and the two of you are gonna make babies and rub it in my face and I’m gonna have to move to old Honolulu, San Francisco, or Ashta-fucking-bula.
“Wowza,” he says. “I can’t believe I’ve been wasting my fucking life.”
There it is; he wants you. I am gonna lose you, I really am. “Okay then.”
“Fuck cocaine, Goldberg. Gimme that rock.”
I can’t do it, Vail. I can’t spend the rest of my life knowing that I was the one who brought this dead phantom dick back to life and let him wrap you around his finger.
I can’t let you linger unloved and caged as you and Dick mimic the soap opera that is your sad-sack S I don’t need a gun.
I watch him go white. Didn’t know eyeballs could sweat like that.
I see it in his neck. He was right! Blue and red.
This is the rock that no paper can cover up.
This is the blow that ends him and saves you and there is fire in his face.
Smoke snaking through his lungs, pulling them in tighter.
His eyes are not on the same head. Bubbles in the sky above the schoolyard.
I can’t catch them, can’t see them. He’s the kind of asshole who will probably get to hell and cry to all the pretty dead girls about his tragic suicide at twenty-five.
That’s what liars do. They lie to themselves first, to practice for all the lies they tell The Others.
I bend over his body—it’s a body now, he is going going gone—and I know the truth.
I know it when I dig his wallet out of his back pocket.
Richard Arnold Palmer didn’t overdose and wasn’t a fucking accident. I killed him. I broke his dickhead heart.
And I did it for you.
It is quiet. I expected something dramatic.
I thought the world would explode or something.
And that’s stupid, right? People die every day.
I wait to feel heavy or hardened. I’m supposed to be a changed man.
That’s how it works, right? A solider is never the same after the first kill. But I’m not like that, I guess.
I feel…the same.
I was testing him, rescuing you, but now that he’s gone I can admit it.
I did this for me too, Vail. I wanted to know the depth of my devotion.
Would I still kill to be in his shoes if he was dead…
if being the one you love meant getting killed in a warehouse?
Losing out on a future, a life? Would I, you know, die if that would make you love me?
I stand over his dead body and I’m sure of two things.
First, there was only one way to find out. Second, the answer is yes, Vail.
Yes, I fucking would.