Fortunate Son

14

Eric sat up until late in the night holding his daughter and thinking about Raela. Christie loved him and so did Mona. He had fallen into this life as he had into everything else. He never made decisions — he didn’t have to. Everything came to Eric.

Raela was his first real challenge — that’s how he saw it. If he became friends with the child, she would own him, and his family would be destroyed. He knew this. But it didn’t have to happen. All he had to do was commit himself to the life he was living. This commitment would save his girlfriend and daughter, and make him a part of the world. He would be like other people who had to deny themselves in order to survive.

At three in the morning he brought Mona inside and put her in her bed. Then he went to his bedroom and gently shook Christie by the shoulder.

She came awake with a start.

“What’s wrong? What?”

“I wanted to ask you something.”

“What?” she asked, the fear still deeply rooted in her voice.

“Do you still love me?”

She hesitated.

“Why are you waking me up in the middle of the night to ask me that?” she said. Then, noticing that he was dressed, “Haven’t you been to bed?”

“I’ve been awake,” he said, “thinking about you.”

“Me? What about me?”

“I want you to marry me.”

Christie gasped. “What?”

“Marry me. We’re already parents together. We need to work right together.”

Christie slapped Eric across the face hard enough to turn his head. When he turned back, she slapped him again.

“How dare you,” she said, seething.

“What? I thought you wanted this?”

“I do. I did. But I gave up. You were here, but not the way I wanted you. I loved you, and all you ever did was care in return. You never laughed out loud or ran to me or got mad and walked out. You never got jealous when men would stare. You weren’t even upset when you found Drew here sitting with me after you’d been gone for days.”

“You’re friends,” Eric said with a sheepish smile. “I didn’t think women liked men to be jealous.”

“But you shouldn’t take us for granted,” she said in a voice loud enough to fill a small auditorium.

“I do care. I love you. I want you to marry me.”

Christie was fully awake now. Her violet, reddened eyes were wide with something like rage. She was shaking, but when Eric reached out to calm her she pushed him away.

“What are you?” she said. “How dare you.”

“I don’t understand, Christie. I’m sorry.”

She would not cry. She would not.

She got up from the bed and dressed quickly in pants and a T-shirt, putting on no underwear.

“I’m going away for a while,” she told Eric, holding back the rage.

“When will you be back?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Today?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right. If that’s what you have to do.”

“It is. I’m going,” she said, and she was out of the apartment in less than a minute.

Christie drove toward the desert, finally able to cry now that she was behind the wheel and sealed in her car. She turned the radio on and then off. She took out her cell phone, entered a number, then disconnected before the call engaged. She turned on the radio again, turned it off again. She put a CD into the player. It was an old collection, one she had bought for her mother, Mary McCaslin’s Way Out West. When the sweet, high voice began to sing her cowboy complaints, Christie calmed down enough to wend toward depression.

Drew wasn’t visiting from back East. He’d dropped out of school and come back to L.A. a year before. He called her when Eric wasn’t home and begged her to come back to him. Her departure from his life, it seemed, left a wound that would not heal.

She still liked Drew. She cared for him. But after months of his begging and after years of Eric’s cool detachment, she couldn’t take any more. So when Eric went away to keep from getting Mona sick (as if, she thought, his germs were deadlier than other people’s), Christie said okay when Drew wanted to come over. She said to herself that she merely wanted company, to have her own life. Maybe they would have dinner and talk about old times, she had thought. Her mother had wanted to spend time with Mona, and so Christie packed her an overnight bag.

Drew tried to kiss her at the front door, but she pushed him away and said that if he did that again he’d have to leave. She meant that. He apologized nicely, and they sat down on separate chairs in the living room in front of the window that looked out over Santa Monica.

They started out talking about his paintings. There was a gallery in San Jose interested in showing two canvases. They were paintings of Christie the way he remembered her when they’d gone to Catalina Island for the weekend once. They were nudes. He’d love to show them to her. To him she had always been the ideal of beauty. He loved her then and he still did. He dreamed about her; he told her he dated women who looked like her. He had dropped out of school to be near her.

“I love only you,” he said at last.

Her anger at Eric and the pathetic bleating of Drew came together in Christie’s brow.

“It has nothing to do with you, Drew,” she said, affecting a gentle tone. “It’s just that...”

“What?”

“It’s just that Eric is so wonderful.” She felt a perverse satisfaction seeing the pain entering Drew’s face. “It’s not just that I love him, but he’s got everything a woman could want in a man. That day he beat you on the tennis court I called him. We went for a drive, and I told him that I loved you and I wanted to be just friends. But he took me in the backseat and made love to me until I was completely his. I didn’t even want to be with him, but he made himself my man.”

The tears flowing from Drew’s eyes were a balm for Christie’s ragged heart. She loved hurting Drew, but at the same time she told herself that it was for his own good.

“Stop,” he said.

“From that first night, we got together whenever I could get away from you,” she continued. “You remember that stain on the roof of my car? That was Eric. His dick is the biggest thing I’ve ever seen, and when he came it was so hard that I could feel it inside.”

“Stop, Christie.”

“You can leave whenever you want, Drew. You’re telling me how much you love me. I’m just telling you how I feel.” She expected him to jump to his feet and run from the apartment. She wanted to make him run, to feel the pain that she felt. She realized that she really did blame him for not being man enough to keep her.

But when he did stand up, it was only so that he could fall to his knees and press his face against her skirted lap.

“Why are you doing this?” came his muffled cry.

“You’re always calling me,” she said in the same removed tone Eric used when he told her he loved her. “Telling me how you feel. But I’m not the person you think I am. That whole summer after we graduated, I fucked Eric every day. Sometimes I’d be with him and then come to be with you for a while, and then I’d go back and Eric would fuck me again. I didn’t want to be with him, but I couldn’t help it. I had to go. And I didn’t care about what I was doing to you...”

As she spoke, her voice became a whisper; she leaned over him and her skirt slowly rose from the movement of him shaking his head, trying to deny her words.

“You wanted me to kiss your dick, and when I finally did you didn’t know that I had been doing Eric like that since the first night in my car. He didn’t ask me if I would, he just shoved it into my mouth and held my head so I couldn’t move.”

Drew slammed the arm of the chair with his fist.

“No!”

Christie realized that there was a new person coming out of her. She’d never talked like this, never tortured anyone like this. She felt Drew’s hands on her naked thighs and she liked it.

When he looked up at her she said, “Put your head back down.”

“When my parents were gone he came to my house,” she continued. “When you called on the phone I was in the bed with him. When I answered sometimes I was licking his cock while you went on and on about Yale and what you would do there.”

That was when Drew pushed her panties aside and pressed the flat of his tongue against her clitoris.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Once... once he came in my mouth while you were asking what kind of tux you should wear to the prom.”

Some of the things she told him were true, others the product of her imagination. When he tore off his clothes and fell on top of her she whispered, “And he has a really big dick and he could fuck for hours before he’d come. He’d have me coming again and again and begging him to come for me.”

This last part was too much for Drew. His orgasm was a painful, wrenching thing. He pounded so hard against her that one of the legs of the chair broke. She laughed and he kept pounding. She knew that he was past feeling it but didn’t ask him to stop. And he didn’t stop. He kept going until he found the feeling and came again.

And when he was finished and lay beside her on the floor, she asked, “Why didn’t you do me like that when you had a chance to keep me?”

Christie called and asked her grandmother to keep Mona for the next three days.

Drew suggested that they go into the bedroom, but Christie said, “No, that’s his bed,” and sneered as if daring Drew to respond. He dragged her in and mounted her from behind.

“Did he do it like this?” he asked.

She nodded, half in ecstasy, and said, “Only his was much longer and thicker, and when he did it he fucked my ass.”

All that night and for the next three days they made love like feral cats. Christie didn’t say one kind word in the first forty-eight hours. It wasn’t until the third day that she admitted that there were things she liked more about Drew than Eric. But even then she said that she was with Eric now and Drew should move on to someone new.

They slapped each other, pulled hair, and had deep orgasms that Christie never knew were possible. Drew had brought out an angry passion that fed on itself in the ex-cheerleader’s secret heart. She tied him facedown to the four-poster bed with an arm and a leg attached to each corner. Then she got the Vaseline and a thick and muddy, blunt-tipped carrot from the farmer’s market. He screamed when she drove half the length of the root into his rectum.

“Stop it!” he cried, flailing around, trying to get free.

She didn’t remove it, only brought her lips to his ear and said, “Do you want me?”

He went still and nodded his head.

“Then you have to take it all the way,” she said.

She pressed the full length in and then left the room to have her private orgasm on the couch outside.

She untied him an hour later and told him that she’d be his. They’d take Mona and move to Connecticut. Eric wouldn’t mind. She really didn’t think he would. He didn’t love like other people did. There was something wrong with him. He couldn’t get close.

But now, as she entered the Palm Desert with the sun rising and shining through the red blooming ocotillos, Christie understood that Eric really did want her. He wanted to marry her and live together forever. He woke her in the middle of the night, as beautiful then as he had been on that tennis court years before. All of her anger disappeared in the morning, and she knew that she’d never leave Eric for Drew. All of that sweating and swearing, that wild abandon, was just a short phase, a transition, a shoehorn to help her slip into her real life.

It was on the fourth day that Eric walked in on them. Mona had gotten back that afternoon. Christie and Drew were making plans to leave. She was to meet Drew the very next day — today — at two. He would have bought tickets for her and him and Mona. They would fly to New York City, where they’d be married and begin a real life.

But Christie wouldn’t be going to his house in Laurel Canyon, she knew that now. Drew had always been her backup, her second choice.

She had never let him be a man. He would never be a man while he was with her or even just thinking about her. Eric was her man. That’s all there was to it.

“Eric Tanner Nolan,” Thomas said into the receiver.

“N-O-L-A-N?” the information operator asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“I have an ET Nolan on Wilshire. Hold for that number.”

After getting the number Thomas was afraid to call.

What if Eric didn’t remember him or if he didn’t answer the phone? What if Eric did answer and told Thomas not to call anymore?

Thomas felt that this was his last chance, that he hadn’t so much been wandering as looking for his brother, his lost life. He couldn’t let that hope rely on the chance of a single phone call.

The phone stall didn’t have a phone book. Thomas went down street after street looking for another phone with the white pages book. It was at the sixteenth booth that he found what he wanted. He looked up ET Nolan’s address on Wilshire Boulevard. It was a five-mile walk, but Thomas didn’t know that — and even if he had known, it wouldn’t have made a difference. He felt that he had been walking for a lifetime trying to get back to his brother: up and down his alley valley, down on his knees, walking from one drug addict to another, through the juvenile system, and finally behind this wire cart that he’d patched and repaired again and again until it resembled him — scarred and shambling down the streets of Los Angeles.

That was on the afternoon of the day that Christie drove to the desert.

On her ride back she called Drew.

“Hello,” Drew answered brightly.

“I can’t go with you,” she said in a rush. “I’ve decided that I have to make it work with Eric. Good-bye, Drew. I’m sorry.”

“Wait. Wait. Don’t get off.”

“There’s nothing to talk about, Drew. I’m sorry.”

“But why? What happened? I love you.”

“What we were doing wasn’t love,” she said. “It was pain and anger. It was trying to get a feeling back.”

“I feel it,” he said.

“I’m not coming.”

“I bought nonrefundable tickets,” he cried.

“Good-bye, Drew,” Christie said. She disconnected the call and then turned off the phone.

As Thomas walked up the incline toward Wilshire, there was a strong Santa Ana wind blowing. He felt this as an invisible force pushing against him, trying to keep him from reaching his brother. He smiled, knowing that he was fighting against his own ill fortune in the attempt to reach Eric. He felt like a hero pushing that heavy cart with two dead wheels up the rough asphalt street.

The police stopped him on San Vicente.

“It’s against the law to push that cart in the street, Bruno,” the officer said. He was a large white man with a name tag that read PITTMAN.

“I was staying off the sidewalk, officer,” Thomas replied. “Because I thought that maybe I’d get in someone’s way with this big thing.”

“He’s right about that, Pitt,” a Hispanic man, Rodriguez, said with a joking smile.

“What are you doing here, Bruno?” Pittman asked Thomas.

“I’m going to see my brother, Eric.”

“He a bum too?”

“Street person,” the other cop corrected with a smirk on his lips.

“He’s a doctor’s son,” Thomas replied. “We got the same mother. I called him, and he said he’d help me out.”

Officer Pittman stared at Thomas for what seemed like a long time. It was as if the policeman was trying to make up his mind about what his next action should be. He sniffed the air, and Thomas realized that he must have smelled. He knew that sometimes street people smelled bad to straights when they didn’t know it. He wondered if Eric would turn up his nose and walk away.

“It’s three o’clock,” Rodriguez said, pointing to his wristwatch. “It’ll take two hours to process this dude.”

Still Pittman speculated on Thomas. Under that pale-skinned crew cut, the policeman scowled as if there was something important about this roust.

“Come on, man,” Rodriguez said. “He ain’t messin’ with nobody.”

“You got a knife in there, Bruno?”

“No, officer.”

“What about pills? You got pills or pot?”

Thomas thought about the phrase a pot to piss in, but he didn’t try to bring it to voice. He shook his head, wondering why this man was so interested in him.

“I got books,” Thomas offered as if he were a salesman and Pittman a potential customer.

Something about this answer brought a sour twist to Pittman’s lips. For a moment Thomas thought the man might spit on him.

“Get the fuck outta here,” the peace officer said.

A minute later, cops nearly forgotten, Thomas was once again pressing against the invisible force of the wind.

An hour afterward he reached the Tennyson, the building in which the man who bore his brother’s initials lived. He stopped out front, looking up at the huge edifice of glass and steel. It didn’t look like a home. It didn’t remind Thomas of his childhood friend and brother. Now that he was there, he didn’t know what to do. There was a doorman in the lobby. He wouldn’t let Thomas just walk in. And a doorman announcing his name would be even worse than a phone call.

So Thomas sat down on the curb looking up at the tower. He decided that he could wait awhile, and maybe, if he was lucky, Eric would come out of that rotating door and into his brother’s arms.

Patrolmen Pittman and Rodriguez had just stopped at their favorite coffee spot. Rodriguez ordered a dark-roast coffee and Pittman a grande Frappucino made with skim milk, caramel syrup, and chocolate chips. It was their 4:45 lunch hour, and so they sat down and turned their radios to “emergency calls only.”

Christie was at home by then. She had told Eric that she would marry him, and they were already making plans for the wedding. The long separation from her father would be over. Minas Nolan and Ahn would certainly come. Eric had wondered if he could somehow find Thomas and share with him his new life of personal denial. Tommy would understand how much Eric was giving up. Tommy understood everything subtle and emotional.

Distraught Drew had gone to his father’s house, completely lost in his grief. He’d never known such pain before. Those three days with Christie were what he’d yearned for all these years. She was his for those hours, but the moment he took his eyes off her she was lost to him again. His heart clenched into a fist, and everything he’d ever learned or loved sank into the cold ocean of his chest.

Thomas’s thoughts drifted as he sat there. At first he had been nervous about seeing Eric, but now he was visited by a feeling of quiet elation. These moments that he spent waiting were exquisite in their own way — perfect weather, with birds arcing through the sky and people walking and talking up and down the boulevard. It was one of those beautiful instants that get past you if you don’t look. But Thomas was looking. He had nowhere to go and everything to hope for.

While Thomas was having these thoughts, a purple Chrysler drove up and a tall young man climbed out. There was a dark cast to his face and a pained grimace in his expression.

Eric, Christie, and Mona had just gotten into the elevator on the twenty-fifth floor, going down to the street for a walk to the pizza restaurant that Mona loved.

Pittman and Rodriguez were finishing their coffees and ham sandwiches and thinking about going back on the prowl.

Drew stood not six feet from Thomas. After first glances, neither paid heed to the other.

The policemen were in the street, not a block from the Tennyson.

Eric and Christie and Mona entered the lobby. When Thomas saw Eric he stood up and smiled. He would wait patiently for his brother to come out.

Mona dashed for the revolving door, obviously ecstatic about their adventure. Christie came in the next partition, watching after the child and glowing. Eric came last. Just when he was sealed within the glass quarter section, Drew grabbed Thomas’s cart and shoved it into the aperture that Christie had just left.

“Hey, man!” Thomas grabbed Drew by the shoulder, but with a sweep of his arm the tall young man knocked Thomas to the ground.

He took out his father’s Luger, and Christie screamed.

This wasn’t how Drew had it planned. He didn’t want to confront Christie on the street. He wanted to follow Eric to a quiet place and kill him. Kill him and maybe later he could console Christie, take her away to rest. He would be the shoulder she could cry on. But seeing her he was overcome by unexpected hatred. All those things she said that excited him so much in bed now had other meanings. She had cheated on him, made him into a fool. Made love to Eric while telling him a hundred lies.

“Drew!” Christie shouted, and he hated her even more.

The pistol rose of its own accord. Drew didn’t hear the shot, only saw the young mother convulse. He fired three more times, and Christie was down.

Eric shouted and strained against the thick glass.

The child ran for her mother as Drew leveled the gun at her.

Thomas leaped through the air shouting, “Lily!” and he pulled Mona down, wrapping his skinny body around her.

The policemen were running by then.

Drew realized what he had done, but he couldn’t stop his arm and hand from aiming and firing.

Thomas felt each bullet enter his back. He counted them — one, two, three. And then he heard firecrackers and yelling. The child was the loudest, shouting for her mother. Then came Eric with that booming voice Thomas remembered from childhood. And then the darkness he’d known since the death of his mother began to brighten. It got lighter and lighter until all there was was light — no details or shadows, just pure light and then nothing at all.