Tom Sample sits on a bar stool with his legs crossed in European style, left knee over right. Around him, local suburban hipsters in blazers and dreadlocks and pricey shoes chat in the glow of candles that adorn the tables. There is little ambient lighting, and a dim orange glow gives the room a sepia monochrome. Tom is pretending to glance at nothing, but allowing himself brief glimpses at a girl with long, curly hair, ink-black in the dim light of the bar. She sits cross-legged on a wooden chair across the room, chatting with another girl who is comparatively plain. Tom believes that girls like these two form a closed loop when they talk"a barrier to male intrusion. This is Tom’s milieu (he might tell you)"disseminating the motives and vulnerabilities of women. Like most men who believe that they’ve swiped a page from the Secret Tome of Woman, he is mostly ill-informed, or just plain wrong. He waits and watches and steals looks, alternating between the window to her right and the mirror by the patio door, so as to offer a stoic and (so he imagines) mysterious profile. He sips his drink: scotch rocks, which he doesn’t have an affinity for, but finds aesthetic value in. She hasn’t looked his way. With his tumbler in hand and tight black tee shirt, Tom imagines himself through her eyes: slim, urbane, primal. The fantasy lasts only an instant, but he lives for such moments.
“Someone sitting here?” The guy is already clutching the empty stool next to Tom’s. D********g. He is probably no more than twenty-one, with black hair strewn across his forehead and down over his brow.
“No.” Tom picks up his glass, holds it in front of him like a shield, and stares at it until the obnoxious emo lad has dragged the stool away. A hand slides across Tom’s shoulder, accompanied by the cloying reek of cigarette. Tom turns to meet the eyes of Jenn. She is the reason for Tom’s presence here. Really, Jenn is the motive behind everything from Tom’s black jeans to his apartment’s color scheme. Tom is love-struck, and it is unrequited.
“Hey.” She is smiling, but her eyes have drifted away to scan the room. Jenn is strawberry blond, her cut short and springy with the promise of voluminous curls if freed to grow. She is fair, with translucent skin that reveals hints of veins and arteries everywhere, like vines under milky glass. Her hand is resting on a bony hip. The hand, slender and yet worn beyond her years, holds a mystic allure perched as it is beneath the exposed sliver of her abdomen. Tom is transfixed.
“Anyone else here?” She is still looking away, head shifting bird-like, eyes boring into the dim corners of the room. Tom’s spell is broken, and he looks up.
“Just me. How’s it going? I had this amazing discussion with my professor today. He was--“
“What? What are you drinking? Is that scotch? Nasty. I thought you were on a wine kick? I need some wine.” She shifts to focus on the bartender, her hand sliding from hip to pocket. She arches back slightly, as her hand squeezes into the tight opening, and Tom drops his eyes to the exposed abdomen.
Her skin is the color of a low-slung moon in the muted light. He has slept side-by-side with Jenn, but has never touched her at such times. They kissed once, early on, and she has refused him ever since. Mingling scotch and Zoloft frolic in Tom’s frontal lobes, painting a scene in his mind. It is a rerun of an oft-played movie. Her naked back lying next to him, vertebrae revealing a gentle sinuous curve. The tiny hooks that clasp her bra, how they pull and relax with her soft breathing. The scallop above the delicate rim of her panties, and the fine white hairs that inhabit this shadowed region. In the vision, he reaches out his arms, and she turns. Always, she turns, and looks directly into his eyes as he embraces her.
“I’m going to Barcelona. In June.” She sips red wine and flicks her gaze at Tom over the rim. When she meets his eyes, it is to him like a promise fulfilled. She lowers the glass.
“Wanna come?”
* * *
Later, Tom steps off the elevator, and it is as if he has just woken. He walks down the hall, not staggering exactly, but with the meandering, serpentine stroll of a child alone. Once in his apartment, he makes a last, concerted effort to overcome the effect of the scotch that has reached his cerebellum. Tom lurches to the couch, and collapses. In the few moments it takes to reach the understanding that he will not vomit, Tom is reaching for some concrete memory of the evening. He remembers the bar, and Jenn, and a gulf of darkness that feels orange. Where is Jenn? Did he drive home? Is everything okay?
Pieces drift into view, in reverse. The elevator, the black shine of the swinging car door, the herd of bodies under the glare of a streetlight, and Jenn. She had hugged him, hair swinging into his face, breast pressing into his shoulder, and walked away. For a long moment, Tom tries to remember more of her and of their time together. She had said something, about someplace. He can smell the cigarette smoke in her hair, feel the arm on his back, but only the embrace is clear to his memory. And the look. Over her shoulder as she walked away. Not at him, though, but just past him, as though he’d disappeared the minute she walked away, and she was glancing in the approximate space he’d filled. Tom suddenly becomes aware of himself, splayed out on the couch. Boots. He really wants his boots off. They seem so distant, like his body is stretched out over an acre. He considers the prospect, and his mother springs to mind. Not the mother he sees every other Christmas and Thanksgiving. Not the woman who has a new family and an old face, but that old, Polaroid version. Mom, from when things were good, from before the divorce.
They were on vacation on Cape Cod in that ridiculous, egg-shaped camper. Little gnarled pine trees were everywhere"they looked like stage props with the x-shaped bases hidden beneath a bed of soft brown needles that covered the ground. How did the pines grow up out of sand? Tom was maybe ten years old, and his parents were probably around his current age. He sees her now against that backdrop, this Polaroid mother, in a big grey sweatshirt with a little Playboy bunny on the chest. Her ponytail swings as she descends the creaky metal step of the camper, and she is smiling at Tom, nose wrinkling at the bridge. She points at his boots.
“Tie those. We’re going to the dunes today!”
Tom remembers the tan leather of the boots, the red stripes on his socks sticking out over the tops, the slippery plastic feel of the laces. He remembers Mom (this fresh, radiant Mom) walking away as his father emerges from the camper"the smile they exchange"the soft crunch of the needles under her sneakers. He stretches and makes an outrageous roaring sound, then drops his arms and grins. She looks back then, over her shoulder at Tommy, and in her eye is soft warmth that envelops him like summer sun. It is just a quick, over-the-shoulder glance, but it is all he needs.
Tom falls asleep in his heavy black boots.
* * *
Tom sits in the opulence of his father’s office, a bug pinned to velvet. His hands look anemic against the red meat of the leather chair, and his fingers drum staccato misery. In front of him, Tom’s father sits stock straight at his desk"sleeves of his white shirt rolled over hairy slabs of forearm"lecturing. Around him, symbols of his accomplishments sit in silent reproach: diplomas and awards and photos of richly dressed men shaking his hand. He is a broad, swarthy man, with a wreath of graying hair cut tight to his head. Fine creases mark his brow, a Japanese Zen garden raked cautiously around the stone of his skull. It’s his eyes, though, that affect Tom. Cold and inert like ants in amber. Tom has come to see his father in order to obtain funding for the trip to Barcelona. The request is not unprecedented. Tom has been to London and Amsterdam within the last few years, all on daddy’s dime. Ah, but something has changed. His father’s words, which a queasy Tom senses have been carefully chosen to represent a combination of empathy and rigidity, are of the variety that one might term “tough love.”
“Bottom line, the days of the gravy train are over, son.” He pauses to let this definitive (and obviously rehearsed) statement sink in. He eases back in his chair for emphasis. “You’re thirty. You need to buckle down. Get a job.” His voice drops on the last word like heavy book on hard wood. He is finished.
Now Tom sits still, unsure what his own expression reveals. Oh, and there is much to reveal. Beneath the dome of Tom’s head (shaven to conceal male pattern baldness, which began to rear its sinister pate in high school), a storm rages. In the frontal lobes, a steady dialogue is responding to each of his father’s comments: ‘F**k you.’ ‘Bullshit.’ ‘You’ve got money coming out your a*s,’ and the like. Beneath this conscious bravado, however, a subtext seethes in the deeper folds and crevices, in the amygdala. The currents are turbulent. Love is, as always, at the center of the storm. Wanting it. Hating the wanting. Hard-wired emotions intertwined with an array of memories (the hippocampus has checked-in) of a mother who abandoned him long ago (he sees a different Mom in flashes at times like now"primly set mouth and sharp grey eyes"looking over her shoulder from the door to his childhood bedroom. Is that a hint of shame in her glance? She looks beyond him, at the shaded window), a father who lost hope and was somehow reduced to a cash machine, a void that cannot be filled by the Zoloft or the booze or the weed. The thoughts mingle with a sweet pain from another area of his grey matter. It manifests as the simplest of expressions: I can’t. Can’t change, can’t get a job, can’t give up my freedom. Can’t. They are the thoughts of a spoiled child sent to nap time. As always, it builds until the cacophony of thoughts bubble over, and he loses his s**t.
This is, after all, the moment he’s been waiting for. It is almost welcome, this shift in the fulcrum of things, like the lurching of a ship on angry seas, anticipated, but never quite prepared for. If at this moment his father dipped into his business vernacular and pulled out his favored term, “sea change,” Tom would laugh or cry, and might just vomit over the railing of that imaginary ship into an ocean of khaki carpeting. He attacks with the only weapon he’s ever developed against his behemoth father: an ugly cocktail of anger and guilt.
“Dad, you know it’s not like that. You know I want to work. You think I want to live off you? God! I have to take the pills just to function! You know that! I can’t believe you’re being like this!” The rant is meritless at best, infantile at worst. Tom’s father just sits there, implacable, as the words crowd the office, then dissipate into the tiles of the drop ceiling.
A pause. A breath. “Look,” Tom begins to calm, to reason. “I’m not just sitting on my a*s. I’m taking classes. I’m in college!” He is in fact taking two classes: Introduction to Rhetoric and Eastern Philosophy. Neither has paid dividends. Another breath. He schools his voice. “I’ll make a deal with you.” Thirty years as the protege of the man before him has taught Tom what makes the light come into those dead brown eyes. Predictably, the man leans forward and steeples his hirsute fingers on the desktop. “I’ll look for a job. I’ll work part-time, pay the car bill. But I need time; no way I can pay the rent. But I’ll help. When I’m done with school, you can cut me off.” But hapless Tom has miscalculated. He has dropped the same tethered, spurious slug into this vending machine before, and this time, there will be no hum of acquiescence. This time, no free lunch.
His father, who more than likely knows what time it is, twists a wrist and looks at his watch. “Son, you’ve got until the end of the month, then I’m afraid you’re on your own.” Again, the words sound rehearsed. The large man unlinks his fingers, plants them apart on the desk like two arching spiders, and rises from his chair. More theatrics. “My father cut me off when I was seventeen, son. Seventeen. You’ll survive, and you’ll be better for it.” The words drop like a gavel. The audience is over.
* * *
In the evening, Tom perches on a bar stool at a coffee bar called Xando. The day’s malignancy is now a dull throb in the mental corner it has been consigned to, and Tom is struggling to rebound. He lifts a glass of red wine to his lips, tilts and sips. Barcelona. The word rolls through his mind, and it is like a promise of a deep kiss. The thought makes no sense, as it did not when he and Jenn flew to London two years ago. He had cried over a cracked toilet bowl in a Paddington Hotel, alone, drunk and wondering if she’d even come back. Jenn had gone to London with him, but not with him. Amsterdam was supposed to be different"rules were agreed upon, boundaries established. Still Tom ended up in a ball on a thin mattress, asking God and the crisp sheets why, why did I come here? Why can’t she love me? The cell phone in his pocket vibrates. Before he fishes it out, he knows it will be Jenn. The thrill of her call is tempered by the gloom of his father’s edict. He answers.
“Hey,” (she sounds as though she is in the midst of a party) “where are you?”
“Xando. Nobody here. I’m thinking about heading out. Where are you?” He imagines that Jenn is at a bar called Plan B, just a seven blocks away.
“Plan B. With a bunch of people. You should stop by! Did you talk to your dad?”
Tom bites his lower lip to the point of breaking skin. “I’ll be down in a little while.” He flips the phone shut, jams it in his pocket, and drains the wineglass.
Tom drives like hell to Plan B, and jogs up the street to the entrance, where he stops just outside. Through the glass doors, he sees that Jenn is holding court with several men, and though Tom knows these men"knows them to be married or gay or uninterested"he is incensed. The feeling of betrayal is unfounded, nonsensical, but very much there. What is that a look in her eye? No, she has not seen Tom yet, has not realized that she is being watched. She giggles and dips her chin in that deferential way as she looks up into the eyes of an allegedly uninterested man (Tom knows their names, engages in small talk with them regularly, but never bothers naming them. They are an aggregate that he loathes privately and collectively). Tom watches her fingers touch the back of a bar stool lightly, splayed and moving gently back and forth like a palm frond. Jenn is flirting. At this moment, Tom knows he will find a way to go to Barcelona with her. He must. He can’t.
The conundrum of Jenn is always an ugly knot in Tom’s mind. She acted like that when they met"eyes fixed on his, hips swaying slightly as they shared a cigarette outside the bar after last call. She’d seemed so attentive, so accessible and inviting.
“Got any pot?” she’d asked. She always had a knack for dropping that one innocent question that contained a galaxy of possibility"of promise. Something had changed, though. That night, back at his apartment they’d sat together on the couch, shoulders touching, inhaling from a joint. He’d screwed up his courage, and leaned in for the first sweet kiss. She welcomed it, then broke away, placed a finger to his lips. “No. I can’t.” That was all she’d said. No reason, no hope"just “No.” She’d slept there that night, in his bed, and it was divine torture. “I’m too wasted to drive,” was all she’d offered as she’d pulled her shirt up over her head. She displayed no modesty, just stripped to her bra and panties, and crawled into his bed as if she were alone. She only did it the one time. After that, she’d sleep on the couch from time to time, always fully dressed, like a visiting sibling. Why had she had burned that phantasm into his brain that first night? Why had she rejected him without any elucidation? Why are they still friends after three years of this madness? Why? Tom can’t unravel it.
The barroom blurs slightly. Is Tom crying? His mind has checked out again, that much is sure. The Zoloft"designed to keep serotonin levels at that magic level of bliss called “normal”"is put to the test. Once again, the sectors of his brain join in battle. Intellectual perception clashes with raw emotion, and memory joins the fray. A fragment, a vignette with no connection to time, has been freed from some deep vault that might be labeled ‘suppressed.’
There stands Tom’s mother, again young and fresh, seen from a doorway. She is unaware that this mental snapshot is being framed by her son’s callow gaze. An unknown man"he is a Gaussian blur of black hair and deeply tanned skin"rests a hand on her hip with a familiarity that suggests possession. This mom is yet not mom, but some new creature with his mother’s profile. She stands with a drink in one hand, her body swaying to unheard music, smiling. Tom recalls panic. The primal fear that his voyeurism will be discovered"that this creature will turn, and look at him. A paralysis holds him by the door, unable to advance or retreat. Tom can’t move.
“Uh, hello?” The voice jolts him and the battle collapses, an upended chessboard. The memory is lost.
Tom turns, and is face to face with Johnny. The two have been friends for over a decade, primarily because Johnny represents a self that Tom envies. He is a painter, musician, perpetual boyfriend to a host of supplicant women; and has a mystical youthfulness that manifests in his boyish grin, pile of black hair, and seeming inability to gain an ounce of body fat. Tom could not identify it, but he wants to yank the soul from this impossible man, toss it in a dumpster, and step into his skin. Tom smiles.
“Johnny! What’s up man?”
“You alright? You were just standing there.”
“Yea. Just waiting for some d********g to notice. Thanks.”
“Ohhh, that hurts, man. Now you’ll need to buy me a drink.”
Tom does just that. The two stand in the crowded bar, glug-glugging Guinness, eyeing the patrons and exchanging raised brows over particularly fine or hideous women. Tom steals glances at Jenn, who has not noticed him at the other end of the bar, or perhaps does not care. They order more pints and adjourn to the outdoors patio, where Ed soon joins them. Ed is a junkie, though currently abstaining (so he claims, a claim backed by methadone bloat), and a sweet guy. He greets them, then looks into the bar.
“Jenn’s here. See her?”
“Yeah. She’s busy with"whatever.” Tom schools his emotions. Nonchalance is the desired effect. “I’ll say hi later.”
Ed has perhaps seen through this, and commits a grave error in judgment. “She’s such a s**t these days. Now she’s going to Spain with Jamie? That guy is such a dick! She’s a f*****g cockhound, man.” He grins.
In this instant, the great conqueror adrenaline, Genghis Khan of all chemicals, sweeps into Tom’s brain and plants it’s flag. Tom drops his glass and punches poor Ed in the eye. Ed spins backward like a discus hurler in warm up, careening into a plastic chair and falling hard on the ground. He is springy though, this sweet junkie, and he bounds back to his feet. He assails Tom, twisting him into a headlock (the preferred move of those who generally do not fight), and bringing him to the concrete like a calf in a rodeo. There is cursing, grappling, and Ed’s fist connecting twice with Tom’s nose. He wants to fight back, wants to vent so much rage, but he can’t"he is trapped. Tom finally goes limp. He is crying now. He is remembering.
It was six, maybe seven years ago, and Tom was picking up his father from a medical clinic. The man had suffered a deviated septum (which Tom pondered, knowing that such an affliction is a side-effect of cocaine use), and needed Tom to pick him up from the corrective procedure. This was the first time that Tom’s father had needed Tom for anything. Ever. When he greeted his son in the lobby, Tom’s father was heavily drugged and incoherent. Nose bandaged like a hapless prizefighter, he grinned, and the expression was so alien and yet familiar that Tom was left speechless in wonder. The man seemed shrunken to life-size, and giggled like a child.
“You’re a great guy Tommy. Great guy. Want me to drive?” He grinned as his own joke, hugged Tom and tilted his head until their remarkably similar foreheads touched. He looked Tom straight in the eyes, and for that brief moment, they were equals. “Love you son. Take me home.”
The blur of tears clears a bit, and Tom sees the furrowed concern of Jenn’s face. She is crouched before him, hands dangling between her knees, looking right into his eyes.
Tom clears his thick throat. “I can’t go to Barcelona.”
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