Twentynine Palms. Daniel Pyne
look at it—”
“Oh Jesusfuck oh—”
“Jack—”
“Get away from me!”
“Jack—”
“Owshitowshitowshitshitshit—”
“Jack, will you let me look at your eye? Shit—here—sorry—but what is fucking wrong with you? You know? Don’t ever do that. Don’t ever try to—”
“Get out. Of my way.”
Then, Tory, seeing it: “Oh man. Oh fuck.”
What.
“Here put this—at least it’s—you just don’t—don’t do that, Jack, you just don’t—”
And Jack has never felt this kind of pain before and never will again, and never will shake the memory of the dull, black, searing screw someone is bearing down on, driving deep beneath the socket of his eye. All he can think about is the pain. Tory’s voice is distant, something overheard.
“It’s not bleeding. It’s okay.”
They’re moving. Up the beach. The sand, on the soles of his feet, burns.
“I’ll drive.”
Jack looks up into the sun. It burns through the haze, and bleaches everything
white.
C.
Now, a woman, improbably beautiful, coiled naked in the low hills of a white down duvet, waits for Jack, hopes crashing. Her platinum hair is tangled, her face flushed from lovemaking just minutes ago, eyes liquid, thighs slick. She’s three weeks past forty.
A toilet flushes. Watching him come out from the bathroom and circle the bed, Hannah’s face is willfully empty of emotion, as if to suggest it doesn’t matter what Jack does now, which only underlines the utter desperation that overtakes her despite the Ativan she popped as soon as he uncoupled and rolled out of bed.
Golf tees spill, scatter across the red Spanish pavers from the pocket of his shorts. He gropes for them. “Shit.”
“Don’t worry about it. Rosaria will clean up in here later.” Hannah stretches out, her breasts, nearly perfect spheres, levitating, defying all Newton’s laws of gravity. “Unless you can’t afford to waste the tees. Do you need money?” Then she covers her mouth, as if coy. “Oops. Sorry. Oh, Hannah, you castrating little slut.”
He smiles mechanically, pulls the baggy shorts up his legs, in a hurry, buttons them, feeling once again the urgent need to get out. White polo shirt. High-tech huaraches.
“I didn’t mean it.” Her voice reaches for him, clutches at him. He’s got to walk out now. “Shit. I’m not good at this part. Listen, baby, what if we—” She stops, he’s looking back at her. “No,” she realizes. Tears well in her eyes. “No.”
Tears, from cold blue eyes.
He leans down and kisses her forehead lightly before he walks out.
Jack is thirty-five.
It’s the year of the Rat.
Later, in his apartment, Jack’s face, like the rest of him, is glazed with sweat from the midday L.A. heat.
His eyes are closed. Only one of them needs to be. He is blind if he opens the wrong one, but that seldom happens and he doesn’t think about it. A world of diminished perspective is, for Jack, status quo. Colors explode against the inside of his eyelid, blossom with the hum of an electric fan. Damp tendrils of his hair tremble in the machine-made breeze.
A phone is ringing.
Jack’s eyes open. He waits.
He’s pretty sure it’s Hannah.
Calculating: she would still be in bed. He smells her perfume, Vera Wang, mixed with the residue of their recent, workmanlike act of copulation. It’s a smell, he decides, that is more than a little unpleasant.
The phone rings, and rings, and rings.
An off-key beep, followed by a moment of silence, then a freakishly compressed voice surges through the cheap speaker of the answering machine.
“Jack?” Jack doesn’t move. “Hey, Jack, it’s Tory. Are you there, man? Jack?” Tory. Shit. “You left your cell phone here.”
Shit.
“Must’ve been, I don’t know, yesterday? And you didn’t fucking notice? I mean, hell, what kind of actor are you, Jack? I mean, yo, it’s kind of like that joke about the actor who comes home, his wife’s been raped by his agent, his kids sold into white slavery, his house burned to the ground, and the guy’s like, ‘My agent came to my house?’” Tory laughs, then lapses into silence. Expecting Jack to pick up, irritated that he doesn’t. A short, frustrated intake of breath: “Okay. Anyway. Your phone’s here. Call me. I’m home.”
Dial tone. Silence. Jack closes his eyes again. Cell phone. Fuck. Goddamn it. Shit.
He imagines the Hope Ranch house, sun through the French doors, Tory standing in the middle of the cavernous ballroom, holding Jack’s cheap Nokia like it’s some kind of radioactive waste, his eyes dead, pretty and mean in the way married money will spoil the flesh and rot the soul. When Tory’s short fuse is lit, the slender muscles of his neck will tighten and relax, tighten and relax.
Wondering about Jack’s fucking phone.
Jack could have left it. That’s possible. Not yesterday, but Tuesday, when he was last up there, helping Tory clean out the Montecito garage before the old house went on the market. But two days had passed. Tory is right. It’s inconceivable Jack wouldn’t know his phone was gone.
A dull, tingling, vacant rolling dread gathers in Jack’s chest, slow crawling, connected to nothing, borne of the boy’s unknown, the boy’s unknowable, and the immutable yearning for acceptance by that which can never give it. Tory was Jack’s event horizon, and, once inside his gravitational pull, falling into the black hole was a certainty. That they have remained friends is as baffling to Jack as the compressed planes of his halved vision. And what has happened with Hannah is so primal that Jack knows, has known from the beginning, it would, must, inevitably catalyze a spectacular meltdown.
Jack doesn’t, however, regret what he’s done.
His mind calculates. If he’d left the phone at Tory’s on Tuesday, not today after fucking Hannah (twice) at noon and then telling her the affair was over—if he’d really left the phone on Tuesday while cleaning the old house and discovered it missing when he got back to L.A. and didn’t know where it was or where he’d left it and wasn’t patient enough to retrace his steps since he was, say, waiting for a call from his agent—couldn’t Jack simply have replaced it? Visit a T-Mobile store, buy a new calling plan, get the free RAZR. After all, Jack had been talking about giving Verizon the shitcan for months because he kept losing the signal on Olympic between Roxbury and McCarthy Vista, a vortex of wireless cross-cancellation so frustrating that a few of Jack’s other actor friends had stopped driving the Olympic corridor altogether.
Jack has a new phone. Which is why he didn’t realize (or care) that the old one was at Tory’s. Which explains everything except why it was in the master bedroom. Well, Rosario could have found it and put it there, not knowing whose it was, which works, until Tory asks Rosario—
• or Jack could just talk to Hannah and she—
• no, talking to Hannah would—
• talking to Hannah wouldn’t—
• talking with Hannah, Jesus—
• but, nevertheless, the thing with the new phone is solid. Who the hell knows