Blind hearts - 6. Chapter 6

As Alex shut the last door to Dimov’s apartment complex, he remembered with a twist at his side that he had wanted to tell him that parking in West Hollywood was a bitch. Then he skirted the front edge of the sidewalk facing a tight line of cars, looked up the road, down the road ... now, where had he parked his car?

Sighing, he began the skipping saunter down the inclined sidewalk. Every couple feet, the pavement was broken by tree roots into slipshod tents. The dark rustled with the piney scent of the cypresses and the distant uprising of laughter from somewhere among the amber window views.

He did not want to think about Dimov demanding things, deciding things. Sex with him was nice, the unforgiving, relentless brutality of it, but everything else around it was bullshit. Why bother with bullshit when you could have the most splendid of life’s pleasures for free? Headlights rushed upon him, expanding a glare over his face and neck, and then retreated upwards to where glittering dark of the road met with the inky outlines of the Hollywood Mountains.

With the passing of a stray headlight, Alex’s feeling sunk to gloomier angrier depths. The sight of Dimov, bending over his knees, looked hollowed out was unacceptably upsetting. Yes, it pained him a little. He liked to think he was a fun guy with sprightly humors. And the tingling fact of this paining him ruffled him more. These sorts of things were not supposed to his concern; rather he had no time to spare over humble feelings of hurt. It defeated the purpose of cost-free sex. But he was pained, and he did care, and there really was nothing he could do about it. Shrugging, he resigned himself to Dimov, boulder shoulders, stone muscles, being just a bad delicate egg. Bummer.

He came to four way stop, still mumbling unsurely about his car. The sounds of cars swift over the main road was closer now, and he could see down the road the fluorescent white silhouettes of a storefront. His phone rang in his pocket. It was his father, David.

“Hey, I’m not disturbing you?” The husky baritone flooded over the phone.

Alex grimaced at his father’s indecorous formality. “No. Looking for my car as we speak.”

“Em … Is Frank walking?”

“For graduation you mean? Yeah. His family has a whole she bang planned.”

“I take it you’re also walking then…”

Alex wondered eerily by what escalator of logic did David arrive at that conclusion. “Actually I’m not. Mom doesn’t seem keen on it.”

“Well, we’d like you to walk.”

The “we” hovered morosely over Alex’s ears. Would Susan absolutely love him taking pictures with David’s twenty-something girlfriend? His pace quickened as his thoughts yo-yoed between yes and no. Finally, bleeding sweat under a streetlight of the main road, he said, “I’ll talk to Mom about it.

David ended the conversation with lunch plans, leaving Alex dumb and stupid at the traffic lights. At one point in his life, he had counted on David being nothing more than a lamp fixture in the living room, turning on and off according Susan’s nagging about the garbage. David did not contest or praise his homosexual thoughts on anything, and he did not care for his straight opinions on anything either. So it was surprising when soon after the divorce, David invited him out to lunch. These morphed uneasily into monthly affairs in an establishment with menu offerings of canned food and plastic cheese. He could not find the wherewithal to refuse or to suggest another restaurant. Since David suffered the awkwardness of asking, he might as well suffer David’s knife screeching against the dinner plate.

But fascinating insights did occur during these lunches. He could still remember when David burst out of his wall of silence and asked him how his mother was doing. He replied a curt, “fine.” Alex supposed ‘fine’ covered Susan wobbling against the walls, wheezing by stairwells, fainting in hallways. But his father went to say, “I know your mother makes noise about the University of Chicago being far away and expensive, but if that’s what you want to do, then that’s what you want to do.”

His words were astounding, quite simply. Alex did not know whether to be amazed that his father finally opined on his life or be impatient with the discolored peas on his blackened chicken breast. Something possessed him to say, “It’s all right. I decided on Irvine.” And then after losing against a slab of supposedly rare steak, David asked a waiter for the check.

For days afterwards, Alex wrestled for peace on his decision. Was it duty to idea of family or acquiescence to the idea of family that had moved him? And through the freshmen experience of a theatric cast of friends, drunken sex in a closet, losing meanderings at the investment club, the question had long been irrelevant. He forgot about a time when he wanted to escape the igloo of his house and the undeniable tingle when he gazed upon Frank’s chin.

And under the heaven of dim stars, his car nowhere in sight, he was still stumped over the question. He sallied another block, passing by the regular poles of parking meters and those parking signs that read like an SAT logic test. His phone was buzzing in his pocket. It was a text message from Frank.

2morrow, free GOOD food at Malibu. 1 pm?

I dunno Frankie boy. Mom’s going berserk with ur evil capitalist influence.

Shucks, all women fucking hate me. What did I do to ur mom? I luv ur mom.

Alex swayed his head at the careless truth of it. Of course Frank would love a woman who wasn’t his mother, or someone in whom he had no sexual interest whatsoever. Alex clucked, surveyed un-seriously across the street the empty parking spots and one or two cars dissolving into the blue night.

He replied. She smells u being fake a mile away.

Fake, that’s a new one.

Telling her quilting is stupid is kinda stupid.

I was sixteen! I’m allowed to say stupid shit. Anyway u can tell her that my evil capitalist dad got me a shining job in NY. Consulting. It seems I’m obligated to do it, if I don’t want to knife Mom with a heart attack. Yeah, I luv women, esp moms.

Suddenly the skies were falling around Alex. These messages, these calls… they were darts shooting from an unseen direction and impaling his heart. Like the call he had received at the end of freshmen year of college, one fine Sunday during another damned lunch with David, reminding him of an existence he had so painstakingly tried to erase.

Frank had whinnied something about a hot girl and poker before Alex had the presence of mind to drop the phone and mind David slicing a disc of ham like it was a stubborn cow, and slicing still until the knife screeched against the glass plate. He remembered David’s glassy stare that needled him to say quickly, “Oh that was Frank. He wants us to learn poker together.”

David wiped his moustache like he was looking for something in its thick ledge and murmured, “You’d be good at it. You think well under pressure.”

Looking across the table to a steel shine of the diner counter, he thought ruefully that Frank would concur with his father. Thinking led him to picturing the stocky bastard lounging on a pool chair, the sun strong on his brow, and hairy paws just below his navel and guiding his eyes to the hairy trail that disappeared under the much too thin creases of his swim short. He gulped, cursed inwardly the runt for disturbing his life. Then he came back to his table, to David’s intense stare, which bumped him fully over to unease.

“Yeah well. Poker sounds like an expensive hobby,” The hot air was rising rapidly through his lungs, “Maybe for fun. Certainly have no money waste on it. Frank doesn’t mind funding me. But that’s just sketchy. Would make Mom go apeshit—sorry about my language … I’d have to spend a whole summer working to blow off money on poker. … seems something… Mom wants me to do volunteer work, says it’s great for med school application … Poker sounds more fun, playing poker with Frank sounds more interesting that running a soup kitchen…”

With a lapse of his mind engines, he was able to notice David exhaling for far too long, then he promptly shut up.

“Oh I remember Frank,” David said solidly, “I remembered you liked him.”

“Of course I like him, he’s my buddy.”

There was slight twitch in David’s lips for just one moment before he, as if reclaiming a dry aura, bent over his plate and began the surgical task of dividing a black burr from the cream white potato, and the wrinkly potato skin. Alex imagined him a toddler separating the green peas from orange carrots. A low noise wafted from David’s downturned face; Alex did not care to ask him to repeat himself. But the noise still worked through his eardrum and snagged on the stubs in his brain. “I meant you liked him.”

Alex’s fingers went slack, clinking his fork over his plate. Immediately, he regained control of the fork, but his muscles clenched over it. His thoughts chased after Susan’s words, hunted for clues of her understanding, as much David seemed to. But he came up with nothing, just more of her nagging on the classes he should be taking, the men he should stop fucking. Incensed, he glowered at David’s fingers, thick and hairy, still precise over the damn spuds. He thought if his feelings were this transparent to dull David, then he must become an act of God to vanquish them.

An Act of God … Alex sneered, staring at Frank’s text message framed within blue border. U coming to Malibu 2morrow or what? A truck came barreling past him, its triumphant roar of its engines, the acrid void of its exhaust. In its wake, powerful feelings pumped him. He smashed a yes reply to the message and checked for other messages from an odd assortment of previous lovers. And then it was back to the question at hand: where was his fucking car?