ZGo and love - 11. Mexican Standoff

More than a year ago Gilda brought her car into Trent’s shop for repairs. While Trent imagined a stupid small brain behind her burnt ochre forehead, Gilda was unimpressed with the serious smell of petro-carbons or his glistening growling look that promised a price gouging; neither was pleased her daughter Janice who erupted into wailing when she had to take a phone call. However, Trent moved quickly to sooth Janice to wheezy stillness. Gilda was immediately smitten with his capable masculinity, but he was immured with the image of ten-year-old Luke blinking over Carly’s body crooked and bloody by the jagged black of a car tire.

Now they lived together in a Culver City apartment on Venice Boulevard, still scrabbling to impressions: Gilda to Trent’s bearish allure, Trent to her feminine promise of preserve. And on this Sunday afternoon—April coolness and Los Angeles everlasting sunshine—Luke, Janice, and Trent recuperated at the dinner table to the sounds of competitive cupcake baking on television. Janice danced about the Luke’s knees, flashing up her kindergarten paintings of genius. Blue and pink blobs were mommy and daddy; slashes of black crayon were supposed to be Luke.

Gilda was retrieving a container from the kitchen cabinet to pack a lunchbox for Luke(skinnier than a pin) when she recalled the black mole on an ex-boyfriend’s nose(Jarhead called me more bendable than rubber!). The container slipped from her fingers, and flint was sharpening its harsh hot flecks in the darkest corner of her heart. But the greasy pans sprawled across the counter and the sink and the dish pile therein tilting at a dangerous angle, and all hers alone to clean. A firmness crept into her wilting lips, and she slapped her hands over her apron to wipe them clean, to prepare herself for that exciting duty of living. “I’m alive and good,” she would, in the kitchen lined with faux-wood cabinetry, have yelled, and if perhaps she could spare Trent’s plosive sneers against happy shit, she would have twirled her impression of a liberated nun jubilant amidst the greenery of the Swiss Alps.

Yes, she was alive and well. Lisa was dead, ashes in a kitschy urn dead for seven months (bad luck maybe but she should have drunk more green tea). She leaned on the counter facing the dining table; a giddy relief warmed her heart. She and Trent could now stroll arm in arm down the breezy walkway towards the azure horizon. They had suffered the last year in the thrall of that mountain burning, spewing a blackish red over their good skies, lunting a stifling miasma over their good home. The mountain had appeared at her door at two in the freaking morning, knocking and knocking, and after Trent had driven him away, knocking and knocking still. Gilda’s grandmother would have said the angel of death was demanding to be let into their apartment. Trent did not offer to kiss away her unvoiced images of a traitorous husband, only to say, ‘I’m divorced, honest.’

Now things would be good, yes, good and gay, now that Luke had brought over a box of chocolates for Janice (Real fancy. Did he steal it?) and gobbled up her toothsome Shake-and-Bake pork chops. (Who’d have thought of such a great combination?). And look here these oranges for ratty Luke to take home—two weeks old, but still fresh.

Gilda gathered herself off the counter and said out loud to Luke, “What have you been up to?”

“Go. Playing lots of go,” said Luke playing slap-the-hand with little Janice at the table.

A smile twitched on Gilda’s face as she unraveled puzzlement on this new occupation of ‘go.’ Was go as useless as watching foreign cartoons for weeks on end? It seemed better than staring at the ocean for five hours or parlaying with vagrants.

“Spent the whole of last week watching a go anime,” Luke added.

Sure, why do I even bother? Gilda went on to pack peas into the container. But the fluorescents were beaming a milky heat over her nape, and she unburdened herself against the counter again and watched the lovely bird’s wings of Janice’s arm flap against Luke’s baggy side. A sweet thing Janice… agate eyes, prim nose that just demanded to be kissed. But Luke… and the unsmiling slit in his beard and the hair weedy and crispy-looking over the striped shoulders.

Luke looked haggard then on that night spumy with unnatural curses; he looked haggard now. Where was the cellist who turned down admissions to Columbia? She could see a chess bum—yes, just a lazy bum who had inherited a paid-off three-bedroom house in bountiful Mar Vista.

Gilda proceeded to fill the bum’s food pack with three slabs of pork chops, their apartment suddenly dawning around her a damnable hollow of thin walls and impossible-to-clean carpets.

“Trent, why don’t ya give him a job at your garage?” she asked dejectedly. “He can’t live on Lisa’s savings for too long.”

The girly giggles were snipped short. Luke had pressed down Janice’s hands on his lap to stop her from slapping. His eyes, cracked marbles, were glaring back to Gilda. She shuddered, ducked to the cool white wall of the fridge, and thought he needed fresher fruit.

Meanwhile the conversation had passed over Trent like static. The plates glimmering with nacreous hues, the tablecloth embossed with blue volutes, the glasses bleeding beads of water on the rims, all blurred to static. Trent, slumped at the table, stared at the oily patch on his plate previously occupied by pork chops. No amount of feminine entreaties would move to him try the peas, not even the fact that his belly made a cushiony pillow for his interlaced fingers.

Staring at Luke was like staring at the wind; there was nothing to see. He peered over the rectangle of velvet couches, the ovoid particleboard coffee table and to the wall-mounted LCD television. A blonde had just won the cupcake competition with the prize-winning rainier cherry cupcake frosted with lemon mascarpone, drizzled with a blood orange reduction. Her football ass looked more appetizing than the lopsided confection. The mixed martial arts game at the neighborhood bar looked more appetizing than her football ass, but Gilda, chignon vibrating spasmodically, had shrieked unspeakable profanities against his virgin ass if he dared to abscond her nice Sunday lunch.

Gilda was of the opinion that they were cursed. It was one thing when parent curse their children for little misdeeds like stuffing carrots into their shoes, but it was quite another when children cursed their parents with a voiceless glare that damned them with a perditious foreboding. But as always her opinions moved Trent none; she thought a diesel engine could run on gas.

He pushed the plate aside and wished for more meat and water. Then there was the sound of a hard slap on a thigh and a bright burst of girlish laughter and a triplet of hoarse chuckling. Trent flinched and looked across the length of the table, and beheld not the wind, not the thrift store painting of apples and guns on the wall, but a chimera wavering into a fragile husk of bones he had once held every night. The Jesus guy was once the toddler with a bronze glimmer in his eyes, sweeping up his neatly stacked newspapers into some kind of joyful rain, or the kid flinching and wincing against his side to every kick and punch of an MMA game.

“You fucking look like shit. What’s with that scuzzy beard?” Trent blurted, shaking off a tendril of need taking root.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to use profanity in Janice’s presence,” Luke said in his same colorless voice.

“You don’t fucking say. God, fuck, Jared must be one stuffing with your mouth with dick.”

“I don’t understand what Jared has to do with your impoliteness in front of a child.”

Trent grunted, stabbed his peas, chewed like it was a chore, and spat out the masticated mash on the glass plate. Los Angeles had cured him of the desire for the four seasons, reflexive adulation of God’s goodness, but not his frustration at dead-sounding queers. He quickened to arise and decry the sunshine stupidities, but Luke’s face held him with his familiar intense stare. Trent’s fingers slackened over the warm metallic fork, and it felt like Drano was scouring its ungodly pain in his chest.

“Ok boys, time for dessert?”

Janice cheered for peach pie, Gilda cheered for apple pie, the television cheered for the sexual allure of super white teeth. But Trent’s heart was straining, and his cheeks were damp and hot. After Carly died, he had wanted to drown the murderer in the bathtub, but time managed to a weld a cicatrix over his gaping emotions. He had learned to feel the life in his hollow voice, to ease himself into the stares that could singe hair and skin, to even accept the sordid premise of two men fucking each other.

And now Trent clenched a weak fist to where blood pounded the most and pondered how Luke’s sockets could leak with hatred. Who taught him that? Jared? Or was Lisa using Luke to punish him? Oh the bitch would do that—Impossible. A faggot with girly hair can’t threaten him with ghosts and guilt. He was alive, a little overweight, a little hypertensive, but he was alive, and what was Lisa? Ashes and a slut.

Trent reclaimed himself with a smile. “So where were you last night, Mr. Landlord?”

“I was indisposed,” Luke said with a little effort.

“Doing what? Servicing Jared?”

“Oh Luke, how’s he doing? Must be nice to have someone your age you can talk to.” Gilda’s voice, metallic and unsteady, streamed over the whir of microwave zapping a plate of pie with photons.

Trent looked forward to cinnamon scent perfuming the air; it lightened him a little. “Luke, tell him to tell you to do the shit you’re supposed to do. Mow the lawn. Tuneup your car. Fucking kick out your tenants.”

“Dad, I don’t see what Jared has to do with anything.”

Trent reminded himself not to get irritated. “Just get shit done. I won’t let you turn her house into a dump.”

Gilda, blue blouse, blue jeans, came out of the kitchen with two plates of hot apple pie topped with ice cream. Janice, blushed cheeks encased between the V of her hands, grumbled for peachy peach while Trent lost himself in the delicate wisps of steam rising from the golden sugary slice, but only for a moment. Luke’s lupine glare engulfing him again.

“Honey, get him some cookies. I swear peanut butter makes him stiff.”

“Please,” Gilda drawled, “don’t say that. You aren’t being hospitable.”

“What? He used to run his mouth off about gifting cookies. There was even this kid, that he asked me for one week straight … what was his name again?”

Luke stared. And yet with all its ultra-violet intensity, Trent eased himself into the moist bite of pie, secure in knowing the stare was fundamentally a sign of Luke’s innocence. Luke was questioning him. He was seeking to understand him. He was looking for human information as he had told him once before. Trent knew his son. Luke was incapable of hatred, yet alone deathly curses.

Trent was guffawing now. “Don’t play dumb. What’s the name of kid whose shoulder you dislocated?”

Gilda gasped. “Honey… I don’t think—”

“You think Luke’s a pansy? I told you, he may like Jared’s dick, but he’ll break your neck without thinking about—”

The neighing screech of Luke’s chair shifting back from the table made Trent shudder to silence. Luke arose from his seat, and Trent, Gilda, Janice, were ants crawling in his shadow looming over them like a crumbling fortress.

“Thank for the lunch, ma’am,” Luke said with a dead calm, “But I have some go—”

“Sit down,” Trent ordered.

The word could have very well been an attack of lace because Luke, commandingly tall, continued to search in his pockets for keys. But Gilda darted red at the cheeks and her hands shook over the table. Her mind whirled as though she were the penitent locked forever outsides the gates of a confession booth. Luke’s matchstick back was turning to her burning eyes and she scrambled straightforward to him, pulled on his arm, her voice thin and winded over his impassive face. “Please don’t go… Wait! I packed you a box—” She dropped his arm and flitted for this box but stopped abruptly halfway between dinning area and the kitchen, Trent bellowing commands Luke would not obey and pounding a placard of maleficent foreboding, and she flitted back to Luke making away for the door and captured his arm. Thin and brittle Luke’s arm was in her command, and with an obedient stare he shuffled with her across the dining table, to the white front of the kitchen, watched mutely her scattered scrambling over containers, plastic bags, fruit, cookies. In five minutes she had assembled a bag bulging and poking like it contained a many-headed beast. There was a moment of silence, a soft curve of a smile on her peach lips, a moment of tense appreciation for his munificent presence. She pressed the tight bag handles into his damp hands, laughing now with a prideful edge. “Don’t worry about the containers, you can keep them. Next week, we’ll have another lunch.” She rubbernecked her face rilled with sweat over the counter, in search of a conceding shrug from the man of the house. “Trent, same time should be good?”

“Thank you, but I won’t be coming, ma’am,” Luke said.

Her laughter colored darker. “I know I’m wrong person to say this, but I—we worry a lot about you. That house is so big and empty and sad, can’t be good for you to cooped up alone in there.”

“I have tenants,” Luke said patiently.

“I wasn’t going to say, but I have to agree with your father. Shouldn’t you be selling the house? I know your mother would want you to move on.”

Luke collected his beard, and his mind seemed to be dragged to the doldrums as he stroked it in long downward movements.

“Interesting conundrum what Mom would like … I can’t say myself. Selling the house would mean I have move things in Carly’s room…. She didn’t like me disturbing things in there… Maybe she wouldn’t like me neglecting the lawn and flowers. I should get to that straightaway. I still don’t know about how these lunches. I can’t say definitively she’d want me here…. But she likes it if I do as Dad says, within reason of course … then again, I don’t know if she’d want me having lunch with you especially. I gather she didn’t like you much, rather loathed you. But I’m neutral about you, perhaps she’d prefer if I mirrored her stance with respect to you. Hatred sounds difficult but as a matter of—”

“Will you shut up about your mother?” Trent barked.

Gilda’s heart was a bloated watermelon now. She leaned on the cold edge of the stove to retain her balance, avoided Luke’s corpuscular eyes swimming within strands of hair. Sounds gathered in her tight throat, she managed to say, “Your father’s a little impatient. Just remember we all care about you just as much.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I think perhaps Mom—”

“God, Luke, just shut up about your mother.” Trent smashed upward from his seat and pounded to the x-ray blinding glare of the balcony. He faced the terrible orb of the sun, muttered indistinctly and then whirled back to face to Luke’s waiting eyes. “Sell the house. Take the money and spend it on good dick. This yakking and yapping on a dead slut—God, it’s painful to hear. So damn painful. Luke, she’s dead. Dead, finito, mud, dead. Now can we get back to dessert?”

The air was taut, tight, an overly-tensioned G string. And yet Janice dared needled a request for peach pie, and the television intruded with whoops and cheers for Sassy Susannah, and no one heard the thump of Luke’s bag hitting the linoleum floor and spraying an orange and cookie detritus. He slipped both hands coolly into his pockets, thanked a pale pallid Glida again, and said in a low voice, “I really must go, ma’am, or I shall lose my temper. Mom wouldn’t like that.” And he walked away, slowly and deliberately, his gait bandy in obvious discomfort.

And there, the door bang, the twisty gazes between man and not-yet-wife, and the invisible invasion of force and vehemence into Gilda’s leaking mind. She yelled, “If you keep up with this bullshit, you won’t be getting any money from him.”

“Yeah, I’m going to the bar.” And he did just that.