Eye to Eye Read online

  “So I’m not fired?” I had one egg in my refrigerator, and Earl and I were still living from paycheck to paycheck, in spite of his okay bartending salary. That which makes you want to kill someone, namely a spoiled, self-absorbed rich kid, will make you stronger, I suppose.

  “You’re welcome,” Charlie said. “I’m going to get me a glass. I want a taste of this D’Alba myself.”

  He went through the swinging door. Bita sighed, put her spoon in her bowl and pushed it away from her. She blew me a kiss from across the table and then sank down in her chair. “Thanks for stopping by, Ron.” She said it as though she had made up her mind about something. What, I did not know.

  I winked at her. Bita and I have always done things simple that way. “Hey.” I sit up in my chair like a shot. I felt ready to tell my good news. Charlie came through the door with some soufflé in a bowl and a big wineglass. He took his seat next to Bita and patted her thigh underneath the table. “I got news. Good news.”

  “You and Earl are breaking up,” Charlie said.

  “Shut up, Charlie.” Bita glared at him. “Don’t be such a jerk.”

  “What? I’m just saying that Ronnie and the bartending badass are quite the odd couple. You two would be a great sitcom.” Charlie sipped his wine. “An interracial Green Acres.”

  Bita crossed her arms and set her lips tight. “You don’t know anything.”

  Charlie raised both hands in surrender and took another sip of his wine. “Fine,” he said, still grinning like a know-it-all idiot.

  WE KNOW YOU’RE HAVING AN AFFAIR, YOU IDIOT, is what I wanted to say, but I just changed the subject. “Anyway, as I was saying. I got good news. My book’s being published.”

  “Hey!” Bita grinned, it was the biggest smile I’ve seen on her all night. “I can’t believe you waited all this time to tell me.”

  “Well, that is good news,” Charlie said. He held up his glass so we could toast. I clinked glasses with Charlie, and then Bita knocked her glass against mine, a little too hard.

  “Who’s doing it?” Bita asked, back to being generally happy for me. “Little Brown? Somebody like that?”

  “No…not exactly…some press called Burning Spear?”

  Charlie spit up his wine. “Burning Spear?”

  Bita frowned at him. “What’s wrong with Burning Spear?” She turned to me. “It’s going to be a real book, hardcover and everything, right?”

  “Yeah, hardcover and everything.”

  Bita gave Charlie an I-told-you-so look. But he was on a roll. He put his glass down long enough to rub his thick hands together. “We get press releases and galley proofs from them at my office all the time, from agents trying to get us to make films out of that crap. Hilarious.”

  “You’re just being sexist and dismissive because it’s women writing these books.”

  “No,” Charlie says, pouring himself more wine. “I’m being dismissive because that shit is silly.”

  “What about all the books written by men?” I stand up because I’m getting so mad. “All that macho Hemingway bullshit, lots of drinking and fucking and angst about the minutiae in their lives. That’s so important? Or what about all those books set in academia where the male, troll, professor is always banging the undergrad who’s just dying to suck his old, shriveled up—”

  “Don’t even talk to Charlie about this,” Bita says. “Charlie, don’t you have something to do?”

  But I was not finished. “They ought to call that dick lit, but they call it literature.”

  Charlie shook his head. “Well, congrats, Ron, I guess. Good for you. I’m going upstairs to catch the end of the ball game. Try not to get fired this week.”

  Just like Charlie to rain on my parade. Bita reached across the table and grabbed my hand. “Ronnie. This is good news. It’s the very best news. You’re going to be published, and I’m proud of you. Don’t listen to Charlie. Consider the source,” she said nodding toward the stairs.

  As I turn up Ian’s narrow street and prepare myself for the latest confrontation, I wonder why I let people like Charlie get to me. People like Ian. People like Katie. If I’m going to be honest with myself, I have to admit that the main problem is me. For all my tough talk, it doesn’t take much to make me doubt myself, and that’s why I can’t be an adult around Ian. He turns me into one of those kids on the schoolyard who finally has the guts to fight back—except I’m not a kid, which makes me pathetic. But his privilege, and alternately his cockiness and cluelessness about his privilege, that’s what I can’t seem to get over, so until someone gets fired—or strangled—this is going to be my life. A duel to the death with Ian.

  I press the entry button at the bottom of his driveway and wait for his housekeeper, Maricela, to buzz me in. And as I wind up the driveway, I try to psyche myself out. You love Ian. He’s the sweetest. You feel sorry for Ian. How tragic to have money coming out your ass from the day you’re born until the day you die. Tragic.

  I park in the circular driveway that makes a doughnut around the fountain in front and knock with the lion’s head on the door. What a house. It looks like the place where tigers and mermaids and cherubs come to die.

  The door opens and Maricela pokes her head around the door timidly. “Hello, Veronica,” she says, nodding and smiling and I think that if Maricela has managed not to put her foot up Ian’s ass after ten years of dealing with him, I need to try a lot harder.

  “Maricela,” I say. “How are you today?”

  After closing the door she wipes her hands on her immaculate white apron. Her dress is light pink and her long, dark hair is in a bun as it has been every time I’ve ever seen her. “Fine, fine,” she replies. “Ian is in the study.” And then she leaves.

  I can hear the television coming from the study, so I just follow the sound and knock on the door before I enter. Ian’s got the TV on so loud he doesn’t even hear me. Of course, TV is the cute word for gigantic, wall-mounted plasma something or other that Ian’s watching. He must be sunken down in the green leather couch facing the TV because I can’t see him. The channel’s on Pimp My Ride and he’s watching a van being converted to a house, basically, with a washing machine, television, bed, everything but a toilet.

  When I reach the couch, I stand over Ian, who’s laid out on his back, his arms crossed over his chest with the remote tucked under one of his arms.

  “Hey,” I say, trying to get started on the right foot. “Can you believe all they can do to cars these days? It’s crazy what they can do.”

  “Yeah,” Ian says, still not looking at me.

  “I mean, a washing machine. In a car. That’s wild.”

  Silence.

  “All right. So let’s get started then. Time is money. Turn off the TV, Ian.”

  Ian sighs all big and exaggerated like I’m asking him to do something that’s just exhausting. Like building the goddamn Egyptian pyramids. It takes him forever to finally click the television off.

  “God. Are you all right? Do I need to call a doctor? Get you a glass of water?”

  Ian sits up and glares at me through his scrupulously accidentally tussled and moussed bangs. I can practically hear the “fuck you” on the tip of his tongue. “Whatever,” he says.

  “Where’s the Morrison?” I sit down on the couch—on the other end of the couch so my hand won’t fly out in a spontaneous slap.

  “Oh, c’mon, man. That shit was brutal. I get it. The girl wants blue eyes because she wants to be white and all that bullshit. It’s a classic, blah, blah.”

  Not bad, actually. You have to read a bit of the book to get even that little bit of theme. So Ian had read something. “How do you know that? That she wants to be white?”

  Ian shrugged. “I dunno. The book opens with that stuff. That stuff that’s all the American dream stuff run in together. See Dick and Jane…”

  “So why does Morrison run it all together, then?” This kid, as big a jerk as he was, was actually smart—if he half got off his ass.
r />   Ian picked at his black fingernails and blew air up toward his bangs. He watched them rise and fall for a while before he answered me. “What about that stuff you mentioned last time? That stuff about work songs and Gil Scott Heron and hip-hop. I looked up work songs.”

  He did? “You did?”

  “Yeah? So? Like that’s so hard? To look shit up?”

  “It’s not hard. I’m just saying.” Just saying that you’re usually too cool for school and too damn lazy to care about anything or anyone other than yourself—unless it’s music. “So what did you learn then?”

  Ian sighs. Everything is such a gigantic pain in the ass to him. So exhausting, dealing with me. The biggest tragedy of his life. He sits up and faces the TV, refuses to turn his head to look at me. He’s going to turn to stone or something if he does. “It’s not like I learned so much.” He glances sideways at me, turns his head ever so slightly. “But the stuff I looked up talked about how slaves sang songs to help them get through their work, and then out of that came jazz, and then rock and roll and then hip-hop.”

  That was the very short version, yeah. In grad school, my students would rather kill themselves than actually set foot in the library and so I would get these goofy “research” papers that had “facts” from whatever came up on the Internet. Stuff that quoted the Bible or some random dude as part of their argument and analysis for a comparison between Dude, Where’s My Car? and American Pie. But whatever Ian had found was pretty good. I stretch out my legs in front of me, put my hands behind my head and lock them so I can rest my head on them. “Where did you read all of that?” My legs keep sticking to the leather on the couch and I continue to be totally at a loss for why people blow money on leather for furniture. Tacky, one, and disgusting, two. Like sitting on skin all day long.

  “I found this article that came from the Library of Congress. All this history stuff was at this one link.”

  “Cool,” I say, casually, as if I don’t care. But the Library of Congress? Ian was an impressive little shit. “So, you knew all this stuff already? You said you didn’t learn anything.”

  “I mean, I guess I didn’t know it know it, but I kinda did. Like I knew all about rock coming from the blues and stuff. Any idiot can listen to the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin and hear that.”

  True.

  “But if you didn’t know it know it, but now you do know it know it, then you learned something.” I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s like I want to make the both of us miserable by having us go around and around. I can never leave well enough alone. When it comes to teaching and learning, even in its way, like seriously, loosely termed variations in the form of me and Ian, I’m like a sports coach. Nobody ever told Shaq, that’s good enough, that you sorta kinda know what you’re doing. Don’t practice as hard today. Just shoot a couple of hoops, as long as you sorta kinda have a feel for it. Whatever. What the hell kind of coach is that? And so even though I fled academia and Indiana, it’s in my goddamn blood, the pushing-teaching thing. Followed me all the way to L. A.

  “Whatever,” Ian spouts.

  Whatever. Whoever started the whole “whatever” thing should be drop-kicked. It’s so final and perfect, unless you’re the one hearing someone end a conversation with it.

  I decide to give Ian one more nudge because I’m a glutton for punishment, and I do have to feel as though I’m earning my money and not robbing his parents blind by just babysitting. “You did really good research.”

  Shrug. Yawn.

  Hate him. “But one more thing. How does all of this relate to Morrison, to the context of her novel in the context of the times in which she’s setting the novel?”

  Ian finally turns to me and levels his light brown eyes at me. “You’re kidding, right? How does music relate to Morrison? That’s the most random shit I ever heard. Like how work songs and hip-hop relate to Morrison?”

  I use one of Ian’s smart-ass lines. “Did I stutter?”

  He rolls his eyes at me. “Oh my God, I wish you’d get fired or leave me alone.”

  “Yeah, well, you know what they say, you can’t always get what you want.” And I stick my tongue out.

  He doesn’t mean to, but Ian laughs. A real, amused laugh. And then he recovers, replaces the laughing eyes with the sullen again. “Very funny.”

  “Seriously.” My thoughts wander for a bit, thinking about a good way to get Ian onto stuff without being preachy. “Seriously. All of this stuff is connected. Books and music and film and art and the world and politics and why you want to produce hip-hop, even. It’s all related.”

  “Whatever,” Ian says and then it’s my turn to sigh. But then he stands up. “Listen, I know all of this stuff is connected because I’m not a retard. I get stuff. You think you’re, like, tricking me into learning and stuff, but you’re not.”

  “So tell me how it’s all related then.”

  “I will, but not right now. I’m hungry. I’m going to ask Maricela to fix me a sandwich or something. You staying?”

  That was his elegant way of asking me if I’d like to join him for lunch.

  “No, as much as I can’t tear myself away from the good times we’re having here, I should go. But next time I’m staying a full hour.”

  More eye rolling. “See you Thursday, then.”

  I make my way toward the door and Ian follows me until he hits the kitchen. “Later,” he says, and then he’s gone.

  My flip-flops make loud slapping sounds as I walk down the hallway. When I get to the door and pull it open, I’m yet again amazed by how heavy it is, that Maricela has to come open this damn thing every time she’s near. I close the door quietly behind me and unlock my car, which now strikes me as ridiculous. What was I thinking? That some millionaire, desperate for a shitty, dented Honda, would hot-wire it and jet off to Bel Air? Dumb. I get myself settled in the car and turn the key, but only get a sickly, throat-clearing kind of sound. “Do not play,” I whisper to my car. “Do not fuck with me today.” I try again. More screechy throat clearing. I try again and again for five minutes until I accept the fact that my car is not going to start. Shit. I sit for a moment, running through all my options. I could take a cab home—if I were rich. From Beverly Hills to Echo Park. Please. One-fourth my rent. I could ask Ian to give me a lift home. He-larious. I could call Earl to come get me. The only real option.

  I get out of the car and knock on the door with the lion’s head. Ian opens the door and eyes me suspiciously. “I thought you left already.”

  “Yeah, well. My car won’t start.” Ian studies me, and then spots my car. “Nice ride.”

  “Just, can I use your phone, please?” Ian stares at me as though I’m speaking French all of a sudden.

  “What do you mean? What’s wrong with yours? Your cell’s not working?”

  “I don’t have a cell phone.”

  “Wow.” Ian shakes his head and turns up the corner of his lip. “Please tell me you lost it or something.”

  “I never had one, okay? How long do you want to chitchat before you let me use your phone?”

  “Man, you should be treating me so much nicer. You so need this job, like a lot you need this job. No cell. You have running water at your house, at least?”

  I raise both my eyebrows at Ian. “Phone. Now.”

  He opens the door wide, exaggeratedly, and gestures me through, like Vanna White displaying letters on Wheel of Fortune.

  “Thank you.” I use the phone propped up on one of their many elaborate marble tables in the foyer and call Earl, who happens to pick up. Like the sweetheart he is, he says he’ll be right over and so I tell Ian I’ll wait in the foyer for Earl. He shrugs and takes his sandwich back to the gigantic TV.

  I don’t know what to do. Sit on the steps inside the foyer or wait outside? I decide it would be boring just to sit around, and so I follow the sound of the television and sit in a chair next to Ian, who’s sprawled out on the couch.

  “What are you watching?”


  “Laguna Beach,” Ian replies, mouth full of sandwich.

  “Never heard of it. What’s the premise?”

  “The premise?” Ian smirks. “The premise is that these kids hook up with each other and the girls are total bitches and the dudes are dumbasses.”

  I watch TV for a while and then I watch Ian watch TV. He’s right. It’s a reality TV soap opera and the kids aren’t likeable, really. At least that’s my geriatric thirty-one-year-old’s perspective. They’re pretty to look at though. One group of girls is torturing another group of girls and the dudes are all players. They all have a ton of dough and live in ginormous houses, not unlike Ian’s. The camera follows them and all their little dramas and the more I watch, the more I miss the early days of The Real World, before hot tubs and threesomes.

  “So, why are you watching them?” I ask after a while.

  Ian shrugs. “It’s so dumb it’s genius. I can watch this crap for hours. It’s like watching two stories. There’s the dumb one, which they totally rig to be reality—” Ian rolls his eyes at this “—and then there’s the show that’s actually reality. Like, these people, they totally look like tools, but then they’re acting like tools on purpose because they’re total whores for the camera.”

  Ian is looking at me when he’s telling me all this. My little culture critic! Bravo! I get an idea for an assignment for Ian, something that, hopefully, he won’t think sucks. “You want to write a paper on Laguna Beach?”

  Ian puts his empty plate on the table in front of him and gapes at me. “What?”

  “A paper. On Laguna Beach.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Instead of reading a book?”

  “In addition to.”

  Ian snorts.

  “C’mon,” I say. “Write a paper about what you were just arguing, that the show works on two levels or however many levels you think. Take notes the next time you watch the show and form your argument.”

  Ian stands and picks up his plate to take to the kitchen. On his own! “If you leave me alone about Toni Morrison for like, two seconds, then I’ll do it.”