Good Kids: A Novel by Nugent Benjamin

Author:Nugent, Benjamin [Nugent, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2013-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

3.

I Have to Remind Myself of That

On the way home, I told Julie about Jeremy. She rocked in her seat and cursed. She put her hands behind her head, somewhere in the depths of her hair, which appeared to calm her down. “It’s not the worst thing in the world,” she said. “What’s he going to do? Fire me and wait to see if the tiger-observing-sex thing gets on Gawker? You might have just done the show a favor, honestly.”

I told her about Todd and Khadijah, the dinner invitation. She remained unfazed. There would be some awkwardness, we agreed, a ghost from the past floating in the air above our food, at dinner. But nothing worse than that.

“You told me about that vow on our third date, and I was like, I owe her,” said Julie. “I need to send that girl a thank-you note and some scones.”

“It doesn’t freak you out?”

“I’d be jealous of an attractive awning, if you stood under it, but relative to other people, no. I’m not jealous of Khadijah. I mean, tell me if I should be. But it was thirteen years ago.”

I was taking downhill curves in her white Volkswagen, a light and obedient car. I was the one who liked to drive.

“Khadijah’s the last person you would ever need to be jealous of,” I said. An exaggeration, but one meant to convey affection. I was bleary from the pomegranate vodka, and from puking, so we bought coffee with cinnamon from a taco truck on La Cienega. That was all I needed to steer us home through the flats. Back at Julie’s house, in Miracle Mile, we fell to our battle stations, brushed our teeth, and had drunken sex. We lay under her down comforter, patterned with green birds, safe, nesting.

The hungover morning passed quickly. I sat on the study floor, my guitar in my lap, a Beatle in India. No “Dear Prudence” descended. I talked myself into falling in love with a meaningless chord progression, a limp melody, until I took a break to smoke a cigarette and walk to Miracle Mile’s Gaia Foods. By the time I let myself back in and turned off the alarm and put down my grocery bags on the kitchen island and put the groceries in the fridge and took two Advil, I’d forgotten the song.

That evening, Julie came home from work at 11:00 p.m., which was normal, and bore down on the single bottle of wine we kept in the kitchen, beside the cartons of organic soup, which was unusual. Neither of us ever drank at home. We drank at parties, where we got drunk.

“Would you open this for me, please?” she asked.

Sitting with the bottle wedged between my stocking feet, I went to work with the corkscrew. She watched me.

“How was your day?” She clamped two wineglasses on the counter.

“Besides the songwriting failures, kind of awesome.” I grunted, and the cork popped out. “The mail came, and I got this weird ‘This Is Just Wrong’ check from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

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