Fraternity Page 4

  A close-up of Caleb’s hands tapping the wheel. Of course, we hear him say. Of course we’ll put it on my card.

  Decor in the reception area: red Chinese fans; a watercolor of a seaside cliff; a small sculpture of a cat in a bow tie.

  A nurse in blue scrubs stands in a doorframe. Joanne? she says. Carla stands.

  Carla no longer wears her baseball cap. She leans against the wall of an elevator and closes her eyes. Some of her hair is stuck to her face. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand as she falls asleep. Caleb takes her by the shoulders and pulls her away from the elevator’s wall.

  A handheld shot, through the Lincoln’s driver-side window, of passing billboards: VEEP, GEICO, IT’S TIME FOR DODGER BASEBALL IN 4:18:05, 4:18:04, 4:18:03.

  Carla sleeps on a bed with white sheets, in a bedroom with gallery-white walls and large windows covered with gauzy curtains. She’s curled up on her side. On the nightstand, there’s a small framed drawing an artist gave her, a portrait of the two principal characters from her film. Caleb stands beside her bed and watches her. He takes the little sketch from the nightstand and holds it to the light.

  The low desert at sunset, framed by the Lincoln’s windshield. The roof is down. Carla, in the passenger seat of the rumbling car, lights a cigarette using the car’s detachable lighter, her hair and the smoke whipped back by the wind.

  I can hear Carla in my mind’s ear: I would never shoot a scene with a young couple smoking cigarettes in a vintage car headed to Twentynine Palms. I would gouge my eyes out before I put that in a film.

  And I say: But that’s what happened. That is the car you owned. You liked to smoke with the top down, and your feet on the dash, on a desert road. Because deep down you still loved that kind of movie, even though you were too smart to make that kind of movie. We love the things we think we’ve gotten over. It’s nice to have you back in my head, directing.

  A coyote sniffs at the trunk of a Joshua tree. It looks at them.

  That’s him, says Carla. She points at the coyote.

  I still think it might have been a girl, says Caleb, driving.

  No, that’s our baby, says Carla. That’s the second coyote this week he’s inhabited.

  The car climbs a gentle slope toward a small cluster of windmills.

  Close-up on a windmill’s face, its three thin blades spinning slowly in the brown and violet evening. No child of mine is growing up to be a scavenger dog, we hear Caleb say. A coyote’s a scavenger dog. He’s not a scavenger, we hear Carla reply. He’s figuring things out. He’ll be okay.

  * * *

  Carla mostly worked behind the camera. So the fans who accosted her on the street were educated people. One of them told her she was quietly subversive. Another told her she was a throwback to the age of the auteur. When they looked at her, there was something in their faces that was rare and handsome: concentration.

  Carla was beautiful when she humored fans. She liked to rummage in her bag for a Nat Sherman as they stood there watching her, produce one with a show of triumph, and ash on the heel of her hand. She became smaller and brighter. Her high school self, that big-nosed girl with flyaway curls, wouldn’t stop haunting her, so she wore her power like a joke, smiled with her teeth, arms folded, eyes incredulous. I saw why some other famous people, other kinds of famous people, had entourages; I thought Carla might be happier if she always had some friends around to remind her that everyone loved her, that the high school Carla was never coming back.

  Once, when we were waiting in line to buy hot dogs from a kiosk at the airport, a teenage girl was talking on her phone to her friend about her flight delays when she abruptly changed the topic of conversation.

  “Wait. Stop. I’m standing behind Carla Dakopoulos at a hot dog stand,” murmured the girl. “Yeah. She’s talking to this guy about how he has to read this book she’s carrying. I thought he was Thor, but he’s not Thor. She’s wearing white Converse and white nineties jeans and this red polka-dot top with one of those little belts in the back. Now she’s ordering a hot dog. This is embarrassing, she’s looking at me. You owe me. I’m embarrassed. Yes, right at me. Now she’s turned away again.”

  * * *

  The first e-mail from my ex-girlfriend came when I was watching an old French sci-fi film composed of still photographs. Carla had assigned it to me; she said it was Film 101. She had just left my apartment for a meeting in Universal City. The sharp, joyous smell of new tires hung in the air. This was the smell our vibrator released after it was cleaned.

  Nutella,

  Hope it’s not weird to still call you that? Is it true you’re dating Carla? She’s one of our clients. How’s that going? She’s a lucky woman. I recently sold a documentary-style show on competitive gamers for frankly a lot more money than I thought I would. It made me think of your mom’s boyfriend’s computer game addiction.

  Hope you’re well,

  Olive

  The last time Olive and I had stood face-to-face, she’d said that it was so sad watching me decline from an ambitious fraternity president fresh out of college to a benumbed failure that she no longer ever truly wanted to sleep with me. “If you want,” she’d said, “you can wait until I fall asleep and poke me. I understand you have needs.”

  It was odd that now she would keep me abreast of her accomplishments. I showed the e-mail to Carla that night, in the interest of transparency.

  “She walks like a duck,” Carla said. That was not right. When Olive wore heels, she threw her legs in front of her and swung her arms, as if she were worried about losing forward momentum.

  “True,” I said to Carla. “You always nail people. I guess because you’re a director.”

  Carla scrambled off my mattress and duckwalked up and down the green carpet, smoking her cigarette, looking nothing like Olive.

  “Oh my God—uncanny,” I said, clapping. “Hi, Olive.”

  We had sex, building to the vibrator, and watched The Lion King. I wanted Carla to see it so that she could see the real America. Carla’s father was a film scholar. Her mother directed an arts foundation. Carla had grown up in Brooklyn and learned to drive at twenty-seven.

  Mufasa, the dad lion, was showing Simba, the child lion, the savanna over which he would one day reign. “Everything the light touches is our kingdom,” Mufasa said.

  “That’s it,” I said. “That’s our country. That’s what it’s like. My dad once took me out for a drive, when he found out I had grown some pubic hair, and he was like, ‘I want you to know you can have anything you want, son, if you go out and work for it.’ And he let me hold the wheel, so I could see what it felt like to be a man.” This was not true.

  “That’s so bad,” she said. “That’s kind of fucked.” She laid her head on my shoulder. I think she knew I was lying. I think she knew I knew she knew I was lying. We had a tacit understanding: every once in a while, I got to be the artist, and she got to be the audience.

  When the movie was over, she knelt on my mattress and looked out the window. My purple-and-yellow Delta Zeta Chi sweatshirt was all she wore. She liked the sweatshirt because it proved my world was real.

  “The thing about the people in that movie,” she said of The Lion King, “is that they’re all struggling with real problems.”

  “Most people,” I said, “have real problems.”

  “Of course.” She shook her lighter, which, resting on the sill during the climax of the movie, had been exposed to light rain. “But they don’t attack their real problems, typically. They attack fake problems while their real problems eat them alive. That’s what good movies get that Disney movies don’t.”

  “Before you respond to Olive’s e-mail,” she said, as we were falling asleep, “show me what you’re going to say.”

  “Whatever you want,” I told her, and fit two of her knuckles in my mouth.

  * * *

  I was eating a late breakfast in a booth by myself at a coffee shop in Burbank. The walls were covered with autographed pho
tos of actors. The pie case was taller even than its counterpart at the House of Pies. I’d just finished my broccoli-egg-white omelet when I looked up and saw the manager standing over me, his hands in a prayerful position, a busboy standing behind him with a dish towel thrown over his shoulder.

  “Sir,” said the manager. “Excuse me, I’m so sorry to bother you. But are you Tye Sheridan?”

  I slugged down the rest of my coffee. In no sense was I Tye Sheridan, or his near equivalent. I didn’t even look like him. I bore a stronger resemblance to the Hemsworths. What the man had seen on me was professional skin, professional muscles, professional hair, and a face that would pop on camera, if given a chance. “That’s me,” I said humbly.

  “It’s an honor to meet you,” the manager said. We shook hands. The busboy stepped forward and produced a clipping from a magazine, Sheridan in Ready Player One. The manager smoothed it out as he laid it on the table. I don’t remember the words he used when he asked for my signature and dedication. What I remember is his helpless grin, and the helpless grin of the busboy behind him, their submission.

  * * *

  The next morning, I showed Carla my proposed reply to Olive: We’re so in love. So cool that you sold the gamer show. Carla approved it and I tapped send. Thirteen minutes later, Olive replied:

  Carla D. and Nutella in love … adorable, and it should help with your acting.

  I still remember how anxious you were about your career. You were so paranoid that nothing would ever work out for you and now look at you, dating a wunderkind. I think you are going to be huge, a legend. We’ll all be looking at your face on billboards. Do you still not talk to your dad since he sent you the McKinsey internship application?

  I could feel that Carla was angry as she read it over my shoulder.

  “She wants you back,” she said. “She’s big-upping you and negging you, now that you’re dating me, because of my…” The omitted word was fame.

  I agreed that Olive’s interest in me had been revived by my dating a famous person. But she didn’t want me back, I explained. She didn’t want to sleep with me per se, she just wanted to share something with Carla. It could be me, a doula, anything of an intimate nature.

  Carla was unmollified by my take on the situation. She was throwing on her blazer, looking for her car keys. She was needed on set; dawn was breaking around the edges of the towel I used as a curtain.

  “If she e-mails you again,” she said, “tell me right away.”

  “Yes,” I said. I was still sitting on my mattress. I got on my knees and looked up at her. “The instant she e-mails me again, I’ll tell you.” I pulled down Carla’s pants. I fucked Carla even though she didn’t have time. We said, “I love you.”

  * * *

  The next night, Carla showed me The Story of Adele H. It was about a celebrity’s daughter who went mad stalking a soldier who ignored her. The movie didn’t say it, but what it was about was that she got hotter and hotter the madder she became, wandering North American colonies in a green dress.

  “I didn’t realize how problematic this movie was when I was a kid,” said Carla. “I just thought, I’m unlovable, like her. All the world will attend my dad’s funeral while I’m in an asylum, like her. I’ll always be obscure and alone, like her.”

  What I liked about the movie, I said, was that the girl had no reason to like the guy. She didn’t know him.

  “Of course not,” said Carla. “It’s easier to be obsessed with someone when you don’t know them. You make them into whatever it is you want.”

  When Carla fell asleep, I went to the bathroom, sat on the toilet, opened the e-mail from Olive, and hit reply. It means a lot to hear you say that, I wrote, and hit send.

  In the morning, she wrote back. “Uh-oh,” I called to Carla. “Here comes Olive.” Carla came to look at my phone with her toothbrush arrested in her mouth. She read the e-mail I’d sent to Olive. Then she read Olive’s response:

  I miss you, Nutella. And I’m worried about you. You haven’t had an easy path. I’m here, you know, if you ever want to have a drink and talk about how things are going.

  Carla paced. She took a small bag of pretzels from her purse, tore it open, and put a pretzel in her mouth. “Fuck her,” she said, eating. “You’re her ex. We’ve all been there. What the fuck.” I struggled to suppress a grin. Having succeeded in making Carla jealous, I felt as if I were seated in the cockpit of a fighter plane, a lethal machine I could halfway control.

  * * *

  “I have a question about frats,” said Carla. My Delta Zeta Chi sweatshirt was lying on the bathroom floor, where she’d dropped it on the way into the shower. She’d put on the clothes she’d brought in her overnight bag and she was strafing the hair at the nape of her neck with the blow-dryer she kept in my dresser.

  “Ask me anything you want,” I said.

  “You’re nice,” she said. “But frat boys are fucked up. Every day there’s some story on the internet about something disgusting being done to some girl in a frat house, or some shitty thing they did to each other. Did you do stuff like that? Or are you the one nice one?”

  I said that when the right guys are running a fraternity, it’s a place where people will tell you if you’re being an asshole. The instant you do something obnoxious, you get called on it. It’s like having twenty older brothers who’re there to help you grow up. But if the wrong guys are running a fraternity it’s more like a barbarian tribe, where all that matters is whether you’re in it or not. If you’re in it you can do what you want and all the others will stand behind you. A kid who’s insecure, who’s been kicked around and left out his whole life, he suddenly has that and he gets high. He does something terrible to a girl to remind himself that he has it. Maybe that’s even the appeal he has, for some girl he’s trying to seduce: the way he walks and talks and wipes his ass, it’s all done with a certain confidence, because he knows he’s special now. It’s not all his fault, necessarily. He picks it up from the atmosphere.

  * * *

  Dear Caleb,

  Please accept my sincere apologies for the e-mails I’ve sent you over the past few days. I regret the intrusion and promise it will not continue.

  Sincerely,

  Olive

  A few hours after I received the e-mail, Carla knocked on my door. It was dusk, and she was tired from a day of meetings, her makeup imperfectly removed. A stroke of eyeliner darkened her left eye. Her MacBook was tucked under her arm. We had plans to watch the beginning of Fanny and Alexander, which I’d never seen, and she had it on her hard drive. I unlocked the door and sat on my mattress, waiting.

  She walked past me into my apartment. She took a bottle of Sancerre from her bag. Next, two cucumber-and-egg-salad sandwiches from craft services or a restaurant, wrapped in wax paper. She placed them at my feet, on the carpet.

  I didn’t say anything. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “Let’s not eat these sandwiches, actually,” she said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Let’s have dinner somewhere really amazing. It’s my treat. I insist.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Carla drove. The Lincoln’s engine snarled as we ascended a hill beside a lake full of idle rowboats and merged with the northbound 101. The silhouetted tops of palm trees hovered like spiders in the sky.

  “I didn’t tell them to fire her,” said Carla. “They’re not going to fire her. I said it shouldn’t be a punitive approach we took, just, let’s figure out how we can get along, going forward.”

  A nearby car was playing a radio show about cooking. Then we broke free of traffic and were alone with the sound of the engine and the damp air in our faces.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  Carla rolled up her window. She’d had her agent, who was Olive’s boss, get Olive on a conference call, she said. “It was short. She cried. She was like, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’”

  “You forced her to apologize to me,” I said. “You forced her to stop e-ma
iling me.”

  Carla said nothing. She looked at the road and drummed her fingers on the wheel. I told her to take the next exit, and we sank into a lowland of fast food and half-gentrified strip malls. I told her to pull into a parking lot shared by a pharmacy, a Laundromat, and a gelateria.

  Once she’d parked the car, she cut the engine and put her hands in the air. “I have a problem with jealousy,” she said. “I’m sorry I hurt someone, but I acknowledge it, and I will try to get better. I’m sorry.” I didn’t say anything. “No, really,” she said. “I’ll go to therapy. We can do couples therapy. I want to get better.”

  “Stop,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  She looked confused. “I’m being sincere. Maybe this could be an important wake-up call. If I work really hard, maybe it will bring us closer. We could get to a more honest place.”

  Why didn’t I take her hand and say, Yes, let’s try? At the time, I was only aware that I couldn’t bring myself to look her in the eye or continue the conversation. Now I think I was ashamed of what my love was built on. I was so ashamed I could only form the most generic sentences. “This can’t work,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I told her I would miss her, and that I would treasure the time we’d spent together.

  I opened the door. Behind me, Carla started to cry. The landscape whipped and sharpened as if it were the screen of an old television that had been smacked; I wondered if I was crying. A sunburned family paraded from the pharmacy in white T-shirts, a boy bucking in the seat of a shopping cart like a knight riding a horse into a valley. The streetlamps were dimmed by fog.

  “Why are you walking away from me?” asked Carla. She was calling me “sweetie,” softer and softer.

  * * *

  People ask me what Carla was like, and I think, what was Carla like? I don’t know. What she was like was: Carla is talking to me. That’s Carla’s body. Carla is educating me. I just made Carla laugh. Carla is taking me out for my birthday dinner; that’s actually Carla sitting across from me, with the white bluffs behind her. That’s actually Carla on the toilet. That’s actually Carla identifying a homeless guy as our baby and crying at her joke. That’s really Carla at the kitchen island, eating strawberries with the greens still on, depositing the greens and the surrounding flesh on the orange tile.