Model Home (51 page)

“And I don't know if you're like me, sick of wimpy scissors that won't cut anything but hair, but we've got a special offer right now if you order any BladeCo set and knife block. I'll throw in these sixty-dollar Super Shears, guaranteed to be the sharpest on the planet. Would you have a penny on you, by any chance?”

Mindy Tremor got off her Exercycle and fished one from her purse. Brandishing it between two fingers, like a magician, Warren slipped the penny into the hinge of the scissors and then snipped it effortlessly in half. Mindy Tremor actually gasped. Her daughter smirked, but oddly he did not feel humiliated. He had not felt humiliated for some time. All the shame he'd felt over his failure—losing his money, letting down his family—seemed ridiculous to him now. Or not ridiculous:
immaterial.
It was as if it had happened to someone else.

“That's what I mean when I say BladeCo products speak for themselves.”

“Hey, that's pretty awesome,” the boy said.

“Not just awe
some,
” Warren said, handing him a new penny from his pocket. “Awe-
much.
”

Later, driving home, Warren passed the exit that led to Melody's trailer park. The sign for Mahogany Views was still there, advertising annual ease only. A couple weeks ago, he'd stopped by on his way back from an appointment in Rosamond, not knowing what he would say if Melody was home. He hadn't wanted to seem overly pitiful; nor, if it turned out that her husband had moved back in, did he want to cause trouble. He wasn't sure if he'd be greeted with a kiss or a punch. In any case, the problem failed
to present itself. The trailer park was gone. Vanished. Instead of rows of tidy, sun-bleached trailers, Warren was confronted with a bulldozer sending up a great pillar of dust, digging up some broken concrete and shoveling the giant slabs into a dump truck. They were breaking ground for a subdivision.

Warren sat there in his car for a long time, watching them work. He wanted to laugh at the developer's hubris but did not feel at all confident that the project would fail. There were developments springing up all around them, from Palmdale to the 405, dotting the Mojave with miraculous three-story homes.

Except in the vicinity of the dump, of course. Cancer Corridor, they called it on the news. That was a wasteland, Warren's own.

Today, instead of heading right home, he stopped by Mojave Video. He'd gotten into the habit of doing this; it was right off the freeway, and he enjoyed having Dustin pick out a video for him to watch at home. Now that they were the only ones there, he had nothing else to do at night.

“You look like a Mormon,” Dustin said, glancing at Warren's name tag, which he'd forgotten to take off. As always, the inside of the store—its aisles of dusty tapes, TV flickering in the corner—made him comfortably depressed. A woman in fatigues opened the door, looked at the two of them, and then left, checking her watch as if she'd forgotten something. “See there? You're driving away customers.”

“That was a coincidence,” Warren said.

Dustin began sorting through some videotapes by the register, logging their titles into a notebook. “Actually, she's a pain in the ass. I don't even know her name. Rents
The Deer Hunter
like three times a week, just so she can hang around and talk.”

“Maybe she's attracted to you.”

Dustin looked away without saying anything. Even Warren had to admit this was unlikely. Last week, Warren had seen a mother—a woman with flabby, sunburned arms—whisper to her toddler before approaching the counter. Dustin had either given up caring or was too distracted to notice. Since he'd stopped seeing Taz, he'd been more out of it than usual. Warren felt bad for him, of course, but, selfishly, he couldn't help thinking of it as a blessing, too: without Taz, he and Dustin had been spending more time together, sometimes even driving into town to grab lunch.

He started to ask for a recommendation but Dustin hushed him,
turning his attention to the TV. On the screen, a man with a blue-painted face was wrapping himself in dynamite; he lit the fuse but then changed his mind at the last minute, saying,
“Merde!”
and trying to put the flame out with his hand. The dynamite exploded anyway. Unconcerned, the camera panned out to the ocean, the word
FIN
appearing divinely in the sky. It was so awful Warren had to laugh.

“What on earth was that?” he asked.

“Godard. The New Wave.”

“I thought you hated New Wave.”

“That's
music
. Jesus.” Dustin turned around, fiddling with the VCR behind the register. “Two completely different things.”

Somehow they'd come full circle: Warren staring at his son's back, facing the brunt of his disdain. At least they were talking, though. He asked Dustin if he could rent the New Wave movie.

“They talk to the camera and stuff. It's weird. I don't think you'll like it.”

“I like weird,” Warren said. “Plus I'm into explosions.”

Dustin didn't laugh. Still, the fact that Warren could make a crack like this at all—without incurring his wrath—seemed like progress. To be honest, he was surprised that Dustin had wanted to live with him instead of his mother.
He'll sit around watching movies all day,
Camille had warned. If Warren were a better man, perhaps, he would have insisted Dustin move out and face the world, but he was too grateful to make him leave.

Dustin slipped a different tape into the VCR, another French film with the same riveting, boxer-faced actor who had blown himself up. The owner had put Dustin in charge of stocking the foreign film section, and he was doing his best to fill it with movies no one would rent. For the first time, it occurred to Warren that his son
liked
working in a video store. The place was cool and peaceful, the buzz of a trapped fly mixing with the melodious breeze of French from the TV. What was wrong with watching movies all day? As a man you were so conditioned to believe that ambition was important, that without it you were lost—but what did it matter in the end? Certainly there was little evidence that it made you happy.

“This reminds me a bit of your mom's videos,” Warren said. “The same sort of non sequiturs.”

“He smokes about as much as Mom did, too.”

Warren nodded, pretending to watch the movie. “What do you want for dinner tonight? I was thinking of making veal parmigiana.”

“I might go out with Osman,” Dustin said. “There's a movie he wants to see. I haven't decided.”

“Who's Osmond?”

“
Osman.
He works the weekend shift with me.”

“I'll make dinner anyway,” Warren said, trying to hide his disappointment. “You can eat it tomorrow, if you decide to go out.”

At home, Warren stripped off his coat and tie and filled the bathtub with steaming water. He'd never taken baths when Camille lived here, not wanting to hog the bathroom. Now that she'd left, he had the freedom to do other things as well. He could leave his shoes in the bathroom overnight. He could play the stereo as loud as Dustin's. He could call tank tops “wife beaters” without being scolded. He could leave the newspaper any way he wanted, sections folded this way and that, not having to reassemble each one primly like a gift. Generally, though, these freedoms paled in comparison to what he'd lost. The loneliness mired everything, like a swamp. It was huge and unnavigable. Sometimes he missed Camille so much he felt like he couldn't walk. Though they hadn't shared a bed in months, he'd gravitated back to his old side of the mattress, perched at the edge as if making room for her restless limbs, the only way he could sleep.

He tried not to think about Dustin moving out. He knew the boy would eventually find his own place, perhaps even make a life for himself. The idea of living in an empty house, waiting for the bank to kick him out, filled Warren with dread.

He got out of the bath and changed into sweats. On his way to the kitchen, he heard a car outside the house, pulling up to the curb. Warren's heart leapt. He rushed to the window but it was only the mailman, brown and sun-wizened, his pith helmet slipping forward as he leaned out of the truck. Surprisingly, the man failed to flip off the house or even glower in its direction. He seemed to have accepted his mail route at last, resigned to a fate he couldn't control.

Warren went out to get the mail after he'd gone, the evening sun on his shoulders gentle as a hand. The smell of the dump still had the power to turn his stomach, though there was something consoling, too, about its unwavering stink, a feeling he'd
come to associate with home. Curled inside the mailbox, sandwiched between the phone bill and a Sharper Image catalog, was an eleven-by-fourteen envelope. Warren opened the envelope and pulled out a glossy photograph of Jesus Christ in a hooded robe, clutching a shepherd's staff and staring majestically into the distance, presumably at His flock. It took Warren a second to recognize the face. At the bottom, just above Christ's bold and splashy signature, were the words
Keep on keepin' on.
Warren laughed. He started to throw the picture in the trash can, but some unnegotiable force caused him to hold on to it.

Back inside, he began to get dinner on, pulling
The Joy of Cooking
down from the shelf and flipping to the recipe for veal parmigiana. It was Dustin's favorite dish; he'd loved it since he was a little boy, four or five, ordering veal pajama at restaurants because he couldn't pronounce the name. Warren took the cutlets from the fridge and began to pound them thin as pancakes. He didn't know when he'd begun to like cooking; it had happened after Camille left, a way to fill the hour before dark. It wasn't the cooking itself he liked so much as the idea that Dustin would eat it. Up until now, everything Warren had done for his son—buying him beer, breaking into the Shackneys' house, even saving his life on the lawn—had failed to make Dustin happy. In his own peculiar way, Warren had devoted his life to helping him. But perhaps he'd needed something else, a devotion strong enough to refuse him.

Warren would do what he could to let Dustin live. Surely, though, it was still his duty—a father's one true job—to feed him.

He mixed up some bread crumbs and Parmesan and then began the sauce, chopping an onion on the counter. He'd become so expert at the task that it annoyed him when his eyes burned. He opened the window. The air was turning cold and breezy, hoarse with insects, the desert beginning to take on the otherworldly glow that happened before dusk. The Joshua trees, dwarfed by their own shadows, moved him strangely. Lately, the smallest things had the power to crush or elate him. Except for the freeway in the distance, there was no one for miles. Warren had the shivery, unsettling feeling that he was the last person on earth. Millions of years ago, this was the bottom of the sea, a place of gigantic sharks and four-legged fish.

He set the table for dinner, inspecting the knives for stray bits
of food. The clock over the sink said 6:43. Dustin would be home in a few minutes or not at all.

The tomato sauce simmered on the stove, fogging Warren's glasses when he bent down to stir it. He set the timer for ten minutes and then sat down to wait.
You've got your whole life ahead of you,
people liked to say. In truth there was not much time, a blip, and most of what you did was a mistake. You were lucky to find a safe and proper home. In the end, even the world cast you out, withdrawing its welcome.

The kitchen darkened slowly, dimming imperceptibly as a cave. Warren remembered being sick as a boy, too flu-ridden to go to school, how he used to lie in bed as the windows grew dark and wait for his mother to get home from her interminable shift at the gas station, the walls of his room disappearing bit by bit before his eyes. The boredom would merge with his sickness until he couldn't tell them apart. How desperate he'd felt! He could have switched on the light but out of some childish perversity refused to get out of bed. Lying there in the dark, damp with sweat, Warren would imagine his mother's face with the studious precision of a dream, perfecting every last detail in his mind, from the tiny pores in her nose to the mysterious, slept-on crease of her earlobe. Only a perfect likeness would bring her to his door. And somehow it worked: she would show up after what seemed like years and flip on the lights of his room and touch his forehead with a rough, slender, gas-smelling hand, which wouldn't shame him in the privacy of their own home but feel like all he'd been waiting for, the purest of joys. It startled Warren now to think of it. Was that really all there was to love? Darkness undone, a hand on your forehead. In the meantime all you could do was wait—tired, alone, the minutes as long or short as a lifetime—for the face in your dream to appear.

I would like to thank the Stanford Creative Writing Program and the National Endowment for the Arts for their generous support in helping me write this book. I am deeply grateful to Andrew Altschul, Scott Hutchins, Dorian Karchmar, Greg Martin, Samantha Martin, and Tom McNeely for the extraordinary time and effort they put into this book and for their invaluable insights and suggestions. I am indebted to Dr. Gordon Noel for his medical expertise and to Alison Florance, Hunter Johnson, Margaret W. Noel, and Bruce Snider for their advice on professions not my own. I am also indebted to the following authors and books: Barbara Ravage,
Burn Unit: Saving Lives After the Flames;
Andrew M. Munster, MD,
Severe Burns: A Family Guide to Medical and Emotional Recovery;
Dennis J. Stouffer,
Journeys through Hell: Stories of Burn Survivors' Reconstruction of Self and Identity;
John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton,
Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry.
My wife, Katharine Noel, helped me more than I can possibly express
—
for her patience, encouragement, and abundant wisdom, I am profoundly grateful.