Nicotine (33 page)

“What?” He squints as his head wobbles in bewilderment. “What are you saying? Do you need me to force you?”

“No. No! If it were just me, sure, but a baby? I'd be mixing up somebody else in this sick thing. Somebody who has a right to be happy. I'm not a happy person, but I'm under no obligation to give a fuck. It's just me!”

Matt's emotions are very exasperated—exasperated desire and exasperated fear, linked by exasperation into incoherent helplessness. “I don't have to see either of you,” he insists. “I'll pay for everything, and you can live by yourself, on top of your old house. You know I'm making a really nice apartment up there, on the roof where you used to live, but with fireplaces and climate control. You'll be so happy, with all your friends. I would help you. It would be easy.” He pauses, then adds, “I'm so sorry about what I did to your friends. But you couldn't really expect me to get along with Rob, under the circumstances. I'll make it up to you.”

“How would that help anything? I want to fuck you, but you don't want to fuck me.” He makes a gesture of protest, but she goes on. “If you wanted that, you wouldn't want me
pregnant
and a
mom
. Right now you don't even know it. It's hormones, because you've never been a father, and you're getting old. It's your biological clock. I'm twenty-four, Matt.”

He goes motionless and quiet.

“We can fuck,” she says firmly, “with birth control. We'll get condoms from the concierge.”

He sits down on the bed. All his strongest desires conflict with
his desire to be liked by Jazz. He could grab her right now and fuck a baby into her, and if she didn't abort it, she would love it very much whether she liked it or not, and it would love him the way he loved his parents, from a respectful distance. But she still would not be the love he wants, because (as he knows) it wasn't him she was talking about. It was herself. They are too similar. He knows what he would say to a woman who offered him a baby to raise. He would say, “Tell it to your biological clock.”

He feels the helpless, unpleasant sensation of being trapped in a conversation with an equal. Sex never makes him feel helpless. Love appears to consist of helplessness and nothing else.

Maybe she's right, he thinks. Maybe love is a bad idea. He tries to imagine casual sex with her, and can't.

Eyes shut, he hears the door close. She is gone.

He jumps up to run after her. Then he sits down again.

“I SAW MATT LAST NIGHT,”
Jazz tells Rob as he stands at the campground deep sink to do some hand laundry. “We didn't fuck.”

“What do you mean, ‘saw'?”

“Got together. You were busy.”

“I wasn't
that
busy. I would have found the time to throw your phone on the fire and tie you to a tree.” She is silent. “Let's be friends. Talk to me.” He lathers up his socks for the second time, paying extra attention to the grubby heels.

“He's in love, and he thinks it's forever. It's like he's seventeen. He wants my baby.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“Leave the country with no forwarding address.”

“That's a little harsh,” Rob says. “I mean on me.”

“Nothing is forever, except babies.”

“Let me see your phone a second.” She hands it over. He bangs it against the stucco wall of the restroom building, cracking the glass
of the display. He drops it in the water. It lies forlornly at the bottom of the sink, emitting bubbles.

“Breaking my phone won't make my accounts go away,” Jazz says. “He can still get in touch with me.”

“I miss modern life,” Rob says. “Remember when you could leave Dodge after high noon and the sheriff wasn't in your fucking
pocket
? You're going to be fielding booty calls from that fucker forever!”

“Rob. Rob. I left him sitting crying in a hotel room. I didn't fuck him. You're the last man I ever fucked. I love you. I don't want to be anybody's baby-mama. Rob!” Down in the water, the phone lights up for a fraction of a second, then dies. They both glance at it, and Jazz says, “It's still
working
?” She picks it up and shakes it, and water flies out. She taps the display a few times. “Oh well. I guess it's really broken.”

“Maybe hang it out to dry. I'm sorry.”

“I wanted a new phone anyway. I want a burner clamshell phone like you and the other celebrities have.”

“You're crazy,” he says. He touches her face tenderly. “I really think you should have a baby, just so you get a chance to love somebody who deserves it. You're such a loving person, and the guys you love are such fucking jokes.”

“Rob the romantic,” she says. “One night with Penny, and you're a breeder.”

“I love her. She's as tormented as you or anybody, but when she's in trouble, it's through no fault of her own. I spent so much of my life around self-defeating fuckups, I forgot that was even possible!”

She looks down, unhappy. Her phone's display is black and blank.
I'm not going to chase you,
Matt writes to her.
I know what campground you're in. I also know you can't want me as much as you do and not come back to me. You're not that strong. That's what you always say, and I'm starting to believe it.
But she can't see it, not right now.

BACK AT THE CAMPSITE, ROB
proposes they all spend the day doing some sightseeing together.

He drives into San Francisco, intending to cross the Golden Gate Bridge. But the toll situation is vague and intimidating, requiring or not requiring an RFID sticker that might or might not require a credit card, and in the end he parks near Fort Point and they walk the entire way up to cross the bridge on foot.

In the middle of the bridge, Jazz makes a joke about suicide hotlines. Rob offers her his phone. Sorry says she's so light, she'd waft down like a leaf and not get hurt. Penny grabs her arm and doesn't let go again until they're in Marin County.

They leave the road and hike down to the first beach on the left. Past the scarred pines and ruined amenities, below the empty campground, Sorry sits down on the tar-blackened sand. The others wade into tiny waves that make the smooth stones go clack-clack. A dark wall approaches over the ocean, low and sinister, and eats the bridge. “Fog,” Rob says knowingly, but there is reverence in his voice.

They return to the minivan exhausted, after a long march through blank, boring whiteness.

After a few wrong turns, they find Golden Gate Park, nowhere near the Golden Gate, and park. They can't find uninhabited benches, so they sit on the grass.

Penny's euphoria is fading. She hasn't had sex with Rob in nearly seven hours.

She feels irritable and needy, seeking his attention and ashamed of herself for doing so. She doesn't so much mind the idea of flying to California every weekend—she's small enough to curl up in economy, and she'll have the money to pay for it if she keeps living at Tranquility—but she will miss him so much. She knows it already. All week, every week, she'll be his lonely girlfriend, his lover in name only, pouring her erotic creativity into dumb texts, kissing his distorted face on frustrating video calls, staring stupidly at her phone.
She will bridge the weeks between their encounters by implementing the new life skills she learned in his absence—skepticism, apathy, how to run on empty—while the pleasure she would take in seeing him every morning and every night will lie there like a five-hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk, with no one to pick it up, until it blows away.

She doesn't feel she has a choice. She's not going to find anything better than what she has. For jobs and men, it's a seller's market. There are no other fish in the sea. If she throws these ones back, she'll be empty-handed.

She sniffles and interweaves her fingers with his fingers. She tries hard to entertain the notion that she might be jumping the gun. You can't sleep with a guy for one day—no matter how hard you've worked to get him—and go straight to long-term future plans, right? After his career as CHA's leading tease, he might be raring to try out Californication. He's a man, after all. That's why she loves him. She leans on him and says, “I love you.” He puts his arm around her and nods hello to a stranger who's staring at him as she walks by looking like a younger version of Kestrel in wrestling booties and a black silk romper. Penny adds, “I'm getting a headache. I need coffee.”

“I second the motion,” Sorry says, and Jazz agrees.

Penny and Rob walk into a nearby business district to look for takeout. She pays thirteen dollars for four paper cups of drip coffee. They take small, hot sips as they walk back to the park, still not seeing a bench anywhere. They deliver the coffee to Jazz and Sorry and sit down near them on the grass, and Penny says, “Rob.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you really plan to stay here?”

“I don't know.”

She is silent. Then she says, “That doesn't give me much to work with.”

“I truly don't know. I have absolute freedom.”

“I don't. I have a job that starts in two and a half weeks, and I
want to start it. I need to make money, and I need to learn more. It's an interesting job, and I know I'll learn a lot. But I'm in love with you, so it makes me feel like shit.”

“Isn't love supposed to make you happy?”

“I can't go back there.” She leans on him and clutches his arm. “I want to be with you. I
need
to be with you. If I have to go home—I can't imagine it. I'll
die
.”

“That's an easy one,” he says. “Since it doesn't matter to me, and you want to be in New York, we'll go back to Tranquility. If we start tomorrow, we can take it slow, like two hundred miles a day, which is nothing. But do you have gas money? That's the main thing holding me in Oakland. I spent everything I had on a tent and sleeping bags. It was still cheaper than the motels in this place.”

Penny sobs.

“Don't cry!” he says, embracing her. “I love you!”

“I'm not crying,” she says. Immediately she stops. She shakes her head, aware that it is chock full of fluff.

“Oh good,” he says.

They walk a few feet and sketch their plans to Sorry and Jazz.

“Me, I'm going to Hawaii,” Sorry says. “California squared!”

“Hawaii!” Jazz says. She hits Sorry on the arm. “Shit, what a great idea! Why didn't you say that before? It's a tropical island
in
America
. You don't even need a passport!”

“And you know it has a
major
tourist trade. Maybe I never told you guys this, but I can make these baskets—really professional-looking baskets. I learned it in the hospital. I could sell them on consignment at gift shops. I mean, nobody in New York is going to buy native crafts, because there are no natives, but in Hawaii—”

“You look kind of Hawaiian. Doesn't she?” Jazz says.

Penny and Rob regard Sorry in this new light.

“Yes,” Penny says. “Definitely. She totally has the hair, and in Hawaii being heavy is a sign of belonging to the hereditary ruling class.”

“We can squat on public land,” Sorry says. “Can I have your tent? If there's just the two of you, you can sleep in the van.”

“It's so basic, I don't know if it's really waterproof. Hawaii probably has monsoon rains.”

“I think it's one of those places where it rains on one side of the island and not on the other. We'll go to the dry side.”

“Okay, you can have my tent.”

Several minutes later, as Sorry and Jazz are booking last-minute one-way tickets to Honolulu on Sorry's tablet, Penny says to Rob, “I can't believe it. I was all tortured deciding whether to throw my life away for love and move to Oakland. Now it's like, Oakland who? Where am I? What am I even doing?”

“You're on vacation.” He kisses her.

“Seriously! Every time I think I know what's happening, the cards get reshuffled.”

“You could get a job in Hawaii,” Rob says.

Penny laughs, frowns, and says, “I'm going to miss them.”

“They'll be back. Jazz is like a comet. Try to slow her down, and you'll get your hands ripped off. But wait it out, and she always comes back.”

“That's like this seventies saying my dad used to quote—‘If you love something, set it free'—except it's like, ‘Set it free or it will rip your hands off.'”

“I think you might be missing something about that saying.” He croons in a hippie voice, “‘I promise you, baby, I'll never set you free.'”

“Oh right,” Penny says.

“My dad is like that. He tells women he loves them but they're free to go, and he lives in a thirty-foot trailer with no electric. Now, when I'm in love, there are nicer things I can think of to say, like”—he affects a girlish falsetto—“‘I'd
die
if I had to be separated from you for even
one day
.'”

“Stop it!”

He lets his hands drop from her body.

She picks them up and puts them back. “I didn't mean
that
. I meant stop gloating.”

TWO DAYS LATER, ROB DRIVES
his friends to San Francisco International, on the other side of the bay. Traffic is bad, and they arrive rushed. Sorry leans forward to stub out her cigarette in the dashboard ashtray. Simultaneously, she presses five hundred dollars in cash into Rob's hand.

“I can't accept this,” he says. “I've never known where you get your money, but I know you need it more than I do.”

“I got a divorce settlement. If I'm ever so down and out I need five hundred dollars, I'll know who to call.”

They all disembark and set their luggage on the sidewalk. Sorry wears a long, stretchy black gown and a bone amulet on a leather thong (gift from Penny). Jazz looks smashing, in red sandals and a new white dress patterned with big red flowers.