Richard Lange - Sweet Nothing

I’M PUSHING THE CART out of the supermarket, rolling through the automatic doors, when I decide I want a cigarette. Need a cigarette. I’ve been a good boy for six months, ever since Claire’s EPT came up positive. If she couldn’t drink or smoke, I wouldn’t either. The deal seemed like one a husband should make when his wife is carrying their baby, but suddenly, here in the Vons parking lot, I’m all, Forget that, got to get me one of those coffin nails .

The problem is, no one smokes in L.A. I’m there five minutes waiting for somebody to come out of the store and light up so I can bum one, and I finally end up paying a homeless guy fifty cents for a generic. He strikes a match with his filthy hands, and we talk about spy satellites as I lean on my cart, puffing away. He tells me they have this technology now that allows them to look inside your mailbox and peek into your windows from way out in space, and I’m wondering, Should I care about this? Because I don’t.

The cigarette gives me a headache, and the weather makes it worse. The kind of hot we’re having sucks the sweat out of you even if you’re only going to the mailbox. Walk down the hill to 7-Eleven, and you’re risking dehydration and death.

Also, Claire’s parents are coming. David and Marjorie. For the weekend. That’s why Claire sent me here in the first place, to buy all sorts of expensive stuff that we never spring for when it’s just us. Lox, shrimp, organic blueberries, fancy coffee. I didn’t put up a fight. I could see how nervous she was when I helped her spread clean sheets on the foldout couch this morning. And she’s so big these days, so unsteady on her feet with all that added girth. She always looks like she’s about to cry, like she’s shocked at how gravity has turned against her.

Because of this I find myself agreeing to things we’d definitely have gone toe to toe over before she got pregnant, even though a buddy of mine warned me against such retrenchments. He said that once you give up ground, getting it back is a bitch. But I’m not sure I trust his advice. He and his wife divorced three months after their baby was born, and everything is war to him now.

I smoke the cigarette to the filter, drop it to the pavement, and twist it out. Then, reaching into one of the grocery bags, I grab whatever comes to hand first.

“You like pâté?” I ask the homeless guy.

He grimaces. “Pâté?”

“It’s good,” I say, “here,” and give him the can.

“Don’t you have any beer?” he says.

“DON’T YOU HAVE any beer?”

This is from David, Claire’s dad, a couple of hours later. He and Marjorie have just arrived, and I’ve walked them out of the sweltering apartment and onto our little deck overlooking Echo Park. Claire has brought champagne for the two of them and sparkling cider for us. Truthfully, I’m with Dad. I’d kill for a beer right now, and another cigarette, but I laugh with Claire when Marjorie whispers, “David!” and I lift my glass of cider and smile when David makes a toast to family.

We sit at the table on the deck and dig into the imported crackers and twenty-dollar cheese that Claire has arranged ever so carefully on a silver serving platter that we argued about for three days when I happened upon the receipt. The conversation goes pretty smoothly, considering that this is only the second time I’ve met David and Marjorie, the first being at our wedding, a year ago. I don’t know much about them except that they’re rich and constantly on the move. Paris, New York, Singapore. Right now they’re en route to Hong Kong.

“So how are you feeling?” Marjorie asks Claire, reaching over to brush aside a lock of hair that has fallen across her daughter’s forehead.

“Fat. Ugly. Stupid,” Claire replies.

“What a thing to say,” David snaps. “Don’t you know how blessed you are?” He turns to me. “What a thing for her to say.”

I shrug and try to make a joke. “Well, she sure is hungry. A whole pint of Ben and Jerry’s in one sitting. This kid’s going to come out looking like a sumo wrestler.”

David ignores me, turns back to Claire.

“You’re not fat, and you’re not ugly,” he says. “You’re blessed.”

Back when Claire and I were first going out, I asked her what her dad did, and she said, “Something with diamonds, some kind of broker.” How he put it at the rehearsal dinner was “I’m a middleman, a person who knows lots of people. If you have a gem you want to sell, you come to me. If you want to buy a gem, I can also help you there. Nothing too exciting.”

This seemed sketchy to me, but then so do half the jobs our friends have: consultant, aggregator, brander. Not that I have any room to talk. I still tell people I work in production when all I ever did was PA on a couple of commercials right after I got out of film school. What I really am is a part-time substitute teacher. And Claire, for the record, is not in wardrobe; she owns a little thrift store on Sunset that would have gone out of business ages ago if David didn’t send a check every month.

“What are you going to do when the baby comes?” David says.

“What do you mean?” Claire replies.

He gestures toward the apartment. “There’s only one bedroom. You need a nursery.”

“The baby will sleep in our room. It’ll be fine.”

David turns to me and raises a wise finger. “Buy yourself some earplugs,” he says. “You don’t even know.”

My dad cut out before I was walking, moved to Dallas, halfway across the country. I saw him maybe five or six times growing up — a day here, a weekend there — and not at all in the past ten years. And my stepfather, he was the quiet type, let my mom do the raising. What I’m saying is, if this is an example of fatherly wisdom — buy earplugs — I guess I didn’t miss out on much. I don’t even like his tone. How does he know what I know? And talking about the size of a person’s home right in front of him — there must be a rule against that somewhere.

LUCIFER, CLAIRE’S CAT, won’t leave me alone. I’m on my iPad in the living room, playing this game I’m hooked on, where you maneuver a soap bubble through a narrow cavern studded with stalactites and stalagmites, and the goddamned kitty keeps butting me with his big black head and purring so loudly that he seems to be doing it just to be annoying.

The bubble pops again, and I give up and lie down on the couch. Lucifer sits on my chest and does that strange kneading thing with his paws. Claire and her mom are at Ikea, and David is napping in the bedroom. I can hear his snores over the noise of the fan I’ve got trained on me.

Okay, so this place is kind of a dump. The plaster walls are cracked, the floor feels spongy beneath your feet, and when the guy in the next unit takes a leak, he sounds like he’s using our toilet. But we’ve got the hills. We’ve got the trees and the lake and the park. I tried to explain this to David earlier, and he laughed and said, “And the gangs and the graffiti and the midnight gunshots.” That made me wonder what Claire had been telling him behind my back. I mean, having a baby was her idea, and so was the idea to have it here .

But I don’t want to be that kind of person anymore — blamers, Claire calls them — so I push the cat off and go into the kitchen. Maybe some dishes need washing. Sometimes giving myself over to ritual is helpful.