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sea fishing

Alex had been waiting fifteen minutes in the doctor’s office with his mother when he received a text message from Ian Keith, a buddy from his college investment club. The message, thankfully, had nothing to say about the gold standard or Hayekian divagations on the American economy or the soon-coming-but-never-arriving inflation apocalypse—an ordinary, yet surprising message really, ‘Some Silver Lake friends of mine are running a poker game this weekend. You should come.” When and how did chimp-eared concealed-weapons permit holder acquire friends from the yuppie dungeon of Silver Lake? He had to meet these people. The reply was obvious.

The waiting room was cold box of white light and still life paintings. Bouncing gazes around the empty chairs, over the counter where a nurse pecked at a computer, he was searching for a mirror of his exhilaration. Frank would understand! He tapped a message to him, ending with, “Make up with Janet already and bring her along,” then paused. Why did he need Janet again?”

Alex peeked at Susan primly occupied with a thumbed-over magazine glossy with images with of women, thinner, younger, happier than her. There was a noticeable febrile looseness to her mouth despite the lipstick and gloss. The day’s appointment, he hoped, would solve her complaints of bone pain and maybe raise a smile back on her face spoilt with a red bumpy rash.  

He looked back ruefully on the message—She would not care for his rendezvous with Frank or Janet. Besides, she had never met Janet, and that was by design.

In high school, after he had introduced his first and last boyfriend to Susan, for weeks after, her psychoanalysis would not end. “If you’re unhappy about my divorce say so, why run around with the melodramatic case of nerves?  There are better ways to rebel than dating a guy who knows more than me about quilts … His love of things French is pathological—you wanted to go with Frank to Paris, is that it?” How now would she divine his soul through his relations with Janet?

When Janet’s parents had called from Provo to inform of their rabbit’s death, he was helpless with her tears, and more so Frank, who was impervious and a trite unfeeling. He growled at Frank to be more sensitive and patient with her. He was open to her midnight insecurities on the phone. He insisted on Frank and Janet as a unit, and yet his dawn peregrinations of thought never wandered past the basic fact: she was his rival.

They were graduating. There was no need for his pussyfooting anymore.

He texted Frank an invitation without mentioning Janet. 

Frank replied. No shit, I thought Ian wld ak-47 the shit out of Silver Lake already.

Fucking tell me about it.

But I got a thing with C. for next week. I see a homerun on this one.

A burst of rose and lemon rode in air, chemical and overbearing, dictatorial over and against sentiments of blood and bone, of life in its raw and putrid earthiness. He grimaced—Was this C for Cherise, strawberry blonde, notable for her claim of bicycling from Los Angeles to San Francisco, also notable for being one foot shorter than Frank? Or C for Cynthia, over whom Janet and Frank bickered about the “angle of declination” of his gaze at her drop necklace bisecting her cleavage?

Alex quirked a smile back to Susan’s worried glance. Frank had texted.

Grandpa and his buddies sprung on me a sea fishing trip this weekend. u should come and take all the tuna.

Despite Susan’s grouses about mercury and cadmium, she liked his tuna steaks, but Alex bristled.

C. coming?

She’s the only reason I’m comin. We need to outnumber grandpa’s buddies or I’ll shoot myself. Bring the fucker.

Alex squirmed. There was only one boy known to Frank as “the fucker”. I don’t give a shit about Tony. Invite Janet and Tom.

Before he could tear himself up for suggesting Janet, Frank replied, Wait, y are we givin a shit about Janet again?

 Alex felt red and hot and impossibly tangled with emotion. Susan next to him, brazenly a reading an article, “Five Telltale Signs Mr. Cutie is into You,” was not helping his slithering feelings of embarrassment.

Yeah, yeah, I’m passing. Mom’s getting antsy.

No shit? I’ll drive by and drop off some fish.

The screen of pastel pink overshadowing his sights, Alex could see himself on ivory white deck of a power catamaran, overlooking the sea writhing in its bluesness, incomprehensible open and accepting of all his desires. Frank’s mother, in a chastely tied loincloth, splashing around messily with a glass of champagne. She would chastise him about his ten-week absence last summer, the gall of him leaving his poor mother alone for an investment banking internship in New York, the inevitability of her two-week medical crisis that followed his return. And Frank preoccupied with laughing and flirting and boasting with C. (whoever the hell she was) would not be in sight to save him from the jaws of gimlet-eyed guilt, but his grandfather might. His rotund bare chest of grey hair, he would be overlooking the sea with his old friends, loose and waxen in swim shorts. Stories would be shared of the old days, when men were gentlemen and women were ladies, when the ladies would give up anything and everything to satisfy their need, those old days when values were clear and sacrosanct, when the young took heed of the old, and the old made way for the young.

A nurse, her face caked with foundation, came out of the corridor, calling, “Susan Stanton, the doctor’s ready to see you.”

The chair, the wall, the table shook as Susan helped herself with the aid of her cane to her feet. Alex’s help was unneeded, she grumbling insisted, no good either for him to join her in seeing the doctor. And as she wambled after the nurse’s coconut-scented trail, Alex spun in a matrix of questions that would never be answered.