Everything Changes

says.
    “He’s angry,” I say, following him toward the exit, upset with myself, even as I say it, feeling the need to explain, or excuse Matt. “You had to know he’d be angry. That we’d all be.”
    “I knew,” he says. He’s still somewhat shell-shocked from the musical assault, and he’s eyeing that exit door like a drowning man eyeing the distant shore. He takes a few more steps, and then turns to look back at the stage, the lights dancing in the wet flesh of his cheeks, and his moist eyes meet mine knowingly. “He’s something else, though, isn’t he?” he says.
    I nod. “That he is.”
    “Goddamn,” he says, shaking his head in wonder. “And how is he otherwise?”
    I consider the question, wondering how much I want to share with him, how much he’s entitled to know, and whether I want the information to hurt him or not. “Otherwise,” I say, “he’s a big, fucking mess.”
    Norm nods sadly as we step out of the club and onto the street. “Well, you tell him that I was proud of him tonight, okay? That I’ve never been prouder.”
    “I’m not sure that’s what he wants to hear.”
    “Just tell him for me,” Norm says. “Will you do that?”
    Our eyes meet. “Sure,” I say.
    “Thanks, Zack.”
    I watch him as he walks down the street, head down, shoulders stooped against the cold, and I can feel things quivering inside me, emotions, as yet unrecognizable, messing with my blood, diving at random into the slipstream of my consciousness, fucking with me. It’s been a long day; it feels like weeks ago that I woke up and pissed a red thread into the toilet. I can feel my last reserves of strength fading, but as I watch my father being swallowed up into the darkness of the Village, hunched over in his blazer for warmth, the strange thing is that despite my inability to discern how I feel about anything these days, I’m pretty sure that I’m sorry to see him go.

Chapter 12
    Only when I climb into the cab does it hit me that I’ve forgotten to tell Matt about vomiting in the van. I turn on my cell phone and dial Jed’s, but even if his is still on, he’ll never hear it ring in the club. Sure enough, I get his voice mail and hang up. My own voice mail icon is blinking, so I dial up my messages. There’s only one, from Hope.
    “Hi, Zack. Sorry I couldn’t call you earlier. I was stuck in meetings until after nine. I did try you earlier in the day at work and then at your apartment. Where did you go? You’re usually so reachable. I know you’re at Matt’s show now, so call me when you head home. I’ll keep my ringer on, even if I’m sleeping, so I can at least say good night to you. I love you, babe, ’bye.”
    Her voice opens the floodgates, and the guilt comes pouring in like a tidal wave. What the hell is wrong with me? What is it that’s driving me to screw up my relationship with this beautiful, bright, passionate woman who has defied the natural order of things by unaccountably falling for me? A few years ago I was your average single man, a jaded member of the Upper West Side infantry, hitting the bars in teams of two and three, scanning, scoping, and on occasion engaging. More often than not, I found myself targeting slightly flawed women, big boned or slightly pudgy, women with smaller chests or imperfect complexions. Basically, decently attractive women who wouldn’t have that resigned look in their eye, that exhaustion born of being too beautiful and hit on too often. If the beautiful women didn’t want the attention, then why did they come out to the bars? The inescapable conclusion, of course, was that they were looking to meet someone too. I just knew intuitively that that someone wasn’t me. If a woman was too good-looking, I always felt that any approach was too obvious, that to concede my intentions would result in instantaneous rejection. And even with nothing to lose, I pathologically avoided that rejection, concealing my intentions by ignoring them, which worked great, except I didn’t get laid very often at all.
    Hope, though, is a once-in-a-lifetime score. She’s the embodiment of that molten perfection I’d always viewed wistfully from afar, the kind of girl who, if anything, would want to be friends and talk to me about her boyfriends. And I would take that unintentional abuse, because there’s a whole other kind of love out there exercised by the sexual middle class, guys like me who tolerate such one-sided relationships, because we’re