Denise Takata’s father left her when she was 8 with no particular memories of him. Unlike most mothers raising a child alone, her mother, Michelle talked about him openly, comparing him to every boyfriend and lover that came after his abrupt departure for Japan. “He could never cope with America” Michelle told her daughter,defending him. “And I would never have been accepted by Kenji’s family, so I stayed.” Denise Takata would have been in ruins were she like most other girls abandoned by their fathers but Kenji had been neither affectionate nor particularly fatherly, so Denise suffered no great trauma and moved on with her life half pleased that the man who had forever seemed like a stranger in their house was permanently absent. Kenji did leave one mark on Denise because even twenty years later, she could never bring herself to be surprised at being left by a man. Her longtime boyfriend, Sal, a self described poet and co-editor of the local literary magazine “Devil’s Wine” told Denise he had no idea how a self possessed woman like Michelle could have raised a little girl with such little self esteem. “Self esteem is a joke, Sal. Propaganda promoted by the public school system. The only thing it ever achieves is self delusion like yours.” Denise said cooly as they sorted through their books on their shelves to determine who was the original owner of the paperback penguin classic, “A Heart of Darkness” before they went their separate ways “Fuck you Denise” Sal would say before he shut the door for the next to the last time. What great last words those would have been, Denise thought. But Sal came back three days later to retrieve his Taiwanese cappuccino maker and before he closed his car door in her face he looked at her through tear fiilled bovine eyes and said, “I hope you and Hero live happily ever after.”
Hero was the thorn in Sal’s side: The great friend who Denise Takata has known since they were working on their English degrees at the University of Chicago. He called, or she called every night, without fail and Denise would retreat into the patio, and sit for hours on the little upside down plastic bucket smoking cigarette after cigarette as she mentored her friend through his 15 year writer’s block.
“Why don’t you just commit to something.” Sal overheard her saying to him through the kitchen window. “Just stick to your story like your life depends on it.” Words Sal had uttered to Denise just three weeks prior in reference to Hero’s problem. “Don’t be condescending, Sal. He’s not writing poetry. He’s writing a novel. It‘s a bit tougher” she replied
“A screenplay.” Sal said disdainfully.
And here she was mothering Hero with his words, helping him. Sal fell out of love with Denise before he even really fell into it, But it was Denise’s sharp tongue and mind, diverging so profoundly from the warm all accepting embrace of his colleaues that drove him into a sort of obsessive frenzy with Denise Takata. By the fifth week of their acquaintance she was pointing out the thinness of his metaphor, his clichéd analogies, jumping on a lazily written phrase he had been so proud of. It was also quite easy for Sal to move into Denise’s Santa Monica loft, outfitted with the spareness of someone so critical and self aware they can barely commit to décor. So he came bounding into her life, like a stray cat into the arms of the lonely old woman, with a sense of unquestioned entitlement.
Sal’s poet friends hated Denise Takata because they knew she hated them right back. There was no explanation Denise could give for this when asked and she herself wondered at times if Kenji, with his starched shirts and briefcase didn’t have something to do with her opinion of the bourgeois bohemians that met on her living room floor once a month, refusing the couch, to be in touch with the “great earth herself“.
“They’re here again.” she whispered into the phone from her bucket
“The poets?” Hero asked
“They’re theme this month is Sojourns”
“You should poison them.” he laughs
“You should come over and help me. We could be partners in crime. And then we could drive off a cliff together”
Hero falls silent on the other end. He never knows what to say to Denise when she brings up spending eternity with her. She backpedals.
“How’s Lauren?” she asks in response to his silence.
She imagines Hero on the other end of the line, his face creasing at the sound of his wife’s name and it makes her smile.
(question: is this something you would want to keep reading? can't decide if I should keep writing this.)
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