We Are Not Perfect

By Cappuccino Girl

Rating: General

Pairing: CJ/Toby and Toby/Andi and everything in between

Notes: Part of the bordello’s secret santa. For Luna, with all my love. Thanks to the infamous Oro, who holds hands, gives advice, and has an abundance of patience. The title(s) are taken from PJ Harvey’s ‘You Said Something’ and Death Cab for Cutie’s ‘Why You’d Want to Live Here’.

~* a rooftop, manhattan, at one in the morning

There was an evening, sitting on the balcony of your apartment as the snow fell, when Toby had told you of the day CJ had come home with a cat. It had been two weeks into the school summer vacation, and she’d pulled out of the parking lot at work only to find a grey kitten standing in the middle of the road. It was tiny, and looked as lost as she had felt on her first day in Los Angeles, so she picked it up and shoved it in the trunk of her car, listening to it cry the entire way home. You’ve often wondered what became of that cat, whether it’s still alive, what she called it.

The snow is falling again now, and you’re on the roof of Toby’s building this time. CJ’s sick but she’s still out here while you drink Toby’s whiskey, and he smokes cigars. Nobody speaks. The city speaks for you, in shades of yellow lights and far-away sirens. At this height, could you watch snow form before your eyes?

CJ shivers and Toby takes the grey blanket he’s been sitting on and tucks it around her. He doesn’t ask her whether she’d like to go back inside. Instead, he fills up her glass and hands you the bottle.

An errand firework lights up the sky, ninety minutes too late, yet perfect. It cracks open in a sparkling array of green light above the roof, then dies down into shimmering rain.

You seem to have lost all feeling in your toes. Toby throws a snowball, a proverbial ice breaker which hits you hard, right in the chest with a muted thud. CJ laughs, hoarse and coughing. Stupid woman being outside like this, drinking like this when she has the flu.

CJ said, “This city never sleeps, so why the hell should I?” and she’s probably right somehow.

Toby once said that he could count her visits. One every year for the past seven years. An airplane ticket each time, except for that one in '79 when she tried to hitchhike from Napa to New York and he drove all the way to Cincinnati to collect her because he'd read a week-old newspaper that had wrongly predicted a snowstorm. She left each of her ticket stubs in a box on his desk, and you found them at Thanksgiving, the day he proposed.

Toby hasn’t said a thing all evening, and you’re waiting for it to end in disaster, with empty space hanging between you. You never really wanted to be here to start with, but it would have seemed odd somehow, almost immoral to leave the two of them alone together. You lean over to kiss his cheek and he doesn’t even turn to look at you. Maybe it was supposed to be CJ all along, as your mother had said. It was a last ditch effort and now you’ve dragged him onto your sinking life.

“I’m going to go inside now,” you say.

You walk away. Behind you, Toby pulls a wedding invitation from his pocket and places it in CJ’s hands, saying, "I didn't know how to send this."

~* i can't see why you'd want to live here

This city seemed beautiful when you were young. Your father took you here and said, "Andrea, this is the city of dreams." You believed him then. The air was better, the ocean bluer, and there was less trash along the side of the road. You left it all behind, stuck a postcard in a scrapbook and decided that you'd live there one day.

Twenty years later and still on the east coast, you were loathing Brooklyn and falling in love with Toby on a humid summer night. It is still unclear whether the alcohol was to blame, but somehow he said that he loved you, so you dragged him across the country where he never wanted to go. You told him that he'd learn to love it. Maybe you meant that he'd learn to love you.

Over the years, the air grew worse in the city of angels, and most of your dreams became distant figments of your childish imagination. Now all you're left with is a doctorate you can't afford to finish and an algae-ridden swimming pool. You can't live in LA and he hates California and you never were able to compromise.

Yesterday morning, you drew a line on the bathroom mirror in cheap red lipstick thinking, this is the line you cannot cross. He never crossed it, just wiped it away.

You fold his shirts and pack his bags and leave them on the porch. "I want you to leave, Toby." And he does.

~* i can almost see the skyline

You sit in a hammock, sipping a glass of wine. CJ brought you the bottle, and you wonder whether Toby once told her that it was your favorite. Your time in Congress is a blurry recollection, now. You're writing for various unglamorous academic publications, and CJ hosts a political talk show. She might have it all, the pretty clothes and sun tan.

You watch her laying near the pool with a hand in the water and her dress spilling blue petals on the lawn. She smiles. She seems to have so few worries in spite of the year she must have had. But then, it's always easy to forget that she once was a press secretary to the President. Her emotions are concealed on all manner of occasions. For now, you'll believe that she's as carefree as she looks, trying to tie her hair back while insisting on remaining flat on the ground.

Your daughter lays down beside her.

"Look up," CJ whispers. "Can you see the castle in the clouds?" Molly giggles. "See the girl? She's a princess who has come to take back the throne from her evil cousin."

Huck squints from his place by the diving board. "I don't see the cousin."

"Can't you? He's there. I just saw him."

Molly nods in agreement. "He has a really big hat."

"He does?"

"Maybe you need to be here to see him," Molly suggests.

You sent him away again, three months today. He calls each week to talk to the kids, and you try not to fight. Toby doesn't want argue, but somehow, the years of frustration got stuck inside you and for the first time in your life, you want to yell. At him. You want to ask him how he could have done the same thing twice. Neither of you seem to know what you both did, but it felt like déjà vu all over again when the bags were sitting on the front porch and you were crying over your children's first yearbook. You used to believe in second chances.

CJ turns her head towards you and her eyes are the same color as the water in your swimming pool. She mouths, deep in thought?

You nod and smile, because only CJ could talk about princesses and notice your concern. She pulls her feet out of your flower patch and crawls over to you. Placing her head on the hammock, she lets out a long sigh before draining the final drops from your glass of wine.

Somehow, you find yourself laughing. "You have grass. In your hair." You pull it out and show it to her.

"My father used to do that with me, find pictures in the clouds," she says softly.

"Do you miss him?"

"Sometimes." You watch as she closes her eyes, then asks, "Do you miss Toby?"

"A different kind of miss."

CJ nods, and this time it's sincere and heartfelt, and her hand on your ring finger. These are the moments when you want to know why it never worked, for you, for CJ. Why you both hurt him, yet never would hurt each other.

"You never lived together, did you?"

CJ pauses, and you can sense her discomfort. You hate making her feel guilty about Toby. Eventually, she says, "He doesn't like LA."

"It all comes down to this city," you say up to the sky.

This city fuels young love, and ruins marriages, and is all plastic and fiction. Some days you curse it, curse the boys who sell drugs on the corner of your street from their sports cars, curse the beaches when they're filled with people, and how nobody walks anywhere. But now, as you wiggle your toes, and hear the bugs humming in the tree above, your life seems so fulfilling and perfect for a minute that maybe this is what you've needed all along. So you sit there with CJ drinking wine in the back garden of your LA house watching your daughter make daisy chains.

*finis.

The author loves feedback. please send any and all to cappuccinogirlie@hotmail.com