Title: The Trick is the Second Time
Summary: He's always the first one in and the last one out
I have no idea where this came from. Bear with me.
One of the many things he never shares about his ex-wife is that they had one of those meet-cute things that Mindy is always trying to orchestrate with strangers. The medical school used to hire actors to play-act as patients to teach their socially inept students how to interact with actual human beings. Christina wasn't an actress, but she needed the extra money. This was before her photos, purposefully blurred – artistically imperfect, she would say – took off.
He diagnosed her twice. The first time, she told him that was fatigued and nauseous, that her breasts were sore. He steered clear of her chest, and touched her abdomen gingerly, feeling rather than hearing the laugh that was bubbling out of her. When he said, congratulations, you're pregnant, she laughed again. She shook his hand to say goodbye and he hoped she couldn't feel how sweaty his traitorous hands were through his gloves.
The second time, he wrote her a prescription for anti-inflammatories and a free dinner. She looked like she couldn't decide whether to be pleased or offended.
"So is this why you became a doctor, so you could hit on your sick, vulnerable patients?"
"No! You're not even a real patient. I'm Danny by the way."
"Doctor Dan."
"Please don't call me that."
"Okay Daniel. What's your number?" He gave it to her, but she never called.
One month later, she walked up to his table in a shitty pizza joint near the hospital, and says, "hey Doctor Dan, remember me – your pregnant patient with lupus? I think you still owe me dinner." He smiled at her, turning on the full Castellano beam, like his ma always told him he should, and she smiled back.
So she wasn't Catholic. She was barely even Christian. He didn't like that she was taller than him. He hated when she cut her hair. She ate everything he made, indifferently, but left to her own devices, made nothing but steamed chicken and vegetables, barely seasoned. She was immaculate in certain ways, always adjusting furniture, taking photos on and off the walls, molding their apartment into a series of perfect lines, but she never cleaned, and she used to wear dirty clothing straight off the ground.
But she calmed him. She had a way of laughing at him, or putting her hands on his shoulders that sucked the rage out of him. It was like waking up one day and discovering your entire life you'd had a buzzing in your ear. She had her own nasty temper, but it flared quickly and died. Compared to his constant, simmering rage, it was nothing.
Growing up, he'd been the first one into fights, and the last one out. He wasn't the only kid in his neighborhood with an anger management problem, but his mom was the only one who took it seriously, who signed him up for little league and peewee soccer to burn off steam. Three baseball games, two brawls and one black eye later, his mom told him, in her best don't-fight-me-on-this voice that she was enrolling him in dance classes. He was so horrified; he actually could not speak at first. Before his tongue could get out of the way, it was his father who was saying, "are you fucking kidding me, my son is not going to be a goddamn ballerina." So Dan shut his mouth. He was on his ma's side, and if that meant dancing, so be it.
"My entire life before you has been about putting something between me and my fists," he told Christina once, but he wasn't sure she believed him.
So none of it was what he expected, but he loved her. She made him feel like a giddy, nervous wreck half the time, and an idiot the other half, and for the first time in his life he thought maybe, maybe this could work.
The finding out is also a cliche. She's in her bra, tall, lean and impeccable as always, and the guy, that fucking guy, is smoking a cigarette in Danny's fucking bed. He breaks things, breaks everything he can get his hands on. He wakes up in the hospital, and the doctor tells him, in a warning tone of voice that he's lucky nobody is pressing charges. He never talks about that day with anybody. Not even Richie. Some mornings he wakes up, and all he can think about is that fucking cigarette, and how Christina would never have let him smoke in the apartment.
Just living in his head is like walking through a jungle, every thought a stinging reminder of her. He buys all new furniture, replaces half his wardrobe, even changes his shampoo. His body, always so well trained, will only sleep on his side of the bed, curving away from the space where she used to be. You're being a drama queen, Richie tells him. And I should know.
He refuses to talk to her, but for weeks, she slips letters under the doors. He despises himself for reading every word. We were all wrong for each other, Danny. I'm sorry. I always felt like I was watching myself around you, like I might say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing and you would never forgive me.
You never cared about my photography.
I shouldn't have cheated on you. I know that sounds feeble, but it's true. I don't know, maybe some part of me knew it was the only way you'd ever leave me.
He works all the time. He never thinks about anything beyond the next day. Abandons any pretense of having a life. He is the best resident in his program, and not just because the other residents are always making eyes at each other and trying to get out of weekend surgeries. Richie flies up from Florida, at his ma's urging, apparently concerned that his older brother is about to commit suicide through over-work.
"I know break-ups are tough, and you know I always liked Christina, but you have to pull yourself together."
"This wasn't a break-up! We didn't go on a few dates and then make out with somebody else at a club. This isn't like you and your boyfriends, Richie. This was my life."
"Danny," says Richie, forgiving him, and admonishing him at once. "This is still your life. Buck up. You're a Castellano man and you're embarrassing the clan."
Danny shuts up after that, mostly because he's afraid he'll take another cheap shot at his brother. He lets Richie drag him out to a bar, where he drinks too much expensive bourbon and makes out in the corner with a small, blurry redhead.
His brother agrees to leave after that, but only after Danny promises to re-enter the world outside the hospital. And Castellanos, or at least this Castellano, keep their promises. He takes up running again, signs up for classes on real estate, spanish, beer brewing, even cooking, until the teacher mixes up puttanesca and l'amatriciana and Danny storms out, taking his spoon with him.
He goes on first and second dates, but never makes it to a third. It seems impossible to him to go through the tedium of getting to know a person again, of learning to like them despite everything that he inevitably hates about them. He's fairly certain that love is a trick he can't pull off twice.
And he never promised his brother he would make nice with the world; he just said he would be in it. He never writes Christina back. He snaps at the secretaries. He daydreams, occasionally, about locking his fellow residents in a room and setting it on fire.
He still thinks about that cigarette, most days. About the moment that his life, as that person, that person he was just beginning to know, ended.
On Valentine's Day, he does two C-sections, and Mindy takes care of a breached birth, and he finds her in the break room eating cold pizza and drinking Doctor Dan's Winter Wheat Ale. When he walks in, she says, "Danny, these are truly disgusting."
"Well, then stop drinking all of them. Everybody else likes them." He grabs the opened bottle from her hand and takes a swig.
"Nobody likes them. Not even Beverly, and last week she offered me moonshine she made in her bathroom sink."
"I won fourth place at a beer brewery festival with this!" Even he can hear the defensiveness in his voice, and let's be honest; it's not his best work, so he changes the subject. "Which singing competition is this? The one with the chick? Or the one with the guy?"
"Danny, first of all, that sentence made no sense. Second of all, this isn't even a T.V. show, it's a movie."
On-screen, the apparent protagonist, who has floppy hair and looks like he's never thrown a punch in his life, declares his undying love and Danny groans. "God, why do you even like these things so much?"
"I don't know Danny, why do you like weird old gangster films so much."
He likes how she always uses his name when she talks to him, spitting it back at him like it's an insult. "I'm serious. Tell me why."
She looks like she's considering telling him off, but she's had one and a half beers more than she should, which means she's sober enough to be coherent, but drunk enough to be a little too honest.
"You know, I was this weird, chubby Indian kid in like, the whitest town in America. And my parents were great, but they had no idea how to raise a kid here. I never had the right things to wear. I didn't play sports or go to Hebrew school. On Saturday nights, I babysat Rishi until I was in college. These movies were the first things that made any sense to me, that made me feel like maybe I belonged in this weird place," she pauses and evaluates him. "Don't laugh. I'm sure it's hard to understand since you grew up in the most close knit neighborhood in the world and had like a million friends."
He squeezes her hand quickly, feeling a smile pulling at the corner of his face. "Okay."
"Okay, you accept my reason? Or okay, as you are agreeing that I am pathetic?"
"Okay, as in, I will watch this horrible movie with you."
"It's almost over. And next is the Bridge Jones sequel, ugh."
"What, does the guy not get the girl or something? Does something realistic happen?"
"Danny, romantic sequels are always terrible. Grease? Miss Congeniality? Legally Blonde? I dare you to think of one romantic comedy that has a good sequel. You can't. Because it would be too sad."
"Or boring," she adds.
He kisses her on the floor of the Empire State Building until he realizes that his hand is resting on still sticky chewing gum, and there's an empty soda can under his knee. He can feel gawkers gazing down at him, although, since it's New York, they're pretending to be bored by the couple making out next to them. Across the deck, a tourist, marked by his I Love New York t-shirt, is taking photos of them.
"Min, I think we're about to be arrested for public indecency," he mutters.
"Did you say something about food earlier?"
He smiles, drawing her closer for a second and then releases her. He suggests pizza at the same time she suggests Chinese, and they debate dinner options the entire ride down. As the door opens, he cuts off her inevitable racist comment about Italians, and says, "hey, you're happy right?"
"Yes, you dork. Although I'm not sure how you could have handled all of this worse than you did." She smiles at him, her eyes shining. "I always knew I'd get my squabbling-ever-after."
He laughs, and leads her out the door.
Our lives aren't stories. That's a given. But what he wants Mindy to understand, what she will never understand is that all we get is pieces of the fantasy, if we're lucky. We never get everything, not all at once, not with one person.
He knows they will ruin this. She is, still, the most annoying person he has ever met in his entire life. It's true, he woke up one day and realized that he could only imagine his life when she was there, but he knows that the pendulum can swing back. Maybe someday in the not too distant future, he will wake up again and everything he loved about her will be worn down to his bare dislike of everything she is, and everything she likes.
And he is too demanding, too stuck in his ways. He will always hear Christina's voice in his ear, you cut my wings, broke my spirit, took everything you loved about me and made it something I hated.
Christina went to the Middle East, his dad went to California, even Richie left.
Richie tells him that Florida is where all the tennis pros go – Danny what would I do in the winter? It doesn't make any sense. Plus, I look great with a tan. But he can never shake the feeling that part of it is him. The big brother who interrogates his boyfriend and refuses to allow him to shop at IKEA because that stuff is crap, and that one horrifying time, almost brought Richie to tears, lecturing him on safe sex.
But she doesn't leave. She has years of practice of absorbing his intensity by throwing her own insanity back at him. It's exhausting, but he needs to be exhausted. He has spent his entire life learning how to leave, and how to be left, but for now, he stays, and she stays, and he thinks maybe, maybe this time.