“You want me to do a headstand?” said Callie, aghast.
“You need to get all the energy from your feet into your heart. Your feet have contact with the earth. That’s where all the energy comes from and you’ve got to move it into your heart.”
Skeptical but obedient, Callie got down on the floor and inched her buttocks up to the wall.
“Well,” said Virginia, looking over at her young protégé, “that’s not technically a headstand, but it will do. So, chickadee, tell me the latest news on your book.”
“It’s been so exciting,” said Callie. “I keep pinching myself. My publisher has high hopes for The Fussy Virgin and even arranged for me to do a book signing in the city next week.”
Virginia clapped her hands. “Good girl. You’re going to have the time of your life. Nothing like your first book. I always loved doing signings. I felt like a rock star. Although, I don’t do them that much anymore, takes too much energy.”
“I find it hard to believe you don’t have enough energy for anything.”
“Tell me, with all that’s going on with your book, why aren’t you in New York doing fabulous literary related activities?”
“I needed to sort some things out,” said Callie. “I’ve done a lot of thinking over the last eighteen months. In a weird way, I owe everything that’s happened to the Mystery Man.”
“Ahhh. The elusive Mystery Man is still on your mind,” said Virginia. “And what lessons have you learned from him?”
“It was something he said on our call. At first I dismissed it but it kept creeping into my mind and finally I had to confront it.”
“And what was that?”
“That I might a have been a little intolerant of other people’s points of view, thinking my way was the only way, the right way. I’ve realized that everyone has different priorities and my concerns are no more important than anyone else’s. I figured out that each one of us has a purpose and we’re on our own path trying to do the best we can, and no one path is more important or valid than another.”
Virginia swung her legs down with the ease of a twenty-year-old, stood up and beckoned Callie to follow her into the kitchen. “It’s tea time,” she said.
The large open kitchen with pickled wooden floors and white cabinets and counters was littered with household items, bags of unpacked groceries and bric-a-brac. Virginia pushed things out of the way with the sweep of her arm and worked silently as she boiled water in her white kettle. Pouring the hot water over tea bags into two mugs, she handed one to Callie and the two sat at the kitchen table.
“Sounds to me like you’ve learned an enormous lesson.”
“When I was talking to him, I showed him the real me,” said Callie. “I’ve realized if you don’t live an authentic life, you’re not really living. And that your life may be completely different from mine but that’s okay.”
“That’s quite an epiphany,” said Virginia, smiling.
Callie grinned at the older woman but her eyes were still sad.
“Listen, chickadee,” said Virginia, “I write romance novels where the two protagonists always end up sailing off into the sunset together. But in real life, it doesn’t always work out that way.”
Callie groaned.
“Hear me out,” Virginia continued. “If anybody knows romance, it’s me. After four husbands and a dozen bestselling romance novels, I’ve earned my stripes when it comes to love. If this Mystery Man is truly your person, you’ll find each other. There’s a saying that soulmates are like boomerangs—you separate them and throw them out into space, but they’ll always come back together. Soulmates are always circling each other. You’ve got to believe that, Callie.”
“I believe,” said Callie with quiet determination.
74
A week after Ben Huston’s victory, Patrick walked quickly down an icy Manhattan sidewalk checking the address of each building on West 78th Street. Finding the number he was looking for, he stopped in front of a tidy brownstone. The brass plaque on the street level door said “Francesca Scoville, Ph.D., Licensed Therapist.” Patrick inhaled and exhaled, noticing his breath was visible around him. He pressed the doorbell twice and a woman’s voice on the intercom asked for his name. When a buzzer sounded, Patrick pushed the door open and took a seat in a cream-colored waiting room.
Never having been to a therapist before, he was apprehensive about the meeting. The appointment hadn’t been his idea at all. Right after election day, Lorenzo had stopped by his apartment for a heart-to-heart talk. That’s when his best friend reviewed every single crazy behavior he had witnessed Patrick do for a year and a half with regards to the Mystery Woman. After example thirty-seven, Patrick finally acknowledged his obsession had impacted his life and maybe a therapist would help put things into perspective. If he ever wanted to have a solid relationship with Sunny or any other woman, he needed some closure.
Lorenzo had given Patrick Dr. Francesca Scoville’s card and Patrick had promised he would make an appointment.
A petite woman in her fifties with short spiky black hair and dangly bohemian earrings opened the door to her office and smiled. “Patrick?” said Dr. Scoville as she signaled for him to follow her into her office.
The interior office was light blue. Two small sofas in a creamy almost white-colored leather faced each other in the center of the room. A white wooden coffee table with a wainscoting finish sat between the two loveseats. The office had a beachy feel, which Patrick thought was odd given they were in the middle of Manhattan. Guess she wants her patients to feel relaxed, he thought.
“What brings you here today?” asked Dr. Scoville.
“I’ve never been to a therapist before. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do or say.”
“There are no rules, Patrick. This is your time. Talk about whatever motivated you to make the appointment,” said the therapist.
“I promised my best friend I’d come. It has to do with a woman, actually two women.”
“Not the first time I’ve heard that,” said the therapist with a slight smile. “Give me a little background for context.”
Patrick launched into the saga of the random Valentine’s phone call twenty-one months earlier. He described the lengthy conversation and the intense connection he felt towards the woman on the phone.
“Sounds like this woman struck a deep chord within you. What’s the problem?”
“I started to ask her out and I was sure she was about to say yes, when half the city had a blackout,” said Patrick.
“I remember that, I lost power, too.”
“Our phone call was cut off before I could find out her name.”
“She didn’t call you back?”
Patrick shook his head. “I waited for weeks.” He told Dr. Scoville how he tried to figure out who the Mystery Woman was from the information she had shared with him. He outlined how he had tracked her down, found a writing group she had been to, and her connection to the Museum of Modern Art. Dr. Scoville nodded supportively as Patrick spoke. Listening to himself tell the therapist his whole story, it dawned on him how crazy it all sounded.
“I think I’ve got the picture,” said Dr. Scoville when Patrick finished. “Let me play back to you what I heard. You got a random phone call from a telemarketer that wound up becoming a multi-hour conversation.”
“Yes.”
“During that conversation, you and she saw eye to eye on almost everything.”
“Exactly.”
“But, before you could find out her name, the call was interrupted and lost. You’ve spent the last twenty-one months looking for a woman whose name you don’t know. You also don’t know what she looks like or if she is even available and…”
“She’s single,” interrupted Patrick, “and she knows I am, too.”
“Let’s unpack this for a few minutes,” said the therapist. “You crashed writing groups posing as her friend to get information about her. You followed numerous women around a museum. You even
got our future Senator Ben Huston involved. I know you may think this is all incredibly romantic, Patrick, but honestly, it might border on stalking.”
“But I don’t even know who she is? How could that be stalking?” This therapist thinks I’m whacked.
“Let me give you a little insight into this kind of behavior. There are stalkers who want to do bodily harm, that’s definitely not you.”
“Of course not.” She thinks I’m unhinged.
“Other types of stalking can be where someone identifies a person, sometimes a complete stranger, as being their true love and begins to behave as if they are in a relationship with that person.”
“But that was the problem, I couldn’t identify her.”
“Not by name, but you’ve identified her essence,” said the therapist. “These types of stalkers nurture the delusion that their love is reciprocated. In many cases, there’s usually some kind of underlying mental disorder coupled with efforts to overcome isolation and an inability to have any kind of social competence.”
Patrick’s mouth hung open. Did she say “underlying mental disorder”? He gathered his thoughts and tried to process what the therapist was suggesting.
“Now tell me about the second woman,” said Dr. Scoville. “Do you know who she is?”
“Yes, of course. She’s someone I’m currently seeing. Her name is Sunny. At first, I wasn’t sure we were right for each other. Now that I know the Mystery Woman doesn’t share the same feelings, because she’s getting married and moving to London, I wondered if I should try harder with Sunny.”
The therapist looked at her watch. “Our time is about up but I think I can help you work through this.”
“Am I crazy?”
“Of course not,” said Dr. Scoville. “Love is a very powerful emotion and sometimes clouds our perception of reality. Let’s pick this up at our next session.”
“Okay,” said Patrick, nodding.
“In the meantime, I want you to buy a book called, Imagination Run Wild,” said Dr. Scoville, writing the name down on a piece of paper and handing it to him. “There’s a lot in the book that will help you. I’m going away over the Thanksgiving break for a couple of weeks. Let’s pick this up in early December. Read the book and we’ll discuss it at our next session. I think you’ll find some parallels.”
“I really don’t think I need to read—” protested Patrick.
“Trust me. Read it.”
When Patrick left the therapist and stepped back out onto West 78th Street, it had gotten colder and he buttoned the top button of his jacket to shield his neck from the wind. Walking briskly, he wondered if Dr. Scoville was right.
Was I projecting my emotions onto the Mystery Woman the whole time? Guess the joke is on me. Turns out, she never gave me a second thought.
75
Two days later after much internal debate, Patrick decided to go all in with Sunny. He admitted to himself that he never really gave a hundred percent to his relationship with her because of the MW.
He called Sunny that afternoon and asked her to have dinner with him, saying he wanted to talk about their relationship. They agreed to meet at 8pm at Aldo’s, an Italian trattoria in Patrick’s Upper West Side neighborhood.
Then, he texted Lorenzo.
Wingman, meeting Sunny for dinner at 8. Want to grab a beer before?
At 6:30, Patrick sidled up to Lorenzo at Rasputin’s Pub on Columbus Avenue. Standing at the bar, they ordered a beer and updated each other on what was going on in their respective lives.
“So, you’re going to give your relationship with Sunny another shot?” said Lorenzo.
“I owe it to myself to see how it would go if I’m not constantly thinking about someone else.”
“She sensed it, you know. Sunny told me it always felt like there was another person in your relationship,” said Lorenzo as he took a sip of his beer.
Patrick looked at his friend and furrowed his brow. “When did she tell you that?”
“Over the summer,” said Lorenzo. “She was worried about how things were going between you two and asked me to meet her for a drink to pick my brains.”
“You don’t have any brains. You never told me you talked to Sunny.”
“She asked me not to say anything and I promised I wouldn’t. She’s hard to say no to.”
“Tell me about it,” said Patrick with a wistful grin. “What did you tell her?”
“The usual stuff. How you’ve always been non-committal with women, how they called you Houdini in college.”
Lorenzo paused and looked away.
“What else, Renzo?”
“I might have mentioned the Mystery Woman,” said Lorenzo, “and how you went to the Museum of Modern Art forty times and posted notes on Craigslist.”
“You told her about that?”
“She already knew something was up,” said Lorenzo. “I had a few cocktails and then she looked at me with those big brown sad eyes. I folded.”
“I can’t believe you told her. What happened to our code? She must think I’m insane,” said Patrick.
“She actually looked relieved. I think learning the truth validated what she had been feeling.”
“Who are you supposed to be, Freud?”
An hour later, Patrick was seated at a table at Aldo’s. When Sunny arrived, she slid into the booth right beside him.
“Hi, sweetie,” she whispered into his ear. “I was so happy when you called today. I know we can make this work if we both set our minds to it.”
“I saw Lorenzo earlier,” said Patrick sheepishly. “I know he told you about that woman I met on the phone last year. I want you to know that it happened long before I met you and I’m totally over it. It won’t interfere with us anymore.”
“That’s a relief,” said Sunny, letting out a breath. “When Lorenzo told me about her, I’ll have to admit, I was a little jealous.”
“It’s over,” said Patrick. “I got carried away. And I’m sorry. It wasn’t fair to you.”
“If you say it’s over, then I believe you. We won’t ever talk about it again.”
They ordered dinner and traded stories about their jobs, weekend plans, and their families. Sunny complained about various people at the station along with who was sleeping with who, making Patrick chuckle. He brought her up to speed on some of his cases and what he hoped the outcomes would be. They laughed, they giggled, they looked into each other’s eyes and shared a piece of cheesecake for dessert. After dinner, they walked back to his place holding hands. Sunny stayed the night and as she always did when things went her way, she slept like a baby.
76
Over the next two weeks, Patrick and Sunny saw each other often and spoke on the phone more frequently than ever before. With the Mystery Woman a distant memory, he was more invested in their relationship. They traded funny texts back and forth during the days and spent several nights each week together. Things were going so well that Sunny invited Patrick to come to her family’s house for Thanksgiving. In an effort to be a more committed boyfriend, he accepted even though he had already agreed to go to his sister’s in New Jersey for the holiday. Instead, he planned to spend Thanksgiving day at Sunny’s family’s house and drive out to his sister’s later that night.
On Thanksgiving morning, with Sunny in the passenger seat of his car, Patrick stopped at Zelda’s, a bakery on the east side of Manhattan, to pick up the pumpkin crumb pie he had ordered to bring to the Rainardi’s house.
With insane amounts of holiday traffic, the drive out to Long Island was long and slow. When they finally arrived they were greeted by several of Sunny’s cousins, an aunt and an uncle, as well as Sunny’s two younger brothers and her parents. Patrick was peppered with questions from the minute he walked through the door.
“We’ve heard so much about you,” said Sunny’s mother, Gloria, holding a tray of appetizers. “You’re as handsome as my daughter described. Deviled egg?”
Patrick was charming and friendly an
d bonded with Sunny’s father over their mutual love of college basketball. With enough food to feed a hundred people, by the time Patrick sat down for Thanksgiving dinner, he was already full of appetizers.
“Everything is delicious,” said Patrick as he helped himself to a couple of slices of turkey. “The gravy, the mashed potatoes and the stuffing is amazing.”
“I put sausage in it,” said Gloria Rainardi. “That’s my secret ingredient.”
After dinner, they cleaned up the dishes and got ready for dessert. There were five pies on the sideboard including Patrick’s. When the coffee was ready, everyone grabbed a cup and a slice or two of pie and sat down at the dining room table again.
“This pumpkin crumb pie is possibly the best I’ve ever had,” said Sunny’s mother to Patrick.
“You have to order it in advance,” said Sunny. “It’s very popular.”
“We’re so glad to finally meet you, Patrick,” said Gloria. “The last time Sunny brought someone home for us to meet was more than two years ago. He was very nice but then got a job offer in Alaska and moved away. Long distance relationships are tough. I guess you would know that, Sunny mentioned your last girlfriend moved to London and—”
“Mom, can you pass me the chocolate cream pie?” said Sunny, interrupting.
Patrick narrowed his eyes and stared at Sunny from across the table. Twenty minutes later when Patrick got up to leave, Sunny offered to walk him to his car. He thanked her parents, said goodnight to everyone as the two of them put on their winter coats and walked out the front door. When they got to his car, she leaned in and kissed him.
“I wish you weren’t leaving. Everyone loved you,” said Sunny. “This was a great Thanksgiving. My mother couldn’t stop raving about you in the kitchen.”
The Fussy Virgin Page 25