Breathe. Slow down.
Anne had called me back again, minutes later. Trevor had filed for an emergency hearing.
“He’s doing it. He’s going for full custody.”
“No, don’t panic.”
Why did I have this sister?
“Yes, it happens.”
Why me?
“No, it probably won’t happen.”
What did I do to deserve this?
Oh. Shit. What paragraph am I on?
I skipped through pages. The words wiggling and dancing dropping off the page. Where were they going?
“But this is divorce court. I don’t have a crystal ball.”
Come back, words.
I’m going to lose Pep. I’m going to lose my child.
Breathe.
I have so much more to teach her. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know how to use a house key—
Help. Help me—
Or to kick an attacker in the shin, not the nuts—
I’m in a tunnel. All is dark. Wind blows my hair back.
My body relaxed. My breathing steadied.
This is what I imagine the luge felt like. I’m not bad at this, I always thought the luge was my sport—
I blinked. My eyes opened to thirty sets of eyes staring down at me. The back of my head felt sore.
“Ow,” I said. Someone was holding my hand.
It felt nice.
Was I in a dream? Am I not the 2020 hope of Luge Nation?
A young face, honey-almond skin, soft hazel eyes bracketed by heavy glasses, a pierced septum he was talking. (Why did he pierce his beautiful septum?)
“Agnes?” he asked. “Hey, are you okay?”
I chewed my lip.
“Yes?” I said. “Other than my head—”
“The kid’s always been a fainter.” Dad’s voice. His head floating above me. A striking resemblance to Paul Newman. The crystalline-blue eyes that will never be passed down. When he goes, they are gone.
“She’ll be all right,” he said. “Right, kiddo?”
I blinked. My legs felt clammy. I reached down.
“Was I dreaming?” I asked as someone helped me sit up. I stared down at my jeans. Between my legs, my pants were moist, clammy tentacles unfurling.
“You think you’ll be cool to sign?” the Book Soup rep asked.
“What happened?” I whispered, spreading my hands to hide the wet spot.
“Your mouth was opening and closing,” he said, pantomiming a hungry guppy. “No sound was coming out. Thought it might be your mic. Then you just totally . . . crumbled. You hit your head. It was amazing!”
Liz’s face emerged. Glass of water in her hand. “Have you eaten today?” she asked.
“Just my pride,” I said. Then, “Did I pee myself?”
“Your water bottle landed in your lap.”
“Oh, thank God,” I said. “Are you sure?”
Liz and my dad and the rep pulled me up to standing. I heard applause. My reading was over. I scanned the room.
My stalker had vanished, off to find more suitable prey. Who could blame him?
The line was shrinking as I signed books, and the buyers and I pretended I hadn’t collapsed and wet my pants in front of them. With a water bottle. But still.
“I’m fine,” I said to Liz. I signed, waving my other hand over my pants to dry them, the water stain retreating so it looked like my bladder merely dribbled.
“Trevor’s taking Pep. He had Fin arrested. But everything’s fine. I’ll get through this. I’m the oak, right?”
“Oaks burn down,” she said. “Oaks snap. Be the willow. Bent but unbroken.”
“I can’t be a willow,” I said. “Look at me. Peasant stock.”
“Can you make it out to Tracy?” asked a woman with Tootsie Roll bangs and the aggressively lined and glossed smile of a former teen beauty queen.
I paid attention to the proper spelling of Tracie as opposed to Tracy as opposed to Tracey. I felt both lucky to be here and like a dinosaur. Books—for how much longer? We can’t compete against Candy Crush. Or Pokémon.
Or porn.
“My husband divorced me last year,” she said, grabbing my hand. “It’s been tough—he left me and the kids—but we’re fine. We’re going to make it.”
Lip stain on her eyetooth. Her hand squeezing mine. My fingers going numb.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“No,” she said, whipping her blond hair. “No, no, no. We’re fine.” Her lower lips started to shake, and she let me go. “Selfie?”
I smiled, and I wanted to cry.
“How’s the dead zone?” the next person in line asked.
I looked up. Gio. The black leather jacket. The wide smile. Those soft eyes.
“On its last breath,” I said.
“Sign this and let’s grab something to eat,” he said.
Our fingertips touched.
I’m not going to say it felt like sex.
(Reader: It felt like sex.)
* * *
My dad was in heaven. Gio Metz and Shu (and, incidentally, me, his daughter) eating pasta and clams at Dan Tana’s.
Dad was vying for captain of Team Gio; Gio was old-school. Gio ate. Gio drank. Gio listened. Gio laughed hard and loud.
Gio could get Dad into film premieres.
My dad and I argued over who would drive Gio back to his hotel after dinner. I won. I wanted to fill up on Gio’s laugh before I headed into the dead zone.
I parked outside his hotel on the Strip.
“Did you hear what happened?” I asked. “At the signing.”
“You passed out,” he said, his fingers interlaced over his stomach. “I was outside, watching you.”
“Great,” I said. “I needed a new stalker. I lost mine tonight.”
“I married one of my stalkers,” Gio said. “Agnes, you don’t need someone to push you down. You need someone to catch you.”
He formed a net with his fingers together.
“Fall into me. I’ll give you a soft landing,” he said and patted his belly.
A group of girls, all hair and smiles and giggles, held each other up as they stumbled across Sunset toward the Rainbow.
“I’m no knight in shining armor,” Gio continued. “I’m not even sure they make armor in my size.”
“How about my knight in rumpled khaki?”
He put his warm hands on my face and drew me in for a kiss.
Afterward, I watched the world’s best kisser step into his hotel before checking my phone.
Eighteen missed calls. One hundred and twenty-two Google Alerts.
Dear God, not Google Alerts.
“I’m the oak,” I said to myself, taking a deep breath. “No, I’m the willow. Oh, God, which fucking tree am I?”
Oh, internet, you sly dog. Someone had downloaded the video of me fainting, then pissing myself. Except I hadn’t pissed myself.
I’m almost positive.
Gabriela was at the house.
“It’s okay, missus,” she said. “I pee myself at my wedding.”
“I didn’t—”
“It’s okay, missus,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said.
I sat in my bathroom in front of the tray of a thousand creams. The bathtub yawned. You gonna come in or you just gonna sit there? I’d just had the best kiss of my life on what was shaping up to be the worst night.
My phone flashed. More alerts. Morse code for you’re fucked.
It buzzed. “Are you okay?” Liz asked.
“I’m viral,” I said. “I’m sick with TMZ, Perez Hilton, and Bossip fever.”
“Black gossip? That’s big.”
“I’m not unproud of that,” I admitted.
“Ignore it all,” Liz said. “Tomorrow there’ll be a #MeToo #DontForgetMe—”
“#WhatAboutMe,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said. “They’re still diving into the ’90s; they haven’t even touched the aughts, and the Twitte
r news cycle is thirty seconds long.”
“Thank you,” I said. I rubbed my shoulder. Granite.
“Now. Gio.”
Gio.
“We kissed,” I said.
“Scale of one to ten.”
“Broke the scale.”
“A real man,” she said.
“I don’t remember ever being kissed like that. Where has that kiss been?”
“Maybe they don’t make kisses like that anymore,” Liz mused.
“Maybe kissing is a lost art,” I said.
“Maybe it’s like one of those ancient languages,” Liz said.
“It was like . . . slipping into a warm bath.”
“Tongue?”
“The tip,” I said. “Gentle yet firm.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh . . . my God.”
We paused.
“Am I allowed to have sex while fighting for my life?” I asked.
“It’s mandatory,” Liz said. “Check your divorce manual.”
My other line was ringing.
“That’s him!” I said.
“Go!”
I switched over to Gio.
“Did you forget something?” I asked.
“My heart?” he asked. “My soul?”
“C’mon.”
“My common sense?” he opined.
“Anyone who’s ever sat through one of your movies knows you have no common sense.”
“I’m falling in love with a woman who’s going through a divorce,” he said. “I’ve lost my mind.”
“Hashtag fake news,” I said.
He laughed. I was getting used to that laugh. No, addicted. Can you be addicted to a laugh? Is there a Gio’s Laugh Anonymous?
“You have a home alarm, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Put it on,” he said. “There are people out there who care about your health and safety and brain and smile and warm, soft lips.”
Then he hung up.
18: It’s My Ex Parte and I’ll Cry If I Want To
Sunglasses were my friend.
As were hoodies.
And baseball caps. (Dodgers, Rams, Raiders, Braves, Sox. Clippers. Lakers. I was a polyamorous fan. A sports polygamist)
I wore them in tandem for days.
One hot afternoon spent trudging up a wide, dusty trail into the brittle Santa Monica Mountains, dodging Lycra-clad kamikazes on $10,000 bikes, I wore all three.
My piss tape had managed to land on the wings of a Spix’s macaw—a slow news day—a rare creature emerging from the chattering classes flying from phone to phone. Meanwhile, nary a syllable had escaped the tweeter in chief’s leaden fingertips, nor a befuddled media icon taken down by a thirty-year-old buttocks swipe. No mass shooting, no swordplay with nuclear weapons. CNN wasn’t sobbing, Fox wasn’t shouting.
The news had become an iceberg, stolid, unmoving.
Nothing had happened.
So I’d become a meme.
Memes.
I had a nickname. Nicknames: Nappy Novelist. Pisseller. Wet Wipe Wordsmith. Urine Time . . .
Lucas, my agent, left me a message. I hadn’t talked to him in weeks. “Superbabe!” he said. “You’ve cracked the Amazon Top 100 in pop fiction.”
Then he paused.
“Pee makes all things possible,” he’d said and giggled. I pictured his curls bouncing uncontrollably.
“Off with the sunglasses,” said the security guard, hairline receding under her weave, busty figure lacquered into her uniform. “No sunglasses.”
I slipped off my glasses and placed them in a bin that looked like a grimy holdover from a coal mining operation. I slipped off my purse and set it in. I watched as the rubber teeth swallowed and gulped.
I stared ahead at the marble tunnel of the courthouse as I stepped through the x-ray machine.
The guard’s eyelashes fluttered, big as dust mops.
“I know you,” she said, recognition lighting up her green contacts.
I hooked my glasses onto my ears and slunk sideways to the elevator bank.
Anne was running a few minutes late to the emergency custody hearing, so I sat on a cold, unforgiving bench outside the courtroom watching all the other chickens in their midnight blues and blacks, waiting to be plucked and slaughtered. And the lawyers, the roosters, parading by with their overstuffed briefcases, their puffed-up breasts.
The hallway smelled like sorrow and rage and disappointment and reams and reams of paper. Paper used as bricks, filled with hostile, indigestible words. Paper as health hazard, causing stomachaches and heart palpitations and sleepless nights. A forest of terrifying paper.
We can save the environment; kill the divorce industry.
I placed my hands on my knees. Steady, stop shaking.
Buzz.
Text from Lucas. Top 50! Urine play! F04A
Meanwhile, I stood out in the crowd like an Easter egg in an oil spill. I had chosen a powder-blue dress suit. I wanted to appear benign and carefree; I looked, in a word, ridiculous.
Trevor and Ulger and the guy with the hair like an abandoned bird’s nest had noisily filled a bench down the hall. Ulger’s basso voice rode over the orchestra of pain.
Waverly had called last night to tell me not to worry. “Worry is a wasted emotion,” she’d said, “like guilt. Or trust. Or happiness.”
This is what I was paying for, I’d thought.
“You’re missing something,” she’d said in her droll, flat pitch. “A piece of information. An object, maybe. A letter? Something that could stop the proceedings cold. In the eighth year of my divorce, I’d discovered he’d had an affair with a manicurist.”
“The eighth year,” I said. “And it went on—”
“Several more years.”
Strategy wasn’t my strong suit. (Neither was this powder-blue suit.) In a land where women fake pregnancy (then, oh, here comes the tragic, albeit bloodless miscarriage) to trap a guy into marriage, I couldn’t strategize. I knew women who’d seduced their hapless spouses into bed after kicking them out, to move the date of legal separation. To get more money.
I knew a lot of assholes with vaginas, too, apparently.
I needed to find me some of that pesky leverage.
Gabriela had slipped an amethyst crystal the size of a small rock into my purse this morning. “From La Reina,” she’d said, kissing the tips of her fingers. “She bring you good luck. Maybe Trevor have pequeño heart attack in court.” I was pretty sure it was a Dollar Store crystal, but who was I to question La Reina?
“Gracias, Gabi,” I’d said. “What time do you think she’ll be bringing the luck part? I’d hate to miss it.”
Gabriela, who’d escaped a bloody civil war, having spent a childhood shoeless and on the edge of starvation, had looked at me with enormous sadness in her eyes, then had given me a big hug before practically carrying me to the car.
I smelled a pop of gardenias. A swan dressed for a funeral floated down next to me on the bench. Her attorney, scraggly beard, large pores, was wearing a suit that had been dry-cleaned so many times it looked like it could crack. He wasn’t one of those high-end roosters with gold initial cuff links, pin-striped suits, and Italian loafers who smelled like their grandchildren’s weddings were already paid for.
“He’s trying to take the car,” the swan was saying, tapping her sensible shoes against the marble. “He wants me to not have a car. Can he do that?”
“It’s in his name,” the attorney said, bored. I hated him.
“How do I get to work?” she asked, pleading. “How do I get the kids to school?”
A man sank onto the bench on the other side of me, wearing work boots and a pressed denim shirt. He smelled like soap wrapped in an honest day’s work. “I’m willing to help her out,” he said to the attorney, who looked like a child dressed in his father’s suit. The sleeves were too long, pants dusting the floor. “They’re my children. But, I mean, she wants the juicer. I’m the only one who ever used that juicer. It was
a birthday gift, you know? How is that fair?”
He used a juicer; this threw me.
Baby attorney nodded gravely, pushed his father’s glasses up his nose.
“If you would just let me do my job,” baby attorney said, his voice barely breaching adolescence, “I advised you not to communicate with her.”
“She’s the mother of my children,” he said. “Geez.”
“He wants the kids to change schools,” the swan was saying. “He won’t even pay for soccer anymore. But he can pay for his new girlfriend’s boobs.”
Ouch. My head hurt. I handed over a Kleenex (thank you, Gabi!) as her attorney slunk away in his shiny suit to use the water fountain. The man in work boots was busy staring at pictures of his children on his phone and audibly sighing.
“I hope her boobs explode,” I said to the swan. “I hope those puppies get knocked out by a soccer ball and explode all over the field.”
“What a jerk, right?” she said.
“You’re too kind,” I said. I elbowed the man. “Did you hear about the guy she was married to? Unbelievable.”
“Sorry?” The whites of his gray-blue eyes were scribbled over with red lines. I thought of Pep’s old Etch A Sketch.
“He won’t even pay for soccer,” I said.
“My kids love baseball,” the man said, blinking at the swan. “I would die before I’d take them out of baseball.”
“Hi, I’m Agnes,” I said, putting out my hand. He shook it. Warm, calloused. Capable. “I’m here for my divorce. What’s your name?”
“Hank,” he said.
“Hank, this is . . .” I looked at the swan.
“Alicia,” she said.
“Should we, like, meet here every week?” I asked. “Like a book club, but we read briefs instead?”
Hank smiled. Alicia smiled. Their eyes caught. My heart broke, semisweet.
“Anonymous v. Anonymous,” the court bailiff called.
“You guys should compare notes,” I said, “see who wins the worst ex award. I would play, but that’s unfair; I know I would win. You’re both long shots, sorry.”
“Nope,” Hank said, “mine wins, hands down.”
“Oh, wait a minute, Hank,” Alicia said, sitting up, her neck curving back. “I think you’ve got this twisted.”
“Anonymous v. Anonymous,” the bailiff called out.
“Seems like you guys are already fighting,” I said. “An excellent start!”
Been There, Married That (ARC) Page 22