Miserable Love Stories

by Alex Bernstein

  Here at the A&P, the deli guys look like deli guys: big, hardy, white-haired men, butchers and ex-marines. They’re all business. Not cute or chatty. They don’t need to wear sweatshirts to make them look less provocative. And they certainly don’t give out a lot of free samples of ham.

  Ryan finds the bamboo carving boards.

  “They’re reinforced! Price Chopper had the normal ones, but these are reinforced!”

  “Why do you want a bamboo chopping board so badly anyway?”

  “Hot Wheels ramp!”

  And so, the kids have finished and the grocery’s turned on the canned music. It’s a regular day again.

  Angels we have heard on high

  And I realize it’s not canned music. It’s a husky familiar voice.

  Sweetly singing o’er the plains

  And Ryan rushes to the front of the store, abandoning our cart and carving board. And there she is, dressed in sparkling white deli cutter’s overalls, but with a red and white Santa’s hat on and singing to a karaoke machine.

  And the mountains in reply

  Echoing their joyous strains

  Ryan waves to her, maniacally. She grins and waves back, then finishes singing. The crowd claps and she comes over to us.

  “Merry Christmas,” she says.

  “You sound great!” says Ryan.

  “Thank you.”

  “Dad let me get the bamboo board!”

  “Good. The ones here are better anyway—”

  “They’re reinforced!” they say in unison.

  “Frankie!” calls one of the burly, all-business ex-marines.

  “It was great seeing you guys again,” she says. “Stop by and get some meat!”

  She goes off, back to work. I realize, Ryan’s right. I can’t be scared all the time. No matter what happens.

  Life’s too short to be shy.

  “Frankie!” I call out. “Do you—do you have any plans for dinner?”

  She stares at me.

  “Never mind,” I say.

  “No,” she says. “I don’t.”

  “Would you like to have dinner with us?”

  “Only,” she says, “if Ryan cooks”

  Ryan looks at me, panicked.

  “I don’t cook that good,” he says.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “We’ll help.”

  Manic Pixie Dream Girl Police

  AT A STARBUCKS. FRANKLIN, LATE TWENTIES, SHEEPISH, lonely, depressed, nerdy, stands near MEG, a barista, early twenties, very cool, possibly with streaked colors in her hair. She makes him a latte.

  FRANKLIN: So, uh . . . you like being a barista?

  MEG: Sure! But I’m also into skydiving and surfing. I’m a veterinarian on the weekend—and I’m lead singer in an all-girl rock band! (plays air guitar) Cranggg! (beat) But you have to be careful cause a lot of people are totally fake! But I can spot phonies a mile away!

  FRANKLIN: And, uh . . . what about me?

  MEG: You are totally real.

  FRANKLIN: Hey, this is gonna sound lame, but—would you like to hang out sometime?

  MEG: Like a date?

  FRANKLIN: Uhm—

  MEG: Absolutely!

  FRANKLIN: Oh, wow. Great! That’s—

  Suddenly, SIRENS BLARE, LIGHTS FLASH. Meg freezes in place, and THREE WOMEN in camouflage riot gear rush on. Franklin looks around, terrified.

  BECKY: Alright! Secure the area!

  Two of the women grab a now limp Meg and hold her. BECKY, the chief, reads a summons to Franklin.

  BECKY: Franklin Delacourte?! (beat) This your little play we’re in?

  FRANKLIN: Uh, yes . . . ?

  BECKY: (looking at summons) Looks like you’ve created a Manic Pixie Dream Girl to save you from your pathetic little story?

  FRANKLIN: (confused) Manic—?

  BECKY: Manic Pixie Dream Girl! Wish fulfillment! Male fantasy! You’ve created some two-dimensional bippity boppity plaything to fall in love with you, unbelievable as that is, and rescue you from this sad gutter of an existence. (to the others) Alright! Take her away!

  Franklin stops them.

  FRANKLIN: Wait! Wait! Isn’t a little escapism a good thing?! Don’t I have some kind of artistic license?

  BECKY: Not today, buster!

  FRANKLIN: Wait! What—if I cut out the rock band—and the skydiving, and—give her a live-in mother who suffers from—dementia?

  BECKY: (impatient) And?

  FRANKLIN: And . . . make her considerably less interested in me?

  Becky considers, waves away the other riot gear women, and rips up the summons.

  BECKY: Alright. But we’re watching you!

  They leave. Meg comes back to life, but she seems much more normal, depressed and much less interested in Franklin.

  FRANKLIN: So . . . about tonight?

  BECKY: Oh, sorry I can’t. I have to take care of my demented mother.

  Watering Plants

  JEN WAS THE HOTTEST THING ON THE FLOOR.

  And I was dancing with her and losing myself.

  I had never in my life been to the kind of parties Keller Manyon held after—and sometimes during—work hours. They started early and went all night. It wasn’t just the under-thirties. Everyone at the company partied hard. At the moment, the crowd was throbbing up and down to blaring, unrecognizable house music.

  The party was at the gigantic loft apartment of K/M’s Creative Director, Bob Caldwell. Looking at the place, it was hard to imagine a human being living there day to day. There was no apparent furniture or living space, just an open warehouse with random, ragged couches strewn about. Giant pop art pieces hung on the walls including an enormous black and white replica of Bob’s most famous vodka ad—the one that probably bought this apartment for him and maybe even his mansion in Westchester, where his wife and teenage kids lived.

  “Greg!” Bob yelled to me over the music. I’d come to know Bob a little beyond my regular duties at K/M in that I provided him with an endless supply of dime bags once or twice a week. Bob, with his shock of white hair and dark tan, held forth among a cluster of young employees.

  “Have you seen Greg’s band?!” he yelled to them. “He’s lead guitar in the best band in the village!”

  “Bass,” I shouted, uselessly.

  “Motherfucker’s awesome!” he yelled.

  “You are the man!” he yelled at me.

  But Jen was the only reason I was there. We had flirted at the office a few times, or so I’d imagined. I could never really tell if she was just being playful. She was not the type I typically ended up with. On the dance floor, she writhed and shouted, but if you peeled away that drunken abandon—that sexy sloppiness—she was, at heart, a know-it-all, a prep, a Vassar girl.

  At Keller Manyon, she was a junior art director.

  And I was the guy that watered the plants.

  I liked watering the plants, but I had a lot of jobs at the time. I played bass in Chrome Stitch, a blues funk band, which paid nothing, and I worked weekends and off-nights at Continental Thrift, a used clothing store, which paid slightly more than next to nothing. I did building services for 85 Fifth Avenue—which meant working almost exclusively for K/M every day, all week long. I did odd jobs, party and meeting set-ups, occasional catering. I reset lightly broken furniture and crooked artwork and did minor janitorial. And I helped during mail room emergencies.

  But mostly I watered the plants.

  Unlike all of my other occupations, watering the plants paid unbelievably well. It was a job you could do without moderating your appearance too much. As long as you looked modestly institutional, it didn’t much matter if you had a thick, massive beard or tats everywhere—all of which I had.

  Jen and I had gone outside to get air and watch the snow beat down. She was frantically texting while cradling her beer bottle between her legs. I offered her a joint. She took a long drag and smiled at me.

  “You have anything harder?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Sorry.�
�

  “No?” she said, surprised. “You?”

  “Yeah, no,” I repeated, politely.

  “Shiiiiiiiit,” she said, staring at me.

  “Is that a problem?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “I dunno,” she smiled. “I think I kinda like that.”

  I was spinning, trying to catch snow on my tongue and slipped and fell, which made her guffaw loudly. She helped me up, then pulled me close and kissed me. It was one of those kisses where the kiss separates you and whomever you’re kissing from the rest of the world—just you and them alone on some hidden, cosmic island.

  “Let’s go to your place,” she whispered to me, matter of factly.

  “Okay,” I said. “Uh, it’s not—”

  “What?”

  “I mean, I wasn’t expecting company. Like ever.”

  She grinned.

  She woke up around eight the next morning, bleary-eyed and disoriented.

  “Oh . . . oh shit,” she said.

  Nearby, I was hunched over a beat-up, low-to-the-ground coffee table, separating seeds from a pound bag of Northern Lights, which was approximately my Saturday morning routine. (And if Jen wasn’t there, there’d have been cartoons on in the background.)

  “Morning,” I said.

  “Hey,” she said, burying her head back into the pillow.

  I climbed next to her, cautiously.

  “So . . . this happened,” I pointed out.

  “I see that,” she said.

  “Regrets?”

  She peered at me through the pillow.

  “Absolutely not,” she said.

  Slowly, she turned, sat up, and took in the full measure of my castle: frayed posters, dilapidated carpet, mangled band equipment, miscellaneous dope paraphernalia, and clothes strewn about everywhere.

  “I tried to clean a bit before you got up,” I said.

  “Really?” she laughed.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Jesus! What’s that smell?” she gulped, suddenly.

  “Space heater caught fire a couple weeks ago,” I pointed to a blackened outlet across the room. Nearby was the stand-alone metal oil heater with a charred, melted rubber plug at the end of it. She gagged. “That’s probably the residual smell. I wanted to fix it—”

  “Just buy a new one!”

  “Yeah, I should throw it out. I’m kind of used to the smell. It was worse a week ago, if you can believe it.”

  “God,” she said, recoiling.

  I got up and opened a window.

  “Where’s my phone?” she asked.

  I handed it to her.

  “It was buzzing all night, so I turned it off. That okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Who’s Peaches?”

  Peaches was the name that kept texting her all night.

  “My aunt Paula,” she grumbled, annoyed.

  “Want some breakfast?” I asked.

  She grit her teeth, worried.

  “I mean, go out for breakfast?”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  At a diner, two blocks away.

  I had coffee and toast and watched as she devoured an oversized breakfast burrito and a large chocolate muffin. Her dark brown hair, knotted, she was an angelic, ragged mess.

  “Stop staring,” she said. “You’re freaking me out.”

  “I feel like—” I started.

  “Yeah?”

  “I feel like—I dunno—I feel like I might not be seeing you again.”

  She looked at me, surprised, pissed.

  “Why?”

  “It just seems like—this is a fluke or something.”

  “What?” she laughed. “I’m not good enough for you?!”

  “For me?” I said. “Wow.”

  She stared at me, pissed, confused. She hit me.

  “Hey!” I said, grabbing her arm and holding it away. “Some of us don’t work out ten times a week.”

  “I barely work out,” she said, going back to her food. “I just burn all this off.”

  I sat back, watched her, looked out the window. Crowds passed by. Her phone buzzed.

  “Jesus Christ!” she said, looking at the text.

  “Your aunt?”

  “All goddamn day long.”

  She turned the phone off, put it away. I looked at her.

  “So . . . last night was real, then?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Was it?”

  “For me, yeah,” I said. “I knew what I was doing.”

  She ate and drank, said nothing.

  “So . . . you’d wanna go out again?” I said.

  “Fuck yeah,” she said.

  We saw a lot of each other after that. She frequently came to gigs and brought friends from work or her African dance class. She hung out with me and the band. We made fun of people on the street and at work and we saw movies and drank and drank and smoked weed and drank, but not too much. Or maybe it was too much. Who knows? And we always ended up back at my place on my crap futon on the floor.

  She had her own apartment, somewhere uptown in the seventies on the east side. But she never brought me there. Her father paid rent—“half the rent!” she’d correct me—but she seemed ashamed of its very existence. (So we both hated our apartments, but for very different reasons.) She didn’t go there much herself unless she absolutely needed a change of clothes or to get work done.

  Then there was Keller Manyon. We kept things on the down-low, but she was surrounded by talented, beautiful young copywriters and designers who made money hand over fist or who were on the verge of doing so. Folks who I liked, who treated me almost like an equal while I fixed their broken chairs, watered their plants, and sold pot to them.

  Once, I was in Bob Caldwell’s office, watering his geraniums. He was reviewing one of Jen’s Fila mock-ups and offered me a lit jay.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Can’t while I’m working.”

  “In three weeks,” he brayed, “I’m gonna have that music spot for you, Greg. Swear to God, I’m gonna get you in production here. Hold me to it!”

  “Thanks, Bob,” I said, spraying the back edges of the leaves near the window.

  His three-week music promise had been a broken record for well over six months. But I knew nothing about commercial music editing and couldn’t hold a candle to his experienced production guys. So, I didn’t give it much thought.

  “Jen!” he barked.

  And Jen was there, suddenly, holding a stack of illustrations wedged under her arm.

  “You know Greg?” he asked.

  She feigned confusion.

  “The plant guy? Yeah,” she said. “My plant’s alive. So, good job, dude!”

  “He’s the best fucking plant guy!” said Bob. Then he pulled my cd out of his desk drawer and threw it at her. “Listen to it. Fuckin’ brilliant. He did the whole thing. Songs. Lead guitar.”

  “Just bass,” I corrected.

  “I’ll give a listen,” she said, po-faced. “I love new music. Especially bass.”

  I left them, closing the door and then heard laughing back inside. Was he offering her the joint? Was she taking it? And why not, if that’s what the boss wants? Whatever it takes to keep ahead of the game. In some ways, I thought, she was just as messed up as he was.

  In those first few intense weeks, she’d occasionally show up at my door drunk or crying, or drunk and crying and throw herself into my arms. Sometimes, I’d wake up to her staring at me or pulling on my hair, which she did all the time. More and more frequently she stayed at my place. Essentially, without any formal invitation, she moved in with me. Who was I to complain?

  And I tried to clean the place up for her, but it was useless. There was just too much shit accumulated. She didn’t seem to care. Still, it seemed like just a matter of time before she opened her eyes and decided to call it quits.

  “Let’s go to your place,” I said abruptly one night.

  We were sitting on
the futon watching TV, eating Chinese, when I had my radical idea.

  “What?”

  “Let’s go to your place.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “No. No no no no no no no . . .”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a dump.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s too sterile.”

  “For me?”

  “No. Just . . . no.”

  “You don’t want me up there?”

  “It’s not mine. This place is yours. It’s a shithole—but it’s your shithole. It’s fully lived in.”

  “I feel like there’s a part of you I don’t even know. Your books—”

  “I don’t have books.”

  “How can you be an art director and not have books?”

  “How can you be a fucking drug dealer and just sell pot?! What the fuck is that?”

  I turned away from her.

  “Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Greg,” she said. “Come on. I’m sorry.”

  I turned back to her.

  “When you leave here, you go somewhere I don’t know anything about.”

  “I only go up to change for work or class if I have to. And usually not even then.”

  “I share my only space with you. But—”

  “You’re right,” she said. “You’re right. I don’t share it with you.”

  “So?”

  “I know. I just—I’m sorry.”

  I was speechless. I sat back against the wall, stared out the window.

  “Don’t you even fuckin’ pout on me,” she said. “C’mon, is this a deal-breaker?”

  I said nothing. She kneeled up, got in my face.

  “Is this a deal-breaker?”

  “No,” I said.

  Two nights later, the band had a cancellation. I was restless and figured what the hell and took the subway up to Seventy-Third and Third. The weather had dropped fifteen degrees and I was bundled in a heavy coat, scarf, and boots. The area was a nondescript, dreary, dull part of Manhattan, a place where some mildly well-off dad could set his little girl up in an apartment without completely bankrupting himself. She was right, I thought, it wasn’t a good neighborhood for her. She could do better.