by Greg Ames
Paige looked up from the floor, blinking her teary eyes. “What? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“We shouldn’t fixate on all the details,” I said.
Paige couldn’t let it go. “He made a sandwich? After he tied you to a chair and smashed my pictures?”
“They have no respect for personal property,” Mike said. “They think they deserve welfare checks and government handouts, but maybe they should try working for a living.”
Paige’s mouth fell open. She looked at Mike, then at me, trying to process everything at once.
“Whoa, Mike,” I said. “Let’s not jump to any unfounded conclusions here.”
“I blame Barack Hussein Obama for all the entitlements,” Mike said.
“Heh-heh,” I said. “I think what Mike’s trying to say—”
“Prison isn’t enough for some of them,” Mike said, nodding. “They seem to love it there. So maybe we need to impose stricter measures.”
Jesus, was Mike a straight-up racist asshole? How had I missed that during my stringent locker-room vetting process?
“Rehabilitation?” Mike went on. “More like three hots and a cot. Club Med.”
I had to stop him. Paige’s family wouldn’t stand for that crap. Not at all. And neither would I.
I had no choice but to view this as a teachable moment.
“First of all, Mike, let’s stop saying ‘they,’” I suggested, angling my face toward him, so I could see him with my unswollen eye. “That’s only confusing matters. It was just one dude. Just a tiny Caucasian guy in flip-flops and a poncho. Second of all—”
“He was wearing flip-flops and a fucking poncho?” Paige stared at me. “For real?”
“The point is,” I said, my voice cracking with frustration, “the point is we have each other. Right, Mike? Paige? We’re safe. Nobody is trying to hurt us anymore because Mike Balducci is here.”
“You gotta call the cops,” Mike said.
“That’s what I told him,” Paige said, nodding at Mike. “I told him that half an hour ago.”
I put my hands on my hips and smiled at the two of them. “It’s uncanny how you two always think alike. Look at me, you two, I’m still shaking.” I held out my hand and wriggled my fingers. “I don’t trust my own decision-making right now. You too should put your heads together and confer. If you need privacy, you can go in the bedroom and shut the door. Cuddle up and discuss my screwed-up and frankly embarrassing situation.”
“I’m calling the cops,” Paige said.
“Good idea,” Mike said. “That’s what I would do.”
I laughed and shook my finger at them. “You guys,” I said.
The police officers arrived an hour later, two stocky guys in their thirties who couldn’t have looked more bored. They strutted in wearing their full gear—guns, pepper spray, cuffs, etc. “So who called about the break-in?”
I raised my shaky hand. “I did, officer.” Slumped in the armchair, I had an afghan draped over my lap. “Little old me.”
Beside me on the end table was a mug of Earl Grey tea from Paige. She was such a thoughtful person, empathetic, and for a moment I envied Mike.
I gave the cops a precise description of the freckled redheaded perp. I said the flipper rested on the poncho’s fabric like “a mammoth slug on a picnic blanket,” and I was mildly disappointed when they didn’t write that simile down in their notepads.
The cops said they’d see what they could do. With the afghan wrapped around my shoulders I escorted them out.
“Good luck, officers,” Mike called out. “Sounds like this particular criminal will be easy to find. The rest of ’em are probably harder to spot in the dark.”
One of the cops, a biracial man, turned and said, “Excuse me? What did you just say?”
I stepped neatly between them. “We’ve all been through a lot tonight, officer. Forgive my friend. He’s undeniably handsome and popular with the ladies and makes enough money to satisfy any woman, but sometimes he speaks out of turn.”
The cop looked at me and narrowed his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “We’ll let you know if we find anything.”
After they left, I headed for the bedroom, barely lifting my feet. “Gonna lie down,” I said. “Really bushed. Doesn’t take much to rattle a guy like me.”
“Anything I can do?” Mike asked. The champ. I knew he’d come through sooner or later.
I turned to Paige. “Do you feel safe staying here tonight, honey? Would you rather go somewhere else?” Then I looked pointedly at Mike. “A hotel would probably be too expensive.”
Mike coughed into his fist. “I’d better get going,” he said.
I put my hand out to stop him. “Want to crash on the couch, buddy? I don’t presume to speak for Paige, but I think we’d both feel better if a man was here.”
“Nah,” Mike said. “I’ll just head back to my condo.”
Paige smiled at him. “Good night, Mike.” She took hold of his elbow and walked him to the door. “Thanks for stopping by. We both appreciate it.”
“Yeah, just—you know.” He shrugged. “All right. Cool.”
“And thanks for dinner,” she added. “It was fun—considering.”
They looked at each other. This was Mike’s big opportunity. The door to her heart was wide open. Would the swain deliver?
Mike cleared his throat. I tiptoed closer, hunched under the afghan. Paige and I both endured a tantalizing moment of suspense.
“Well, okay,” Mike said at last, twirling his car keys on his finger. “Later.”
Disappointing. No other way to put it. I made a mental note to buy Mike a pocket thesaurus.
In retrospect, the truth was obvious. Paige deserved better than this. Frankly, I deserved better. That night I decided to tell Adam Kennedy that Mike Balducci was out of the running in the marriage sweepstakes.
What I hadn’t planned on, however, was losing my job. “Sorry, hombre,” my manager Brett said, bouncing a superball against his office wall. “Nothing personal. We’re all on thin ice here, including yours truly.” He caught the ball and tossed it again. “I’ll probably be right behind you on the unemployment line.”
While my coworkers averted their eyes, I cleaned out my desk and dumped everything in the trash. All of that useless, disposable junk—why had I cared about any of it? I walked out of the building in a daze, empty-handed and unemployed.
For a week I refused to believe that my termination had anything to do with my abilities or my character. Cutbacks were unavoidable, I told myself. The economy was in bad shape. I made thirty phone calls and tried to cash in favors but my friends couldn’t hook me up, and all those bullshit websites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Craigslist were full of dead ends. How did people find jobs these days?
Demoralized, I spent mornings on the couch with the remote control in my hand, watching game shows and soap operas. I scooped butter pecan ice cream straight from the carton. Unshowered, unshaved, I moped around our apartment in my black bathrobe. I gained twelve pounds and couldn’t muster the energy for sit-ups or push-ups, let alone a trip to the gym. My life slowed to a grinding halt, and I realized how important Paige was to me. I couldn’t wait for her to get home at night.
Mike Balducci called a few times, saying he hadn’t seen me at the gym, but I told him to leave us alone. “You got us into this mess in the first place,” I told him. “I’ll take it from here, thank you very much.”
During this time of doubt and turmoil, I leaned on Paige, my pillar, my greatest support. I had made some mistakes in the past, sure, but all married couples weathered storms, and I looked forward to sharing our own. “Oh, we had some rough times at the beginning,” they always said, smiling at one another and reaching for the other’s hand. Precisely! And so had we!
It took me a while, over a month, to acclimate to unemployment. With what little remained of my savings I bought Paige flowers and chocolates. I told her I couldn’t wait to marry her. I offered her back rub
s at night. I asked if I could rub her feet, too.
“I’m tired,” she said. “Let’s just go to sleep, Declan. Okay?”
While she was at work, I vacuumed the apartment. I did loads of laundry. I looked up recipes online and cooked sumptuous feasts with ingredients from the co-op. I investigated honeymoon locales and prepared pros and cons lists for each. Reception themes? Countless options.
When Paige returned from work at night, I barraged her with chitchat after another day alone in the apartment. “You should have seen this three-legged dog at the post office—so cute!” I followed her from room to room. “How do you feel about Belize for our honeymoon?” I joined her in the kitchen. “I’m really beginning to understand jazz. It’s really coming alive to me on a personal level, you know?” I cornered her in the bedroom. “Can you look at this thing on the back of my neck? What is it?”
Paige came home later and later at night, which was understandable because of the big project she told me she was working on. Sometimes she went out with her girlfriends directly from work. A few times, more than once, she called me at midnight and warned me not to wait up.
“But I made paella,” I said the last time it happened.
I waited up anyway. And I confronted her when she returned at dawn, stumbling in with her hair snarled and her skirt askew. “Who were you with?” I said. “What were you doing? Why didn’t you call?”
“I told you I went dancing. Danshing,” she slurred.
When Paige suggested we postpone the wedding, I choked back tears and asked why. “I’m only twenty-four,” she said.
“That’s not that young.”
“Thanks, Declan.” She walked into the bathroom. “You say the sweetest things sometimes.”
Most nights she refused to have sex with me, claiming she was tired, or her breasts hurt, or she’d just eaten a huge burger, or she had a rib injury, or there was a supermoon.
“Suit yourself!” I stormed out of the bedroom and slept on the couch.
Then, one night, Paige dropped the bomb. She told me she’d bumped into our old friend Mike Balducci at a nightclub and they’d danced together.
“That loser?” I said. “Did he bore you to death?”
“What are you saying? You love Mike. You’re the one who made me see his good qualities. He’s conservative, but kind. In a way he reminds me of my grandfather.”
“Mike is dumber than this pillow,” I said, slapping my hand on it for emphasis.
“You said Mike had a high IQ.”
“Did I? I was thinking of somebody else. Mike was held back in eighth grade. And he abuses animals. And he tips five percent in restaurants. Mike Balducci is bad news.”
She looked beautiful with her glossy black hair washed and pinned up on her head. I remembered the first day I saw her in psych class. She wore a camouflage tank top with spaghetti straps. Her cheap aviator sunglasses, hooked on the neckline, dead center, pulled down the worn cotton fabric to reveal crescents of white skin just below her tan line. When she crossed her legs and hitched her sarong to mid-calf, I noticed her bare ankle, the sandal dangling from her bobbing toe, and the mosquito bite she’d picked until it developed a scab. I made a mental note to buy calamine lotion and cotton balls.
Who needed an exit strategy? Not me. This was shaping up to be, by far, the worst mistake of my life. I felt powerless to stop what I’d set in motion.
“Belize is beautiful at this time of the year!” I said. “It’s beautiful and we’re going to see it as man and wife.”
Paige told me I needed to see a therapist.
Instead, I met with Adam Kennedy at the sports bar and told him what was happening.
“Solid gold,” Adam said, patting me on the back. “Won’t be long now.”
“But I love Paige.” I listed her good qualities and related anecdotes that revealed her strength of character, describing the type of woman any man would like to spend his life with. How foolish I’d been!
Paige and I were both Libras born four days apart in September, which, according to her, meant that we were often incapable of deciding what to eat for dinner or which movies to watch. When we moved in together and consolidated our books, we found that they were too numerous to keep in a cramped, three-room apartment. All the shelves were packed. We had a lot of duplicates. Corners were overrun with teetering stacks of paperbacks. But being Libras, we couldn’t decide which ones to chuck and which ones to keep.
I felt relief to have been awarded an astrological explanation for my lifelong inability to get shit done. And Paige had given that to me. She explained that Libras were extremists, prone to black-and-white thinking. The misconception most people had was that Libras were balanced people—hence, the scales. People thought that if there were twelve of one thing—cookies, say—Libras would split them up into equal groups of six and six. But what it really meant, according to Paige, was that Libras would hoard all twelve or take none at all. They needed balance; they didn’t have balance. While she talked about this connection we shared, I admired the zigzag part in her shiny black hair, the glyph she erased and reconfigured from time to time by raking her hand through it. It was October. She was still tanned from summer, but the brown freckled skin on her shoulders had started to peel. I wanted to help her exfoliate.
I said all this to Adam.
“Agreed,” he said. “She’s a great catch for Mike Ballsacky.”
“She’s a great catch for me!” I said.
“Negative,” he said. “You could do better.”
Paige began sleeping at her mom’s house in Floral Park. She said she wanted to spend more time with her family. I couldn’t get her on her cell phone. When I called the house, her mom said Paige was taking a nap or playing with her nieces and didn’t want to be disturbed.
I drove past the house every night, not in a stalkerish way but as a future husband who was focused on her well-being. I parked across the street and watched through the picture window. Her father read the newspaper in the living room every night. Her mother read a book. Her sister smiled a lot. What a great family! And, God, wasn’t Paige beautiful? When she got down on the floor and played board games with her nieces, I admired her skill with children. I wanted so badly to be inside the house with them, drinking Salada tea and eating Hydrox cookies. I would have done anything to get her back. Anything.
One night in April I was parked across the street, eating my dinner, when Adam Kennedy pulled up in a customized van. Big pieces of cardboard were taped over the side windows. I wondered how Adam knew I was there. And where was his Range Rover? I was about to call out to him, to warn him he was blowing my cover, when he jumped out of the van and hurried up the walk with a bouquet of flowers in his fist.
I tumbled out of my car, spilling my carryout meatloaf and mashed potatoes in the process, and darted across the front lawn. I confronted my co-conspirator before he rang the bell. “What are you doing?” I said. “You’re gonna ruin everything.”
The look of surprise on Adam’s face was quickly replaced by placidity. “Oh, hey. Didn’t see you there. What’s up?” He looked down at the red carnations in his hand. “This is all part of our strategy. Phase Five.”
“There is no more strategy. I decided I’m going to marry Paige after all.”
Adam rang the bell again. “Too late for that.”
“Get out of here.” I shoved him. “Go.”
“You’re in too deep, soldier,” Adam said. “You can’t evacuate from a Five-Phase exit strategy now. It would be a disaster. Who knows how many civilians will be affected?”
“Watch me.” I rang the doorbell. “Watch the sparks fly.”
“This is a quagmire,” Adam said and rang the bell.
We heard Mike’s car only after it was parked. He had pulled up in his cherry-red BMW. I took in his dark suit, the open-necked shirt, and the handkerchief neatly folded in his breast pocket. He, too, was carrying flowers.
“Froggy comes a-courtin’, eh?” Adam said with
a nervous giggle.
“Not now, Mike.” I held out my hand, palm vertical, fingers pointing at the sky. “Stop right there.”
“What are you doing here?” Mike said with genuine surprise. “And who’s this?”
The front door of the house opened. Paige appeared behind the glass of the storm door, dressed in a nice blouse and a skirt I didn’t recognize.
“A full-blown quagmire,” Adam said.
Mike Balducci tried to step past us but I grabbed him and held him back. Adam shoved us both. I tightened my bear hug on Mike, who was still clutching his bouquet of cherry blossoms.
“Go home,” I grunted in his ear. “You’re out of your depths.”
“Get off me,” Mike said.
“Kill him,” Adam said to one or both of us.
Paige slapped her palm against the glass. “Stop, you idiots.”
Her family members joined her in the vestibule, the father in reading glasses, the mother holding a cup of dice.
Civilians gathered on the sidewalk. They didn’t know what to do. A child on a leash dropped his tennis ball and cried. His mother pressed him to her thighs and covered his face with her hands, but he had already seen too much.
“Look at yourselves,” Paige said to us. “What is wrong with you guys?”
The first punch came from Adam, a haymaker that connected with the force of a club. Pink petals spilled over the flagstone.
I heard shouting and screams from every direction. Torn green tissue paper fluttered across the lawn. For a moment, I didn’t know who to help or where to pledge my allegiance.
While Adam subdued Mike with a vicious chokehold, Paige waved me over to the door for a private lover’s chat.
Finally, an opportunity to make things right!
I apologized to her for Mike and Adam’s behavior. “They should be ashamed of themselves,” I said loud enough for her father to hear. “Your family deserves better.”
“No sweat,” she said. “Stuff happens.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. “You’re amazing,” I told her.
“Hey, I know you love live music. You know who else does? My co-worker Savannah.”