by Malena Lott
“Don't be ridiculous. You can't help that Leonardo is Leonardo any more than I can.”
“Right. And?”
“We must correct the bad behavior.” Panchal came around the front of the desk and sat on the corner.
I began to think of all the bad things I'd done with da Vinci in the last month. Panchal knowing about even one of them would be devastating. Correcting the bad behavior would mean giving up da Vinci, breaking things off with him.
Panchal waved his hands in the air. “Tardiness. Absenteeism. Total disrespect for the Panchal Way of Immersion.”
That bad behavior? Not the sleeping-with-the-teacher kind of bad behavior? The Way of Immersion was Panchal's method for smooth integration. While every immigrant is expected to struggle, Panchal's “way” should work if only they followed the rules. Panchal continued: “I expected him to be different. It is his birthright, see? I expected him to make his own path, but something has happened to him in the last month. Something big. Would you know what this is?”
I nearly blurted the first thing that came to mind: da Vinci was my lover. But that was the biggest thing that had happened to me in the last thirty days, not da Vinci. No, he likely had bigger worries, like making his grades and learning English and finding his way in a new country. But Panchal knew all of this. All immigrants dealt with these dilemmas. It was something else. “He joined a fraternity,” I said, wiping the sweat on my brow with the back of my hand.
Panchal crossed his arms. “American fraternities can be hard for Americans, let alone someone like da Vinci. Frat houses are not a part of Panchal immersion.”
“Yes, sir. But they offered him free tutoring and a nice gym.”
“And beer and girls,” he added in disgust. “I can see the lure, Ramona. But I thought da Vinci was smarter than that. Perhaps he is just big, dumb jock after all?”
I vacillated between wanting to defend da Vinci and agreeing with Panchal. Da Vinci had started spending more and more time at the frat house and on campus, partying four or five nights out of the week and crashing at the frat house half the time instead of our new bed. I missed him, but what choice did I have? I knew I would lose him if I pushed him too hard.
“You have a special relationship,” Panchal said. “You can talk some sense into him. He must be on time and finish every job he is assigned. He must not miss English class. Is this understood?”
“I'll see what I can do.”
Panchal put his hand gently on my shoulder. “And Ramona? Be careful. Your heart is still tender.”
Long exhale. He knew. Of course he knew, and he cared too much about me to stand in the way of my happiness. I could see it there-the light at the end of the tunnel-when I would feel la vita allegra, but I had never expected I would stumble so much on my journey. Joel, da Vinci, Monica, Cortland.
Panchal was right. My heart was still bruised, and there was only one way to avoid further heartbreak: institute the arm's length policy. “Arm's length!” I would yell at the boys when they picked on each other. If I kept everyone at arm's length, not only would they not be able to reach my lips, but they'd be at a safe distance from my heart, too.
“What are you doing here?” I said as I entered the Starbucks Tuesday morning, my vocal cords tightening. I froze in place. Cortland sat in the corner booth where we had sat together two weeks prior. He was unshaven and wild eyed. He didn't look or act himself.
Cortland stood and grabbed my arms. “You haven't called me.”
I shook loose of him, remembering my arm's length policy. He was already breaking it, and his touch felt like lightning on my skin. “I said it would be a few days.”
Sadness and longing flickered in his eyes. “My God. You look beautiful.”
I hadn't dolled up for him, but her. I had gotten up early to look good for Monica, and fortunately, neither of my boys threw up that morning to foil our meeting, but instead I found something even worse. I had thought about calling Cortland a hundred times since Saturday night, but I had stopped short of it, because what good would it do? Avoiding the issue seemed a far smarter way to go. If only there weren't another human being on the other end of it.
“Please don't,” I said, looking behind him to see if Monica had arrived. I could see he was hurting, and it made pretending it didn't happen all the harder. “I'm meeting Monica here. I guess you remembered that.”
He shoved hands in his jacket pocket. “I'm sorry. Maybe I shouldn't have come, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about you. I haven't felt this way in… in a long time. Maybe ever.”
I cocked my head, trying to brush off the weight of his words. Arm's length, Ramona! “ You're forgetting one key fact: you're with my sister. You were with her all weekend, were you not? Didn't you have a dinner date at Monica's last night?”
“I couldn't cancel. But things aren't serious with Rachel. We haven't even been together yet.”
I leaned in. “In case you've forgotten, you keyed her. What are you going to do, put a lock on your bedroom door to keep her out?”
Cortland stiffened. “So you're telling me things are that serious between you and da Vinci? Just say the word and I'll back off. But I have to know. It's driving me crazy.”
Through the window, I could see Monica emerge from her red Mercedes, wearing a crisp red suit, different than the first one I'd seen her in that day at school. A power suit. The color of love. A suit that said, Stop! Pay attention to me! I'm important. “ I'm sorry, Cortland. I can't do this.”
He bit his lip and nodded slowly. “Thanks for clearing that up.” He turned to leave, and I could feel my bruised heart beating within me, aching, yearning, begging me to go after him and plan a grown-up kind of talk in a private place. This was crazy. It was all crazy, the whole lot of it. I had to be careful, just as Panchal had said. I wasn't thinking rationally. My heart had made me do some stupid things in the last month. In my effort to find joy and adventure, I had inadvertently opened the dam. But I had Monica to deal with. I had to resolve my past before I could think about my future.
Monica shook hands with Cortland on her way in, and I surveyed my outfit, black dress pants and a fitted black sweater, wishing I had the confidence to wear a color- any color-other than black. I was still dressed in mourning gear.
“Your sister is amazing,” Monica said as we wrapped our hands around our steaming cups minutes later. I had figured Monica as the no-fat latte kind of girl, but she surprised me. Like me, her favorite was the café mocha.
“Chocolate fiend,” she said, flashing a white smile at me. Where were the coffee stains?
“Me, too,” I confessed.
“Joel used to say we were like a Reese's cup-him with the peanut butter and me with the chocolate.”
My heart burned at the mention of his name. Of course, Joel's peanut butter addiction did not belong to me. And thankfully he had never called us Reese's. I would've been offended if he'd used the same term of endearment. I wished I could've been the bigger person and let my jealousy wash away, but it was there. I was jealous of all the years she had Joel before me and all the space she had occupied in his mind and heart after she had left him.
“Yes, the peanut butter,” I said. “I couldn't bear to throw away the last jar of it. I know a food can't define a person, but he wouldn't have been Joel without the peanut butter.”
Monica laughed. “Or the way he made a pizza sandwich by putting one piece on top of the other.”
“My kids still do that,” I said, then lowered my voice. “Thanks for meeting me.”
“No, thank you. Like I said before, I've thought about you often. How you and your family are doing, and I guess I have some unresolved issues where Joel is concerned.”
I could feel my throat strain and I forced down some of my coffee. I had to stay strong. “Well, he had an unresolved life. Isn't that the worst part of dying young?”
Monica's voice softened. “The worst part is that you're left behind. God, I can't even imagine. Even th
ough things have never been great with my husband, I can't believe how dependent on him I am. I can't imagine.”
“I get by. We get by. I mean, it's not easy, but you have to keep going. For the sake of the kids.”
“I don't know how to say this without just coming right out and saying it, Ramona. I feel selfish for even bringing it up. I have such respect for your marriage. I do.”
“I appreciate your saying that, but I can't take away the history that you two had together. I know he loved you. I'd be a fool to think that went away when you left him.”
Monica cringed. “Is that what he told you? That I left him?”
“That you broke off the engagement.”
“It's complicated.”
“Look, you don't have to tell me. It's none of my business.”
“But it is,” she said earnestly, her voice rising. “I've lived with such guilt over the years. Some days I worry I'll die without talking to you. And I can't let this go unfinished.”
My hands began to shake. “I don't know if I'm strong enough to hear what you have to tell me. Maybe that's why I never called you before now.”
Monica's eyes glistened with tears. “What did he tell you about me?”
“At first, it was just that you broke off the engagement because you were in love with another man. I often thought I should thank you for doing that. If you'd married him, I wouldn't have ever met him.”
Monica shook her head. “I cheated on him with his best friend.”
“I'd heard it was something like that. Judith refuses to talk about it.”
“She hates me and rightly so I guess. He was humiliated. The whole family was.”
“You have to admit, it's a soap opera moment.”
“We were all best friends, since junior high. The guys since they were babies. They were inseparable. I guess by dating one, in some ways I thought I was dating both of them. Joel was the nice one, the funny guy. The boy-next-door type, you know? I had dated Jonathon first, in junior high. We were king and queen of our eighth-grade dance. But then Jonathon got seriously girl-crazy and he broke my heart. So to get back at him, I started dating his best friend.”
“Joel.”
“Exactly. And the thing is, Joel was my best friend, too, so it was easy to love him. I pined for Jonathon off and on, and when Joel and I would break up, Jonathon was there to console me, and one thing would lead to another. I was on and off with Joel in the public and Jonathon in private.”
I'd never known. How could Joel not tell me? “But you were kids then.”
“I don't buy that. Teenagers and college students may not have the logic yet, but they have the passion. I was passionately in love with both Jonathon and Joel, but it was different. I was more attracted to Jonathon, but knew that Joel was the one I should marry. I knew this even when I was fifteen. And that never changed.”
“So what happened?”
“Something I never expected: Jonathon finally grew up. He quit his womanizing ways. He'd slept with half the sorority girls on campus already. He was a player, but as my wedding with Joel approached, Jonathan came to me and said he was done with other girls-that I was the one that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.”
“So you broke things off with Joel?”
Monica grabbed a napkin and dabbed the corners of her eyes. “No. Even though I wanted to believe Jonathon, I couldn't believe he'd changed. We were twenty-five. I was in law school, Joel was at his first architecture firm and we were planning on getting married two months later. Joel had wanted to elope in college, but I wasn't ready. I convinced him we should wait until after I graduated from law school, but Joel insisted we not wait another year. I guess I was putting it off because I wasn't sure I should marry Joel. Not without him knowing the truth.”
“But all the while you were sleeping with Jonathon?”
Monica shook her head. “Not after we got engaged. But Joel and I had been going to premarital counseling and they talked about the importance of being truthful and not keeping secrets, and I couldn't marry Joel with the guilt of what I'd done with his best friend over the years. So I confessed that I'd been in love with Jonathon, that I'd been with him off and on since I was thirteen, but that it was all behind us now.”
“Your confession broke off your engagement.”
“I lost him for good. I destroyed our love, and I ruined their friendship. I think that's what hurt Joel the most. He lost his fiancée and his best friend.”
My heart ached, but for once it wasn't for me. I hurt for Joel. “It must've been too painful for Joel to talk about.”
“My crime was that I was in love with two men. Two men who I often confused as one. I was immature and selfish. And when I tried to do the right thing, it cost me Joel.”
“But you married Jonathon.”
“Yes, but not until you married Joel. I begged for him to come back to me, but he told me he was dating someone. Someone completely the opposite of me. Someone who would never hurt him.”
“Someone safe,” I whispered.
“I don't know. I guess so. But my marriage has been strained since the beginning. Joel is still very much alive in my marriage. I'm not sure if it will keep us together or tear us apart. I don't know how to fix it, except to try to do the right thing again.”
I could feel my temples pound. The boy next door had married the girl next door, not out of passion, but for security. I would never cheat on him; he knew that. I wasn't the type. He had picked me carefully, someone so different than Monica that I would never remind him of his old flame. Monica's Blackberry buzzed. I began to panic. “You can't leave. We're not done here.”
Monica gathered her things. “I wish I didn't have to. Judges are sticklers for promptness. Let's get together again soon, though. Wow. I already feel better talking to you like this.”
And I felt strangely worse. “I can't wait another two weeks. Can you come over tonight?”
“My daughter has a basketball game and then I have to take the red eye to New York. As soon as I get back, though. I promise.”
“How long?”
“Three days. Four tops.”
I watched her leave as elegantly as she had arrived, though she was now a different person in my eyes. I knew her secrets. Some of them, but not all. Not the one I needed to know the most. I knew she was a cheater. Jonathon was a cheater. But what about Joel? What about my husband? And was I the rebound girl that became the rebound wife?
Was Joel just seeking revenge when he took me as a wife?
Alfred Lord Tennyson once wrote, “It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.” With all due respect to Lord T, he didn't know what the hell he was talking about. It is far better to have never loved at all, for never knowing love means you will never know what you are missing. But then this is a Griever talking. I have a distinct feeling Alfred was a Normal when he wrote that. I doubted he would've said it just after he had lost the love of his life. In fact, he probably wrote it while in the throes of a passionate love affair and said it off-handedly to a Griever. It's just the type of smart-ass remark a Normal says to a Griever, believing he is making them feel better.
I knew I needed escape. I took Bellezza for a jog around the neighborhood when I really wanted to jog to the local 7-Eleven for a box of Ding Dongs. I had helped the boys with their homework and began putting away the mountain of clothes in my closet. I found pieces of apparel I had forgotten I even had. Brightly colored clothing. Blues, greens, reds, purples. I told my mother I didn't need help this week. I told Anh I was cutting off the organizational umbilical cord. I had to do it myself, for myself. If she and my mother kept cleaning up my messes, I would never learn. I knew I could not become Normal when my world was still so cluttered.
As I vacuumed the dust bunnies (how quickly they procreate) underneath the couch at 1 a.m., waiting for da Vinci to come home, it hit me: I deserved more than this. I had become a doormat with him-a highly sexual doormat, but a doorma
t all the same.
I had become da Vinci's security blanket, making America a little easier for him, just like he had made life a little easier for me. And I owed it to da Vinci, Panchal, and especially myself, to straighten things out.
So I implored Zoya, who was usually up eating a bowl of cereal with her pregnant appetite, to stay at the house with the boys so I could go fetch some Italian.
I had expected to find the frat house pumping with party music, but it was strangely quiet, the side door propped open with a large rock, making it all too easy to sneak in. I had no idea where I would find him, but I began climbing the stairs when a young freckled-faced frat descended the stairs with a beer in his hand. He immediately put the brew behind his back. I must look like someone's mother and he assumed he was in trouble. “Are you here to apply for the house mom job?”
My ego deflated, but fortunately, it wasn't that big to begin with. “House mom? Definitely not. I'm looking for Leonardo da Vinci.”
“Einstein? Oh, he crashed in Pickler's room.”
Einstein? Pretty rude, wasn't it? Just because a person doesn't know English very well doesn't make him dumb. “Could you show me the way?”
“Sure thing. Right this way. I really think you should consider the house mom thing, though. You get free room and board, and I'm sure the guys would like you. Our last one was a real old bat.”
I couldn't even get my own boys to clean their rooms, let alone a hundred hormone-crazed frat boys. I wasn't sure if I should feel complimented or insulted.
The frat boy-who told me his name was T-Bone, which seemed like an awfully big name for such a small man-led me through the stained-carpeted hallways, passing by the TV room with three guys asleep on the couches. The pungent odor was worse than da Vinci had described, a combination of alcohol, urine and gym socks.
T-Bone rapped lightly on the door, then peeked inside and turned to me with a grin. “He's busy,” he said taking a swig of his beer. “Sure you want me to disturb him?”
I shook my head, feeling hot tears rush to the surface. I should've left it alone. A few more weeks and da Vinci would've weaned himself from me. Why rush it? I heard moaning from inside the room and considered rushing in to surprise him and just end it right there.