I decided Mystic Mary was a nutjob, so I flipped off the little portable television I kept in my top desk drawer and looked for a book to read instead. Nora Roberts would be good. The pornographic Jake fantasy had left me feeling a little frustrated, and I could use a good, steamy sex scene. I scrounged around in my middle drawer for a couple minutes but couldn’t find a single book. I did find my wedding ring, though. I sighed and put it on, absently twisting it and thinking about Officer Biceps’ biceps.
Jeez, get a grip, I thought as the intercom buzzed.
“Destiny, Avie’s here to see you,” the intercom announced. Thank god. I collected my purse and my sweater and went to greet my sister.
“Finally. I’m starving,” I snarked by way of a greeting, as if it were somehow Avie’s fault I was bored and frustrated. Avie rolled her eyes and held the door open with an exaggerated flourish. As we approached the glass-fronted office of the graphic design firm next door, the receptionist there nearly broke her arm flagging us down.
“You have got to check this,” Jodie announced when I poked my head into the lobby. Her bare and actually rather unattractive feet were propped up on her desk, and she was rolling a bottle of hot pink nail enamel between her palms.
I stepped inside and Avie followed. “Your nail polish?” I’d never understood how Jodie kept her job. Besides the fact that she rarely seemed to be at her desk, she was usually shoeless, her low-rise jeans had a tendency to show at least an inch of ass, and don’t even get me started on the tattoos.
“Hunh-uh. Sssshhh.”
I shushed, and we heard the unmistakable sounds of a romantic liaison emanating from her desk. “What the hell? They let you watch porn over here?” I’ve never actually seen a porn video, but I was thinking it had to be more entertaining than doodling and Mystic Mary, and I considered switching jobs.
“Nope. It’s the intercom.” Jodie stared at the phone with obvious delight. “It’s Mignon, they must be on her desk. I guess one of them hit the intercom button with their ass.” She did a wrinkly-nosed grimace. “God, I hope it was their ass.”
“Mignon?” I asked with a frown. “As in filet mignon? That’s a name?”
“You’re going to criticize somebody’s name? Really?” Avie mocked. Then to Jodie she whispered, “Can they hear us?”
Jodie grinned. “I muted it. We can hear them, but they can’t hear us hearing them. Pretty cool, hunh?”
The grunting and heavy breathing was escalating. I made a valiant if unsuccessful attempt to resist blushing. Avie and Jodie listened casually, Avie peeking at the nail polish bottle.
“What does that mean, Summer Blush? Looks like fuschia.”
“Fuschia has more blue in it,” Jodie said, matter-of-fact, and began dabbing color on her toenails. They were all normal-sized toes but they pointed every which way, and now I understood why she opted to forego footwear. Coercing those feet into shoes would be a major undertaking. I tried not to stare, but I felt my lip curl and I couldn’t pull my eyes away. The grunting had reached a fevered pitch, and Jodie giggled. “Man, that didn’t take long.”
“Well, should we go to lunch?” I asked, embarrassed and fidgety.
Now Avie giggled, ignoring me and unzipping the black zip-front hoodie she had on over her pink, or possibly fuschia, leotard. “Who’s the guy?” she asked Jodie.
“Don’t know. I didn’t see anybody, so he must’ve come in while I was on my coffee break.” Or on the phone, or in the bathroom, or down the hall talking to the cute guy at the mortgage company, I thought. “It’s weird ’cause I didn’t even know Mignon was seeing anybody.”
The cooing lovey-dovey sounds were even more uncomfortable to listen to than the grunting they replaced, but we all continued to stare at Jodie’s telephone. Personally, I was relieved it wasn’t a video phone.
“Oh, pookie,” Mignon breathed. Pookie? Good gravy, was she twelve? “I wish we could always be together.”
“We will, I promise,” the male voice answered, and I groaned and gave thanks that I hadn’t already eaten. Of course, now I never would again. “I’m going to get rid of her. Permanently, so we can be together all the time.”
Avie stood motionless for a minute, then looked at me, her green eyes huge. “Holy shit, is that - ”
I nodded abruptly. “Come on. Lunch. Please?”
Jodie fixed her gaze on me. “You know him? Who is he?”
“He’s, uh, the landlord,” I explained truthfully, if evasively.
“It’s Destiny’s husband,” Avie offered.
“No, I won’t ask you to give up everything to be with me. I love you too much,” Mignon was saying in martyred tones.
“Your husband?” Jodie more or less shrieked. “You just heard your husband doing the nasty with some skank, who calls him pookie, by the way, and all you can say is, ‘Let’s do lunch?’ What’s your damage, DeGraff?”
“No damage. It’s just not the first time, is all,” I replied flatly.
“It’s okay. I figured out a way so I won’t have to give up anything,” Dickhead told his floozy of the week. “I’ll be free. And we’ll be together forever.” Yeah, I thought cynically, or at least until the trapeze lady comes back to town.
“First time you stood around listening to it,” Avie filled in helpfully. “And I think it’s gotta be the first time for pookie. Course, if there’s a poodle in there, it wouldn’t be the first time for that.”
“You’re remedial,” Jodie announced over slurping kissing sounds. “I’m not married, but I can tell you if I ever caught my husband knocking boots, I so wouldn’t stand around discussing nail polish colors.” She considered for a moment. “First I’d Bobbitt him. Then I’d divorce his ass. And there sure as hell wouldn’t be any second time, poodle or not.”
“It’s complicated,” I told Jodie before turning to my sister. “Seriously, Av, I’m going to lunch. Now. You can come with, or you can stay and listen to the freak show.”
“Ssshhh,” she hissed, and I glared and headed for the door.
“How complicated could it be?” Jodie asked.
“Soon?” the floozy whined. “Will you be free soon?”
“Is tonight soon enough for you, honeybear?”
“Oh, pookie!” Mignon gushed, and the heavy breathing started up again in earnest.
“How complicated could it possibly be?” Jodie demanded again. “He bangs the ho, you get the butter knife and a lawyer. Voila.”
“Amen, sister,” Avie said, giving me a look.
I rolled my eyes and forcibly took Avie’s arm, steering her outside. It was unseasonably cool in the middle of October in Long Beach, a brisk breeze blowing in off the Pacific. The office was on Ocean Boulevard, a couple blocks from the beach, and that’s where we were headed. I buttoned my sweater and marched Avie towards the boardwalk.
I tossed the menu on the table without a glance and looked out at the horizon. We had a partial view of the marina, and I tried to pick out my dad’s boat, but from this distance they all looked alike. Ominous clouds were rolling in, and I was feeling a little chilly in the outdoor seating area of Sal’s, the only decent pizza place in a twelve-mile radius. We ordered a large veggie gourmet and two iced teas.
“I thought about it all the way here, and I don’t think that sounded good, back there,” Avie said when the waiter had dropped off our drinks and left.
I tried not to gag. “You had to mull it over to come to that conclusion? I think you’re the one who’s remedial.”
“Not that part, stupid. Although that part was pretty pathetic. I meant the part about getting rid of you. And all that talk about permanently and forever and tonight. Sounded, I don’t know... threatening. I think we should call the cops.”
“I think you should watch something besides Law & Order. Dickhead talks to his lawyer fourteen times a day, trying to find a way out of the pre-nup. Obviously, they finally came up with something.”
“Jeez, Thor, will you pull your head out of your ass
for just a second? If there was any way to divorce you without paying you a bazillion dollars, his lawyer would’ve figured it out long before now. And we both know he’d sooner part with his dick than sell any of his precious property to come up with a couple mil for the settlement. So if I’ve done the math right, there are exactly two ways he can ‘get rid of you.’ One, make you so miserable that you divorce him.” She gave me a pointed look. “Sadly, your misery threshold seems to know no bounds.”
I ignored the editorial comment. “And the other way?”
“Put you out of your misery. Permanently.”
I sighed. I know it’s hard to imagine, but once upon a time, I was actually in love with Dickhead. He was funny and charming and, today’s display with the floozy notwithstanding, not too shabby in bed. And he loved me, too, as much as a narcissist with the attention span of a gnat could, I suppose. I had no interest in the fortune in commercial real estate his parents had left him, so when he sheepishly approached me with a pre-nup, I wasn’t offended. His attorney wrote it to protect Dickhead in the event I turned out to be a gold-digging whore. I took it to my dad, a boat mechanic and retired Navy intelligence officer, for his opinion. He thought there should be a clause to protect me in the event Dickhead turned out to be a trophy-hunting... well, dickhead. Dad revised the agreement, leading to a barrage of name-calling that left the attorney’s ears bleeding. Nobody can really swear like a sailor except a sailor. The final agreement basically stated that if I divorced Dickhead for any reason, I’d leave the union with exactly what I came into it with: zilch. But if Dickhead filed, California’s community property laws would apply. He’d keep his entire inheritance, of course, but we’d split everything acquired during the marriage fifty-fifty. Even though the real estate market in Southern California had taken a beating in the economic downtown, Dickhead had turned buying foreclosed properties and reselling them at a profit into quite an artform, and my half of what we’d acquired contained an awful lot of zeroes.
The waiter brought our pizza, and I took the biggest slice, partly because it was my birthday and partly because Avie was annoying the hell out of me. “Look, if you have enough time and throw enough money at a problem, you can usually find a way to solve it,” I said with a shrug. “Dickhead’s ‘job’ consists of sitting at a desk and owning stuff, which doesn’t really take up much time. So he has plenty left over to work on the pre-nup.”
“Well, he has to go for all those manicures and massages and shopping expeditions. That’s awfully time consuming,” Avie reminded me.
“Right. And he has to look at internet porn and whack off, too, and the poor guy’s gotta eat, so I guess his days are actually pretty full. But since his lawyer’s on retainer, he can make that poor schmuck work on the pre-nup problem twenty-four/seven if he wants to. Eventually, even a retarded monkey with a typewriter can write a play, or something.”
“His lawyer’s a retarded monkey?”
“He’ll probably make a big production of presenting me with divorce papers and a whopping two dollar settlement and call it a birthday present.” I had an ugly thought. “He’s not coming to my party, is he?”
“You know about the party?”
Crap, I’d forgotten it was a ‘surprise.’ “No, not really. I just guessed. There’s a party?”
“Jesus, you’re the worst liar in the universe. Of course he’s not coming to your party.”
“Great. He can spring his surprise on me in private. Now, are we done with the putting-me-out-of-my-misery talk?”
Avie shrugged, plucking onions off her pizza. “Fine. But I told you you should’ve left him after the car lady,” she said, referring to the BMW leasing agent I found naked under Dickhead’s desk a week after we got home from our honeymoon.
“Yes, I seem to recall you mentioning that.” Hard to forget, considering she brought it up on a weekly basis. If she inadvertently missed a week, my mom eagerly took up the slack.
“Or after the grieving widows’ ‘support group’ meeting, or definitely after the neighbor, her poodle and your stilettos.”
After the car lady, I rationalized that everyone was entitled to one mistake. Dickhead was contrite, and I accepted his apology and the charming house he bought me as a token of his love and sincerity. But there’s no rationalizing away a Poodle Incident. I tried to kick him out, but it turned out the bastard had only put half the house in my name. So much for his sincerity. Since neither of us could evict the other, I banished him to the guestroom, burned the stilettos and called a lawyer. I didn’t give a damn about his stupid money; I just wanted to be rid of him. The sooner, the better.
“There’s no point in rehashing this yet again,” I moaned.
Avie munched on crust, looking thoughtful, and switched to a new strategy. “Des, I know a divorce was too much to deal with when Dad had the stroke. I’m not criticizing you for not filing while he was so sick.” It was a kinder, gentler strategy, probably in honor of my birthday, but still I had the distinct impression I was about to be criticized. Again. “But he’s been gone for over two years. Not divorcing Dickhead won’t bring Dad back.”
“Duh.”
The kinder, gentler strategy was abandoned. “Goddammit, Thor, you’re thirty. Plenty young enough to find a guy and have a nice life together. Or find a guy and wantonly use him for sex. Or a girl, you know, whatever floats your boat. Or live alone with a dozen cats. But you’re not getting any younger, and you’re wasting time with a guy you can’t stand because you’re so friggin’ stubborn. Pretty soon, you’ll be forty. Then fifty. How much of your life are you going to give him?”
“He cheated on me, he humiliated me, and I was willing to file and not take a dime. But he didn’t even have the decency to stop his fooling around while Dad was dying, and when I found him in the bathtub with the twins after the funeral -- ”
“Jesus, I know all that. And I don’t blame you for wanting to get even with him. But not this way. You don’t care about the money, and this is hurting you at least as much as it’s hurting him. More, probably, since you’re actually human.”
I sighed. “I know you’re worried about me, Avie, but don’t be. I’m fine.” I really was. Avie was right about me wanting to get even with Dickhead for all the lousy things he’d done, but that was only part of the reason I hadn’t divorced him. The part I was too embarrassed to admit to her was that I had simply gotten comfortable with the routine of it all. I loved my house and my garden and I really couldn’t imagine living anyplace else. Besides, most of my time was taken up with my job, Avie, my friends. Maybe my life wasn’t exciting, but I liked most of it most of the time, and it wasn’t that hard to ignore the rest. Anyway, it’s not like my life had ever been all that exciting.
I guess you could say I was in a rut.
Unfortunately, between Dickhead’s stubbornness and greed and my stubbornness and complacence, two years, eight months and six days had passed since the Poodle Incident, and here we were.
Not that I was counting.
“You’re hopeless,” Avie muttered over her peach gelato.
“I have to pee,” I countered, and made my way to the ladies’ room. I double-checked the mirror after washing my hands, concluding that Jake had been generous in his estimation of my age. A manicure wasn’t going to cut it. The black circles demanded a facial at the least.
“I know you’re probably right,” Avie said, apropos of nothing, when I returned to the table, “but I’ll feel better if you take this.” She shoved her napkin across the table towards me. It covered something hard and lumpy.
I peeked underneath and screamed a girlie scream. “Eeeek!”
“Sssshhhh!” Avie snapped, darting her eyes from side to side surreptitiously. “I cannot believe you just said eeeek. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“What the hell is wrong with me? What the hell is wrong with you? You’re passing me a cannon in the middle of Sal’s.” I peeked under the napkin again. “Since when do you have a gun?”
It was actually a little gun, not a big macho gun, certainly not a cannon. But it was still a friggin’ gun.
“Since forever. I try not to advertise it, considering it’s a teensy bit illegal to carry it in my purse.”
“Really? Where are you supposed to carry it?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I guess in a holster on my hip.” I squinted, doubtful, as she went on. “But that seems a bit aggressive. And it really ruins the look of my outfits.” I nodded. Avie had a thing for Ann Taylor. I couldn’t remember the last time I went shopping at Ann Taylor and thought, “Hey, that dress would go great with a hip-holster.”
“Okay, let’s start over,” I said slowly, shoving the lumpy napkin back to Avie. “Why do you have a gun? And do you find it comes in handy in your line of work?” Avie teaches ballet to seven year olds. I bet her class does the best darn plies in the entire dance academy.
“Funny. Charles was worried about me coming home alone at night when he was on the road, so he got it for me. I have a permit for it, and I learned to shoot it and everything.” She gave me an earnest look. “Listen, Oprah had this show on once, about husbands who kill their wives. Lots of them had been married way longer than you, with no history of violence or anything. They just went along, quietly miserable, until the guy snapped. And then it was too late.” Avie shoved the lumpy napkin back to me. “You should take it, at least till we’re positive Dickhead isn’t planning to OJ you.”
I cringed. “I don’t want it, I don’t need it, I don’t even know how to use it. I’d probably shoot my foot off.”
“Don’t point it at your foot,” she said reasonably, “or at any other part of your body. Don’t point it at anybody else’s body parts, either, unless you plan to shoot them. If you do want to shoot somebody’s body parts, aim and squeeze the trigger. That’s it.”
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