Charmed Thirds

by Megan Mccafferty

  And that's when I decided to fuck Bastian.

  “I want to go to your place,” I said, wondering if Bastian could read my real message.

  “Let's go now,” Bastian said in a tone that let me know he knew exactly what I had in mind.

  Despite the sidewalk-scorching heat, we ran the ten blocks to his apartment, lugging our beach chairs and camcorder and TELL US A STORY board the whole way. When we first took off, I felt reckless and romantic. I'm going to fuck Bastian! I'm going to fuck Bastian! But sprinting past mountains of wilting garbage and hurdling curdled rain puddles did little to enhance the mood. By the time we trudged up the five stifling flights to his front door we were both dripping in a manner that is sexy in the movies, but rank in real life. Bastian's shirt was translucent with sweat, sticking to clumps of chest hair in a way that was more vile than virile. And he smelled . . . meaty. Like chorizo.

  I don't think I presented such an olfactory offense to Bastian, however, as he practically attacked me as soon as we shut the door behind us. I instinctively swerved away.

  “I'm sorry!” we both said.

  “I just feel so . . . gross right now,” I said as I stretched out the front of my T-shirt to fan myself. “Can I use your bathroom to, you know, freshen up?”

  “Of course! No problems!” These were the words he spoke, but his contracted center frontralis said otherwise.

  As I made my way to the bathroom, I noted that Bastian's apartment was not unlike other grad students' apartments: dark, cramped, and crammed with thick, academic books. I noticed that there were framed photos throughout, but I made a concerted effort not to take a closer look. His wife and kids were visiting family back home in Spain. I needed to revert to my dream scenario in which they didn't exist anymore and I didn't want photographic evidence to the contrary.

  I slipped inside the bathroom, turned on the tap, and splashed cold water on my face and neck and what would be called my décolletage if I had any. I examined my face in the mirror. I looked greener than usual, the effect of fluorescent lighting and nausea. The longer I stood in that bathroom, the less I was sure that I ever wanted to come out.

  “Would you like some chilled wine?” Bastian shouted.

  Wine is such a mature drink. Bastian would never offer me a Monkeyfucker.

  “Sure!” I called back.

  But I wasn't sure of anything. I sat down on the toilet and made up one deal-breaking absurdity after another. If I were meant to fuck Bastian, why would I have nasty stubble on my legs? Why would he have one of these horrible fuzzy toilet-bowl covers that give me that ick feeling? Why would I have had garlic knots for lunch?

  “Bella,” he said, right outside the door. “I'm waiting for you . . .”

  And then I saw it. My sign. The one that told me what I already knew: Dexy was right. I'm not the type who can sleep with married men.

  If I were really meant to fuck Bastian, why would his two-year-old's rubber ducky be perched in plain sight on the edge of this grimy, soap-scummy bathtub?

  NO! NO! NO! Seeing that indisputable sign of his real life, I knew that the fantasy of fucking Bastian would be far better than the reality. All summer I had succeeded in stripping him of any real identity other than the foreign lothario porno stereotype I'd first created for him. But Bastian wasn't just an oversexed, misunderstood man who needed me to emancipate him from his loveless marriage, he was an actual person. Except I had no idea who that person was because I never bothered to find out.

  “Lo siento mucho!” was all I could say as I pushed past him and out the door.

  the thirtieth

  I stuck my key in the mailbox lock and twisted until it clicked. I reached in and picked up the black-and-white postcard inside. On it, a couple crashed into a passionate embrace. My mouth went mothbally, my stomach spun, and sour sweat arose from my fevered skin. My brain buzzed with bits and pieces of poetry: soul disease heavenly happenstance rare creation furious flutter hummingbird heart hello hello . . .

  And intuitively, I knew the word that would be written in his hand before I actually read it. The word that would tell me why I can't let go. The word that made me discover the bittersweet truth about our relationship for the very first time:

  With Marcus, I'm clinging to what might have been. And not what was.

  * * *

  December 15th

  Dear Marcus,

  LOVE.

  All semester you had me wondering, waiting, watching the mailbox. Could you have chosen a more compelling word? What better way to keep me wanting more?

  I WISH OUR LOVE . . .

  You wish our LOVE what? What would the next word be? What would the next postcard bring? Oh, sweet mystery. It was the perfect cliffhanger, but I wouldn't expect anything less from you.

  That said, I feel obliged to express my disappointment over the holiday message I received today: WAS. So now I've got: I WISH OUR LOVE WAS. This pretty much puts me where LOVE left me four months ago.

  Which is nowhere at all.

  Are you losing your touch?

  How long do you plan on sending these postcards anyway? Months? Years? How long will this go on?

  And what makes you think that I'll still be waiting for the answer?

  Respectfully,

  J.

  * * *

  the twentieth

  There is only one thing worse than walking in on two people having sex.

  Walking in on two people having sex and having those two people be YOUR PARENTS.

  Even more harrowing is walking in on your parents when they don't even have the decency to be doing it in some totally boring position but one that is way more porno than parental and on the couch in the living room instead of under the sheets, in their bed, in their room, in the dark, where sex among the dimply of butt and bald of head belongs.

  The only response to such a sight?

  “AIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

  And the slam of the front door.

  I stood on the front steps and contemplated my next move. Should I stare into the sun until my retinas sizzle? Or play dead in a snowbank and wait for the crows to pluck out my eyeballs? I could always stab myself in the corneas with an icicle hanging from the portico . . .

  Of course, these solutions weren't solutions at all. I could destroy my vision, but I could never blind my mind's eye. The memory of what I had just seen (and heard! shudder!) would surely stay with me until the day I died. Oh yes. Let's just bypass the obvious, Freudian ways in which it would show up unannounced—BAM!—and ruin all my future sexual activities. It will most certainly pop up when it's most unexpected and inappropriate, like when I'm contemplating the long-term impact of right-wing appointments to the Supreme Court, just to remind me that it—BAM!—is still here. Years might go by, and I might be on the verge of not even remembering that I had been witness to such horror and—BAM!—the memory will surely come back in all its shame.

  Then I had a thought: Maybe I was at the wrong house!

  I'm still getting used to my parents' condo on the bay in the appropriately named Bayside section of Pineville. Yes, Pineville. You would think that with all this talk about following one's dreams, it might have led my mother further afield. But no, it brought her just five minutes away from their old house in Pineville, albeit in a decidedly higher tax bracket because many Manhattan commuters are buying in this area, one of the last underdeveloped waterfronts in the state.

  They bought something called the Belize Royale model, which I thought was just about the most ridiculous sounding thing ever, especially when I found out that the only thing that makes it different from the regular old Belize model is an extra half bath (which prompted my dad and me to joke about “taking a Royale,” which my mother did not think was at all funny). The inside looks exactly like every other condo I've ever been in: white walls, hardwood floors, stainless steel appliances. Everything so new and so . . . cold. Obviously, I have another reason for not getting too exc
ited about the place: I associate it with the education my parents aren't paying for. That Jacuzzi tub? Six credits! Those marble countertops? Nine credits! The vaulted ceiling upgrade? Twelve credits!

  From the outside you can't tell the difference between a Royale and a non-Royale because association rules dictate that each two-story town house must look exactly like every other unit: a boxy, two-story structure with gray vinyl siding, white shutters, and a redbrick front porch. So it was entirely possible that I'd gotten confused and had walked in on some other geriatrics getting their freak on. It wasn't my parents after all! Whew!

  I had all but convinced myself of this less nauseating reality when my mother came to the door in her robe, my father following close behind in a T-shirt and sweats.

  “Jessie, honey,” she said, her voice straining for wholesome normalcy. “You came home early.”

  And I was afraid to open my mouth, aware of how close I was to projectile vomiting on them. It was the most uncomfortable moment in my life, and any reader of the journal knows that this is saying quite a lot. Leave it to my mother to amp up the awkwardness to a whole new intolerable level.

  “If we had known, we would have sped things up . . .”

  “Moooooom.” My bowels bellowed inside me. “Don't say another word about it.”

  “Since we moved in here it's been like a second honeymoon!”

  “But you've lived here since September!”

  She sighed and brought her hand to her chest in a swoon. “I know.”

  My knees buckled. I liked it so much better when I thought my parents were headed for divorce. “Dad! Make her stop! She's killing me!”

  My dad couldn't look me in the eyes. “It's obvious that Jessie is upset . . .”

  “Upset? She should be happy!”

  “I'm clinically dead,” I whimpered.

  “You should be happy that you have parents who are not only still married, but still have a healthy and robust sex life.”

  “Helen . . .”

  “I'm a corpse,” I said, staggering across their gleaming floors to the guest room. “I can't hear you anymore.”

  As if my relationship with my parents wasn't already on shaky ground. Without their money, I took the maximum twenty-two credits last semester in the hopes that I'll be able graduate a semester early and save myself about $15,000 in loans. On top of this death wish of a class schedule, I worked two jobs. One was in the Psychology Department, cataloging narratives for the Storytelling Project, which means I was paid to watch the tapes and enter a brief description into a database, i.e.,

  Name: JESSICA D.

  Sex: FEMALE

  Race: CAUCASIAN

  D.O.B.: 1/19/1984

  Occupation: COLLEGE STUDENT

  Story category: SEX

  Synopsis: WALKS IN ON PARENTS ENGAGED IN SEXUAL INTERCOURSE AND PERFORMS OWN CLITORIDECTOMY WITH PULL TAB FROM COCA-COLA CAN

  This was a difficult job because I was constantly reminded of Bastian, who, thankfully, returned to his wife and kids in Spain. So the only awkward moments I suffered were inside my own head. Which was plenty enough.

  The other job was at the I SCREAM!, a frozen confectionery near campus. I have to keep this a secret from my family because Wally D's Sweet Treat Shoppe hasn't opened up a branch in Morningside Heights and working for a rival franchise would be considered an unforgivable betrayal. It was a logical choice, though, what with a summer's worth of boardwalk experience in the industry. If the economy doesn't improve and I am unemployable after graduation, I've always got my peerless scooping skills to fall back on. And as G-Money knows, custard and donuts are fail-safe.

  So I've got that going for me.

  And to think I survived this deadly workload, only to be murdered by the sight of my parents' bare asses, a tragedy that gives a whole new meaning to the word assassination.

  the twenty-fifth

  Christmas sucked. It suuuuuuucked. And it's not even over yet, which means that there are still a few hours left in which my parents can explore the limits of suckiness.

  First, the presents. Now, before you go off on how spoiled I am and how I should be grateful that my parents buy me presents at all, let it be known that I did not want any gifts. My parents (meaning, really, my mother) bought me presents because they (meaning she) never listen to me. I told my parents that all I wanted was money for next semester's textbooks. When my mother refused (“Christmas gifts do not come in envelopes! They come in beautifully wrapped boxes! Don't you have any sense of tradition?”), I sent her a wish list from cheapbooks.com. This morning I found out she summarily ignored that in favor of J.Crew's entire winter catalog.

  The moment of ironic truth came when, after opening box after bookless box, I reached in my Christmas stocking and pulled out . . . an envelope! I thought maybe, maybe, maybe it would contain a check, which would, if not quite restore my faith in my mother—because that would imply that there was once faith to begin with—but make me more optimistic about the future of our historically rocky relationship.

  But no, it was not a check. It was a gift certificate to a spa.

  “For a mother-daughter day of pampering!”

  My hands were shaking with . . . shock. Rage. Malnutrition. Poverty.

  “Not even a thank-you?” she asked.

  “For what?” I asked, my voice quivering. “For something I didn't ask for? For something I don't want?”

  “How could anyone not want a trip to a spa?”

  “A day of beauty is so unnecessary in my financial situation! Did you know that I've recycled cans to afford the luxury of ordering something that isn't on the McDonald's Dollar Menu? Did you know that I've survived on nothing but ice cream and bagels for weeks at a time?”

  “I thought . . . ,” my mom began.

  “These gifts cost waaaaay more than the textbooks would have! For the cost of a day of beauty, you can feed a starving college student for a whole semester. So this wasn't about not wanting to spend money. This is about teaching me a life lesson through beauty treatments and Fair Isle sweaters! Well, guess what? The only thing I've learned here is that you know less about me now than you ever did, which is something I never thought was even possible!”

  “Jessie . . . ,” my dad began. But I ignored him and kept going.

  “You do this all the time! You have this annoying habit of doing things behind my back, like clearing out my room or buying this new house. And when I don't act all grateful for this thing I never wanted or asked for, you turn around and play the martyr saying, ‘But I did it all for yooooooooouuuuuuu. . . .'”

  “Enough!” my dad barked. My mom's face was in her hands. She has a fiftysomething's hands. There's very little you can do to take years, let alone decades, off your hands.

  “I've had enough, too,” I said, and I stomped upstairs to the guest room that my mother has staged in a style that she describes as “city-country,” which reminds me of Shania Twain every time she says it, which is a lot. I flopped onto the dusky rose coverlet covering the white-painted brass daybed, gazing up at the lights twinkling on the wrought-iron chandelier. I thought about Martha Stewart's daughter and how, at that moment, I was jealous of her. I daydreamed about a world in which my mother was incarcerated and it was a very peaceful place.

  A few minutes into my reverie, I heard a knock at the door. It was my dad.

  “Can I talk to you?”

  “Sure,” I said. Though I couldn't imagine what he had to tell me. We've never been very communicative, but we hadn't exchanged a word since the assassination attempt.

  He ducked under the chandelier and looked helplessly around the room for somewhere to sit. All the furniture was so tastefully distressed that I couldn't blame him for doubting whether it would support his lanky frame. I scooted to one side of the daybed and he sat down on the other.

  “You've really upset your mother.”

  “I know. But can you see how she has upset me?”

  He sighed, took off his glass
es, and rubbed his head. “I told her to buy the books.”

  “You did?”

  “I did.”

  “Thanks for trying, Dad,” I said. “Really.”

  “Do you know what she said?”

  “That Christmas gifts come in boxes?”

  “No,” he said. “She said that you've been working so hard at school that you deserve some R&R.”

  I sunk into the velvet.

  “But doesn't she see that one day of pampering won't do squat to relieve the stress of buying books? Or food?”

  “No, she doesn't,” my dad said matter-of-factly. “Your mother didn't go to college, and she doesn't understand what you're taking on.”

  “But I've tried to tell her!”

  “She's tough to get through to these days. Menopause is making her crazy.”

  And then he went on to say that my mother is going through wild hormonal swings that are making her very difficult to live with.

  “She's almost as moody as you were in high school.”

  And instead of being insulted, I felt a touch of pride. My dad's comment not only implied that I had matured since then, but that he had noticed the change.

  “I worked my way through college . . . ,” my dad began. And just when I was expecting another life lesson about the school of hard knocks, my dad handed me a check for $250. “I know how hard it is. I'm proud of you. And so is your mother, even if she shows it in strange ways. I hope this helps.”

  “It does, Dad,” I said, tearing up. “It really does.”

  And before I even got the impulse to hug him, he was up off the daybed, but not before cracking his head on the chandelier.

  “I hate this damn thing,” he muttered.

  Getting that check depressed me more than not having it at all. Because when my dad walked out, he left a lonesome void that no one else would fill. I was surprised by how much I wanted him to stay and talk to me about his college life that I know nothing about. It's so strange how you can spend so much time with the people responsible for your very existence, yet know so little about them. Then again, how much do we ever know about anyone? Why should our parents be any exception?