Keep Calm and Carry a Big Drink

by Kim Gruenenfelder

  “I should have just married Fred when I had the chance. Gotten it over with.”

  “Now you are out of your fucking mind. He cheated on you every chance he got.”

  I shrug. “Every relationship has its issues.”

  “And what does that even mean? ‘Gotten it over with’? What exactly are you getting over?”

  “Dating. If I had just gotten married when the opportunity presented itself, I’d be done now. No flying to the other side of the planet for sex. If I wanted sex, I’d just roll over and tap someone.”

  The good-looking man near me tries to suppress a laugh. Since he’s reading a book, I hope he’s laughing at the book and not me.

  “Yeah. That’s why we get married,” Nic says, yawning, as she rocks her new baby softly. “All the easy sex.”

  “And the being done.”

  “Yes. It’s just one giant finish line over here.” She yawns again and closes her eyes.

  “Maybe I should quit my job.”

  “In this economy?” Nic asks with closed eyes.

  “Okay, I have to move. Maybe I should move to the Westside. Or maybe I should run for political office. Or take up knitting. Or rescue a dog. I don’t know—something.”

  “You’re going to France for sex. That’s something.”

  “It’s crazy.”

  “True. But it’s something.”

  I shake my head. “It’s not enough, and it’s temporary, a few weeks at the most. I need to make a change. A concrete, long-lasting change.” I take a moment before I say the next words out loud. “What I’m doing day to day is not how I want to spend the rest of my life. You have the baby and your family, Seema has Scott. I don’t have any responsibilities yet. And if I don’t do something different now, I don’t think I ever will.”

  Nic opens her eyes. She seems to have really heard me. She nods. “Okay. So what should be different? How do you want to spend the rest of your life?”

  I sigh. “I have no idea. According to the charm I pulled, I’m gonna make a lot of money. Maybe I should start by playing the lottery?”

  “I wouldn’t read too much into that charm. My experience with those charms is that they’re never what they appear to be. I think my charm was right—I am leading a wild nightlife. Meaning I no longer sleep at night.”

  “You’re only in day four.”

  “Don’t remind me. I didn’t sleep during the month leading up to when he was born because I got up every twenty minutes to pee. So I was ridiculously overtired before I even started day one. I promise you—God is a man with a twisted sense of humor. No woman would do this to her bitches.”

  “Do you want me to come home and help?”

  “Absolutely not. Jason’s mom is here now, and my mom’s coming next week. You go have your sex. I do think I better get the baby into bed though. He’ll be up in less than three hours for the next round of breast-feeding.”

  I smile and say softly, “He’s a really cute baby.”

  I can hear the smile in her voice when she says, “Yeah, he is. Thanks.”

  There are so many things I want to say: how terribly lucky she is. How desperately I want what she has. How much I admire her for always having her life so together. Instead I just say, “Promise you’ll call me if you need anything.”

  “With the eight-hour time difference, you’ll be the perfect person to call during the two A.M. feeding. Love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  “Now go have sex with someone while you still have a taut tummy.”

  I laugh. “Will do.”

  And she’s off.

  I click off my phone and kill time by checking for texts, phone messages, and e-mails.

  The cute blondish dude a few seats away from me looks up from his book. “If it’s any consolation, I’ve flown across the country for sex.”

  I think about that for a minute. “Not quite as crazy, since it doesn’t require a passport. Plus, you’re a guy. It’s different.”

  “In what way?”

  “You are the man—you are the aggressor. Society decided a long time ago that your team makes the passes and rushes yards to get a touchdown. My team, on the other hand, plays defense.”

  He nods, smiling at my wording. “I do make a lot of passes.”

  “Therefore, it’s way more pathetic as a girl.”

  The guy laughs and points to the empty seat next to me. “May I?”

  “Sure,” I say, moving my purse over.

  He closes his book and takes the seat beside me. I jut my chin toward the book. “What are you reading? Is it any good?”

  “Something called Six-Word Memoirs. My mom gave it to me for the plane.”

  “Ahhh, your mom. That explains why it’s an actual book, you know with paper and binding.”

  He laughs again. He laughs easily, I like that. “Indeed. After finishing it, I plan to listen to a mix tape on my Walkman.”

  I look at the cover of his book. “I’ve heard about Six-Words. My friend is doing an ar—” I stop myself. Although I love Scott, and I know he’s successful at his job, somehow saying My friend is doing an art installation based on its premise sounds pretentious as hell to me. So I bend the truth a bit. “My friend was teaching my class about it for a project.”

  Handsome dude rests his face on his left hand and focuses all of his attention on me. “Cool. Are you a writer?”

  “Teacher.” I think about that and awkwardly correct myself. “Or at least I was until this past June. I taught math.”

  He nods. “And what do you do now?”

  Crap. I have just discovered a more diabolical question to have to answer than Why is a girl like you still single? “It’s a long story,” I evade.

  He checks his watch. “Well, I’ve got about an hour. And you, from what I understand, have about four and a half hours until you’re off to Paris.”

  My eyes widen. “Were you eavesdropping?”

  “We’re the only two people in the bar, and I’m reading a book my mother gave me. Of course I was eavesdropping.” His eyes twinkle. “You’re very fun to listen to, you know.”

  I smile and look away from him shyly for a moment. “Why is it the charming ones are always only around for an hour?”

  “Because it’s easy to be charming when you’re only on deck for an hour.” He points to my wineglass. “What are you drinking?”

  “Wow. Okay, that is charming.”

  “What is?”

  “‘What are you drinking?’ Not ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ More of an observation: ‘I have noticed that your glass is getting empty, and I would like to take care of you.’”

  Blondie smiles and looks up at the ceiling for a moment. “Thanks. I think. So what are you drinking?”

  “Cabernet.”

  He looks at the bartender. “Kyle, can you get us a bottle of your best cabernet and two glasses?”

  I point to his pint, now empty, save the beer foam. “Oh, but you’re drinking beer. I don’t want to—”

  “Nonsense. I get to be charming for an hour. What man can resist that opportunity? So, you wanna tell me about the guy?”

  “Yes. But first, can I ask you a personal question?”

  “When I was sixteen,” he answers immediately.

  I laugh a little. “No. What’s your name?”

  “Ben.”

  As Kyle the bartender uncorks our cabernet, I put out my hand. “Hi, Ben, I’m Mel.”

  He shakes my hand. “Mel. Short for…?”

  “Not telling. Too much fun to be a woman of mystery—if only for an hour. So, you want to tell me about the girl?”

  Ben looks confused. “What girl?”

  “The girl you flew across the country to have sex with.”

  “Oh, her! Nothing to tell,” he says, shrugging. “College sweetheart. We ran into each other at a reunion. She invited me to visit her, I flew out, disaster ensued. You?”

  “I’ve had a crush on him since I was eighteen. Saw him at a wedding las
t weekend, he invited me to Paris, so I’m going. Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “You know, I might not be your best judge. I wish you luck though.”

  “Thanks.”

  Kyle finishes filling our glasses and places the bottle between us. Ben raises his glass for a toast. “Here’s to doing crazy things in our youth in search of love, and even crazier things in our old age once we’ve found it.”

  I smile, and we toast.

  “Do you believe in fate, Ben?”

  “I’m gonna go with no.”

  I nod slowly. Right. He’s right—I knew that.

  Ben points to me. “I’m assuming you’re going somewhere with this though, so continue.”

  “I went to this bridal shower for my friend—”

  “And you got depressed because it wasn’t you.”

  “Why does everyone assume a single woman can’t be happy for her engaged friend?”

  “For the same reason I couldn’t be happy for my college roommate making five million dollars before he turned twenty-eight.”

  “Software?”

  “What else could have made that kind of money so quickly? Seriously, he had been out of school for less than six years. Who does that?”

  “I hear that. But in the case of my friend, I am actually very happy for her. That wasn’t my point.”

  Ben gives me a doubting look. I make a show of rolling my eyes. “Okay, I wasn’t as happy for her as I should have been, but that’s still not my point. My point is we did this cake thing at the party, and this charm told me I was going to make a lot of money.”

  He furrows his brow, confused. “I’m sorry, wait. It told you?”

  “Yeah … Well, it’s kind of like the charm you pull is supposed to symbolize your fate.”

  He nods slowly, still not getting it, but continuing to be charming for my hour. “Okay, so it’s like an augury?”

  “Yes!” I say, raising up my hand and pointing to him excitedly. “It’s like an augury. Do you believe in auguries?”

  “No.”

  I wave him off quickly. “You’re a guy, of course you don’t. Anyway, my augury didn’t tell me anything about love or happiness, it just said I was going to make a lot of money. And I shouldn’t be depressed about it, but I am. I don’t want money—I want romance, love, adventure, a reason to want to go to work every day. And then I started to wonder—are we all fated to our destiny, does everything happen despite ourselves? Or, if we make enough of an effort, can we change things? I mean, a planet naturally goes around in space over and over again, but if you use enough energy to push, it can leave its orbit. I mean, that’s just physics, right? So there might be a L’Arbre d’Argent in Paris. Maybe it’s a restaurant, and maybe the charm wasn’t dooming me to have money instead of love. Maybe it’s just trying to tell me that I need to go to Paris.”

  “L’Arbre d’Argent?”

  “It’s French for ‘money tree,’ Do you want to see my money tree?”

  He opens his mouth, but I shut him down. “It’s not a sexual thing, if that was your joke.”

  Ben shrugs. “Honey, you threw that right down the middle for me, I had to swing.”

  He called me honey. Why am I just a little bit happy that he called me honey? I put out my wrist and show him the money-tree charm on my bracelet. “What do you think?”

  He gently takes my wrist and gives the bracelet a good, long look. Finally he says, “I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

  Embarrassed, I pull my hand away. “Never mind. Maybe this is a girl thing. Girls are superstitious about psychics and charms and fate. Men don’t understand.”

  “No, no. I think I get what you’re saying. And men can be superstitious. There are a bunch of athletes who have lucky charms of some sort or another: a pair of socks, lucky numbers on their jerseys, maybe a routine they do right before the game. So why not have a charm that means something to you?”

  “Thanks,” I say, self-consciously glancing at my charm before returning my gaze into his green eyes. “I know logically it’s stupid, but I still keep trying to find meaning in the damn thing.”

  “I think I know what it means.”

  He’s patronizing me. I roll my eyes playfully. “No, you don’t!”

  “Sure I do. Your life was okay, and going along pretty much as you planned it. But it wasn’t great—and you weren’t excited about anything anymore. So, no matter what that charm ended up being—an airplane, a heart, a puppy, whatever—you had already decided that that charm was telling you that you needed to change. And now you’re changing.”

  I suddenly feel a little sick, and totally exposed. He may have a point. Shit! Am I that much of a basket case?

  We hear a woman announce over the loudspeaker in Bronx English, “Flight Eighty-Six to Los Angeles International Airport will begin boarding in five minutes.”

  “Whoa. It must be later than I thought,” Ben says, pulling out his wallet. “Kyle, can I get the check?”

  Kyle immediately places the bill on the counter. I reach to pick it up, but Ben gets to it first, throwing down a credit card before I can even see the bill. “No, no. It’s on me.”

  “But you barely had anything. And most of the bottle’s still left.”

  “And you have four more hours until Paris. Enjoy. And enjoy Paris.”

  He smiles at me, and for one silly moment I don’t want him to go. Something about him makes me feel relaxed and okay with the world. So I hint, “Do you live in LA?”

  “Nope. Doing a big seeing-the-family run. Saw my parents in New York, now I’m going to see my sister and her kids.”

  “Oh,” I say, disappointed.

  Kyle gives Ben his card back with a receipt. Ben signs it quickly, takes his book and his carry-on, and stands up. He puts out his hand. “I had a lovely time, Mel…”

  “Melissa,” I say, taking his hand to shake it. “Good luck, Ben.”

  “Benoit.”

  “Benoit? Is that French?”

  “Oui.” He gives me a flirtatious smile. “My mom’s family is from there. See why I don’t believe in fate? All the times I went to Paris in my childhood, not once did I meet a vision of loveliness going there in the hopes of finding sex. I can’t catch a break.”

  I smile. “Vision of loveliness, huh?”

  “Too much?”

  “No, no. Gotta say, you pulled it off. Charming as hell.”

  He shrugs, still smiling. “Turned out I only had to be for less than an hour.”

  Ben starts to walk away, then stops. He turns around and walks back to me, puts down his carry-on, takes my hand, and kisses it. “I really wish I hadn’t met you in an airport.”

  I blush. I am speechless. He smiles, picks up his carry-on, and turns to leave. As I watch him walk away, I call out, “Hey! Your last name wouldn’t happen to be Arbredargent, would it?”

  Ben turns back to me, smiles, and yells back, “Honey, if it had been, we’d already be on our way to city hall to get married.”

  I laugh. “So what would your six-word memoir of our time together be?”

  Ben gets this almost wicked look in his eyes. “‘Fell in love for an hour.’ You?”

  “‘Saw change. It didn’t scare me.’”

  He nods his head at me approvingly, then turns around and walks out of my life.

  I sure liked the way he called me honey.

  I sip my wine and check my e-mails. One from Seema just came in:

  Scott was bitten by a green mamba snake before the safari even started. He’s fine, and in recovery. But we are soooooo never doing another cake pull.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I managed to get a few hours of sleep on the flight from New York to Paris, which was good because we landed around eight in the morning, Paris time, and I had no idea what to expect of the day ahead.

  The view from my window before we landed was nothing like what I thought it would be. Instead of a huge cityscape, with the Eiffel Tower in plain view, the scenery was incredibly g
reen and farmlike. It looked more like what Scotland looks like in my head. Not bad by any means—just totally different from how I pictured it.

  Soon my plane lands at Charles de Gaulle Airport, taxies on the runway for a rather lengthy time (Are we going to that gate? No. That gate? No. How may fucking gates are in this terminal?), then finally parks at Terminal 2 (Deux).

  I’m officially in Paris!

  Okay, well, an airport outside Paris, which basically looks like every other airport I’ve been to. As I walk out of my gate and trudge toward customs, it occurs to me that I could have accidentally jetted into Detroit or Chicago. Other than the “Je vous blah, blah, blah” lilting over the loudspeaker system, and everyone’s dressed much better. Very few T-shirts and sneakers here.

  Customs takes awhile, which gives me time to freak out again. I haven’t booked my return flight yet. Will that make me look stalkery, or will Jay think it’s a good thing? Spontaneous, whimsical. Although I have Jay’s phone number in Paris, I don’t know how to use the French phones yet, and I turned off my phone before we left New York. What if he isn’t here waiting for me? What if I can’t find him?

  I’m next in line, and other than for the tightening of my gut that I feel every time I face police, I am fine. I show my passport, they ask me a few questions, and I am on my way. I wheel my old, black suitcase through the arrivals exit, and there he is.

  I catch my breath. Everything is going to be perfect.

  Jay’s dressed more formally than in Los Angeles, with a freshly ironed button-up shirt that shows off his buff chest and small waist, a pair of dark blue jeans, and black Mephisto loafers. His face lights up when he sees me, and he puts out his arms and pulls me into a bear hug. “Hey, kiddo! You made it!”

  Kiddo?

  I hug him back, and being in his arms again feels so good that I forget all about kiddo.

  We begin kissing, making out for so long that I’m positive people are telling us to get a chambre.

  Finally, the two of us come up for air, just long enough for me to see an older, blond woman glaring at us. “Oops,” I say to Jay, blushing a little, “I think maybe we overdid it. People are staring.”

  He glances around to see whom I’m looking at, and his eyes make contact with the blonde. He leans in to me and whispers, “Oops is right. Let me introduce you.”