The Lonely Hearts Club

by Brenda Janowitz

  “It’s okay to think about him,” I say. “You loved him, he loved you. He was brilliant, and an amazing musician and songwriter. Hugely talented. Can’t we remember him for that?”

  “I guess so,” Chloe says. “Hey, this is weird.”

  “What’s weird?” I say, blanket still over my head.

  “Check out the comment section.”

  “What is it?” I say as I sit up and look at the computer screen.

  “The number keeps going up,” Chloe says. I look at the number of guest comments and Chloe’s right. The number keeps going higher and higher, faster and faster, right before my eyes.

  “Something must be broken,” I say, hitting whatever keys on my computer that I can. “It says it has ninety-seven comments.”

  “Hey, look,” Chloe says. “This one says ‘Amen, sister,’ too!”

  “People are actually posting comments?”

  I click back to the link for guest comments and Chloe is right—this is not a mistake. The blog has already gotten ninety-seven comments and the count is growing by the second.

  Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred, one hundred and one, one hundred and two...

  14 - Wanna Be Startin’ Something?

  “Do you like pizza?” I ask Max, the number-one IT guy at Chloe’s ad agency. He’s at the loft since Chloe begged him to come by and fix my computer after it crashed this morning. Apparently it wasn’t equipped to deal with the volume of responses I downloaded from my blog. I’m supposed to be making him lunch for his services, which is fair, since he’s doing it for me on his lunch break.

  When Max walked in, I almost laughed out loud. He looked like he came straight from Central Casting for the role of dorky computer guy: sandy long hair half pulled back into a ponytail with the sides falling over his overgrown sideburns, black horn-rimmed glasses, and a short-sleeved button-down shirt and khakis. You can tell these are his “I work in an office” khakis that he only wears Monday through Friday, from the hours of 9 A.M. to 5 P.M.

  Totally not my type. Which doesn’t matter at all, since I’m not looking for anyone new right now. Especially now. Now that I’ve sworn off love and encouraged 2,500 people in the tristate area to do likewise.

  But still, I find myself wondering why Chloe never dated Max, because there’s something about him that I instantly like.

  “Who doesn’t like pizza?” he says with a laugh. “But you know, I was promised a homemade lunch for my services.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. They’ll make it from scratch over at Mario’s,” I tell him with a sly smile. The phone rings and I pick it up.

  “Is this some sort of a joke, Jo?” my father says.

  “Hi, Daddy,” I murmur into the phone as I turn my back to Max.

  “This computer thing you’ve written, is it a joke?” he asks. “Why are you so angry?”

  I’m wondering how my dad even saw the blog. He barely knows how to operate a computer. I ask him as much.

  “Barbie printed it out for me,” he says. How very helpful of her, I think. “She’s worried about you.”

  “No,” I say. “She’s just worried about having a deranged bridesmaid walk down her aisle.”

  My father is not amused. “It really doesn’t matter why she printed it for me,” he says. “What matters is why you wrote it.”

  “I don’t know why I wrote it,” I whisper into the phone, hoping, for some reason, that Max cannot hear me. “But you don’t have to worry about me. I’m fine.”

  “This is not the sort of behavior a person who is ‘fine’ exhibits,” he says. “Maybe you should come home to Long Island for a few days. Just to relax.”

  I think of telling him that spending a few days on Long Island with my parents will have the opposite effect from relaxing me, but think better of it. “I’m fine here in the city.”

  “Well, then I’ll come into the city,” he says. “Meet me at Balthazar at seven.”

  I try to voice my dissent, but he’s already hung up the phone. Now I know where Andrew learned that trick. I set the phone back in its cradle a little too harshly and it makes an audible crash.

  “I’m just about done here,” Max says, pretending not to have heard this exchange with my father.

  “Can I get you anything to drink?” I ask.

  “Whatever you’re having is fine with me,” he says.

  I’ve been drinking water all morning in an attempt to flush out all of the vodka tonics I drank last night, but there’s something that seems wrong about giving a guest a glass of water. Alcohol would be too festive for the occasion, so I compromise and bring two iced teas over to the couch.

  “Thanks,” he says, and turns my laptop to me.

  “Thank you,” I say. “How does it look?”

  “All better,” he says, taking a sip of his iced tea. He leans over and shows me around the Web site, demonstrating all of the changes he’s made to accommodate the massive amount of traffic the site is getting. With his arm brushing mine, I’m suddenly very aware of the wife beater and pajama bottoms I’m still wearing. And that I’m not wearing a bra. “You know, you could make a ton of money with this Web site on advertising. You’ve obviously hit a nerve here. This is what people want to read, how they feel. You’ve tapped into something special. Are you tracking how many people have tweeted at you? Have you seen what some of these people have written to you? You’ve practically started a movement.”

  “A movement is not exactly a bunch of people from your mailing list writing comments on your blog post.”

  “You have more than 50,000 people on your mailing list?”

  “2,500,” I say, not quite believing my ears. “Did you say 5,000?”

  “Fifty,” he says. “50,000.”

  “That’s not possible,” I say, inching away from Max. He smells like soap and lemon and sweat.

  “I know people who have quit their day jobs on a lot less,” he says, nodding at me. “With the traffic you got in just one night, I’d imagine that you could start selling ad space on this thing as soon as today. I can help you out with that, if you wanted.”

  “You’d help me?” I ask as my mind begins to race. I could do this. I could actually do this. Work on my music during the day and update the blog at night. This could actually be the start of something.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I could be like a consultant to your site or something like that. I could even help you with a redesign, since it’s sort of dated. We could create a brand that goes across your blog, your Facebook page, and your Twitter page. Make it relate more to your blog, less to the band.”

  “I want it to still relate to the band,” I say and Max looks back at me. “I’m not ready to let go of the band yet.”

  “Okay,” he says, furrowing his brow, “but the real money’s in the high-traffic area—the blog.”

  “I could use the money,” I say, and immediately realize that we are sitting in a 3,000-square-foot loft in Soho. “This place is my dad’s and he wants me to start paying rent on it.”

  “The nerve,” Max says and we both laugh, me nervously, and him…I’m not sure why. As I look at him, I notice that his sideburns are a much darker shade of dirty blond than the rest of his hair.

  “Hey, so do you really believe all this stuff?”

  “What stuff?” I say, still laughing as I sip my iced tea.

  “The stuff you wrote on your blog. About love being evil and killing your soul and all that?” he asks as he puts his iced tea down on the coffee table. I’m charmed by the fact that he first locates a coaster before setting it down. Jesse never once thought to use a coaster. Or to take care of the loft in any way at all. Or me, for that matter.

  “I didn’t write the ‘killing your soul’ part,” I say as I quickly take another swig of iced tea.

  “About swearing off love?”

  “Um, yes,” I say, holding my glass between my hands. “I guess I do. I mean I did. What I meant was—”

  Fortunately for me, the buzzer i
nterrupts my fumbling and I get up to answer the door.

  I try not to look Max in the eyes as we sit at the kitchen counter to eat our pizza.

  “Thank you for coming over to fix my computer,” I say, taking out a piece of pizza and putting it onto a plate for him.

  “I didn’t mean to get too personal,” Max says in between bites. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “You didn’t,” I say. “It’s fine. After all, it’s out there in cyberspace, right?”

  “Right,” he says. There’s a long spell of silence as we both chew our pizza. Whenever it seems like one of us is done chewing, the other takes a sip of iced tea so as to not have to talk more.

  It goes like that for a while. Sip, bite, sip, bite. Glance over at the other person—quick sip to avoid talking. Finally, Max breaks the silence: “So, is Jo short for anything?”

  “No,” I say, but it’s a lie. I never tell anyone the truth about my name anymore. That my given name is actually Jodi.

  I always lie. Right to their faces. Jodi just sounds so ordinary and commonplace. Anyone can be a Jodi. Anyone. But not just anyone can be a Jo. I’ve been going by Jo since I was in the second grade. Even the second-grade me was cool enough to know that I could never be one of the legions of Ashleys, Jessicas, and Brittanys we had running around our school.

  Also, there was another girl in our class named Jodi who everyone hated and made fun of. They would taunt her in the halls by singing, “Jodi is grody, Jodi is grody...”

  “That’s a strange name for a kid,” he says. “Did they tease you as a child?” I can see in his eyes that he is dying for me to say yes—that he was tormented as a child, himself—and that he wants to make that connection with me.

  But then I think about my broken heart and my vow to never let that happen again. “No.”

  I look into his eyes (dark green? hazel?) and he looks like I just killed his pet dog. He wipes his mouth and gets up from the counter.

  “Thanks for lunch, Jo,” he says, putting his plate into the sink. “I’d better get back to work now.”

  “Thanks for fixing my computer,” I say, watching him as he walks toward the door and fumbles with his coat. I want to say more, but I don’t know if I should. Did I really mean what I said about giving up on love?

  “Good luck with everything,” he says as he throws his scarf around his neck hastily.

  “You know what?” I say, jumping up from my seat as he reaches for the door. “I think I might want some help with the Web site after all. Are you free tomorrow night?”

  15 - You Really Got Me

  Facebook status update from Rachel Gray:

  Have you guys seen The Lonely Hearts Club Web site lately? Jo Waldman is reading my mind. Love sucks—the sooner we all figure that out, the better. #LonelyHeartsClub

  Tweet from @juliamusic:

  Jo Waldman has got it right over on @LonelyHeartsClub. I vow to be done with love, too!

  E-mail from Allsnotfairinloveandmusic:

  Dear Jo,

  You don’t know me, but your post struck a chord. You see, I’ve been married for a while now, and we’re no longer happy. We’re growing apart. I know that I vowed to the Lord to stay married till death do us part, but it’s becoming harder by the day. But I can’t leave. I have nowhere to go. What should I do?

  Instagram from ChloChlo: Picture of a dead bird in the street

  This is what love does to you. #LonelyHeartsClub

  It never stops. The computer keeps chirping, telling me that more and more people are reaching out to me. Don’t they know that all I want to do is get under the covers and hide?

  I don’t even recognize most of the screen names—not on the blog comments, not on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Who are these people? I have no idea how they even found me. Could the reach of my crazy rant be even wider than I thought? I check the site—more than 300,000 unique views. That can’t possibly be right. I’ll have to have Max check that for me when he comes over later. 300,000. There’s just no way.

  The idea of it terrifies me. I flip on the television and tune to The Today Show. Nothing like bland morning TV to clear one’s mind. Which I now have the luxury of doing every morning since I’m presently sans job.

  Amber Fairchild pops onto the screen. She is seemingly everywhere. Why can’t I ever get away from her? She’s there to do a live version of one of her disposable pop numbers, she tells Matt Lauer. Except she doesn’t say it that way, of course. She says, in her throaty farmer’s daughter accent, “I’d love to perform for you.” Even Matt Lauer can’t control the chuckle that escapes his lips as she says this. Does she realize that everything she says is a double entendre? Did someone from her camp tell her that this is actually clever? A way to get respect as an artist?

  The music pulses and throbs and she takes her sequin-bedazzled ass over to the mike. She shimmies her hips and throws her hands above her head—her signature dance move—and begins to sing.

  Correction: Her lips are moving, but no sound is coming out. It takes me a second to process what’s happening, but the studio audience knows it immediately.

  “Hey,” an audience member calls out. “What’s going on?”

  Amber’s face twists into a question mark. She has no idea what to do, so she does what she’s always done since she was fifteen years old: She keeps singing. Or pretending to sing, to put it more accurately.

  I can’t believe my eyes. She’s lip-synching. She’s actually lip-synching! There’s no greater crime in pop stardom than lip-synching. You might as well put a disclaimer on your album cover: THE ARTIST CANNOT ACTUALLY SING. ALL SONGS HAVE BEEN AUTO-TUNED SO THAT NO TRACE OF HER ACTUAL SINGING VOICE REMAINS. A huge laugh escapes my lips just as I hear my computer dinging again.

  This thing has got to stop ringing. Or at least I’ll need a better sound if this thing’s going to be exploding all day and all night. I guess I should call Max about that. He’s been over just about every night since Valentine’s Day, but I can’t help it. I keep finding new things to ask him about. And as much as I haven’t admitted it to myself yet, it’s sort of nice having someone around. Having him around.

  “Do you subsist entirely on pizza?” he asks me as I order in yet again from Mario’s.

  “I happen to think that red wine and a pepperoni pizza is as close to perfection as you can get,” I say.

  “Good point,” he says, and takes a big swig of wine and another bite of pizza. “I think you may be onto something.”

  “Anyway, I can’t really order in from my Italian place anymore,” I say. “I sort of had an incident.”

  “I don’t even want to know,” Max says. “But there’s more to life than just Italian food. Riesling goes really well with Chinese food or Thai. Do you have any whites in that collection of yours?”

  “That’s my dad’s collection,” I say, looking at the massive wine fridge that’s parked in the kitchen. “I’ve got a few bottles of my own in the fridge.”

  “So I don’t rate for the fancy collection,” Max says, pushing his dirty-blond hair behind his ears. “I think I see what’s going on here.”

  “I don’t rate for the fancy collection,” I say, flipping my hair back off my shoulders.

  “Well, if I had a fancy-wine collection,” Max says, leaning into me, as if he about to tell me a secret, “I would let you share it with me.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You know, there’s a Thai restaurant just down the block that’s pretty good,” Max says, eyes still looking at the computer. “Maybe we could hit it one night, drink some Riesling.”

  I don’t know how to respond. Did he just ask me out on a date? Surely he knows by now that I don’t believe in love, that I’m not interested in dating.

  “Thai food?” I manage to eke out. Max keeps his eyes planted on the computer screen, fingers still typing away.

  “Or not,” he says. “Whatever.”

  “Okay, whatever,” I say. And he doesn’t bring it up again the re
st of the week.

  Instagram from ChloChlo: Picture of a young couple kissing, sunlight streaming through from between their faces.

  Suckers. These people are just minutes away from having their hearts totally ripped apart.

  Blog comment from Rockboy1983:

  I know how you feel. Love can suck the soul right out of you. It used to be the thing I lived for—finding love, falling in love, being in love. Love was my oxygen. But it’s all different now. I don’t know if it’s different because I’m an adult or because I’m with the wrong girl, but I’m now stuck with my girlfriend, since she recently announced that she is pregnant. This doesn’t feel like love. This feels like my duty. I’m not going to run away from it, but this isn’t how I imagined how my life would turn out.

  Love steals your life away.

  16 - Heat of the Moment

  This is it. I can feel it. It’s the start of a new chapter. A new me. I may have been standing still for the last two years, but that’s over. Now is the time that I do something.

  It’s been three weeks since my Valentine’s Day rant went viral, but it’s taken me that long to come up with the next thing I wanted to say. I considered getting liquored up and writing again in the middle of the night, while in a rage, but having Max around all the time doesn’t engender the sort of rage I had coursing through my veins when I was with Jesse.

  Instead, I go back to what I know: I get out my old Moleskine notebook, the one I used to carry with me everywhere to jot song lyrics in. The blog post I come up with is entirely different from the first—it’s a series of observations, stories from my past, and even anecdotes from friends. But the message is the same: Love breaks your heart. Love makes you weak.

  And it’s just as well received as the first. Maybe more so. Comments are flying in, and I’m getting mentioned on Facebook and retweeted so much that I can barely keep up. And I should probably post something on Instagram. If only to get Chloe off my back about Instagram. She has not shut up for the last three days about Instagram. (An argument for having Chloe take over Instagram duties?)