Crazy, Stupid, Fauxmance (Creative HeARTS)

by Shellee Roberts

  Inside, the building is all stone and wood and patterned carpet, classy, but kind of stuffy. “So, this is a country club,” I say.

  “See, I told you it wasn’t a big deal.” No matter how many times he says it, though, I can’t make myself believe it.

  He leads me inside a beautifully lit dining room with a wall of windows overlooking acres and acres of perfectly manicured golf course and, beyond that, Lake Austin. Unfortunately, the spectacular view is completely lost on me because the only thing I notice is that I’m spectacularly overdressed. The room is packed, only a few of the dozens of six-top tables are empty, and it’s a sea of button-downs, golf shirts, and sweater twin sets.

  My stomach basically dissolves into jelly. Apparently I should have asked more questions when Cabot told me to wear whatever I want, because I did and now I feel like an idiot. I look like I’m about to go on stage for a revival performance of West Side Story.

  “Oh, crap,” Cabot says under his breath, and I want to burst into tears because I’m so mortified. But he hasn’t noticed anything wrong at all. “My dad brought somebody with him.”

  I follow Cabot’s gaze to see a man and a woman sitting alone at a table near the windows. Even from here I can tell that’s his dad; the same dark hair, strong nose, and angular jaw. We cross the room, and I practically glue myself to Cabot, trying to ignore all the stares.

  “Ah, Cabot, you’re finally here,” his father says, rising from his seat. He glances at his watch. “I thought I might get stood up again.” Cabot has an inch, maybe two, on his dad, but they have the same fit build, and the older Wheeler has the same crinkles at the corners of his midnight-blue eyes.

  “Traffic,” Cabot explains. “Dad, this is my friend Mariely.” I notice he doesn’t say “girlfriend” like he did to his old friends. Mr. Wheeler’s eyes widen for a split second when he sees me, my dress, and my too-much makeup and too-big hair. My skin crawls underneath the satin material of my dress because I feel so ridiculous. But he shakes my hand and says, “A pleasure to meet you, Mariely.” Then he turns to the woman sitting at the table. “Cabot, this is my, uh, new friend, Amanda.” Amanda is slim, blond, and definitely closer in age to me and Cabot than to Mr. Wheeler. However, she’s appropriately dressed for this encounter in a stylish sheath dress.

  Cabot extends his hand to her. “I’m Cabot Wheeler.” His tone is formal and polite, but not overly friendly. “What happened to Veronica?” he says to his dad.

  Mr. Wheeler’s lips tighten, and while Cabot looks relaxed, his fingers tighten ever so slightly on mine. I get the distinct impression that Amanda and I have just become bit players in the middle of the Wheeler father-son saga. Well, I may not know my lines, but I am dressed for theater at least.

  I jump in. “It’s nice to meet you, Amanda. I guess it’s a night for new friends.” We take our seats. The waiter arrives with water and I grab my glass, taking a big sip, hoping to get my nerves under control.

  “Your dad has been telling me all about you, Cabot,” Amanda says.

  “Really? He’s never mentioned you to me before, but then he probably sees you way more often than he does me.”

  Amanda shifts uncomfortably in her chair.

  “Mariely, do you attend NextGen Academy with Cabot?” Mr. Wheeler asks me.

  “Yes, I’m in the theater track.”

  “Oh? My firm is a major donor to the Zachary Scott Theatre, you know.” He says this to Amanda rather than to me, though. She seems duly impressed.

  “So, Amanda, what do you do?” I ask, trying to keep the conversation going.

  “I run a local nonprofit now, but I used to be a dancer,” she reveals.

  From the corner of my eye I see Mr. Wheeler reach for his wineglass and swirl the crimson liquid, studying it with the intensity of someone deliberately avoiding having to look anywhere else. Especially not at Cabot. Suddenly, it dawns on me why Mr. Wheeler brought a new “friend” this evening—he thought Cabot would be bringing Audrey, and Amanda and Audrey would have dance in common to talk about. He was trying to win points with his son.

  Right now I wish, probably as much as Mr. Wheeler, that Audrey were here instead of me. Audrey would know what to wear to a country club. And Audrey would probably know how to handle Cabot, who’s becoming more sullen by the moment.

  “Ballet or modern?” I ask.

  “Exotic?” Cabot chimes in. I suck in my breath. I can’t believe what I heard. Absolutely cannot believe I heard it from Cabot. I stare at him, mouth agape.

  “Cabot, apologize. Immediately,” his dad growls, slamming down his wineglass.

  If the standoff between father and son was awkward before, it’s straight-up hostile now. Mr. Wheeler turns nearly the same color as his wine. Amanda, too, has pinkened, though she wears her embarrassment becomingly, as beautiful blond girls do. I, on the other hand, can only imagine the shade I’m currently wearing: whatever off-green color clashes worst with my dress. If I was mortified before, I’m appalled now. Who is this boy sitting next to me? Certainly he’s not the person who came up to me at a coffee shop two weeks ago and apologized for hosting a party where I found my boyfriend cheating on me. No, this is the guy who would be friends with those three shitheads from yesterday. This guy is a dick. I don’t know him at all.

  The silence at our table crescendos to Cold War levels of tension, until, finally, Cabot speaks. “I’m sorry, Amanda. I was rude and what I said was insulting. I’m an asshole. It’s a genetic defect from my father’s side.”

  Mr. Wheeler throws his napkin down on the table. “Enough, Cabot. Outside. Right now.” He gets up and stalks toward the door, never looking back to make sure Cabot’s even following—the expectation is clear. Cabot does, and he doesn’t seem to care that everyone, and I mean everyone, in the dining room, is watching.

  Amanda and I are left alone. “Ballet,” she says when everyone else goes back to their meals. “I was a ballet dancer.”

  “Oh,” I answer, the ability to feign even polite interest beyond the scope of my talent at this moment. Amanda picks up her purse and excuses herself to the ladies’ room. I wonder if I have enough cash in my account for Uber or if I should beg Willa to come rescue me. Either way, I’m leaving. Tonight has been a disaster. I reach for my purse, and for the second time in as many weeks I muster all the dignity I can manage, which isn’t much when your date for the evening has just been dragged outside by his father for a scolding, like he’s a two-year-old. Of all the ways I could describe Cabot over the last two weeks, I never thought jerk would be one of them. I make my way to the front door, as he and his dad return.

  “Mr. Wheeler, it was nice to meet you. Amanda is in the ladies’ room,” I tell him. I can barely look at Cabot. “I’ll see you at school.”

  He follows me. “Mariely, wait.” His fingertips brush my wrist, but I wrest it away. He doesn’t try again.

  Outside, the sun has set and it’s dark and I’m at least thirty miles from home. I start texting Willa—Uber would cost a fortune from here to my house.

  I know Cabot is still standing behind me because my heart is doing that jumping-hurdles thing it does when he’s close by. “Mariely, I’m sorry. What happened had nothing to do with you or Amanda. That was about me and my dad and—”

  I turn and face him again. “It doesn’t matter. You’re obviously not the person I thought you were. I’ve already had a relationship with a guy who didn’t turn out to be who I thought he was. I don’t want to go through that disappointment again.”

  “Mariely—”

  “No, I think we should go back to our original plan. We can still pretend we’re together at school, but let’s keep it at school, no more deviating from the script. Then after the dance we’ll go our separate ways.”

  Cabot’s gaze drops to the ground. “I’m sorry. I acted like an asshole.” He looks up at me again, his eyes pleading. “But I’m not that guy. I’m not my father. I won’t be. Please don’t leave. Give me the chance to show you who
I am, for real.”

  I want to believe him so badly. I want to give him a chance and see where tonight goes, even though nothing that has happened so far has given me any reason to hope that Cabot and I have a snowball’s chance in hell of making it as a real couple. But I nod anyway. “Okay.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Once we’re away from that horrible place, Cabot asks me, “Do you want to know what that was all about?”

  I wasn’t going to ask, no matter how much it’s killing me not to. Cabot’s issues with his dad seem deeply personal. He and I are barely dipping our toes into the real-life pool, so diving headfirst into revealing deep, dark family secrets? I’m definitely not ready, and I don’t want to push Cabot if he’s not ready, either.

  “You don’t have to tell me, not if you don’t want to.”

  “No, it’s fine. Almost everyone else in that club knows already, so why shouldn’t you?” His fingers squeeze the steering wheel, and he gives a bitter half laugh. “If someone had told me two years ago that my dad and I would be like this, I’d have thought they were crazy. My dad was everything to me when I was a kid. He taught me how to ride a bike, how to read, how to tie a tie, how to shave, how to drive, how to ask out a girl, everything. I thought he was like Superman or something. I wanted to be just like him, smart, funny, the life of the party. He’s a lawyer, a good one, and he went to Baylor Law School, so from the time I was little, I had all this Baylor Bears stuff all over my room ’cause if he went there I was going to go there, too. Remember when I told you I used to debate at my old school?”

  “Yeah,” I say, thinking back to that first day of our fauxmance. It seems like months ago now, not weeks. “As impressed as I was by your knowledge of the words of Benjamin Franklin., I still have a really hard time imagining you in debate. It’s so…”

  “Boring?” he supplied.

  “More like relentlessly unartistic.”

  He chuckles. “Yeah, so is my father. The thing is, I was good at it. Really good at it. I made team captain at the beginning of my sophomore year—the first time that ever happened in the history of the school. My mom and dad took me out to dinner that night to celebrate at this really expensive restaurant. He told me how proud he was of me, how I reminded him of himself at the same age. I remember feeling how lucky I was that he was my dad. We had a really nice house on the lake, boats, we took ski vacations at Christmas, I’ve been to almost all the islands in the Caribbean—I’m not saying all this to brag, I’m saying this because I knew we were really fortunate, and that my dad worked hard to make all of it possible for me and my mom because he loved us so much.”

  “So I’m guessing there’s a ‘but’ coming because so far this sounds more fairy tale than nightmare.”

  Cabot sighs. “Oh, it’s coming. The very next day we had early release from school. I didn’t have my license yet, so my mom picked me up and when we got home there was a car waiting there. A woman got out and she had one of those baby carrier things with her. She came up to my mom and handed her some papers. I was looking at the baby. He had all this dark hair like mine, like my dad’s, and he was looking up at me with my eyes…”

  “Your dad’s eyes?”

  Cabot nods. “I knew he was my brother. The woman was a cocktail waitress in the Warehouse District, close to my dad’s law office. And apparently she wasn’t his first cocktail waitress, or his first affair. So my mom and I moved out into my grandfather’s house in Pemberton Heights, and…I realized my dad isn’t Superman. He’s just an ordinary douche bag who cheats on his wife.”

  “That doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you,” I tell him.

  “No, it means he didn’t respect my mom or me enough to keep his pants up so we could be a family. After that, I dropped debate, I tore down all the Baylor stuff in my room, and I transferred to NextGen the following fall.”

  “So the only reason you’re pursuing art is to get back at your dad? That’s kind of an odd revenge strategy.”

  He cocks an eyebrow. “Says the girl who’s currently involved in a bogus hookup scheme with me to make her gay ex-boyfriend jealous.”

  I make a face. “Touché. What I meant is, revenge is not your typical artist’s motivation.”

  “For me in the beginning, it was. I couldn’t think of anything else so completely opposite of my father. He’d always considered my mom’s gallery more of a hobby than a legitimate career. I guess I wanted to really show him that I took her side.”

  “But now you love it.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to do if I couldn’t paint. When I’m in my studio, just me and the canvas…I lose time, I let go of all the extraneous shit that makes me crazy, I step outside myself almost, and put it all into the paint.”

  I knew those feelings, all of them. “That’s how it is when I’m on stage. It’s like I’ve been living my life only halfway until the moment the curtain comes up and then I’m fully alive.”

  “Can I come see you perform sometime?” he asks.

  “Yes, but I won’t have a performance until long after the dance next week, after…” I let the word linger in the air, because, well, I don’t know what’s happening after the dance next week.

  “I want to talk about that, about us after the dance,” Cabot says, “but first, how do you feel about picnics?”

  “Now? Cabot, it’s dark and I’m not exactly dressed for outdoors. Not that I was dressed for the country club, either.”

  “Why? You look beautiful.”

  “Yeah, if we were going to a Broadway show, but come on, this dress, me? I didn’t fit in there.”

  “Why would you want to? All those people care about is fitting in, driving the right car, living in the right neighborhood, wearing the clothes magazines tell them they should be wearing this season. None of them have an original opinion of their own about anything. That you don’t fit in there—that’s what I like best about you. You’re not afraid to be different, to express yourself, to look the way you want to look and not care what people think about it. It’s why I like being with you.”

  Except I do care. I dress the way I do because I shop at secondhand stores and yard sales, and I want it to look like it’s a style choice, not because I don’t have the money to afford new clothes. And I wish that my worries were which car and which house to live in, but most days I’m just glad to have a house and my bus pass. I don’t say any of this to Cabot, though, because how could he possibly understand what that’s like?

  He continues. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life keeping up appearances, Mariely, only knowing the ‘right’ people, joining the ‘right’ clubs. What does ‘right’ mean anyway? I don’t want to calculate everything I do for its ROI on my life. That’s my dad. I tried to put all that behind when I came to NextGen.” He takes a breath. “Of course, I immediately started dating Audrey, the poster child for that life, because I’m an idiot.”

  I smile. “She was easy.”

  A grin spreads to his eyes as he remembers our conversation at the lake. “Yeah, she was easy.” But then the grin fades, and his eyes take on a blazing intensity that sends crazy heat all over me. “I don’t want easy. I’m ready for more.”

  Oh. My. God.

  We drop into the ginormous downtown Whole Foods and pick up picnic supplies: veggie egg rolls, pot stickers, some sort of organic, hand-squeezed sparkling lemonade, and two snickerdoodle cookies. Cabot pays, and I can’t help but notice that this one meal costs more than half what Lita spends on a full week of groceries for our whole family. With our picnic in tow, we drive through the bungalow-lined streets of old Austin. Near Zilker Park, Cabot takes a left onto a lane with only a couple of houses on it and a dead end. He pulls off to the side and kills the engine.

  “Where are we?” I ask as we climb out of the car.

  Cabot only smiles. “A surprise. Grab your jacket, it might get a little cool.” The sky is cloudless and the moon, though not quite full, is high and bright enough to cast shadows. Our dinner
in one hand, with the other Cabot leads me toward the dark tangle of trees at the street’s end. There’s a worn, narrow pathway, but you’d have to know it was there to find it. I hold tight to Cabot because my borrowed shoes were made for sitting and looking pretty, not off-road hiking.

  “Are we going far?” I ask

  “We’re here,” he says, squeezing my hand. All I can see is a large limestone boulder with a fence jutting out from either side of it, the kind they put up around monuments and other places where they don’t want people to trespass. I guess this huge rock was in the way so they just incorporated it into the fence line.

  I’m confused. “Where’s here?”

  “I’m going to climb over and let you in. Stay put.”

  “Can we get in trouble for whatever it is we’re about to do?” I ask, but I’m pretty sure I already know the answer.

  “We can, but we won’t,” Cabot says. The boulder is wider than it is high, and Cabot scrambles easily to the top in his Vans. He walks along the fence and then pushes open a gate I didn’t realize was right in front of me.

  “You can only open it from this side,” he explains.

  “I’m guessing this is not your first time.”

  Cabot winks, unrepentant. “Visiting hours are not the best viewing hours. Take off your shoes and hop on my back instead, it’ll be faster.”

  “I never pictured this evening going like this,” I say, holding my borrowed shoes in one hand while I wrap my other arm around Cabot and he hoists me onto his back.

  Cabot chuckles. “What? Awkward family dinner where you don’t get to eat followed by misdemeanor trespassing in the moonlight? This is just a regular Thursday in my life.” He walks along a gravel footpath, the kind you find in a park, but I don’t see anything that indicates this is a park. Then we come to a small wooden bridge and Cabot sets me down.

  “This is what I wanted to show you.”

  The bridge spans a pond covered in lily pads, but out in the middle is a tiny island and on the island, rising out of the lilies and grass, is a man. Or rather a statue of a man. The moonlight illuminates the muscles of his white marble body, his arms holding the body of a woman in a frozen embrace. Her hand is in his hair, pulling him close for a passionate kiss.