by Anne Wagener
“Unlike when we first met?” Brandon begins telling the story of the first time he saw Susan across the orchestra pit, which everyone except me undoubtedly has heard multiple times. “Forbidden love: string and brass,” he says, swinging an arm around her shoulders and planting a kiss on the nape of her neck.
I’m happy to be excused from the conversation so I can focus on my salmon and asparagus. I can’t remember the last time I ate a fresh, steamed vegetable. I haven’t exactly been able to afford farmers’ market fare since graduation—if it doesn’t come in a frozen package I’m not buying it. As I work through my plate, my mind tunes back in.
Lisa is telling a story: “I’ll never forget when Susan called me after Brandon asked her out after that fated Christmas pops rehearsal. She said, ‘It’ll never work. He’s a trumpet player, for God’s sake.’ ”
Brandon claps a hand to his chest, feigning devastation. A ripple of polite tittering passes around the table. I titter along: The great love of my seventh-grade life was a trumpet player named Angus. He was Patient Zero in my history of lovesickness, followed by countless other musicians, artists, and creative types. By the time Mr. Singer-Songwriter Scott came along, I was fully primed, and it all dates back to Angus.
Angus had checked off all sorts of middle school clichés with his high-top sneakers, school band uniform, gigantic ears, and carroty hair, a formula that normally would have earned him geek status—but Angus had a mystery quotient of brassy confidence that drew me to him, along with almost every other girl in the seventh grade. I lusted after him as much as a bony, braces-clad seventh-grader can lust after any pubescent boy.
I’m still thinking about Angus, and the time he serenaded the entire school with Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” over the loudspeakers on his trumpet (in January), when I sense someone standing behind me.
“Charlie!” Susan slides her hand from Brandon’s and leaps up from the table. “You’re here!”
I set down my fork, bracing myself to meet the person Lin’s been referring to with crossed eyes as “Charlie ‘Ring My Bell’ Bell.” We couldn’t find a Facebook profile, so Lin created several theoretical physiques for Charlie in our notebook, none of them flattering. Lin told me I should “flirt the boy up” anyway. “You need practice,” he said, tugging on my ponytail. Touché. I haven’t flirted with anyone since the early Scott days, which might as well be the Paleolithic era.
Time to get a look at my victim. I turn, stare, blink. Stare some more. Aaaand I’m ringing. Loud and clear. Shamelessly tolling the hour.
He’s wearing a worn brown suit, a pair of red Chucks, an “I Love Yeats” necktie, and a smile that stops my jaw halfway through a bite of salmon. I do a head-to-toe double take, telling myself it’s just so I can draw him for Lin.
Charlie Bell is tallish, with a slightly angular face. Strong jaw. Dark eyes with gold flecks that seem to steal bits of light from around the room. Eyebrows hefty enough to lift a set of barbells. Lips that could also pass a rigorous fitness test. Limber-looking body, with potential for quite a bit of lean muscle under that suit.
A giant eraser descends from the ceiling and rubs away everything around us with its pink tip. And I watch him, basil between my teeth and an arrow wedged between the chambers of my heart.
Susan stands on her tiptoes to throw her arms around Charlie’s neck. He smiles into her frizzy hair, then smooths it as she pulls away. “Sorry I’m late,” he says, setting a fist superhero-style on his hip. “Flight got delayed.”
Susan turns to me, a hand on his shoulder. “This is the missing groomsman, my little brother, Charlie. Just in from California. Charlie, this is Piper Brody, bridesmaid extraordinaire.”
He gives me a look I pray is saying, Well, helllooo there! One side of his mouth curls upward, and it feels like he’s evaluating me. Did his California roommate draw a series of would-be Pipers on an apartment notebook? If so, I hope I’m blowing them out of the water—I imagine their little cartoon limbs flailing as I vanquish them. I say a silent thanks to Lin for helping me choose tonight’s warm-autumn-friendly attire.
I extend my hand, but Charlie reaches down and wraps me in a hug. A little piece of salmon is stuck in my throat. I swallow it and pat his back. Dashing? Check. Smells good? Check. Taller than me? Sweet Jesus, check.
“Great to meet you, Piper.” He pulls back, disheveled hair falling across his eyes. His face is slightly flushed. “I hear I’m going to be your escort on the big day.”
Susan laughs. “I hope you won’t mind humoring him a little, maybe dancing with him a time or two at the reception?” Charlie elbows her.
“I guess I could manage.” I sneak another look at Charlie. He grins at me (holy dimples!) and runs a hand through his hair, rearranging it into another erratic pattern. Shit! Now I’m blushing, too.
Having finished her meal, Lisa offers Charlie her seat. Before she ambles over to the other side of the table, she wiggles her eyebrows at me. Still flustered, I pass Charlie the breadbasket. “You gotta try this cheese bread.” I close my eyes so my internal ninja can deliver a swift roundhouse kick to my brain. Cheese bread? Why don’t you just pop a zit in front of him and ask him to clip your toenails, Brody? Sexy and alluring! Think sexy and alluring! “So, California, huh?” Okay, so not exactly a sex-kitten conversation starter, but it definitely beats cheese bread.
“I work at a Starbucks in L.A. You know, the standard bachelor of arts fare.”
“I’m an airport bookstore employee, if it makes you feel any better.” I take a drink, hoping the wine will give my lingering blush a better justification than schoolgirl attraction and self-consciousness.
“Groovy,” he says, then flinches as if hit by an internal ninja of his own. “Sorry—I must be jet-lagged. My only conversation partner on the plane was a seven-year-old who told me the plot of literally every Thomas the Tank Engine episode.” He raises his glass. “Anyway, cheers to us and our illustrious lifestyles.”
We clink glasses, maintaining eye contact as we withdraw our hands. I attempt a demure sip of wine while simultaneously imagining myself splashing half the glass down my sienna top.
Charlie drinks, too. “Much better,” he says, setting his glass down and resting one elbow casually on the table. He cocks his other elbow on the back of his chair so his upper body is on full, glorious display. “I haven’t had anything but PBR for months. I mean, nothing against PBR, but part of the reason I was looking forward to this wedding was the free booze.”
“Me, too.” I’m relieved to be honest for the first time this evening.
“What’s your drink of choice?”
“Well, my roommate has a thing for classic cocktails, so lately I’ve been drinking a lot of sidecars. He also makes a mean Tom Collins.”
Charlie nods politely, but he’s frowning. “Is he— Is it just you two? Living together?”
“Oh! No! I mean, yes, it is, but—” I take a breath. “What I mean is, he plays for Team Tom Collins, not Team Shirley Temple.”
“Ah.” Charlie smiles into his drink. “I see. What’s in a sidecar, anyway?”
I smile, thinking of Lin brandishing his stainless steel cocktail shaker. I actually have no idea what Lin puts in a sidecar, so I make a noncommittal gesture and ask Charlie about his favorites. We chat a bit more until the table draws us into another discussion about Susan and Brandon.
Their families seem so nice, so sitcom-wholesome. I shudder to think how my extended family would behave at an event like this. No doubt my aunt would wander away to the bar, my parents would find something wrong with the food and holler for the waiter, and my cousins’ kids would tie my shoelaces together under the table to make sure I had a nice fork puncture below my eye in time for wedding photos.
Susan’s family has a grace I can’t comprehend. Charlie seems to fit in well enough, but there’s a tightness around his mom’s eyes when she as
ks how things are going “out west.” That look reminds me of the slightly stilted conversations I’ve had with my parents since graduation. I turn to cast an empathetic glance at Charlie to find he’s already looking at me. His gaze makes me feel like I don’t know what to do with my limbs, like I might burst into an eighth-grade show choir move at random. I feel simultaneously frozen in place. To my horror, I wink at him. I wink at him!
His cheeks flush again, and then he winks back. He winks back!
Before we can embarrass ourselves further, Susan and Brandon begin reviewing tomorrow’s schedule. Susan walks around the table, handing small bags to several guests. She has a secret smile for me when she hands me my bag. The tag reads, “I’m glad I called you. Thanks for saving my wedding.”
I open the rectangular black velvet box inside the pink sheer bag. She’s given me a pair of pearl earrings and a matching necklace. I look up, about to protest, feeling like an impostor for yet another time this evening. Then again, I bet I could pawn these and eat for a month. Or longer, if I stick to ramen and peanut butter.
I slide the bag into my purse and take a last bite of key lime pie as people begin to push back from the table, breaking off into groups of two or three and ambling toward the door. I rest my napkin on the table and smooth it out, focusing diligently on inanimate objects. Before I can stand up, Charlie catches my wrist. “I need your help,” he says, leaning close.
His tie is slightly askew from numerous hugs; the red heart symbol between “I” and “Yeats” rests on the left side of his chest above his actual heart. Inadvertently, I picture him flexing those lean-muscley pectorals one at a time. Pec winking.
“Okay,” I say, forcing my gaze back to his eyes and giving him a smile that threatens to spill off the sides of my face.
“Here’s what’s going to happen at my parents’ house. I’m going to get grilled on job prospects as my parents sip brandy and my grandparents ask me if I’m married while their crazy three-legged Chihuahua named Gus humps my leg. Have you ever been humped by a three-legged Chihuahua?”
I shake my head.
“Would you like to save me from such a dire fate?”
“What do you have in mind?” I try to be coy but fail. I’m one breath away from humping his leg myself. His hand is still on my wrist, and I can feel his pulse beating against mine.
“How would you feel about getting out of here?”
“Good.” Really good.
He pulls his hand away to push back his brown suit sleeve, which is tasseled by loose threads dangling off the cuff. This motion exposes a naked, freckled wrist. He studies it, then looks back at me with a conspiratorial grin. “It’s happy hour in California. Can I buy you a drink?”
Four
Several blocks northeast, Charlie leads me below street level into Rocket Bar, a divey establishment that boasts Skee-Ball, darts, shuffleboard, and pool, along with typical bar fare and a smattering of posters announcing upcoming live music shows for bands with names like Angry Achilles, Bert and Hernia, Smog Breathers.
Above the eighties music playing over the speakers, Charlie asks me what I want to drink. I’m afraid more wine will make me sleepy after this week’s C shifts, and I want to be alert for every moment of tonight. “Beer me!” I say.
He bows in acquiescence and wedges himself between hipsters at the bar to procure two pints of something amber that smells hoppy and delightful. We find a table by the Skee-Ball machines and settle into rickety chairs.
“Cheers,” he says, and we clink glasses.
“Thanks for the beer.”
“You’re welcome,” he says, “but I’m bartering for information. Talk to me. Tell me about yourself.”
“Well.” I suddenly feel like I’ve never done a single interesting thing. Charlie seems less nervous now, as if the Rocket Bar environs, despite their visual and sonic clatter, have soothed him. Or maybe it’s just the beer.
I take a drink, stalling. I’m rusty on straight-male interaction. To prevent turning the subtle pause into an awkward one, I forge ahead. “I have this side project of learning a new word every day since graduation, to make sure my brain doesn’t wither away. I’ve already forgotten everything from all those required college classes. I got nothing on Euclid’s theorems and the theory of relativity.”
Charlie looks intrigued. “And today’s word?”
“Scintilla: a small amount or trace. It’s from the Latin term for a spark or particle of fire.”
He beams, and I can see his dimples even in the sparse light. “I’ll add it to my arsenal. Let me guess—English major?”
I nod. “What gave me away, the gratuitous verbiage or the dead-end job?”
“Both. Takes one to know one.” He raises his glass and we cheer again. “For a while there I couldn’t get enough of the transcendentalists, but more recently, I’ve been getting into contemporary American poets. My poor screenplay characters tend to break out into verse, and my instructors keep telling me to make them talk like actual people.”
Oh dear Lord. He’s hot and he’s a word geek? I consider splashing my beer onto my face to wake up from whatever dreamland I’m inhabiting. I reach down to subtly pinch my thigh while hoping the unsteady chair doesn’t collapse under me. But when I look again, he’s still there, and the conversational ball is in my court. “Instructors? So you’re taking writing classes?”
“Yeah! It’s all the rage in L.A. That’s the nice thing about being out there. Lots of masters, hence lots of master classes. Not that I can really afford them on a barista’s budget. But enough about me! What hamlet of English majordom did you reside in?”
“I went through a transcendentalist phase, too. I even spent a week in the wilderness one fateful spring break.”
“Yeah? How’d that go?”
I cup my hands around my glass. “I fell into a swamp.”
He smiles, then presses his lips together.
“Ha, ha. You wouldn’t be grinning if you had to pry leeches off your ankles,” I say, pretending to glare at him.
He shakes his head. “You’re an idealist. It’s adorable. So what next? You didn’t retire to Walden Pond, then.”
“I went backward in time—did my senior thesis on Milton. Themes of temptation and damnation were my specialty.”
His eyebrows rise. “Nice. So are you more of a literature-analysis type or a writer type? Or, dare I ask, both?”
I take a breath. “Well, I do like to write. I just haven’t devoted much time to it recently.”
“I’m sorry. Work?”
I nod. “That’s part of it. Ever since graduation, I feel like there’s this wall between me and creativity. My dates with creativity used to happen around two a.m., and two a.m. and I haven’t really been friends lately.”
“I hear you. It’s a struggle. I get back to my apartment after work and enter a macchiato-scented daze. I actually find the best time to write is on the job. At peak caffeination. Writing on the job helps, I swear. If you’re anything like me, you have this static in your head that only goes away if you get things down on paper.”
“I think I know what you mean. For me, it’s less like static and more like . . . sinus pressure.” Nice one. Reeeal attractive.
To my surprise, he nods. “You’re right, it is more like pressure. It’s the soul-crushing guilt and anxiety that come when you’re not doing the one thing you know you’re meant to be doing.”
“Exactly.” Feeling vulnerable, I decide on a change of subject. “So, this place is great. I’ve never been here before.”
“Really? You’ve been missing out.”
“I spent most of my Mason years at karaoke bars,” I admit, bringing the pint glass to my lips and taking a long drink just as Depeche Mode fades into a familiar voice singing, “I lose myself in you.” I swallow hard as I set the glass down, my hand shaking. I’m in shock: I�
�ve never heard Scott’s music on the radio before, but it causes a physical reaction. My heart pauses for several stanzas, then hammers out a series of frenzied eighth notes. Like coming up from a long dive underwater and gasping for air.
Had Scott ever lost himself in me? I doubt it. Scott never cared much about my interests, except where they aligned with his. Occasionally I was called on to critique his song lyrics, but he never read my stories.
The last time I went to a dive bar was the night he broke up with me. He brought me to Calamity Brew, a frequent venue for his band, the Gaussian Pyramids. We arrived late, after separate family graduation dinners. I’d asked him if he wanted our families to eat together. “No, that’s okay,” he said, not meeting my eyes.
Calamity Brew was still in disarray from graduation celebrations, and a few groups of friends lingered over drinks, postponing the inevitable goodbyes. I sat down first; Scott sat directly across from me, like we were in separate departure zones. My shoulders crept upward as my defenses slowly roused themselves.
And then he made The Speech. “We’re young, Piper. We have our whole lives in front of us. And I owe it to myself to give this band a shot. I’ll never have less responsibility and more freedom than I do at this exact moment in my life.” He even waxed poetic: “I’m at, like, the apex of my life, with all this burgeoning post-bac freedom but without any adult responsibilities to tie me down.” He held his arms at cross-angles, making a human mathematical diagram.
Who says “burgeoning” during a breakup? I should have pushed his arm diagram against his forehead and watched him tip backward onto the beer-stained floor.
Instead, I started to cry. “So you consider me—what? A responsibility? I don’t get to be part of your journey? I’m not welcome with you at the apex?”
“You’re taking my words and twisting them around.” He made a face as if he’d sipped one of the wounded soldiers lining the stage. “We’re at a natural crossroads, and I’m saying it’s best if we go our separate ways.”