Whenever You Call

by Anna King

  For a moment I was tempted by his knives, which were so expensive and sharp that they made cooking a whole different experience. Then I thought of his car, which happened to be a Saab convertible.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll call the kids about staying here, and maybe Alex could use some help.”

  “I was hoping Jen might come.”

  Isaac and Jen had last spoken about six months before our divorce was final, though spoken might not be the appropriate term. More like screamed, mostly Jen to Isaac, in my defense.

  “I’m not sure about that, Isaac, but I’ll ask her.”

  “I could e-mail and ask her myself.”

  “Good idea.” I sat forward in the bath. My thighs were puckered from being submerged underwater for so long. “Okay, I have to get going. Let me know if there’s anything else to do.” I disconnected without listening to his farewells. Though he’d been a colossal jerk to me, I found myself missing the old Isaac. The problem with the Buddha, from my admittedly uneducated perspective, was that loving kindness resembled cream of wheat cereal, white and bland, if healthy. And the problem with healthy was it left no room for miracles. Though, as said, I didn’t believe in miracles.

  I dried off and on my way upstairs, checked my e-mail. A veritable miracle awaited me.

  9

  THE E-MAIL WAITING FOR me when I got out of the bath, from Mr. Rabbitfish, read as follows:

  Would you like to have dinner this Saturday night? The Harvest?

  I had many reactions to this e-mail, the most obvious one being Eureka! Then I thought how coincidental it was for him to suggest the Harvest Restaurant, where I would be applying for a job. Finally, I remembered Isaac’s going-away party. I muttered a disgusting word, the kind of word that could make you feel alternately satisfied at expressing your frustration and, at the same time, sickened by yourself. A really bad word.

  I started typing like a nincompoop.

  Well, remember the saga of my ex and how he was going to become a Buddhist monk? Unfortunately, my daughter has volunteered to throw him a going-away party this Saturday night. I’d invite you, but I really doubt this would be the best venue for us to get to know one another.

  I crossed out venue and replaced it with the word time. I continued to write:

  How about Friday night? Thanks for disproving your unknowable status!

  Still naked, I wrote a group e-mail to my children in that bouncy tone a mother uses when she’s secretly miffed at her kids. Too many exclamation points and expressions of joy.

  I offered my guest room to Noah and Elliot, then asked Alex what I could do to help.

  Bing! An e-mail from Mr. Rabbitfish arrived.

  Oh, we misunderstand each other. My unknowable status remains intact. Busy Friday night with, well, something. Perhaps another time.

  Okay, so, obviously, he’s a colossal schmuck. But, here’s the thing. He killed me with that e-mail. The sharp knife cut straight under my breastbone. Blood spurted everywhere. I hadn’t felt this bad since Isaac told me about the undergraduate who gave him a blow job. Still, I knew what to do. I left the computer and walked with enormous dignity up two flights of stairs. I made myself a Bitter Pernod with aplomb, and then I sipped it gently, as if it contained the most precious nutrients.

  Finally, I went down to my bedroom and put on the robe I’d bought it in India, where I’d made a pilgrimage just after my third divorce went through. At the time, I’d called it a trip, not a pilgrimage. It became a pilgrimage after I literally passed out one night at the Kohinoor Continental in Bombay, and woke to remember a dream involving a merman with a huge cock who’d pleasured me endlessly. A pilgrimage, indeed.

  I wrapped the cotton paisley robe around me and tied it at the waist. Then I carried the drink out to my front steps and sat down. A quick inventory of my body suggested that the bleeding had stopped. Instead I felt so pissed off I could hardly stand it. I drank the Bitter Pernod more quickly than I meant to, while the anger multiplied into thousands of wee cells. Call them mad cells. They birthed one another like rabbits. Uh-oh. Rabbits led to Rabbitfish. I drained the drink and headed inside, then downstairs to my study.

  You invite me to dinner and still maintain that you’re unknowable?

  Well, I think I know you. I said it once; I say it again.

  I think I know you.

  The phone rang at that moment, so I pushed the SEND button for the e-mail. Good thing. I might have kept writing the sentence I think I know you over and over again, so much so that I would appear to be insane.

  My daughter, Alex was calling from the hospital, and the conversation was necessarily brief. We agreed that I would make my famous salmon curry casserole and bring half a dozen bottles of wine. After I hung up, I checked my e-mail.

  Dubious. And stop being so pissy or I’ll never take you to dinner. (Even though you are, well, somewhat adorable.)

  Feeling confused, to say the least, I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, then climbed into bed at the unreasonable hour of eight o’clock, where I reviewed flash cards for the next day’s drinks test. I slithered around in the bed, punching pillows, yanking sheets here and there, dissatisfied with everything.

  I heard the computer give its binging noise, and I realized that I’d forgotten to turn if off for the night. I walked downstairs slowly, not expecting anything. I’d already decided that under no circumstances would I ever e-mail Mr. Rabbitfish again. There were e-mails from both my boys, telling me when they were due to arrive and saying they would stay in my guest room. I smiled. Well, I would have my sons with me. The friggin’ lord giveth and taketh away. It has ever been so.

  AFTER class the next day, I hopped on the T and went to pay a visit to Jen at her office. If I’d called her first, she’d tell me she was too busy. Of course, I knew she really was busy, so I risked being obnoxious by showing up like that. Except she was in love and when you’re in love, you crave talking about your beloved. The T was jammed, but I was so lost in conjecturing Al’s gender preferences (was he or was he not gay?) that I forgot to look around in search of a possible Missed Connection. I suppose I’d abruptly shifted my affiliation away from the Craigslist board because of Mr. Rabbitfish’s e-mail the night before. Obviously, there must be something drastically wrong with the guy, and probably all the guys who frequent the Missed Connections board.

  The whole Rabbitfish thing was a stupid dream of desire, a fairy tale, a fantasy. Somehow, I’d believed that one could post a listing on the Board and, magically, find the love of one’s life. True, I’d actually “found” Mr. Rabbitfish on Match.com. Or I thought Mr. Rabbitfish was the same fellow named “The Sky” on Match.com. I didn’t really know. It was all hopelessly disappointing and I had only my romantic nature to blame. It seemed to me that I was always coming to grief over the best things about myself. I couldn’t figure out why this would be. The train threw me sideways in a rocking motion, and my eyelids closed briefly. I was being rocked to sleep even while I tried to understand why my romantic nature, which was a wonderful quality (god damn it!), should invariably bring me smack against the most unromantic of situations.

  I drowsed, shifting here and there, thinking about Jen’s exceptionally unromantic nature, and yet, there she was, in the throes of deep romantic love. True, she’d waited a rather long time, but still. I’d been waiting for real love my whole life, too. And here I was, alone. I always resisted feeling sorry for myself, like most rational people, because, basically, it’s irrational to feel sorry for oneself when there’s so much suffering in the world. Except, when I began to analyze how my romantic character led me in the opposite direction from love, it rationally occurred to me that perhaps I should feel sorry for myself. If not feeling sorry for myself hadn’t brought me joy, then why not try the opposite tact?

  The train pulled into Copley and I stood up automatically, already much happier. I would allow myself to feel pitiful and pathetic, and in so doing, I felt good. The laws of trickery.

&
nbsp; Which reminded me of Mr. Rabbitfish’s strange clues and odd, mysterious behavior. More laws of trickery. I was a straightforward person and I found myself falling into a situation like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. I stopped walking, struck by the connection. I felt like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole. Mr. Rabbit was a source of extreme confusion and twistyness, just like the rabbit hole.

  A man behind me trod on my heels and gruffly said, Excuse me. He didn’t really mean it because, obviously, I’d been at fault for stopping so suddenly in the midst of a fast-moving pedestrian flow. I skedaddled to the side and touched the grimy wall with one hand. For the first time in my life, I thought I understood something, something really big and significant. But then it was gone, slipping sideways, knocked into oblivion.

  As I’d predicted, Jen was thrilled to see me. Her large corner office glittered with late-afternoon sunshine. The dazzling light behind her head and upper body made her look like a madonna. I wondered briefly if that was the realization I’d had in the subway station. Then I remembered that madonnas were bullshit.

  “Tell me what you like best about him,” I said.

  Jen backed away from the desk and brought her electric wheelchair around so that we could talk together like friends. “This is going to sound very self-serving,” she began.

  I grinned. “The best kind of love there is.”

  “Well, I’m kind of ashamed to feel this way, but not so ashamed that I can’t admit it to you.” Suddenly, she yawned, taking even herself by surprise. “Apparently, he is really turned on by me. I mean, sexually.” Her eyes squinted at me, daring me to laugh.

  So, of course, I laughed. “He must have a foot fetish,” I said.

  And that was it. We were off. Laughing our fool heads off, or feet, as the case may be. I finally got tissues from a drawer in her desk, and we managed to pull ourselves together enough to blow our noses.

  “Anyway, he’s just an animal,” Jen said. “It’s great. I really don’t care about anything at the moment except getting back into bed with him.”

  “You know this stage will only last about three months,” I lectured in a mock serious voice.

  She smiled, but said, “I doubt that.”

  “What else makes him so wonderful?”

  “He’s funny, smart, interesting—,” she trailed off.

  “Bottom-line, we’re talking fabulous sex, right?”

  She nodded, sucking in her lower lip and grinning at the same time. “Are you okay?”

  I told her about what happened with Mr. Rabbitfish, having forgotten that I’d promised never to contact him again.

  “Hey!” she protested.

  “I couldn’t help it,” I said. “I can’t quite remember why I couldn’t help it, but you’ll have to give me the benefit of the doubt. I had a very good reason to e-mail him again, really.”

  Jen’s head tilted a little to the left, her lawyerly mode coming on. I’d wondered more than once whether she tilted in that direction because she was using the analytical side of her brain. She murmured, “I wonder why you’re so compelled by this guy. It’s unlike you to get turned on by a man you’ve never actually seen.”

  “I thought I did see him that day at the cafe, but even then it was only the back of his head.” I paused, thinking. I could hear the buzzing of intercoms and voices from the hall outside. “You’re right—I’m usually seduced by the whole package and that definitely includes a man’s physical presence. He doesn’t have to be handsome, or even nominally attractive, but it’s a part of a person I need to experience.”

  As I was talking, I found myself staring at Jen’s lower legs. Except she had no lower legs. I wondered why I’d come to see her. We were used to having marathon phone conversations, perhaps even more than other women friends did because of the added difficulties Jen had in getting around. So why hadn’t I simply gone home and called her? In fact, I didn’t think I’d been to her office in more than a year, when she’d wanted to fix me up with another lawyer in the office and we decided I should check him out first (he hadn’t passed muster).

  I’d come to do exactly what I was doing: look at the place where her lower legs would have been if she’d had them. Half-expecting, hoping, surmising, or pretending that her sensation of having legs when she’d made love to Tom had translated into legs. Or maybe even sprouts of legs, like tadpoles that would ultimately grow into legs.

  My eyes rose to meet her eyes. She tilted her head again, looking at me without a word.

  Finally, she said, “What?”

  I swallowed against the sudden thickness in my throat, embarrassed and confused at the same time. “I think something’s the matter with me. I keep indulging in magical thinking. Like, yes, somehow this totally absurd situation with a guy I only know by the name of Mr. Rabbitfish is going to become a great love for me. And I actually thought that when you said you felt like you had legs, you might have legs.”

  “I thought so, too, to be honest.”

  My next words came blurting out. “I just have to get real.”

  “Ummm,” Jen said.

  “That’s why I’ve quit writing. No more imagination. Just pour the drinks, smile, and LIVE.”

  “I don’t know about—”

  I interrupted, “It must be an occupational hazard of fiction writers. We overdose on our imaginations.”

  “Can I say something?”

  “Sorry.”

  “It seems like you’ve been doing this magical thinking, as you call it, since you quit writing, not the other way around.”

  “What?”

  Her eyes twinkled, and she suddenly zoomed her wheelchair into reverse, then zipped back around her desk. She always drove like a maniac in that thing.

  I glared. “I’m determined to be a bartender. I have an interview at The Harvest tomorrow.”

  “And I’m a big-time corporate lawyer who has to get her ass in gear so I can enjoy myself tonight.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m going.”

  I was just about out the door when she yelled. “By the way, I’m coming to Isaac’s going-away party and I’m bringing Tom.”

  “Did you tell Tom it’s a party for a wannabe Buddhist monk?”

  “Are you kidding? We laughed for ten minutes straight, then he—”

  I waved good-bye. “Have pity on your celibate best friend.”

  The next morning, I dressed up for bar tending class because I would go straight from the end of class to my interview at The Harvest Restaurant. I felt strange as I flipped through my clothes. For years, I hadn’t had to prove myself as capable in any way other than how I combined words on a page. It took three different outfits for me to figure out that a female bartender should be all about sex.

  Al’s expression when I sashayed into the classroom ten minutes late made me even more nervous. While running both hands through his mane, he walked over to me.

  I asked, “Too much?”

  “Ab-so-lute-ly not.” Then he leaned even closer. “Start my book by any chance?”

  “Hey, I warned you!”

  Al grinned and shrugged one shoulder.

  I sat down and Al passed out that day’s drinks’ test, which I finished quickly. I didn’t think of myself as particularly smart when it came to memorizing, but for some reason I’d been able to remember the recipes with ease. I’d say magical ease except that I was trying to get away from the magical thinking syndrome of the last week.

  Jelly, at my table, whispered, “Fourth drink, is it vermouth or lillet?”

  Story of my life in school. Soft touch. The geek who so obviously didn’t want to be a geek that she was willing to cheat to prove herself cool. Though, despite the endless, whispery cries for help, I’d never aided or abetted a cheater. Which meant, obviously, that I became ever more geeky. My usual method, dating from the eighth grade, was to pretend I hadn’t heard the hissing voice asking for help. That’s what I tried with Jelly. I gazed off into nothingness, trying to appear as if I was in a space
y trance.

  I knew she wasn’t buying it. She gave off these disgusted vibes that seemed to say, “You act as if you care about those beneath you, but when push comes to shove, you don’t really.”

  Suddenly I coughed and cleared my throat. The throat action sounded remarkably like lillet.

  Her pen moved.

  I told myself you couldn’t get any realer than this. I was now a cheater. I actually felt sick to my stomach.

  After the tests were graded and it appeared that Jelly had squeaked by, I found myself thrilled. It was so wrong. She hadn’t learned a darn thing and if anyone ever asked for that drink in a real bar, she was going to have a problem, even though I really doubted anyone in their right mind would want one in the first place. Half the drink recipes we memorized were rarely ordered.

  I joined the rest of the class down in the pizza parlor for lunch. Clearly, a bond from Jelly now looped around me and I was so buoyed up by this that I figured I might be able to connect with all of them, except, truthfully, I didn’t hold out much hope for Cathy. And why did I care, anyway?

  The familiar silence grabbed the group as we waited for the pizzas, but this time I figured out it was because they were hungry and didn’t have the energy to talk. People are ruled by their stomachs. Without food, they fold into deaf, dumb and blind organisms. But what really complicated human behavior was that people were hungry all the time. Not their stomachs, not really, although that’s what they thought was hungry. It was more like their mouths were hungry. Their mouths constantly hung open, like little baby birds begging for their mother’s regurgitated crap. I had no idea what this meant, but I knew it was true. Until our little group started filling their gigantic mouths with pizza, they would be catatonic.

  Sure enough, the pizza came, they ate, and they started to talk. With mouths full of food. Charming.

  Ike said, “All we gotta do is get a hold of that certificate and we can copy it.”

  I thought, Oh shit.

  “Only one person is going to get a certificate, at the rate we’re going.” Jelly poked me with her elbow and grinned.