Jo Piazza

by Love Rehab

  “So we have a kidnapper and a thief on our hands,” Jordana said, sighing. “I’m calling the police.”

  And then a feeling of clarity washed over me. “How long has Stella been here?” I asked.

  “About ten weeks,” Annie said.

  “And what day is today?”

  “It’s Sunday. Very, very early Sunday morning.”

  My hand clasped to my mouth in my “Aha!” moment. “She’s going to the tulip ceremony. She’s going to stop the Husband from proposing to someone else on live national television. It’s the only thing that makes sense. She snuck out in the dead of night. She took Katrina’s hottest shoes. She must have gotten ahold of an Internet connection at some point and found out the latest on the show and snapped. But the question is where’s the ceremony?”

  Joe, who had crashed on the couch downstairs after the party, now emerged from the basement, looking adorable in the bottoms of scrubs and a worn NYU T-shirt that must have been at least ten years old and was probably as soft as kitten fur.

  “New York.” We all turned toward him, surprised he was the one supplying us with this information. “The final tulip ceremony is taking place in New York this year, on top of the Empire State Building, in some homage to Sleepless in Seattle and An Affair to Remember. The producers have been building it up all season. I guess the ratings have been slipping since none of the Husbands ever turn into a real husband—they all end up on Dancing with Celebrities or Famous People Rehab—so they decided to make this tulip ceremony more dramatic. Both women have a time to be on the roof. The Husband comes up to the roof for the one he’s chosen. The other just gets left up there all alone like the strange alternative plot of a poorly written romantic comedy.” Joe began to look a little sheepish for knowing so many details about the show’s final episode when he saw all of our heads cocked to the side in wonder.

  He tried to explain. “When Stella came and talked to me about her situation, as her counselor I felt like I should be familiar with what she was battling against, so I started watching at my place.” Then he admitted, “Once I started I couldn’t stop. The show is addictive. He just keeps dumping these women on national television and the ones remaining just keep getting nastier and nastier each episode until finally there are only the two nastiest, most cunning ones left, but he doesn’t know it because he only spends like an hour with each of them at a time.”

  I cut him off. “You don’t have to explain. We all know how addictive reality dating shows can be. Now we know where she went. We just need to figure out how to stop her before she completely embarrasses herself or gets arrested for whatever it is she’s planning.”

  “Who’s coming with me? We can fit three more in my car.”

  All ten hands went into the air.

  Jordana spoke up. “I think we’re all coming. We’re all in this together.”

  Joe, looking for a way to redeem his momentarily lost manhood, piped up. “I have the keys to the hospital’s geriatrics van. I think that will fit all of us.”

  We drove to Manhattan in silence, with Jordana curled around the wheelchair lift on the floor. We went directly to my old apartment, which I hadn’t visited in more than three months. I figured we could use it as a base of operations.

  I don’t know why, but I had had the foresight to straighten up before abandoning the place, so fortunately there were no granny panties lying around. I did feel like I was entering the apartment of a girl I didn’t know very well. Could I really have changed so much in three months? Pictures of Eric and me still covered every available surface. Why did I ever want to look at him that much? Or at anyone that much for that matter. I felt a little twinge of guilt when I saw Joe look at what had to be the tenth photo of Eric and me posing in front of something silly: the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, a naked guy playing the guitar in Times Square. It was as if I had to keep taking pictures of the two of us in front of things that were real to prove we were real. If I could just see it in glossy print, then everything must be OK. The thing is that a picture does tell a thousand words, a thousand words we are too scared to tell ourselves about why we insisted on taking it in the first place. These pictures were all forced fun, and you could see it on Eric’s face. I remembered the one in Times Square. It was freezing, which was too bad for that naked cowboy, and Eric was begging me to just get in a cab with him, but I insisted and finally found a Japanese tourist who spoke English and agreed to take the picture. In it I am smiling maniacally, so pleased to be getting proof of our day together. Eric is looking off into the distance. At the time, when I first printed the photo out, I told myself he was being reflective about our wonderful time. Now I could see he was looking for a way to escape the moment.

  It was almost four a.m. by the time we got settled and started to form some kind of game plan for the following morning. My fridge miraculously still held several not bad blocks of cheese in addition to all the contents that should have been disposed of weeks earlier, so I was able to create the semblance of a cheese plate for us to snack on while we decided what to do. One of Jordana’s private clients was a producer with ABC, the network that aired The Husband, and Jordana knew that she typically got up around six a.m. to do a lap around the reservoir with her Wheaton terrier, Bosco. She didn’t want to call or text her, worried that would set off alarm bells, so she planned to stage a run-in in the park to try to pump her for information about what time the producers would begin setting up for the grand finale.

  Before we left, Princess mentioned that Tito once told her his brother worked security at the Empire State Building. She sent him a text and then explained to us that they exchanged numbers once when she told him she was worried about Nahla eating one of the plants in the garden that had what she thought were poisonous berries.

  Now we just had to wait for Jordana’s client and Tito to wake up so we could figure out our next steps. Everyone seemed content to find a spot and a pillow and curl up in my small living room so I migrated to my old bedroom. I ran my hand over the teddy bear that Eric had won me at Coney Island, one of the only presents he had ever given me and the result of a bearded lady egging him on by saying he threw like a girl. He spent $50 to win that scrappy bear, just to save his ego. Why didn’t any of these things bother me when we were together? Love goggles were the only answer. Like having seven beers, everything looks prettier and fuzzier about a person when we think we are in love with him or her.

  I heard a soft knock and thought that I really should offer the other half of the bed to someone else since we had so much work to do tomorrow morning. When I cracked the door, I saw it was Joe.

  “Can I come in?” he asked shyly.

  “Of course. Welcome to my world, my other world. It feels like a whole other life.”

  “You’ve come really far in the past three months. You’ve learned a lot about yourself. That’s a hard thing to do. Trust me, I’ve been trying to do it too.”

  “I’m sorry about all the Eric pictures,” I said, not knowing entirely why I was apologizing to Joe. What did he care that my apartment was filled with gigantically cheesy photos of me and my ex-boyfriend?

  “No need to apologize for anything. The girl in those pictures looks like she’s trying really hard to be happy.” At first I was amazed that he knew me so well, but then I remembered that, as a shrink, it was his job to know.

  “She thought she was happy.”

  “But she wasn’t?”

  “Not really, no. It’s like she—it’s like I—had a fantasy about what things should be like and was working really hard to make it all come true. And when it didn’t, I was faking it to try to make it.”

  Joe lay down on the bed above the covers. He patted the space next to him in such a chaste way I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t been so exhausted. But as I lay down he curled his arm under my waist and pulled my head into the little nook between his shoulder and his breastbone. I had always tried to snuggle my head into this exact space on Eri
c’s chest, but it never fit. I was always being poked by an errant bone sticking out somewhere that didn’t correspond with the shape of my head. But stubborn me kept trying. I couldn’t even count how many sleepless nights I spent trying to fit my head into that space where nature didn’t want it to go and how many little bruises I had around my temples from trying to force it to fit.

  “If you had a boat, what would you name it?” Joe asked me. This man loved non-sequitur storytelling.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about getting a boat,” I replied, playing along because I liked the space my head was nestled into.

  “Me neither. I get horrible seasickness.”

  “Then why would you name a boat?”

  “That’s the thing. The only reason I want a boat is to give it a name. It’s really the only thing besides your kid that you get to name, and unlike with kids, you can give it a crazy name. Like Apple Pie Lovey.”

  “You can name your kids that if you’re a celebrity.”

  “True, but I’m not a celebrity. I’m a poor drunk doctor in New Jersey.”

  “OK, so what would you name your boat?”

  Joe was obviously excited to talk about his imaginary boat and he began to ramble. As he talked I realized how much I adored these tangents he would go off on. They were soothing, and they demonstrated that he actually gave a lot of thought to things.

  “One time I was in this little Sicilian fishing village on a tiny island off the western coast of the island called Marettimo, and all the boats there had names about the moon: Piccolo Luna—Little Moon, Grande Luna—Big Moon, Blanca Luna—White Moon. Beautiful, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then in the middle of all the moons, the Puttana Grossa.”

  “The what?”

  “The Fat Whore. It belonged to a fisherman named Pippo, who got the boat after his wife ran away with his business partner, Marco. They went to the next island to raise goats. So every time Pippo would circle that other island, passing the goat farm, he would honk the horn, pull down his pants, literally moon his ex-wife, and then point to the name of the boat.”

  This made me laugh so hard I had to catch myself when I remembered there were people sleeping in the other room who had to get up in a couple of hours.

  “So are you telling me you would name your boat something crazy after your ex-wife? Elizabeth Is a Slut or some such?”

  “No. I’m not angry at her anymore. Plus, why would I give her the satisfaction of naming my boat after her?”

  I switched gears for a minute. “What’s Marettimo like?”

  “It’s the most beautiful place in the world. Picture these untouched white cliffs plunging into water that alternates between turquoise and emerald green.”

  “It sounds like paradise. But Pippo still wanted revenge. He couldn’t be happy in the most beautiful place in the world?”

  “Love makes people crazy, Sophie. You know that better than anyone. I think the Puttana Grossa was his version of, say, putting a naked picture of his wife on the Internet.”

  I gasped and turned red, before realizing he didn’t actually know that I had done something like that. He must have just been using it as an example. I hoped he was just using it as an example.

  “You’d love Marettimo,” he murmured. “I’d love to see it again sober. We should go there sometime.”

  The use of that pronoun—we—gave me flutters in my belly of the happy sort I hadn’t felt in years. But the flutters were quickly followed by a twinge of warning: DO NOT GET AHEAD OF YOURSELF, SOPHIE.

  I thought for a minute.

  “I would name mine Serenity Luna.”

  “Serenity Moon? That’s nice,” Joe said, burying his face in my hair.

  As I listened to his breathing get shallower, I decided not to admit to him that I thought the Floozy McSecretary sounded like a jaunty name. Of course, Eric didn’t have a goat farm and I couldn’t exactly ride my boat around his office building. The closest I could come would be to rent an ad on the side of a taxicab. But that would be ridiculous. And anyway, the thought didn’t give me the same satisfaction my former revenge plots had in the past. I pushed it out of my head to fall asleep thinking about towering cliffs, green and blue water, and the word we.

  I thought Joe was asleep, until he smoothed my hair back.

  “Did you really kiss me back that night?” I blurted out before I could stop the verbal diarrhea from spewing out. Old habits die hard.

  “Mmmm hmmm,” Joe said.

  The old me would have asked nineteen questions. Why did he kiss me back? Did it mean he liked me? Did he want to be my boyfriend? How was the kiss? And on and on and on, but I decided, for once in my life, to just be content in a nice moment.

  “That’s good,” I whispered and drifted off to sleep.

  Jordana came in and discreetly shook me awake, glancing at Joe with a knowing smile. “Oh, Dr. Twelve Steps,” she said, to which he awakened and stretched with a low lion roar.

  “What time is it?” I asked her.

  “Five thirty. I’m going to the reservoir. Tito wrote back. His cousin is trying to figure out the plan for this evening. Let’s reconvene for breakfast at Sarabeth’s below the park at seven?”

  “Sounds good.”

  As Jordana walked out the door Joe reached down and intertwined his fingers with mine.

  “I bought the Dixie Chicks album after you crashed that first AA meeting in the Presbyterian church.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “No, it was terrible, awful, whiny stuff, but it made me smile when I listened to it because it reminded me of the madcap story you told that night. And it reminded me of you.”

  “Did you also buy Downton Abbey?”

  He looked away. “I did.”

  “And?”

  “It was pretty fantastic. I can’t blame you on that front. I don’t know if Lady Mary and Matthew Crawley are going to be able to make it work, but I’m rooting for them. Of course, that reminded me of you too. The entire twenty-one hours of it.”

  This was quite possibly the sweetest, nonforced thing a man had ever said to me. I decided I needed to return the favor with some memories of my own.

  “You had Boston cream all over your face the night we met.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yup. It was there forever. And Boston cream is my favorite.”

  “You could have told me.”

  “You looked cute with it on there.”

  And then he leaned down. It was definitely him who did the leaning this time and lightly brushed his lips over mine. This time I wasn’t half in the bag and I was able to enjoy every second of his lips pushing down soft, and then harder. His hands came to the sides of my face as he slowly pulled back.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Wow back.”

  “If you’re still not ready for a relationship, I totally understand.”

  “I am starting to think I’m ready.”

  “Oh good, because I think I’m ready.”

  I was ready for quite a lot actually and I think Joe was too, but we couldn’t be ready just then since I could hear everyone else start to stir and groan their own morning sighs.

  “To be continued?” I asked.

  “Definitely.”

  We hastily untangled ourselves. I rallied the troops and got us all dressed and out the door. My favorite doorman, Nico, stopped me as I headed out and handed me a giant stack of mail.

  “I weeded out all the crap, ma’am,” he said with a wink. I stuffed it into my already overflowing purse and hailed us four cabs on Twenty-Third Street.

  At Sarabeth’s, Jordana informed us that she met her client exactly as planned and the client was so excited to see her (since Jordana had been conspicuously absent from the city), she insisted on having coffee and croissants, so Jordana had plenty of time to pump her for information. The tulip ceremony was indeed being broadcast live from the roof of the Empire State Building. They would begin setting up
at 3:00 p.m. for a taping at 8:00 p.m. It would go down only slightly differently than Joe had explained. The Husband would meet the two women on the observation deck. He would pull one to the side to dump her before getting down on one knee to propose to the other one. The deck would be divided by a false wall so that the women weren’t standing right next to each other.

  The producer made our lives one hundred times easier when she offered Jordana tickets to the finale. There had been risers constructed for a live studio audience of about three hundred. In exchange, Jordana had to promise to come back to the city to give the producer three private yoga lessons. No one gives anyone anything for free in this town.

  So we had tickets to the actual show and would at least be on deck if we couldn’t stop whatever Stella was planning before this thing actually went on the air. Tito’s cousin said he could sneak some of us onto the setup if we could find a pair of Carrefour coveralls to blend in with the workers. Tito was on his way into the city, and he said he and Princess would do just that to see if Stella had staked out the show early.

  Joe had to drive the geriatrics van back to Yardville, since the hospital would soon be missing it, and then take a train back to the city to be there in time for the show.

  I went back to my apartment with Annie and had lain down on the bed for a much needed nap when I heard, “I would do anything for love … but I won’t do that.” I glanced down at the phone’s screen to see, “DO NOT CALL THIS LYING CHEATING BASTARD.” It was Eric.

  Annie rolled onto her side and saw the name flash across the screen just as I did.

  “Don’t answer it, Sophie.”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  “Seriously. I think you could have something great with Joe. He really likes you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I lied to you when you asked me before if he talked about you. He only talks about you all the time in my counseling sessions. He’s lucky I quite like you myself or I would have told him to shut the hell up by now.”