by Deanna Kizis
4. The Web Designer: Looking for love
“She was from Australia, and she was having a problem with her green card so I thought I’d help her out. Of course, she still owes me about two grand.”
Postdate Phone Status: Nonexistent. Davies is one of those rare guys who would do anything to be in a relationship, which is why nobody wants to be in a relationship with him.
DATE FIVE: DAVID JETTER, THE SCREENWRITER
How We Meet: We’re introduced by the aforementioned Evan Katz, who produced Jetter’s first feature, Geek Out, which he pitched as “Rushmore meets Road Trip.”
5. The Screenwriter: Enormously endowed?
Stats: Katz cited Jetter’s “enormous endowment” as his main selling point. I accused Katz of sampling the goods, but he claimed to have heard it from an ex-girlfriend.
The Date: Jetter takes me to a Thai restaurant famous for its singing Elvises. It’s fun, although Jetter is a strict vegetarian, which means we don’t want the same things to eat and this leads to tense ordering negotiations. Even worse, I start to notice a pattern. In the parking lot, the attendant asks for four dollars, and Jetter looks at me and asks if I have singles. “Of course,” I say, handing him four ones. When the check comes at dinner, he asks, “Do you mind if we split this?” tallies up my portion, but doesn’t deduct his share of the parking. By the time we get to the candy counter before a movie, and Jetter starts to say, “Do you happen to have a …” I just interrupt, “Don’t worry, I got it.” By the end of the evening, I’m out thirty-two dollars; Jetter’s up thirteen.
“INCAPABLE OF GETTING THE HINT (OR PICKING UP THE CHECK) JETTER STILL CALLS NOW AND THEN.”
Postdate Phone Status: Incapable of getting the hint (or picking up the check) Jetter still calls now and then. Whenever he asks if I want to go to a movie/party/dinner I do the math in my head and conclude that it would be cheaper to stay home.
Five dates, five chances, five duds. No wonder I’m starting to suspect it might be better to bunker down at home with my cat and the latest episode of Sex and the City than to actually venture out into the war zone. Then again, the guy I liked most was a two-timing pig, and the guy I liked least was engagement-ring-toting marriage material, so it’s possible that I’m the one with the problem. Either way, one thing is certain: These guys could be perfect someones—for someone else.
I decided it was too tragic to sit around fretting over my failed dating life, so I got ready for lunch with the Mother. When I was in high school, we went every weekend. Of course, my baby sister, Audrey, was living at home back then. Now she lived in San Francisco, shacked up (not that Audrey would ever call it shacking up) with her boyfriend.
I threw on jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt, and walked a couple of blocks to Eat Well, a diner around the corner. The Mother hated it because they were always blasting punk rock, but I liked the buttermilk biscuits.
I grabbed two menus and took a table near the kitchen just as I saw the Mother striding through the restaurant, mouthing the words, “No booth?” She looked fabulous as usual. Even in blue jeans the Mother carried herself like Sharon Stone—after the actress married the multimillionaire, gained enough weight to make her look human, and got the chic haircut. I feel like whenever a guy I’m dating meets the Mother there’s this tiny pffft of disappointment because I didn’t inherit her self-possession or perfect bone structure. Audrey looks like her, though.
“Do you see an open booth?” I said as she harrumphed into her seat. “Hello to you, too, by the way.”
She smiled. “Be a bitch, why don’t you?”
I told her I shared her point of view.
“Sorry,” she said. “Hello.” She spread her napkin on her lap and pretended to study the menu. It was only going to be a couple of minutes until …
“So, did you have a date last night?”
There it was.
“No,” I said. “You?”
“With Julio.”
I had no idea who Julio was, but I let it go. The Mother had no illusions about my lifestyle; I had no illusions about hers. When I was six, the fact that my father had an affair with his racketball instructor helped convince her it was time to get a divorce. So she took her 2.5 children (I always thought of Audrey as being one and a half times the kid that I was), moved us to a condominium in the San Fernando Valley, and took up real estate. As my dad spiraled into a Topanga Canyon, surfing, existential, ride-the-wave-of-life sort of existence, she started an aggressive dating campaign. The guys came and went like clockwork, and Audrey and I were left at home with the asthmatic, diabetic baby-sitter, Ms. Britton-Baff, who never let me watch Three’s Company because she thought it was too “lustful.” I made it my personal mission to torture Britton-Barf, as I called her, by occasionally going into Audrey’s room and screaming at the top of my lungs, “Oh my God! Where are you taking the baby?” This would send the baby-sitter puffing up the stairs, after which she’d chew me out until she got too winded to go on.
I didn’t really blame the Mother, though—she was raised Roman Catholic, got married young, had two kids by twenty-one. Besides, there was an upside: The Mother bought better junk food than all the other moms, taught me how to disco dance in our living room to “MacArthur Park,” and when I got suspended for smoking pot in the high school parking lot, yeah, she grounded me. But then, because she knew I’d stolen it from her and didn’t want me to tell my dad—who was about to leave on a surfing trip and had a lot of grandiose ideas about how his kids should be parented (even though he was never there to do it himself)—she let me invite friends over for a weekend-long sleepover party.
After we ordered, the Mother sat back and folded her arms across her chest. She studied me closely, like she was sizing me up or something.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Not much,” she said. “You?”
“Not much.”
She hadn’t started complaining about my choice of restaurants yet, either.
“Why are you smiling like that?” I asked.
“Am I?”
“You know you are.”
“Well, I can’t tell you. It’s not my place.”
I reminded her that she never was one to stick to her “place” so why start now? She looked thoughtful and said, “You know what? You’re right. Okay, the big news is … Are you ready?”
I rolled my eyes, and before I took my first sip of my coffee, I said, “Born ready.”
“Okay, then … Your sister is getting married.”
I gasped in horror. The coffee was a thousand degrees, too, and I sucked in too much. I could actually feel the roof of my mouth sizzle. “Wait,” I said, grabbing an ice cube from my water glass. “What? You’ve got to be joking.”
“Not so far.”
“My twenty-one-year-old sister.”
“The only one you have.”
“Is getting married.”
“Yes.”
“To whom?”
“What do you mean ‘to whom’? To Jamie.”
“To her commando boyfriend, Jamie.”
“Ben, stop it.” She slapped her palm flat on the table. “Stop it now.”
The Mother may act like a big sister much of the time, but I knew from experience it would be unwise to push her too far. Then I thought, as I often did, Fuck it.
I said, “He’s a gun-toting Republican from Texas who wants to join the CIA.”
“What does this have to do with politics?” she said, waving the thought away. “Your sister is getting married!”
“Have you ever been to Texas? They shoot gay people for fun in Texas!”
“Now you’re just being ridiculous.”
“Besides, you don’t believe in marriage.”
“How can you say that?” She looked offended. “I’ve been married three times.”
“Exactly.”
“Please don’t ruin this for me.” The Mother leaned forward. “I’m thrilled. Thrilled that at least I get to see one of my dau
ghters marry the right man.”
The jab didn’t escape my attention, so I told her for the hundredth time that Jack was hardly the right man. She nodded, like, If that’s what you need to tell yourself …
“When did this happen?” I asked.
“Yesterday. She was going to call you but, well, you know. Anyway, Jamie proposed to her in the Color Me Mine where they met. He put the engagement ring inside a ceramic mug she was painting. Isn’t it just adorable?”
I felt like I was going to throw up.
With that, the Mother kicked off an endless monologue about all the plans she and Audrey were already making for the wedding. I sat there, stunned. Audrey’s too young to get married, I thought. Nobody gets married that young anymore. I didn’t want to get married. Why should she want to get married?
But every time the Mother’s voice went up at the end of a sentence, I nodded and smiled. I heard, “Something something something bridal shower since you’ll be the maid of honor?” Nodded and smiled. “Something something something very Martha Stewart?” Nodded and smiled. And then, “Something something something who you’re going to bring to the wedding?”
Suddenly it occurred to me that I was about to become a cliché thanks to a ring in the bottom of a DIY coffee mug. I was the twenty-seven-year-old sister who would have to bring her best friend to the wedding because I probably wouldn’t have a boyfriend to take. Everyone would tut-tut over me, convinced that my decision to break up with Jack was a horrendous mistake, and the rumor that I was a lesbian (which I knew was being circulated by my Catholic grandmother) would finally gain a toehold. And yet, I mused, Little Miss Perfect promises to spend the rest of her life with a Nazi and she gets a party thrown for her. This sucked. It sucked.
“When is this taking place?” I asked.
“The second weekend in March.”
I had six months to get a boyfriend.
“Well …” I offered. “I did just meet someone new. I think.”
“Someone new. You think. Sounds promising.”
The waitress put our food on the table—the Mother’s egg white and chicken omelet and my American cheese and bacon scramble. To annoy her, I pointed at her plate and said, “Isn’t that like eating the mommy and the baby?”
She ignored me.
My breakfast looked delicious—all hot and gooey and just waiting to be eaten—but I couldn’t believe she hadn’t asked me anything about Max. So I glumly pushed the food around until the Mother finally asked a couple of perfunctory questions.
I gave her all the details anyway. How we met, how he owned his own company, how he hadn’t called yet, but how he would call because, you know, the three-day rule, and how he said he wanted to hang out sometime …
“Then hang out.” She took a bite of toast, like, That’s that.
I looked at her like, Is that all you’re going to say?
“What? You know, the first time Jamie saw Audrey, he followed her into that Color Me Mine off the street? He asked for her number and called her that day. Took her to that cute seafood place on the pier for dinner …”
“Yeah, Mom, because he’s a stalker.”
“And let me guess,” she said, taking a sip of her water. “You met this ‘Max’ person at some party where he was probably cruising around looking to get laid. Honey, when are you going to find someone who can really give you what you need?”
I wanted to ask what Max had done to deserve quotation marks around his name, but decided to just give up. The Mother went back to talking nonstop about Audrey’s wedding plans. I nodded/smiled until I got a neck cramp, and, finally, lunch with the Mother was over.
Seriously disturbed, I went home and sulked. Then you should hang out, I thought. Maybe she doesn’t remember what it was like when she was younger, when she probably picked guys because they were into man-perms and liked Pink Floyd. My mom—who used to be cool—was suddenly acting like I should be romancing with gállant frat boys who wore pressed chinos and patronized ceramic chain stores. Yuck.
I stared at the ceiling and blew smoke rings. Maybe this wouldn’t be so jarring if she’d been grooming me from day one to hubby hunt. But the first time I told the Mother I was in love—with a boy in a band named Deus ex Machina who wore Dickies and drove a Vespa—she simply said, “Go on the pill, wear a condom anyway, and never confuse sex with love.” I entered the sexual arms race armed to the teeth.
As the afternoon wore on, the things she said continued to nag. I put some leftover Chinese food in the microwave and curled up to watch Sunday-night HBO in my pajamas. But after the first few minutes I realized the Six Feet Under was a rerun. So I sat there, channel-surfing, eating my food out of the box, and I started to feel more and more pathetic. Like people were walking by my place outside, hearing the TV and thinking, That poor, poor girl. I turned the volume down another notch.
Jack was reliable, I thought. And on a night like tonight he’d have been sitting next to me, which is at least more dignified. I finished the last of my kung pao chicken and turned off the TV. I figured if Max called that night, at least I could call the weekend a success.
But he didn’t.
CHAPTER
3
“Five days,” I said, brandishing my drink at Kiki and Nina. I’d been checking my voicemail every day, checking the caller ID, too—not even a hang-up from Max. “Five days is too long.” (It came out daysh.)
“Maybe he lost your number.” Kiki was trying to sound hopeful.
“He didn’t loosh my number,” I said, with a look like, Who do you think you’re kidding? “That’s like saying, maybe the phone isn’t working, when you know, deep down inside, that the phone is working.”
“Well, maybe the phone isn’t working.”
“The phone company does not rest!” I shook my drink in her face, and it spilled over my knuckles onto the dirty wooden table. “Boys do not lose numbers of girls they intend to call!”
“Okay. Okay. Take it easy. It’s only been a couple of days since you met the guy,” Kiki said, nervously eyeing my fourth scotch like now would be a good time to take it away. From my cold, dead hand, I thought.
Besides, that would have been against the whole Shortstop ethos—we were in the kind of dark, dank, smelly Eastside hole where doing your best Barfly imitation is strongly encouraged. And I was doing just that. If I keep going like this, I mused, I’m going to end up like Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet, standing outside naked with my arms stretched out and moaning, “He put his spell into me …”
Just then, the waitress interrupted to tell me I had to take my cigarette outside.
“Even here?” I was aghast.
“The city keeps giving us tickets.” She shrugged.
But the look on my face chased the waitress away. I continued to puff—calling after her, “This is my last one, I swear”—and sat back, satisfied. Now I could torment my well-meaning friends in peace. “So back to the subject at hand, girls,” I said. “Five daysh. Days. Not three. Not four.” I held my fingers up, and gave them a little countdown. “One. Two. Three. Four. Five.”
“It must be really awful for you to wait so long for him to call, particularly when you’re feeling fragile about your sister’s engagement,” Nina said in a compassionate tone.
I turned toward her. “You’re right,” I said. “It is awful. Do you think there’s a reason—something about how I look, something that I said—that would make him not want to call me?”
But ever since Nina decided to get her master’s in psychology, she answers every question with a question. As in …
“Do you think there’s a reason why he wouldn’t want to call you?” she asked, with a concerned look on her face.
“Nina, I don’t know if there’s a reason why he wouldn’t want to call me. That’s why I’m asking you.”
She ignored this last bit, saying, “It must be terrible to feel like there’s something wrong with you.”
That would be the “reflective listen
ing” she’d learned last semester.
I looked back at Kiki, exasperated. “A little help?”
“Okay,” she said. “Just give me a second to think.”
“Take your time.” I looked away, worried that someone was listening to our conversation and I’d been discovered for the loser that I was. Just the opposite, though—some sleazy guy at the bar with greasy hair and a motorcycle jacket was giving me the eye. I gave him the finger. He laughed and went back to hitting on the bartender, ogling her bare midriff. Female bartenders in L.A. always show their midriffs so they get bigger tips. It’s true. I imagine them at Crunch Fitness, working those abs. They probably make more money than I do.
“All right, I’ve got it,” Kiki said. “Here’s the thing: If he’s not going to call, then I say fuck him and find somebody else. I mean, maybe he just broke up with somebody. Maybe he’s still seeing somebody. Maybe he’s an asshole.” She shook her head. “If any of the above is true, then be glad he hasn’t called you, okay? It means he’s saving you a lot of trouble. So fuck him and find somebody else.”
I took a look around the bar. “There’s nobody good here.”
“Well,” said Kiki, “you know, wait a day or two.”
“So, what are we doing this weekend?” interrupted Nina, who usually gets bored about halfway through most conversations. (That her lack of empathy may interfere with her career as a psychologist has never occurred to her.) “Maybe we could go do a nice, long day at Malibu, get a tan.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m going with Audrey to look at wedding dresses.”
“Sunday?”
“I can’t. I’m going with Audrey to look at more wedding dresses if she doesn’t find one on Saturday.” I put my head down next to my drink.
“Goddamn her.” Kiki banged her hand on the table so hard it hurt my brain. “I’m sorry, but this is the last thing you need. Hi? You’re twenty-seven. You’re single. And your twenty-one-year-old sister, who as we both know looks like a Barbie doll, is getting married before you. It’s not okay.”