by Devan Sipher
“Does this mean you don’t want to date anymore?” I asked.
NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! How could I have said that? This is why I’m a writer. This is why I write words down on paper. So I can edit myself. So I don’t say the first idiotic thing that pops into my head.
There was silence. Painful, awkward silence. And there was nothing I could do but wait it out as the Don Diamond Orchestra segued into a disco version of “Can’t Buy Me Love.”
“It’s nothing personal,” Jill finally said before clicking off.
Giddy couples glided by me on their way to the dance floor. A waiter passed out color-coordinated noisemakers and party hats.
Barbara rushed by. “Jonathan Adler designed the hats and signed each one. They’re collectibles. Are you staying for the balloon drop? Tell me you’re staying.”
“Sure,” I said dully as a drunk groomsman honked on a designer party favor, welcoming the new year.
Chapter Two
Never Have Parents
“We’re concerned about your ex-wife,” said my father. It was the first thing he said when he phoned me at eight a.m. the next morning, proving that it was never too early for delusional behavior.
“I don’t have an ex-wife,” I said.
“But you may one day,” he said.
I had bolted out of my sofa bed, thinking it was my editor calling, so I was relieved it was just my father wishing me a happy New Year. Or at least I assumed that was why Saul Greene was calling his firstborn. Good tidings and random assaults were often interchangeable in my family.
“You need to be prepared for the worst-case scenario,” my father declared.
“We went to an estate-planning seminar,” my mother chimed in after picking up another line at their Floridian compound in Boca Raton, on the wrong side of the interstate. Their new hobby was obsessing about their wills. From what I could tell, the purpose was to find new and unusual ways to torment my younger brother and me.
“Gavin, do you know the divorce rate in New York?” my mother asked before proceeding to tell me it was very high.
“We have to think about the future,” my father said. “We have to think about our grandchildren.” Except they didn’t have any, which was a frequent subject of discussion.
“What if she remarries?” my mother said.
“Who?” I asked groggily.
“Your ex-wife!” she cried out.
“You’re jumping to conclusions, Lorraine,” my father chastised, becoming the voice of reason on the topic of my future ex-spouse. “We don’t know that she’ll remarry. Sometimes couples get back together. Look at Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.”
“That’s different!” my mother protested. “She converted for him.”
“She converted for Eddie Fisher!”
“Didn’t she convert back?”
I put down the phone and reached for a box of Raisin Bran, then decided it was more of a Frosted Flakes day. There was an open bottle of Absolut vodka on the cluttered kitchen counter. I remembered taking it out when I got home from the wedding, intending to drink myself into oblivion. But I don’t really like the taste of straight vodka. I had looked in the fridge for something to mix with it, but there was only an empty jug of milk, three bottles of Sam Adams, and a couple desiccated chili peppers. The freezer was better stocked, and I had taken out a bag of frozen berries to make myself a vodka slush. But then I concluded that drinking a fruity frozen drink by myself on New Year’s was not the way to improve my self-image.
Looking at the bottle in the morning, I thought again about taking a swig. I would never be the next Ernest Hemingway if my tastes ran to berry coladas. Of course, in Hemingway’s journalist days, he wrote about the Spanish Civil War, not society weddings.
Does the man make the beat or the beat make the man? I put the vodka back in the freezer alongside the berries and several cartons of Ben & Jerry’s, then sat down in my office/dining nook, box of Frosted reinforcement in hand. Eyeing the stack of reporter’s notebooks by my laptop, I found myself dreading the long hours of writing about Mimi and Mylo that were awaiting me. The story was due in a little more than twenty-four hours, since the holiday had fallen on a Monday rather than on a weekend. If I started immediately, there was a small chance I’d finish without having to stay up all night. I picked up the phone. My mother’s high-pitched voice was unmistakably audible before the handset reached my ear.
“What if your ex-wife has children with her second husband? Do you want them to inherit your money?” My mother missed her calling. She should have been working for the IRS. “Your life will be over before you know it. And all you can do is hope that your children will succeed where you failed. But you don’t have any children. And it just kills me, thinking of you dead and your ex-wife off spending your money on children that aren’t even related to you. Do you see why I worry so?”
I knew better than to respond. Another one of my resolutions was minimizing altercations with my parents. Emotionally drained, I just said, “Happy New Year.” The small nicety threw my mother off balance. She paused, possibly to consider what passes for holiday interaction in less colorful families.
“Were you with Janice last night?” my mother asked.
“Who’s Janice?” I replied before considering whether I wanted to know.
“The girl you’re dating,” my father said. By my father’s definition, a girl was any unmarried woman under eighty.
“Her name is Jill,” I said, choking on her name as a corn flake went down the wrong pipe. I had forgotten that my parents had met her briefly while they were in town for a weekend in December. It was a drive-by introduction. Literally. I was putting them in a taxi to go see a matinee of Mamma Mia! when Jill showed up early for a running date.
“She said her name was Janice,” my father insisted.
“Why would she say it was Janice when it’s Jill?” I said through clenched teeth.
“Maybe her sister’s name is Janice,” my mother offered unhelpfully.
“Her name is Jill!”
“Does her family call her Janice?” my dad persisted.
“HER NAME IS JILL! ONLY JILL!”
I do not want to yell at my parents. I do not want to yell at my parents. I repeated the words in my mind like Bart Simpson scrawling on a chalkboard.
“Bernie’s in the hospital,” my mother announced while I was still stabilizing my heart rate. Bernie Perlstein was my grandmother’s husband. Her fourth, but who was counting? I was dizzy from the abrupt change in topics. A conversation with my parents was like living out a Dada manifesto.
I tried to remember how recently I had spoken with Bernie. A World War II veteran and former airline pilot, he was a proud but generous man and devoted to my grandmother. He’d seemed fine at Thanksgiving, but I recalled that he was being treated for a blood-protein problem.
“He had an accident,” my father said nonchalantly. My father never said anything nonchalantly. My parents don’t do understated. This was not about blood proteins. Something was terribly wrong.
“I told Grandma not to let him drive,” my mother said, hinting at the potential peril I risked whenever I ignored her advice.
“Was Grandma with him?” I asked as a hundred other questions came to mind. My chest constricted, imagining my grandmother amid broken glass and twisted metal. She was eighty-two and still ran three miles every morning. (She wore bikinis until she was eighty.) She was dauntless and irrepressible—and the only person in the world who loved me unconditionally.
“They should be releasing her from the hospital soon,” my father said.
“Don’t worry,” my mother fluttered. “The car is fine.”
Chapter Three
Let Dead Fish Lie
Mimi Martin is not crying over popped balloons.
Ugh. I backspaced and tried again. I was still on the first line of my column after hours of typing and deleting but mostly worrying about my grandmother, whom I hadn’t been able to reach despite nu
merous attempts. I sat hunched over my laptop, which was going to do wonders for my posture if I was lucky enough to also make it to eighty-two.
Tears weren’t the only thing falling at Mimi Martin’s wedding on New Year’s Eve.
Worse.
When Mimi Martin met Mylo Nikolaidis on his private yacht, she thought he was a catch. And after their wedding last week, there was one less fish in the sea.
Barbara’s stricken face flashed before me.
My brain refused to function. On a good day, my writing process was more pain than pleasure. This was not a good day.
Thomas Mann once said, “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” I tried not to think about Thomas Mann. I tried not to think about Jill. I wanted to call her, but I knew that I shouldn’t. Couldn’t. Shouldn’t.
So I called Hope instead. Hope was my in-case-of-emergency person, and this was an emotional emergency. But her voice mail was full. Probably because I had been leaving messages all day. I returned to staring at my computer screen.
Inadequate.
Not just my lede paragraph. My life. Who was I to expound on marriage? I was a fraud. It was only a matter of time before people figured it out. There would be a write-in campaign from outraged readers. My editor would purge my columns from the database. And who was going to want to go out with an unemployed journalist who lived in a studio apartment and had a fourteen-inch neck? My cell phone rang.
“Are you spiraling?” asked my brother, Gary.
“No,” I lied.
“Well, stop,” he said, then laughed. I had e-mailed him after my parents’ news flash and also detailed my New Year’s debacle. Deferring to the three-hour time difference in Los Angeles, I had refrained from calling, but it turned out that my father had no such hesitation. Gary’s girlfriend was less than thrilled.
“I kept asking him, ‘What time is it, Dad?’” Gary said. “‘What time do you think it is in LA?’ He said, ‘Why are you asking me about the time? Do you need a new clock?’”
Gary and I had a habit of indulging each other’s rants about our parents’ infractions, though we’d usually conclude the other was overreacting.
“They called me too,” I pointed out.
Gary didn’t appreciate my lack of sympathy. “Last week I listened to you carry on for an hour after Mom suggested you get a mail-order bride.”
I changed the topic. “I talked to a nurse on Grandma’s floor at Delray Medical Center. She said she’d have a doctor get back to me.”
“Way ahead of you, Reporter Boy,” Gary said. Only two years younger and five inches taller, he liked to tweak my ego whenever possible. “I e-mailed the ER doctor who admitted her. He said they only kept her overnight for observation.” I was relieved to hear that. “Also found out that Bernie is in the ICU.” So did I, I almost responded, momentarily feeling more competitive than compassionate.
“So can you go down to Florida?” he asked, just casually enough to convince me it was the main reason for his call.
“I’m on deadline,” I said. My first instinct had been to go to Florida immediately. I had already checked out airfares, but I wasn’t about to tell Gary that. When it came to family obligations, he was very generous with volunteering my time.
“Grandma shouldn’t be alone,” he said, knowing full well that she wasn’t, since our parents lived less than a half hour away. Close enough to torment her in good times and assist in bad. “You know how much it would mean to her to have one of us there.” Yes, I did, and it was clear which one of us he had in mind. “It seems the least we can do.”
“No, it’s the least you can do,” I shot back, feeling guilty I wasn’t already on a plane but knowing there was little I could do there.
“Leslie and I have been up since six. We tracked down this Dr. Stein, who, by the way, is one of more than a dozen Dr. Steins in Delray Beach. And Leslie already sent a basket of brownies and a bouquet of flowers, both of which she signed your name to.”
Leslie was his latest in a long string of live-in girlfriends, and her effort was more predictable than praiseworthy. They had been together about six months, which was usually when his girlfriends began thinking he was interested in a long-term commitment. Unlike me, he never hesitated about opening his heart, his wallet, and his home. He just refused to close off the option of moving on if someone better came along. My parents had given up on him ever marrying. “Maybe he’ll get one of his girlfriends pregnant by mistake,” my mother had said to me. “A mother can only hope.”
“Leslie was sorry to hear about Jill,” Gary said in a way that seemed as much about flattering Leslie as consoling me.
“I’m thinking of calling her,” I said.
“Leslie?”
“Jill!”
“Don’t,” he snapped. There was often a hint of coldness beneath Gary’s concern. Something his girlfriends inevitably learned too late. “You got dumped on New Year’s, and that sucks. But there’s no point in dwelling on it.”
I wasn’t dwelling. I was regretting. Not just the evening but everything I had hoped would happen afterward.
“You romanticize things too much,” Gary said. “You keep looking for the one woman who’s going to rock your world, and she doesn’t exist.”
But she did exist. In my head. She was smart. Extraordinarily smart. I imagined she went to Harvard (where I was only wait-listed). And she was curious about the world. Not just curious. Passionate and adventurous. She had backpacked through South America. Or taught English in Estonia. Or she was the kind of person who would consider doing so. What was so wrong with wanting Jill to be that person?
“You need to stop searching for a soul mate and just find a date,” Gary said. “Is Hope still single?” he asked with the subtlety of a B-1 Bomber.
Gary and Hope had gone out one time, five years back. Ever since, he’d been trying to convince me to date her. I suspected it was to score one for the team.
“We’re friends,” I said for the umpteenth time. “Very good friends.”
“Very good place to start a relationship. You’re like Patrick Dempsey in Made of Honor. You’re going to figure out you want her when it’s too late.” Conversations with Gary inevitably included movie references. Sometimes classics like Casablanca, but usually something of a more dubious vintage that his PR firm was promoting. “I can feel your sperm dying inside of you, one at a time,” he said, quoting from the cinematic gem about a male bridesmaid.
Fortunately, my call waiting beeped. It was Hope.
“Ask her out,” Gary said.
“I don’t want to ask her out.”
“You have nothing to lose but your bar privileges,” he said. “Eight Men Out. Great flick.”
I swapped calls.
“I’m going to end up spending the rest of my life alone,” said Hope.
She was stealing my opening line. But empathy got the better of me.
“What happened to Number Two?” I asked. Hope had stopped referring to the men she dated by name. Instead she assigned them leader-board rankings. It was to help her keep from getting emotionally attached to them. It wasn’t really working. She yearned to date with reckless abandon, but Hope’s idea of recklessness was eating a chocolate cupcake before dinner. The perennial number one on her list was Conrad Eberhart III, her once and future ex-boyfriend with whom she compared every other man she met. Number two at the moment was a Japanese chef from Seattle.
“Number Two has been eighty-sixed,” she said. His name was Sebastian. They met in October at St. Vincent’s emergency room when she stitched his thumb back together after an unfortunate Iron Chef episode that won’t be airing any time soon. As she was suturing the wound, he asked if a patient had ever kissed her. Then he did. She had been to Seattle every other weekend since then, but he had made the cross-country trip for the holiday.
“He broke my bed,” she said. “Which sounds much more fun than it was.”
“Still seems
like you had a better night than I did,” I said.
“That was early. Then we went to my chief of staff’s annual bash.” A deadly affair I had been coerced to attend the previous year. Dr. Aldridge lived in a large, overstuffed apartment on Park Avenue with his wife and children (also large and overstuffed). The evening’s entertainment consisted of ER doctors trying to outdrink the surgeons, while the radiologists and anesthesiologists compared malpractice rates, and the psychiatrists smoked compulsively. “I had warned him it would be boring,” Hope said defensively. “He said he would amuse himself. I guess he did, because at midnight I couldn’t find him. Do you know what it’s like to be in a room full of drunk couples and you’re the only one not being kissed?”
She was describing my life. I flashed back on the cascade of silver and black balloons the night before. I had focused on the balloons to avert my gaze from the lithe women in low-cut gowns, welcoming the open mouths of strong-jawed men. Barbara had pecked me on the cheek, which only made me feel worse.
I shook free of the memory to realize Hope was near the end of her story. “I finally found Number Two in the kitchen, with his tongue down the caterer’s throat.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked if we could bring her back to my apartment.” I could hear Hope munching on something. “You have to stop me before I OD on chocolate,” she said.
“Stop eating chocolate,” I commanded.
“Telling me doesn’t do any good. I have to be physically restrained. And it would help if you ply me with nonfat meringue cookies that we can pick up at Trader Joe’s on the way to the open house.” I had completely forgotten she had invited me to a party.
“I can’t go. I’m working.”
“If you’re working, why did you call me seventeen times?” She sounded displeased I had commandeered her voice mail.
“In between calls I was working,” I said unconvincingly.
“If you come to my aid, you will be rewarded with good karma, and your column will get done sooner.” I was usually susceptible to such logic, but it was going to take a lot more than karma to get this piece done in the number of hours remaining.