The Girlfriend Curse

by Valerie Frankel

  “You’ll dine out on this story for months,” he said, still holding her tightly against him.

  “The jolt did something strange to my brain,” she said.

  Linus said, “I think I’ll take you to the hospital.”

  “I had a blinding flash of insight,” she explained.

  “The insight that you never want to touch a live wire again.”

  “That, too,” she said.

  “What else?”

  “I’m falling in love with you,” she said.

  Linus stopped mid-step. He said, “I’m definitely taking you to the hospital.”

  He scooped up Peg in his arms and deposited her on the bench of his pickup. He went back to tell the group where he was going. Through the window, Peg could hear their reactions. Wilma’s attempt to settle down the group, Artemis offering a police escort. Tracy insisting she come, too. Linus agreeing. The two of them walked back to the pickup and climbed into the cab. Tracy held Peg’s hand on the ride, and kept repeating that Peg would be fine.

  Linus didn’t say a word.

  Chapter 28

  Dear Nina:

  I’ve gotten the shock of my life, literally. I was electrocuted, and the jolt made me realize that I’m in love with Linus, the program director. We had an encounter on the couch a few nights ago, after a drug experiment. He’s an amazing man. And he’s attracted to me, too. I know he is, because of the couch incident, but he thinks it was all a dream. Not sure if he loves me, though. But maybe that’s good. I feel like I’ve made a conscious choice with him, instead of letting circumstance and lust steer me around the park.

  Much happier now,

  Peg

  “Lower,” said Peg. “Now harder. Oh, YES. That’s it. More, don’t stop. YES! YES!”

  “Be quiet!” said Tracy. “You’re getting me excited, and the last thing I need is a sexual identity crisis.”

  Peg lay flat on her stomach, on her bed, in a flimsy pair of shorts and a tank top, melting under the ministrations of Tracy’s magic fingers.

  “Linus was sweet at the hospital, don’t you think?” asked Peg. “Very protective. Very…loving.”

  Using her elbow, Tracy dug into Peg’s knotty shoulder muscles. “He was weird,” countered Tracy. “Quiet. Like he didn’t want to say something he’d regret later in court. You should sue the bastard.”

  “That’s what you said about the exterminator.”

  “Him, too.”

  “I’m not suing anyone,” said Peg. “I feel great. Better than I have in years.”

  “Recharged?” asked Tracy.

  “I have to say, shock treatment might be getting a bad rap. Yesterday morning, I was confused, disheartened, anxiety floating like the mist. One jolt later, I’m energized-yet-relaxed, focused-yet-expansive, hopeful, stressless, as if the shock lit up words in my head, and I only had to speak them for relief.”

  “The word ‘relief’ makes me think of laxatives,” said Tracy.

  “It was a cleaning, voiding experience,” said Peg.

  “Your ‘relief’ begins and ends with the fact that you’ve been in bed for an entire day, people waiting on you, bringing you food, rubbing your back. Linus has instructed everyone to make you as comfortable as possible. I’m telling you, the guy is terrified. You should see his face.”

  Peg would dearly love an extreme close-up of Linus’s face, and the rest of him, too, but she hadn’t seen him since they got back from the hospital yesterday. Tracy said, “You know, Ray feels terrible.”

  “He should.”

  “Your letter? The one you wrote to your friend Nina? Ray took it to the post office himself,” said Tracy. “He paid to overnight it to New York.”

  “He could overnight the collected works of Shakespeare and nothing would change between us.”

  “If you hadn’t been electrocuted, you wouldn’t have had your precious ‘relief.’ ”

  Peg said, “By that logic, I should thank Ray.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “I’ll put it on my list.”

  “My fingers are tired,” said Tracy. She stopped massaging Peg’s back and shook out her hands.

  “If you ever want to give up on the Red Sox, you could have a real future at Madame Quong’s massage parlor on Mott Street,” said Peg, sitting up, noticing suddenly that the Federal was awful quiet. “Where is everyone?” she asked.

  “How about a game of cards?” replied Tracy, reaching for the deck on the night table.

  “I hit my gin limit after ten rounds,” said Peg, squinting suspiciously at her friend. “What’s going on? You’re keeping something from me.”

  “How about TV?” said Tracy. “Or we could go online.”

  Peg and Tracy snickered together at those absurd suggestions. Television was impossible. The Federal got terrible reception. Only one channel, a local NBC station, was watchable, but even that was as fuzzy as an angora sweater. Internet surfing was more like drowning. Linus’s ancient IBM with the dialup modem took forever to start up, and an eternity to load. This part of Vermont didn’t have an electronic superhighway. It had a single lane dirt road.

  “Can’t we get out of here? Find the others?” asked Peg.

  “You are just dying to see Linus, aren’t you?” said Tracy. “Don’t look so surprised. I have eyes. My eyes can see. You clung to him at the hospital yesterday like a leech. You didn’t need that much support, Peg. Dr. Andy said you were in perfect physical condition.”

  “I wanted the support of the man I…so profoundly respect and admire.”

  “Two week ago, you profoundly respected and admired Ray.”

  “That was a knee-jerk reflex. He was just like all the other jerks I once thought I needed,” said Peg.

  “But why Linus?” asked Tracy. “I’ll grant you, he is tall. I was the first among us to notice his crunchy cuteness. He’s smart. He’s got this house.”

  “He’s the mayor. He’s wise. He’s funny. He’s got a surprisingly muscular chest. He’s a runner. He went to Harvard.” He gave her a spine-adjusting orgasms in five seconds flat. In his sleep.

  Tracy countered, “He lives with another woman. He desperately needs a haircut. He lives with another woman. He’s eight years older than you. Have I mentioned that he lives with another woman? And his clothes?” Tracy crinkled her nose in disgust. “How do you know he has a muscular chest?” she asked as an afterthought.

  “Who gives a shit about clothes?” said Peg. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

  “It must be love,” said Tracy.

  “He may live with another woman, but not for long. Linus and Wilma broke up. The night of the fair. She’s moving out when the session is over.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Tracy. “Linus and Wilma have been disgustingly cozy all week. Holding hands, their arms around each other.”

  Peg had noticed the increase in affection since their breakup, too. Seller’s remorse on Wilma’s part? “If Wilma is leaving Manshire in a week, considering how Type A she is, I’ll bet she’s already started to pack. We could poke around their room.”

  Tracy squinted at her. “Snooping is vile and low. It’s like peeping. It’s sick.”

  “It’s not sick. It’s healthy,”’ defended Peg. “Healthy curiosity.”

  “It’s unethical,” announced Tracy.

  “Said the woman who mixes a mean Xanax cocktail.”

  Tracy let a sly grin creep up her cheeks. “Well, we are alone.”

  Within thirty seconds, they were down the stairs and in front of Linus and Wilma’s bedroom door.

  “Open it,” said Peg.

  “You open it,” said Tracy.

  Peg grasped the handle, and pushed the door inward. The room was neat, orderly, undisturbed by the ravages of packing. Wilma’s clothes hung in the closet. Assuming Linus didn’t wear Jockey For Her white bikini briefs, Wilma’s intimates dresser drawer was full. Pop psyche books were stacked high on her night table—A Case Against Monogamy; The Ten
Rules of Romance; The Good Girl, Bad Boy Syndrome. The books were marked up, pages dog-eared, paragraphs circled in red.

  “They don’t have much stuff,” said Tracy. “Adhering to the Vermont belief that clutter is evil.”

  “Let’s turn on the computer,” said Peg.

  “You’ll leave a record of when files were last opened,” warned Tracy.

  Peg sighed in disappointment. “Snooping has never been less satisfying.”

  “Imagine if someone went through my drawers,” said Tracy.

  “And found your purple plastic penis,” said Peg.

  “Now, that would be satisfying.”

  They left the bedroom. Went to the living room. Flopped on the couch. Maybe Wilma wasn’t moving out. Was it possible that Linus lied about their breakup? Peg wouldn’t have told Linus she was falling for him—in any state of electrocution—had she not thought he was soon-to-be available. She considered a previous fear: Had he really been paying her special attention—asking her to go running, telling her she was irresistible, confiding to her about his alleged breakup—or was this his method of forcing Peg to venture deeper into Inward Bound?

  The contentment of an hour ago was quickly replaced with a more familiar miasma of doubt and confusion. How could she have told Linus she was falling in love with him? Thank God she’d said “falling.” She could always reel it back in, blame her blurt on the shock. Blame it on him.

  Peg said to Tracy, “Linus was weird at the hospital.”

  “Maybe it was something you said.”

  Peg jumped to her feet. “I’m going for a run. A long, viscious, unforgiving ten-miler straight uphill.”

  “Last time you set out to run five miles, you went less than two,” Tracy reminded her. “Take a drive with me. We’ll go into Manshire. See the sights.”

  “What sights? The general store? The commemorative plaque?” asked Peg.

  “The air might clear your head,” said Tracy.

  Peg couldn’t disagree. The women got into Tracy’s Camry. They drove. Over hill and hill. It seemed like for every uphill in Manshire, there was an equal amount of more uphill. As they climbed and climbed, Peg closed her eyes, letting the sun shine on her lids, turning the underside yellow and orange.

  Too soon, Tracy made a quick right and stopped the car.

  “We’re here,” she said, removing her keys from the ignition.

  “We’re at my farm,” said Peg, opening her eyes. “You thought I needed another shock?”

  Tracy ignored her and got out of the car. Peg groaned and followed Tracy toward the house. That was when Peg noticed Chuck Plenet’s red exterminator truck parked on the lawn. The grass under the truck was destroyed.

  Could he do anything right? Rage suddenly took control of Peg’s limbs. She marched toward the house, ready to face off with Chuck Plenet. She might have left New York, but New York hadn’t left her. She’d stuff his mouse hole with steel wool. She’d insecticide his walls.

  She’d…As she got closer to the door, Peg spotted Linus’s pickup parked on the other side of the house. Linus had also parked on the grass, creating another patch of demolished sod.

  She’d demolish his sod. She’d Bound his Inward. Linus and Chuck Plenet were probably best-fucking-friends, she realized.

  She punched open the screen door. In her sudden-onset female hysteria, Peg didn’t wonder why the exterminator had shown up today. Or why Linus’s truck was there, or how he’d gotten her address. She wasn’t thinking rationally, or at all. Anger, if not blind like love, was dangerously nearsighted. As she entered her house—once a diorama of the food-chain-inaction—Peg didn’t notice the desanguinated lemony-scented floors. She overlooked the sparkling clean countertops, the freshly spackled, formerly-mouse-gnawed base moldings on the walls. She did notice that the only creatures scurrying from room to room were people. And there were dozens of them.

  Many of the people had unfamiliar faces, men in grimy overhauls and “Plenet Killer” T-shirts. They were spraying powdery insecticide from tanks on their backs into the wall corners and along the cracks of the floor in the living room.

  There was Gloria, sunny in an orange top, polishing the mantel. Upstairs, in the master bedroom, Ben and Luke were lifting the decimated mattress—the one that had been low-income housing for several families of mice—and then carrying it down the stairs and outside, where they heaved it into Chuck’s truck. In the master bathroom, Ray was scrubbing her bathtub with Ajax.

  Stunned by the kindness on display, Peg drifted back downstairs and onto her deck, no longer caring about the mangled sod, shamed by her anger, letting a few tears roll.

  Tracy tapped Peg on the shoulder. “This was Linus’s idea, making your house the last group project of the week. Except we aren’t divided into teams. We’re working as a single, multi-armed organism. My job was the keep you occupied. Linus convinced your exterminator—he who should be sued—to come out here with a crew and finish the job today. Gloria said it took most of the morning to round up the cats and dogs.”

  “How did Linus know what was going on out here?” asked Peg.

  “I told him,” Tracy said. “Yesterday, at the hospital, while Dr. Andy was examining you.”

  Chuck Plenet lumbered through the living room’s French doors and joined Peg and Tracy on the deck.

  He said, “Ms. Silver, good to see you.” He smiled obsequiously. “You should have told me you were friends with Linus Bester. We could have saved ourselves a lot of misunderstandings.”

  “There were no misunderstandings between us,” said Peg. “You took advantage of my desperation. I know it, you know it and now Linus knows it, too.”

  Chuck growled, and said, “I’ve got your bill here.” He pulled a long sheet of paper out of his pants pocket and handed it to her. On it, he’d listed a hundred itemized entries, each with a price. The grand total: $1,490.

  Peg said, “We agreed on a total of six hundred dollars.”

  “Additional expenses,” he said. “I had to hire ten men to get this done today.”

  “I’ll gladly pay you the six hundred we agreed upon.”

  “And the balance?”

  “Where is Linus? I’m sure he’d like to check the addition on this bill,” said Peg.

  Chuck grabbed the bill back from Peg. He said, “Give me seven hundred today, and we’ll call it even.”

  “Six.”

  “Six fifty.”

  “Maybe we should ask the mayor to decide.”

  The fear of pain of death flashed behind Chuck’s eyes at the mention of Linus’s name (which Peg loved dropping). He grabbed the bill back and agreed to $600. She said she’d mail him a check.

  Five minutes later, Chuck and his crew sped away in the truck (tearing up still more sod). After they left, Wilma’s green hybrid pulled into the driveway (thank you, Wilma). Linus and Wilma stepped out, opened the car’s trunk and removed bags and boxes. Ray, Luke, Ben and Gloria came out of the house and helped unload Wilma’s trunk of groceries, a bag of charcoal briquettes, a pony keg of Long Trail, a radio/CD player, which Ray brought over to the deck, plugged into the outside socket and tuned to the DCR station. Suddenly, music rolled over Peg’s hill.

  Confused, she said, “I don’t have power yet.”

  “Linus got it turned on this morning,” said Ray. He joined Peg and Tracy by the deck railing. Ray smiled nervously at Peg. She smiled back. He took the opening, and put his hands on her shoulders. He drew her in for a hug. A brotherly hug. Sexless, and not unpleasant.

  He said, “We got off to a bad start.”

  “We had a great start,” she corrected. “Bad middle.”

  “We can have a good ending,” said Ray.

  “Who says our friendship has to end?” she asked.

  They let each other go. Ray turned to walk to the driveway. Peg’s eyes followed him as he went down the deck steps to relieve Gloria of a twelve-pack of soda. The two of them went back into the house, holding hands.

  As she
watched that odd couple, Linus crossed into her line of vision. He stood in the driveway, staring at her.

  Peg’s heart stampeded in her chest. She broke eye contact and dashed inside. In the living room, Gloria was setting up a makeshift bar (plywood sheet on two sawhorses).

  “Nice house,” said Gloria. “It is now anyway. The dusting and polishing? That was me. I did it with a rag and a can of Pledge. In Connecticut, we have servants for that kind of thing.”

  Peg curtsied and said, “I am honored by your condescension.”

  “You may rise,” said Gloria. “Unless you haven’t figured it out by now, we’re throwing a party tonight. A coming-out party.”

  “For whom?” asked Peg.

  “For the whole group.”

  “We’re all gay?”

  Gloria said, “I don’t think we are.”

  “So this is a coming out, like a debut.”

  “Exactly. Minus the elbow gloves,” said Gloria, who’d probably had a debutante ball when she was sixteen. “Week Four begins tonight. We’re to apply our new understanding of ourselves in social situations with strangers. Linus has invited the people on the road and some of his friends.”

  “An Old Dirty Goat Road block party,” said Peg. “I hope no one brings an actual goat.”

  Gloria said, “Linus thought it would be a nice way to introduce you to your new neighbors.”

  Linus sure was doing a lot of thinking about Peg. Wilma walked into the room, carrying bags of ice.

  “Look who’s out of bed,” she said, handing Peg the bags.

  “Bathtub?” she suggested.

  Peg put the bags in the bathtub on the first floor. She joined Tracy stocking the fridge with hamburgers and hot dogs. She helped Luke set up the Weber charcoal grill. She wandered into her pasture and picked wildflowers, which Ben expertly arranged (he’d once been member of the Hartford Flower Arranging Club). The grill was hot as the sun dropped, in perfect timing for the arrival of Artemis Call, Albert DeWitt, Donna Judd, Dr. Andy and his wife Katie, who brought a case of Smoking Loon wine. They all greeted the Inward Bounders as if they were old, dear friends.