I'm Not Julia Roberts

by Laura Ruby

  Beatrix got testy anyway. “You’re late,” she told Ward.

  “Did the ceremony begin?” Ward asked.

  “You know it didn’t,” Beatrix answered.

  Ward grinned, also helpful. “Then we’re not late, are we?”

  Beatrix pursed her lips and faced the football field, where Devin would soon be slumping in his chair with the two hundred other graduates as the principal and the salutatorian and then the valedictorian bored everyone woozy. Lu herself was already woozy. She hated any events that required the presence of them all, hated the vapid commentary that dripped from her own lips, hated the way the boys got stiff and unsure, afraid that if they paid more attention to one parent, the other might explode in rage or, worse, tears.

  The band tuned their instruments, and they all tried to pretend that they were at ease in one another’s company while Lu rifled dispiritedly through her bag. That’s what she did at these things, rifled through her bag. She wished that, like Ollie, she could veg out with a Game Boy, oblivious to the world. But no, she had to be a grown-up.

  Suddenly, Ward popped up from his seat, waving at some man she didn’t recognize who sat several sections below them. Before Lu had a chance to protest, Ward slipped from their row and jogged down the steps to greet him, leaving Lu to fend for herself.

  She continued to rifle through her bag, furiously now. There were several things she knew: Ward was friendly, he didn’t mean to make her uncomfortable, he wasn’t abandoning her. And then: She should be adult enough to manage situations like these. Hadn’t they been married for years? Hadn’t she had plenty of practice?

  Beatrix took notice of all that rifling and took pity on Lu, a frightening prospect. “Devin tells me that he applied for another scholarship through your agency.”

  Lu pulled a pen out of the bag, one with a wad of gum stuck to the end of it. “Well, yes. They offer a small—”

  “Uh-huh,” said Beatrix. “Do you know how many applications the agency received?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s run out of the national—”

  “Right.” Beatrix swiveled her head to the left and right, and Lu was again reminded of a bird, the way birds look at you: one eye at a time. “He’ll probably apply for the one that Coke’s doing. Oh, and did you hear about that one offered by the duct tape association?”

  “No, I—”

  “They want you to make an outfit entirely out of duct tape and then have someone photograph you wearing it. Isn’t that crazy?”

  Lu opted for the one-word answer, because it seemed that would be the only thing she’d be able to get in. “Yes.”

  “Devin will do it, though. He said that Ward wants him to get as much as he can from scholarships.” Beatrix smiled with half her mouth. “I can believe it. You know how Ward is. Even with all his money . . .” She trailed off, shrugging, before turning around to face the field.

  Shocked, Lu stared at the back of Beatrix’s head and tried to figure out the most appropriate response. The options she liked most were the least mature, the least political: thwapping Beatrix with her purse, scrawling obscene words on her suit in red lipstick, announcing loudly that she didn’t know anyone actually got gonorrhea anymore and she wished Beatrix luck with it. Her lips parted and pursed, forming words and then losing them. She thought of her old cat, Picky, dear Picky, sitting in the window, watching the birds fly past. Picky, his mouth gaping—to utter a battle cry, to protest his imprisonment, to rail at the world—and issuing only sad and silent meows.

  In front of her, Alan, Beatrix’s husband, fiddled with his camera case, unlocking it and snapping it shut. The curse of the second spouse: rifling and fiddling, opening and closing. She zipped up her purse and set it at her feet. Yes, she had brought baggage to her marriage, but her husband had brought the whole moving van. She imagined the graduates filing out onto the field: young and fresh and relatively unencumbered. She thought about what it would be like to be one of them, to be with one . . . say, Mr. Tasty Pants. How would he taste? Tangy. Or maybe sweet and minty, like an iced tea. And what would he do if she were to pull a whole Mrs. Robinson thing, slit skirt and shiny set hair, ice cubes clinking in a glass? She could see his face, the wide-set blue eyes even wider, the cheeks flushed, the lips parted slightly as he tried to get enough oxygen.

  Ward sat down, grabbed her hand, squeezed it. She tried not to pull away, tried not to let him see her face, how far she’d gotten in the ten minutes he was gone.

  “How you holding up?” he whispered in her ear.

  “Fine,” she whispered back, the Graduate vision in her head morphing into scenes of Ward crying, her mother-in-law looking at her in disgust, her stepsons frowning in confusion: What kind of skank was she?

  Ward gestured at the field, where his son would soon be tugging on the tassels of his mortarboard. “Maybe one day, we’ll be watching ours,” he said.

  Lu felt, rather than saw, Beatrix’s renewed attention, felt her cocked eyebrow like a gun against her flesh.

  “One day,” Lu said, patting Ward’s hand.

  The thing that really sucked about selling houses was all the damn paperwork. “This is what I think,” Lu said. “These contracts mate with other contracts and make lots and lots of baby contracts.” A sheaf of papers fell to the floor.

  “Do you need me to file these?” Glynn said, appearing like an angel in front of Lu’s desk, tapping a particularly precarious pile leaning like the Tower of Pisa.

  “I’ll take you to lunch if you file those. And dinner, and maybe for snacks later.”

  Glynn smiled, gathering the papers in her arms. “I like snacks.” She paused. “How was the graduation?”

  “Oh, you know,” Lu said, remembering her own graduation, her father showing up out of nowhere with his camera, his wife, and two creepy kids, her mother pinched and furious and so quiet that Lu was afraid she had stopped breathing. “Boring speech from principal, boring speech from vice principal, boring speeches from kids number one and number two, bad choir hams up lame song with tambourines.”

  Glynn walked over to the filing cabinets and opened one of the drawers. “The things we do for our kids, you know?”

  “Hmm . . . ,” Lu said. Glynn couldn’t stand her ex-husband’s new wife, but she never extended the hatred to other stepmothers, something for which Lu was grateful. She liked having Glynn around the office, glad that Glynn had been desperate enough for a job that she’d jumped at the chance to be their office manager. Glynn kept Lu and all the other agents from descending into contract chaos. Plus, being a librarian, she knew things, odd facts about the average snowfall in Scandinavian countries, the mating habits of blue-footed boobies. Anyway, she was the closest thing to a real friend that Lu had made in five years, and Lu was treading lightly so that she didn’t scare Glynn off.

  “So what are you reading about today?” Lu asked, gesturing to Glynn’s tidy desk, its pristine surface marred only by a computer, phone and message pad, and a single yellow book.

  “An autistic woman.”

  “What?” Lu unconsciously gripped her lower abdomen, where the wrinkled eggs curled like pill bugs, shunning contact.

  Glynn slipped a contract into its proper file and pushed the drawer closed. “She’s high functioning, a professor of animal science. She designs equipment for farm animals, chutes and pens that help keep animals calm when they’re being transferred here or there. You know what she did?”

  What Lu always said when Glynn asked if Lu knew what: “No, what?”

  “She observed that firm pressure calms down cows, so she made this machine for herself. You lie down in it, and these big pads compress your body, hugging you all over. She said that when she’s really upset, when the world seems like a big bunch of aliens, she uses her machine, and the machine calms her.”

  The door to the office swung open and in strolled Mr. Tasty Pants, one hand tucked casually in his pocket. He nodded at Glynn and dropped in the guest chair on the other side of Lu’s desk.
/>
  “What’s up?” he said, grinning.

  “Uh . . . nothing,” Lu said, heart beating just a bit faster. “Did we have an appointment today?”

  “Nope,” he said. “But I was in the area, and I thought I’d drop by to see if we could get a look at that place you were telling me about. The one on Farwell?”

  “Right,” Lu said. “Right.” She looked down at her messy desk, flustered. Her nose filled with his scent, light and woody and narcotic.

  Glynn saved her. “Here’s the listing,” she said, handing Lu a flyer with a photo of a refurbished building with imposing gates all around.

  “Great, Glynn. Thanks.”

  Glynn looked down at the golden head of Mr. Tasty Pants and then at Lu, a new knowledge in her eyes. “You’re welcome.”

  The condo was stripped down to the studs, but they could still make out the layout, the flow. The price was right. And he would be able to choose the cabinets, the granite countertops, the bathroom tile.

  Mr. Tasty Pants was pleased.

  “I want it,” he said.

  “Well, then,” Lu told him as they walked to her car and jumped inside, “we need to put a bid in right away. This is not going to stay on the market long.”

  He slapped his hands together, rubbed them as if he were trying to warm them up. “So, let’s get back to your office.”

  His scent was even heavier in the small car, and her head reeled with it. “Shouldn’t you call your fiancée before you make an offer on a new apartment? Won’t she want to see it?”

  He leaned his head back and looked directly into her eyes in the most disconcerting way, as if she hadn’t a secret in the world. “I’m not married yet.”

  “But you will be soon.”

  “Soon,” he said. “But not yet.” He reached out and brushed her cheek lightly with the back of his hand, and she saw how very easy it would be to follow him to some motel or some apartment, fling off her clothes and her conscience, and do her best to get a string-free, full-body hug, the kind that you can get only if you can’t feel too much.

  “You are so hot,” he said.

  She didn’t know whether to laugh or to wince. “Thanks,” she said. And then: “I am married. As we speak.”

  He nodded but didn’t drop his hand. “I know.”

  “You probably shouldn’t be touching me like that.”

  He dropped his hand. “Sorry,” he said, not sorry. “It didn’t seem like it mattered.”

  “To you?”

  “To you.”

  “Of course it matters,” she said with as much indignation as she could muster. She wanted him, but she didn’t want to do anything that would make people hate her. How adolescent was that?

  “Sorry,” he said again. “It’s just that I know some women, older women, who don’t care.”

  “Older women,” Lu said, rubbing her cheek where he’d touched it.

  “Sure. Even my own mother.”

  Lu felt a sneaking nausea. “What about your mother?”

  “You know that saying, ‘Men leave women for other women, women leave men for other lives’? My mom did that. She stepped out on my dad, found a new life. It happens.”

  “What are you saying?” Lu said, half-excited and half-aghast. “You want to start a new life with me? Or you think I want a new life with you?”

  “Nah,” he said. “I just thought you might want to . . .” He trailed off, cheeks pink. “You don’t seem like the new-life type.”

  She closed her eyes. “Really? What type am I?”

  “You want the truth?”

  “Shoot.”

  “You seem like kind of a ballbuster.” He laughed.

  “Great,” Lu said. “That’s really great. So is the wife-to-be a ballbuster, too, or are we ballbusters just extracurricular?”

  His blue eyes were earnest. “When I get married, I’m married. I’m old-fashioned that way.”

  Her tongue clucked of its own volition. “Marriage isn’t forever, dear. Children, now they’re forever. But marriage? Without kids? That’s something you shake out and inspect every day. Like checking your shirt for stains before you put it on.”

  But rather than hearing this for what it was, her shredded history in a nutshell, he saw it as an opportunity. The hand was back, rubbing her cheek, her neck. “So, what’s the shirt look like today?”

  Later, she will regret that she didn’t tell Mr. Tasty Pants to put it back in his pants. She will regret that she let him rub her cheek, kiss her hand for a minute or two even after he had compared her to his own mother. She will regret the flushed and guilty look that must have been on her face when she and the boy went back to the office, the look that had Glynn eyeing them suspiciously the rest of the afternoon. And Lu will regret that she didn’t once name Ward specifically as a reason not to screw Mr. Tasty Pants brainless.

  “Forget about the autistic babies,” she told Annika. “I’m the autistic one.”

  “You said that the Virgin Mary would be tempted. You passed the test. And now you know you still got it.”

  “What do you mean, still? I just got it,” Lu said. “And I’m losing it at the same time. How fair is that?”

  “You’re looking for justice? You poor thing.”

  “Annie . . .”

  “I know, Lu. I do. But you’re all right. Things are all right. It was just flirting. It was harmless. A game.”

  That’s how she’d thought about it when she first allowed herself to think of Mr. Tasty Pants rising naked from a bathtub: harmless, just a little diversion. A person can divert themselves right out of their own lives. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know anything.”

  “You know that you don’t know. That’s the smartest way to be, don’t you think?”

  Lu didn’t want to think. The more she thought, the worse she actually felt. Here she had spent so much time convincing herself that she had built something meaningful, yet she had nearly succumbed to a bit part in a slice of suburban porn. All she needed was a copy of Madame Bovary on the nightstand and the whole pathetic picture would be complete. How quickly we slip and slide toward disaster, she thought. What sort of catastrophe would it take to teach us, finally, how and what to cherish?

  She ran, trying to imitate Vamoose, to make her body a metronome, her breath a chant, but she couldn’t shut down the streaming video in her head. After Devin’s graduation ceremony, the audience had wandered en masse down to the football field, searching for their offspring or the offspring of their spouses or friends. It took twenty minutes of recon to find Devin, after which everyone stood around him awkwardly, like common folk waiting for a chance to shake hands with the president. Lu wondered how Devin felt about being the center of things, about his parents’ split that made him both far too important and not important enough. Devin did his best, punching his younger brothers in the arms and kissing his mother, grinning as his stepfather took photographs. He pushed away his father’s outstretched hand and gathered Ward in a hug, slapping at his back. When he came to Lu, he smiled, not in the frantic and vaguely lascivious way of his middle teens, but warmly, gently. “Thanks for coming, Loop,” he murmured, and kissed her, too. Watching him perform the delicate negotiations his fractured family required of him, Lu got a cramp in her throat, because she realized that she had had some tiny part in his life, even if it was a stupid part, or an annoying part, or simply a part he had to bear. And because she wished that she could love him even more for it, wished that her love weren’t so mean and small and given to hiccups, like the reception on a broken radio.

  Yes, she thought, the radio; she needed noise, she needed distraction. She turned up the volume so the music blared in her ears, loud enough to mask the sound of the engine that must have been revving behind her, the gaggle of boys inside working themselves up for the offensive.

  When the balloon hit, when the water broke, it wasn’t the blast of cold that she would have expected, but a warm torrent, like something fed and ripened by her
own body, like something offered up to the world in a single bright burst. But she didn’t yell, she didn’t stop. She ran the gauntlet, willing to take another shot.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my editor, Caryn Karmatz Rudy, who took a chance. Ellen Levine, who keeps taking them. Sona Vogel, who scrutinized. Gina Frangello, Zoe Zolbrod, Cecelia Downs, Karen Schreck, Audrey Glassman Vernick, Laura Jones Hunt, and Brian Yansky, who read (and read and read and . . .). Annika Cioffi, Linda Rasmussen, and Tracey George, who listened. Anne Ursu and Gretchen Moran Laskas, who know why. Fran and Ray Metro, who cheered. Melissa and Jess, who remind me of me. Joan Ruby and Richard Ruby, who tried. And for my sister, Melissa Ruby, who understands.