Exes and Ohs

by Beth Kendrick

  She straightened her shoulders and sniffed, “There’s no call for such language. It’s just an idea.”

  “A bad idea.”

  “Well, do you have anything better? Because I don’t know about you, but I am not going out in public like this. The new trainee down at Fantastic Sam’s is not going to be able to fix this. We need the big guns.” She paused, then played her trump card. “And I must add, you are never going to get Alex back looking like that.”

  I closed my eyes. Inhale. Exhale. “Cesca. Ignoring for the moment the fact that this is all your fault, I don’t want Alex back.”

  “Fine. Lie to yourself. I don’t care. But I’m never going to get another date looking like Pat Benatar’s color-blind twin, so give me Harmony’s number.”

  “This is funny to you? You’ve ruined our hair—not to mention the bathroom tile—and you’re pregnant, and you find this amusing?”

  “I’m late, not pregnant,” she corrected me. “Now cough up her number.”

  Without another word, I whipped out my cell phone and scrolled through the stored contacts until I reached St. James. I hit the talk button and handed it over to my turncoat roommate.

  Cesca cleared her throat and put on her Upbeat Therapist Voice. “Hello? Is this Harmony? Yes, hi, this is Cesca DiSanto. I’m a friend of Gwen Traynor, and I am so sorry to bother you on a Sunday, but I have a quick question—what? Yes, she is. Hang on a sec.”

  Cesca raised her eyebrows and passed the phone over. “She wants to talk to you.”

  “Did I mention that I hate you?” But I accepted the phone. “Hello?”

  “Gwen? Hi!” Harmony sounded exuberant. Doubtlessly because she and Alex had just finished a daylong marathon of passionate makeup sex. “How are you, chérie?”

  I put her name on the growing list of people I despised. “Never been better. How’re you?”

  “Great! I’m making an apple pie! From scratch!”

  I almost dropped the phone. “Excuse me?”

  “Pie! I’m getting in touch with my inner homemaker.” There was a long pause, then: “Ouch! Damn! How the hell are you supposed to get these seeds out? Is that a worm? Oh, gross…”

  I rolled my eyes. “Aw. Isn’t that sweet?”

  “Do you know anything about pie crusts? Because I followed the recipe—well, except for all the butter and white flour, obviously—and it doesn’t look anything like the picture in the cookbook.”

  “Pie is not my area of expertise,” I told her.

  “Anyway, it’s great that you called. I just wanted to talk to you about yesterday. I know you and Alex were kind of involved, and—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. My roommate, Cesca, is the one who would like to speak with you. She needs some help with her—”

  “Hey, do you guys want to come over for dinner? I’m trying to do the Domestic Goddess thing today because, well, you know Alex, and believe me, I need to get back on his good side. He has been in such a mood today. His aura is, like, pitch-black. He isn’t here right now, but he’ll be back soon, and Leo and I are making a pizza for dinner. Carb-free, of course. We’d love to have you guys over.”

  Cesca winced when she saw my expression. I wasn’t sure what Harmony was envisioning, but I wanted no part of her twisted menage à pizza scenario. I tried to remain cordial.

  “Why would I want to go over there and have dinner with a former client, my ex-boyfriend, and the woman he left me for?”

  “Well, you did call me,” she said cheerfully. “And Leo’d be delighted to see you. He keeps asking when we’re going to hang out with you again.”

  So the four-year-old I’d met twice missed me, and the thirty-five-year-old I’d slept with did not. Perfect.

  I cleared my throat. “I’m going to have to pass on dinner. We’re kind of having a hair emergency.”

  “Oh no!” She gasped. “That is the worst! I completely feel your pain. Once, when my regular stylist was in London, his assistant did my hair for the Daytime Emmys, and he gave me bangs and went bonkers with the mousse. Those vicious bastards on E! said I looked like the ambassador to New Jersey.” She harrumphed at the memory. “What happened to you guys?”

  She did not seem to understand that she and I were sworn enemies, not shopping buddies. She had stolen my man and disgraced the good name of postmodern feminism by baking a pie under false pretenses. How dare she be so…nice? It was a slap in the face!

  I drummed my fingers on the countertop. “Let’s just say we tried to turn our bathroom into a beauty parlor and mistakes were made.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then: “You…you…dye from a box? Oh, you poor things!”

  I gritted my teeth. “We don’t need your pity, thank you very much. Just a recommendation for a good stylist who’s available on Sundays. Cesca wanted her hair to look like yours, so—”

  “Oh, that is so sweet! Tell her I’m flattered.”

  I closed my eyes and imagined her Bel Air bungalow burning down in one raging, carb-free conflagration.

  “Don’t you worry. I’ve got my stylist’s home number on speed dial. Matthieu is, like, a genius. I’ll send him right over. Where do you live?”

  “Slow down. I don’t know if we can afford genius. How much does this guy charge?”

  “Not that much. A couple hundred per hour, I guess. And he is worth every single penny.”

  “A couple hundred what? Dollars?”

  Her voice was a verbal shrug. “Yeah.”

  I shook my head at Cesca, who pulled a face. “Well, thanks, but no thanks. I guess we’ll just go Sinead O’Connor for a few months.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, chérie. It’s on me.”

  I slapped my palm down onto the counter. Cesca jumped. “No!”

  I heard pots and pans banging around. “Why not? You’re my Pookie’s therapist. It’s the least I can—”

  “I don’t want your charity, all right? And I’m not Leo’s therapist anymore.” I took a deep breath, the pit of my stomach knotting, and addressed the real issue. “I know what happened with Alex isn’t a big deal to you—I’m sure you have ex-fiancés move in with you all the time—but it is a big deal to me. A very big deal.”

  She paused. “He was never my fiancé. Where did you get that idea?”

  Oops. Apparently, Alex C. hadn’t had time to discuss his marital intentions before Alex S. came onto the scene.

  I backpedaled at Olympic speeds. “Uh, since you mentioned getting engaged the other day, I just assumed…”

  Her tone was warm and gentle. “Gwen. I know this is a big deal to you. I know Alex is all in love with you—”

  I snorted. “Right. That’s why he’s moving in with you.”

  “Come on. He’s moving in because he wants to be a good father to Leo.” She broke off for a moment. “Hang on, is that—oh, phooey, I burned the pizza. The soy cheese is all black. Anyway. He’s trying to be the father he never had. You know men and their dads. Issues up the wazoo. It’s not like he and I are wild about each other.” She lowered her voice. “In fact, we sometimes have trouble getting along.”

  I feigned shock. “Get out.”

  “It’s true! I mean, we don’t fight in front of you, of course…”

  I laughed out loud. I couldn’t help it.

  “…But believe me, we’ve had a few battles. He’s a very negative personality. It’s not like I wouldn’t rather be dating Vin Diesel—and believe me, he’s asked—but it’s time we all grew up and created a whole, holistic family. A Synchrona family. If I want to achieve inner synchronicity, I have to start aligning my head values with my heart values.”

  My depression boiled into rage. Alex had given me up for a one-woman anthology of New Age platitudes?

  Well. I didn’t need a man who would do that. As my mother would say, he could go pound sand. I was well rid of him.

  I’d learned my lesson. Men with values = certain chaos and rejection. Back to the usual shifty-eyed louts.

  �
��So anyway, don’t worry your brilliant little head about Matthieu. He’ll be right over. Uh-oh. I think the apple pie is collapsing in there. I gotta go. Hey, Alex just walked in the door. Do you want to talk to him?”

  “No.” I gave her my address, hung up, threw the phone into the mass of sofa cushions, and hauled our one stainless steel pot out of the cabinet.

  “What’s going on?” Cesca asked.

  “She has my dream man, she doesn’t even want him, and somewhere out there Vin Diesel is pining away, all for the sake of an insipid Rodeo Drive cult,” I said. “Thus, I am going to prepare and consume an entire box of macaroni and cheese. Don’t try to stop me.”

  “Make me a box too.” She cleared her throat. “What about our hair?”

  “Matthieu will be right over.”

  Her eyes lit up. “Matthieu?”

  “From Harmony’s glam squad. Congratulations—your hair is going to be soap opera ready.”

  “I’ll settle for going out in public without frightening small children.” She frowned as I filled the pot with tap water. “How much is this going to cost?”

  I smiled grimly. “Just my dignity. Harmony’s taking care of it. Which is the least she can do, considering.” I shook the blue macaroni boxes like maracas. “Now are you taking that pregnancy test, or what?”

  She turned her back, pretending to search for a spoon. “Later.”

  Matthieu, a ponytailed strand of a man draped in black Versace, took one look at our apartment, blanched, and announced, “I cannot vork in these conditions.” Apparently, he broke out in hives anywhere south of Sunset Boulevard.

  He squired us to his glass-and-mirror studio in Beverly Hills, gave us a stern reprimand about the perils of home hair treatments, and set to work with honey conditioning cremes, vegetable-based neutralizers and, yes, Evian rinses. All the stuff you read about in Star while rolling your eyes.

  He dealt with Cesca first, declaring her entire head “a state ov emergency” and then, while she was flipping through Vanity Fair under the hair dryer, he set to work on me.

  “Gwendolyn, love.” He frowned at me in the mirror and sifted through my hair, examining the body and texture. “Are you Irish?”

  I blinked. “Half Irish. How did you know?”

  He nodded and reached for his cigarettes. “You haff Irish hair. I see red undertones at the roots. Why would you dye your hair such a color as this?” He seemed personally wounded. “You should be ash-blond. Platinum.”

  I shrugged one shoulder under my voluminous black smock. “It used to be dark brown. Cesca seemed to think I should be golden blond.”

  He sniffed. “Francesca. What does she know? You girls are psychologists, yes? You stick to what is inside the head, and let me deal with the outside. This color.” He grimaced. “It makes you look diseased.”

  “I know.”

  “Did this happen because ov a man?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  He patted my arm. “Don’t vorry. We make him sorry. I make you look like Cameron Diaz.”

  I smiled and chugged a spare bottle of Evian. “Go for it. It’s time for a change. The bigger, the better.”

  13

  The end result came a lot closer to Jennie Garth than Cameron Diaz, but it was still a big improvement over the T.B. convalescent look. Matthieu had made swift work of my half-Irish hair, shearing off a good six inches and lightening the color to a luminous flaxen.

  When I woke up Monday morning and headed to the bathroom to get ready for work, an intoxicating mix of unexpected confidence and daring washed over me.

  My Inner Blonde was emerging.

  As I scrambled to find something to wear to the clinic, I had to fight the urge to wear that modest black blazer without a shirt underneath. The sight of the wedding dress in my closet elicited nothing but a supercilious smirk.

  Being blond, it seemed, was a natural mood enhancer. For the first time since I’d hightailed it from the Santa Monica Pier, I felt optimistic. Cheery, even. The glass was half full, dammit!

  And I wasn’t the only one.

  “You really need bright red lipstick to go with that hair,” Cesca commented as I headed out the door.

  “I work in a clinic for preschoolers, not a bordello,” I reminded her. “Don’t you think red lipstick is a little much before cocktail hour?”

  “Then magenta.” She tossed me a little black M.A.C. tube. “Here, borrow mine. I’ll wear red. It goes, don’t you think?”

  She raked her fingers through her perfectly streaked tousle of black waves. The leather jacket she’d paired with jeans and a white T-shirt completed the rebel intelligentsia ensemble. She looked ready for action. Like a sexy biker elf.

  “You going to class or a party backstage?” I asked.

  “My affective disorders seminar. There’s a cute guy from the cognitive program who sits across the table.” She winked. “And don’t worry about…you know. I’ll take care of it when I get home.”

  She was referring, of course, to the pregnancy test, which remained unopened under our bathroom sink. Last time I had asked about this, her only response had been: “Why menstruate when I can procrastinate?” Which I took as my cue to stop asking.

  “Whatever.” I grabbed my keys. “Ces. Look at us.”

  She grinned. “Isn’t it great? I told you!”

  “But where will this madness end? Can cosmetic surgery be far behind?”

  “As soon as I can afford it,” she vowed, raising her index and middle fingers in a V. “Peace out.”

  The whole blond power thing was more than just my imagination. A stubble-faced giant of an undergrad held the apartment building door for me. My five-year-old Saturn magically transformed into the Party Mobile. Today, I had the courage to sing along with the radio at the top of my lungs, which drowned out the slight squeak I’d started to hear whenever I braked. At the intersection of Hilgard and Le Conte (the very intersection where scant weeks ago I’d had the Vera Wang–induced meltdown) a silver Porsche pulled up alongside my car and the aspiring film producer behind the wheel interrupted his cell phone conversation, lowered his shades and winked. Somehow, now that I had sassy platinum hair, this no longer seemed like a clichéd and sexist affront. He was merely affirming the fact that, thanks to Matthieu’s artistic genius, I had got it goin’ on.

  When I trotted out of the parking garage, drivers—Los Angeles drivers—stopped to let me cross the street. No stop light or riot police or anything.

  I strutted through the clinic doors, ready to conquer.

  Julie, the clinic secretary, darted out of her cubicle and blocked my path. “Gwen, I have a…” Her jaw dropped as she stared at my head. “Your hair.”

  She didn’t look stunned by my beauty. She just looked stunned.

  I managed not to squirm under her scrutiny. “A quick little makeover. Do you like it?”

  “Yes, actually. You look great. It’s just…not like you.”

  I smiled and brushed soft blond waves behind my ear. “Cesca’s idea. I just hope it doesn’t freak the kids out too much.”

  “Cesca. That explains it. Anyway, I have a message for you. An Alex Coughlin called for you.”

  I tried to freeze my facial muscles into a mask of indifference, but my lips and eyelids twitched madly. “Did he?”

  “Yes. He said he’ll meet you at twelve-thirty for coffee at Café Chou. He says it’s urgent.” I could tell she was dying to ask what this was all about, but I wasn’t about to volunteer anything.

  “Hmmm,” I said. “Interesting.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “So shall I confirm for twelve-thirty?”

  I shrugged. “Sure. Go ahead. Thanks.”

  When twelve-thirty arrived, of course, I was safely barricaded in my office, sucking down my third Diet Coke of the day. It wasn’t that I was nervous about confronting Alex. No. It was that I was nervous and pissed off.

  Why should I have to have coffee with him? To make him feel better? The faithless, lying
lout. We’d shared a night of scorching passion, not to mention a day at the International Surfing Museum. We’d shared an undeniable pheromone connection and a common desire to flee the pretentious for the pedestrian. He’d traced the contours of my body with his tongue. But apparently none of that mattered to him.

  So why should I come running at his every command? The brunette Gwen Traynor might be pliable and empathetic, but the blond Gwen refused to put up with this crap.

  The new Gwen would: (1) stop being such a simp when it came to men; (2) burn that insidious wedding dress and toast marshmallows over the flames to make three-thousand-dollar s’mores; (3) get her ass in gear, finish her stupid dissertation, and then move to a city far away where none of her exes were flaunting their lithe, alterna-artistic wives in her face. I was thinking London, Rome, or Chattanooga (they’d never think to look for me there).

  You’ll notice that the plan outlined above did not include having coffee with Alex Coughlin and humiliating myself.

  But then someone knocked on the door.

  I tried to ignore the sharp raps, but he was insistent.

  “I know you’re in there.” His voice was muffled, but I recognized his tone. It was the buy-sell-you’re-fired tone. All impatient productivity.

  This, of course, enraged me. I was not some bothersome merger to be dealt with and filed away. I was not a woman to be trifled with. Not anymore. I too had become a force of nature—a blond beast created in the image of Harmony St. James.

  So I marched across the office, flung open the door, and greeted Alex Coughlin with a white-hot glare.

  “May I help you?!” I was so close I could smell the starch in his white-collared shirt.

  He took a step back, at which point I got a good look at his total dishevelment.

  His body was all buttoned up in Saville Row and knotted with a shantung silk tie, but his face looked ragged and uneven. His eyes were ringed in purple circles of fatigue. Lines I hadn’t noticed before strained his forehead and lips. A dark crescent of stubble lined the part of his jawline he’d forgotten to shave.

  He looked like I’d felt for the past three days. Embattled and exhausted by emotional jet lag. My heart started to open up despite my best efforts to hold on to my self-righteous rage.