Exes and Ohs

by Beth Kendrick

  Mrs. DiSanto tuned out her children’s bickering, the better to interrogate the new son-in-law. “Carter, I’m very sorry to keep asking, but how did you two meet, again?”

  Carter sighed. He had already been through this with Cesca’s brothers, Cesca’s father, Cesca’s grandparents, and a sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times. But he finished his bite of pasta and started, “Well, one of my buddies from high school—”

  “Paul Brenneman,” Cesca supplied.

  “Yeah. Paul came over here to see Gwen.”

  “But Gwen wasn’t here. I was.” Cesca beamed. “And when I told him that Gwen had left for the night, he looked so sad that I asked him if he wanted to go to Maloney’s with me to watch the end of the Lakers game.”

  Mrs. DiSanto held up a hand. “What is Maloney’s?”

  “It’s a sports bar,” Cesca admitted.

  Her mother covered her face with her hands. “My only daughter. My little girl, going to a sports bar with strange men.” She turned and appealed to Carter. “You get her under control.”

  Cesca shushed her. “Anyway, Paul said we could do better than Maloney’s, since he knew some guys from the team, so we went over to the Staples Center, and it was love at first sight.”

  Carter caught up his new bride in a hug. “Love at first sight.”

  Mrs. DiSanto narrowed her eyes. “But what happened to Paul?”

  Carter seemed startled. “Oh yeah. He’s still trying to hook up with Gwen, I guess.” He crossed his arms and gave me a look. “You really should call him after standing him up like that.”

  “Yeah, that’s just plain rude,” Cesca chimed in.

  “Oh, shut it,” I told her. “If it weren’t for me standing him up, you’d still be living on frat row here.”

  She giggled and threw her arms around her husband. “That’s true.”

  Mrs. DiSanto regarded me with soft eyes. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Don’t worry, Ma.” Cesca dug her stash of Oreos out of the cabinet. “I’ll keep chipping in on the rent until our lease runs out. She’s not gonna have to go live in the streets.”

  “But she’ll be all alone.” Mrs. DiSanto placed a hand on my forearm. “With nobody.”

  Just what a girl wants to hear after she’s been left by not one but two men for ex-girlfriends, and her roommate moves into a mansion with a professional basketball player.

  I gritted my teeth. “For the last time. I don’t mind being alone. In fact, I love being alone. Just think, I’ll never have to ruin another slice of pizza with pineapple and Canadian bacon.”

  “Philistine. You don’t know what you’re missing,” Cesca insisted for the ten-thousandth time since our freshman year of college.

  Carter raised an eyebrow at his new bride. “You put that on your pizza?”

  “You’ll learn to love it.”

  Mrs. DiSanto wasn’t ready to let me off the hook just yet. “But won’t you be lonely?”

  “Of course not.”

  And this was not a total lie. Cesca and I had shared our living quarters for lo these many years, but I could see some definite advantages to going it alone. No more waiting for the shower. No more arguments over how we could watch I Love the Eighties and the Raiders game at the same time. I could spend an entire weekend in a single pair of hideous flannel pajamas. Hell, I could wear the red track pants every single day for the rest of my life, and no one would get on my case.

  Cesca watched me mull this over. “You’re going to wear those horrible pants every day now, aren’t you?”

  I smiled. “Maybe.”

  “I’m sending a SWAT team from the fashion police,” she warned. Then she locked eyes with her new husband and forgot all about Adidas atrocities. “Oh, sweetheart, we’ve got to get ready for dinner, right?”

  Carter consulted the wristwatch that could have paid for all my graduate schooling. “Yeah. We better get going.”

  She beamed as her brothers straggled through the door. “We’re having dinner tonight. With Phil Jackson.”

  Tony looked like someone had just twisted a dagger between his ribs. “I can’t believe you get to have dinner with Phil and you didn’t even think to invite us.”

  “I should’ve married a Laker,” David grumbled.

  And as quickly as they had trooped into the apartment, they all trooped out. Cesca and her husband and her parents and her brothers locked the door behind them, leaving only a half-eaten pan of manicotti. My roommate—make that my ex-roommate—had gotten a life and left me behind in the corner I’d painted myself into.

  Well, no use being melodramatic about it. Or starving myself to death. For the first time in three days, I felt a faint stirring of hunger, so I grabbed a plate, tossed some manicotti in the microwave, and headed into my bedroom to usher in the Golden Age of the Red Pants.

  21

  Two weeks later, I ended up calling Officer Paul Brenneman because my adviser, Dr. Cortez, basically made me.

  I spent those two weeks working through the all-too-familiar stages of breakup recovery; from undereating to overeating, from pathetic self-pity to murderous rage, from living in track pants to straining my credit limit at the Beverly Center boutiques, from listening to the Smiths to blasting Gloria Gaynor.

  I showed up at the clinic, did the best work of which I was capable, and avoided anyplace where there was the remotest chance I’d run into Dennis, Alex, or anyone who’d want an update on either my dissertation or my roommate. I saved nearly twenty bucks per week in coffee expenditures alone.

  I didn’t hear from Alex and he didn’t hear from me. Cesca, however, heard plenty. At odd hours of the night, when I couldn’t sleep and there was nothing good on TV, I’d call and interrupt her wedded bliss with Dark Tales from the Newly Single.

  She handled this with her customary generosity of spirit and badness of attitude.

  “You’re lucky we had to delay the honeymoon ’til after the play-offs, ’cause I’m screening my calls when we get to St. Croix,” she’d say. “Now why don’t you just come and stay over here tonight? Carter’s on the road, and I’m all alone in this giant house and we have like four guest rooms and a casita.”

  “Eh. You live far away now.”

  “Oh, come on. There’s no traffic this time of night even if you take Sunset. I have a big box of Belgian truffles with your name on it.”

  “Forget it. I’d have to get up at the crack of dawn to make it to the clinic on time tomorrow. I’d rather complain over the phone.”

  “You just don’t want to hear my lecture about those track pants again. You’re wearing them right now, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  She always, always took my calls, feigned interest in my grievances, and then contributed little nuggets of wisdom like, “This sounds like what I went through the third time Mike and I broke up. It’s the gambling hall theorem all over again.”

  “The gambling hall theorem?”

  “Yeah, you know. You have to leave the gambling hall before you get in too deep. If you’re on a losing streak, then digging in at the craps table isn’t going to help you—it’s just gonna get you deeper into debt. You took a chance on Alex, and you lost, but you didn’t lose big—only two hundred dollars or so. Now, with Mike, I kept going back to the table trying to change my luck. I was in the hole thousands of dollars. The casino enforcers were breaking my kneecaps out in the alley.”

  “Uh-huh.” I yawned. Nothing like a good, long Mike story to lull me back to sleep.

  “In fact, I’m still losing money on that man,” she fumed, starting in on a few greivances of her own. “Do you realize that he just spilled his guts to the National fucking Enquirer so they could do a story on my wedding?”

  “He did?”

  “Check out the tabloids next time you hit the grocery store.”

  “Ugh. How Rick Salomon of him.”

  “And it was lies! All lies! The man said that Carter was a thug and that I was prone to violent outb
ursts. He said I threw plates with no provocation. Can you believe that?”

  I glanced at the dustpan I had used to sweep up the shards of ceramic. “Has he no shame?”

  “That boy’s lucky he’s touring with the latest inductee to the Anemic Rocker Hall of Fame, is all I have to say. When I find him…” She broke off, and I heard rustling plastic on her end of the line.

  “Twizzlers?” I guessed.

  “Bingo. Consider them an appetizer for the truffles—are you sure you don’t want to come over?”

  I closed my eyes for a moment, wishing that she hadn’t progressed to the next stage in her life. Wishing that we were having this conversation here in the apartment with a veritable concession stand of sugary goodness piled up between us. Wishing that Carter had never swept her off her feet and into a fairy-tale ending in a gated community by the glittering waves of the Pacific.

  That’s right. I, Gwen Traynor, was secretly hoping my best and oldest friend’s marriage would fall apart for the sole reason that I was lonely and scared of my own shortcomings.

  Not exactly my finest hour.

  “I’m not driving all the way over there right now, but let’s have lunch tomorrow. How’s married life, anyway?” I asked nonchalantly. “Are you having any trouble adjusting? I mean, I know it’s a huge change…”

  She laughed. “Honey. I married a Laker with a degree in biochemistry from USC and leopardlike prowess in bed. This whole marriage thing kicks ass.” She chomped into another Twizzler. “My adviser even said I could have the rest of the summer off and reschedule my qualifying exams for the fall.”

  “Oh.” The leopard part was news to me. “Well, that’s great.”

  “And that reminds me. What’s going on with Paul? Did you ever call him?”

  “No.”

  She gasped. “Rude! Well, I hope you have a good excuse.”

  “No, not really.”

  “So you’re stubbornly sitting home alone? Even though you have a cute policeman on tap?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Gwen! You can’t hole up like a hermit forever.” I could practically hear her eyes rolling. “I’m giving you two more weeks of grieving time for Alex, and then I’m personally taking charge of your social life.”

  “I’m not grieving, and I’ve got to go,” I said as my call-waiting beeped. “But I’ll say this one last time: My dating days are through until I get out of the City of Exes.”

  But I spoke too soon. The caller on the other line turned out to be Dr. Cortez, who informed me that the clinic board was throwing a benefit ball, at which my attendance was mandatory.

  “Um…” I couldn’t help glancing at the clock. Almost 11 P.M. “Can we talk about this tomorrow?”

  But social decorum had never been his strong suit.

  “Heather Vaughn was supposed to go, but now there’s a conflict in her schedule,” he snapped, as if Heather had deliberately schemed to foil him. “And we need a presence from the lab to explain the importance of our work to the donors. So whatever you’re doing next Friday, cancel it.”

  “As it happens, my Friday nights are completely free,” I bragged. “Except, of course, for all the extra hours I put in on my research.”

  “Well, then, your dissertation should be finished by now, shouldn’t it?” he shot back.

  Oooh. Well played.

  “So I’ll see you next Friday,” he commanded. “Bring a date and a delightful attitude.”

  “A date?”

  “That’s right. It’s a social event.” He sounded very put out by this fact. “Bring a date. Meet and mingle. I want you to chat up the board members.”

  My breath caught. “The board members?”

  “Yes. One of them spoke very highly of you.”

  Would that be the one who’d had sex with me, by any chance?

  I tried to bail with all my might. “You know, actually, now that we’re talking about it, I think I might be out of town next Friday. I’ll have to check and get back to you—”

  “Ms. Traynor,” Dr. Cortez said in his snottiest headmaster voice, “I will see you next Friday at the benefit.”

  I could tell from his tone that any further argument would result in mind-boggling theoretical questions and unprecedented verbal laceration at my next oral exam.

  “Okay, then!” I chirped. “I’ll dig out my dancing shoes. Bye!”

  I hung up, pitched the cordless phone clear into the hall, and spent a few minutes fuming over the indentured servitude that is graduate school. Then I got to my feet, called Cesca back, and asked for Paul’s number.

  “Your roots need retouching,” Cesca announced as she zipped me into my little black dress two hours before the benefit.

  I frowned at her. “If I wanted scathing criticism, I’d call Dr. Cortez.”

  “I’m just saying. It takes a little extra maintenance to be a blonde.” She fastened the hook at the top of the zipper and instructed me to twirl. When I did so, she frowned.

  “What now?” I demanded.

  “You should have borrowed my Zac Posen.”

  “Stop name-dropping your wardrobe.”

  She grinned. “Who? Me?”

  “I get it, I get it. You shop on Rodeo Drive now.” I stepped into my shoes and strode over to the mirror. “I think I look pretty damn good. And you know where I got this dress? T.J. Maxx. Forty bucks, on clearance.”

  She nodded, impressed. “Who’s the designer?”

  “Label whore.”

  “I just think that if you borrowed the Zac Posen, you’d be sending a message to Harmony and Alex.”

  “Yeah. And that message would be, ‘This hem is way too short for me and I’m too insecure to dress according to my station in life.’” I stuck my tongue out, and rummaged through my cosmetics drawer for lipstick. “Let Harmony prance around in Zac Posen or Roberto Cavalli or whomever. I’m a scientist, and I’m dressing like a scientist. Dark roots and all.”

  “You’re a hard woman, Gwen Traynor.” She shooed me back toward the bed, brandishing a mascara wand. “I can see why Alex zeroed in on you with his big Nick at Nite fantasy.”

  I closed my eyes as she moved in to beautify my lashes. “Oh really?”

  “Yeah. You’re never going to be a real L.A. woman. You’re just too midwestern.”

  “If you’re implying that I’m frumpy…”

  She finished applying mascara and attacked me with blusher. “All I’m implying is that you’re never going to be one of those women who thinks a three-carat engagement ring is a good idea.”

  This was true. When Dennis had first broached the subject of marriage, I had said that I wanted to wear my grandmother’s ring, with its tasteful sprinkling of antique diamonds. But Dennis had insisted upon what he called “going big”—the iceberg from Tiffany & Co. Something we could show off to his friends and his parents.

  “Big diamonds are pointless.” I could hear an echo of my mother in my voice. “At the end of the day, it’s a piece of rock. A piece of rock that’s going to catch on all your sweaters.”

  “See? I rest my case.” She paused to admire the blingtastic jewel adorning her own ring finger. “But to each her own. My sweaters will just have to take their chances.”

  I changed the subject. “What time is it, anyway?”

  “Six-thirty. What time are you supposed to be there?”

  “I’m meeting Paul in the hotel lobby at eight.”

  “He’s not picking you up here?”

  “Remember what happened the last time he tried to pick me up here?”

  “Yes I do.” Cesca’s eyes filled with dreamy delight. “I found my ideal man, season tickets to the Lakers, and a lifetime supply of Zac Posen all at once.”

  “So…uh…do you like seviche?”

  I shifted my weight from foot to foot and kept my eyes on the velvet-draped entrance to the ballroom. No sign of Harmony and Alex yet. “I’m not really sure what that is,” I admitted.

  “Oh.” Paul scuffed th
e burgundy carpet with his shoe. “It’s like, fish with lime and grape seed oil and stuff. It’s great when you make it with halibut.”

  “Oh.” I nodded. And once again, the conversation ran drier than the Mojave. I sneaked a surreptitious glance at Paul’s watch. Nine o’clock. We were looking at three more hours, minimum, of awkward pauses and door glancing.

  Don’t get me wrong—he seemed a nice enough guy. And he looked good in a tux. The raffish charm of Mark McGrath meets the cool debonair of Armani. This was not lost on the other female guests—lonely hearts postdocs kept coming up to me, making eye contact with Paul and purring, “Hi there. Didn’t I see you at the neuroscience symposium last week?”

  If only he had the small-talk skills to back it all up.

  If only I could devote my undivided attention to plumbing the depths of his knowledge about limes and marine life.

  But he didn’t, and I couldn’t, so my date with Officer Paul collapsed like a house of cards. The initial physical attraction wore off five minutes after we stopped discussing the miraculous courtship of Carter and Cesca, whereupon we realized that we had nothing to talk about. And I do mean nothing.

  I smiled at him. He smiled at me.

  I glanced at the door again, and when I turned back, I caught him checking his watch.

  Luckily, Dr. Cortez swooped down upon us, preempting any further attempts at conversation.

  “Gwendolyn. You’re here. Good.” He regarded Paul with the sneering hauteur a sommelier might reserve for a bottle of Boone’s Farm. “Hello.”

  “Hey.” My hunky date extended his hunky right hand. “Paul Brenneman.”

  “Doctor Richard Cortez.” The sommelier deigned to touch the hunky date. “I apologize for whisking Gwendolyn away like this, but duty calls.”

  “Good Goddess! Paul!” Harmony St. James shoved Dr. Cortez aside like a linebacker in lamé and barreled right into Paul’s arms. “Chérie! How are you?”

  “Harmony?” Crimson seeped into Paul’s cheeks. “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, I’m very into charity,” she assured him, waving her Louis Vuitton wallet. “It’s all about the kids, you know. By the way, Leo says hi.” She grabbed my shoulders and air kissed both sides of my face. “Gwen! You look fabulous!”