by Kyle Smith
“Not yet,” I say.
“Ooh, look at him,” Pete says. “Don Juanabee.”
“It’s going ridiculously well,” I say. “I just met her.”
“Best thing you can do?” he says. “Say good night and walk away. She’ll go nuts.”
I can’t do that. This is the most beautiful girl I’ve ever gotten this far with. She’s laughing at the right moments. Looking serious at the right moments. She’s still wearing her little yellow coat and just thinking about what’s under there is making the mercury rise in my thermometer.
So here it is. I’m drunk on the night air. I’m drunk on her face. I’m drunk on alcohol. She’s matched me drink for drink. Five. Six. We’ve spent three hours together, maybe more. We’re sitting side by side with cool moody alternative music playing, the kind she used to make out to in high school.
Give her a cigarette.
“Thanks,” she says. She fumbles around in her coat. I’m already lighting a match. Although I hate cigarettes, I love to light up pretty girls. Because.
“Lighting up a girl, there’s something, sexual, about it,” I say, waving out the match.
“Def initely,” she says, shooting a plume in my direction.
I move closer. She doesn’t flee. I move closer still. She’s sticking. Now she’s in my kissing radius. I look at her. Straighten your posture, man. Your posture is always bad. I look away. Look around the room. Check out the juke. Stare into the yellow light of this grungy subterranean grotto. And then: lean back toward her. And I go in.
And she sticks. Relief wells up in me. Surges. A wave of calmness. I am liked. Meeting this girl is like cleaning behind my refrigerator: a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Bachelorhood has had a long run, there have been several girlfriends who were almost perfect. But this could be the last girl I ever kiss.
We kiss. We pause. We kiss some more. Her hand is on my shoulder.
Then I pull up and put my mouth up next to her ear and very softly I say exactly what I’m thinking.
You should never say what you’re actually thinking.
You should especially never say what you’re actually thinking if you are in danger of giving up the secret you, the one it should take six months of hard-core dating to uncover.
You should extra-super-especially never say what you’re actually thinking if what you’re thinking sounds like dialogue from a 1968 episode of Days of Our Lives.
But here’s what I say. I say, “Where have you been all my life?”
She just gives me a crooked little smile. I’ve never seen anyone smile like that before. Half of her mouth is delighted. The other half is worried.
Then she gives a little laugh.
And I am filled with hope.
Third Dose
We make a date for Thursday to see a movie about jujitsu and boxing and sword-fighting and love. All of your basic forms of combat.
“There’s an eight-thirty,” I say. “There’s also a six.”
“Maybe eight-thirty,” she says. “No, wait. Shoot. How about six?”
I show up at 5:50. She isn’t there. She isn’t there at 6:15. Go to the Mexican restaurant next door. Change for a dollar, please. Call the office. Call the house. No messages.
I’m paralyzed. Surely she wouldn’t go in without me. So I wait. Six-thirty. What the hell. I’ll just wait till the eight-thirty showing. See what happens. Say she shows up at eight-fifteen all is forgiven.
I cross Forty-second Street to the HMV store and stew a bit. Check the office machine. Check the home machine. Check ’em again. Wait ten minutes and recheck. I’m frantic, running over the possibilities. I once read this article about Occam’s razor. It’s a theory: the simplest explanation is the likeliest. The simplest explanation is, she has simply lost interest.
I sit through the film anyway. I really wanted to see it. But it’s so poetically sad and lyrically pained and tragically tragic that it’s like seeing my psychic X rays blown up forty feet wide. I leave before the end. I just know somebody’s going to die.
I have this problem. Sometimes I go overboard. But I don’t just go overboard. I go overboard without a life jacket. In shark-infested waters. With a vicious nosebleed. And I just remembered to forget how to swim.
I call in sick on Friday. No messages. Call Julia at the office. It rings. Someone picks up. The line goes dead. I don’t call back. The weekend passes. I call in sick on Monday. Call her at the office. She doesn’t answer. I leave a message. “Uh, hi. It’s, uh, Tom? Could you call me?” But she doesn’t.
I’m mad at myself, mainly. I saw a yellow light, or a yellow coat, and I stepped on the pedal. Right into a buzzing intersection.
Tuesday I go back to work devising excuses. No one tells me I don’t look sick.
I feel like ten pounds of nothing in a five-pound sack at the office that whole week. I don’t see her around. She might be out covering a story. She could be sick! Too sick to operate a phone? It could happen. I picture her lying in a soap-opera hospital room with swaddled head muttering her “Who am I?”s to teams of mystified doctors.
The following Monday. Ten days since she blew me off. In my cubicle there are stacks of newspapers, layouts, magazines, all the crap of my crap existence. Hello, I’m Mr. Crap, who are you? Oh, you’re Mr. Calm, Secure, Married Guy? I guess you don’t worry about where your next lay is coming from. Or, your next cuddle. Because even guys get tired of fucking. Yeah, it’s pretty easy to find someone to fuck. Actually, it’s incredibly hard to find someone you want to fuck, but it’s even harder to find someone you want to wake up with.
At the bottom of the stack: a note. No envelope. Thick, unlined white paper. Folded in thirds. My name in cursive.
Tom,
I can’t tell you how sorry I am about last week. I don’t think I can even give you a reason that doesn’t sound like a lame excuse. The truth is that I’ve been having a rough few weeks, and I haven’t quite been myself. This is no excuse for not simply picking up the phone and calling you, I know.
The thing is, I really liked hanging out with you, and I would like to try it again. Of course, if you think I’m a complete jerk/psychopath, that’s understandable. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry.
Julia
God, even her handwriting is beautiful. It’s neat, it’s readable, but it’s kind of cool and smart and tragic: tight, angular, brooding. Not like girly handwriting with its fat loops, its smiley faces in the girly dots of the i s. Now she’s really done it to me.
I don’t call her until I’m getting ready to leave at the end of the day.
“Hey,” I tell the phone.
“How are you,” she says. Other girls’ voices rise? Like, at the end of every sentence? Not hers. Her voice is all low and smooth and soothing and sexy. Talking to her, you expect to be charged $3.95 a minute.
My other line is ringing.
“Got your note,” I say.
“Yes,” she says.
“How about we start over?” I say.
“I’d like that,” she says.
And I pick up the other line to deal with this hour’s story of the century.
Third Dose. Second Attempt.
I tell her to meet me at one of those nouvelle Mexican places. It’s a lot like the oldvelle Mexican places, except there is a little jar of crayons for doodling on the butcher paper that covers the tablecloth, the loud music is soul instead of salsa, and the margaritas have flavors like pomegranate and kiwi-kumquat. Also, for what each of them costs you could go on a three-day bender in Tijuana. Shooter say: Let her see you waste money.
“I’ll just have a regular margarita,” she tells the waitress. She is perfectly still in her cute yellow coat. I imagine everyone is looking at her. And I don’t have much imagination.
“And for you?” the waitress says.
“The watermelon. Is that seedless?”
Julia laughs. The waitress doesn’t. New York waitresses don’t laugh.
“Actually I’ll just have the strawb
erry-mango,” I say. It occurs to me a moment too late that this is perhaps not the manliest drink in existence. I should have said something like, “Whiskey and soda. Hold the soda.”
The waitress rolls her eyes and leaves without a word.
“Missed you the other night,” I point out, picturing Shooter slamming a glass on the table and bellowing, “WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU?” Should I be more like Shooter, or more like me? And if the latter: who the hell am I?
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“What happened?” I say.
She doesn’t say anything. She just makes a lost-doggy face and lets her shoulders droop. I can see words forming in her green eyes. She can’t get them out of her mouth, though. Then something occurs to her. She rootles through her purse for an answer. And finds her cigarettes.
“That’s your reply?” I say.
“It’s just, boyfriend things,” she says.
I light a match for her.
“Things,” I say. She leans into my flame.
“Things haven’t been so good lately. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. You know?” She blows smoke out of the side of her mouth. Her coat is still on even though it’s warm in here. She looks as if she could run away at any moment.
“Can you tell me what things?” I say.
“Not yet,” she says.
Little does she know. I’m a sucker for a good mystery. Or even a bad one, if it has green eyes. One of which is partially hidden by that gorgeous hair. She’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a truly excellent body.
When I was a kid, my older brothers would scamper off on a Sunday afternoon while my parents dragged me around to flea markets. They were there to rescue woebegone furniture, begrimed wooden survivors that reminded them of stuff their parents had had around the house when they were kids. These soapboxes and pedestal tables they planned to tote back home so they could spend several devoted days lovingly stripping off the paint in order to unveil the battered piece of junk that always lay underneath. At the flea market I’d mope listlessly through the piles of scratched records and clothes that smelled like somebody else’s house. Did I want anything? my parents would ask. No. The macramé lady, the tube-sock king. Did anything catch my eye? No. The hard-candy booth, the land of hand-painted ceramic farm animals. Couldn’t they get me anything for being such a Good Boy? No. Until we stumbled upon some merchant-wizard who had a barrel filled with lumps of under-cover merchandise in brown paper sacks tied with ribbons. A Magic Marker question mark was their only label. GRAB BAGS, the sign would say. Only a buck. I had to have one, every time. By the time we got home I would have thrown away the Bakelite candy bowl or wooden duck that always lay within.
The waitress comes back with our drinks. At the next table two white guys and a black guy sit down and start arguing about sports. One of them, the biggest, is wearing a backward baseball cap. It’s a look that says, “I’m so proud to have made it to the first rung of Wall Street that I’m prepared to spend up to fifty dollars tonight.” The big guy banters strenuously with the waitress. I watch. I love seeing other guys strike out.
Julia lets out another puff of smoke. It corkscrews over her head. Everything she does has this style to it.
“So how was the movie?” she says.
“It was okay,” I say. “I like old movies better.”
Her eyes widen. “You are so right. I don’t understand why there’s one theater that shows old movies and a hundred theaters that show new movies. Isn’t that so ass backwards? I mean, if you go in a bookstore, they have a table full of new stuff in front, and the whole rest of the store is old books.”
“Same with CD stores.”
“Does everything have to be so relentlessly now?” she says. “I wish everything would slow down. I wish time would start moving back wards.”
“Well. As Woody Allen said, that would mean I’d have to sit through the Ice Capades again.”
“I like getting older,” she says. “I just want history to go back. There’s a lot of stuff I missed. The Beatles. JFK.”
“Let’s fight it.”
She smiles. “Yes, shall we? But how.”
“Never read a book that’s less than ten years old.” Easy for me. I don’t read much anyway.
“Yes. And only black-and-white movies.”
“Unless they have Steve McQueen in them.”
“Mmm,” she says. “Or Hugh Grant. Or Jack Nicholson.”
“You can’t like Hugh Grant and Jack Nicholson,” I say. “That’s like me saying I want to marry either Audrey Hepburn or Marilyn Monroe.”
She shrugs. “At least I want to sleep with the liv ing, Grandpa.”
“Maybe you don’t know what you want.”
“Sure I do. Somebody who’s like Hugh when I want him to be like Hugh and like Jack when I need that.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. “And how are the young bucks supposed to figure out today’s mood?”
“That’s just the thing,” she says, blowing more smoke. “If you can’t read, don’t pick up the book.”
She looks exactly like Gloria Grahame when she says this. The turned-up nose schooled in long-distance bullshit detection. The way she cocks that eyebrow of hers. You should never cock a weapon indoors. Somebody could get hurt.
“Do you know,” I venture, “who Gloria Grahame was?”
She half-closes her eyes. Her mouth falls into a lopsided grin. She looks as if she’s entered a trance. “She was the haunted drunken diva in The Bad and the Beautiful. She was my favorite character in Oklahoma!, for God’s sake. The Girl Who Can’t Say No. That was the best song. ‘Every time I lose a wrestling match, I get a funny feeling that I won.’ She must have been the first character ever in the history of the movies to make it okay and fine to be a total slut. She didn’t have to pay for her sin in the end. She didn’t go crazy or get killed.”
“You kind of remind me of her,” I say.
“Do I now?”
This earns me another drink.
“I could never figure out Gloria Grahame,” I say. “You always got the feeling that she could end up marrying the hero, or—”
“Or garroting him,” she says. “She was like a more fem Lauren Bacall. Oh, oh. Do you know In a Lonely Place?”
“Know it? Memorized it.”
“That little speech he gave her, do you remember it?” she says.
“Sure. In the car. ‘I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me.’ ”
“And,” Julia says, taking a big philosophical drag, “ ‘I lived a few weeks while she loved me.’ I love hard-boiled despair.”
“The look on her face when Bogart tells her that,” I say. “That face could imply anything.”
“So right. Why speak when you can imply?”
Spoken like a true grab bag.
“What are you doing at Tabloid?”
“Please,” she says. “The Southeastern Connecticut Poetry Review doesn’t pay.”
“Maybe there’s poetry in what we do. We’re just trying to get the rhythm of the massacre. The song of squalor.”
“I’ll bet you can write,” she says, lighting another cigarette.
“I earn a nice living at it,” I say.
She raises an eyebrow.
“What?” I say.
“No. I mean, write.”
Poof. A little guilt dart hits me in the throat. There are times when I’ve thought about growing up, cashing in however many talent chips I have, getting down to work. But there’s always something good on TV.
“Maybe I will, sometime,” I tell her.
“Will you write a story about me?” she says.
“No,” I say.
She looks hurt.
So I say, “You could only be a novel.”
Save! And the crowd goes wild. I’ve won another drink. I catch her looking at me in a different way.
“What’s with that look?” I say.
“Nothing. It’s just, I don’t know. You’re one of the fe
w redheads I’ve met who doesn’t have that disgusting orange hair.”
“Umm, thanks?”
“No offense, of course.” She puts a hand on my hand and gives me the look of the big-bucks newswoman in the primary-colored jacket who gets paid to make people cry.
I look at her hand, hoping it’ll stay there a while. “You wish you had it,” I say. “Don’t you.” My hair would look much better on a girl. All girls wish they had red hair. Sometimes I think the only reason any of them ever go out with me is that they’re plotting to shear me in the night and make a run for it to the wig shop.
She laughs. Reclaims her hand. “I could do a lot with your hair.”
“You’re looking at me like a German shepherd looks at a steak.”
“I like your nose, too,” she says.
“Oh. Well that, you can have.”
“Okay. Now you have to pay me a compliment.”
This throws me. Where do I begin? With the a’s?
“Why?” I say.
“I just gave you two of them.”
“ ‘Not disgusting’ is a compliment?”
“Sure.”
“Okay,” I say. “Let me think about this.” I look at the floor. I look at the ceiling. I tuck my chin down and look up at her shyly. “Julia,” I say. “Honestly? I have to be serious for a second. Of all the girls I’ve known—”
I think she’s holding her breath.
“You’re one of many who does not make me puke.”
She laughs. But she looks a little relieved.
“You still owe me one, you jerk,” she says.
“And you have mysterious eyes,” I say.
That half smile again. As she starts to doodle with a crayon.
“That’ll do,” she says.
“Draw a picture of you,” I say.
“Okay, but you have to do one of you,” she says.
I take a crayon out of the little glass jar and start sketching out an epic. I can’t draw. There are a lot of things I can’t do. This does not stop me from trying to do them.
I’m trying to see what she’s doing but she’s blocking me.
“Uh-uh-uh,” she says, without looking up from her work.