by Kyle Smith
“Rollo,” I say, putting my drink down and clutching his lapels to make the chalk stripes stop moving, “you don’t have sources. What you have is imagination.”
“Isn’t it obvious in every glance and sigh?” he says.
“Rollo,” I say. “Who told you this?”
“Dearie,” he says, “nothing transpires at Langan’s without my knowledge. I’m here every night. I was here the night you met her. Valentine’s Day, wasn’t it?”
“I thought I saw you down the bar,” I say. “I assumed you were unconscious.”
“Good reporters blend into the surroundings,” he says.
“You were blending into a coma. I’ve seen geraniums that moved more.”
He lifts a witchy index finger to his forehead. “The third eye,” he says. “It’s always open.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Or Ciaran the bartender told you.”
He ignores this. The mystique of the hack legend. No one must know how he knows what he knows, because if they did, they could cut out the middleman. “So will you be seeing this young sweetie tonight?” he says.
I shrug. “She has a boyfriend. It’s a long story.” Actually, it isn’t, though, is it? It’s a short story. It’s a fucking haiku:
secrets over drinks
some sweaty naked Twister
enter lisping putz
“You are unschooled in the seducer’s arts,” Rollo says. “Here, write this down,” he says, knowing that I, like him, like all hacks, have a notebook on me at all times.
I’m taking notes at my birthday party. There are times when my life seems a little weird, even to myself.
He pauses, puffs out his cheeks, empties his drink, and slams it on the shelf. Now he’s talking at the speed of drink.
“Tell her how you feel. But she musn’t feel threatened.”
“She musn’t,” I say, looking around, hoping Shooter isn’t hearing any of this. But Shooter is doing shots at the bar. With three blondes and a redhead.
“Tell her this. Start out by saying, ‘Look, it’s obvious you’re not going to marry him.’ ”
“Is it?” I say.
“You’ll be confident. She wouldn’t be going round with you if she wanted to marry this chump, would she? You’ll tell her, ‘I know this must be difficult for you.’ You’ll ask her, nicely, ‘What can I do to help you make a decision?’ Make sure you tell her, ‘I’m not going to rush you.’ Underline that.”
I underline.
“Give her safe. Give her se cure.”
Write, write.
“Don’t be negative. Be supportive. Act as if you’re with her and it will happen,” he says. “Act like a boyfriend and you’ll become one. Make it easy for her.”
“That easy?” I say.
“That easy,” he says. “And one thing more,” he adds, pulling my ear close to his flammable breath. “Girls like having smutty propositions murmured in their ears.”
“Right.”
“To the bog for me. Another drink will be required upon my return.”
“Will any of this work?” I call after him.
“A great load of bollocks, all of it,” he roars, over the heads of the crowd. “Of course it’ll work.”
As he walks away I notice for the first time that Rollo looks a little like my father. A guy who took with him whatever advice fathers are supposed to give sons.
Check the watch. 9:15 and she’s not there. At 9:21 she remains absent. At 9:25 there is no sign of. And 9:27. And 9:28. And 9:29. She’s not coming. Another routine rejection. I’ve been cut down more than Michael Jackson’s nose.
That’s when Brandy shows up. She isn’t alone.
“Tom,” she says. “This is Katie Swenson.”
Former coworker of Bran’s. She recently quit the intensely competitive, back-stabbing world of TV news to…go to law school. But. Cute cheeks, streaky Cameron Diaz butterscotch hair, Midwestern honesty, like my mom. (Ugh. Make a note not to think of Mom when I think of Katie.) I like Katie. I also like Bran, and this way if I flirt with one I get to fire up the other one’s competitive streak. Perfect. When it comes to relationships, scratch a girl and find a combat-hardened field marshal.
“Did you bring me a present?” I ask Bran.
“No,” she says. “But Katie did.”
“Oh?”
“Got it right here in my bag,” Katie says. “Voilà.”
It’s a pack of tarot cards.
“Let me tell your fortune,” she says. “It’ll be fun.”
I put down my drink.
A guy I know named Doug is standing there saying he doesn’t get psychics.
“Like, take TV psychics. If they’re really good, they tell you things like, you’ve just lost a family member/a job/a boyfriend. Things you already knew. For this I’m supposed to pay four ninety-five a minute? What good is that? Tell me what Cisco’s going to do in the next six months.”
“But maybe we can tell you something you didn’t know about yourself,” Katie says. “Tell ya what I’m gonna do. Let me read your aura.”
She takes my left hand and peers into it. Strokes it a bit. Then she does the same with my right hand. Possibly she is flirting with me. She really is a tasty package. She’s got hair like summer and a voice like three A.M.
“You’re facing this huge obstacle,” she says. “And you’re not sure whether to confront it. But you will. And at first it will seem like a disaster. But after a while it’ll get much better.”
I feel a drop of sweat on my forehead. I look at Doug, a TV writer whose idea for a wacky show—it’s about a bunch of slackers who keep plotting to steal from each other the talking urn o’ ashes of Kurt Cobain, who razzes them every time they do something stupid—just got rejected by MTV, Comedy Central, and even Showtime.
“What about this guy?” I protest. “He’s got obstacles. Everyone’s got ’em.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you what’s in your refrigerator,” Katie says.
“What?” I say.
“Mmmm. Muh. May. Mayonnaise,” she says.
“What are you? The oracle of Hellman’s?”
“Well?” she says.
“That is so dumb. Because everyone has mayonnaise in their refrigerator. Except me.” I’m still rattled, though. She got the obstacles, right off. Her next remark could reveal my masturbation habits.
She looks sad.
“I’ve got mustard,” I say.
“That’s right,” she says, brightening right up. “Mustard. It was the m that threw me.”
Thank God she doesn’t know what that m really stands for.
“And I see some kind of…lunch meat.”
“Absurd,” I say. Every guy has lunch meat in his fridge. Except, as it happens, me. Just the stuff I use to make a Bloody Mary takes up practically a whole shelf.
And that’s when the waitress breaks in to tell us time’s up.
“That’s it,” I say. “Gotta go.”
“Wait,” says Bran, looking more smug than usual. “She hasn’t read your tarot yet.”
“Tell me some other time,” I say, thinking, This girl can see right through me. Just like Neil Diamond, Dan Fogelberg, and Bread.
“Five more minutes?” Katie asks the waitress, and gives her this sweet smile. The waitress shrugs.
“Okay,” she says, and deals me four cards. “You’re the Questioner. We’re going to read them left to right. First card.” She turns it over. “Eight of cups. Interesting. It means a beginning, in the relationship sense. Traditionally, a blond woman could be of some assistance to you.”
She gives me the kind of little smirk only blondes can do. This girl is cute, no doubt about it. But I’m thinking about Julia’s dirty-blond hair. Come to think of it, Liesl is a blonde too.
“It’s always about the blondes,” says Bran, shaking her dark head. “The world is so…blondist.”
“Two,” says Katie, flipping again. “The knight of swords. Okay. This indicates a clever, charming man, a trusted
adviser you consult with regularly. But he could be unreliable. He could bring excitement, or trouble, into your life.”
I try not to look at Shooter, but at this very moment he and Rollo are sitting next to each other on an overstuffed sofa. Both of them have a girl sitting on either knee. Rollo is whispering obviously dirty things to one of the girls. The other one he’s tickling. The girls on Shooter’s knees are…well…I believe the word is “undulating.”
“Three,” says Katie. “The two of swords. Stalemate, a dead end. Things drag on endlessly.”
You know how you never think about your armpits until you notice something is going on there? I’m thinking about my armpits. I don’t need antiperspirant. I need a couple of Maxipads.
Snap, snap. Katie, with the fingers. “You ready?” she says, fetching me back to earth.
“Pay attention, Tom,” says Bran, looking highly entertained.
“Four,” Katie says.
It’s a guy with a moronic giggle carrying a stick on his shoulder and wearing bells on his hat. A dog is chasing him, pulling his pants halfway down so his butt sticks out of his pants.
“Now,” says Katie, “I have to caution you, this one is something of a misnomer. See how he’s marching forward, and he’s got his traveling stick? This is the card that generally indicates new beginnings. Fresh starts. A new job, or a journey of some kind.”
“You can’t argue with the cards,” Bran says. “Tom, you’re the fool.”
Friday, July 27
Always take a personal day to follow the birthday. Sleeping in. So nice. And the dreams. I had an excellent sports fantasy: championship bowling, a record-breaking score; also, for a ball I was using Dwayne’s head. Then up for some toast and tea, a languorous morning wielding the TV clicker, and now I can get on with the serious business of the day: not calling her.
I’m not going to call her, I’m not going to call her.
I’m not going to call her.
Outside it’s 80 degrees, and 80 percent stupidity. But I’m not going out there. Why take a chance?
I shower and “blow out” my longish hair. It’s starting to look like something that should be seen only on a member of the New York Islanders. In the attempt to cultivate flowing poetic-mysterious Johnny Depp hair, or at least interestingly demented-wavy Beethoven locks, I have created a formidable humidity mop. Something must be done.
When I turn off the dryer, the phone is ringing. I get there too late. My machine clicks off and the phone goes dead. A hanger-upper. Julia is a hanger-upper, a machineophobic. Instantly I hit*69. Well, not instantly. Can I afford to waste the 75 cents, plus the roughly 150 percent tax that mysteriously seems to apply to everything telephone related?
I get a pleasant morning-chat-show-type voice. The number I am calling cannot be reached by this method.
It’s ten A.M. Obviously it was her, calling from work —Tabloid blocks the number on all outgoing calls, natch—and how kind of her! To worry that I might still be asleep. That’s why she hung up.
I don’t dare leave the apartment lest the phone ring. I wonder if I’ll be able to last the entire day without going to the bathroom, though.
One P.M. The phone.
“Hello?”
“Hello? I don’t know if you remember me, but…”
My relief tank is refilling rapidly, making cheerful glug-glug noises.
“You sound,” I say, “like a girl I used to like.”
She half-laughs. “I know. I know!”
“Did you sleep through it?”
“Yup.”
“Poor sleepyhead,” I say. And she’s done it again: she’s turned me. I am the one offering sympathy. When she slept through my god-damned birthday party.
“I woke up at eight and I thought, ‘It’s okay, I’ll just take a cab downtown.’ Then I fell asleep again.”
I half-laugh. And I can’t help it. I get a plate and prepare to load it up from the self-punishment buffet.
“Do you want to hang out after work?” I say.
“Okay.”
Get dressed. Suck in. Psych up. I want to be everything for her. I want Tom Cruise’s smile, Bob Dylan’s poetry, and Elvis’s swagger. Instead I have Tom Cruise’s height, Bob Dylan’s hair, and Elvis’s liver. Cinch the belt one notch more than usual. The pain is not, as I expected, Satanic; it is merely excruciating. One more notch and I can throw this belt away. I have lost some pounds.
I’m there at five on the dot to pick her up. We go see a movie about a guy who can’t create any new memories. Whatever he sees, whatever he hears, whatever information is shoved right in his face, he just forgets. There’s a scene where his girl is really mean to him, knowing that five minutes later he won’t remember a thing. Some guys, they just don’t learn.
“Let’s go to the park,” I say. “We have to take advantage of these summer nights. The snows will be coming in, like, three weeks.”
“That,” she says, “would be lovely.”
I have prepared for the occasion. I’ve got a backpack containing a bottle of wine, two plastic glasses, a corkscrew, and a sheet. We go to the park and sit under a tree. The Sheep Meadow is alive with chirping. Not birds. Cell phones. Daddies are playing with their little girls all around us. Julia looks wistful.
Fifty feet behind us, a couple is making out. Fifty feet in front of us, a couple is making out.
“Reminds me of a Dylan song,” I say.
“Most things do,” she says.
The lyrics just leak out of me.
“They sat together in the park,
As the evening sky grew dark,
She looked at him and he felt a spark,
Tingle to his bones.”
“ ‘Simple Twist of Fate,’ ” she says.
“Correct.” I smile gratefully. This girl is so much fun to talk to, it’s like talking to myself.
Dusk is already happening. This, too, is part of my plan.
I open the wine without getting any cork in the bottle (hooray) and we sit on the sheet and I pour her a little more wine than I pour myself.
“I loved your note,” she says.
Her first byline in the paper today. To celebrate, before I left work yesterday I left her a funny card and a bottle of champagne. Also a long-stemmed rose.
I know. Don’t tell me.
“What did you think when you saw the rose? Did you think some copy editor was stalking you?”
“I knew it was you the minute I saw it,” she says.
She is sitting up. I’m lying behind her. Adoring the cello swell of her hips, the fascinating smallness of her waist. She’s wearing a tight little sleeveless number that rides up above the small of her back. My fingers take a walk.
“You have all these little white hairs on your back,” I say. And she does. It’s like chick down. It’s adorable.
“I know. I used to shave my back. I’m so hairy!”
“It’s okay,” I say.
I fill my lungs. She notices.
I sit up and move nearer. I pick up her hands. We’ve had two glasses of wine each.
“I’d like to say something,” I say.
After the roller coaster has finished creeping up its steepest incline and before it begins its descent, there is that moment. Of absolute stillness.
She winces a little. The uh-ohs are etched into her forehead.
I pause for a long time. Partly this is a dramatic pause. Partly it’s the pause you use when you don’t want to know what’s going to happen next.
I hunt for non-clichés, but there aren’t any. Everything I feel has been felt before. Everything I have to say has been said better. But this could be the last chance I have to tell her these things she already knows.
“I want to thank you,” I say. “For being you and sharing as much of yourself as you have.”
Her eyes are desperate. We’re sitting close. You couldn’t slip a Frisbee between us.
“But the thing is,” I say, “it’s obvious you’re not going to
marry him. And I know you’ve been thinking, ‘Am I a bad person?’ You’re not a bad person. If anyone would think you’re a bad person, it’d be me. And I know you’re a…kind, thoughtful, generous person. You just made one mistake.”
Her face goes all damp. “You don’t have another bottle of wine, do you?”
“And you thought maybe you’d fall in love with him after a while, but you didn’t,” I say. “You don’t want to hurt his feelings. But you’re not doing him any favors if you wait another two or three years before you tell him. You’re torturing him, Julia.” Aren’t I a great guy? He’s living with a sexy, sweet, smart woman. And I want to save him from all that.
Big pause. The sun is setting. The broiling has ended, leaving an absolutely perfect summer evening. Red wine is starting to spread over the horizon, the plaid light of dusk arriving filtered through the leaves. People are starting to pack up their beach blankets and their beverage coolers and their footballs and their dogs and children. But everyone moves slowly. Everyone is clinging to the day.
Julia is really crying now.
“You’re right,” she says.
And I think, This is going rather well.
“I think you just moved in with him because you needed a place to stay in the city,” I say. I try not to remind her that she has never, in all of our conversations, mentioned this scrap of information.
“It all sort of happened at the same time,” she says through the tears. “One time I tried to tell him. We went out for coffee and, I told him I didn’t want to go on, but he just started crying. So I said, ‘No, no, I’m not leaving!’ ”
Zip. Boing. This is news. I wonder what was happening between her and me around that time.
“When was that?” I say.
“A couple of months ago,” she says.
A couple of months ago. I think back to what was going on between us a couple of months ago. And just like that, it’s like adjusting the knob on a pair of time binoculars.
“He’s always saying, ‘I know you’re going to leave me someday,’ ” she says.
I’m trying not to touch her, trying not to turn this into a sex thing.
“I want to take care of you,” I say.