When he heard that, Frank finally turned around to intervene. “Hey, hey, hey, everyone calm down here.” He looked at me and said, “Look, you don’t have to disrespect my DJ like that.”
“Disrespect your DJ?” said Lisa. “Your DJ’s disrespecting us. You want somebody to calm down, you talk to him.” Then she looked at Gladys and said, “Let’s go. Now!” Gladys knew better than to argue with Lisa now that her patience had run low. She scooped her purse off the sofa and trotted over like an obedient puppy without even a glance at Frank.
“See, all this is unnecessary,” he said. “Like my man said, she’s a grown woman and can make her own decisions.”
“He’s not a man,” said Lisa. “And neither are you.” She grabbed Gladys by the arm and dragged her through the curtain. Miriam gave an apologetic shrug and followed them.
I lingered to give Frank one last piece of my mind. “The next time your girlfriend goes out, you’d better hope she’s with friends just like us.” His DJ opened his mouth and I said, “Go ’head, say something. Give me the reason to go straight to your manager. And if you think he’ll let you get away with this, wait until he gets his copy of my letter to the state liquor authority.” Both of them kept their mouths shut, and when I turned around to leave, Lisa was standing there waiting for me. She had returned to make sure I was OK.
“Where are Paris and Nicole?” I said.
“Outside. Look, Ricky, I know this is a lot to ask, especially after all that’s just happened, but would you mind terribly driving them home?” asked Lisa. “We’ll go to Raffaella’s first for some coffee.…”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Are you sure? It’s OK to say no.”
“No, it’s not a problem.”
“I just want to make sure that they get home without any more incidents.”
I put my arm around Lisa’s shoulder. “For you, yes.”
Lisa put her arm around my waist. “It’s so good to see you, Ricky.” We both exhaled and fled Studs.
* * *
We got my car out of the parking garage and drove to Raffaella’s in complete silence, each of us brewing in her own thoughts about what had occurred. Thank God, it only took ten minutes to arrive and settle in at the café. We each placed our orders and then the silence returned.
Finally Gladys made a surprising announcement. “I have to tell Pablo.”
Not only was telling Pablo the last thing I thought she would even consider, I found myself oddly touched that she would share the possibility with us. She knew that Lisa and I did not approve of her behavior at Studs, and it crossed my mind that she merely tossed out that idea in the hopes that we would talk her out of it.
“I think that’s the right thing to do,” I said.
“Me, too,” said Lisa.
Miriam shook her head. “I personally don’t think that’s necessary, but whatever you decide to do, you have my support.”
“You don’t think I should tell him?” Gladys seemed genuinely shocked by Miriam’s nonchalance.
“Tell him what, Gladys? You didn’t do anything.”
“Because we stopped her,” Lisa said. She looked to me for support.
“Gladys, you honestly can’t say that if we hadn’t shown up when we did, nothing would have happened.”
Gladys shook her head. “No, I can’t say that.” The server arrived with our orders and we paused until he finished and left. “But it’s not what you guys think. I mean, nothing would have happened that I didn’t want to happen. I’m not that drunk.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “You’re drunk enough for him to have taken advantage of you. And he would have, had we not barged in.”
“Frank was a doll,” Gladys said, batting her eyes like a teenager gushing over her crush. “He wasn’t going to do anything to me. If I had wanted to stop, he would’ve stopped.” She paused as if she wanted to say more, but instead added a third packet of sugar to her latte.
Lisa scoffed. “You don’t know him or what he’s capable of. You don’t know if he would’ve slipped something in your drink.”
“Exactly.”
“You don’t know how many times he’s done this before with other women.”
“Probably does it all the fuckin’ time.”
“You don’t know if he has a disease.”
“Or if his little friend would’ve wanted to do more than be a lookout.”
“No! Frank’s a sweetheart. Nothing like that was going to happen.”
Miriam said, “The bottom line is, thank God, nothing did happen. And that’s why there’s nothing to tell Pablo. Whatever happened at the club, stays at the club.”
“No, I have to tell him.”
“Tell him what? That you kissed a stripper? For what?”
“Because we’re getting married next week, and if I can’t tell him that, maybe we shouldn’t get married.”
Why did it take that long for me to realize that Gladys was having such serious doubts about the wedding? Not the ordinary nerves that engaged couples have the eve before their walk down their aisle like I surely had. She disappeared with Frank not because she felt entitled to one last fling before she married Pablo, but because she was deathly afraid that perhaps she should not marry him.
“¡Ay, Gladys, you’re acting like you cheated on him!”
“Didn’t she?” said Lisa.
“No, of course not!”
“It really doesn’t matter whether we think she did or didn’t,” I interjected. “The point is—and Gladys, tell me if I’m wrong here—whatever you did do was something that if Pablo did at his bachelor party, you would want him to tell you.”
With a somber slant to her lips, Gladys nodded. Miriam gasped as if Gladys had lost her mind right before her eyes. “Kissing? If he had kissed a stripper he’s never likely to see again, you would want him to tell you?”
“We did a little more than that.” The three of us shut up and leaned in for the scoop. “Frank has my panties.”
“What?”
“At one point, he took them off, and I guess I left them behind at the club. But that’s all he did, I swear to God.”
“You left your panties behind at the club?”
“I checked my purse, and I don’t have them.”
“And you’re going to tell Pablo that?” Miriam asked. She murmured and then took a long sip of her cappuccino.
“You don’t think I should? I mean, if I were in his shoes, I would want to know.”
Lisa reached across the table and put her hand over Gladys’s. “It’s your decision, but I think you should tell him,” she said. “If you’re going to go through with this marriage, you want to get it to an honest start. If you can’t tell Pablo what happened and work through it, you have to ask yourself whether you should be getting married. Yes, a lot worse could have happened that didn’t, but something did happen.”
“My brother’s not going to call off the wedding just because you flirted with some stripper,” said Miriam.
“You don’t think so?” My social worker’s ear caught a hint of disappointment in Gladys’s tone, but my experience told me that if Pablo did not call off the wedding, she would go through with it.
“I know so,” said Miriam. “Besides women need to stop feeling guilty about doing things that men do all the time without a second thought.”
“Not all men,” I said.
“That’s right. Your husband’s perfect,” Miriam said.
“Far from it, but I know that. You, on the other hand, don’t, so don’t go there.”
“I’m not saying anything about your husband in particular, Ricky, I’m talking about men in general. Including Pablo, who I know that if he were in Gladys’s position, not only would he not say shit, he’d never think about it again. So she shouldn’t beat herself up over what almost happened. And just for argument’s sake…”
“Please no more arguments,” said Gladys as she fiddled with the crumbs of her coffee cake.
&n
bsp; “… Let’s just say something had happened. So what? It’s your bachelorette party. It’s one night. It’s before your wedding. Big deal, let it go.”
“So you’re saying if Gladys had fucked that guy, you wouldn’t tell your brother?” Lisa asked.
“No, I wouldn’t tell him. He’s my brother, but she’s my friend. All I wanted is for Gladys to have fun tonight, and if that meant one last fling before she got married, so be it. If Pablo weren’t my brother, I wouldn’t feel any differently, so why should I change my tune just because he is?”
We fell silent, chewing on our pastries and Miriam’s rationalizations. I tried to remember what I knew of Miriam’s relationship with her brother Pablo. They never struck me as particularly close. Then again, they never appeared unusually antagonistic either. Back in our college days, Miriam and Pablo just … were. But I had to remind myself that I had not talked to Miriam in years, and I had no idea what might have occurred between them for her to become so casual about his emotional welfare. Something involving her ex-husband, Larry, maybe. Perhaps something that Pablo knew about and, out of a twisted sense of fraternity, kept from Miriam to protect Larry. Or maybe he meant to protect Miriam although she didn’t see it that way.
Then I considered the possibility that nothing had happened between Miriam and Pablo at all. More like something had happened to her. Larry did something to her. Or maybe Miriam did something to herself. Along the way she made a choice—to act out, to settle, to look the other way. Some poor choice that demanded she be less than honest with herself. And now Miriam had to experience the miserable consequences and would be damned if everyone did not suffer along with her, including her best friend and brother.
I could have asked Miriam and found out what that was, but I felt it’d be too much, too late. Not because of what happened at Studs, but because it was one of those things where I had to have been there all along in order to understand. To be helpful. To be a friend. And then I began to feel some responsibility for what had occurred at the club.
“I gotta get going,” I said. I reached for my purse and motioned for our server to bring our bill.
“Do you guys need a ride?” Lisa asked. She nudged me to remind me of what I had agreed to at the club. I had not forgotten nor did I intend to renege. Still, I wish she had let me out of it considering the recent conversation.
“No, we can take a cab into Brooklyn,” said Miriam. “Gladys is staying with me.”
Lucky Gladys. “I insist,” I said.
“Don’t you live in El Barrio? It’s out of your way.”
“Where do you live? Park Slope? That’s nothing from here, especially at this hour. Lisa, where are you?”
“I’m on the Lower East Side. Nice night like this, I could walk if I wanted to.”
“At this hour, like hell you will. Just come with me to take them to Brooklyn. Keep me company on the way back into Manhattan. Unless you’re tired…”
“No, I’d like that.”
“You’re sure?”
“Totally.”
Gladys started one more fight before we left Raffaella’s when she insisted on picking up the tab. Ordinarily, it would have been a silly argument, and we would have had a riot having it. But we all knew she made the offer as a way to apologize for her behavior earlier that night, and it all just seemed so sad.
During the drive to Brooklyn. Miriam hinted that she and Gladys find some neighborhood bar or lounge for a nightcap. Gladys said she was tired and just wanted to go to bed. She pulled out her cell phone and dialed a number. “I bet Pablo’s not even home yet.” As soon as Gladys said that, her head snapped back against the car seat. “Hey, honey, where are you?” she droned into the telephone. “Already? Oh. Well, did you have fun? ’Cause … you sound real … sober. Yeah, me, too. Wait until you see the presents the girls got us.”
I waited for Gladys to hint that something critical had happened that night that they needed to discuss. I waited for her to get off the telephone and ask us for our advice on how to handle the discussion and all its possible consequences. I waited for an opportunity to counsel Gladys that if she had such deep reservations about marrying Pablo, she owed it to herself to cancel the wedding despite whatever pressures others may impose on her.
“I guess I can go back and exchange it for the purple one.”
When Lisa and I dropped off Miriam and Gladys at Miriam’s Park Slope apartment, the four of us climbed out of my car to exchange hugs and numbers. Suddenly Gladys said, “You guys know you’re invited to the wedding, right? I mean, I know it’s last minute and all, but of course, I’d love to have you there. Ricky, feel free to bring, um…”
“Eduardo.”
“Yeah, we’ll make it work.” She said nothing to Lisa about bringing a date, and I knew it had nothing to do with Lisa’s recent return to singlehood.
“Oh, thank you, that’s sweet,” I said. “We can’t make it though. ’Uardo has this big thing next Saturday so…”
“And I’m on call that weekend,” said Lisa.
“Oh. OK. But let’s the four of us get together when I come back from my honeymoon, yeah?”
We promised to stay in better touch, and then Lisa and I climbed back into my car and drove off. The second I stopped at the first light, Lisa said, “What a night.”
“You mean nightmare.”
“I can’t believe Gladys ran off with that stripper.”
“At least she wanted to tell Pablo about it. I give her that. I mean, Miriam was encouraging her to lie to her own brother!”
“Let me tell you something, Ricky. When I came out, my brother took it hard. In fact, he was pretty fucked up to me, and for a while there I thought our relationship was over. We’re great now, closer than ever, but you know what? Even then had I learned that his fiancée disappeared with some stripper, I’d tell the bitch, ‘Do you want to tell him or should I?’ And then I’d give her a deadline.”
I snickered in agreement and pulled onto the Manhattan Bridge. “Even if it were me?”
“Especially if it were you.”
“Me, too.”
“You don’t even have a brother,” she teased.
“Even more the reason…” We had a good laugh over that and then suddenly Lisa grew so serious, I began to worry. “What?”
“It’s my fault.”
“What’s your fault?”
“What happened tonight?”
“That Gladys ran off with that himbo? How you figure that’s your fault?”
“I gave the pig fifty bucks so that he’d pay her special attention…”
“Lisa, stop! First of all, you did not pay him all that much.…”
“I just wanted her to have fun.”
“And she was. We all were except for Miriam, who wasn’t even really trying. The fun stopped when Gladys decided to take things too far.”
“God, I’m just as bad as Miriam!”
“You are not! Lisa, you’re talking as if you paid him to fuck her…”
“Jesus!”
“… and you didn’t. They hooked up because he wanted to, not because you slipped him an extra couple of bucks. They hooked up because she wanted to. She said it herself at the restaurant and again at the café. Gladys has no business getting married, and if she had asked me, I would’ve told her so.”
Why did Gladys have to ask me? After all, we had been friends for years. But the Gladys who balked when strange men harassed her in the street, until her friends made her feel safe enough to fight back, had become a Gladys who disappeared on those friends with a horny stripper. Maybe because so much time had passed, I felt we needed permission to be the same with each other. Or actually to be different.
“Gladys went this far with the wedding out of some crazy notion that this is the right time and not because Pablo’s the right man. That’s why she did what she did tonight, and that’s probably the real reason why she feels so compelled to tell him. A part of Gladys hopes he’ll get upset and call off the w
edding. None of this has anything to do with you. The way she was banging on that stage and waving that money, it probably would have happened even if you hadn’t tipped Frank. And remember, Lisa, Gladys doesn’t even know that you tipped him.”
Lisa drew her hand to her mouth and gasped. “God, that’s right. Imagine if she did! You know what they’d be saying about me right now.”
“What?”
“‘Lisa, that big ol’ man-bashing lesbo, paid that stripper to come on to you and sabotage your wedding.’”
“No!” I said and I truly meant it. “Miriam and Gladys might’ve gotten a little skanky over the years, but they’re not that bad.”
“You don’t think?”
I gave it a second thought. “No. Miriam’s in such a funky place toward men, had she known you had tipped Frank, she would’ve been all for it. Hell, she would’ve matched you dollar for dollar and thrown in the hotel room to boot. You saw her with that credit card.” I forced a laugh.
“And to think, I almost didn’t come tonight.”
“Didn’t feel like dealing with their reaction to your coming out?”
“Oh, no, not that at all. At this point in my life, the closet is locked. Whoever can’t deal with it, that’s their problem.”
“Good for you!”
“It’s just that I never got an invitation to the wedding. And I’m not so hard to find. I’ve been at the same address in D.C., and my parents are still in Brooklyn,” said Lisa as she ran her fingers through her perfect hair. “If I hadn’t bumped into Miriam in the Village last week, I never would’ve known about Gladys’s wedding and that had nothing to do with my being gay because neither of them knew. I was so happy about the idea of all of us being together again, it never occurred to me until later that I had never received an invitation. I mean, did you?”
“No.”
“So I started thinking why should I go? Obviously, Gladys felt so much time had passed since we spoke, the friendship no longer mattered. With all I’m going through right now with my crazy schedule and the breakup with Celina, why should I bother? But I started thinking about all the fun we had in college, the things we helped each other through. I really wanted to see everyone again, especially you.”
Friday Night Chicas Page 24