The Dirty Book Club

by Lisi Harrison

  “What are you doing?” Addie asked, still too loud.

  “Going to the restroom,” she said, and then slipped inside.

  Cactus-green eyes darting, Addie began biting her thumbnail.

  “Did you grow up in Pearl Beach?” M.J. asked.

  Addie nodded, her attention fixed on the door.

  “Do you work around here?”

  Another nod.

  “Where?”

  “Women’s health clinic,” she answered. Then, as if seeing M.J. for the first time, said, “You don’t have regular periods, do you?”

  Shocked, M.J. brought a hand to her chest, which looked like a tarmac compared to Addie’s. “How did you know that?”

  “You’re too skinny and—”

  The bathroom door flew open and out walked Gloria, followed by a sexy Australopithecus, a type whose prominent brow bone, long limbs, and hunched shoulders harkened early man. “Look who I found hiding in the shower! It’s my son David.”

  With a forced smile, M.J. peered past Gloria’s shoulder and down the hall. Where the fuck was Dan?

  “Hey,” David grumbled with a stoner’s lazy drawl. He had Leo’s navy-blue eyes, tanned skin, and the kind of magnetism that gets a man funeral-fucked.

  “Do I need to remind you that this is your father’s shiva?”

  “No, Mom. I’m quite aware.”

  Gloria inhaled, preparing for a lecture, but was interrupted by a guy, roughly M.J.’s age, waving a manila envelope that he promptly gave to Gloria.

  “Who’s that?” M.J. muttered to Addie, taking in his pin-striped suit, black-framed glasses, and fedora.

  “Easton Keller,” she said, scenting his name with the smell of scotch. “He manages Liddy’s bookshop. And yes, he really does dress like that.”

  “It arrived last night,” he told Gloria. “While I was closing up the store.”

  Addie and David began sneaking away. Gloria was too busy running her finger across the postmarked Republique Francaise stamps to notice. “Did Liddy see it?”

  Easton pointed out the top line of the mailing address, “It’s addressed: ‘To the DBC care of Gloria Golden.’ ”

  It was hard to imagine Gloria being a member of the Downtown Beach Club, or any organization that would voluntarily place her in the same room as Kelsey. But like so many well-off women her age, she probably took it on as a charity project, and in the name of doing good, learned to tolerate the bad.

  Gloria cut the seal with her fingernail, reached inside, and pulled out three Air France tickets that had been tied together with a black ribbon. While most people would have tossed off the ribbon and ripped open the envelopes, Gloria took a moment, the bounty balanced in her palm.

  “What is it?” Easton asked just as a postcard of the Eiffel Tower slipped out and drifted toward the floor. It read:

  Pact #34

  MEN COME FIRST, MEN GO FIRST.

  See you soon!

  All my love and air miles,

  —M

  Much like stubbing a toe on a coffee table, there was a brief delay before the impact was felt, at which point Gloria leaned against the wall of family photos and muttered, “My God.”

  * * *

  “YOU’RE BACK!” DAN said, relegating his laptop to the floor like a lumpish cat. He was sitting inside the blue-taped border that was meant to be their couch, back against the wall, as if laying claim to the coveted L seat.

  “Seer’sly?” M.J. slurred, the champagne from Gloria’s having gone straight to her tongue.

  “I was just about to call you.”

  Why? To tell me about the boy band you joined? M.J. might have said to the unbuttoned dress shirt that pooled around his pelvis. But only the Jaws of Life could pry her sense of humor from the wreckage of that afternoon. So Dan got M.J.’s bitchy face instead, followed by her wild-eyed insistence that a phone call was not what she had needed; anything short of an emergency airlift would have been a waste of his time.

  “Dan, that wasn’t a funeral, it was a fever dream,” M.J. continued, “and you left me there.” She forced the back strap of her sandal over her heel as if it were a Madden, not a Moschino. “So next time you want to feel Jewish guilty about something, feel Jewish guilty about that.”

  He lifted his gaze to her swaying torso. “I do; I feel terrible. It’s just that Randy called and—” A gust blew from his nostrils. “You’re not going to believe this—”

  M.J. cocked her head, an invitation to motherfucking try her.

  Face suddenly wide with hope, or maybe it was fear, Dan stood and took her hands in his. “Wanna go to Java?”

  “Coffee?” M.J. withdrew her hands. “I’m not drunk, Dan, I’m pissed.”

  “No.” He laughed. “Java the island.”

  “In Indonesia?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m confused.”

  Pacing, Dan admitted that he had also been confused. Not about the date of the trip—he was right about the thirty-first—it’s the month he got wrong.

  Panic smacked. “May thirty-first?” M.J. shrieked. “As in forty-eight hours from now?”

  “If Randy hadn’t called to make sure I got the water filters . . .” Dan sighed with his entire body. “The point is, I messed up. We’re supposed to leave on your birthday.”

  “ ‘Supposed to’?” M.J. asked, following Dan to the fridge, where he removed a beer, twisted off the cap, and tossed it in the sink where it landed with a hollow plink.

  “I’m not going,” he mumbled into the bottle.

  “Can’t change your flight, huh?”

  “Actually, I can,” he said.

  “Oh.” M.J. reached for his beer and took a swig as a tsunami of insecurity crashed over her. One she had always associated with teenage hormones and thought she’d outgrown decades ago. But being away from Dan, and alone in Pearl Beach, would be unbearable. Was unemployment the new PMS? “So why aren’t you going?”

  “I can’t leave you on your birthday,” he said with a pitying pout. “We could fly up to San Francisco so you could meet my family. It’ll be fun. Of course, Randy won’t be there, but you’ll meet him some other time. Unless . . .” He reclaimed his beer and drained it. “You come with me.”

  “On a guys’ surf trip?”

  “Why not?”

  “For one, I’m not a guy, and for two, I don’t surf.”

  “And for three, Java is insanely gorgeous, so who cares? We can travel around Jakarta, check out the temples.”

  “Aren’t you going to be surfing?”

  “Not all day.”

  Dan lifted himself to sit on the kitchen counter and began knocking his ankles against the cupboard where pots and pans would go if they had any. “And when I am, you can explore. Check out the volcanoes and the rain forests, learn to surf. Actually, I can’t think of a single reason why you shouldn’t come.”

  “I can,” M.J. wanted to say, because the boards she favored met in climate-controlled conference rooms; sharks wore suits, waves were greetings made in passing, and surf was an outdated term for trolling the Internet. And what about pride? She’d have to recuse herself as an independent woman, at least until she stopped living Dan’s life and learned how to live her own. She’d read enough Judy Blume novels to know that.

  “So?” Dan asked. “Whadd’ya say?”

  M.J. opened the sliding glass door and gazed out at the restless ocean. On the beach, couples were taking lazy all-the-time-in-the-world strolls under the dusking sky. It was time for rosé on the deck, chips, dips, and perfumed conversations about where to go for dinner. Not this. “I don’t understand why you have to go all the way to Java when there are perfectly good waves right here.”

  “It’s an adventure.”

  M.J. stepped onto the deck and lifted her face to the setting sun, a sun that could just as easily make her feel lonely as it could feel loved. It depended what was inside her when the light hit, what it illuminated. And in that moment it shined on a dozen good reasons
to give Dan her blessing and let him have that adventure with his friends. But a dozen wasn’t enough.

  “Count me in.”

  CHAPTER

  Eight

  Pearl Beach, California

  Wednesday, June 1

  Waning Crescent Moon

  IF BIRTHDAY CAKES were supermodels, this one would be Kate Upton.

  Rich, professionally frosted, and hardly the type to be picked up at a grocery store, the curvy, butter-colored treat was not what M.J. expected to wake up to. How had Dan managed to checker-jump over today, land in tomorrow, and still find her favorite: vanilla pudding in the center and covered in fresh berries? And the card: Thirty-four years ago my future was born, thirty-four years from now I will still be grateful. You are the most beautiful, elegant, intelligent, goof-ass I will ever know. I love you, Dan.

  His words expanded behind M.J.’s ribs like the grow-in-water dinosaurs she and April used to submerge in the bath. If it had been written in Dan’s woozy doctor’s scrawl, the surge of adoration might have made her burst. But the tidy rows of block letters suggested the hand of a different kind of professional. One who answered the phone at Pearl Beach Bakery, took dictation, then neatly transcribed the long-distance caller’s sentiments onto the back of the shop’s promotional postcard. Still. At some point between Los Angeles and Hong Kong or maybe Hong Kong and Jakarta, Dan made it happen.

  M.J. tried to thank him with a call, a text, an e-mail, a Skype, but if it was close to noon in California, it wasn’t her birthday anymore where Dan was. He had circumvented the occasion, left it somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, where it now hung in hindsight, meaningless as an empty threat.

  She should have been lying beside him, nestled inside his warm, croissant-shaped embrace. Their naked bodies swaddled in coarse three-star hotel sheets, their skin carrying the floral scent of complimentary soap. But while booking her ticket, M.J. realized that her passport was still in New York.

  “Maybe this is a good time for you to fly back and get the rest of your stuff,” Dan said after she insisted he go to Indonesia without her.

  “Not a bad idea,” she said, because it wasn’t. The trip home, the packing, the purging, it would keep her occupied while Dan was gone. But the possibility of her moving back to New York was still too strong. And the only thing more maddening than schlepping one’s entire wardrobe across the country was schlepping it back. So M.J. left it at that, knowing that she’d have ten days to manufacture a good reason why the trip just wasn’t in the cards.

  Now, braless and barefoot wearing one of Dan’s unlaundered T-shirts she was staring down the barrel of day one without a single activity in sight. Only a kaleidoscope of blues that shifted from one lonely image to another: the fog outside her windows known as June gloom, the L-shaped tape that outlined the corpse of their futon couch, her birthday cake on the kitchen counter, no candles, one fork.

  M.J. hooked her finger around the hair elastic on her wrist and snap! A hot sting radiated up her arm. It was a tactic she’d inherited from her mother. “When you want to bite your nails, pull the rubber band,” Jan had said. The goal was to trick the mind into associating the bad habit with pain so she’d stop doing it, and M.J. was not going to feel sorry for herself. She would celebrate the life her parents gave her. Celebrate the boyfriend who wanted her to feel loved on her birthday. Celebrate this sleepy, uninspired town; her grim existence.

  Snap.

  M.J. would not think about the contract at the bottom of her suitcase or how easy it would be to sign it and return to the place where honking horns and screaming ambition drowned out the mewls of her mental anguish—anguish that poor Gloria would be stuck with for the rest of her life now that Leo was gone.

  Snap.

  Then a revelation: Why not share the cake with Gloria?

  On her way out, M.J. noticed a black envelope wedged under her front door and immediately thought of her neighbors in #5F; their endless attempts to buy her apartment, and her refusal to sell it. How could she when it was bought with her parents’ life insurance money? Selling the apartment would be like selling them and—

  Snap.

  Cake box balanced in her open palm, M.J. picked up what appeared to be an invitation to the type of party that required a Latin password and a mask. There was a gold seal on the back flap with the letters DBC stamped into its waxy center; hardly the anchors and starfish she expected from the Downtown Beach Club.

  “No, thanks,” she muttered as it landed among the to-go cups and magazines in the recycle bin. She promised to give Pearl Beach a chance but not Kelsey Pincer-Golden. If only she had her paper shredder.

  Snap.

  * * *

  NO LONGER BRALESS, but still barefoot, M.J. scampered across the asphalt of the Goldens’ driveway, wishing that trail of cool soapy water was still trickling down from the garage.

  She rang the bell, stepped back onto the bristly WELCOME mat, and waited. If Gloria’s afternoons were anything like M.J.’s in the weeks that followed the accident, she was caught in the grog of last night’s sleeping pill, trying to remember where she left her leg muscles.

  The door yawned open.

  “Britt?”

  “Oh, hey,” she said, eyeing the box. “I didn’t know Mama Rosa’s made cakes.”

  “It’s my birthday,” M.J. said with a rise-above-it grin. Because Gloria didn’t need a catfight. She needed compassion and kindness; someone to mind her while she wandered around her bungalow as if searching for lost keys, someone to hold her when she realized that what’s really missing is gone forever.

  “Thirty-six?” Britt snipped.

  “Thirty-two,” M.J. lied. “Anyway, I thought Gloria might want some cake,” she said as she stepped into the foyer, which was now a balmy seventy-six degrees. The macaroon cookie smell had been replaced by a putrid combination of gardenia-scented candles and ammonia, the living room, stripped clean of its dated tchotchkes. “Is she here?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know when she’ll be back?”

  “Thanksgiving.”

  “You’re seriously not going to tell me?”

  The dimple below Britt’s lip twitched. “I just did. Gloria moved to Paris. Dot and Liddy picked her up in a Lyft two hours ago.”

  The cake became heavy. M.J. placed it on the foyer table beside a ceramic peacock business-card holder. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.” Britt plucked a card from the peacock and offered it to M.J. “I’m listing the house.”

  “She didn’t say good-bye.”

  “Sorry,” Britt said, a bad actress trying to care. “Were you close?”

  Snap.

  “I guess not,” M.J. muttered, vision coning as she stepped back out into the gray afternoon, leaving her birthday cake and all hope for companionship behind.

  * * *

  M.J. RETURNED HOME to a garden gnome. Cocksure and squat, it stood on the front porch mocking her with his jubilant smile and whimsical swimwear. Had a friend with an ironic sense of humor delivered him, M.J. would have kissed his cherubic cheeks and positioned him on the deck with a view of the ocean and a permanent seat for cocktail hour. But the sky-blue card lodged between his chubby knuckles suggested a different kind of messenger: one who legitimately thought this smug little bastard was cute.

  As suspected, he was a “gifty” from Kelsey, there to invite M.J. to the Downtown Beach Club’s new-recruits luncheon on June 16.

  “Then tell me, lass,” she imagined the gnome saying, and with a leprechaun’s Irish accent of all things. “If I brought tidings of the Beach Club luncheon, what was in that black envelope you chucked in the rubbish?”

  “Good question, Smug Little Bastard,” M.J. told him. Then she hurried inside, rummaged through the recycle bin, and pulled out the answer.

  Dearest M.J.,

  I am currently en route to what I hope is no longer called “Gay Par-eee,” since I am unattached for the first time in fifty-one years and have a suitcase full
of lingerie (black, of course, because I am mourning).

  My Leo is gone and my boys are grown, so I’m going to live the rest of my life with the women who have helped me brave it. One of whom once said, “Men come first, so men go first,” and on May 18, 1962, had us promise that when the last of our husbands “croaked” we’d move to France. Of course, we didn’t believe her prediction would ever come true. But she was right. We’re all single now.

  The weight of my sorrow is crippling. When Leo died, he killed us both. Everything I have ever known is gone. And yet, I have to keep going and doing because there’s a young girl inside of me, tugging on my pant leg, reminding me that she’s in there and that her story isn’t over. I need to start a new chapter—one that’s all about her this time—and I need to start it now. Because every moment wasted is another blank page falling away and one less chance for her to leave her mark.

  M.J., I will miss the secrets and martinis we could have shared had I stayed. I will miss giving you unsolicited advice about your love life the way Liddy, Dot, and Marjorie gave unsolicited advice about mine. Most of all, I will miss watching your story unfold. As it does, don’t ignore the young girl tugging on your pant leg, help her become the woman she wants to be. Start by showing up at:

  The Good Book

  Saturday, June 4

  7:00 PM

  The key will get you in; discretion will keep you in.

  That’s right: don’t tell anyone. Not even the handsome doctor.

  Au revoir,

  Gloria

  The enclosed key had been the one Gloria wore the evening they met. Bronze, with an oval bow and two wards jutting from the shaft, it hung from a tarnished chain that smelled like pennies and Coco Chanel.

  M.J. lowered it over her head and gently positioned it in the dip between her clavicle.

  You are so not wearing that in public, said the young girl inside her, tugging.

  “I won’t,” M.J. promised as she held the key against her chest like a hug from someone she didn’t want to let go.