by Jill Kargman
“What?” Trip asked.
“Please tell us you’re opening your own restaurant,” Anne begged.
“Guys, we’re not there yet okay?” I semisnapped. “You’ll be the first to know,” I assured them.
“It’s okay, sweetheart.” Wylie smiled, taking my wrist gently. He matched our friends’ eager gazes in his direction. “It looks like . . . I might be getting funding from the McElroy brothers.”
Claps and whoops ensued.
“No way! That is MAJOR,” said Annie, who worked at New York magazine and instantly knew the legendary restaurateurs’ famed names. “Wylie, congrats!”
“Babe, it might not work out,” I cautioned, heeding his own advice to zip it until leases were signed and money wired. “I thought—”
“Well, it’s our friends, babe! If it doesn’t work out they’ll still love me, right?” he joked. “Plus I think it will turn out well. Things always work themselves out. And speaking of which, dinner is served.”
We started to walk toward the dining table, beautifully lit with votives and hurricanes, and fragrant with fresh-cut peonies brought by Gadi and Anne.
“Wylie, in case you all didn’t know, is the most optimistic person on the face of the earth,” I pronounced.
“It’s true,” Kira seconded. “He thinks the glass is half full even if it’s three-quarters empty.”
“So?” Wylie responded, carrying out platters of gorgeous appetizers, from his grilled Caesar salad to a mouth-watering Caprese to baked clams everyone immediate tore into. “It’s a good thing to be a positive person, what can I say?”
“You know, it’s true, Wylie, you are, like, the happiest person I know,” said Trip. “You’re like a happy pill with a face on it.”
“A hot face,” P.J. added. “Hazel, is he like James Franco’s doppelgänger or what?”
I smiled, looking at cute grinning Wylie, his hands behind his head. He was the happiest person on the planet. And he did look like James Franco, his brown eyes twinkling in the glass hurricane lamplight, twinkling and warm.
“What’s not to be happy about?” Wylie asked. “I got the best job in the world, the best friends, and of course”—squeezing my hand and lifting it—“I got my lucky charm, here. Things can’t go to pot when I got a girl like my Hazel.”
Choruses of awwwwws.
“Yeah well, you are always living in la-la land,” I said, sipping my drink. “It’s not all bliss all the time out there, ya know. There does happen to be a whole other world out there of the suffering.”
“Yeah thanks, I know that,” he scoffed, amused by my plunge into the darkness of reality. “She’s always the prophet of doom,” he joked as Kira giggled, knowingly.
“Too many apocalyptic games at your company,” Drew added.
“Babe, I’m just saying that despite all that mess out there in the cruel planet, we are all here together, with heirloom tomatoes from an Amish farmer who only comes here once a month!” Wylie said, his shiny eyes beaming. “We have the simple pleasures, and . . . I have you. You know, it’s like the end of Manhattan. When Isaac lists the things that make life worth living. The apples and pears by Cézanne, Groucho Marx, Willie Mays . . . Hazel’s face.”
He leaned over and patted my cheek. My heart skipped a beat, I must admit. We were both Woody Allen fanatics, and he effortlessly and brilliantly wove in parallels often.
“Thanks, my love. I love those tomatoes and this fresh mozzarella, and all that great stuff BUT, there’s also lists of catastrophic horrors!” I countered. “I mean, forget even the hideous injustices and tragedies abroad or even in our own country below the poverty line, I’m talking about right here, struggling with growing up, growing old.”
“Uh, it’s better than the alternative, Hazel,” Tate said. “It’s called birthdays or dirt nap.”
“Of course it is, but . . . maybe it’s the industry I’m in or maybe I’m just textbook Peter Pan syndrome or whatever, but I just can’t fucking believe I’m thirty!” I lamented, dropping my head into my hands.
“It’s great, trust me,” Anne attested, six months into her third decade. “You totally come together as a person at thirty. I think this is your year,” she added with a wink.
“What’s so weird to me is that there are celebrities now, like, accomplished award-wining celebrities who are so much younger than us,” Gadi said. “It drives me nuts.”
“Tell me about it,” Tate said. “Especially when you feel like a perv for diggin’ on them.”
“Please,” I scoffed. “You’re a man. You’re allowed to do that. It’s considered way more pervy when we lust after some infant.”
“Like who?” Anne asked, curious.
“No one for me,” I said, shaking my head. “I mean, I don’t like younger guys . . .”
“Awww, she only has eyes for Wy . . . ,” Anne cooed.
“. . . I like older guys,” I finished my sentence.
“Why on earth?” Anne asked.
“I don’t know, the boys don’t know anything. I like experience.”
“Fuck experience! I like a young butt,” Kira blurted, clearly buzzed.
“Nice,” Drew said, rolling his eyes.
“Okay so: you guys. Let’s go around the table and say who our celebrity crush is,” Anne moderated. “Pretend you get a free pass from your significant other and you could totally bone them.”
“Okay then, Anne, you’re first,” Trip commanded.
Anne considered her options for a moment.
“Um . . . okay . . . Orlando Bloom.”
“Barf.” Trip mock-puked. “Pretty boy.”
“He’s hot!” Annie countered, offended.
“Honey, if you can get Orlando Bloom to bang your pregnant ass then by all means free pass from me,” Gadi joked.
“Thanks, honey.”
“I’d do that Cullen guy from Twilight,” Kira said, flirtatiously twisting a lock of blond hair around her finger, as if Robert Pattinson, whose name she knew damn well, were across the room.
“Great, hon, you’ll have to knock down like one thousand seven hundred teenage girls to tap that,” Drew said confidently. “Mine’s Natalie Portman,” he added.
“What?” Tate practically squealed. “No, no, no, that’s all wrong. She’s too pretty, like a painting. You don’t want to fuck a painting. You want some hot piece of ass in a centerfold who will fuck your brains out. I’d take Pam Anderson in 1987. Are we allowed to do time-machine versions?”
“Oh, please,” I said holding down vom. “I feel like I’m at my office.”
“How ’bout you, Hazel?” P.J. asked. “Who’s the older guy?”
I looked down and turned a shade of cotton-candy pink, drawing breath to admit the name of the man who had slayed me since I was seventeen. Who snipped my heart into red ribbons. The star on the movie screen of my closed eyelids. The fantasy who had permeated my every thought of sex since teenagehood.
Wylie beat me to the punch. “It’s Finn Schiller. She’s obsessed.”
“Really?” P.J. recoiled, incredulous. “He looks as if he needs a shower.”
“Wait . . . EW! Finn Schiller from that band The Void?” Anne asked, her face contorted with revulsion.
“He’s not from the band,” I corrected, defensively. “He is the band. He writes every note of music, each searing lyric, plays every instrument.”
“I never got that; why even have a band name, why not just be Finn Schiller?” asked Tate.
“He’s modest. He doesn’t want to be famous, he doesn’t lust for limelight. Unlike the loser pretty pussies you guys crave. It’s so much more masculine to lurk in the shadows versus pose on the red carpet.”
“Wait, Finn Schiller had that big hit on MTV with the really sexual violent video—” Tate wondered. “That dude seems royally fucked-up.”
>
“NO YOU DI-IN!” I wagged my finger defensively. “Don’t go knocking my audio husband,” I said, winking at Wylie.
“Yeah but that was like his biggest hit, but he had so many even better, more smoldering, delicious songs than that,” Kira said, knowing of what she spoke. A closet megafan, my sister was also madly in love with him. “He is one of the best songwriters ever. Spin magazine said Shameful Ghosts is one of the top one hundred albums of all time.”
“Wait, he’s the guy whose songs are all like ‘I hate everybody/I’m going to bang youuuu,’ ” P.J. sang teasingly. “He’s an angry motherfucker.”
“Shut up,” I mock-slapped P.J.
I put my hand over my heart. “I love him.”
“He’s what people call a tortured soul,” Kira explained, pointing her thumb in my direction. “Florence Nightingale over here loves that shit.”
“No I don’t. I just am drawn to him, he’s always had this power over me, like he’s a six-foot magnet and my bones are coated in metal.”
“Okay . . . ,” Tate said, thinking I was officially a weirdo.
“All the guys you selected are total fetuses!” I said, shaking my head. “They don’t have the emotion, the rage, the passion that Finn does.”
“What, do you know the guy?” Drew asked.
“No. But his music is so raw, so fiercely candid I sometimes feel like I do. Plus he’s turning forty, so you know he has more depth and soul than the zygotes you’re naming.”
“Oy vey,” Trip said. “Glenn Close, stage left!”
“She is his number one fan, à la Misery,” Kira said. “Minus the hobbling.”
“Yeah, tied with you,” I retorted. “Plus I’m a good kind of fan—devoted but with a normal happy life. It’s not like I’m gonna go boil rabbits on his stove.”
“Speaking of dinner, let’s eat while the food is still hot. I’ll bring in the lasagna. And the rabbit stew for Glenn,” Wylie joked, getting up from his chair, patting my head sweetly as he walked by. He entered the kitchen, and I watched how he caringly took out the rest of the food, filling the room with an incredible mouthwatering bouquet of scents. He glanced in my direction and I smiled. I was starving. And how many girls’ boyfriends can deliver a feast fit for a queen? Very few.
“Yum, that smells amaaazing, Wy,” my sister gushed.
“Hey, it’s not every day the love of your life turns thirty,” Wylie said.
Again our gang erupted in echoes of touched cooing. I smiled. Cute. Very cute. As Wylie and P.J. filled the plates with food, I leaned back in my chair and looked around the table. The tea lights flickered, my friends, my sister, and brother-in-law laughed and sipped wine as vintage Stones played. The food was amazing, the warmth of everyone’s laughter so comforting, and even though I was leaving my twenties in the Urban Outfitters dust, birthdays didn’t get much better than this.
Chapter 4
When a fantasy turns you on, you’re obligated to God and nature to start doing it—right away.
—Stewart Brand
We climbed into bed, and Wylie snuggled beside me in his white T-shirt and boxers. “I just realized something,” he said with a coy glance in his chocolate-kiss eyes.
“What’s that?” I asked, noticing the glimmer that meant he wanted to have sex.
“I’ll never sleep with someone in their twenties ever again after tonight.”
I laughed. “You better not!” I faux-threatened with a finger in his face.
“I wouldn’t want to,” he said, seriously, touching my arm. “I have you. I love you so much, sweetheart. Now more than ever. Really.”
I leaned over and kissed him. Our warm mouths grew hotter as we rolled over and he climbed on top of me.
“Babe, let me hop in the shower quickly, okay?” he asked. “Actually, why don’t you come with me?”
But I’d already showered before dinner and was actually exhausted and cozy on the bed, toasty under my Bloomingdale’s Number 6 level down comforter. Which is basically like a slice of lava on top of you and could fry penguins in Antarctica.
“It’s okay, I’m so snuggly,” I said, running my hands through his hair as his chin rested on my chest. “You hop in and you can shag me rotten after.”
“Done!”
He hopped up and took his clothes off. Even though nearly three years had passed, I always drew breath a bit when I saw his perfect physique. Not too big, not scrawny, just perfect, normal. Sweet. The tall chef with a Roadrunner’s metabolism. He turned to smile at me before he walked into the bathroom. I heard the shower water being turned on and the curtain move to the left as he climbed in to lather up, as per his nightly ritual. He loved night showers—he usually got home from work feeling like he’d been stewed in garlic and herbs, but to me he was always yummy spices from all over, like he had the world’s fields all inside of him, a potpourri of all his recipes.
As I lay there, too tired to even leaf through a catalog, let alone my Time Out New York magazine, I tossed a few from my pile by my suitcase so I would have reading for the plane ride. As my eyelids grew heavier, the blazing GE lightbulb didn’t feel so “soft white.” The wine was definitely causing my head to throb, and I decided to haul my sleepy ass out of my toasty bed to flip off the lights and stagger back to lie down in the darkness.
Oh. My. Fucking. God.
To my utter and complete shock, as my eyes hit the ceiling, they didn’t see the normal eggshell paint turned gray with nocturnal shadows. Instead, as my pupils dilated in the night, I saw above me that Wylie had taken little glow-in-the-dark stars and spelled out three little words on my ceiling.
They were: MARRY ME, HAZEL.
My heart started racing faster than a shooting star. Sweat poured from my brow as I started to pant. Oh my god. My youth really was behind me. Now I was thirty. Now I’d be married. Now everything I knew of life would change. But . . . I didn’t want it to. Not yet! Oh FUCK! What was wrong with me? Didn’t every girl in the world pray for a gesture like this? In luminescent constellations no less? I thought I was going to suffer a heart attack. Right then and there. What do I do? Ohmygodohmygod. I looked at the phone. Too late to call Kira. I panted.
I couldn’t bear to say no.
But I wasn’t prepared to say yes.
The faucet turned off. The last of the water stopped dripping. My pulse was a quasar’s velocity. I heard the curtain pushed back open as the towel dried my beloved’s skin. But by the time he turned the door handle open, he found me, on my side curled up, eyes closed.
“Haze?” he asked. “Hazel? Are you asleep, sweetie?”
I said nothing, lying in fetal position, forcing myself to breathe slowly as my back gently moved in staged slumber. I even conjured a semisnore for reality’s sake.
“Shoot. Okay,” he said to himself, leaning next to me to kiss my allegedly slumbering forehead. “Good night, sweetie.”
In the blackness of my Oscar-winning dead-duck performance, I wondered what the fuck was wrong with me. The dream proposal. “Cut out in little stars,” Romeo and Juliet–style.
And typical Wylie, the king of details, the guy who tied the caviar beggars’ purses with a thin bow made of chive, even speared my heart with the punctuation he employed in his celestial would-be proposal. In MARRY ME, HAZEL, the comma was a comet.
Chapter 5
True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.
—William Shakespeare
The next morning I woke up and began darting around in the darkness to get ready for my flight. I quietly gathered my toiletry kit, extra shoes, and baseball hat to shove in my mostly packed suitcase. I tiptoed, trying not to wake sleeping Wylie, and glanced at the ceiling, where his ignored proposal was still stuck, only not as brightly aglow, as early morning light was jus
t starting to stream through the perimeter of our blackout shades. I exhaled in guilt and opened the bedroom door to sneak out and closed it behind me softly. I walked into the kitchen with my bags and peeled a fluorescent pink Post-it from the pad by the phone and scribbled on it in my trademark thin Japanese architecture pen and stuck it on the fridge door.
“Wy honey, thank you for such a beautiful bday dindin, angel. I love you xoH” it read. I looked at it against the matte silver door surface and thought of him waking up alone with the pale snot-green plastic galaxy above his sleepy head. I picked up my luggage and went downstairs.
The traffic to JFK was mercifully nonexistent as my Town Car flew down the highway, getting me to the terminal in plenty of time. The skies above looked rather threatening, but I’d signed up for texted alerts should my plane be delayed. The only problem was, I was so anal about travel, what with interminable security lines and all, that often by the time I received word of a delay I was already in Sbarro, jamming down a slice. But as this was the crack of dawn my tummy wasn’t quite up for pizza, so I hoped to happen upon some sort of nonvile breakfast sandwich in my two-hour sojourn to the gate.
“Good morning, Ms. Lavery,” said the chipper gal at the counter. Clickety clackety click clack went her secret counter-shrouded keyboard as I looked around at the infusion of fanny-pack-wearing travelers toting wheely luggage and neck pillows. “Anything to check this morning?”
“Uh, yeah, I have one duffel bag here,” I said, plopping it on her metal scale. I wasn’t a big packer. Kira literally needed four enormous Vuitton suitcases to even go for a weekend wedding within a striking distance of two hours and was always appalled by my small army tote. But I liked packing light, it was almost like a fun challenge to make all the outfits from a few separate staples. I liked my freedom though and didn’t want to lug my compact but still heavy bag, so I was happy when it was tagged and taken from me.
“Now, Ms. Lavery, I see here that you have several hundred thousand miles and we really don’t have a full flight this morning, so I can put you in for an upgrade, since this is a full-fare ticket,” she offered.