Faking It (10 page)

"Wanna get something to eat?"

My reflexive smile-hiding turned into a contorted look of someone who'd just sucked a lemon, peel and all.

"Okay."

We walked down the street and around the corner to a restaurant just as tiny as the gallery yet almost filled to capacity.

"So what'd you think of the exhibit?" Devin asked me after we were seated.

I took in a breath, afraid of saying something stupid. "It was good."

I sounded like my students during their first peer review. Good essay. Good word choice. Good start.

"Just good?" he asked.

"I mean, I obviously don't have the eye that you have," I added.

"You don't need one to enjoy it."

"Well, I did--enjoyed it, I mean. What did you think of it?"

"I think it shows promise. The silk screened paintings looked a little muddy to me; other than that, though..." he trailed off.

"What do you mean by 'muddy'?" I asked.

"To me, silk screens colors should be clear, vibrant. These just looked messy. The colors were..." he tried to think of a word, "...I don't know,
muddy
. Like a kid mixing all his fingerpaints together, or dipping your Easter Eggs into every single dye."

I laughed; I used to do both when I was a kid.

His eyes sparkled. "I like your laugh, Andi."

Before I had a chance to react, the server came to take our orders. I chose the classic spaghetti and meatballs, while Devin ordered the primavera and roasted vegetables along with a glass of wine, which he named by brand and grape. "And a ginger ale in a wine glass for the professor," he said with a wink as he gestured to me. The server smiled at me politely before whisking the menu from my hands. After she left, Devin then turned to me, "Sorry, I didn't wanna call you
lady
, and
her
just sounded rude."

I nodded. "Word choice," I said. "It makes all the difference in the world."

"I've been really conscious of that lately."

Say something witty, say something witty, say something witty...

"So, have you been to Long Island lately?" I asked.

Definitely not witty. Not even a distant cousin of witty.

Devin shook his head. "Not in a few weeks. I used to have a client in Manhasset, but she stopped calling. I think she finally met someone and started dating him. The only other occasion I have is to see family, and I'm not much of a family guy."

"They know what you do for a living?"

He nodded and raised his eyebrows. "Oh yeah."

"And they disapprove," I said more as a statement than a question.

"Yeah." The server returned with our drinks and he practically gulped half of his upon his answer. Touchy subject, I'd gathered.

"Tell me about your family, and growing up on the Island. Did you like it? You came back, obviously, so you must have."

I sipped my ginger ale and coughed once. "Yeah, I liked it, I guess. I didn't have anything else to compare it to until I left. I've always loved being near the ocean--not
on
it, mind you, but near it. On it makes me a little seasick."

"What about
in
it?"

"Depends on how strong the undertow is. I almost got carried away by it when I was a kid. Thankfully, my older brother was close enough to pull me to safety."

"You really look up to your brothers, don't you."

I nodded. "They've always looked out for me. Even before my father died. They used to read to me and let me tag along with them and their girlfriends to Jones Beach, and they even used to let me help them record. We had a studio in our basement, and I used to come down and just listen to them for hours. I used to do things like adjust the mic stands if I could reach them, or I used to press the Record, Stop, and Play buttons on the tape machine, that sort of thing."

"How come you never took up an instrument yourself?"

Because I was no good at it,
I heard a voice say. "I tried to play the drums when I was a kid. And they both tried to teach me guitar, of course. But I didn't have the patience to learn. And they had all the talent. Not that I'm tone deaf or anything like that. I probably listen to music the way you look at a piece of art. I hear more than just the song; I hear all the little nuances of the composition."

"Well phrased," he said.

"I suppose I look at writing the same way. Writing was always my thing, from day one. And teaching, I guess. My brothers are lousy teachers," I joked.

"You're a very good teacher," he said, his tone serious.

"So are you."

"What do you write?"

"Mostly memoirs, personal essays. The kinds of things I'm having you read and write."

"I'd love to read it some day."

"
My
stuff?" I asked, taken back by the question, for some reason.

"Sure, why not?"

"It's been a while since I showed it to anyone," I said.
You mean, since you showed it to a guy,
I thought.
A guy you
like...

"I'll bet it's good."

"Maybe," I said. "Maybe you'll think it's muddy."

He laughed.

This was nice. Natural.

Our orders arrived.

"So tell me something about
your
family and
your
experience of the Island," I said as I used my spoon to twirl my spaghetti around my fork. "Do you have any brothers and sisters?"

"Two sisters," he said before biting into a forkful of pasta. "Mmmm," he said while chewing, "this is good." He then finished chewing and continued, "I'm the middle child. They both still live on the Island. One's a soccer mom and the other is an administrative assistant for some company. I wouldn't call us a close family. My dad..." he trailed off. "...my dad doesn't think too much of me."

I had gathered that much from his memoir.

"I'm sorry to hear that. If it makes you feel any better, I don't think my mom thinks too much of me."

"Then let's not waste a good meal on them," he said, holding up his wine glass and waiting for me to do the same. I picked mine up and raised it to his. "Cheers," he said.

"To beautiful things," I said, looking straight at him and averting my eyes at the last nanosecond.

"Hear hear."

We clinked glasses and drank. Devin paused before continuing, as if the moment actually moved him.

"As for life on the Island, well, I was your average kid who biked everywhere with his buddies and got suspended for smoking in the boys' room once and bought records at Record World."

"And you looked at art books and went to museums. Yep. Average kid."

"And you buried your nose in every other kind of book, I'll bet," he retorted, wearing a sly grin.

"More or less. I went through phases."

"Please tell me you didn't have Boy George posters when you were a teenager."

"Simon LeBon," I replied.

"He was cool."

"And you?"

"Charlie's Angels."

I rolled my eyes around. Of course. "No Janet Jackson or Debbie Gibson?"

"Debbie Gibson was way too young for me. Janet wasn't my kind of music."

So how did this average kid wind up sexually servicing women for a living? I wanted to ask him. At what point did he decide that this was a good career move? Had he mentioned it to his guidance counselor in high school? Did he read a brochure? Were there recruitment days? I said none of it. Instead, I continued to grill him on musical tastes and which high school he went to and why he preferred the city to the suburbs.

The time whisked by in fast motion, and at some point I stepped outside of myself and observed us, completely at ease with each other, laughing and sharing more stories about growing up on Long Island before moving on to my time in Massachusetts. As I recounted my first visit to Boston and getting lost trying to find the
Cheers
bar, my brothers visiting and insisting we make a pilgrimage to the Samuel Adams Pub (their Junior's--I sat there and drank water while they sampled beer as if at a wine tasting), my chest felt a pang for Boston and all its history and accents and asymmetrical set-up. And Devin listened, so attentive, so interested, so present. It was as if we were the only two in the restaurant. As if we were dating.

When the server brought us the check, Devin refused to let me pay for my dinner.

"Don't worry about it," he said.

"But Devin..."

"It's my treat."

"Thanks," I said, a hint of doubt in my voice as I tried to read the gesture: was this
I'm a nice guy and this was my idea so I'm paying
, or
we're on a date and I'm a gentleman so I'm paying
?

After dinner, when we exited the restaurant and stepped out onto the sidewalk, dusk setting in, he stopped and looked both ways, then turned to me.

"Wanna catch a movie or something?"

The invitation left me feeling both exhilarated and confused. What was going on here? Was he afraid to go home? Come to think of it, why wasn't he on a date with a client? He was always booked. And yet, I couldn't bring myself to confront him. If I reminded him about the contract, it meant that we'd have to stop the sessions, and I didn't want to do that. Plus, he'd have to pay me for services rendered, and frankly, I had no idea how to do the math on that. Besides, he could refuse, or insist that I pay him (which was far more costly) on the grounds that I had agreed to go with him (I could picture us on
The People's Court
--the old one, with Judge Wabner and Rusty the Bailiff--trying to explain the contract, "Well, you see Your Honor, we had this arrangement...").

There was also the possibility that this was not a date; just an innocent outing between friends, for lack of a better word. Or, perhaps even more frightening, it
was
a date. What if he kisses me? What if he wants to sleep with me? Would it count as part of our arrangement? Would he find out the real reason why I wanted and needed the instruction in the first place?

I opted to keep quiet.

"It's getting kind of late. I really oughtta get back to the Island. I have work to do tomorrow."

"You can always stay at my place--on the couch, I mean."

A sensation not unlike a swift kick in the stomach crossed with the deflation of a tire overtook me. I couldn't imagine anyone sleeping on Devin's couch. Sitting on it was one thing, but sleeping on it? It would protest, get a restraining order. Heck, calling it a "couch" seemed an insult.

"Thanks anyway. This was nice. I haven't hung out in the city like this in a while."

He rode the subway with me to Penn Station, and even offered to ride the LIRR with me in order to make sure I got home safely.

"I'm fine," I said. "Really, thanks."

"Okay, Andi. See ya."

I waited for a kiss, a hug...
something
. I'd seen him kiss Allison the textbook rep on the cheek. But here and now, nothing. Not even a handshake.

I rode home, staring past my reflection in the blackness of the window, replaying every word and movement of the day. A very young couple sat a few rows diagonally ahead of me, in the seats that faced the opposite direction. Her head rested on his shoulder, strands of blonde-streaked hair falling into her eyes, and he gingerly pushed them out and over her ear, without disturbing her sleep. He then kissed the top of her head and laid his hand on her leg before closing his own eyes, as if life was perfect in that moment for him. And it probably was. He looked a little bit like a younger version of Andrew.

Chapter Nine

Week Five of the Arrangement

T
HIS WAS NOT GOOD.

Ever since Thursday, I held vigil with my phone and telepathically willed it to ring; otherwise, I compulsively checked the answering machine to see if Devin called while I was in the shower, or out getting the mail, or running an errand. Nothing.

In the meantime, I tried to keep busy. I went to JonesBeach and tried to read, or to Starbucks with my laptop and tried to write, and yet again out to lunch with my mother. We sat facing each other in the Northport Restaurant & Diner, my mother commenting about how the necklines of my tops were getting lower.

My mother had always been rather striking--she was one of those moms who would wear slacks and a full face of makeup when she went food shopping, her hair neatly coiffed and her accessories all matching. When my father died, she spent months in bed, and let the gray roots grow out. Wrinkles appeared on her pained face seemingly overnight. And then, as she slowly rejoined the living and I progressed through my hellish adolescence, Mom did more than put on a happy face. She got cosmetic surgery, took up jogging, and updated her wardrobe. I, on the other hand, fought with frizzy hair, Snickers bars, and lots of pairs of leggings and hand-me-down Lee jeans. Growing up with two brothers, I'd never had much instruction on how to put an outfit together. You'd think Mom would've offered a hand. But all she gave me was criticism. Looking back, it was as if she and I were in competition for good fashion sense and appeal, and she would not be outdone.

Today, Mom was back to her put-together persona. Her hair now a lustrous silver bob and her makeup straight out of Lancome's exclusive line, she looked ten years younger and like she ran a corporation in the pantsuit she donned, the jacket resting comfortably her bare shoulders and silk camisole. The air conditioning was too high, she complained.

"So, what have you been up to?" she asked after we ordered.

"Just your typical summer stuff," I said, averting eye contact. "You know, summer reading, working on my essays, hanging out with friends."

"Anyone I know?"

"Oh, just my friends Maggie and Jayce," I said as the sane and insane parts of my brain held a quick debate on whether I should mention Devin. Guess who lost. "And I've been going into the city once a week to take a class. It's sort of a self-help class."

She looked at me, her eyes burning with suspicion.

"What kind of self-help?"

Aw, crap.
I regretted this instantly.

"Oh, you know, the usual."