Furiously Happy (36 page)

“Huh,” Maury replied.

“Would it be tax deductible if I came to see you for mental problems?” I asked. “Also, are you licensed to prescribe drugs? Because that's sort of a deal breaker.”

Victor shook his head. “It's like you're allergic to making sense.” He seemed a bit snappish, but probably because of the spider thing. I'd be pissed too if I'd spent years trying to save money and suddenly realized it could all be replaced by spiders and I'd be fucked.

I placed a soothing hand on Victor's sleeve and whispered, “
I hear and acknowledge your pain.
”

“This is not therapy,”
he barked.
“This is financial planning.”
He looked slightly frazzled and I considered slipping some of my Xanax into his coffee, but then I thought that maybe my possible new therapist would see me as being a little
too
free with drugs and so instead I just said, “Well, it's sort of both, isn't it?”

Maury changed the subject to funeral planning and wills and I blanked out a little. Personally, I've always been a little bit icked out by wills. Mostly because of the math involved. I'm fine with funeral planning and dead bodies and all that stuff. In fact, I recently saw a coffin in a magazine that I wanted that had “Hi coffin. You look nice” written on the side and I thought that was very clever and would put everyone at ease while they were grieving me, and so I told Victor that he could buy me that one, or if it was too expensive he could just buy me a cheap casket and stencil that shit on the side himself, but then Victor got all yelly about my talking about funerals again, probably because he's bad at arts and crafts. Or maybe because he knows that after going through the chipper-shredder I won't need anything more than a small cocktail shaker to hold what's left of me. In a way that would be nice though, because I'd finally get to go to an event where I was the thinnest person there.

Then I realized that Victor and Maury were staring at me and that they'd asked me a question about the will but I couldn't remember what it was so I just said, “When I die I'd like all my stuff to be left to my cat.” Then Victor just rubbed his temples and I explained, “Not really though, because there's
no
way Ferris Mewler is outliving me and Hunter S. Thomcat is way too irresponsible to take on that sort of money, but this way you can just tell everyone that I'm obviously insane if I'm leaving shit to a cat and then you can just handle all the will stuff yourself and I don't have to do any of this paperwork.
WE ALL WIN.
Except Hunter S. Thomcat, I guess. He'd better find himself a sugar mama or something.”

Victor sighed, but frankly I'm not really sure what he'd expected. It was my job to accidentally make money and his job to make sure that I didn't lose it when I was doing wobbly cartwheels in the parking lot after the bars closed. Our roles had been clearly defined.

Maury cleared his throat. “We can come back to wills later. How about retirement plans?”

Victor spent the next several minutes speaking in a combination of words and letters that I'm pretty sure meant “I have a retirement plan and it's quite good.”

Maury looked at me expectantly.

“I have a drawer I put change into.”

Victor put his head in his hands.

“Not quarters though. I use those for gum.”

Then Victor and Maury talked about dividends and stipends and split ends and then Victor woke me up an hour later to sign things that looked far too important for me to sign. I agreed to sign them if he'd take me somewhere for lunch where I could have some booze and Maury recommended a place in the same building, which was convenient because I was so overwhelmed I didn't think I could make it very far. In fact, when we got downstairs to the café the waiter asked what I'd like to drink and I said, “I would like booze, but I don't have it in me to make any more decisions today so you just pick something for me, will you?” He did and it was very strong and I suspect that Maury sends all of his easily overwhelmed clients there and that's probably “the Maury Special.” I laid my head down on the table and Victor wondered aloud how I would ever manage to live if he wasn't there.

“Well, my life would be much simpler,” I explained with perfect honesty. “I don't know how the eight remotes for the TV work so I'd never use it again, and when the lights burned out I'd just sort of leave them if I couldn't reach them with a chair, and when the computers broke I'd just throw them in a ditch, and when my car stopped working I'd probably just buy a donkey to ride into town to buy provisions from the gas station. I suspect I'd become accidentally Amish within a year. In fact, I bet the Amish are just a whole tribe of people who didn't have someone around to turn the TV on for them for several generations and finally said, ‘Fuck it. We're just going to live life this way.'”

“I'm pretty sure that's not even
remotely
accurate,” Victor replied.

“Well, I'd look it up online but I tried to update iTunes this morning and now my phone is frozen so I think I'm going to use it as a paperweight from now on.”

Victor stared at me.

“That was a joke,” I explained. “But, actually, I
did
manage to somehow delete half of my icons, so if you could help me out there I'd appreciate it. No rush though. I know you've had a tough morning.”

“You have no idea,” he said.

“Actually, I do. I mean, I realize that I'm ridiculously inept when it comes to … you know …
things
. Stuff like money and planning and complicated television sets. But what you
don't
think about is that I'm fantastic with people. Except when I'm hiding from them, obviously. And I'm there to make things lovely and good and to make sure that everyone is happy. Everyone except for maybe Maury, I mean. He seemed a bit flustered.”

“Yeah, there's a lot of that going around,” Victor replied. But he said it in a way that made me think that he agreed, or that he just didn't have a way to respond properly. “Just please do your best to be a little more financially responsible and we'll be fine.”

I nodded, kissed him on the cheek, and then excused myself to powder my nose, but then when I was walking down the hall to go to the bathroom I saw it. The giant Zoltar fortune-telling machine from the movie
Big
.

The same one that turned Tom Hanks into a successful grown-up. And so I immediately decided that I needed to have my fortune told and I ran back to Victor and told him I needed some quarters to see what our fortune was.

“You want take our money and throw it away on a fortune-telling machine?
Have you learned nothing today?
”

“Well, I learned you're pretty stingy with quarters. You know perfectly well I've spent all mine on gum. Plus, it's only fifty cents for advisement on our fortune. Or for getting a fortune. Something like that. And that's what this whole day has been about, right?”

Then he sighed and fished out a bunch of quarters.

The first fortune was for me and it was so perfect I ran back to the table to share it:

So basically Zoltar told me that I'm fiscally sound and that I'd wasted the whole day setting up retirement plans when I just needed to spend as much as I could out of my never-ending chest of money. Victor did not agree.

So I went to get his fortune so that I could prove how remarkably accurate it was. This was his fortune:

“See!” I said. “According to Zoltar, you've got tons of happiness in your future and it's all caused by your perseverance and clever ways of handling your domestic problems.”

“I think
you
might be my domestic problems.”

“Well, either way, everything's coming up roses, right?”

And then Victor laughed, in spite of himself. And that's how you know that you've got a real fortune. Because money can't buy the happiness of a good and understanding spouse. But it can buy a new phone when you accidentally drop it in the toilet after having too many Maury Specials.

PS: After dinner the waiter brought us fortune cookies and I was like, “FOUR FORTUNES IN ONE DAY! WHAT A BOON!” Victor said cookies weren't really the same thing as actual fortune, but I think Victor's underestimating the importance of cookies. But then we opened them and decided to just stick with Zoltar because mine said, “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible,” and I'm pretty sure that's supposed to be insulting, although it also implies that I'm somehow “responsible” and I think that proves I'd gotten the wrong cookie. But then Victor opened his and said, “Mine says, ‘Never argue with a fool.'”

“
What?
” I said. “
THAT'S WHAT OUR WHOLE MARRIAGE IS BASED ON.
”

Victor shrugged. “This cookie is telling me not to talk to you.”

I crossed my arms. “Well,
this
cookie is making me feel guilty and I don't even know what I've done.”

Victor nodded. “Well, the cookie has a point.”

“YOU CAN'T TELL US WHAT TO DO, COOKIES. YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW US,” I might have yelled.

And that's when we decided not to take advice from cookies anymore and Victor also tried to make me not take advice from fortune-telling robots near bathrooms but I said that's just throwing the baby out with the bathwater and that's bad financial advice for everyone. Unless your baby is really spendy. But still, I think it's a good idea to keep them even if they do end up costing you time and money because they're worth all the fuss because of the joy they bring into your life.

And Victor smiled and held my hand and agreed.

I don't think we were talking about the same thing, but it was nice to see him smile so I smiled back and we walked out of the restaurant to face the future together …

 … unknown, uncertain, dangerously entertaining, and
furiously happy
.