Getting Over Jack Wagner (7 page)

“No, wait. Are you kidding me?” Andrew says. “Ferreting? Since when?”

I can sympathize with this. I am familiar with the surreal, disjointed feeling of having discovered a word that's common to the rest of the world but which you've never heard before. It's like the first time I encountered “mirage” at the age of eighteen. It can be truly disconcerting. You start to wonder what other common words—the equivalent of table, chair, cake—have been narrowly missing your life for twenty-six years.

“Let it go, Andrew. You get the idea,” I say, settling deeper into the cushions. “She was picking in his goatee. Then she was looking in his ears. Then she was checking out his nails…”

“You mean grooming,” he interjects. “She was grooming him.”

“Fine. She was grooming him. Whatever. It was disgusting.”

He yawns, returning to my orbit. “Yeah, that sounds pretty gross.” I hear the thump of the dictionary closing, then another Cracker Jack crunch over the line. “So you pulled the plug?”

“I guess. Almost.” I glance at the screen, where Fleetwood appears to be starting the 9:30
P.M.
decline.

“How did you break it to him?”

“I didn't, really. It was a weird moment. We were in his car. It smelled like lasagna.” The thing is, Andrew will understand the gross, insignificant significance of the lasagna detail without my having to explain it. It's good to have friends like this. “I told him I needed to go home and unwind.”

“Ooohhh!” He makes the annoying, missed-goal crowd noise again. “The fatal Eliza-unwind move. So have you?”

“What?”

“Unwound.”

“Not exactly. I went with Hannah to that herbal tea place that stresses me out.” I consider asking his opinion on what Hannah said about me dating guys I know I'll never get close to, but decide against it. There are certain places Andrew and I just don't go. It's one of the main differences between male and female bonding, I think: with men, all you have to do is joke around, watch
Seinfeld,
and toss a Frisbee to affirm the strength of your friendship; with women (after the initial PMS confessional in the ladies' rest room) it gets harder, quieter, denser, until emotions are required of almost every conversation.

“So where'd you go this afternoon?” I ask, opting out.

“Nowhere,” Andrew says, crunching. “Who goes out on rainy Sunday afternoons?”

“Where were you then?”

“Here.”

“Then where were you when I called?”

“Oh.” His chewing pauses, as if caught in the act of something. “I was here. I mean, for the most part I was here.”

“You suck at lying. You were home when I called you. Why didn't you pick up?”

He's quiet for a long moment. Too long. “Well, Kimberley was over.”

I start to get a queasy feeling.

“We were kind of…”

The picture is suddenly, painfully clear: Andrew and Kimberley in the throes of passion and/or legal debating, the phone ringing, Andrew hesitating, Kimberley whispering something like, “If you let it ring, I'll make it worth your while,” and then the two of them falling on the bed half dressed as my message plays naively in the background, sounding more desperate, I'm sure, than I remember it.

“Andrew, I think I gotta go. Fleetwood's not looking so good.”

 

Dreams Come True, Inc. is the last place I feel like being on Monday morning but there I am, riding the elevator, bright and early. “Bright and early” is actually a popular inter-office phrase, along with “How are
we
today?” and “Happy Monday!” (or Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.) and, occasionally, “Howdy-do!”

Dreams is a happy workplace, a family of a workplace, a workplace that exists in the plural “we.” On birthdays, we all crowd around the desk of the VIP and sing like those chipper, bebuttoned waiters and waitresses at franchise restaurants. Then there's card opening, cake eating, sometimes candle blowing and wish making. It's a wonder we get any work done.

I step off the elevator at Floor #12 and slouch unhappily down the posh hall to Dreams. It's hard to miss: the door is plastered with a poster of a tan, blond couple sitting in a heart-shaped hot tub. The tub is filled with rose petals, and the blondes are gazing at each other over the rims of their garish pink drinks. Across the dusky sky are the words:
Ever feel like your life is…missing something?
Like every morning for the past almost-two years, I bitterly shove open the door, resolve to find a new job tomorrow, then force a smile on my face when I'm confronted by Dreams's front receptionist: Beryl.

Beryl is about sixty years old and looks exactly as a Beryl should: round, pink-cheeked, twinkly. Beryl is of an age when people called boyfriends “fellows,” an age when people were named, well, Beryl. She's also of an age when people had warm, patient telephone manners; problem is, she has no modern-day telephone savvy. This combination makes for a lot of cheerful “Good mornings!” and good-natured “Oops! What the dickens?” while staring, perplexed, at the blinking lights of her phone pad. I would be willing to bet that Beryl's children gave her a VCR one Christmas and it's never left the box.

“Happy Monday, Eliza!” Beryl sings. I check out her pin. Beryl has an endless supply of pins that appear, one each morning, at the top of her collar. Today: a sterling silver bunch of grapes with smiley faces.

“Happy Monday,” I return. “Cool pin.”

“Well, thank you!” Beryl smiles, then her smile heightens to a beam. “Guess who got a promotion this weekend?”

I don't have to guess, but I do, for her sake. “Donny?”

Donny is Beryl's twenty-eight-year-old, unmarried grandson that she has been trying to set me up with for almost two years. I don't think it's any special credit to me; all the other twenty-somethings in the office just happen to have long-term boyfriends, boyfriends who call the office and come to staff parties and even send flowers, which creates a major buzz of inter-office gushing and sniffing. My boyfriends are a different brand. They're not long-term. They don't make phone calls in the daytime. They surely don't send flowers. Beryl probably doesn't even know they exist, which makes me an eligible bachelorette for the Donster.

I have been avoiding the Donny date for a couple of reasons:

• a) He's twenty-eight, and apparently has been single for almost two years. Not necessarily bad but, you know. Pause for caution.
  
• b) He's not a musician—which I know sounds simplistic and lame—but, to make matters worse, he is a businessman. It's not so much the simple fact of his being a businessman that makes me wary. It's everything that I assume must have preceded this: every ironed sock and slick interview and childhood dream (i.e., did Donny have an actual passion to become a businessman? or just no passion to become anything else? and which is worse?).
  
• c) The issue of Donny's automatic PCT: pop culture translation.
  

A person's PCT is the first celebrity—from movies, music, TV—who comes to mind when you hear their name.

Elton = John.

Clint = Eastwood.

Of course, a PCT can vary based on a person's age and experience. In some circles, Johnny = Depp. In others, Cash or Carson. But no matter who you are, there's no getting around Donny's PCT: Osmond. One might argue that he's probably presenting himself to the public as Don rather than Donny by now. But really, Don isn't much better. (PCT = Ho.)

Personally, I don't want a boyfriend with a PCT too obvious. In that way, Karl was nice. Jung, yeah. Sagan, maybe. But Karl's name didn't make anyone leap to mind the way Donny's does. In fact, I think Karl was the first and only Karl I've ever known. Karl was a good name, a clean slate of a name, a name free of any glaring associations—pop culture or otherwise—and therefore one I can eventually file away with Zach and Jordan and Travis and every other male name I dated once and am therefore unable to ever date again.

“That's great,” I tell Beryl. “Tell him congratulations for me.”

“You could tell him yourself,” she says, giving me a great big wink. “He's a real catch, our Donny. He has so much drive!”

“Drive?” I know, for sure, that Beryl did not come up with “drive” on her own. I have to wonder, then, who she picked “drive” up from. Donny's mother? Donny's father? Donny himself? This possibility is too horrific to dwell on.

I stare at the smiling grapes, mumble, “Maybe someday, Beryl” for the umpteenth time, and scurry in the direction of my desk.

On the way, I peer into the posh, monstrous office of our boss who, not surprisingly, isn't in it. Our boss is rarely on the premises. Her real name is Marian, but I have secretly renamed her the Queen Mother. The QM is sleek, single, has fingernails long as clothespins, and is always traveling—which I suppose, if you run a travel agency, is the main perk. She calls in at least once every day from wherever in the world she happens to be partying (runways, beaches, tiki bars) and when she returns, brings us little presents of chocolates and key chains bought in international airports, like a surrogate mom.

I arrive at my desk, drop my bookbag, and stare down at the mess of travel brochures. It is strange, being poor and working in this business. On the one hand, I am immersed in a lifestyle that feels unreal to me: expensive hotels, exotic resorts, luxury cruises. At the same time, all that unreal stuff intensifies what
is
real: my brown-bottomed coffee cup, my bitten-down nails, my “Joke a Day” calendar (an office birthday gift, “because you're the funny one!”) and worst of all, the poster of a tanned, perfect-bodied woman lounging on a St. Barth beach that hangs, unfortunately, just above my desk.

I wave to Maggie, the Travel Agent in the cubicle next to mine. She flutters her fingers at me and points exaggeratedly to the receiver, confirming what I already see: she's on the phone.

“I have that information on Paris right here, Mr. Warner,” Maggie chirps. “Could you hold for a second while I put my finger on it?” She puts Mr. Warner on hold and breezy, tropical “hold music” seeps from her handset. “Happy Monday, Eliza,” she smiles at me.

“Happy Monday, Maggie,” I intone. It's easy to feel a little like a cult member at Dreams.

Maggie starts riffling through a file cabinet, humming to herself. Maggie is pretty and nice. All the Travel Agents are pretty and nice. They are the kinds of women all girls were supposed to grow up and become, women with pressed blouses and painted fingernails. They grew up on the Main Line, went to prep schools, and can spend hours discussing the latest innovations in strapless bras and fat-free yogurts. They all have boyfriends, of course, and eventually engagements, office showers and weddings and honeymoons. (Aha!
That's
why so many pretty, nice women with boyfriends end up working at Dreams: easy access to honeymoons!) Anytime one of the Agents gets married, I include a tidbit in our company newsletter. Usually it's a photo of Agent and “hubby” on a tropical beach with the caption: “Dreams's own travel agent gets dreamy!” or something like that. We call it PR.

Maggie resurfaces with folder in hand, sips from the can of Diet Coke that is forever on her desktop, and reconnects with Mr. Warner. “Thanks for holding, Mr. Warner! We have hotel rates starting at two hundred and thirty—that's U.S. dollars—for a standard double…”

I locate my laptop in the midst of the mess that is my desk—old files, stray photos, vacation guide books and videos, a paperweight shaped like a pineapple, a book called
Words That Pay!
—and turn the computer on. The screen glows a greenish gray. It's not like a TV screen, sucking you in instantly with brightness and happiness and volume. A computer screen starts slow, blank, a gradual scattering of icons in the emptiness.

Today's task is to finish the article I started on Friday: “Passion on Puerto Vallarta!” But first, coffee. I head to the “kitchen,” really just a strip of Formica in the back of the office with a coffeemaker, sink filled with empty cups, and mini-fridge stocked with cases of Diet Coke and hunks of leftover birthday cake. When I walk up, Tracy the Travel Agent and Aileen the Travel Agent are nibbling from last week's chocolate frosted, while Aileen describes the dinner her boyfriend Leonardo (PCT so obvious it's not worth mentioning) cooked her Saturday night.

“Hey, Eliza!” they greet me, then look down at the cake and blush. “Never too early for cake, right?”

“Definitely not.”

“Want some?” Tracy asks prettily.

“Thanks. I think I'll start with coffee.”

“Do anything interesting this weekend?” Aileen asks nicely.

The Agents are always interested in my weekends. I think, because I have a nose ring, they suspect I have a really wild weekend lifestyle involving raves and cops and VW buses. They'd be disappointed to know I usually log several reruns of
Alf.
I do, however, frequent The Blue Room. Ever since I told them about the band I saw there wearing nothing but thongs, they've regarded me and my life with a mixture of fear and fascination.