Here Today, Gone to Maui (14 page)

She slipped on oversize sunglasses and leaned back on her lounge. “Kinda like you, I was going out with this guy, supernice, totally into me, bought me lots of shit, but the sex just wasn’t that hot, you know?”

She turned to me and slipped her sunglasses down to make eye contact. Then she pushed them back up. “Plus, he was married, and even though he said he was thinking about leaving his wife, I had this feeling like he was leading me on. He was really rich, though. That was cool. But he was, like, a lot older than me, so I kept feeling like I was screwing my grandpa.”

I sucked on my mai tai straw, only to realize that the plastic cup was empty. “Yeah. That sounds exactly like my situation. Except for the grandpa bit.” I held up my hand to get the waitress’s attention. She wore blue board shorts and bright white sneakers. She raised her eyebrows as if to ask,
Another one?

“Just a Diet Coke,” I said (I had to drive). “And charge it to her room.”

“So, anyways,” Tiara continued, fluttering her pink nails. “We’re at the restaurant, Jimmy’s restaurant, and I’m just taking my first sip of champagne—the good shit, really expensive—and I hear this voice say, ‘Excuse me, is this your purse?’ ’Cuz it’d dropped off my chair. Jimmy wasn’t even my waiter, but he just, like, came to my rescue, like a knight in shining armor.” She took a deep breath, which made her chest even huger, and let out a long sigh. Then she slipped a finger behind her big sunglasses to wipe away a tear.

Old guy. Champagne.

“Wait a minute. The guy you were with—silver hair, distinguished-looking? Ate there a lot?” I remembered the sugar daddy. “Mr. Richardson?”

“Mr. Robertson.”

“Right. Jimmy said he was a regular. Brought in a new young woman every month.” Tiara looked stunned. “But maybe he cared about you,” I said quickly, not wanting to hurt her, in spite of everything. “Maybe he really would have left his wife for you.” (And, gee, isn’t that a romantic thought.)

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s just—if Mr. Robertson brought in all these other girls . . . how many of his dates do you think Jimmy picked up? Just the ones who dropped their purses on the floor?”

I remembered how Jimmy tricked Geoffrey into leaving me alone. It seemed cute at the time. “Maybe you didn’t drop your purse, after all. Maybe he knocked it over when you weren’t looking.”

There were two of us here; how many more were in California? And that waitering job: was it really for the extra cash? Or did he just do it to meet women?

“That first night—did Jimmy make love to you on the beach?” I asked.

Her face crumpled. “I had sand in my crack for days.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “What an asshole.”

“No!” She really looked upset by that assessment. “What Jimmy and I had was real.”

“Sure it was,” I muttered. “He just forgot to mention that he had another girlfriend.”

“I thought there might be someone else,” she said quietly.

“Why?”

“He was always changing plans at the last minute or hurrying off with some lame excuse. But I didn’t want to screw things up. I figured, if I just gave him time, he’d realize I was his perfect match. But . . .” She looked up from under her long lashes before dropping her gaze to her long legs. “I never wanted to hurt anyone. If I’d known you then . . .” She let the sentiment go unfinished. “Do you really think there were others?”

I thought back to my nights alone and my anonymous phone call to his office. “I always wondered about Ana.”

“Who?”

“You know, the office manager. He made a big deal about me not calling his office.”

“Me, too,” she said, nibbling on a long fingernail.

“I worried it was because he had something going on with Ana,” I said. “Or maybe he was juggling so many women that he didn’t want to get caught.”

“Do you really think there are more women?” Tiara squeaked, sounding hurt again.

My diamond—if it was mine—caught the light. How many rings could he possibly afford? “It was probably just you and me.”

On top of the tiki umbrellas, birds hopped around, chirping and pecking, hoping to score a stray potato chip, content with a lifetime of crumbs. The ocean breezes tickled us from behind. My eyes stung with tears; not just for the loss of Jimmy, but for the loss of hope: for a better man, a better me.

Tiara suddenly sat up and gasped. “What time is it?”

I checked my watch. “Almost six.”

She popped off the lounge. “I’ve got to get to check-in at the cabanas—I’m scheduled for an oceanfront massage.”

“A
massage
?”

She adjusted her mesh cover-up. “I scheduled it my first day here. I forgot to cancel it, which means they’ll charge me, anyway.” The cabanas were right behind us, at the edge of the beach, little teak rooms draped with canvas for privacy.

“I know Jimmy would want me to go,” Tiara said. “Especially since I’ve been under all this stress.” She paused to blink back tears. “It was supposed to be a couples’ massage. We were each going to have our own masseuse.”

“Nice,” I said sarcastically.

She touched my arm. “Why don’t you come? You can take Jimmy’s place.”

I tried to say no, but I was thinking,
Ew
.

“New,” I said.

“It would be fun,” she chirped, squeezing my arm (and pinching me just the tiniest bit with her talons). “We’d be like sorority sisters. Or sister-sisters.” On any other day, the thought of Beth and me getting a couples’ massage in Hawaii would have cracked me up.

“Jimmy would have liked that,” I said, making no effort to keep the bitterness from my voice.

“So you’ll come?”

“New,” I said.

That night, I dreamed about Joey Ardolino.

Joey and I went to the same high school, but we traveled in different circles. He was a second-string football player, a C student, a heavy-metal fan. I was a viola-playing honor-roll student, a baton twirler, and president of the French club. I’d known Joey since freshman year—our school wasn’t that big—and he seemed nice enough. We’d smile when we passed in the hall or say hi if we bumped into each other around town. He was undeniably cute, with lush lips, giant brown eyes, soft olive skin, and a wiry build, but I was hung up on a trombone player and didn’t give Joey a lot of thought.

Until junior year, that is. The second week of September we had an all-school assembly—a chance for club presidents to push their extracurricular offerings on the apathetic student body. (With yearbook photos scheduled for October, the pressure was on.) As president of the French club, I had three stomach-clenching minutes to say, “
Bonjour, mes amis,”
and describe the club’s upcoming activities—in French, no less. (Geeky, yes, but my adviser made me do it.)

It went pretty well—which is to say that nobody in the audience laughed or threw spitballs—and attendance at the next French-club meeting was respectable enough for me to consider the speech a success.

Joey didn’t come to the French Club meeting—I think he took Spanish—but he showed up at my locker the next morning, hands in the pockets of his faded blue jeans, work boots stubbing the ground. He wore a dark blue hooded sweatshirt even though the days were still summer warm, and he smiled shyly.

“You did really good yesterday,” he said. “You know—at the assembly.”

“Thanks,” I said, surprised. “I was nervous.”

“You didn’t look it.” He blushed and dropped his eyes to the ground.

“It helped that I had to speak French,” I said. “If I messed up, no one would know.”

He beamed at me as if that was the cleverest thing he’d ever heard (which, maybe, it was).

I pulled out a textbook covered with brown kraft paper and shut my locker. “I’d better get to class.” I wasn’t trying to ditch him; even then I hated to be late.

“I can walk you,” he said, apparently lacking my fixation on punctuality. “What class is it?”

“Trig.”

“Cool.”

Things went on like this for a couple of weeks. He’d show up at my locker, bat his thick eyelashes, make small talk (I mean, really small), and walk me to class. He thought it was cool that I played the viola, cool that I was in honors English, cool that I watched
Quantum Leap
.

We were a mismatched couple—him in his hoodie and work boots, me in my Docksider shoes, Gap jeans, and oxford cloth shirts. “I never would have put you two together,” my best friend, Regina, said—but the way she looked at him, long and hard, left no doubt that she would have been glad to have Joey lingering at her locker instead of mine. The trombone player did a double take when he saw us whispering outside the music room, and I didn’t bother trying to hide my smile.

After two weeks, Joey finally asked me out on a date. We went to his friend’s house and watched TV, and then we drove around town with his friend and his friend’s girlfriend until we found a shadowy spot to park behind the public library. There we spent a good half hour necking while Nirvana played on the radio.

The following Monday, I bounded into school with a big smile: I had my first official boyfriend. I’d been to formal dances and group movie dates, but this was the real thing. I expected some hand-holding to go along with our new status, perhaps a chaste peck when he dropped me off at trig class, but things continued as before: the random locker visits, the strolls down the hallway.

He was busy the next weekend—family stuff, he said—but he called me twice, and the next week he continued to spend quality time with me in the four-minute breaks between classes.

“I need to talk to you,” Regina told me at the beginning of orchestra one day. A harpist, ballerina, and aspiring anorexic, Regina was the only person I’ve ever known who could make me look laid-back. “It’s about Joey.”

“Mm.” I rested my viola on my shoulder and made a show of tuning the strings, which were pretty much in tune to begin with. In the past few weeks, my honors and music friends had warned me that Joey had been known to cut class and skip school on occasion. There was even a rumor that he’d been caught smoking pot after a football game sophomore year, but I didn’t believe it.

“Joey’s dating Katie Rothman,” Regina said. Her face was tight, anxious—I mean, even more than usual.

“No, he’s not,” I said calmly. “He’s dating me.”
Why can’t she just be happy for me?
I thought.

“But he’s dating Katie, too.” She detailed the chain of information, which began with Katie telling someone about her Saturday-night date with Joey and ended with us there in seventh-period orchestra.

“It’s not true,” I said, believing my words. “Joey likes
me
.” You’d think I’d be less trusting, considering that I’d so recently had a front-row seat to my parents’ divorce, but this was different. My mother was middle-aged, messy, sagging at the edges, while I was young, accomplished, and well groomed. Besides, I spoke French. On top of that, Katie was a little, well, quirky—an artist with a tiny lisp who favored tinted glasses and thrift-shop clothes. There was no way Joey could like her.

But Regina was right, of course. Joey was dating me
and
he was dating Katie.

“I’m so confused,” he moaned when I confronted him after school that day, his big brown eyes looking genuinely pained. “I didn’t plan it this way, you know? It just, like, happened. I like both of you. I mean, you’re cuter and sweeter, but Katie is exciting because she’s
different
.”

I held back a mouthful of biting comments because I was supposed to be the sweet one. If I called him a cocksucker, I’d be left with nothing but my cuteness to recommend me. And I wasn’t even all that cute.

The next day, Katie smiled when I passed her in the hall. She had a wide mouth and funky-crooked teeth. I thought,
What does she have to be happy about?

A couple of days later, while I was still (stupidly) waiting for Joey to make his choice, I ran into Katie in the lunch line (it was pizza day) and she said, “I guess we’ve got something in common.” She laughed sweetly. (And
I
was supposed to be the sweet one.)

I said, “Yeah, I guess,” and grabbed a salad because it got me out of line faster. If she was happy, it could only mean one thing: Joey had chosen her.

But he hadn’t. In the end, he drifted away from both of us. For the rest of high school, Katie continued to smile at me, while I did my best to avoid her.

The summer after my freshman year of college, I took a job at a local clothing store only to discover that Katie worked there, too. She had just finished her first year of art school; her short hair was now streaked with pink, and she had three holes in each ear.

“I hated you in high school,” I confessed one day while we were dressing a mannequin. (Katie wanted to glue a metallic stud to the mannequin’s nose, but I talked her out of it.)

“Why?” She looked genuinely confused.