How to Meet Cute Boys (20 page)

“That’s funny.”

“Thanks. So Stephen proceeded to tell this story about some woman who checked in last summer wearing dark sunglasses and all-black,
and stayed in her room for two weeks with the heat on.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Exactly. And when her
DO NOT DISTURB
sign had been on the door for days and nobody had seen her, they finally opened her room and found that she’d overdosed on
heroin. Total bummer, right?”

“Gross.”

“I know. But here’s the thing, so Stephen with a
ph
is telling this story, and I’m starting to feel a little light-headed from the martini I’m drinking, which, mixed with the
heat, has become a toxic substance and is congealing my brain.” I laughed. “So I say, ‘Oh, well, don’t worry about me and
Max. We don’t do smack. We just smoke the chronic.’ ”

“That’s not funny.”

“I
know
. What was I thinking, right? Wait, it gets worse. So Stephen looks at me and goes, ‘Are you aware that the gentleman sitting
next to you’—he motions to my left at this sunburned/mustached/mirrored Aviator sunglasses guy—‘is on the vice squad in downtown
Los Angeles?’ ”

I rolled my eyes at Max. “I was so embarrassed. And nobody laughed. I think that cop guy is going to stake us out.”

“That’s great, B,” Max said.

“Wait, are you mad?”

“No.”

“You usually think it’s funny when I make an ass of myself.”

“I’m just a little out of it.”

After dinner, at least, Max rose to the occasion. We got back to the room and he dug around in his backpack and pulled out
a Ziploc baggie filled with tea lights. He scattered them around the room, looking a little sheepish.

“Too corny?” he said, lighting them with his Zippo.

“I like corny.” I stretched out on the bed and watched the flames make jumpy patterns on the ceiling.

“Well, since there’s no TV …” he said.

“And no smoking …” I said.

“Ben, what are we going to do?”

We found activities that I deemed most suitable. And Max finally seemed to relax. After, I was snuggled up in his arms, and
he said, “So I told my friends at work about our trip, and how we’re going to get massages and marinate in the Jacuzzi and
all that. And the girls were all, ‘Oh, I wish
I
were your girlfriend.’ ”

I tried not to cry out. Out of nowhere, he’d said the G-word. Exactly the way Kiki had predicted. But even though my heart
was doing cartwheels of ecstasy, I kept my cool. I said, “I guess they’re going to have to get in line.”

There was this long pause. Then Max said, “I guess.”

Suddenly he didn’t seem so relaxed.

“Well, I’m …” I was about to say,
I’m your girlfriend
. But maybe I wasn’t out of the woods quite yet. So instead I said, “Maybe
I
want to be your girlfriend, too.”

“Oh B.” He pulled me closer, gave me a little hug. “That’s a really big topic.”

“I know,” I said. Except I didn’t know. So I said, “Wait … I’m sorry, what was the point of your story?”

“The point?” He pulled back and looked at me. “Look, B, I’m not seeing anybody else if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I’m not asking. I just—I guess I’m asking if we’re on the same page.”

“I think we both know where this is going.”

He said it so confidently I shut up for a second. I didn’t want to push.
He’s not seeing anyone else,
I thought.
That’s good
. But for some reason I couldn’t let it go. I wanted to hear the word
girlfriend
. I
had
to.

“What if I saw somebody else?” I said. “What would you do?”

“I would assume that you didn’t want to be with me. I would be upset, but the truth is that you can’t make anyone do what
they don’t want to do.”

“That’s it?”

“What would you want me to do? I’m not going to challenge some guy to a duel.” He laughed softly and poked me in the shoulder.
“En garde.”

“But would you be miserable? Would you want to die?”

“I don’t know about
die
. Look,” he said, fiddling with the ends of my hair, “if you want to be with someone, you make the time. But if you want to
see other people, I think you should, right?”

Now I was confused. I wanted to be his girlfriend. Instead I was getting his permission to date someone else. I pulled my
head away and looked at him.

“But I don’t want to see anybody else,” I said.

“Then we’re on the same page.” Max gave me a kiss on my forehead. And promptly fell asleep.

After staring at the clock for an hour, I was about to drift off when …

“I don’t think I feel well.”

It was Max’s voice coming through the pitch black.

“Do you want me to get you some water?” I propped myself up on an elbow and reached for his shoulder.

“No.” It was muffled.

“Advil? Do you have a headache?”

“Hunh-unh.”

“Stomachache?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“I think I may be coming down with something.”

Selfishly, I couldn’t help but think,
On our weekend?

Then he said, “I need some juice.”

I had to break it to him about the room service. And no, there was no minibar, either. But even though I was finally exhausted,
I offered to drive Max to a liquor store. We got up and dressed, and proceeded on this morbid little pilgrimage around downtown
Palm Springs, past the spring-break-esque partyers, past the drunken disco dads and their trophy wives, until we found a gas
station with a soda machine on the outskirts of town. Max got a Sprite, and he drank it in silence while we headed back to
the hotel.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” I said.

He said, “Let’s not make a big thing out of it.”

It was the boyfriend/girlfriend talk. Had to be.
Good God,
I thought, looking out the window at the Joshua trees sliding silently by,
why did I initiate The Talk?

“This isn’t cream, Ben.”

It was the following morning, and I was browsing through the free Palm Springs magazine, chock-full of ads for various golf
courses so minty green they looked like they were spray-painted. Max was staring into a creamer with the look of a man who
had just been horribly betrayed. He said, “This is nonfat milk.”

Although the hotel didn’t feel the need to provide a single convenience, their semisincere yet somehow passive aggressive
attempt to make it up to us was to place a tray of hard fat-free bran muffins and lukewarm coffee outside our room in the
morning. I don’t really like bran muffins, but I was trying to be a trouper so I took a couple of bites. Not too many though,
since Max has never seen me in a bikini before and I didn’t want to look bloated.

“That sucks,” I said.

“I can’t not have my coffee,” he said, with complete earnestness.

“Well, but you
have
coffee.”

“With nonfat milk. In my world, that’s not coffee.”

“Okay, let me call,” I said brightly, dialing the front desk. Stephen with a
ph
answered, probably wondering if we needed a new bong, crack pipe, syringe …

“Hi, this is Room Two-Oh-Four,” I said. “Do you by any chance have real cream for the coffee? Really?
No
cream?” I looked at Max and he was making this circular motion with his hand. “What about whole milk. Do you have that?”

Max shook his head.

“Oh, okay, never mind, we need actual cream.”

Stephen said there was a grocery store about five miles away. “Where is that?” I scrambled for a pen. “Make a right. Yeah.
Two lights. Left. Ummm-hmmm. Right. Right. Left. Wait, how far away is this? Uh-huh. Right. Next light. Okay, thanks.”

I hung up. Max looked like he’d just swallowed the whole world’s worth of misery.

“I’ll get it,” I said.

“No, I’ll get it,” he moaned, lying back down on the bed. I took this to mean he still wasn’t feeling well.

“Come on, it’s fine. I’ll just go get it. It’s only, like, five minutes away.”

I got dressed and grabbed the keys to the car. Outside, it seemed even hotter than it had the day before, and the steering
wheel burned the palms of my hands while I drove. I passed a bank that had one of those giant thermometer things outside and
the red line was spiked on 114 degrees. Squinting at the street signs, I realized I couldn’t have been more lost. It was crazy,
because all of Palm Springs is basically this grid, but all the streets are named things like Rio Noches and Rio Dios and
the Spanish-style buildings all look exactly the same. Finally I found the store just as the sweat was starting to streak
down the front of the sexy little summer dress I’d bought special at Fred Segal. Inside, I realized I’d never bought cream
for coffee in my life since I drank it black.
Is half-and-half cream?
I wondered.
Or is that like half cream and half something else that in Max’s world won’t really be cream?
I didn’t see anything with just
CREAM
on it, and I started to panic. His whole day and my entire life’s happiness depended on buying the right thing. So I bought
half-and-half, whipping cream, and actual whipped cream in hopes that one of them would be okay.

I got back, palms burned and pits sweaty, and laid the purchases before Max, explaining that I wasn’t sure which one he would
want.

“That’s so cute,” he said.

Then he held up the half-and-half and poured an inch in his coffee. I was relieved to see that he looked half happy.

I was starting to suspect that a weekend away was meant for people who were much more comfortable with one another than Max
and me. Things just seemed
off
. I felt silly brushing my teeth next to him, putting on makeup in front of him, trying to decide what to wear while he was
in the room. After the cream debacle, Max again wasn’t feeling well, so he decided to take another nap. I said I’d be relaxing
by the pool when he was ready to face the world. The temperature was just this side of hell but I was happy enough standing
in the water and browsing through the stack of magazines I propped on the adobe tiles at the side.
Max will come out soon,
I told myself, browsing through
Elle
. Then I flipped through
InStyle
. Then
Vogue, Glamour, Cosmo, Allure,
and
Filly,
which I think is important to read since they pay my rent. By then I could feel a sunburn spreading over my shoulders and
the back of my neck. I didn’t want to end up looking like Mr. Vice Squad detective, who came out of his room to glare at me
with his beet red stomach hanging over his Speedo, so I headed in to see how Max was doing.

He was out cold. I checked his forehead, but it felt cool. I hovered, trying not to wake him, but I was unsure what to do
with myself. I’d done the swimming, I’d done the magazines. It was too warm to try the sauna. I could have called Kiki, but
that seemed like too much of a defeat. So I wandered around the room, tidying things up even though I’d already put all my
stuff neatly away. I was getting more and more desperate for Max to wake up. Restless, I went for a walk around the hotel,
peeking into the gift shop where they sold sea-foam green robes monogrammed with the hotel initials. Stephen, who worked the
cash register—in addition to being the front-desk guy and the bartender and the towel boy—eyed me suspiciously. “Haven’t seen
the young man all day,” he said.

“He’s not feeling well.”

Stephen was making me nervous—the guy was everywhere and I was afraid he’d summon the cop to check my body cavities for stolen
towels—so I went back to the room. I tried making innocent little noises to rouse Max, casually knocking over the ice bucket,
which made a much bigger racket than I thought it would. But it didn’t work.

“I knocked over the ice bucket,” I said. He didn’t move.

“The cop is here and he intends to strip-search me with a flashlight so he can peer into all my body cavities.”

Still nothing.

“Then he’s going to do you.”

Max stayed asleep.

“I think I’m in love with you,” I said, thinking this certainly would startle him into consciousness.

It didn’t.

Of course, that was a stupid thing to do considering the circumstances. “Just kidding,” I added. I huffed down into a chair,
and cracked the Philip Roth book I’d bought in another misguided attempt to become a member of the intelligentsia. The book
was painstakingly slow. It was four o’clock.

I tried to wake Max at seven. He muttered, “Five more minutes.”

I tried again at seven-thirty, and he said, “I think I need another half an hour.”

At eight-thirty I was starving, so I said, in what I hoped was a bemused tone, “Hey, Max. I’m dying of hunger over here.”

He roused himself, and in a kind of sleepwalk that reminded me of the zombies in the Michael Jackson “Thriller” video, he
dressed himself in the same T-shirt and jeans he’d worn for the trip yesterday. Obviously it wasn’t going to be a nice dinner.
We drove around looking for someplace where they’d have chicken soup (as if anyone serves chicken soup in Palm Springs). I
finally convinced him to stop at a pizza place.

Max obviously wasn’t in the mood to talk. So while I ate my slice, I pretended to stare at the television they had blaring
in the corner. “Look!” I said to Max. “TV!” He didn’t laugh. When we got back to the room, Max said, “Sorry, I’m just really
under the weather, B. I feel terrible.” And he crawled back into bed.

Terrible about ruining our trip?
I wondered.
Terrible as in, sick? Terrible because he doesn’t want me to be his girlfriend?

We left first thing in the morning, driving by all the enticing outlet stores that lined the freeway. The same stores we’d
both said we were dying to go to on the way down here. That was less than forty-eight hours ago. When I was happy.

ASTRO
FILLY

He’s so cute, isn’t he? His eyes, his hair, his shitty personality. Yeah, you heard me right. Most things end, and it’s better
to know how in advance. Here, love warnings from the stars.