Love Monkey (15 page)

“Theventy-thixers,” he says.

“Who's that point guard they have that's supposed to be so great?”

“Allen Iverthon.”

“Tom?” Julia says.

“We're talking sports,” I say.

She slaps my knee under the table. I pinch her thigh.

And then it happens. No shit. The juke. That guitar line.

DUMB-dumb-dumb-dumb-DUMB-dumb.

Someone is playing “Jessie's Girl.”

And I go all queasy again, thinking of what horrors await me back at Julia's house. It's one story and a basement, three dollhouse-sized bedrooms on the main floor.
Spare me the squeak.
Oh please, please, spare me the squeak.

I spend the rest of the evening looking down the barrel of my one-and-done Corona getting pointedly not drunk. I drop out of the conversation. Joe is wearing a T-shirt that says
GET HOOKED ON A BOOK AT THE RED HOOK LIBRARY
. There is a drawing of a huge fish getting baited, and thus doomed, with a book, which seems an excellent way to scare children out of reading. Joe is sitting next to Carla. Both of them are between conversations with other people so they look at each other. But they can't think of anything to say. So they start to cuddle. They're all caressy smoochy.

Before we get in the car for the drive to Julia's house, she gives Dwayne the keys.

“You're driving,” she says.

I resume my backseat position, and this time Julia clambers in beside me, sacrificially taking the hump seat. Her thighs press up against mine. Carla is on the other side of her. Joe is in the front seat. As we go around corners, Julia leans into me a little. I can smell her. Can she smell me? Do I still smell nice?

Back at her house, Dwayne hits the bathroom first. He and Julia run into each other outside the door.

“The toilet won't fluth,” he whispers urgently.

A toilet is possibly the least complicated piece of machinery in the house. There is not much that can go wrong. You push on the handle. Inside the tank, the handle is attached to a chain, which in
turn has a rubber stopper on the end. The stopper covers the drain. When you push the handle, you're pulling up the stopper so water can flow out of the tank, down the drain, and into the bowl.

I take the lid off the tank. The chain has fallen off the stopper. This takes approximately four seconds to fix. Dwayne is not even smart enough to figure out that toilet maintenance begins with removal of the lid. This is no ordinary dullard. It's as if he has an advanced degree in stupid. The guy could lose a game of one-card monte. On the other hand, he is clever enough to get himself into a situation where he is about to see Julia naked, which makes him the Bill Gates of this house.

I'm putting the lid back on the toilet when Julia appears with a glass of water. I look at her eyes and her skin and her hair and her body. What I want is a glass of her. My heart hurts. Not my heart-shaped heart, my Disney heart; no, my real heart, the thumping thing. My auricles ache. My ventricles vent.
Spare me the squeak.

“Hi,” she says.

“I fixed the toilet,” I say. But this is not what I am really saying. I am saying:
I am a useful male! I can fix household items!
I am saying:
You are stuck with a dumb guy when a toilet-repairing visionary stands before you!

“Oh,” she says. “Wow. I brought you this.”

I take the glass of water gratefully. I had thought it was for her. This is her small gesture of affection. Her secret signal to me. Or, possibly, the world's lamest consolation prize.

Julia ushers me across the hall to Silent Al's room; it's weird, like a snapshot of myself from fifteen years ago. There is a cheap stereo matched with expensive speakers. There are posters of alternative heroes, edgy achievers: Einstein, of course. Brando, Gandhi,
Goodfellas
, Carl Sagan, Jim Morrison, and…Big Al from
Happy Days
. This one I peer at more closely. “To Al, from Al.” There's a bunch of newspaper clips about John Glenn's return to space, a poster for
Miller Lite, and, perfect for a guy who lives three thousand miles from California, another for Ron Jon surfwear (wasn't that an '80s thing? Maybe it's back in a retro-ironic way).

“I drew this,” she says. There's a child's felt-tip drawing on a piece of construction paper fun-tak'd to the ceiling. Which is only about six and a half feet off the floor.

“It's Carl Sagan,” she says.

He is standing at the window of a spaceship with stars in the background. One rubbery arm is bent up so that the legendary space authority can wave in that slightly disjointed way of kids' drawings. I can't tell whether she drew it fifteen years ago or yesterday, but either way it's perfect. It says family, it says loving big sister, it says closeness and warmth and two people knowing each other so well. All the things I don't have.

“It's nice,” I say, but I'm looking at her.

And we stand there, for a second.

“So I'll see you in the morning?”

I nod.

Julia goes to join Dwayne downstairs, to sleep in the basement. I hear them talking in low voices.

When I turn the lights out, there are these glow-in-the-dark stars all over the ceiling and I think I have never seen anything so mysterious and wonderful. I stare at them for seven hours, waiting for morning. Listening.

But no squeaks do I hear.

I
wait for everyone else to get up first. Then I creep into the kitchen, the sheepish monster, the undead thing everyone would prefer not to have to deal with. I have my bag in my hand.

Everyone's having bagels and coffee, all familylike.

Julia bounces up, stands next to me. Awkwardly close. Awkwardly far. “Do you want a bagel?”

The thought makes me queasy. I need: a shower, clean clothes, a gallon of mouthwash, an oxygen mask, sleep, a body transplant, persuasive evidence that anybody other than my mom cares about me, a Bloody Mary, something to scrape my face with, a deep-tissue massage, Visine, some sex, and a team of paramedics to carry me out of here. But not a bagel.

“Do you want a doughnut?” says Julia's dad.

I do not.

“Would you like thumb coffee?” says Dwayne.

I would not.

“I have to go,” I say to Julia's ear.

I'm overhandling the train schedule. I move it from my bag to my jeans pocket to my shirt pocket. I have parked my bag ostentatiously in the middle of the living room, which is about four feet from the middle of the kitchen. It's a really small house.

There is munching. There is slurping. And I'm feeling really, really, deeply unwell.

“The train is in twelve minutes,” I tell Julia's other ear.

And we're in the car. Soon I'll be free. Free to have a little breakdown.

“Traffic is light today,” I say, stupidly. It's a Sunday morning in suburbia.

“It was nice of you to come up here,” she says.

We talk about her chattering mother and her silent brother.

And I think: I wouldn't mind this. I could live with the she's-not-into-me-anymore thing. I could handle the she's-living-with-someone-else detail. All of this would not unduly trouble me.

If only she would continue having sex with me.

When we get to the station the train is already there. I grab my bag and prepare to bolt. She hurriedly undoes her seat belt, skootches over to give me a kiss on the cheek.

“I'll call you later,” she says with worried eyes. “I
prom
ise.”

And I'm gone. I get ten minutes of sleep on the train, bringing the cumulative total since Friday night to ten minutes. Back home I sleepwalk through the day for a while and then go by the grocery store, straight to aisle two, home of beer, soda, dip, chips: they call it aisle two but why not call it what it is? It's the Bachelor aisle. Unchaperoned men in the eighteen to thirty-four demographic skulk and loiter, toting their glum plastic baskets like lost Little Red Riding Hoods who missed their chance to be wolves. Sometimes I wonder what's in the other aisles. That reminds me: I need cereal.

Lite FM seems to be blaring directly from a box of raisin bran. Look at this. When I was a kid you had crunch berries. Little delightful nipple-colored nuggets of sweetness in a humdrum sea of Cap'n Crunch. You had to work for those berries, go spoon diving, you had to make
decisions
, dammit: devour them all at once? Try to apportion at least one to every mouthful? Pick around them so that you can finish with a giant berry crescendo of confectionery nirvana?

Today you can buy an entire box of
just the berries
. Kids today. They don't know hardship.
And
they have Super Soakers.
And
their little Emilys and Amandas start on the BJs in, like, fourth grade. You read these stories about hallway hummers: it's practically a phys. ed. requirement now.

And as I'm checking out, I'm under attack from Lite FM. You know you're in trouble when you start hearing oracles at the frequency of 106.7. It's playing Bread.

Bread say:

I drop my can of artichoke hearts. When I pick it up, the can is dented. When you're in this state, the State, every song is about you. Manilow, Diamond, Fogelberg:
these men are prophets!
Cue blubbering.

W
alking home, I think about The Dinner a couple of weeks ago. The plan then was, instead of the usual date—a meal out, a few drinks, a few more drinks, a few more few more drinks, and then an invitation
for a midnight tour of my apartment—instead of this, there would be dinner in, drinks in, and behold: a fed, happy, drowsy, tipsy girl planted adorably on the sofa by nine-thirty. A clandestine romp and then she could, if such was her choice (not that I would encourage it), get dressed and be out of there by midnight.

“This is the operator?” I said when I called her. “I have a collect obscene phone call for Julia Brouillard. Will you accept the obscenities?”

“Put it through,” she said.

Did she want to grab a bite after work? She did. Sushi? No. (Good. That was a test.) Chinese? Eh, maybe. Italian? Italian. Then, as a just-about-to-hang-up-the-phone afterthought: oh, why didn't she just sort of, oh, you know, have dinner over
my
place?

“Hmm,” she said.

“I must warn you, your insurance premiums may rise as a direct result,” I said.

“Hmm,” she said.

“You wouldn't even have to bring anything,” I said. “Except of course a fire extinguisher.”

She laughed.

“Okay,” she said.

“Say six?” I said.

“Six.”

I hung up mightily pleased, and only moderately horrified. I had made dinner for a girl only once before in my life. It did not go well. Besty came over to that apartment I shared with a gangly, bearded maniac on West 106th. This was back in my twenties, that period when everyone's girlfriends were turning into their wives. I made blackened swordfish. Also blackened garlic bread, blackened green beans, and blackened soup. The kitchen gadget I am best acquainted with is the smoke detector. (For me, every recipe begins the same way: disable all alarms.)

Besty forgave me that time. She even put out: there is no limit to the sympathy of women. Later, however, she advised me never to cook for her (or any other woman) again.

So the night I offered Julia dinner, I left work with a hard culinary glint in my eye. This time I wasn't going to screw it up.

Where to begin.

Not only did I lack the skill to be a cook, I lacked the
stuff
. My cupboard contained one all-purpose soup/cereal/salad bowl, four smallish plates, lots of immortal food—fallout-shelter food, really—and an armada of drinking glasses. I didn't even have any napkins.

First stop. Bourgeois Barn. Some cloth napkins. Ooh, and matching place mats. Did I need napkin rings? Let's not get carried away. There's a fine line between tasteful and gay.

Second stop. Glutton Mart. Reached for a shopping basket. No:
a cart
. Started in produce. Got stuff for salad. What was the most fashionable lettuce? What was this season's superstar tomato?

Second course. Fresh tortellini. With cheese, the real Italian way. Vodka sauce, she loved vodka sauce. Oh. What about smoothies for a predinner drink? With a surreptitious extra shot of rum for the lady. Back to the produce aisle. Bananas. Apples. Yogurt.

Steak. Two big sirloins. Yes. Why? They were expensive.
Let her see you waste money.

Of course I needed dessert. Something light and tasteful yet unusual. Passion-fruit sorbet? Better get the coconut one too. One scoop of each. Oh, and a single square of Ghirardelli's chocolate to stick in the middle of a scoop. It's called
presentation.

Back to the produce aisle: got a fresh lemon. That way, if she wanted a glass of water, I'd put a slice of lemon in it. Verrry fancy. Who could resist?

The checkout stand. It was like the line to get into a Knicks playoff game. But it was moving pretty fast. Only a few more minutes and—damn. Bread. Back to the deli section. Spent precious minutes
squeezing the white paper sleeves, going, what's the difference between French bread and Italian? I went for the French. Anything French says sex.

Back in line. It had gotten longer. By the time I got through it, it was 6:12. 6:12! Got a cab. For an eleven-block ride? I was burning money, bleeding money. Too bad she wasn't here to see it. That was all right. I planned to casually mention all this foolishness later. In charmingly self-deprecating fashion.

Back home. 6:18. She had probably been here and gone.
No.
I had to stop thinking that way. Simultaneously got out the George Foreman grill Mom got me for Christmas, washed the arugula, chopped the tomatoes. (Shit. Forgot to buy another steak knife. That was okay. I'd give her this one and saw away at mine quietly with…no! Better! Cutely, charmingly, we'd share the steak knife! Pass it back and forth! Like two Paris bohos in the twenties disdaining materialist cutlery-obsessed society!) Heh, heh. Got some water boiling for the pasta. Too bad I had only one saucepan. How was I going to warm the fresh vodka sauce? The same way I warmed my bachelor Ragu: in the same quick-rinsed saucepan, while the pasta sat in my only bowl, with a plate over it desperately fencing in the steam.

6:26. Salad was done. The steaks looked as if they were going to take a hell of a long time. They were a fucking inch thick. Plus each one was the entire size of the George Foreman grill, so simultaneous cooking was impossible unless I put one in a frying pan, in which case I was guaranteed to burn it and by the way where the fuck was she?

6:29. The phone.

“Hey,” she said. “It's me. I'm coming out of the subway.”

“Cool,” I said, transferring the steam of the kitchen from my forehead to my sleeve.

“I was just wondering if you wanted me to bring anything,” she said.

I was shoving a corkscrew into a bottle of my best red while looking at the jumble of empty bags, the two pints of sorbet sweating atop the fridge, the place mats and napkins with the tags still on them, the bubbles starting to disturb the surface of the water in the saucepan, the arugula and tomatoes washed and chopped and shoved back in the plastic baggies they came in since I had no mixing bowl and I said, “I think everything's under control.”

When I hung up I thought: shit. She likes
white
wine.

W
ow,” she said as she entered my apartment, which had actually been pretty clean half an hour prior. Now it looked like a food processor had exploded. “Just so long as you didn't go to any
trouble
.”

Cue sheepish grin.

That's when she handed me the flowers.

“Thanks for these,” I said. What the hell was I supposed to do with flowers?

“Do you have a vahz?” she said.

No, I didn't have a
vahz
. What kind of guy owns a
vahz
?

“Got something better,” I said, rummaging in the cabinet. “This'll be perfect.”

“Such taste,” she said, and plunked them in an eight-inch-high pilsner glass reading
PANAMA CITY SPRING BREAK 1989. IF YOU'RE NOT WASTED, THE WEEKEND IS
! She put some water in them and put the flowers on the windowsill.

The salad, the steaks, the tortellini: I was a sweaty mess the entire meal, dashing madly back and forth from my two-seater dining table to the spattered stove. I don't really have enough plates for a gathering of more than one. I spent half the meal frantically washing things. She picked listlessly at my feast. Ate one-sixth of the steak. This, I thought, must be what it's like to be a mom.

“Sorry,” she said, catching my look. “I was pretty much full after the smoothie.”

“Did you save room for dessert?”

“Of course,” she said.

As I was getting dessert, she picked out a CD. “Hey,” she said. “
Automatic for the People
!”

“Great disc,” I said, slightly disappointed. Why didn't she suggest
Murmur
?

I picked up my napkin and…shit. That goddamn price tag. Surreptitiously I peeled it off under the table, as though this would make the price tag on hers disappear.

“So,” I said, giving her my smiliest smile as she sat down.

“You all right?” she said.

“Try this wine,” I said, pouring her a big glass.

“I really didn't expect all this,” she said. “New
place
mats? Really.”

“These old things?” I said. “Family heirloom. Passed down by my granddaddy Ezekiel Farrell.”

When we were done I shooed her away from the dish Everest in the sink (yep, there they were, pretty much every dish I own) and sat on the couch, swirling a glass of wine.

She went back to the table and just peered at me. From three feet away. Three miles.

And we talked about R.E.M. for a while. And the Cure and Radiohead and Nick Drake and
why wasn't she coming over to sit next to me
?

“C'mere,” I said.

Shooter say:
Do not ask. Tell
.

She came over. I kissed her. Kissed her some more. Something in the kitchen crashed extravagantly. She flinched.

“The maid will get that,” I said.

Got my hands on her waist, up under her shirt, with ideas. She stopped me. Double elbow slam on my hands. Girl kung fu.

“Grrr,” she said, ducking and pressing her head to my chest. We sat for a while hugging. Not long enough. She oozed away.

“I really have to go,” she said. It was nine-thirty.

Michael say:
Everybody hurts sometime.

T
hat was two weeks ago. Today I walk home from the grocery store and shelve my dented hearts. I need something to take the edge off. When I've got woman problems, at some point I always turn to the thing that is guaranteed to please the senses even as it dulls them. It makes me feel better for a while, then it makes me feel worse. The next day I always resolve to put it out of my house and never use it again, but I know I'm lying to myself.