Lovesick (3 page)

“I’m sorry, but I’m not giving Gregory the satisfaction of rejecting me on a whole new level,” I tell him. “You’re being a total hypocrite. Look at what happened to your own grandson when he asked
his
future father-in-law.”

Jordan, Sid’s grandson, was ridiculed for asking permission. Something along the lines of: “Our daughter is not a piece of property. We don’t treat her like chattel. And please don’t tell me you’re expecting some sort of dowry. Abigail is an adult. I suggest you ask her yourself.” Jordan did, Abigail said yes, and they lived happily ever after, but not before her father struck “obey and honor” from their wedding vows.

“That man is a hippie tree-hugging commie,” Sid says of Jordan’s father-in-law. “He doesn’t count. You ask the father for his blessing because that’s what us old geezers expect. Why do you ask for my opinion when you don’t even want it?”

“This would be so much easier if Paige were just
your
daughter.”

“Don’t say that!” he says loud enough to startle the next table.

“Drink your tea,” I suggest softly.

Sid is on all sorts of heart medicine. I need him to stay calm.

“What am I going to do with you?” Sid laments, clearing his throat.

“Gregory doesn’t make it easy,” I mumble, gulping down my latte.

“You’re no walk in the park yourself,” he responds. “Level with me, kid: how are the two of you getting along?”

“Pretty good,” I lie.

“I’m blind, but I’m not deaf. I hear the way you talk to each other.”

“Just don’t tell him I told you what I’m going to tell Paige.”

“And the wedding? The grandchildren? You plan to enter them into a witness protection program?”

My stomach gurgles from anxiety. Everything’s starting to unravel.

“I think Gregory hates me,” I whisper.

“He doesn’t hate you,” Sid insists, softly. “Do you know Elie Wiesel?”

“I’ve seen her around the pharmacy.”

“She is a he, and I highly doubt you’ve seen Elie Wiesel trolling the aisles of Day’s Pharmacy. Wiesel is a famous writer and philosopher, a Holocaust survivor. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in the 1980s. He’s famous for saying a lot of very smart things, but one of my favorites is ‘The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.’”

Sid studies me. “Just
talk
to Gregory,” he says. “Gregory is a good, generous man—more generous than you’ll ever know. You need to have a relationship with him. It would make Paige happy and earn you—whatever you call ’em—‘points!’”

Staring blankly at the table, I run the back of the Magic Marker along a grain in the wood. My chest hurts.

“Do you love her?”

“You know I do.”

He snatches the marker from my hand, pulls off the cap, and starts drawing across my stunning masterpiece.

“Can you not do that?” I beg.

“You want the perfect formula? You think you’re ready?” he asks.

Sid draws a big, thick jittery “G” around the circumference of my chart. “From where I’m sitting, you missed the biggest factor of all: Gregory. He takes the cake … or rather, pie.”

THE six o’clock news is eleven minutes out. When I see Paige approaching, I punch up a random Web page to hide what I’m doing.
Look busy.

“Okay, bring it on,” Paige goads. “What’s tonight’s word?”

Paige drags her pointer finger across my back as she heads for the nearby printer. She stands there, sorting television scripts.

“‘Chewbacca,’” I tell her.

“That’s impossible,” she says with a slight snort.

Paige and I have a long-standing relationship with Han Solo’s burly seven-foot four-inch fur-covered
Star Wars
sidekick. I met Paige one unseasonably warm October evening, twenty-three Halloweens ago. I was six. Paige was seven.
Return of the Jedi
was still in theaters and a monster hit. I must have run into a dozen Darth Vaders that night, but I was the only Chewbacca in all of Crockett. Drenched in sweat, the gorilla suit sliding off my shoulder, the furry mask tucked under my free arm, I rang doorbell after doorbell. At one house on Alhambra Street, the door opened, the angels sang, and there she was—a vision in white. The flowing robe cinched at the waist, her hair twirled up like Cinnabons glued to the side of her head, Paige was my Princess Leia.

“Put on the head!” she screamed. Paige enjoyed giving out the candy almost as much as eating it.

I complied, and she shrieked with delight, dumping the whole bowl of candy corns in my pillowcase.

“That’s enough of that,” Gregory told her. Our fathers nodded to each other politely. Everyone knew Gregory from the pharmacy.

Chewbacca and Leia up in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
Since then, I’ve often wondered whether all along, Princess Leia was just using Han Solo to get to Chewbacca.

Our love has always been forbidden.

“Fine, you want a different word?” I tell present-day Paige. “How about ‘kumquat’?”

She thinks about it. “Can we go back to ‘Chewbacca’?” she wonders. Paige is entitled to a twenty spot if she can figure out a way to surreptitiously slip the word
kumquat
into her on-air report this evening. Last week she managed to sneak in
carnivorous.
A month ago it was
pinky.

“I love you,” she says with a tender kiss on the cheek, and then she’s gone just as quickly as she appeared: off to the tape room, to the edit bay, to the voice-over booth, to check in with the line producer. She has six, no, five minutes to get her segment approved, cut, and loaded for the six o’clock news. On the scrap paper next to me, I memorialize her drive-by affection with a small slash mark, adding it to the column with three others.

I’m Paige’s ride home this evening. Just like I was last night, and the night before. I’m here because, yet again, her car, affectionately known as “The Vomit Mobile,” was, how do you say, “indisposed.” Three months ago it was the alternator, last month the exhaust system, and now, Lordy it’s the dreaded transmission. At this point, we might as well just put Ollie’s Auto Shop on retainer.

Paige never should have bought that Matchbox car in the first place. I tried to change her mind; I reminded her about the cool-off period, about buyer’s remorse, but she wouldn’t listen. There
was no
remorse.

“You sure you’re supposed to feel every crack in the road?” I pleaded with her as we circled the block on the test drive.

“Aw yeah, they told me that’s how the manufacturer sets the suspension on these sport vehicles, tight, like a stock car,” Paige said.

Little did we realize this convertible would also get the same mileage and provide the same storage space as a Formula One.

Despite all the headaches, to this day, Paige has never regretted her decision to buy the two-seater, though the down payment did clean out her life savings and place her fifteen grand in debt. It would be so easy to resent the fact that she didn’t listen to me, but I don’t. For everything there is to hate about this car, I love what it represents: Paige knew what she wanted and she went for it. I wouldn’t have had the guts. She bought a manual transmission without a lick of experience driving stick. She signed the final paperwork and didn’t even know how to drive her dream car off the lot. Amazing.

“Fine, if this is the Vomit Mobile, then you’re Barfman,” she told me on the herky-jerky drive home.

“Guess that makes you Hurl Girl.”

Paige is so fearless sometimes.

She earned points that day. She got points for buying the car, points for attempting to drive it, and points for having a sense of humor about what was likely an abysmal mistake. To night, it’s points (and cash) if she manages to insert a coded message to her lover on live television.

TV anchor Pamela Worth takes her seat at the anchor desk. The newscast starts in three minutes. It’s
Wheel … of … Fortune
, and this is her last commercial break to tease tonight’s top story. I’m about to be on TV! I am part of the newsroom backdrop—my silhouette is hard at work on a breaking news story. A thin, translucent scrim separates me from Worth. The inference:
Behind me, Andy “Scoop” Altman is doggedly tracking the people responsible for to day’s cat-up-a-tree. When he knows more, faithful viewers, so will you.

The lights flip on, the camera rolls, and I’m frozen. I begin pretend-typing.

“Tonight, breaking news: the Food and Drug Administration pulls a popular hypertension pill off the shelves,” Worth announces. “Details at six.”

I stare at Worth’s profile, and Worth stares uncomfortably at the teleprompter. She’s overestimated the length of her script. Her eyes dip to her desk, but the camera stays trained on the bald spot of her scalp as she nervously shuffles a few blue sheets of paper.

You’ve got four more seconds, Pam. Hurry up!
The least you can do is tell viewers the
name
of the drug so they don’t take it. The depths local news will go to increase ratings.
A common eating utensil could kill you. Find out which one, at six.

The screen dips to black. Vanna White is back, flipping me the “B.” The blinding lights of the flash camera turn off. Worth unhooks her microphone and earpiece, and casually walks away.

As it turns out, Gregory and I got wind of Pamela Worth’s “breaking news” ten hours ago. We received the pharmacy wide warning that said Simpson Pharmaceuticals was being forced to recall its hypertension medicine, Betapro, after tests revealed that instead of lowering blood pressure, the key ingredient—beta-blockers—actually increased the risk of heart failure. Blood pressure medication that raises your blood pressure. Unbelievable.

“Are the two of you making nice?” Paige asks, appearing suddenly, clasping a few small videotapes in one hand. She musses up my hair, and then gently pats my playmate’s flat-screen monitor.

“Please address him as Mac Daddy,” I say of the computer.

Paige introduces herself and then informs both of us that her report—Arnold Schwarzenegger is rumored to be reprising his role in the next
Terminator
movie—was bumped to the last news block thanks to this big Betapro story. Paige’s story is now “the kicker”—television-speak for that light entertainment story that TV producers save until the very end of the program to keep viewers viewing. Paige’s piece on “poodles in poodle skirts” had to be my favorite.

“Do you mind waiting?” she asks.

Where else would I go? What else would I do?

I tell her of course. It’s Thursday, which means pizza and Scrabble. Paige is a Scrabble fiend. Everything is set up and waiting for us at my apartment. The board, the racks, the tiles, the
lazy Susan, the wine, and the pad memorializing Paige’s record: 82 wins, 54 losses. Her first twenty wins shouldn’t count—that was before I realized that she was taking one too many tiles.
Show me in the rules where it says you only get seven letters
, she demanded.
Oh.

“I love you,” she adds sweetly and then runs to get makeup.

Hearing these three precious words, I draw a diagonal line through the four slash marks on my pad, and hot key back to the beautiful diagram-in-progress on Mac Daddy’s screen.

That’s five “I love yous” so far today. Based on historical data and some simple extrapolation, we’re on track to hit seven: a typical count despite an atypical Thursday. Most Thursdays, neither of us works, and the ILYs are flowing and plentiful, but today someone got sick at the news station, and Paige agreed to fill in. When you’re freelancing, you take what you can.

I’m counting on Mac Daddy’s massive left brain to help me figure out which day of the week would be best to pop the question. Before he tells me that, he informs me of an embarrassing truth: Paige averages way more ILYs than I do. Physical meetings, telephone calls, and e-mail, all told, she says it approximately 2.5 times more often than I do.

“Got to get my ILY ratio up,” I whisper.

Mac Daddy gives me the silent treatment, his microprocessor always humming, always judging.

The six o’clock newscast launches with the urgency of an apocalypse as Pamela Worth tosses to a reporter in the field, standing outside Simpson Pharmaceuticals. I feel for him, standing there like a jackass. What’s he supposed to say?
Thanks, Pam. I’m standing outside Simpson Pharmaceuticals. This is what the building looks like when it’s closed. About an hour ago … it was open.

Our anchor needs to lighten up. Nothing a few shadow puppets couldn’t fix.
How would Pamela Worth look with bunny ears?
I wonder.

“What’s an ILY?” Paige curiously whispers over my shoulder, studying the horizontal lines of the stacked bar chart.

“Yewp,” I yip, startled by the visit. My tiny outburst prompts Worth to flub a line on live television. Paige and I clench our teeth in unison. Pamela Worth is such a witch. Paige will likely pay for this later.

“What’s what?” I whisper back, frantically covering the screen with a splayed hand.

“Mm-hmm,” Paige says skeptically. “Make sure you watch my segment,” she demands, and then she runs away.