Second Best Fantasy (5 page)

“I assume there’s a story here, otherwise you wouldn’t have brought me.”

“
Call me Ishmael
,” I said and took her hand. I led her through the empty dining room to the deck beyond. Soon the place would be filled to the brim with more residents returning from weekending elsewhere; Cape May, Atlantic City, Long Branch. I wanted at least a few moments alone, to hear the sound of her voice without straining over a crowd, to gaze upon her face without being joined by the eyes of others. We chose a table near the pier where, if you so desired, you could stroll out and gaze at the scenery while waiting for the chef to drown your lobster in cheap sherry before boiling it to death so as not to leave the look of horror and shock on its face.

Another bopping waitress came over to take our drink order. Janine ordered a Dewar’s on the rocks, as she had when we met. Why break tradition? I thought. “Tanqueray and tonic, with lime please.”

“You’re a purist, aren’t you?”

“When it comes to that, yes. Although I’ve been known to indulge in chick drinks under circumstances of extreme duress.”

“A good Rum Runner on the rocks is hard to come by.

You should have one of those. Although, I assume you would seek out a bartender whose experience ranged beyond that of a sixteen year old.” She nodded in the direction of our waitress 28

who would someday make stewardess.

“So, tell me a story.” She lit a cigarette and leaned forward on her elbows, took a drag and handed it to me. I took a drag and thought about what I should say. There was a story there, in that place. It carried with it both wonderful and horrific connotations. I was such a creature of habit. I was already well on my way to baring my soul a bit further, but didn’t know if she wanted to know how fucked up I really was when it came to women.

“Maggie, I have no delusions about your past,” she said.

There she was doing it again.

“Okay.” I was a writer, after all. I figured I’d tell a story, embellish here and there, and she might not even think it was true; she wouldn’t have been the first. Just then the sixteen year old came, bearing drinks and a tray of a dozen raw oysters on ice. The Sandbar was infamous for their oysters. It wasn’t even necessary to have them on the menu. You were automatically given a dozen as an appetizer unless you requested otherwise.

“An aphrodisiac,” Janine said matter-of-factly and quite intentionally while the waitress was still within earshot.

I weaved a tale I’d relived in my head over and over for several years.

“I came here once many years ago when this place was one of my top five most visited haunts. I didn’t live far from here at the time, I was renting an apartment in Belmar with a woman I thought I would grow old with.”

Janine slurped an oyster and looked into my eyes as if to verify what I’d just said was true. That part was; it still made me flinch a little to bring it up. “Needless to say, we broke up.”

Thoughtfully she said, “All for the best, I assume.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be sitting here with you, now would I?” I still wasn’t sure if
that
was actually all for the best. I doubted it, but continued.

“I went into a deep depression that lasted for months. It was all I could do to show up for work every day. My days were filled with a variety of pills that ironically kept me alive instead of killing me. After about six weeks, I stopped taking pills and going to work and drank to stay drunk twenty-four hours a day. I came 29

here one night with a load on already, and sat at the bar with a tattered notebook that held every line, thought, and fragment I’d ever written for her or about her.”

The hard part was over. Switching gears to the much better part of the story, I paused a moment for the oyster Janine held out to me like a ritualistic offering. When I went to take it from her hand, she pushed me away with a finger and held the oyster up to my lips with her own hand. I let it slide down my throat without chewing, and sucked the juice from her fingertips, feeling the eyes of the stewardess bore into the back of my head. I took a long draw from my drink and continued.

“I was young then, and didn’t have the sexual history I regretfully have now. She was one of only two women I’d ever been with, barring an affair I had when I was seventeen that I try and erase from memory.”

Janine tilted her head to the side, questioning without speaking.

“Another story for another time. Anyway, I got really drunk against the better advice of the bartender, who, by the way, was a guy and at least in his mid-fifties. I read page after page until I was bawling hysterically, and didn’t care. This is an old man’s bar more than anything, what did I care what they thought? Just then, a woman, actually more like a vision, walked in and sat about three stools away from me. She was fucking gorgeous.

Everyone in the place stopped and stared, everyone except me.

A beautiful woman was the last thing in the world I wanted to see, they were nothing but poison as far as I was concerned. I was wearing my glasses, and I took them off, threw them down on the bar, and buried my face in my arms.

“A few moments after, I heard an angel’s voice close to my ear. ‘You’ll break your glasses that way,’ she cooed. I stopped sobbing and looked up. She was even more beautiful close up, if you can imagine. She spoke not a word and, like a magician, twisted and bent my frames for a few minutes and placed them gently back on my face. They felt like new. ‘There now, isn’t that better?’ she asked. Speechless for a second or two, the only words I could finally muster were ‘Can I buy you a 30

drink?’ She ordered wine, I thought that was classy. We didn’t speak until I grew the balls to say ‘I don’t live far from here.’ She smiled, finished her wine, and grabbed her purse and my hand.

As we walked out every guy in the place had his jaw on the floor.

“You shouldn’t drive,’ she said. I poured myself into the passenger’s seat of her little Fiero and directed her to my apartment, amazed. The place was littered with liquor bottles and photographs torn in two. I couldn’t decide if I’d been shocked into stone cold sobriety or if I was hallucinating.”

“Are you ready to order?” the kid interrupted my reverie.

“Honey?” Janine said for the waitress’ amusement, or maybe with sincerity, I couldn’t tell.

“Cajun swordfish.” I started giggling and couldn’t stop, remembering suddenly that I was high.

“Make mine the same, and please bring us another round.” Janine kept her composure and I was afraid I’d embarrassed her.

“Go on, I’m intrigued. It’s hard for me to imagine you all broken up about something, you come off so…detached from all of that.”

Funny, I thought the same thing about her. I hoped I was equally off the mark. “Anyway, there really isn’t much to tell. We didn’t have sex, but we fooled around and made out a lot. I fell asleep in her arms and slept like never before, with…peace.”

I paused, watching her eyes to see some flicker of recognition. She must have flashed back to the previous night in my arms, because she grinned a silly grin and looked away shyly.

I finished, “When I woke up she was gone. She left a business card on my dresser. It’s likely I still have it somewhere.”

“A business card? Let me guess, she worked for an optometrist.”

“Very good, you were paying attention. Yes, that’s how she knew how to bend my frames back into shape like a magician. But, more importantly, what is the moral of this story?”

Janine drummed her fingers on the table for a few minutes. She finished her second drink and lit a cigarette, all before answering. “Sometimes bringing a complete stranger 31

home is the best thing that could ever happen to you.”

I was expecting a witty answer, something like ‘Never let the one that got away actually get away,’ but instead she had brought it all home for me. Subconsciously, I knew this was exactly the reason I had brought her to this place.

She was my second angel, most people aren’t lucky enough to get even one. The woman who had stumbled across me years ago did change my life. She’d made me feel whole, desirable, worth something. The day after that experience I told my ex to pack up her things and get out, much to her surprise, I might add.

It had been so many years ago, I hadn’t thought about it until that morning, with Janine, Janine Jordan for God’s sake, sitting at my kitchen table. My swinging lifestyle, cool job, and life in the Village had made me very happy, and I’d become a rather well adjusted single person. Yet, when looked at from the other side, from that side across the table at the Sandbar in Keyport, NJ, my happiness was a sham and had been for eons. I do believe people can change, but really only superficially or in minor ways. Deep down inside, where we don’t even want to know ourselves, people never really alter, not their very being, the makeup that gives us our personalities, likes, dislikes, loathings, all sorts of things that will never bend and certainly not break. I was no jet-setting dyke in the big city. I wanted a wife, I always had. Never mind the great sadness that comes with that realization. No wonder I never wanted to think about it.

The food arrived and jolted me out of my orbit around a past not often dwelt upon.

“Another round?” Either the stewardess had metamorphosed or there’d been a shift change for the dinner crowd. We took our new hottie up on her offer and delved into our swordfish. No one from a coast who doesn’t like seafood should have the privilege of having been born there.

“Well?” Janine looked pleased, and it lifted my spirits. Or the ‘spirits’ were lifting my spirits, either way I was very contented to sit there with her, although I was looking forward to stop number two.

32

“It’s excellent. I suppose it’s my turn to tell a story?”

“Not necessary. We’ll have our own novel to write by the end of the day.”

I noticed suddenly that we were surrounded by people. I’d been so lost in my story, and then lost in her eyes, I’d barely noticed the influx of the dinner crowd. I ate my swordfish in silence, enjoying the simple pleasure of sharing more than one meal with her over the course of only one day. The boardwalk and the romanticism that wraps around it like a blanket awaited us. However, the LA conversation was lurking in the backdrop no matter how I tried to quash it. Two more days and nights with her was all I had. I wanted to fill the next 48 hours with a million reasons for her to return to me in New York.

After dinner we stayed at the Sandbar for an hour or so, drinking and talking about books, movies, and music. I found it unbelievable that her range of knowledge was equal in all three categories and not limited to her trade. She told me she was twenty-nine and I had to grab on to the table so I didn’t fall out of my chair. Not that an age difference bothered me, she just seemed older, I originally thought I was the younger one. Janine seemed to me so worldly, and I was considered pretty worldly myself.

She was highly educated. Janine had spent two years at a small, private university in Denver she’d chosen based on the reputation of its math and science curriculum. She’d studied to be an architect, and taken an opening in an exchange student program to go to Versailles for a year. After that year, she came back to the states, dropped out in Denver, and moved back home to apply to Julliard.

“I’d always been into the arts, architecture just seemed to be somehow more, I don’t know, practical, I guess.”

I could hardly imagine Janine ever having been practical.

“Anyway,” she told me, “after a year in Versailles, being exposed to that culture, I decided to go for what I really wanted, and that was to paint.”

There was no end to her surprises. “I didn’t even know I could sing until Julliard.”

33

Amazing,
I thought to myself. “Do you still paint?”

“Do you still write?” she responded. Quid pro quo. The check arrived reluctantly, the longer we stayed the bigger the tip, our new waitress was no fool. I doubled the tip anyway, she was much better than the teenagers she succeeded.

I made the most amazing time between Keyport and Lavalette and silently commended myself for remembering several side street short cuts. We’d lost the signal of the New York radio stations hours ago, and Janine flipped the tuner before landing on a pop charts station. Cruising the strip, with eyes peeled for a parking spot, I felt teenagey all over again.

Who was I kidding? This woman couldn’t possibly be amused by roller coasters and skeeball tables after Versailles and Julliard. Then again, she had suggested going fishing, so this idea didn’t seem too much of a stretch when it came to comparing intellectual stimulation. As I rounded the court at the end of the beach to search for parking on the other side of the strip, Janine’s song came blaring out of the speakers.

She reached out an arm and snapped the radio off without comment. I thought better of commenting myself. Giving up, I drove a while longer and paid the outrageous amount of $15 for the privilege of parking in a lot where I’d be lucky not to have my stereo stolen.

“When was the last time you were here?” she asked.

“Four years ago,” I said without effort. I’d been home from Illinois for a visit. An ex of mine nearly ran me over with a shopping cart in the supermarket of my hometown. We hadn’t seen each other since before my move, and this ex happened to be one that was not gotten over easily. It was like a movie that went with that Dan Folgerberg “Auld Lang Syne” song. We went to our separate homes, unpacked our groceries, met at a bar, and left one car behind. Four hours later, we were naked in a hotel room with a Jacuzzi surrounded by our winnings from the boardwalk. That night she’d broken my heart a second time.

“What are you thinking about?”

She didn’t know? “About how much I want to kiss you right now,” I said, and then did.

34

“I’ve only ever been to Coney Island,” she said.
No wonder,
I thought to myself. Between Versailles and Julliard, when would she have had the time?

“This is great, I love stuff like this. I hope that’s not what you’re worried about, why you’re so quiet all of a sudden. As a matter of fact, it’s just this kind of thing that will make me fall in love with you, you know.”