The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (33 page)

“Um, thanks,” I said. Then: “Awkward subject change: I found an apartment, and I need the money you owe me so that I can move.”

“I don’t have it yet,” he said, leaning back in his chair.

“It’s been three weeks. And you said ‘upon delivery.’”

He sighed. “Okay, I’ve had too much therapy to sit here and lie to you, so I’ll say this straight out. I don’t want you to go yet.”

I determinedly ignored the warm rush of blood to my heart. “I respect your honesty, but I’m trying to turn over a new leaf here, and I can’t sponge off of you forever.”

“Well, how about for now?”

“How about you give me my money like you said you would?”

“How about you stay here and deal with whatever is going on between us?”

“How about you realize that Tammy is one of my dearest friends?”

He clenched his jaw. “Like I said the other night, Tammy and I were a long time ago. You and me are happening right now.”

I leaned forward and asked, “Has it occurred to you that you only want me to stay because you can’t have me? If I was all over you like one of your usual cocktail waitresses, you wouldn’t be able to wait to get rid of me.”

“I don’t sleep with cocktail waitresses anymore,” he said. He opened up his dresser drawer and pulled out a checkbook. “Not since I stopped gambling. I think you’re judging me by what you’ve read in the tabloids as opposed to getting to know me for who I am today.”

I shook my head. “Mike, we’re not getting to know each other. We’re a two-night stand kind of situation, and I only slept with you those two times because I was desperate and lonely and pretty much the worst feminist in the world.”

Mike grabbed a fountain pen out of a wooden cup on his desk. “You slept with me because you were desperate and lonely,” he repeated.

“Yes,” I said. “And I’m sorry I did. Now can I pretty please have my money?”

He put on a pair of reading glasses and wrote out the check. But when he tore it off, he peered over the top of his glasses and said, “You’re lying to me. But I’m not mad, because I know you’re also lying to yourself. You’ve got feelings for me, and I’m not going to let you get away with not feeling them. Here’s your check.”

His desk was so large and wide that I had to stand up to take the check and when I reached for it, he caught me by the wrist. “Thursday,” he said. And that was all he said.

Less than two minutes later I discovered what it felt like to have sex in a leather chair, bouncing up and down on his lap until we both came and wilted into each other.

When it was over, I got off of him and scrambled to put my jeans back on.

“The landlord says I can move in on December 15th,” I said, grabbing the check from where I had dropped it, when Mike pulled me across his desk. I met Mike’s eyes for one horrified second and then I left.

I subsisted on snack food and fruit for the next week, refusing to come out of the pool house for any reason. Not even when I woke up to the sound of him swimming laps in the pool that night. And the night after that. And the night after that. Until finally it was December 15th and it was time to pack up my car.

Mike had helped me move in, but on that cold (for L.A.) winter day when I moved out, I did so all by myself. It only took me an hour, since I didn’t have much. After a few trips to my Echo, which I’d left parked in the circular driveway in front of Mike’s house, I was ready to go. I decided against saying good-bye to Mike. The check fiasco had taught me it wouldn’t be safe.

But just as I was about to start the engine to leave, a sharp rap sounded on my passenger window. It was Mike.

“Thursday,” he said. “Roll down the window.”

I really didn’t think I should roll down the window.

“Roll down the window or I’ll stop payment on that check. It couldn’t have cleared yet.”

Okay, fine. It was true that the bank hadn’t released the mandatory seven-day hold on my check yet, so I rolled down the window and said, “What?”

He shook his head at me.

“What?” I said again, knots of terror forming inside my stomach for no reason that I could explain.

“Thursday …” he said. He lowered his eyes to the steering wheel and stared at it for the longest time before saying, “I wish you were braver. That’s all. Have a nice life.”

That said, he stepped back from the car and stood there. Just stood there.

It was a challenge. A challenge for me to stay. A challenge for me to betray Tammy. A challenge to prove that I was indeed brave. But the truth was I wasn’t brave. And the truth was that I knew that he knew that if I got out of this car, we’d kiss and I’d let him take me up to his bedroom and maybe I’d never leave.

“I was madly in love with him,” my mother had once told me, when I was younger and would ask her to tell me over and over how she and my father got together. “I thought he was the whole earth, and I have never wanted to be somebody’s moon so bad.”

What I’d had with Caleb had been nice, I realized, missing my ex-boyfriend with a bitter ache. There had been none of this all-consuming passion. When he was away, I never had problems sleeping like my mother had when my father was on tour, especially later when he started taking his mistress with him on the road, leaving her to ramble around our house at night like the insomniac ghost of her former self. Caleb had been comfortable and low-key and boring. I wanted boring. I deserved boring.

Just talking to Mike Barker felt like driving off a cliff to me.

“
Don’t be pathetic,
” my mother’s corpse whispered over and over again. “
Don’t be pathetic.
”

I didn’t roll back up the window, just stuck my key in the ignition and drove away. It was the right thing to do, but I checked the rearview anyway.

And yes, Mike Barker was still standing there, hands in pocket, watching me go.

I had thought that was the end of it. I moved into my little green guesthouse and kept on looking for a job. I also went to all sorts of holiday parties and
random events with Sharita and visited Janine for Christmas. It was the first time she hadn’t had to pay for my ticket, and that felt good. I still hadn’t worked up the courage to visit Tammy, but I maintained hope that one day, I’d be able to face her again.

As I flew back into Los Angeles on December 30th, I decided to label 2011 as the Year That Everything Changed.

But it all came to a head on December 31st with a sharp knock on my door. I was pulling on a shiny red dress, one that fell a bit shorter than I liked, but hey, it was New Year’s Eve. When I heard the knock, I sighed, because I still had to dig my electric blue heels out of the back of my closet and Sharita was over forty-five minutes early.

Los Angeles was a town that didn’t appreciate people showing up on time. And early was just rude. I had loved these social rules and had adjusted to them accordingly, but Sharita, being an accountant, had never gotten hip to the game. Eight years after her arrival in this West Coast metropolis, she had yet to be anything less than fifteen minutes early to every event that she attended.

But forty-five minutes—that was ridiculous. And I would have told Sharita that when I opened the door. Except it wasn’t Sharita standing there, it was Mike, dressed in a very non-New-Years-y jeans-and-light-sweater ensemble.

“Um …” I said.

“I’m sick of swimming,” he said. “I’ve been swimming every night, and it’s not working. I’m sick of it.”

He was looking at me like this was all my fault.

“If you’re having that much trouble with wanting to gamble,” I said, “you should talk to Davie.”

Something ticked in his jaw. “Davie can’t help with this. In fact, Davie’s part of the problem. I’m swimming because of you, because I want to be with you, but that stops tonight. You can come along if you feel like it.”

I had no intention of going anywhere with him, but I had to ask, “Go where?”

“To Tammy’s,” he said. “We’re going to get her permission to date.”

Then, without waiting for my answer, he turned around and started walking toward his Audi, which was idling in the driveway.

RISA

S
o they released Supa Dupa’s first self-titled album. It was doing okay. Not great, not terrible. Just okay. I did a couple of interviews with alternative weeklies, went on a couple of radio shows. The thirteen- to twenty-five-year-olds, Gravestone’s key market, weren’t rabid about me or anything, but they wouldn’t kick me out of bed.

My A&R guy thought Gravestone might offer me a second album deal.

But I didn’t care.

I was finding it hard to care about much these days. The road had become such a grind. It was all tour buses and a motel every two or three days. That was the only time I could take a decent shower and sleep in a non-cot-sized bed. Lots of acts write their best albums on the road. I was not one of those acts.

Maybe if I were able to pull pussy at every college like the younger guys in the other bands, I would have been able to enjoy it more. But, no, I had to service The Lead Singer’s Girlfriend. And when she couldn’t get away, I had to act like I was pining for her. The situation was so old it was decrepit. It was in a nursing home, on an oxygen machine. And my heart called out, “Euthanasia!” every time she knocked on my motel room door.

Most of the other guys on tour told me I was lucky, because I was the only woman, which meant I didn’t have to share a hotel room. I didn’t tell them that I’d rather share a hotel room than have to pretend to be excited about fucking the same girl I didn’t even like every night.

After falling in love with The One all those years ago, I kind of swore off hanging out with any single girl for more than a week or two. It was either her or nobody long term. So this thing with The Lead Singer’s Girlfriend really went against my nature. And by the time New Year’s Eve rolled around, I was in a pretty shitty mood. I missed my L.A. apartment, I missed The One, I missed my friends. This was the first time in four years that we
hadn’t met up for our annual New Year’s Eve matinee. If I were still in town, I would have dragged Thursday and Sharita over to Tammy’s with a DVD. But I wasn’t in town, so …

 … the night of New Year’s Eve, I was on the East Coast, scheduled to play a corporate party as the opener along with Yes, We Are Trying To Cute You To Death (Yes, We Are for short). This started out as an Ipso! Facto! gig. But the label threw Yes, We Are and Supa Dupa into the deal so that we could get some more exposure. Whatever that meant.

I went on after Yes, We Are, and the suits weren’t exactly rocking out to my set. One corporate drone even plugged the ear closest to the stage with a finger as he networked over his champagne. I started to feel rather stupid in my green patent leather pants and my string bikini top, which had “20” written over one breast and “12” over the other. And I was relieved when the set was through.

The guys from Yes, We Are asked if I wanted to go somewhere, somewhere
real
to celebrate New Year’s. I had already played, and I didn’t have to stick around till midnight. But I couldn’t tell if they were serious about the invite or being nice since I was standing right there when they started tossing around plans. A couple of years ago this wouldn’t have even been a question. I hated, hated, hated my thirties.

I told them sure, give me a second. And then I went into the bathroom and did a line of coke. I was not cliché enough to be a cokehead (anymore), but I was also not young enough to get through a whole New Year’s Eve of hard partying without a little help from my powdery friend. I stared at myself in the corporate mirror while I waited for the coke to do its thing. The track lighting in the bathroom made it look like I had on too much makeup. Garish. Old. That was how I looked.

And I kind of felt like crying then, because I’d never wanted to be anything but a rock star. But I was starting to realize, at the age of thirty, that being a rock star isn’t all that great. And I really wished I’d had this epiphany earlier, before coming out to my parents and getting disowned, before
dropping out of Smith College in the spring semester of my junior year, before spending the last nine years acquiring exactly zero transferrable skills.

Instead, this was the Year I Finally Achieved My Dream … only to find out that my dream sucked and, moreover, I was now too old to truly enjoy it. I didn’t want to go back to school. I didn’t want to start getting up before two in the afternoon. But The One … well, that wasn’t going to happen, was it? Not with my tepid record sales, not with her still refusing to love me back the way I loved her.

What was taking this coke so fucking long to work already?
I was about to line up another rail of powder when my phone rang.

I checked the caller ID. It was Tammy. So I answered it, because if she was going to bring me down with her terminal cancer, then I wanted to save the other line of coke for after the phone call. “What’s up, Tammy-Tam,” I said.

“Thursday,” Tammy was crying so hard, I could barely make out what she was saying. “Thursday and Mike Barker are together. And they came over here. And they … And they … This is The Worst Year Ever.”

Tammy was crazy sobbing now, worse than when the whole Mike Barker situation went down in the first place, worse than when she told me she had cancer.