The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (48 page)

THURSDAY

A
t Tammy’s funeral, Risa sang a song so crazy beautiful even Tammy’s ice queen of a mother, who did not in any way approve of Tammy and Risa’s relationship, actually sniffled.

Risa spent exactly forty minutes at the after-party, accepting condolences and receiving compliments on the song, before she went back into Mike’s pool house. Then she didn’t come out again until late June, at which point she booked some time at a studio and a week later emerged from it with a demo that she sent straight to a few execs she had met from Gravestone’s parent company, Jam Rock Records, with a note explaining what had inspired it and that they’d need to take it as is, with no changes.

Jam Rock offered her a very modest deal, with even less upfront than her original deal with Gravestone. Considering that she had made less with Gravestone than she had as the guitarist for the Sweet Janes, this was definitely a step down, and might have made me mad if I were Risa.

But Risa just shrugged. “That’s okay, the album’ll go big, and I’ll make those bitches pay out the ass for the next one, which won’t even be half as good. And even if it doesn’t work out, I don’t care, as long as I never, ever have to take another fucking note from David Fucking Gall.”

But I had the feeling this wouldn’t be an issue. The rest of the album was very good but, really, all she needed was “Tammy.” That song would be going places, I could already tell. When I had heard it at the funeral, tears came to my eyes and I decided to visit my father in Hawaii for Christmas. Just like that, Brenda or no Brenda. I forgave him for everything right then and there, because it was that kind of song. The kind of song that could change your life. How could a song like that not find an audience?

“Do you think your pool house is magical?” I asked Mike over breakfast in early July. This was the day after Risa moved out, into a ramshackle house in Silver Lake right above the main drag of Sunset Junction.

“I’m beginning to,” he answered.

I asked that not just because of Risa’s record deal, but because of what had happened to me after I started using the pool house as an office.

In New Orleans I had mentioned to Mike that I had written something a little offbeat, “Like
Six Feet Under
, but funny and with black people.”

“Send it to me,” he said. “I want to read it.”

So I sent it to him, and he read it in his trailer the next day and he texted me, “This is really good, baby.”

Then a couple of days later he texted, “Diana likes it, too. She wants to shop it.”

Diana was the executive in charge of Big Dog Barks, Mike’s production company. So I spent the next few days e-mailing back and forth with her assistant, while we put together a treatment. Diana took it around and by June, Big Dog Barks made a deal with a fledgling cable channel that was known for its reruns but had ordered six pilots for two new original series slots, including
Down Home,
which was what we had decided to name my series. Diana had attached a burnt-out show runner who knew all the ropes of running a writing staff but didn’t have much interest in the creative, and just like that, starting in September, after Sharita’s wedding, we would be developing a pilot.

I was still a little stunned. It had all happened so fast. One day I was a starving artist, and the next day I was not. Which is why I asked Mike if he thought the pool house was lucky.

After the pool house conversation, Mrs. Murphy came in with the mail, most of which was for Mike.

“But this is for you,” she said, handing me a card-sized envelope.

“It’s an invite for Sharita’s wedding,” I said, opening the heavy linen envelope. “Do you want to come with me?” I asked Mike.

“Let me look at my schedule,” he answered.

However, later that night he said the words that would send our boyfriendom-girlfriendom into a death spiral. We were swimming naked in his pool, not because he wanted to gamble, but because skinny-dipping might be one the best forms of foreplay there is. And Mike who, before taking up with me had dated a stream of wannabe actresses with weaves they couldn’t get wet, very much liked this form of foreplay. In fact we were playing an increasingly heated game of water tag when he had to go and ruin it all by saying, “We should think about doing like Sharita and Ennis one of these days.”

“Doing what like Sharita and Benny?” I asked, more concerned with holding on to my now-joking mispronunciation of Ennis’s name than the words coming out of his mouth.

“Get married,” he said.

I laughed because I didn’t think he was being serious. Then I stopped laughing when the look on his face told me that this had not been a joke.

“What’s so funny about getting married?” He circled me in the water. Like a shark.

“I thought you were always like, ‘I’m never going to get married,’” I said.

“I never said that.”

“Yeah, you did. You were like, ‘I’m just going to date cocktail waitresses and models forever. Yay, me.’”

“I think you’re talking about George Clooney.” An impatient, pursed-lip look came over his face. Like he was talking to a child. A really dim child. “You know I’m not that guy anymore. I don’t gamble. I don’t date women just because they’re cute. I don’t agree to stupid bets or sign non-disclosure agreements with rich gay heiresses. That’s all in the past, because I’ve worked hard to turn my life around. You get that, right?”

I stopped treading water and let my feet settle at the bottom of the pool. Our sexy game of tag seemed to be over now.

“What exactly do you think we’re doing here?” he asked.

I struggled to find an appropriate answer. “I don’t know. Having fun.”

Now he went still in the pool. “Ask me how many girls I’ve invited to live with me. Ask me how many girls I produced projects with. Ask me how many girls I’ve said ‘I love you’ to.”

“Technically, I’m not a girl. I’m a woman,” I said, because, you know, Smith.

“Ask me,” he said, his voice dipping into growling territory. “And I’ll tell you that the answer is zero. So maybe you’re having fun, but I’m very serious about this. I want to get this pilot together and I want us to get married. That’s what Mike Barker wants. We love each other. We’re passionate about the same things, and the sex is great. What else do we need?”

I folded my arms. “You know who else loved each other, and were passionate about the same things, and probably had great sex in the beginning? My parents.”

The night air, which had just felt a little brisk when we came down to swim, dropped into freezing territory. “We’re not your parents,” he said.

And my mom whispered, “
Don’t be pathetic! Don’t be pathetic! Don’t be pathetic!”

“Before I met you I was so fucked up. I couldn’t get my life together. I went through guys like paper towels. I wasn’t writing. I was crazy depressed. Since meeting you, though, everything’s changed. I really like myself now. I like the person I am in this situation right now. But I don’t want to end up like my mom, afraid to leave somebody who obviously doesn’t love or respect me anymore.”

“Thursday, I love you.”

“I know you do now, and I love you, too, but—” I didn’t know how to explain this to him so that he’d stop trying to turn this into a Hallmark movie where everyone simply overcomes serious emotional baggage with declarations of love. “Doesn’t it bother you that we’re not Davie-approved? She wrote a best-selling book of dating advice, and she helped you recover
from a gambling addiction, but according to her book, we aren’t a long-term match.” I ticked it off on my fingers. “First of all, we had a tumultuous first six months. Second of all, we didn’t meet in the summer. Third of all, you keep referring to yourself in the third person—that wasn’t in the book, but it totally should have been—and fourth of all, we’re complete opposites. That doesn’t give you a moment of pause?”

Mike leaned backwards in the water, letting his feet float in front of him. “You really think we’re opposites?”

I splashed and looked around his saltwater infinity pool, which fell off into a fantastic view of eastern Los Angeles. “Yeah, don’t you?”

He splashed back. “Let’s see … we’ve both dated a lot of other people before each other. You write the kind of roles I want to play. And we both have mothers who abandoned us.”

I was so shocked that he would play that last card that he might as well have Tasered me. I mean, yeah, both of our mothers had grown up in the projects—mine in New York and his in Pittsburgh. But that’s where the similarities ended. While mine had gotten out and made a life for herself with Rick T, Mike’s had remained, gotten knocked up, and eventually succumbed to a crack addiction so bad that Mike had pretty much had to raise himself, supporting both of them as a drug dealer from middle school through high school, until he had somehow managed to get into Amherst on a full scholarship and leave Pittsburgh behind.

And yeah, both our mothers had died while we were in college, his from a drug overdose, mine from a car accident, but …

“My mom didn’t abandon me,” I said.

He regarded me with the same disappointed look he’d tried to pin on me when I was moving out back in December. “You know that’s not true, right? She killed herself.”

“Yeah, but …” I found myself without a good argument, and any remaining sensuality I might have still been feeling toward Mike evaporated in a blink. “My father—”

“Your father wasn’t great, no, but you can’t put all the blame on him. The drugs didn’t kill my mom. She killed herself using them. And so did your mom. They abandoned us and they’re dead now.”

I finally broke down and told him the truth. “Mike, when I look at you, when I think too hard about how much I love you, it makes me feel like I’m driving off a cliff.”

He gave me a sad smile. “Yeah, I get that. I’ve never done crack, but it feels like I’m carrying a crack addict around inside of me. But it’s time to start giving ourselves some credit. We’re not them. I recovered from my gambling addiction, and when you got hurt, you didn’t jump over that railing. We both overcame and we found each other. That’s what we have in common, that’s why we should be together.”

“
Don’t be pathetic! Don’t be pathetic!”
My mother was getting louder.

I stood there, refusing to let the infinity current or Mike sway me. “So you think that, as opposed to trying to find normal people without gambling addictions or suicidal tendencies, we should settle for each other because we’re both really fucked up?”

Mike slapped the pool with an angry swipe of his hand. “You know what? I’m not going to lie. At first I thought it was kind of sexy that you didn’t care who I was and were willing to walk away from me at the drop of a dime. You’ve been good for me, a challenge that I needed in my life. But it’s a thin line between challenge and toxic, and if you can’t figure out how to love me the way I love you, I’m going to have to let you go.”

The way he loved me? What did he know about love? What did either of us really know about love? Anger rose up like a steam cloud inside of me. “Why are you trying to ruin this? We are so happy right now. You’ve got two productions in development. I’m writing for a living. We are both the best versions of ourselves that we have ever been. Why can’t you leave it be instead of setting us up to fail earlier than we have to?”

Suddenly he was in front of me, my head cupped in his wet hands. “I promise you, I’m not like your mother. I won’t leave you.”

“See, you’re not letting me talk. I’m not scared that you’re like my mother. I’m scared that I’ll become like my mother—”

“You’re scared that I’m like your mother and that I’ll leave you. I know, because I’m scared of the exact same thing.”

The conversation had become too much. And after dropping a bomb like that, there wasn’t much left to do but listen to the lapping sounds of the infinity pool.

If this were any other relationship, I would have dumped him right then and there. For presuming too much. For trying to psychoanalyze me. For believing that he could demand anything of me. If Caleb had pulled this mess eight months into our relationship, I would have tucked away my recurring farmers market dream and moved out, job or no job.

But I couldn’t bring myself to dump Mike, and I realized at that moment that my list of reasons for not dating black men had been complete and utter bullshit. The real reason I hadn’t dated black men before Mike, the only reason I hadn’t dated them, was because I didn’t want to be a black woman in love with a black man.

“
Don’t be pathetic! Don’t be pathetic!”
my mother chanted.

Black love wasn’t sweet. It was humiliating and almost impossible for a black woman to disentangle herself from without serious loss of both pride and worth. And if a black woman married a black man? It was over. He could do anything he wanted. Cheat on her, disrespect her, impoverish her, and she still wouldn’t leave him. Like my mother, she’d walk out on life before she ever walked out on her man.

Despite my Connecticut cadence, my liberated sexual attitudes, and my dating history, I was, at the end of this argument, a black woman. And black women, I figured out while in literal deep waters, weren’t good at being in healthy love—especially when it came to black men. In fact, it made us pathetic.

I couldn’t explain this to Mike—Mike who not only hadn’t been to a farmers market during the current century, but had an assistant to do all of
his shopping for him, and a team in place to make sure that he got exactly what he deserved out of every project, and a girlfriend who loved him too much to marry him.

The rev of the engine, the crash through the divider, the quiet as we hung in the air.

“Okay,” Mike said after we had stood there quiet for too long. “You need some time to think about this. It’s a little early, I know. But I’m going to ask you again someday. And if your answer’s still no, then we’re going to have to break up.”

He swam away and got out of the pool. And when I joined him in bed over an hour later, he pulled me in for a long kiss, picking up where we had left off before the argument. True to his word, he didn’t bring it up again. But he didn’t have to. It hung over us now, lurked in every corner of the house.