The Frog Prince (14 page)

“It’s hard work,” I say. I no longer wonder why Shea is so fit. She doesn’t lift weights or run—she just dances
six or seven nights a week. I took ibuprofen before I got to the Mercury Café in anticipation of being bedridden by tomorrow morning. I make a mental note to add something for motion sickness to the pharmaceutical line-up before next time; all that spinning around made me feel like I just got off the teacup ride at Disney World.

“It gets easier,” says Roman, picking up the menu. “Once you repeat it a few times it gets locked in motor memory. Like riding a bike.”

I smile gamely. I don’t share with him that my bike-riding ability still remains sketchy at best even after thirty years.

“You’re picking it up really fast,” he says. He hesitates. “Do you want to go out again tomorrow night?”

Is this even a question?
I think. Aloud I say, “Dancing?” Unlike Shea, I’m not sure I can take dancing seven days a week.

“No, there’s no dancing on Saturdays. I was thinking a movie or something.” He smiles. “I would invite you back to my place and make you dinner, but my place is Christine’s place for about another three weeks.”

“Oh…right. Sure, a movie sounds great.”

“I hope I’m not boring you with my company,” he says. “I don’t want you to feel pressured to keep going out with me.”

I stare at him, wondering if he’s looked in a mirror lately. “Why would you think that?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know…you seemed sort of hesitant.”

I clear my throat. “Well, that’s because there’s a direct correlation between how much time I spend with you and how soon you’ll run screaming into traffic.”

He gets a genuinely puzzled look on his face. “Why do you say that? It’s been great spending time with you…you’re funny, you’re smart.” He smiles. “I couldn’t believe my luck when I met you.”

“You call a quarter of an inch hole through your foot lucky?”

He chuckles. “Yeah…that wasn’t as much of an accident as you think.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were the first person I saw when we walked in the door of the funeral home that night. I couldn’t stop looking at you. I had to ditch Christine and Earl just so I could follow you around.”

“You were stalking me at a funeral home?”

“I was standing behind you for five minutes, trying to think of something to say.”

I ponder this. “So, what
would
you have said if I hadn’t stepped on your foot?”

He grins. “My usual is ‘You wanna blow this place and check out a kegger under a railroad bridge?’ But that seemed a little over the top for a wake.”

I grin back. “Good call.”

“That probably would have been an improvement over making fun of your dead aunt and insulting your family. I felt like an idiot for the rest of the night.”

“Is that why you came to the funeral the next day?”

He shrugs. “I wasn’t sure when I would run into you again. By the time I asked you out to dinner I was in a total panic.”

“Why?”

“I hadn’t exactly left you with the best first impression. I thought about calling you, but I wasn’t sure you’d give me a chance to tell you how I’d met your family and apologized. And I couldn’t believe…” He stops in mid-sentence.

“You couldn’t believe what?” I ask.

“I mean, Christine and Kat both told me you were single, that you weren’t dating anyone, but I just couldn’t believe it. I mean, look at you!” he says, waving his hand towards me. “You can’t really blame me for crashing the funeral, can you?”

His confession seems to require a response from me. “Romantic encounters after funerals are common due to the heightened emotional climate.” I immediately feel my face getting hot, my autonomic nervous system striking yet again.

“
And
you say cute things when you’re embarrassed,” he says, looking down at the menu.

It’s that pivotal moment that occurs in all of my potential relationships, the moment where a guy must accept that he's about to date a perfectly normal looking women with an unfortunate streak of blithering idiocy. I’m a little relieved–it sounds like he has me all figured out and is one of those people who’s just a glutton for punishment.

I excuse myself from the table, retreating to the restroom in the back of the restaurant. The bathroom continues the Alice in Wonderland-y acid trip theme of the main restaurant. I close the door and spend some time studying the white brick walls, and two dozen rolls of toilet paper suspended from invisible thread from the black ceiling.

Are these back-up rolls, I wonder, in the event the regular supply runs out? I’m not sure, but they’re hung pretty high so it’s probably a terrific test of your motivation. I emerge to find an IQ test in the form of a sink that looks like something you’d use to pan for gold. A stream of fine-link chains hangs over the sink, anchored from somewhere above. There are no visible faucets, so once the soap is on my hands I have no idea how to rinse it off.

Great
, I think. Only
I
would need a bathroom buddy to navigate a local restaurant hand-washing experience.

A typical Denver single appears at my side, offering his assistance. “This is pretty tricky to figure out the first time,” he says, reaching across me to pull a cord with a wooden handle that looks like an old-fashioned toilet flusher. “Look there,” he says, pointing to the ceiling.

The water begins to collect at the top of the chains before trickling down the silver links like a waterfall and emptying into the sink.

“Wow,” I say.

“I’m Evan,” he says, holding out his hand to shake. Mine are still wet from the sink so I grab a towel and dry them off really quick so I can offer him my hand.

“Hi, Evan,” I say. “Thanks for your help.”

“Enjoy your dinner,” he says as I walk back in the direction of my table.

“Does that happen to you all the time?” asks Roman as I take my seat.

“What?”

“Guys following you around wherever you go.”

I look around, unsure who he’s referring to. “Someone’s following me?” I say.

He laughs. “The guy at the sink.”

I wave my hand. “Oh, he was just showing me how to turn the water on.”

“Right, right.” Roman pretends to look at his menu. “His table’s by the front door. When he saw you at the sink he bolted all the way to the back to offer his, uh,
help
.”

“I don’t really notice that kind of stuff.” I don’t tell him that I expend most of my energy trying not to embarrass myself, and it’s better if I’m not hyper-aware that I have an audience.

I pick up my menu, a thin piece of wood with words burned into it. “What’s the deal with this place anyway?” I say, looking around.

Just then our server walks up to our table. “Welcome to Beatrice and Woodsley’s,” she says. “Have the two of you been here before?”

“I have,” says Roman. He points at me. “First time. She wants to know what the deal is.”

The server laughs. She must know what “the deal” means because she launches into a pre-rehearsed saga. “All this was inspired by the love story of Beatrice and Woodsley,” she says. “Beatrice was the daughter of a French winemaker in the early eighteen hundreds. Woodsley was a handsome lumberjack. To show his love for her he built her a cabin in the mountains among the aspen trees.”

I look at Roman in disbelief. A French winemaker’s daughter and a lumberjack? This sounds like the premise of an erotica novel or really bad performance art. “Is the owner related to them?” I ask to be polite.

“Oh,” she says airily, “the story isn’t true. Beatrice and Woodsley aren’t real people.”

I stare at her for a few seconds. “So,” I say slowly, “this restaurant is a replica of a non-existent cabin in the woods built in honor of a love affair that didn’t happen between two people who never existed?”

Roman guffaws, but the server is nonplussed and has no response other than “Can I tell you two about our specials tonight?”

I let Roman order; small-plate, high-end restaurants are outside of my comfort zone. He considers the menu for another moment before ordering up a smorgasbord of stuff like yogurt and pea shoots and braised pork belly with house pickles and mango mustard. He also chooses a bottle of wine from the wine list. I am cheered that the whole “French winemaker’s daughter” part of the story at least inspired a real wine cellar.

“Hey, guess who called my mom today?” I say once she’s finished taking our order and clears out.

“Who?”

“Menen.”

Roman raises his eyebrow. “Princess Menen called your mom? Why?”

“I’m not really sure. I think it must be about that dress. The women in Aspen really liked it, and some of them wanted to know how they could reach my mom. Maybe Menen wants my mom to make something for her.”

“You know that Menen owns a boutique in Paris, right?” he says.

“Yeah, you told me.”

“She supports new designers. Maybe she wants to see what else your mom can make.”

“My mom’s not a designer,” I say. “She’s just, you know, my mom. She’s been sewing my clothes since I was in kindergarten.”

“Really? Hmmm…remind me to thank her when I meet her. Speaking of that, when do I get to meet her?”

“My mom? You already met her—at the funeral, remember? You may have missed her…she’s kind of short.”

“Okay, well when do I get to meet your parents
again
? Do I have to wait for someone else in your family to die?”

“When do I get to meet
your
mom?” I counter.

“My mother moved back to Austria after my father died. I’m going to see her at Christmas. Want to come?”

I laugh at his joke. “Okay, how about I have my parents invite you over for Thanksgiving?”

“Perfect,” he says. “I’ll be there.”

“Great,” I mumble, “this should be excruciating.”

“Why? They seemed like nice people.”

“That’s just a show they put on to fool the masses.”

“Everyone thinks their parents are embarrassing. It’s nature’s way of making sure you move out of the family yurt.”

“Mission accomplished,” I say, smiling.

He folds his hands on the table. “What’s there to be embarrassed about? They seem to have done a good job raising you…assuming you’re the law-abiding, upstanding citizen I think you are.”

I look at him, unsure of how much to lay on him. “Well, both of them were pretty average until I left for college.
That’s
when things got weird.”

“They were empty-nesters, give ‘em a break.”

“They weren’t empty-nesters.”

“They weren’t?” he says. “I thought Christine said you didn’t have any brothers or sisters.”

“Only child,” I confirm. “But when I moved out, religion moved in to keep them company.”

He gets it now. “Ah,” he says. “Well, religion brings comfort to a lot of people.”

“I know, and you’re right. I mean, they’re still the same ol’ Mom and Dad to me, but it feels strange since they weren’t religious while I was growing up.”

Roman unrolls his silverware from the napkin on the table. “So what do they think of your line of work?”

“We don’t talk about that. In their view I’m probably one level above a prostitute.”

“So…” He pauses. “Are the four of us just going to stare at each other over turkey and stuffing?”

I laugh. “It won’t be
that
bad. They’ll talk to you. I’m just warning you to steer clear of the topic of religion.”

“Huh,” he says, mulling this over. “Yeah, people in Europe aren’t really that religious. The bad experience of the Dark Ages sort of got stuck in the collective European craw. It was all downhill for religion after the Renaissance. My parents went through the motions of Catholicism, but we’re all agnostics.”

“That’s
awesome
,” I say with a grin. “The guy who’s supposed to represent the Catholic faith of the Holy Roman Empire is agnostic. Does the Pope know about this?”

“Probably not,” he admits. “The Habsburgs haven’t had any real power in Europe for a hundred years, so we sort of dropped off the Vatican’s radar.”

I copy him and unfold my napkin, dumping the silverware onto the tabletop. “Well, at least you and your mother are on the same page when it comes to religion.”

“Yes, but we disagree about other things.”

“Like what?”

Roman rubs the back of his neck with one of his hands. “Like…she values rank and status more than I do. That’s sort of typical for European ex-royalty though.”

“Wow,” I say. “That’s a little intimidating.”

He laughs. “She’s not mean to people, it’s just something that is important to her and not important to me. I’m sure if I’d been raised like she was, I’d think differently.”

“What would your mother think if she knew about me?”

“She knows,” he says. Just then our server reappears and covers our table with plates of delicious-smelling cuisine. Another guy sneaks up on us and pours our wine before putting the bottle on the table.

I wait until they both withdraw. “She knows about me? How?”

“Well, I told her for one thing. But even if I hadn’t, she would have heard about it from someone at the Royal Weekend. There are very few secrets in ‘almost royal’ circles.”

“You told her? What did you say?”

He looks at me like he’s not sure he should answer honestly.

I cringe, waiting for the worst, something along the lines of, “Hey, Mom. You know how you always wanted me to date royalty? Well, I just met the Trailer Park Queen!”

“I told her I’d met a really fascinating, beautiful woman,” he says, “and I that when I wasn’t with her I was
thinking
about being with her.”

I’m not sure how to respond to such a high compliment. So I go for the Brilliant Response Trifecta: the blank stare, red face, and caveman-like grunt.

Roman smiles through his pea shoots. He throws down some wine to clear his mouth and says, “I was serious about Christmas. I’d love for you to come. Is that crazy?”

Maybe it’s the wine, but the idea that Roman believes we’ll still be dating at Christmas warms me right down to my toes. “That might be enough time for you to brief me on the specifics of almost royal protocol,” I say.