The Lonely Hearts Club (12 page)

“Yes,” I say, still typing away furiously, trying to take down what I wrote. “Enough. I can read. But how did you even know that there was something new on there?”

“You linked to it on Facebook. And Twitter.”

“I don’t even know how to tweet,” I say.

“Apparently you do,” Chloe says. “Oh God, whatever you do, don’t check Instagram.”

“Why not?”

“No reason. Anyway, I also got an e-mail from your mailing list,” she said. “Remember how the blog was set up to e-mail your entire mailing list when a new post went up?”

I immediately sober up. What have I done?

“No,” I say, slowly backing away from my computer. “I did not remember that at all.”

What have I done?

What. Have. I. Done. This is not possible. This is just not possible.

My face heats up. Somehow in my Valentine’s Day–induced rage, I thought it would be a good idea to send this rant to everyone on the Lonely Hearts mailing list, Twitter feed, and Facebook page. Which means that the same messages that Chloe received were also sent to more than 2,500 people throughout the tristate area. In one fit of fury, I have completed humiliated myself, my friends, and, quite possibly, my family.

My only hope is that the e-mail gets caught in everyone’s spam filters since the site was set up such a long time ago.

All 2,500 spam filters.

And that no one checks Facebook. Or Twitter. Or, apparently, Instagram.

“My God, Jo, how drunk
were
you?”

“Very, I guess,” I say as I read more of what I wrote on the blog.

“My favorite part is where you start attacking the grandmothers,” Chloe says. “It has to be someone’s fault, right? Why not blame the grandmothers? Here we go: ‘All men suck. All men will lie to you and let you down. There is no such thing as a good man—only a man who is temporarily being nice to you because he wants you to have sex with him or to give him money. Grandmothers—I know what you’re thinking.’ She obviously hasn’t met my grandson. ‘But, no, this goes for you, too. Your grandsons suck. They lie. They are assholes. They cannot commit.’” Chloe laughs. “I love that part.”

“I didn’t mean to attack grandmothers,” I say.

“I posted a comment,” she says. I quickly click on the link for guest comments. This is going from bad to worse.

“‘Amen, sister’?” I say, skimming over Chloe’s entry quickly. “Since when do you say things like ‘Amen, sister’?”

“Isn’t that the problem with a blog?” Chloe asks. “You end up writing stuff you would never say out loud. Actually, maybe that’s the beauty of a blog. That’s why you did it, right?”

“No,” I say. I don’t really know why I did it. “It was just to let off steam, I guess.”

“Do you feel better now?”

“No,” I say. “Not really.” And I
don’t
feel any better. The rage is still coursing through my body. My face feels hot and there’s nothing I can do to cool it down. I’m still angry—I still feel like opening my window and screaming at the world. The rage quickly turns to sadness as I read the rest of Chloe’s entry:

Love is selfish. Love is a lie. Love is waking up in the middle of the night to a phone call saying that the love of your life OD’d after
he’s been promising you for months on end that he’s been sober. Love is having to call your boyfriend’s parents right before Christmas to tell them that their son is dead and you don’t know why and you don’t know how because you weren’t even there
.

Love tears your heart out. Love kills your soul
.

“Oh, Chlo. I’m so sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Thinking about Billy always upsets me,” she says. “Nothing unusual about that.”

“I really didn’t know it was going out to my whole mailing list,” I say, taking the throw blanket that’s draped over the back of the couch and putting it across my shoulders. “You know I would never do anything to hurt you, right?”

“You didn’t hurt me,” she says. “Billy hurt me. When he cared more about drugs than he cared about me, that hurt me. And he hurt you, too, right? The band broke up after he died. But you? You didn’t hurt me. You know, I always think of him on Valentine’s Day. Getting that all out on your blog actually made me feel better, you know?”

“I’m glad it made you feel better,” I say, wondering why I didn’t feel any better after I vented all of
my
feelings. “Anyway, what are you doing on the Internet when you have a Valentine’s Day date? Did you get rid of him already?”

“I sent him home,” she says. “He took me out for drinks. Who does drinks on Valentine’s Day? No matter how casual you are with a guy, on Valentine’s Day, a girl deserves dinner. Don’t you think?”

“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask.

“I wasn’t going to date him past this weekend anyway, so there’s really nothing to say.”

“I meant, do you want to talk about Billy?” I ask, drawing the blanket over my head and lying back on the couch.

“Didn’t I say enough?” she asks, laughing. I’m happy that I got her to laugh, but then I remember that for Chloe, she really has to cry it all out until she feels better.

“There’s no limit on how much you can cry to your best friend,” I say.

“You said it best, Jo: ‘We’re believing in a lie. True love isn’t really out there; it’s a myth. It’s no different than Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. So, I say—let’s just grow up already and call a spade a spade. Let’s just stop deluding ourselves and admit that there’s no such thing as love.’ That’s what you said. Didn’t you mean it?”

“I guess,” I say as I read the rest of what I wrote:
I’m done with love. I’m giving up on love before it breaks my heart again. And I’d suggest that you do the same thing, too
. “I just didn’t mean for that—for how angry I feel—to upset you,” I say.

“Everything you wrote, everything you said, is exactly how I feel,” she says. “How I felt, I mean. I think I’m still mad at Billy for dying. I keep thinking that I’m over it, that I’m ready to move on, but then the tiniest thing will happen—like I’ll hear some song he loved, or some song he hated—and everything just comes flooding back to me, you know?”

“I know,” I say.

“And I’m still on the mailing list for the goddamned Guitar Center,” she says. “Why is that place still sending me mailers when I haven’t even shopped there in over two years? I just got one yesterday.”

“That sucks,” I say, making a mental note to call Guitar Center tomorrow.

“I just wish I could stop thinking about him, you know?” she says. “When do you think I’ll stop thinking about him?”

I try to formulate a response, but I can’t. I don’t think that she will ever stop thinking of him, much in the way my father never stops thinking about his own father, who died when I was only three years old.

“It’s okay to think about him,” I say. “You loved him, he loved you. He was brilliant, and an amazing musician and songwriter. Hugely talented. Can’t we remember him for that?”

“I guess so,” Chloe says. “Hey, this is weird.”

“What’s weird?” I say, blanket still over my head.

“Check out the comment section.”

“What is it?” I say as I sit up and look at the computer screen.

“The number keeps going up,” Chloe says. I look at the number of guest comments and Chloe’s right. The number keeps going higher and higher, faster and faster, right before my eyes.

“Something must be broken,” I say, hitting whatever keys on my computer that I can. “It says it has ninety-seven comments.”

“Hey, look,” Chloe says. “This one says ‘Amen, sister,’ too!”

“People are actually posting comments?”

I click back to the link for guest comments and Chloe is right—this is not a mistake. The blog has already gotten ninety-seven comments and the count is growing by the second.

Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred, one hundred and one, one hundred and two...

14 - Wanna Be Startin’ Something?

“Do you like pizza?” I ask Max, the number-one IT guy at Chloe’s ad agency. He’s at the loft since Chloe begged him to come by and fix my computer after it crashed this morning. Apparently it wasn’t equipped to deal with the volume of responses I downloaded from my blog. I’m supposed to be making him lunch for his services, which is fair, since he’s doing it for me on his lunch break.

When Max walked in, I almost laughed out loud. He looked like he came straight from Central Casting for the role of dorky computer guy: sandy long hair half pulled back into a ponytail with the sides falling over his overgrown sideburns, black horn-rimmed glasses, and a short-sleeved button-down shirt and khakis. You can tell these are his “I work in an office” khakis that he only wears Monday through Friday, from the hours of 9
A.M.
to 5
P.M.

Totally not my type. Which doesn’t matter at all, since I’m not looking for anyone new right now.
Especially
now. Now that I’ve sworn off love and encouraged 2,500 people in the tristate area to do likewise.

But still, I find myself wondering why Chloe never dated Max, because there’s something about him that I instantly like.

“Who doesn’t like pizza?” he says with a laugh. “But you know, I was promised a homemade lunch for my services.”

“Oh, don’t worry. They’ll make it from scratch over at Mario’s,” I tell him with a sly smile. The phone rings and I pick it up.

“Is this some sort of a joke, Jo?” my father says.

“Hi, Daddy,” I murmur into the phone as I turn my back to Max.

“This computer thing you’ve written, is it a joke?” he asks. “Why are you so angry?”

I’m wondering how my dad even saw the blog. He barely knows how to operate a computer. I ask him as much.

“Barbie printed it out for me,” he says.
How very helpful of her
, I think. “She’s worried about you.”

“No,” I say. “She’s just worried about having a deranged bridesmaid walk down her aisle.”

My father is not amused. “It really doesn’t matter why
she
printed it for me,” he says. “What matters is why
you
wrote it.”

“I don’t know why I wrote it,” I whisper into the phone, hoping, for some reason, that Max cannot hear me. “But you don’t have to worry about me. I’m fine.”

“This is not the sort of behavior a person who is ‘fine’ exhibits,” he says. “Maybe you should come home to Long Island for a few days. Just to relax.”

I think of telling him that spending a few days on Long Island with my parents will have the opposite effect from relaxing me, but think better of it. “I’m fine here in the city.”

“Well, then I’ll come into the city,” he says. “Meet me at Balthazar at seven.”

I try to voice my dissent, but he’s already hung up the phone. Now I know where Andrew learned that trick. I set the phone back in its cradle a little too harshly and it makes an audible crash.

“I’m just about done here,” Max says, pretending not to have heard this exchange with my father.

“Can I get you anything to drink?” I ask.

“Whatever you’re having is fine with me,” he says.

I’ve been drinking water all morning in an attempt to flush out all of the vodka tonics I drank last night, but there’s something that seems wrong about giving a guest a glass of water. Alcohol would be too festive for the occasion, so I compromise and bring two iced teas over to the couch.

“Thanks,” he says, and turns my laptop to me.

“Thank
you
,” I say. “How does it look?”

“All better,” he says, taking a sip of his iced tea. He leans over and shows me around the Web site, demonstrating all of the changes he’s made to accommodate the massive amount of traffic the site is getting. With his arm brushing mine, I’m suddenly very aware of the wife beater and pajama bottoms I’m still wearing. And that I’m not wearing a bra. “You know, you could make a ton of money with this Web site on advertising. You’ve obviously hit a nerve here. This is what people want to read, how they feel. You’ve tapped into something special. Are you tracking how many people have tweeted at you? Have you seen what some of these people have written to you? You’ve practically started a movement.”

“A movement is not exactly a bunch of people from your mailing list writing comments on your blog post.”

“You have more than 50,000 people on your mailing list?”

“2,500,” I say, not quite believing my ears. “Did you say 5,000?”

“Fifty,” he says. “50,000.”

“That’s not possible,” I say, inching away from Max. He smells like soap and lemon and sweat.

“I know people who have quit their day jobs on a lot less,” he says, nodding at me. “With the traffic you got in just one night, I’d imagine that you could start selling ad space on this thing
as soon as today. I can help you out with that, if you wanted.”

“You’d help me?” I ask as my mind begins to race. I could do this. I could actually do this. Work on my music during the day and update the blog at night. This could actually be the start of something.

“Yeah,” he says. “I could be like a consultant to your site or something like that. I could even help you with a redesign, since it’s sort of dated. We could create a brand that goes across your blog, your Facebook page, and your Twitter page. Make it relate more to your blog, less to the band.”