The Lonely Hearts Club (5 page)

“Don’t make me blush,” she says, giving me a hug.

“How many people did you have to piss off for this?”

“None, actually,” Chloe says as she finishes off her second glass of sake. “They thought I was a hero for suggesting it. It’s a win-win.” We clink our tiny sake glasses for a toast. “Cheers. To being a sellout for corporate America.”

“Ah,” I say, “to being a sellout for corporate America with a place to live.”

“When do you have to get that first payment on the loft to your dad?” Chloe says, putting her sake glass back down on the table.

“Not for a while, I’m sure. Dinner’s on me,” I say. “You rule.”

“It doesn’t pay
that
well,” Chloe says. “I’m still paying for dinner. You can just pledge your undying love and devotion to me.”

“Done.” We clink our glasses together again.

“Good,” she says, “because you start tomorrow. We’ve got a client meeting with Healthy Foods at noon.”

“I guess I won’t sleep in,” I say. “I’ll set my alarm for ten.”

High on sake and my newly acquired freelance gig, I get back to the loft and kick my shoes off as I walk in the door. Right next to Jesse’s black Converse sneakers, there are a pair of gold stilettos that are not mine.

I make my way into the living room, where Jesse is sitting on my couch with a very familiar-looking redhead. They’ve already polished off a bottle of my father’s 1990 Lafite-Rothschild and are laughing hysterically. Jesse knows that I was holding onto that wine for the next time my father comes over, and I can’t believe he’s opened it. I’m not sure what I’m more
pissed off about—the fact that he’s opened a bottle of wine that I was saving for my father or that he’s done it with some redhead who wears gold stilettos.

“Hey, babe,” Jesse says as he stands up and throws his arm around my waist. “You remember Cassie, don’t you?” For the record, I don’t. “From The Rage?”

“Yes, of course,” I say, practically tripping over my own feet as I go to shake her hand. For some reason, I’m trying very hard to pretend that I’m not drunk. “How
are
you?”

“Great,” she says. “Just great, man.”

“Congratulations on your record deal,” I say, and immediately recall that Jesse told me that no one was supposed to know about it. I eye the bottle of Lafite and see that it is almost completely empty.

“Thanks so much,” Cassie says. “We are
psyched
.”

“You earned it,” Jesse says.

“Thanks, man,” she says as she gets up from the couch. “Anyway, we’re recording tomorrow, so I should probably go.”

“No!”

“Yeah...” Jesse and I say at the same time. I tell Cassie to stay, but Jesse maintains that she probably should go. I scramble awkwardly out of her way as she tries to gather her things to leave.

Jesse walks Cassie to the door and I fall down onto the couch. I can hear them whispering before he closes the door behind her. I position myself just so on the couch so that I look sexy when Jesse comes back to the living room to apologize for inviting some strange woman to our apartment and drinking my father’s expensive wine.

“So,” Jesse says as he walks over to the couch.

“So,” I say, trying to maintain my sexy pose. I’m lying on my right side with my left leg thrown lazily over my right and have my head in my right hand. I’m hoping he mistakes my drunk eyes for sexy bedroom eyes. I like to look good for arguments with Jesse, so that he can tell me that I’m right that much quicker and we can get to making up that much sooner.

“Cassie lent me money for the demo,” he says, standing over me. Usually, he would plop himself right down on the ottoman, but he stands in front of the couch tonight, looking down at me.

“Why did Cassie lend you money?” I ask. It occurs to me to sit up, but I’m simply too exhausted.

“Cassie lent me money and she has none,” he says, still standing over me. “You wouldn’t lend me money, and you have tons.”

“I don’t have tons,” I say, and hoist myself up to sit upright.

“Yeah, right,” Jesse says, opening his arms out wide to show me the loft, as if he’s one of the
Deal or No Deal
girls.

“Why did she lend you money?” I ask, as the room starts to spin. I’m not sure if it’s the sake or the confusion over what is going on.

“I needed the money, Jo. You knew that,” Jesse says. “I had to take the money from wherever I could.”

“What are you,” I say, summoning all of my energy to get up from the couch and walk toward the bedroom, “a drug addict? Getting money anywhere you can?” Jesse doesn’t follow me—he stays firmly planted in the living room.

“Yes. I’m addicted,” Jesse says. “I’m addicted to music.”

“You’re addicted to being a drama queen,” I say, slamming the door to the bedroom in my wake. That was the best comeback I could think of with half a bottle of sake in my belly. I throw my clothes off in a huff and get into bed. I silently pray that Jesse will bring me a glass of water when he comes in, but he never makes it back to the bedroom. That night, he sleeps on the couch.

6 - Just a Girl

“What is that thing on your chin?” Chloe asks me when we’re in the bathroom after the Healthy Foods pitch meeting.

“A zit,” I say. “And how about: ‘Jo, you were great. That meeting went great. You were riffing like you were a hip-hop rapping genius’ instead of an attack on my personal appearance?”

“Yes,” Chloe says, dabbing at her shiny nose with pressed powder. “You were better than Pitbull. ‘Healthy Foods puts you in the mood’ was truly inspired.”

“I hauled my guitar twenty blocks to the meeting and sang all of my ideas,” I say. “The client ate it up.”

“That part was genius,” Chloe says. “They totally did eat that up. You seemed very legit.”

“I blame this on Jesse,” I say, jumping up onto the counter to inspect my pimple. “If he hadn’t been such a prick last night, we totally would have had sex, and I wouldn’t have woken up with a pimple on my chin. You never get a pimple the day after you have sex.”

“Is that the kind of dermatologic advice you picked up from working for your dad?”

“It’s just common knowledge, Chlo,” I say, a smile creeping onto my lips. “That must be why your skin is always so clear. What time is it?”

“Funny,” Chloe says. “It’s almost three. Why?”

“I’m hitting the Long Island Rail Road. I’ve got to get a cortisone shot for this thing.”

“You’re going out to Long Island to have your father pop your zit?”

“Yeah,” I say, waiting for her to make a snide comment about running to daddy. “Why?”

“I thought you were still mad at him for firing you?” Chloe asks.

“I am,” I say, hopping off the counter, “but he’s still my dermatologist.” Chloe just stares back at me. “What?” I say.

“I’m coming,” she says. “If your dad’s giving out free dermatologic advice, I’m so there.”

“Let’s go,” I say, grabbing my guitar. “If we leave now, we can still get an off-peak ticket.”

“How very frugal of you,” Chloe says. “But if you bring your guitar with you, I’ll bring my sketch pad and we can take a car service and bill it to Healthy Foods.”

“Done.”

Forty-five minutes later—you don’t usually hit traffic on the Long Island Expressway before 4
P.M
.—we’re pulling up to my father’s office, and we’ve written three different jingles with three distinct commercial concepts storyboarded out. Chloe even brought her pencils, so the storyboards are in color.

We grab our things and walk into the Manhasset Medical Pavilion, where my father has had his office since the 1970s. Upon graduation of medical school, my father’s father bought the building for him as a gift. Most of the tenants don’t know that my father actually owns the entire building, since he has a management company run the day-to-day operations and make most of the management decisions for him.

The building was renovated and redecorated in the early ’90s, so it still has a vague ’80s feel to it. There is a small living room setup in the lobby in front of the reception desk that has two cheaply made white leather couches facing each other on a pink oriental rug with a mirrored coffee table in between them. A massive vase on the center of the coffee table is clearly meant to be the centerpiece of the setup: a pastel pink, plastic-y looking thing filled with fake flowers. The management company used to have fresh flowers brought in weekly, but the tenants banded together and agreed that they would rather pay less in rent and have fake flowers on permanent display. My mother, my father’s proxy, was the sole dissenting vote in the matter.

Every time we walk into the lobby of the building, Chloe starts humming the theme song to
Miami Vice
and doing the robot.

Probably because she had so little say over the look of the building itself, my mother, who fancies herself a bit of a design whiz, is the self-appointed on-site design czar for my father’s office. (She sends audition tapes to HGTV religiously each year.) Under her command, the office always looks immaculate. In its latest incarnation, it looks like a homey, welcoming living room, complete with overstuffed couches in lush fabrics and a rich blond-wood coffee table. The reception desk is the same shade of wood. I think that my mother went a bit overboard with the vanilla-colored chenille throw that is draped over the back of the couch, but even I have to admit that it does tie together the entire look of the room.

And it smells like a home, not like a doctor’s office at all. My father does various on-site laser surgeries at his office, so he wants it to be a comforting environment for some of his more nervous patients. I know for a fact that potpourri is strategically hidden throughout the office so that it doesn’t smell like a doctor’s office, a touch my mother considers one of her more brilliant
ideas. (“Martha Stewart’s got nothing on me,” she loves to boast. “I could be on HGTV. I just need a good scandal to get my face out there.”)

Chloe is still doing the robot as the elevator doors open and we walk into the office.

“Hi, Jo,” my father’s receptionist says to me. I can’t help but wonder if she knew that my father was going to fire me before I knew it. Or if she complained to him about me, and that was part of the reason I was fired.

“Hello, Tricia,” I say. The “you little Benedict Arnold” part is implied.

“Hey,
girl
ies!” Barbie, the Barbie doll nurse, coos at us before we’ve even had a chance to sit down. Barbie likes to call everyone “girls,” as opposed to women. Or even the less PC but more traditional “ladies.” She also wears a nurse’s uniform—the sort of thing one would wear on Halloween to be dressed up as a “naughty nurse”—to work every day, even though all of the other nurses wear scrubs and clogs.

“Hey, Barbie,” Chloe says and I smile and give Barbie a kiss on the cheek. Barbie is the sort of “girl” (her words, not mine) who kisses everyone hello, and even kisses strangers once she’s introduced to them. She’s just oozing with bubbly cheer.

I should mention here that it’s not just that we call Barbie “the Barbie doll nurse” because she looks like a real live Barbie doll. Make no mistake—she
does
look like a Barbie doll, from her button nose to her blonde hair to her freakishly out-of-proportion long, thin legs and large, large breasts—but also, her name happens to be Barbie. And no, that’s not a nickname or an abbreviation of something like Barbara as you may be thinking. Her name is actually Barbie. It says Barbie Johnson on her driver’s license and even her passport (I checked her employee file). I always thought that it was a cruel gamble for her parents to make, giving their daughter such a
loaded first name, but luckily for her, she grew up to do the name justice. And then some. But I mean, what if she’d grown up to be ugly or overweight or—gasp!—a brunette! What then?