Things I can’t Explain (22 page)

“Yep,” I say, “only parents I have.” I take another breath and continue. “So. I wanted to know…”

“You want me to go to a wedding as your date?”

“Well, when you put it like that, it sounds terrible. Doesn't it? I mean, it could be completely platonic, right? We don't have to be lovey-dovey or kiss or touch or dance. No yucky stuff.” I stop talking, feeling like a six-year-old at a Barbie party. “I'm sorry, I guess you didn't like your role as my significant other.”

“Not true. I did like it,” Nick says, “but I figured the reviews weren't so great for obvious reasons.”

“No, they were excellent,” I assure him. “Raves, actually, except … up until … well, you know, except you have a girlfriend, right?”

Nick takes a pause. Even though I worry that someone will slip in and ask him for a doppio macchiato soy extra foam and ruin our moment of truth, I'm thankful. His pause gives me a respite to feel like a normal person again after putting myself out there. I can breathe in and out and prepare for the response.

“Are your parents doing okay?” he asks. I wonder if this is his roundabout way of saying no, or if he's giving himself time to take stock of his relationship with Roxie and make a decision. I want to give him room because I figure the next thing he says is going to predict whether or not there's any future between us.
On-again or off-again?

“They're not great,” I say honestly. “Dad's still bummed and Mom's hoping that therapy and handfuls of rice at a wedding will turn things around.”

For the first time, I realize: Standing this close to him, I don't really care about Genelle or my parents or saving face after all. I just really like Nick and I hope he says yes because I hope he feels the same way about me.

“You know, this girl I was going out with, the one at the airport?” Nick begins, not really asking a question but rather identifying the obvious person we're not talking about. He doesn't even know that I know they were kissing at the airport between the luggage racks. “It's always been screwed up as far as I was concerned. I produced this totally kick-ass album for her and it almost leveled us up to a record label and a deal that would have been pretty big career-wise. We hooked up in the middle of it all and then it crashed. Ages ago, really. But it was like we had a baby together or something. I can't explain.”

“You don't have to talk about it.”

“No, I want to get it out,” he says. “I don't know why, but when the deal fell apart, I felt like I had let her down. It wasn't my fault. But there were all of these hopes and ambitions, and this girl, well, she's pretty crazy, and she knows how I feel and kind of uses it against me when it's in her interest. It's pretty messed up. I financed the production with my studio so I've had a lot invested and I've been trying to disentangle myself. With the financial obligation, it hasn't been easy. It makes something simple like selling coffee for a living appealing. Just add that to my list of lifelong regrets, right next to getting a Luke Perry haircut in middle school.”

Wow. That's more of an answer than I ever expected. He didn't once say “love,” “girlfriend,” or “Roxie.”

“So, where are things with you two?” I inquire … okay, kind of demand, deciding it's one of those “ask now or forever hold your peace” moments. Maybe Mom was right about that wedding thing. Weddings do make you think about life in different terms. More important, I want to know the facts:
on-again or off-again?

“What I'm saying is that it was a mistake. That I was trying to live up to something that I felt obliged to and that I can't keep putting myself out there like that … and that I'd love to come to the wedding of, well, your archenemy. It would be great to hang out again.”

“Really?” I almost squeal. I want to kick myself, I sound so stupid. “I mean. Really. That's good,” I say with as much maturity as I can muster. I can't help smiling at him, though I'd prefer to be kissing him until he can't breathe.

Shit. This actually worked. At least for the moment.

“But there's one thing,” Nick begins, and I cringe—
off-again, on-again?
“About this no-kissing, no-touching, no-dancing clause … I'd like to leave that open to negotiation, okay?”

Nick crooks that grin again.

“Sure, I'll consider that,” I say. Am I blushing?

“You know, I'm glad you came by, because Denny finished his tour of duty. He's coming back from Afghanistan,” he says. “My barista days are finished and I was worried I wouldn't be able to tell you.”

Whoa. Things are changing quickly. Life is moving on. Our micro-relationship would have been finished anyway. I flash on walking into the
Daily Post
building and finding Nick and Frankensteam gone without a trace and it makes me sad. I can tell that we're both reflecting on our last coffee cart moment. We'll probably never visit this old building again.

“So, what time should I pick you up?” he asks, breaking our contemplation.

I finish giving him the details as some fuzzy-headed intern comes down with a long coffee order including five lattes, three black, one with extra cream and sugar, and four iced mochas with whipped cream. The morning rush has kicked in. I silently nod good-bye and leave him to his work.

The minute I hit the sidewalk, my thumbs fly into a texting frenzy. Our group thread is abuzz delivering Jody, Piper, and Rodgers the fabulous news. The first two responses come like lighting:

“Woohoo!!” Piper texts.

“My blk lace demi cup bra wl b perf,” Jody shoots back.

Rodgers, though, is a little slower off the block. Finally, her message pops up.

“HAVE FUN,” she writes. “JUST WATCH OUT FOR ROXIE.”

It's good advice, even if it's in all caps, but I decide not to dwell on it. Feeling lighter than air, I practically skip to Nuzegeek.

Off-again for Roxie. On-again for me.

Here's hoping it sticks this time.

 

CHAPTER
23

Pulling at least one quote out of Norm that doesn't include the word
dude
was quite a challenge. That's why I've been sitting in a nondescript cubicle in Nuzegeek's sleek offices in an area known as “the bullpen,” combing my notes and QuikVoice files for the last two hours. I have a lot of work to do if I'm going to make Dartmoor's deadline.

The bullpen is filled with modular, gray-upholstered half walls and reserved for freelancers in need of a place to work. I'm told no one ever comes here. Most writers have a more comfortable workspace, are juggling eight or ten jobs, or prefer to avoid face time with nosy editors and decide to write at home. But me, I like digging in and being rooted somewhere, so I've decided this is going to be my base of operations. Naturally the Wi-Fi is massively great for research.

There's one downside to all this, and he's hovering right above me.

“I hear you'll be attending the Fleckerstein-Waterman nuptials,” Dartmoor is saying.

I look up, startled.

“Say what?”

I had hoped to avoid running into Dartsy right away and I'm kind of astonished by what he's saying. For the life of me I can't believe that he's talking about the Fleckerstein-Waterman nuptials I'm attending, but then how many other Fleckerstein-Waterman nuptials could there be?

The fact that he's gone out of his way to find me can't be good.

“I said, I've been informed that you will be attending the wedding of my good friends Wendell Fleckerstein and Genelle Waterman?”

“And how would you know that?” I say, more bluntly than intended. I force myself to remain calm, wondering in what universe Dartmoor and I coexist in overlapping social circles.

“I'm the best man—how could I
not
know?” he responds with indignation. “I have to say, Clarissa, I was a tad dumbfounded as well when I discovered that you're friends with Wendell's beautiful bride-to-be.”

“That makes two of us,” I mutter—on both the “friends” and “beautiful” score. I'm dying to tell him that her boobs are fake and she had her nose pinned—is that petty of me? Yes. I restrain my inner sixteen-year-old. Besides, do I detect a softening in Dartsy's tone? I wonder.

I'm also at least a teeny bit interested in how this tidbit of information rose to the attention of the two people at this very moment I hate most in the world. It raises a terrible possibility that the people I dislike might actually get together to talk about me. Every paranoid's nightmare.

“I'm curious,” I say, “it must have been a tad odd that I came up in your conversation?” Tad? Why would I say tad? That's what Dartsy just said. I've got to stop this mimicking thing I do. Someday someone's going to punch me in the face for making fun of the way they speak.

“Well, Aubrey and I were dining with my old college chum Wendell and Genelle at the Arlington Club the other night when I mentioned your appearance and all the brouhaha with the skater boy on his knees,” he rattles off, “then Wendie's beautiful Genelle went totally bonkers when I mentioned your name.”

Whoa. I hope you don't mind if I stop everything here to diagram Dartmoor's last sentence? Even though sentence diagramming went out in the Stone Age shortly after Misters Reed and Kellogg (yes, I'm obsessed with diagramming sentences enough that I actually know who invented them) made a fortune off their literary invention, my crotchety old English teacher Mrs. Walker was a throwback. She insisted we all know how to diagram sentences even though it had ceased being part of the Tupper High School curriculum back in the '60s, when my parents were in school. Heaven forbid you were dyslexic like poor Chubs Wolenski.

Hugh was also known to pull out his bloodred editing pencil and make wayward apprentice writers diagram pernicious sentences as a punishment when he became frustrated with their writing. Thankfully, he never had to do that with me.

If it isn't obvious by now, I'm an unrepentant meanderer when it comes to ideas and understanding everything going on around me (aka “explaining”). I've never met a tangent I haven't liked. That's why diagramming has been good for me. When I really float off into the never-never land of thoughts and ideas, diagramming anchors me.

I know that makes me a total writing geek, but constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing sentences helps me figure out what I wanted to say to begin with. I honestly think a good sentence diagram is a work of art. Hey, I'm as vernacular as the next girl, but I still think unscrewing a sentence can be revealing—maybe it's even a hedge against early-onset Alzheimer's.

So when I hear a fine specimen, like Dartmoor's last utterance, sometimes I just have to stop and mentally picture what it would look like diagrammed. It also helps me highlight what is truly weird about what has been said. Case in point:

Here we have Dartmoor Millburn, an economic genius who's supposedly a member of some crazy Delta Gamma Epsilon Honor Society at Wesleyan School of Economics (I did my Internet homework), and he's managed to cram into one run-on, compounded sentence such a jumble of prepositions, indirect objects, linking verbs, and predicate nouns that it takes three lines of diagrams to make sense of it.

As every stalwart sentence diagrammer knows, the more a diagram wanders around the page and folds back on itself, the more you can assess whether the genius behind the sentence is Joycean in his understanding of the English language or just plain full of BS.

What do all of those wandering clauses reveal in Dartmoor's case? Well, pretty much that his mind is a convoluted mess and that he's probably lying, if not in fact, then by inference.

I also find the term
bonkers
a curious one for Genelle. Is that how she refers to her new superboobs? Or how Dartmoor the Great thinks of them? Perhaps a Freudian slip (which you can't diagram, by the way).

And where did the parents of these kids get their names—from
Game of Thrones
or Monty Python? I know Clarissa isn't exactly typical, but Aubrey and Wendie née Wendell? I'm more than thrown by the potential gender-bending implications. What name could be more ambiguous than Aubrey? Isn't that just a dyslexic version of Audrey? Unless it's a guy's name, but that's too much to process in the moment.

“I know we've gotten off on the wrong foot,” he says, “but I'm looking forward to some non-work time to get to know you better.” This makes me shudder. “I'm sure you'll like Wendie, Genelle's beau, he's my closest college chum. We worked on Wall Street together and rowed double sculls at the Henley Regatta.”

I'm really suspicious now. Not one nasty personal inference about my brother, my lack of experience, or a mention of my impending deadline and doom. Not an insult in sight. The softer tone, the sharing of pretentious intimate details, and was that an apology? Why does this sound familiar? G-Bomb's insidious convoluted mea culpa rattles in my mind. Some time ago it dawned on me that her maneuver was more twisted than I initially thought. She knew that my parents saw Nick kissing another girl. Her “everyone loves weddings” line was most likely designed to expose that rift further rather than fix it. Now enter the evil Mr. Dartmoor Milburn fugue-ing the same theme.