All This Heavenly Glory (24 page)

(but)

a plummeting grade point average made transferring somewhere else unlikely.

A temporary distraction from junior Billy Glassmeyer comes in the form of a fuzzy-haired blond bartender named Steven Saccavino,
who mixes drinks in the service bar (not much bigger than a very small closet just past the swinging doors inside the kitchen)
and develops a major crush on Charlotte Anne (more accurately he falls deeply in love with her almost overnight, offering
continuous displays and declarations of his ardor, making nosegays out of toothpicks and olives, stealing shy kisses on the
cheek when she has her hands full of dirty dishes, and making frequent marriage proposals). Charlotte Anne, who claims to
be quite ambivalent about S.S., admits (to Evangeline only) to liking the attention possibly more than mere ambivalence allows,
but nonetheless will admit only that she has never met anyone quite like Saccavino and doesn’t think there’s any harm in just
being friends. Charlotte Anne and Steven spend a good deal of time together outside of work, mostly walking around and talking
for hours. Steven has a knack for asking pointed questions about her hopes and dreams that no one else seems to have much
interest in, least of all Billy Glassmeyer, and drawing a variety of romantic scenarios in which he and Charlotte Anne ride
off happily into the sunset, which serves both to enchant her and to leave her seriously disturbed. C.A. Byers alternates
between wondering whether she should kiss him or whether he has some very severe mental problems that she cannot avoid noticing,
as she has never met anyone with quite such a colorful past, certainly not anyone who is twenty years old, although he appears
to be 100 percent sincere both in his feelings for her and in the telling of his life story, which includes one about having
sex with a woman three times his age (considering the mathematical angle here, at any combination of ages, the gap is always
going to be discomforting), which he refers to as the loss of his virginity, which Charlotte Anne thinks isn’t a phrase anyone
can reasonably use when the younger party is
ten,
and which, along with many of his stories, she will have cause, against her will, to picture in her head repeatedly. Charlotte
Anne finds these stories to be so horrifying and tragic that she has reason to believe he is making them all up, even though
he isn’t. Over the course of the summer, Steven Saccavino tells many more stories, including that he occasionally took money
for sexual favors from the time he lost his virginity until he was about fifteen, insisting that he didn’t think of it as
prostitution but that it was in some way pleasurable for him and that any monies received were always a sort of afterthought,
like a little thank-you; that when he first moved to New York he lived briefly at the 79th Street Boat Basin (not in a boat,
but in the underpass); that he and his roommate Hank have only one bed and that they both coincidentally sleep in the nude,
all of which, it should also be said, are told in such a way, because of a general demeanor of innocence, that it appears
that the more shocking aspects of the tales are almost always not the main point of the story, as if, for example, he was
telling the story of his first ice-cream cone and then just happened to lose his virginity to the thirty-year-old who bought
it for him. Charlotte Anne makes many entries in her journal of a should-I-shouldn’t-I nature, arguments swaying her toward
the shouldn’t-I side including her stepfather’s readily apparent dislike of Saccavino (almost always backed up by the question,
“Whatever happened to That Nice Eddie?”) for reasons she’s never certain of except for that he considers Steven to be “spacey”
and says that she could “do better” and accounting for

3) another almost 1.6 regrets; many years later, Charlotte Anne will wonder not a little and not infrequently if she really
could have done better; though the evidence is initially strongly against him, Steven Saccavino will go on to build a successful
contracting business from scratch, and marry and produce two beautiful fuzzy-headed children.

(Not to mention)

that he was madly in love with Charlotte Anne in a way no one really has been at this point. (Okay, well, Eddie Greenfield
was kind of in love with her too, but wasn’t quite so dramatic about it. And Chuck Farley with the one testicle [never seen
by C.A. but frequently spoken about by others] who liked her an awful lot. Later there would also be that guy with the office
job who said she was everything he’d ever dreamed of, but his right-wing politics and chewed fingernails would pretty quickly
get in the way. And she never really counted Brad the flower-bearing
Star Search
™ winner or Mike the letter-writing ornithologist [he wore sandals], because they barely even got in the door. And then there
was the film director who flew her to Maine for a lobster dinner, and also the advertising guy who made her laugh a lot but
bore a strong resemblance to Art Garfunkel. Plus also her slightly overweight next-door neighbor who left homemade pies on
her doormat [rejected more on the basis of his lumberjack-type looks than his being slightly overweight].) By the time she
goes back to college it briefly ends up turning into a should-I-have discourse on the basis of a series of misspelled love
letters from Saccavino that say things like “if you’re busy I could easily sit with a glass wine and watch you think for few
huors” and “when you come home we can walk around the Village a litle drunk while it snows only on us my love.” Charlotte
Anne has never gotten anything remotely resembling a love letter and thinks this is more romantic even than the rare copy
of Billy Joel’s
Cold Spring Harbor
that Eddie Greenfield had given her the day before she broke up with him, but due in equal parts to Steven’s intense feelings
and the misspellings/missing prepositions and articles (although she is consistently charmed by the self-portrait always accompanying
his signature, a slightly distorted smiley face with one wayward curl sprouting from the top of his head), Charlotte Anne
abruptly stops answering his letters, and by this time she has already lost her virginity anyway, to Billy Glassmeyer after
a drunken Saturday night at a gay disco, and accounting for

4) another approximately .4. Charlotte Anne didn’t so much regret the loss as she did her choice of Billy Glassmeyer, not
a shining moment; the then senior, having had what must have been considerable (at least by comparison to Charlotte Anne)
sexual experience, felt the need to share all the fruits of that experience with Charlotte Anne in that one evening (proving
what, she had no idea, although she was certain he was aiming for something), which amounted to a marathon of sorts that C.A.
would thankfully not ever re-create, even after gaining some experience/renewed interest in the area. (Undoubtedly it does
figure in that Billy was a big-time pothead, and that his duration in this instance may have had something to do with being
on a lot of drugs.)

Charlotte Anne also gets several letters from Evangeline, reporting on this or that love affair and saying that Steven Saccavino
walks around like a zombie without her, brokenhearted at the news of the Billy Glassmeyer fiasco. Evangeline’s letters, always
signed off “to thine own self be true,” account for

5) another full regret, as it would be quite some time before Charlotte Anne figured out

a) what that even meant

and

b) a way to do it.

Home for Christmas break, Charlotte Anne runs into Evangeline Powers in front of O’Neal’s Balloon, where Evangeline excitedly
makes note of the
serendipity
of the moment as she is only in New York for two days before flying back to L.A. to finish a sitcom pilot she describes as
What’s Happenin’
meets
Three’s Company!
E.P. adds that she hasn’t heard anything from Saccavino for a while, which is definitely a disappointment, but Charlotte
Anne is still back on
sitcom pilot,
trying to figure out how this aligns itself with any of Evangeline’s principles and concluding that it seems an obvious conflict
with both principles one and two and although three is up for debate, considering the formulaic aspect of the TV project in
question, Charlotte Anne decides that it doesn’t seem daring at all, that it seems like the opposite. Combined disappointments
aside, Charlotte Anne feels marginally pleased with herself for recognizing the compromised principles at all, and immediately
decides to employ principle number three (ruling out numbers one and two on the basis of her not having established what she
might possibly have to sell out at this point and also due to her still not knowing what the hell two means) by impulsively
purchasing a bunch of daisies from the closest Korean market and hopping a cab to the Upper East Side in the hopes of some
kind of epiphany/romantic reunion with Steven Saccavino. Charlotte Anne pushes the buzzer that says SACCAVINO but the voice
that answers is decidedly older and crankier and possibly Chinese, and although she has a pretty strong feeling she missed
the boat, asks if Steven is home. The older, crankier, possibly Chinese voice says, “No live here now,” and Charlotte Anne,
disappointed again but

6) subtracting a full regret on account of the attempted implementation of E. Powers’s principle number three,

goes home to put the flowers in a vase.

S
TART THE DAY as usual like this:

Say
fuck
when the alarm goes off even though it’s a more or less perfect fall day, understanding that this daily
fuck
is three parts habit from when you used to have to actually be somewhere/one part reaction to extreme unpleasantness of the
alarm. Compensate by muttering the serenity prayer before you toss back the covers. Make coffee, prepare Froot Loops to correct
degree of sogginess (moderate), check e-mail, “watch” Today show, attempt Times crossword (it’s Tuesday, so be sure to congratulate
self on your Mon.—Wed. genius level), “read” rest of paper (quote marks indicating actual participation in these particular
activities). Check back page for obituaries. No one under eighty. No need to check to see how they died to reconfirm belief
that cancer and god have personalities and that they are in some sort of pact that involves taking what you think is an unreasonable
percentage of good under-eighty-year-old people for reasons that don’t get explained in the obituaries. Finish turning pages
of
Times
in cool breeze on porch, smell/prune/admire/appreciate flowers, appreciate porch/
Times
/cool breeze/hazelnut coffee/not having to be anywhere, relax (as much as that is possible, with you being you in spite of
the not having to be anywhere) via distant sound of trains/church bells/close and loud sound of birds chirping, if anyone
asks plan to refer to all this as “meditation.” Receive daily morning call from Jenna, reporting about the latest disaster
with her pernicious, narcissistic, unclean boyfriend. Come to believe in evil via the p/n/u boyfriend, who has surpassed limits
of asshole you previously thought impossible. Long past the point where you have any compassion for the hardships (however
extreme) that led him to this condition, long past the point where you started telling Jenna once a day to dump his fucked-up
ass (policy generally being to avoid this kind of hard-and-fast advice given your sense that friends tend to dump the friend
telling them to dump their boyfriend and not the boyfriend), you endure daily revelations of his pernicious, narcissistic
uncleanlinesss today, including a stunning description of p/n/u’s apartment (he has photos of himself all over the apartment,
mostly photos that don’t include anyone else, and when you say,
Oh my god,
Jenna says,
And they’re three-deep
), culminating in this morning’s argument in which he compared your best friend to a kind of cancer. Think
cunt
would be nicer than
cancer
. Feel something close to hate. Think about praying for him. Hold off, wondering if he deserves it.

Check e-mail again, glance at TV, think,
Something has gone horribly wrong at air traffic control.
Thirty minutes later, recognize this as one of your last innocent thoughts, which is ironic considering you thought you had
your last one twenty years ago (something along the lines of
My grandparents lived to be a hundred, therefore my parents will never die
). Fail to ever get a complete grasp on what just happened. Leave TV on for a week straight (a lot even for you), read every
word of everything on the subject in your sight for the following year just in case enlightenment follows.