Charmed Thirds (39 page)

“Jess?”

I’d forgotten that Len was waiting for an answer, one that would bring him peace of mind.

“I don’t think about him at all.”

And Len heaved a sigh of relief, confident that one day he, too, would forget the person who was the source of so much pleasure and pain.

As the evening wore on, I couldn’t help but think about how mature this was, for me and Len to talk over coffee at Helga’s. Len was my first real ex (Scotty doesn’t count—it was, after all, eighth grade), and one of only three guys who have seen me practically, if not totally, naked, even though it was a very, very long time ago and the cutaneous landscape has changed a bit. Still, I thought it was a really grown-up thing. It wasn’t weird at all. Though I suppose it might be different if Len and I had done it. I wonder if I would feel as comfortable sitting across from Kieran. Or Marcus. I doubt I’ll ever know.

Tonight I was okay with that conclusion.

As we returned to Len’s car, he said, “Um, Jess?”

“Yes?”

“I never thought you had bad skin,” he said. “I always thought you looked . . .” He shyly looked down at his keys instead of at me. “Radiant.”

And I told him that was the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a very long time.

The rest of the ride home was filled with more music than conversation. And that, too, was okay. Kurt’s words seemed to express exactly how I was feeling as I rode alongside Len.

I think I’m dumb . . . Or maybe just happy.

the twenty-fourth

For a Sunday night, it was pretty dead. So I got off work early enough to call Len and ask him to meet me at Helga’s. It had become a sort of routine, hanging out on the nights he had off from saving people’s lives and the nights I had off doing the opposite via junk food. With Bridget and Pepe off in LA visiting her dad, I really don’t have anyone else here to spend time with. So I’m grateful for his company, even if we’ve strayed little from our usual dialogue. I want to think that I’ve helped Len feel less alone in his pain. But I should have been tipped off to the contrary when he made a surprising request tonight.

“How about. Um. I meet you at. Um. AJ’s?”

“AJ’s?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s live a little.”

This was an unusual turn of events. First, because Len doesn’t drink. And second, because AJ’s is the darkest, dankest, least-inviting drinking establishment on the boardwalk. It repels bennies, and therefore is most appealing to locals and semilocals like me. AJ’s only concession to any sort of décor is the hundreds of plastic potted plants hanging from the ceiling, all ashen with decades of cigarette-smoky dust. At AJ’s, only two varieties of music are played: Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. I’d told Len that I’d always wanted to get a drink there, for kicks, but never had anyone to go with me and I didn’t want to go alone because that’s the first sign of alcoholism. And while that will give me something to talk about with the street-corner winos with whom I’ll be keeping company after I graduate, there’s no need to get an early start on my addiction.

When I got there, Len already had a half-empty cup of beer in front of him. I decided not to make a big deal about this uncharacteristic libation. I ordered whatever they had on tap. I got Budweiser, served in plastic.
Klassy.

“I have something to tell you,” he said.

Usually that precedes something that I don’t want to hear. But I was open-minded.

“Go on,” I said.

Len swallowed his beer, then looked straight ahead at his reflection in the Miller Lite mirror across the bar. “I don’t want to be a doctor.”

“I don’t want to be a shrink!”

We toasted each other, our plastic cups making more of a crunch than a clink.

“Why don’t you want to be a doctor?” I asked.

“It turns out that I’m not very good with people,” he said with a shrug.

“Me either! What do you think you’ll do after graduation?”

He shook his head slowly, somberly. “I have no idea.”

“Me either!”

“You sound very happy about your uncertain future,” he said, his eyebrows crumpling.

“Oh, I’m totally freaked out,” I said in a blithe tone that undermined the message. “But it’s comforting to know that I’m not alone in my cluelessness. At least you’ve got an extra semester to figure it out. I’ll be unemployed and homeless come January.”

“That’s unfortunate,” he said.

“It is,” I said.

We swiveled back and forth on our bar stools for a few seconds.

“What happened to us?” Len asked, staring into his cup. “We were Most Likely to Succeed. Now we’re both a mess.”

“Yes we are,” I said. There was a fingerprint smudge on the left lens of his glasses that in his younger, more-together days, he would have rubbed off immediately with a small, square piece of felt that he kept in his back pocket for such a purpose. But this Len just ignored it, or didn’t notice it at all, which was also very unlike him.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Actually, we’re messes. Plural. We’re our own separate messes.”

“Hey, Len, you’re not stuttering,” I pointed out. “Did you notice that?”

“Actually, yes, I did notice that. People stammer less when they’re drunk. It’s a counterintuitive but common phenomenon studied by linguists.”

“I bet it’s because drinking helps you let your guard down,” I said. “You’re not as self-conscious about what you say. You just say it.”

“That’s probably it,” he said.

“Probably,” I agreed.

He leaned in very close to my face, like he was about to say something. But he didn’t. I could smell his hot, yeasty breath. Normally, this would gross me out. But there was something about seeing Len so obviously drunk and disheveled that was not unappealing. He was still very geek cute.

“Len, can I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure,” he said, laying his hands flat out on the bar in front of him.

“Are you still a virgin?”

I tried to keep my eyes in my head when he nodded in the affirmative, making his glasses slip yet again.

“You did everything but . . .”

“Everything but.”

“Wow.”

“Wow,” he replied, underwhelmed.

At the far end of the bar, a man and a woman with many tattoos and few teeth flirted with each other.

“You one dirty mufucka!” the woman cackled.

“Naw,” shouted the man. “You tha dirty mufucka!”

“That’s nice,” Len said wistfully. “They’re a nice couple.” He was so earnest it hurt.

“If it makes you feel any better, Len, I don’t think Manda is really a lesbian.”

“They sure looked like lesbians to me when I walked in on them—” he paused midprofanity. “What do lesbians call what they do, anyway?”

“They call it fucking,” I said.

“Ooooooooooooooooooooooh.”
Len was quietly moaning into the foam in his cup. He was falling apart again. After sprucing himself up for the past few outings, he was reverting back to sketchy.

“I didn’t want to do this,” I said, swirling the beer around in my cup. “I’ve been saving this story, but you obviously need to hear it tonight.”

And then, I put my personal mortification aside and began a tale that I hoped would convince him that walking in on your girlfriend having lesbian sex is not the worst thing in the world.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I walked in on my parents . . . ?”

This is what friends do.

Not long after, I drove Len home. He sunk into the passenger seat with his eyes closed, and I thought he was passed out. Quite frankly, I had no idea how I was going to drag his drunk ass into his house without his psycho mom finding out and accusing me of leading him into a life of debauchery. As we pulled in front of his colonial, a Beatles song came on that snapped him out of his stupor. He had leant me
Revolver
a few weeks back and had insisted I listen to it.

“This is the song!” he said, swaying back and forth. “It’s so true! When you love someone, you need them all the time . . .”

“I will be there and everywhere,”
sang the cutest Beatle.
“Here, there, and everywhere . . .
”

I know this promise is meant to be a positive thing. A show of devotion. But what happens when such omnipresence outlasts the actual love? What happens then?

You end up like Len. And me.

the thirty-first

So much for a mature, grown-up relationship.

“I’ve been thinking,” Len said as he finished off a beer. AJ’s was our new standard. It is important, though perhaps unnecessary, to explain that Len is a lightweight. One beer and he’s already silly.

“About what?”

“We should fuck,” he said very seriously.

Budweiser splooshed out of my nostrils.

“But not in the lesbian way,” he clarified, as if that would make it any less hilarious.

I was still choking.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was wrong.”

“No, it wasn’t the wrongness that got me,” I said, in between slurpy gasps for air. “It’s just that it was probably the funniest thing you’ve ever said.”

“I was trying to be rakish and sexy.”

“I know,” I replied, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “That’s why it was funny.”

“We should make love?” he asked, one eyebrow raised high enough to almost touch the spider plant hanging above our heads.

That made me laugh even harder.

“I’m sorry you find my come-ons so hilarious,” he said, starting to giggle a bit himself. Len actually giggled, when he did laugh, which wasn’t often. Maybe it’s
because
of the giggle. A very unmasculine giggle that, juxtaposed with all this sexy talk, just about made me pee my pants.

“You’ve been a virgin for so long. Why give it all up now?”

He studied his empty cup for a moment.

“Why not?” he finally said. “Why not have a summer fling? I’ve never had a summer fling. I think my life has been deficient in fling.”

This also made me laugh. I stopped only when I realized how deadly serious Len was about this.

“Look Len, I know you
think
you want to do it with me. I almost fell into the same trap last summer with this guy.” I stopped to make an important correction. “Actually, he was a man. A totally grown-up man. And foreign.”

Len nodded his head, impressed.

“Anyway, there was this man I really thought I wanted to have sex with. And we got really close to doing it, but I stopped myself when I realized that the reality of sex with him would never, ever live up to the fantasy I built up in my mind all summer long. So I resisted the urge and avoided what probably would have been an awkward embarrassment.”

“So you didn’t do it,” Len said.

“Nope.”

“And look how much better off you are now.” He smacked his lips together with self-satisfaction.

“Hm.” My abstinence argument was soundly trumped. I didn’t know what else to say.

For a few seconds we just sat side by side and totally still on our swivel stools. And I don’t know if it was Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, or all of the above, but their harmonies swiftly rose above the bar chatter and lifted my heavy, hardened heart.

“Carry on, love is coming . . . Love is coming to us all . . .”

And yet, this does not adequately explain why I ended up devirginizing Len Levy on the crusty couch in the basement storage room of Wally D’s Sweet Treat Shoppe.

July 31st

Dear Len,

I’m sorry. It should have been with someone else. You deserved better than me.

Sincerely,
 Jessica

the third

The news of yet another imbroglio broke in my bedroom. And as always, Bridget was beside herself.

“
YOU
DEVIRGINIZED
LEN!!!”

I muffled her mouth. “My parents are downstairs!”

“Oh, come on,” she said, freeing herself from my grasp. “Your mother would be thrilled. She’d probably throw, like, a huge party.”

This was both unfortunate and true. It would be an elaborate theme party. With blown-up condoms for balloons and a cock-shaped ice-cream cake.

“So,” she said, a naughty gleam in her eye. “Was it any good?”

Was it any good?

This was a question I’d been trying to answer since it happened. I’d never been the more experienced one, so I kind of took over and did most of the work. Len came quickly, which is a fairly reliable indicator of a job well done. And I
almost
got off on the whole dominant woman-on-top power trip . . .

Bridget interpreted my silence as a no.

“Well, it doesn’t matter whether it was good or not because he’s going to remember you for, like, the rest of his life,” she said.

When I didn’t respond, she repeated once more with feeling.

“For the rest of his life.”

“I get it.”

“It’s just like, so
deep,”
she said. “Because he waited so long.”

“But it all seems like such a waste, doesn’t it? To wait so long, and then just do it with someone who doesn’t love him. He could have done
that
four years ago.”

It was all so sad. So meaningless. Not just the devirginization, but everything.

Life.

This isn’t a startling insight. It’s something I’ve recognized for quite some time, and can usually will myself to ignore. But after I dropped off Len the other night, there was a car with a Betty Boop decorative license plate cover in front of me at a stoplight. I thought about the type of person who would go out of her way to shop for a Betty Boop decorative license plate cover, and why this person would consider it necessary to express herself through said license plate cover. After contemplating these questions in the span of a red light turned green, I felt like crashing my car into the nearest telephone pole in despair.

Because it’s not just the decorative license plate covers, it’s also the designer checks you can special order because you think the cats-in-a-basket motif makes an important statement about your personal identity that the plain bank-issued checks simply cannot. And it’s the one-of-a-kind sneakers you can custom-design on an obscure Italian Web site, or the generic ones at Target, for that matter. It’s Dexy’s wigs. My mom’s frozen Botoxed face. Bethany’s Prada diaper bag. Mini Dub’s face piercings. Bastian’s ponytail. Kazuko’s Harajuku getups. Tyra Braun’s ladylike guise.