Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Single (17 page)

“Yes,” I say, “I heard.”

“That's her ex-boyfriend,” she explains to Lenny, who never knows what anyone is talking about. I swear, she's like his hired-for-the-handicapped world interpreter. “You should get his new
wife to give you a car!” she says. “Oh my God, Lenny, you should see that orange thing she drives around. It's like what hunters drive when they go kill deer.”

“Deer season isn't for months,” Lenny says.

I ignore them. “Well, I don't really care. I've been dating somebody.”

“Really?” Mom asks. “Who's this now? Is he coming to the wedding? The caterer's order is already in. Do you think he'd want the chicken or the beef? I hope he doesn't want the beef. We're already short on the beef.”

“Shoulda let me bring ham,” Lenny says and shakes his head.

Hailey smacks him. “Nobody eats ham at weddings, Lenny.”

“He's a vegetarian,” I say, “so forget it.”

Brad is not a vegetarian.

My mother looks perplexed. “A vegetarian? Well, I don't know what that means. I don't think you should bring a vegetarian to the wedding,” she says. “That doesn't sound right.”

“Oh, she's not bringing anyone.” Hailey rolls her eyes. “Just wait and see. She'll hire a date like in that one movie. That one where that one girl hires a date and then they fall in love.”

“You could have ham at a wedding,” Lenny says. “Why not?”

“Shut up, Lenny,” Hailey says. “No one's talking about ham anymore.”

 

Brad calls me and asks me if I know of a dry cleaner that only uses hypoallergenic products. I don't, but I Google every dry cleaner in the state until I do. Then I find him an acupuncturist who makes house calls, a masseuse who will come to the office, and a tailor who can turn a suit around in two days.

I order his groceries for him online and even attempt to cook
dinner for him because he's useless in the kitchen, which frankly is fine by me, because there's nothing worse than a man who's a better cook than you. Not that that's hard with me as a standard. I've made him fried chicken the consistency of a leather shoe, meatloaf that looked more like stew, and wild rice soup that clung to the spoon like glue.

Brad and I have been dating for two weeks. I ask Christopher if that means we're exclusive. “Two weeks for the gay bees is considered married.” He sighs. “In Straight Land I have no idea. Shouldn't you be asking him?”

True, but I don't know if I can bring it up with Brad or not. I mean, I assume if we're sleeping together we're connected and exclusive, but Christopher says it only means we're sleeping together at that
particular
moment, and at any other particular moment, he may or may not be connected to any other wharf whore.

“Wharf whore?” I ask. “What's a wharf whore?”

“It's an expression.”

“No, I don't think it is.”

“Just ask him!”

“As if!” I say, smacking him.

I am not asking Brad anything about anything. Instead, I focus on making our dates superincredible while making it look like it's Brad who's making them superincredible. For instance, when he said he wanted to try out the new restaurant on Hennepin called Duplex, I called ahead and reserved the corner table. I actually told the girl who answered the phone exactly what I was doing. I reserved a table for eight o'clock and said, “I'll be wearing a dark blue dress and he'll be in a suit. I'll pretend we don't have a reservation. I'll just tell you his name, Brad Keller, and you act like you know who that is. Look surprised or something, like it's a big deal, and then give us a good table. It'll put him in a really good mood.”

“I heard that,” she says. “They all love a little ego fluff.”

“Exactly,” I say, and then I tell her something Christopher told me to use if I ever go to New York City and can't get a table or need special treatment. I say, “I promise I'll take care of you
in the right way
.” He told me the wording is very specific. It leaves the reward open to the imagination and the maître d' curious. They don't know what it means exactly, but they fill in the blanks themselves. In this case I slipped the girl a ten-dollar bill and a coupon to Cinnabon. Bet she didn't see that coming.

But all my work is worth it. He never suspects I've been two steps ahead of him smoothing things out. He just feels lucky when we're together. Well, almost every time. I don't think he felt very special the night we tried a new Indian restaurant and he discovered a hair that looked very much like it came from the pubic region in his extramild masala. Mostly, though, we get good tables, great treatment, and lots of smiles. We get let into the VIP room at First Avenue and “free” tickets to opening night for
A View from the Bridge
at the Guthrie Theater. (Christopher's mom works in the box office, thank God. Those tickets would have been a fortune.)

 

It spreads like a Girl Scout fire through the woods that I'm dating Brad Keller. Everyone at Keller's knows. I can tell they know by how they straighten up when I'm around, lean in to each other, and whisper. They look at me with their chins slightly elevated, their noses turned up, eyeing me up and down as if to say,
Why her?

I thought dating a Keller executive might make my current position a little easier, but no. If anything, the opposite is true. I hear whispers and snickering when I walk by. Women who used to be nice to me aren't anymore, and one morning in my mailbox is an interoffice envelope with a xeroxed article inside.
“Why Affairs in the Workplace Are Inappropriate” is the title. The sender is marked out with a black pen.

Ashley calls me into her office and tosses the couch-sale script on her desk. “What's this?” she asks. I never know how to answer these rhetorical questions; I never even know if they're rhetorical, so I usually play dumb.

“That's the couch-sale script,” I say.

“I
know
it's the couch-sale script,” she snaps. “I just don't get it.”

I try to explain. “Well, it's an announcer, a
Twilight Zone
‘Rod Serling' character, and he—”

“I can
read
the script,” she says. “I know what it says. I can read, you know.”

“Yes”—I nod—“you can read.”

“You're not the only smart cookie around here, Miss Cinnabon.”

I stare at her awards on the wall. Every one of them is from Keller's.

She tells me to sit down and I sit on the very edge of her couch. “Jen, I'm worried we have a problem,” she says.

“We do?”

“Yes. You haven't been around lately. You've taken several half-days and you leave early a lot. People notice.”

I don't say anything.

“And your work,” she says, standing up, “I don't know. There seems to be something missing. The quality is different, like part of you isn't here. A big part.”

I don't say anything.

“Is something bothering you?” She perches on the corner of her desk. “Something at home maybe?”

“No,” I say, “nothing like that.”

“Dating trouble?” She crosses her arms.

I raise my eyebrows the slightest degree. So this is what she's
after; she wants to know about my relationship with Brad, which I'm very careful not to talk about in the office. Nobody asks me about it either. It's the elephant in the room that we ignore. Looking at Ashley's awards, I feel an odd sensation I don't immediately recognize. It's not happiness, or kindness—it's something like power.

My inner analyzer goes to work and I feel even a little stronger. This is one place I have everyone beat. A lot of people can beat me at a lot of things, but
no one
can beat me at finding potential disasters. Ashley has probably only heard rumblings about Brad and me, and she doesn't know where we stand. She probably wants to fire me and is checking to see if she can. These are simple eighth-grade social skills. Right now she's trying to figure out whether to distance herself from me, or become my best friend.

“I am negotiating a personal challenge,” I confess.

“Really?”

“I'm learning how to balance work and a relationship at the same time.”

She pauses. “Relationship?”

“You're so good at these things,” I say, standing up, “juggling your family and your career. I don't know how you do it. We really should have a girls' coffee sometime and you should give me some pointers, because frankly”—I put my hand on her arm—“I think this is the one.”

 

I have to borrow money from my parents. Well, from my dad actually, because no way was I going to ask my mom. It's his money, anyway; he's worked at the insurance agency his entire life. How did Mom get such a good deal going? Where are men like my dad now? The ones who are breadwinners and come home from work and put on their slippers and smoke a pipe
silently while reading the paper? All you had to do was make them a Manhattan and serve a hot casserole every night, maybe have a kid every two and a half years and that was that. Your bills were paid.

“I'll pay you back, Dad,” I say, standing in his den. “Promise.”

“Don't worry about it, sweetie,” he says. “My pleasure.”

“Really. I will. I just need some money to…”

He holds up his hand to stop me. “You're a grown woman,” he says. “You do what you want with it.”

“I just have some new expenses. That's all.”

He looks up at me. “You're all right, though?”

“Yes. It's nothing bad. I don't need a doctor or anything.”

“Well, good,” he says, going back to his paper. “Your mother would enjoy someone in the family getting a disease too much.”

“Thanks, Dad.” I kiss him on the head. He smells like tobacco and lime aftershave and love. I wish I could ask him a few things about men, but it isn't really like that between us. I'm just glad he's still here, braving the den.

Of course the money he gives me is gone in an instant. Already spent. My spending has gone way up, which is weird because even though I grease palms and sneak tips, Brad pays for absolutely everything. He has seriously never even let me get near a check. It could be because I've been buying a lot more outfits and more expensive makeup and even more expensive hydrating lotions. I don't care how much a new face lotion costs, I'll try it, because, let's face it, after a certain age, it's all about hydration.

I even got an expensive personalized “love Tarot reading” online for eighty bucks. Stupid, I know, especially since it told me Brad and I are totally wrong for each other. If I could just calm down about him, get comfortable, not feel so jumpy about him leaving me for another girl, maybe I would spend less. But
how can I spend less when he may be the last living breadwinner in America? A man who would gladly and easily pay all his wife's bills? When am I going to meet another one of those in Minnesota?

I'm not. That's when.

I just need to balance my expenses more. Cut down on food and gas. Maybe drag the Weber grill into my living room and heat my apartment with a small, ongoing fire. I have to do something, cut back somewhere, but where? I tried to start one of those bill-paying programs that track where your money goes and generate a morbid-looking pie chart so you can see where you can economize, but after I entered all my line items, the pie chart didn't say much of anything. Only that eighty-five percent of my income was going to nonessential items, which is ridiculous.

 

Christopher is getting really irritated with me. “Are we ever going to hang out again?” he asks, “or has Lard Boy taken over your life?”

“Don't call him that,” I say. “He's gained a little weight since we started dating. So what?
Vogue
says it's normal to put on weight if you're in a happy relationship.”

“You'd think with all his money he could pay someone to suck it out.”

“That's mean.”

“He's mean.” Christopher sniffs. “He's got you running all over town doing his errands like some errand girl, only he isn't paying you. You're just going broke dressing up for him.”

“I like helping him! He just moved here and he's under all this pressure. His whole family is watching him to see how he does. So what if I pick up his dry cleaning from time to time?”

“And you pick up his groceries and his new stereo system and his hemorrhoid cream.”

“Just stop! It's normal to help your boyfriend.”

“Please. You don't even know if he is your boyfriend.”

“I do so. We hang out together all the time.”

“Wow,” he says, rolling his eyes. “That settles it. You're as good as Matlock.”

Of course I have no idea if Brad's my boyfriend. None whatsoever. I mean, I think he is; we spend enough time together that he seems to be. He already gave me keys to his house. I even drive his car sometimes. I know it's only been a few weeks, but doesn't that sound like a girlfriend?

“Did he give you front door keys or back door keys?”

“Back door, but we only use the back door!”

 

I decide to be brave and ask Brad directly. We're always together, so I can ask him if we're a couple, right? Sure I can. Just play it cool. No big deal. I get my nails and hair done and then buy salmon with dill sauce at the gourmet counter, which I say I cooked for him, as I serve it up by candlelight in the sexiest dress I own.

No big deal at all.

“That was just delicious, babe,” he says, tossing his napkin on the table and unbuttoning the top of his pants. “Best yet, light and tasty. Perfect after work. Work was a killer today.”

“Was it?”

“Dad has been on me all week. God. The guy's going to retire next year, he's got to let go of some control. You know? He's a control freak.”