Jo Piazza (14 page)

I shook my head.

“Do you want us to leave?”

I shook my head again. I still had the remnants of the wine. I wanted to suckle at the bottle while I lay down. About a half hour later, Joe knocked on the door again with a glass of water.

“We don’t have to talk about you,” he said.

“OK,” I slurred slightly.

He perched at the end of the bed and gently exchanged my wine bottle for his water glass. “I never told you the story about my divorce?” he said with the hint of a question mark at the end.

“Nope, you never did.”

“Well, now’s as good a time as any,” he said with a light laugh. “One thing that never changes is misery loving company. The best way to feel better about a shit situation is to hear about someone else’s shit situation.”

“I want to hear about it,” I murmured, because he was right. The only thing I wanted to hear about at this moment was how someone else had become unhappy.

“My parents met in college at Indiana State. He played football and she was on the dance squad. They got married three weeks after graduation and have been married for the past forty years. I have never seen two people more in love with each other. I mean, I walked in on them having sex.”

“Gross! But everyone walks in on their parents having sex when they’re kids. It’s one of those grail tests of horror we’re forced to endure in order to build character or something.”

“I walked in on them having sex last weekend.”

“Oh, God, old sex. That’s really gross!”

“But kind of great, right? The fact that my parents in their sixties are still having all sorts of sex.”

I reconsidered. It was kind of great, in a gross way.

“Anyway, my entire life I wanted what they had. I wanted their fairy tale marriage with that amount of closeness and so that was what I was looking for when I went away to college. And when I started dating Elizabeth, I figured it had to be her because she was my college girlfriend and she was great on paper and she seemed to want all the same things I wanted. I thought,
Great, now I get to check this off my list
. This was easy and now I’ll live happily ever after like my parents. We moved to New York after school so Liz could go to law school. I decided to go to med school at NYU instead of Yale because Columbia was the best school she got in to. We lived on the Upper West Side to be close to her campus. We decided to get married after we both graduated from school. While we were studying we barely saw each other, so when we did, everything was perfectly fine. Once we got married and we had a little more time to be a couple, something didn’t feel right. In fact, I barely knew this girl. I barely knew myself. I hadn’t been alone since I was eighteen years old and now I was stuck living this life with a stranger. We were nothing like my mom and dad. We never had sex. Neither of us ever seemed to want to. I always imagined coming home and cracking open a bottle of wine with my young wife and trading stories about our day while we cooked dinner and laughed before falling into each other’s arms and making love all night long. But most of the time Liz would go out with her girlfriends from law school, and I would crack open a bottle of whiskey and pass out on the couch.”

“Is that when you started drinking a lot?”

“I was drinking more often than I wasn’t drinking. What put me over the edge was when she cheated on me.”

I put my hand to my mouth. “Did you catch her?”

“I accidentally answered her phone one afternoon when she was in the shower. It was him.”

“How did people ever catch cheaters before cell phones?”

That at least made him laugh a little.

“But the drinking got worse after the separation because I felt like such a failure.”

I looked up at Joe who was perched on the edge of my bed and he looked so sad. The crinkles around his eyes got more pronounced and his mouth twisted into a funny shape with his lower lip curving over his left incisor.

“My divorce was only officially final last week. I didn’t sign the papers right away. Her lawyer kept calling me and her parents called me, but for the first six months I was too drunk to sign anything, then I was too angry, and then I just gave up.”

I sat up so I could look him in the eyes. I finally felt bad about lying there while he was telling me the saddest bedtime story of all time.

“But she was a bad fish,” I said.

“She was my only fish. It was the only time I ever dove,” Joe said, seeming to brighten because I remembered his fish tale. “I think that next time I’ll be a lot more careful.”

“Do you think you’ll have the courage to dive again?”

“I do. When the time is right.”

And then, without thinking about it, I leaned in and I kissed him. At first he stiffened, before loosening his lips and letting me slide my tongue into his mouth and my arms around his neck, and then for a minute he was kissing me back—hungrily, it felt like, before he pulled away.

“We shouldn’t. You just found out your cheating ex is getting married and I … I have so much to work on myself.”

“You’ve been more than six months sober,” I pointed out, eager to keep going. But Joe was firm. “Sophie, you’re a little bit drunk.”

Oh my God. I had just kissed a recovering alcoholic, my breath positively reeking of cheap Chianti. He probably dove into my mouth remembering all sorts of boozy memories. I was a horrible person. He couldn’t have possibly wanted to kiss me.

“I want to kiss you,” he said, as if he were reading my mind. “Now just isn’t the best time for either of us to dive in, and you know that.” I did know it. But I was buoyed by the fact that he said that he wanted to kiss me. For now, that was enough for me.

“Get some sleep, Sophie. I promise all this is going to feel a lot easier in the morning.”

I shuffled my way under the blankets still in my clothes and polished off the glass of water Joe had brought into my room. He kissed me lightly on the forehead.

“Sweet dreams,” he whispered and padded out the door.

What seemed like minutes later but had to have been at least six hours, I heard a wail. “Get up. Get up all of you!” It jolted me out of my uncharacteristically sound (and drunken) sleep.

It was dark, and all I could hear was Jordana screeching. When she flicked on my overhead light, I could see she had a cowbell in one hand, a bottle of champagne in the other, and she was wearing the most spectacular party dress I had ever seen somewhere other than a red carpet event on television. She looked like Jessica Rabbit with all the sequins and bosoms I didn’t realize she had. Even though she had an obvious addiction to sugar, I didn’t take her for a very heavy drinker. Through my crusty sleep-filled eyes, I could see the bottle wasn’t even open.

“You must all get your arses out of bed and put on your finest clothes. It’s an order.” When someone British says something like that, it does sound like a direct order from the Queen or Dumbledore in
Harry Potter
and you end up moving involuntarily to do whatever it is the person barked.

“You can’t wear that,” she said to me about the jeans and T-shirt I was still wearing from the night before. “It isn’t appropriate. Put on your nicest party dress and meet me downstairs in ten. What we are about to do is going to change your life.”

Jordana had apparently given her spiel to everyone in the house because within ten minutes, the family room looked like a group getting ready to go to a cougar prom.

“No shoes. Everyone take off the shoes. I don’t know what you were thinking,” Jordana instructed.

When a bat shit Brit asks you to put on your finest outfit at midnight, you should never include a pair of Jimmy Choos. I don’t know what any of us
had
been thinking. How was it possible that she was making us feel like we were the ones completely out of our minds?

“OK, you will all follow me in a single file line. I promise we are going to return to this house changed women.”

And so we marched in a single file line out of the house and down the street and down four more streets and finally up onto the boardwalk.

“Jordana, we can’t go on the beach now. It’s not allowed until sunrise.”

“Lucky for us we are only about ten minutes from sunrise and I don’t think anyone will begrudge us ten little minutes, certainly not this town’s Keystone Kops.”

We walked onto the beach, pleased we had ditched the heels for flip-flops, but we were a little chilly in the ocean breeze in the party dresses and all, especially Prithi, who really wasn’t wearing much of anything at all. Her party dress was obviously from her prematernity days so what was once a knee-length tube dress barely covered her midsection and enormous boobs.

Jordana instructed us all to line up. I thought,
If she tells us to go into downward dog right now, I might actually throw her into the ocean
.

“Ladies, we are approaching a very important moment in our lives. For the past couple of months each and every one of you has given me strength, a strength I didn’t know I had or that I would ever need. I know that every single one of you has come a long way on your journeys. Well, now, right now actually, is a pivotal moment in all our journeys. I have brought you here on the cusp of the autumnal equinox, the start of fall, one of two days of the year when we have exactly as much day as we have night. Starting in five minutes, we will have exactly twelve hours of sunlight followed by exactly twelve hours of night. The day is in perfect balance. It is our duty to embrace this divine moment. From here on we will be thankful for our blessings and abundance and make the decision to continue to grow as new women.”

Jordana popped the cork and instructed Stella, who was first in our ragtag line, to tip her head backward. She poured just a drop of champagne into each of our mouths, except for Annie’s, and her words actually inspired us to shriek like banshees in celebration. It was as if we had all been taken over by the spirits of the equinox. We yelled at the sea, sticky from champagne and gritty with sand, party dresses dragging in the foam as we watched the sun emerge to begin its twelve-hour journey across the earth to start out its perfectly balanced day.

Jordana came up behind me and put her long limbs around me in a bear hug. “You get to be a new you starting today. It’s a gift.”

She was right. I just had to figure out how to use it.

One day Stella simply started talking again, and once she started there was no shutting her up. Her voice was a surprise. For such a reedy girl, it was low and throaty. But more than that, she was funny. Her jokes were more often than not dirty, and she liked to shock by making references to bizarre sexual acts that most of the time we had never heard of.

Don’t even get me started on how she used “donkey punch.”

In the week since Megan had informed me of Eric’s impending nuptials, I had contemplated calling him exactly thirteen and a half times. (The half was the time I contemplated calling Floozy.)

I knew how many times I almost called because I had documented it on the blackboard in the basement for everyone to see, my own kind of scarlet (chalk) moral inventory of shame. It was a good reminder to myself of what I was up against. I had been an idiot to think that years and years of love and boyfriend addiction and bad breakups could be erased in three months.

My shame was next to another blackboard where we had begun to catalog our deal breakers in relationships to remind ourselves that we deserved better than the losers we had dated in the past.

I hadn’t heard from Joe since the night of the sloppy kiss. I knew he was still coming over to chat with Annie, but he hadn’t made any special trips around the house to see me.

I was an enormous idiot, first, for thinking that he was into me and, second, for throwing myself at a recovering alcoholic while I was drunk. Joe wasn’t looking for a hot mess. Joe was looking for the love of his life, a big juicy fish that was worth taking a dive for, and I was just a clammy sea urchin knocking back one too many seaweed-tinis.

While I was falling off the wagon, Annie was steadily perched atop hers. She hadn’t had a drink in ninety days, had attended copious “meetings” and one-on-one counseling sessions, and was about to go before the judge to find out if she could get her license back. Dave and I sprawled on her bed as she primped to learn her fate.

“Will you drive me to court, Sophie?” she asked, properly attired in a striking pink pencil skirt and white blouse that I figured she borrowed from Princess specially for the occasion.

“Will Joe be there?”

“Why? Are you going to tongue rape him again?”

“Uncool, Annie,” Dave said. “Dude rape is a thing.”

“I knew I shouldn’t have told you what happened!” I moaned.

Dave continued as if I weren’t wailing with emotional angst. “One time I drank a lot of absinthe at a party in the aquarium. I thought I was making out with a mermaid and I woke up in the morning in bed with a sea lion. I think she dude raped me.”

It was Annie’s turn to ignore Dave. “You did it in a moment of weakness,” she said to me in reference to the kiss, or maybe in reference to telling her about it.

I didn’t want to ask, but I couldn’t help myself. “Has he mentioned me when you talk to him?”

“Nope. But we don’t talk about him. We talk about me. That’s what counseling is all about, and yes, he will be there. He is testifying on my behalf. Come on. You know that he probably thinks this whole thing is very funny. He’s the kind of guy who forgives stupid mistakes. And you’re gonna have to see him one of these days.”

“OK, I’ll drive you. But I need something better to wear. Where’s Princess?”