Jo Piazza (16 page)

I must have spaced as I remembered how things went down because Matt was pinching a little bit of chub at my hip.

“S. B. Hawk, hey, you! That was a long time ago. I have forgiven you. You were a ‘see you next Tuesday’ but maybe that is how things were supposed to go. My life is infinitely better for having come out of the closet in high school,” Matt said. “I went into college as a poised and confident gay man. Maybe I should thank you.”

I looked up at my adorable high school boyfriend. “No. I need to apologize. I have never apologized to you for the things I said and did after our breakup but now I will. I am sorry, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”

I did mean it. There was no excuse, besides being seventeen, to have behaved so badly and lashed out in such a vehement way just because a relationship was coming to its natural end. I thought of the next rule for our LAA group.

We hugged it out. Robert reemerged from the kitchen with an entire raspberry truffle cheesecake in a pie tin.

“For the rest of the lovelorn,” he said, presenting it to me.

“Cheesecake, Robert? You’ve watched too many episodes of
The Golden Girls
,” I teased, eagerly accepting the cake.

Robert nodded. “It’s true. In high school, I managed to tape all the reruns of
Golden Girls
off Nick at Nite.”

I was genuinely happy that my first love had found his perfect soul mate.

I was still a little foggy from Robert’s impeccably curated wine pairings when there was a knock on my bedroom door, around 2:30 a.m. This time it was unaccompanied by a cowbell.

I sat up with a start. Princess and Nahla rolled over simultaneously, their matching pink sleep masks inching up their noses as they shifted their weight to their right sides. My first thought was that it was Joe. That he finally wanted to be alone with me and talk about things. I adjusted my white tank top so that it showed a bit more cleavage (why was I constantly kidding myself?) and yelled, “Come in.”

“Stella is missing.” This was the second time Jordana had come to my room in the dead of night, but now she was more concerned than crazy.

“What do you mean missing?” I asked.

“I mean missing. She didn’t come to bed, and I thought maybe she was staying up writing in her journal. I even thought, Ooohhh, maybe she has a dalliance going with Dr. Twelve Steps.” Dr. Twelve Steps was obviously Joe and that one hurt like a sharp jab in my side.

“But after midnight I got nervous so I riffled through her things and found her wallet missing, and a duffel.”

Princess sleeps like a log due to an intense herbal regimen she swallows before bed, so it took three tries to shake her awake as well as a sleepy growl from Nahla, who was also displeased at having her beauty rest disrupted.

“Stella’s missing. We think she left.”

Realizing there was a problem that she could potentially help solve, possibly with her intuitive powers, crystals, and some chanting, Princess came to pretty easily, ordered us to put a pot of coffee on the stove, and said she would meet us downstairs in fifteen minutes after she “got herself together.” I never imagined there was a proper outfit for being woken up in the middle of the night to search for a missing housemate, but I now know it involves mules and a coordinated twin set.

Jordana rallied the other house members, and fifteen minutes later we were all sitting in the living room when we heard Princess shriek and went running to our room. Maybe there was a crazed killer in the house. Maybe he had staged it to look like Stella ran away but he had really dragged her off in the dead of night and now he was after Princess.

Princess was staring at the makeshift closet she had constructed for the overflow of her things.

“Christian is missing. My Christian Louboutin heels are missing,” she said with a low rumble in her tone that indicated she would stab a bitch for stealing her shoes. She would have given them to anyone who asked, probably even a stranger on the street, but the impropriety of taking without asking was simply too much for Princess to bear.

“So we have a kidnapper and a thief on our hands,” Jordana said, sighing. “I’m calling the police.”

And then a feeling of clarity washed over me. “How long has Stella been here?” I asked.

“About ten weeks,” Annie said.

“And what day is today?”

“It’s Sunday. Very, very early Sunday morning.”

My hand clasped to my mouth in my “Aha!” moment. “She’s going to the tulip ceremony. She’s going to stop the Husband from proposing to someone else on live national television. It’s the only thing that makes sense. She snuck out in the dead of night. She took Katrina’s hottest shoes. She must have gotten ahold of an Internet connection at some point and found out the latest on the show and snapped. But the question is where’s the ceremony?”

Joe, who had crashed on the couch downstairs after the party, now emerged from the basement, looking adorable in the bottoms of scrubs and a worn NYU T-shirt that must have been at least ten years old and was probably as soft as kitten fur.

“New York.” We all turned toward him, surprised he was the one supplying us with this information. “The final tulip ceremony is taking place in New York this year, on top of the Empire State Building, in some homage to
Sleepless in Seattle
and
An Affair to Remember
. The producers have been building it up all season. I guess the ratings have been slipping since none of the Husbands ever turn into a real husband—they all end up on
Dancing with Celebrities
or
Famous People Rehab
—so they decided to make this tulip ceremony more dramatic. Both women have a time to be on the roof. The Husband comes up to the roof for the one he’s chosen. The other just gets left up there all alone like the strange alternative plot of a poorly written romantic comedy.” Joe began to look a little sheepish for knowing so many details about the show’s final episode when he saw all of our heads cocked to the side in wonder.

He tried to explain. “When Stella came and talked to me about her situation, as her counselor I felt like I should be familiar with what she was battling against, so I started watching at my place.” Then he admitted, “Once I started I couldn’t stop. The show is addictive. He just keeps dumping these women on national television and the ones remaining just keep getting nastier and nastier each episode until finally there are only the two nastiest, most cunning ones left, but he doesn’t know it because he only spends like an hour with each of them at a time.”

I cut him off. “You don’t have to explain. We all know how addictive reality dating shows can be. Now we know where she went. We just need to figure out how to stop her before she completely embarrasses herself or gets arrested for whatever it is she’s planning.”

“Who’s coming with me? We can fit three more in my car.”

All ten hands went into the air.

Jordana spoke up. “I think we’re all coming. We’re all in this together.”

Joe, looking for a way to redeem his momentarily lost manhood, piped up. “I have the keys to the hospital’s geriatrics van. I think that will fit all of us.”

We drove to Manhattan in silence, with Jordana curled around the wheelchair lift on the floor. We went directly to my old apartment, which I hadn’t visited in more than three months. I figured we could use it as a base of operations.

I don’t know why, but I had had the foresight to straighten up before abandoning the place, so fortunately there were no granny panties lying around. I did feel like I was entering the apartment of a girl I didn’t know very well. Could I really have changed so much in three months? Pictures of Eric and me still covered every available surface. Why did I ever want to look at him that much? Or at anyone that much for that matter. I felt a little twinge of guilt when I saw Joe look at what had to be the tenth photo of Eric and me posing in front of something silly: the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, a naked guy playing the guitar in Times Square. It was as if I had to keep taking pictures of the two of us in front of things that were real to prove we were real. If I could just see it in glossy print, then everything must be OK. The thing is that a picture does tell a thousand words, a thousand words we are too scared to tell ourselves about why we insisted on taking it in the first place. These pictures were all forced fun, and you could see it on Eric’s face. I remembered the one in Times Square. It was freezing, which was too bad for that naked cowboy, and Eric was begging me to just get in a cab with him, but I insisted and finally found a Japanese tourist who spoke English and agreed to take the picture. In it I am smiling maniacally, so pleased to be getting proof of our day together. Eric is looking off into the distance. At the time, when I first printed the photo out, I told myself he was being reflective about our wonderful time. Now I could see he was looking for a way to escape the moment.

It was almost four a.m. by the time we got settled and started to form some kind of game plan for the following morning. My fridge miraculously still held several not bad blocks of cheese in addition to all the contents that should have been disposed of weeks earlier, so I was able to create the semblance of a cheese plate for us to snack on while we decided what to do. One of Jordana’s private clients was a producer with ABC, the network that aired
The Husband
, and Jordana knew that she typically got up around six a.m. to do a lap around the reservoir with her Wheaton terrier, Bosco. She didn’t want to call or text her, worried that would set off alarm bells, so she planned to stage a run-in in the park to try to pump her for information about what time the producers would begin setting up for the grand finale.

Before we left, Princess mentioned that Tito once told her his brother worked security at the Empire State Building. She sent him a text and then explained to us that they exchanged numbers once when she told him she was worried about Nahla eating one of the plants in the garden that had what she thought were poisonous berries.

Now we just had to wait for Jordana’s client and Tito to wake up so we could figure out our next steps. Everyone seemed content to find a spot and a pillow and curl up in my small living room so I migrated to my old bedroom. I ran my hand over the teddy bear that Eric had won me at Coney Island, one of the only presents he had ever given me and the result of a bearded lady egging him on by saying he threw like a girl. He spent $50 to win that scrappy bear, just to save his ego. Why didn’t any of these things bother me when we were together? Love goggles were the only answer. Like having seven beers, everything looks prettier and fuzzier about a person when we think we are in love with him or her.

I heard a soft knock and thought that I really should offer the other half of the bed to someone else since we had so much work to do tomorrow morning. When I cracked the door, I saw it was Joe.

“Can I come in?” he asked shyly.

“Of course. Welcome to my world, my other world. It feels like a whole other life.”

“You’ve come really far in the past three months. You’ve learned a lot about yourself. That’s a hard thing to do. Trust me, I’ve been trying to do it too.”

“I’m sorry about all the Eric pictures,” I said, not knowing entirely why I was apologizing to Joe. What did he care that my apartment was filled with gigantically cheesy photos of me and my ex-boyfriend?

“No need to apologize for anything. The girl in those pictures looks like she’s trying really hard to be happy.” At first I was amazed that he knew me so well, but then I remembered that, as a shrink, it was his job to know.

“She thought she was happy.”

“But she wasn’t?”

“Not really, no. It’s like she—it’s like I—had a fantasy about what things should be like and was working really hard to make it all come true. And when it didn’t, I was faking it to try to make it.”

Joe lay down on the bed above the covers. He patted the space next to him in such a chaste way I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t been so exhausted. But as I lay down he curled his arm under my waist and pulled my head into the little nook between his shoulder and his breastbone. I had always tried to snuggle my head into this exact space on Eric’s chest, but it never fit. I was always being poked by an errant bone sticking out somewhere that didn’t correspond with the shape of my head. But stubborn me kept trying. I couldn’t even count how many sleepless nights I spent trying to fit my head into that space where nature didn’t want it to go and how many little bruises I had around my temples from trying to force it to fit.

“If you had a boat, what would you name it?” Joe asked me. This man loved non-sequitur storytelling.

“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about getting a boat,” I replied, playing along because I liked the space my head was nestled into.

“Me neither. I get horrible seasickness.”

“Then why would you name a boat?”

“That’s the thing. The only reason I want a boat is to give it a name. It’s really the only thing besides your kid that you get to name, and unlike with kids, you can give it a crazy name. Like Apple Pie Lovey.”

“You can name your kids that if you’re a celebrity.”

“True, but I’m not a celebrity. I’m a poor drunk doctor in New Jersey.”

“OK, so what would you name your boat?”

Joe was obviously excited to talk about his imaginary boat and he began to ramble. As he talked I realized how much I adored these tangents he would go off on. They were soothing, and they demonstrated that he actually gave a lot of thought to things.

“One time I was in this little Sicilian fishing village on a tiny island off the western coast of the island called Marettimo, and all the boats there had names about the moon:
Piccolo Luna—Little Moon, Grande Luna—Big Moon, Blanca Luna—White Moon
. Beautiful, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And then in the middle of all the moons, the
Puttana Grossa
.”

“The what?”