Laughing Down the Moon (20 page)

“So,” Mickey began, “how are you?”

“Fine,” I answered. I was okay, so I wasn’t technically lying. The holidays had been decent enough; I’d spent them with Alaina and Falina, and then Patrick, Trisha and Veronica. I was feeling subdued because of the way things had gone with Shiloh—we had spoken briefly on the phone a few times after the soundtrack conversation, but we never really picked up our original energy. I was sad about this when I let myself dwell on it, so I didn’t let myself do that, or at least not often. Not more than once a day, anyway. But on a positive note, my writing assignments were more enjoyable, mostly because I just whipped through them. And Dwight Night, Jr….well, Dwight was dewightful. Yes, I was in love with that bird and not ashamed to admit it. He was the best addition to my life all year, which made me happy and sad all at once because I had honestly thought he’d be one of two wonderful additions, not the only one. But there it was.

“Fine,” I repeated.

“That’s good,” Mickey said, tugging at the collar of her pink shirt.

And suddenly I was tired, like this was going to be more work than I could muster. Mickey must have picked up on that because she decided to turn on the charm.

“Did you make any New Year’s resolutions?” she asked, smiling broadly with both her mouth and her dark eyes. The apples of her cheeks bobbed. It was good to see. There hadn’t been much smiling from either of us in our last months together.

“No, not yet,” I said, “did you?”

“Yes.” Her eyes glinted in the warm, dim interior of the restaurant. “I did.”

“Hmm,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I should ask what her resolutions were. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“Guess what they are,” Mickey said, leaning forward so that her full chest was pressed tightly to the table’s edge.

An attractive woman with jet-black hair, which of course made me think of Shiloh, delivered Mickey’s Diet Coke and my wine to the table. “Thanks,” we both said, looking up at the waitress who dashed off because the restaurant was getting crowded. She was going to have a busy night. I wanted to ask Mickey if she had resolved to stop drinking because I was thrown by her choice of beverage. I had never witnessed her passing up a chance to order a drink. This was something, and I wanted to mention it, but at the same time, I didn’t think I should.

“Okay, so guess,” she prompted.

“Well.” I squinched my eyes at her, pretending to size her up, “Well, I think you resolved to stop sending hate mail to the Pentagon, to buy foreign and to…uhm…to shave your head.” At this, Mickey ran her hand through her short salt-and-pepper hair, the salt strands becoming gossamer under the low lighting above us.

“Oh my God,” she said with mock awe in her voice, “you are so good.” This last part came out seductively. Parts of me that shouldn’t have responded did. I tasted my wine, not making eye contact with Mickey.

I glanced around the dining area and my eyes rested on the back of a head that made me almost choke on the tart wine. The black bobbed hair swung, its owner laughing. The laughter, with its sound of little tinkling bells, reached my ears and hit me with the same force as a physical blow. I held my breath to encourage the wine to go down the right pipe. Shiloh was sitting with her back to me, and judging by her animation, she was facing a wonderfully engaging woman. The woman was pretty with eyes like Shiloh’s and a bright, easy smile. As I watched, the woman talked, holding Shiloh rapt with her story. Then they were both laughing again. I realized as I sat there, that this was exactly what I had feared in the first place with Shiloh—that I would get attached and she’d move on. I took a deep controlled breath.

“Okay Al, so my first resolution,” Mickey was saying. I brought my reluctant gaze to Mickey’s smile. She started over now that I was looking at her. “My first resolution is to fix several things that I broke this past year.”

She was looking hard at me, but I couldn’t get on the same wavelength. “What did you break?” I asked.

She looked surprised that I had to ask.

“Well, our relationship, for starters,” she said, watching for my reaction. I tried not to let my face betray my dismay at her having brought up something I wasn’t sure I wanted to discuss. In fact, I was certain I did not want to discuss it, not now with Shiloh sitting a mere twenty or so feet away. Mickey was waiting for some sort of response, but I couldn’t give her one.

“I know I was wrong to say that we had nothing in common anymore, Al.” Mickey started toying with the saltshaker again. “And I was stupid to leave you,” she said and looked up at me. “I’d like to start over with you,” she said.

She was telling her truth. I could see it in her eyes. How easy it would be to pretend that nothing had ever gone wrong between us. We could go back to being Mickey and Al. She could stop renting her apartment, and we would just go back to the way we used to be with her living in my house, her cleaning fanatically, me trying to set boundaries within which I could have messes that would remain mine alone. We could watch TV and take turns making dinner. I heard Shiloh laughing again, and I had to look. The woman across from her touched Shiloh’s mouth with the corner of her own linen napkin. My mood plummeted. I dragged my eyes back to Mickey’s familiar face. I still didn’t have anything to say.

“So, that’s one resolution,” she said. “My other one is to live greener.”

That was it? To start over with me and to live greener? Not to give up drinking? Well, maybe that was one she was leaving unsaid, I thought as I looked at her Diet Coke. It felt odd to have my future lined up next to living greener in her short list of resolutions. I didn’t like it.

“I guess those are decent resolutions, Mickey. And it’s good that you can actually control one of them,” I said, not caring if my words bit her. What the hell? Did she think she was the only one to have a decision in the restarting of our relationship? I was shocked, but not so shocked that half my brain wasn’t trying to decide whether or not I should go say hi to Shiloh. I would be interrupting. But wouldn’t it be wrong not to let her know I was there? It seemed unfair of me to not go announce myself or something.

But when I put it that way, announcing myself was the last thing I wanted to do with her over there yukking it up with that woman who was touching her mouth. Even if I had the upper hand that twenty-twenty vision gave me, I didn’t feel like intruding. How could I possibly do it anyway? Stand there at the side of the table until the other woman ripped her eyes from Shiloh’s beautiful face long enough to notice me? And then what? And then say, “Hi, I wish I were sitting where you are.” Yeah, no, I didn’t think so.

I had to offer Mickey my strictest attention so as to not burst into tears. I had huge emotional distress potential at that moment, and I wasn’t even PMSing. So, I told myself that here—across from Mickey—was where I was, so I’d better make the most of it.

Mickey was sitting there in silence, watching me. “I’m sorry, Mickey, for saying that,” I began, “but I don’t think you can make a resolution when you are only one half of the deciding force behind following through on it.” I said it kindly and was surprised to find that I was a little bit sad to be saying it. Again I thought of how nice it would be to be with a known entity and have all the uncertainty of just getting to know somebody obliterated from your life, just like that.

“I know,” Mickey said. “I know that I’m not the only one deciding, that’s why I wanted to see you, to tell you.” She looked at me when she said this. “Or to ask you, I mean, what you think.”

“I don’t know what to think, Mick. This is pretty out of the blue, wouldn’t you say?”

“Maybe for you,” she said, “but I haven’t stopped thinking about you since, well, since I moved out.”

“What do you miss most?” I asked, feeling mean and not totally because of Mickey but also because of where I’d rather be sitting and the fact that someone else was there right now. “The bickering about your drinking? The messes I leave behind me everywhere I go? Never being able to be home on your own because I am always there?” The last one had been a more recent complaint. It was a complaint that had sprung up only after we had decided not to pursue our relationship, but before she had moved out on her own—and it was a complaint, I was fairly certain, that had come about because she was ready to start a relationship with some new drinking buddy-slash-girlfriend. I reminded myself then that this bitterness would probably return to me threefold, if not more, so I stopped. But I was really rattled. She made me think about going down that road with her again, and I didn’t want to consider it. Not really. Damn.

“Allura,” she said, using my entire first name, which I can only remember her doing once or twice before. “Allura,” she repeated, “I am sorry.”

I looked at her. Her eyes were watering, her eyebrows were knit together and her lips were beginning to quiver in earnest. I didn’t want her to cry. That would have killed me. Mickey was not a crier. If she started now because of what I had just said to her, well, that would have been terrible.

“Okay, okay,” I crooned quietly to Mickey. I held out my open hand across the table and let her take it in her own. Her bottom lip stopped quivering. I breathed a sigh of relief. She squeezed my hand, and I let her hold it there on the table. I thought of the last time I had my hand held on top of a table. I looked over at Shiloh. I certainly wouldn’t be going over there tonight. Not now.

The woman across from Shiloh caught me off guard. She was still talking to Shiloh with her voice low, yet she was staring straight at me.

I followed her gaze down to my hand in Mickey’s, and then I looked back at the woman. She was glaring at me, I was sure of it. What the hell? Now she looked back at Shiloh, who was standing up, feeling for her coat on the back of her chair. She found it and put it on while the other woman took a few bills from her wallet, placed them on the table, put on her own coat and escorted Shiloh out of the restaurant. The other woman didn’t look back at me and obviously neither did Shiloh.

The rest of the evening passed by me in a blur. I was left feeling sick in the pit of my stomach, like I’d ridden one too many rides at the amusement park. Even my head reeled as I explained to Mickey that now was not a good time to rekindle anything and that there might never be a good time to rekindle. I told her we couldn’t go backward. She told me that deciding to move forward was not going backward, especially if we changed how we did things. I considered her words. Maybe she was right. After what I’d just felt as I watched Shiloh with another woman, part of me thought that life with Mickey looked awfully safe. Comfortable. We’d already been through what I considered the worst with each other, so how could there be any future hurt or letdown? I’d be going in with my eyes wide open. I’d know what to expect.

I felt The Funk wrap its arms around my shoulders. I felt it nuzzle my ear. I closed my eyes for a second.

“Al, are you okay?” Mickey asked.

“Yeah,” I answered. I opened my eyes. “I just need to go home, I think.” Home. That made me think of Shiloh’s soundtrack. Was she that much of a player that she’d let me believe that song was for me and then show up with another woman so soon?

“You’ve barely touched your—”

“I know,” I interrupted her. “I’m sorry, Mickey. I’ve got to go.”

Mickey’s heart was practically laying on the table between us. I felt like we’d attempted surgery and had just given up. And that’s not the way I wanted to leave things.

“Mickey,” I said. “We can’t start over. I can’t start over with you. No matter how right you suppose things could be for us, I’m not right for you anymore. It wouldn’t be good for us, either one of us.”

“You say that now, you think that now, but what if we checked in with each other? Say, in a month? Maybe you’ll feel differently then.”

I was desperate to go home and be miserable alone. Or with Dwight. So I took the chicken’s way out and said, “Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe.”

As I drove home, I reminded myself of all the reasons a person should refrain from falling in love. Near the end of the list was that you never really stopped loving anyone. Not really.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Ab-BRA-cadabra

“Shiloh, Shiloh,” Dwight called out for what must have been the thirtieth time in the past hour.

“Dwight, really,” I said back to him, “can you say something else? How about lilfella? Huh? Lilfella, lilfella, lilfella.” I tried to get him going on one of his other favorite phrases. I was in the middle of an intense solitaire game on my computer, the window with my half-written article for
The Indelible
minimized. Today it was an article on a bra available from China. It was ridiculous. What made it appropriate for my column, but just barely, was that the bra contained technology, if one could call it that, which allowed the wearer to increase or decrease the amount of breast that was pushed up and squeezed over the bra’s edges. The cup size was controlled via a remote control. Part of my assignment was to address the impact of the text in the highly effective advertisements.

Wondering how I was to approach this article, I ate a slippery hunk of overripe avocado from the plate on my desk. It was a food that Patrick told me would help me put on healthy weight. I was tired of my clothes hanging off my bones, looking like they felt sorry for themselves for not belonging to a curvaceous owner. I wanted to get a good start on the article because Veronica was due to come over in an hour.

“Shiloh!” Dwight called.

I sighed.

Usually, Dwight was happy to try new foods, and it was gratifying to watch his reactions as he rolled novel bits around on his tongue. So to replace Shiloh’s name in his mouth, I held out some avocado to him as he leaned over to meet me.

“Here you go, Dwighty, my boy,” I said as he inspected the green goo on my fingers. He leaned back without sampling the avocado.

“No, really, taste,” I encouraged. He leaned forward and then changed his mind again.

“C’mon, Dwight, don’t play hard to get; it’s for you.” I waved my fingers under his beak. He gingerly tasted the avocado. I took the opportunity to smear a bit more under his top beak. He played with it in his mouth and bobbed his head.