Love Love (8 page)

Were we being smart about this? Of course not. We could've waited like normal people, gone through the proper channels, but this felt right to us. It felt like destiny, and all it took was a small chunk of our savings. You were worth the risk, Kevin. I'd do it all over again.

This is not an easy

Kevin turned the sheet, but there was nothing more. He showed the letter to his father.

“I don't know.” He shrugged. “Your mother do all. I do nothing.”

“She says here that she couldn't get pregnant.” Kevin again went through gestures until his father understood.

“Doctor wrong and stupid. Judy, Miracle Baby, your mother say.”

Kevin placed the letter behind the centerfold, as his mother must have done almost forty years ago before she slipped them into an envelope and sealed it. What had she been feeling at that moment? He wished he knew. He wished she were here, so he could ask.

7

W
hat if he didn't show? What if he'd changed his mind? It wouldn't have been the first time Judy was stood up. It wouldn't have even been the tenth.

Just stay calm,
she said to herself.
Just fucking calm down, okay?

This was the reason why she didn't date anymore, why she'd given up this part of her life. It was hard. It was hard to put on mascara, hard to wear heels that jammed her toes, hard to sit here by herself in this restaurant, to wait for her man.

She took another sip of water. The waiter, lurking at his station in the back of the room, met her eyes and smiled, but when the smile wasn't returned, when the smile, in fact, was answered with venom, the waiter dropped his gaze and slunk away through the flapping double doors of the kitchen.

Great. Can't wait to taste all that spit in my food.

She stared at the only thing she could stare at without repercussion, the mural on the wall adjacent to her table, a scene of what she assumed was some place in Italy. She'd come to Gaetano's many times, but she had never had the occasion to study its mural this closely. The waves of the sea were three shades of blue, and where the color was the lightest, the beige stucco poked through.

This was the way it was, wasn't it? With everything. With everyone. From afar, people and things looked solid, but upon closer examination, faults revealed themselves. A perfect example of this was her own life. From afar, someone might consider her a brave soul who defied society's preconceptions and lived life on her own terms. A person of courage who didn't tie herself down to a meaningless career and was willing to sacrifice financial security for the pursuit of . . . of what, exactly? What was it that she was so passionate about that required her to give up so much?

“Are you doing okay, miss? Anything you need?”

Her mousy waiter had been replaced by a girl in a ponytail with a smile so wide it had to hurt her jaws. Had Judy been waiting so long that the first waiter's shift ended? She glanced at her wrist, but she wasn't wearing her watch. The frayed leather strap was one small yank away from ripping apart, so in an effort to appear as beautiful as possible, she'd dispensed with the need to tell time.

“Yes,” Judy told the girl, “I'm doing fine.”

“You're waiting for your party to arrive.”

No. I just like to come to a restaurant and not eat.

The girl returned a moment later, but not for her. She delivered desserts for the table next to Judy's, tiramisu for the man and a fruit cup in a martini glass for the woman. This couple had ordered their meal at the same time Judy had been seated. She'd promised herself that if Roger did not show by the time they finished their meal, she'd leave.

Unfortunately for her, they took their time with their final course. The man sipped his coffee, the woman stirred her tea, and after eating half of their respective desserts, they switched plates to share in their gastronomical delights. Even though the restaurant was almost full, Judy caught enough of their conversation to know that they were husband and wife and that tonight was their anniversary, but there was something else there, an edge she felt as the man clinked his spoon against the martini glass in an attempt to extract the last piece of fruit.

This was where her imagination was supposed to supplant reality. In her last screenwriting class she took at the community college, her instructor, a man who always seemed as though he was on the verge of saying something important (but never did), stressed the importance of extending the limits of reality into the realm of fiction. He'd told the class that stories existed everywhere, but only portions, just the roots. It was up to the artist to nurture and grow these buds into flowers of creativity.

As exciting as it had sounded, when Judy thought about it later, his advice was no different than the songs crooned by other cut-rate teachers she'd taken over the years—Mary Jane the sculptor who baked oblong vases in her barn, Vladimir the photographer with his fetish for orchids, Yuri the poet who forced everyone to write in rhymes. Even in these sad little classes, there were people more
talented than she was, or if not talented, just more driven. It was obvious in the ways they talked, the ways they held themselves, their voices high and strong, making Judy wish she'd stayed home.

Home. That's where she would be going, because the couple was done. The man signed the credit card bill, and they rose, and Judy's evening was thankfully over.

But here was Roger, hurrying toward her, not even letting her have this crumb of satisfaction.

“My car,” he said. “It wouldn't start, AAA took forever, and I kept getting your voice mail?”

She'd forgotten that she'd silenced her cell earlier in the day to avoid the wrath of Beverly, the woman at the temp agency who'd been ringing her phone on the hour, as robotic and as inescapable as the Terminator. Judy knew all Beverly wanted to do was let Judy have it, tell her what a fuckup she was for walking away from her job. Scanning the call history, Judy felt stupider than ever.

As soon as Roger sat down, the waitress with the unstoppable smile pounced on him to offer him a drink. “A beer, please,” he said, and he asked Judy if she wanted anything.

What she wanted to say was that she'd like to leave, but instead she ordered a martini.

“Have you seen our special drinks menu? Our choco-tinis are really yummy. You also can't go wrong with the key-lime-pie-tini.”

Even an hour and a half ago, she would've found this girl tiresome, but now, after the shitstorm of self-doubt and self-hatred she'd endured, Judy tapped into a malignant growth of negative energy, the sort of dark force that would've made Darth Vader proud. She felt herself enlarging, strengthening, ready to tell this goddamn moron of a waitress what she needed to hear.

“Thank you, miss,” Roger said. “But I think my lady here will have a regular martini, like she asked.”

After the waitress left, Judy grabbed the knife and formed a hot, tight fist around the handle. She saw herself jumping out of her chair and stabbing Roger in the eye with it. She could see it happening, bloody ooze dribbling down his face, the image so violent that she immediately dropped the knife back on the table for the fear that she might actually do it.

“I'm not your lady,” Judy said.

“I'm sorry,” Roger said, “I didn't mean to call you that; it just came out. But I felt as if you were going to say something you were going to regret.”

Judy let out a burst of bitter laughter. Was this some kind of a joke? “You made me wait for almost two hours, and now you're telling
me
how I should behave? Wow, Roger, this is like the best first date ever. You really know how to get to a girl. Now I understand why all you have in your cubicle is that shitty little photo of a cat, because that animal is probably the only thing that can stand you.”

As Judy's heart pounded, Roger's very long, very Japanese face revealed nothing. His expression remained as still as a lake of Botox injections, and watching him, Judy realized how different they were. To most people, they looked alike, a pair of Asians sitting down for dinner, but Korea and Japan, the Land of the Morning Calm and the Land of the Rising Sun, were opposites in temperament. Koreans tended to be angrier, brasher people while the Japanese were famous for their infinite composure; it was the difference between red-hot kimchi and serene sushi, hard-hitting
soju
versus the elegant
sake
. Even the
kamikaze
, the Japanese suicide pilots who crashed their planes into enemies, possessed at their very core a steadiness that enabled them to keep their eyes open as they flew into their targets. This was the face Judy was staring into now, a bedrock of solidity, not smiling, not frowning, just being.

The waitress returned with their drinks and asked if they'd made up their minds. Roger surprised her by ordering linguini and clams; after her outburst, she thought for sure their dinner was over. She fumbled through the menu and asked for spinach lasagna. The silence that had descended upon their table continued to spread, and Judy wondered why she didn't just get up and leave. It was what she should do, what mature, grown-up people did in situations like this. Except she couldn't just leave because she'd drank all that water waiting for Roger.

“Excuse me,” she said, and she left for the bathroom. She walked past the waiting station and pushed open the door with a silhouette of a Victorian-era woman sitting in front of a vanity, the word
ladies
prominently displayed in cursive underneath the art.

There was no one else in the dimly lit bathroom with its black tiles and stainless steel sinks that sat on top of the counter like woks. Judy hurried to the toilet and hiked up her skirt and rolled down her
stockings and pulled down her lacy panties, silently cursing the fate of women who had to go through so much more shit than men to look decent. Even after she was done, she remained sitting in the blackness of everything: the toilet itself, the toilet paper holder, the metal walls of the stall. She wanted to stay longer, but she made herself get up and head over to the sink to wash her hands and touch up her face.

She'd never considered herself pretty even when she was young, but compared to now? Compared to these pouches under her eyes, the crow's feet threatening to become eagle's talons, she'd been beauty-pageant worthy. She reapplied her lipstick; she brushed her hair. As she walked out the door of the bathroom and back to their table, she chose the words she'd say to him:
Thanks for trying, but it'll be best if we go our separate ways.
That sounded good, that sounded calm and adult, except she wouldn't be saying anything because he wasn't in his seat. In fact, it was as if their entire table had been replaced, because where they'd been sitting, the napkins and the utensils were reset to their default setting. She was sure it was their table, but now it wasn't their table because he was gone and she'd be getting her coat. It was a relief, actually. She could now go home, released from the constriction of her clothes, climb into bed, pull the covers over her head, and slip into darkness.

“Over here, Judy,” Roger said. He'd sneaked up behind her. He took her hand and led her to the other end of the room, the table next to the fireplace. He sat her down, pushed in her chair, then took a seat himself.

“I asked the waitress if we could start over,” he said.

The light from the fire flickered orange, bronzing the right side of his face. For a moment he looked like a statue, never to move again, and Judy froze, too, wanting to be a part of this stable, dependable universe of his.

You could never start over. You could never take back the things that happened or the words you said. But she appreciated his gesture, even if she feared it was foolish.

S
he had her martini, then she had another, and two more after that. She wanted to get drunk. Was it because she was happy? Or was it because she was sad? Or was it because she wanted to go home with him, for after four drinks, she had trouble standing up, never mind
getting behind the wheel?
Way to go, Judy, way to play hard to get.
Why couldn't she just be like everybody else and have a normal date, one that didn't require a table change because she'd said such awful, mean things to this nice man?

She didn't know. And after finishing her dish of crème brûlée, the creamy sweetness lingering on her tongue, Roger, ever the gentleman, told her he'd drop her off at her house.

“That's very kind of you,” she said slowly, trying to keep her words from sliding into one another. “But maybe you should take me to your place.”

“Are you sure?” he asked. “I mean, you're . . . I just want to make sure this is what you want.”

“I'm what?” she asked playfully. “Drunk? Is that what you wanted to say?”

Roger cleared his throat. “Well, yes, you do seem a little tipsy.”

“You think so,” she said, then added, “Roger?” On paper, it was a stupid-looking name, making her think of Mr. Rogers and his cardigan, but saying it was a different experience. The first syllable opened up her mouth in full, then it tapered down to a sensuous pout of her lips.
Rah-jur, Rah-jur, Rah-jur!
It was a muscular name, a sexy name.

Maybe she was drunker than she thought.