Love Monkey (9 page)

“Where do you live now?”

“In South Norwalk. Connecticut.”

Wow. Now that's a commute. “You can't do that much longer,” I say.

“I know. It takes me an hour and a half to get to work. This week I've been staying with that girl who works in reception.”

“You can find an apartment here,” I say. “Just so long as you're okay with urban squalor.”

She laughs. “That's the thing. I don't mind living in a dump, it's just that there are too many people here. I'm a small-town girl. I just want to read books,” she says. “And be able to drive my car.”

We talk about old girlfriends. Mine. Hers. She had the Obligatory Lesbian Affair. And she's not just saying it to turn me on. Her life is more interesting than mine. She's so much younger than me, and so much older. Her face is at that age when girls have just lost their baby fat but haven't yet put on the adult fat. Post-zit, pre-wrinkle. Her skin is perfect. Yet she's about as young as Yoda.

I ask questions about the things that made her. All of our personalities are just hot dogs crammed with bits and pieces of books and movies and songs, aren't they? That thing you said because it sounded like something Bogart would say. That thing you wore
because it made you feel like a character in a video you saw when you were fourteen. She loves
Blue Velvet
, but also
Meet Me in St. Louis
.
The Virgin Suicides
, but also
Powerpuff Girls
. She has read Sylvia Plath but never interpreted her writing as a call to stop shaving her armpits. She's on antidepressants but doesn't brag about it. She does not wear glasses but she wishes she did. She does not say, “You do the math” or “at the end of the day” or “don't go there.” She lost her virginity in a tree house. I want to buy her books, and jewelry.

Being with her is weird and familiar at the same time, like a memory of the future. You know how when you're young you always think you're going to meet your Ideal? You know, a woman with great hair and clothes who doesn't talk about her hair and clothes? A woman who does not believe “Whatever” is a sentence? A woman who eats steak? A woman who isn't trying to meet Wall Street guys? A woman who neither hates her mother nor is obsessed with pleasing her?

“You should at least try living in the city,” I say, expressing my empathy with a sidle. “It may break your heart, but it'll never bore you.”

She considers this, motionless as a cat on a warm windowsill. You couldn't slide a Saturday edition of
Tabloid
between us. And, ladies and gentlemen, she. Is. Sticking. But she's also lighting a cigarette.

I'm starting to be aware of my breathing. My pulse. My schlong. You know how a cute girl looks through extra-strength beer goggles? That's how she looked when I was stone-cold sober. Imagine how she looks now that I've drunk a gallon of Courage.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-two. How old are you?”

“Thirty-two.” Don't act old. Don't give yourself away. Most girls like slightly older geezers. More mature and that. Keep looking right into her eyes. Giving her a few signs of interest. Basking in her eyes and hair.

That was her last smoke, so I go back to the bar to see if Pete's got some. He doesn't sell, but he scrounges up a few singles and sticks them in my jacket pocket. I score some matches as well.

“Zat your girlfriend?” he wants to know.

“Not yet,” I say.

“Ooh, look at him,” Pete says. “Don Juanabee.”

“It's going ridiculously well,” I say. “I just met her.”

“Best thing you can do?” he says. “Say good night and walk away. She'll go nuts.”

I can't do that. This is the most beautiful girl I've ever gotten this far with. She's laughing at the right moments. Looking serious at the right moments. She's still wearing her little yellow coat and just thinking about what's under there is making the mercury rise in my thermometer.

So here it is. I'm drunk on the night air. I'm drunk on her face. I'm drunk on alcohol. She's matched me drink for drink. Five. Six. We've spent three hours together, maybe more. We're sitting side by side with cool moody alternative music playing, the kind she used to make out to in high school.

Give her a cigarette.

“Thanks,” she says. She fumbles around in her coat. I'm already lighting a match. Although I hate cigarettes, I love to light up pretty girls. Because.

“Lighting up a girl, there's something, sexual, about it,” I say, waving out the match.

“
Def
initely,” she says, shooting a plume in my direction.

I move closer. She doesn't flee. I move closer still. She's sticking. Now she's in my kissing radius. I look at her. Straighten your posture, man. Your posture is always bad. I look away. Look around the room. Check out the juke. Stare into the yellow light of this grungy subterranean grotto. And then: lean back toward her. And I go in.

And she sticks. Relief wells up in me. Surges. A wave of calmness.
I am liked. Meeting this girl is like cleaning behind my refrigerator: a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Bachelorhood has had a long run, there have been several girlfriends who were almost perfect. But this could be the last girl I ever kiss.

We kiss. We pause. We kiss some more. Her hand is on my shoulder.

Then I pull up and put my mouth up next to her ear and very softly I say exactly what I'm thinking.

You should never say what you're actually thinking.

You should especially never say what you're actually thinking if you are in danger of giving up the secret you, the one it should take six months of hard-core dating to uncover.

You should extra-super-especially never say what you're actually thinking if what you're thinking sounds like dialogue from a 1968 episode of
Days of Our Lives
.

But here's what I say. I say, “Where have you been all my life?”

She just gives me a crooked little smile. I've never seen anyone smile like that before. Half of her mouth is delighted. The other half is worried.

Then she gives a little laugh.

And I am filled with hope.

We make a date for Thursday to see a movie about jujitsu and boxing and sword-fighting and love. All of your basic forms of combat.

“There's an eight-thirty,” I say. “There's also a six.”

“Maybe eight-thirty,” she says. “No, wait. Shoot. How about six?”

I show up at 5:50. She isn't there. She isn't there at 6:15. Go to the Mexican restaurant next door. Change for a dollar, please. Call the office. Call the house. No messages.

I'm paralyzed. Surely she wouldn't go in without me. So I wait.
Six-thirty. What the hell. I'll just wait till the eight-thirty showing. See what happens. Say she shows up at eight-fifteen all is forgiven.

I cross Forty-second Street to the HMV store and stew a bit. Check the office machine. Check the home machine. Check 'em again. Wait ten minutes and recheck. I'm frantic, running over the possibilities. I once read this article about Occam's razor. It's a theory: the simplest explanation is the likeliest. The simplest explanation is, she has simply lost interest.

I sit through the film anyway. I really wanted to see it. But it's so poetically sad and lyrically pained and tragically tragic that it's like seeing my psychic X rays blown up forty feet wide. I leave before the end. I just know somebody's going to die.

I have this problem. Sometimes I go overboard. But I don't just go overboard. I go overboard without a life jacket. In shark-infested waters. With a vicious nosebleed. And I just remembered to forget how to swim.

I call in sick on Friday. No messages. Call Julia at the office. It rings. Someone picks up. The line goes dead. I don't call back. The weekend passes. I call in sick on Monday. Call her at the office. She doesn't answer. I leave a message. “Uh, hi. It's, uh, Tom? Could you call me?” But she doesn't.

I'm mad at myself, mainly. I saw a yellow light, or a yellow coat, and I stepped on the pedal. Right into a buzzing intersection.

Tuesday I go back to work devising excuses. No one tells me I don't look sick.

I
feel like ten pounds of nothing in a five-pound sack at the office that whole week. I don't see her around.
She might be out covering a story
.
She could be sick!
Too sick to operate a phone? It could happen. I picture her lying in a soap-opera hospital room with
swaddled head muttering her “Who am I?”s to teams of mystified doctors.

The following Monday. Ten days since she blew me off. In my cubicle there are stacks of newspapers, layouts, magazines, all the crap of my crap existence. Hello, I'm Mr. Crap, who are you? Oh, you're Mr. Calm, Secure, Married Guy? I guess you don't worry about where your next lay is coming from. Or, your next cuddle. Because even guys get tired of fucking. Yeah, it's pretty easy to find someone to fuck. Actually, it's incredibly hard to find someone you want to fuck, but it's even harder to find someone you want to wake up with.

At the bottom of the stack: a note. No envelope. Thick, unlined white paper. Folded in thirds. My name in cursive.

God, even her handwriting is beautiful. It's neat, it's readable, but it's kind of cool and smart and tragic: tight, angular, brooding. Not like girly handwriting with its fat loops, its smiley faces in the girly dots of the
i
s. Now she's really done it to me.

I don't call her until I'm getting ready to leave at the end of the day.

“Hey,” I tell the phone.

“How are you,” she says. Other girls' voices rise? Like, at the end
of every sentence? Not hers. Her voice is all low and smooth and soothing and sexy. Talking to her, you expect to be charged $3.95 a minute.

My other line is ringing.

“Got your note,” I say.

“Yes,” she says.

“How about we start over?” I say.

“I'd like that,” she says.

And I pick up the other line to deal with this hour's story of the century.

I tell her to meet me at one of those nouvelle Mexican places. It's a lot like the oldvelle Mexican places, except there is a little jar of crayons for doodling on the butcher paper that covers the tablecloth, the loud music is soul instead of salsa, and the margaritas have flavors like pomegranate and kiwi-kumquat. Also, for what each of them costs you could go on a three-day bender in Tijuana. Shooter say:
Let her see you waste money
.

“I'll just have a regular margarita,” she tells the waitress. She is perfectly still in her cute yellow coat. I imagine everyone is looking at her. And I don't have much imagination.

“And for you?” the waitress says.

“The watermelon. Is that seedless?”

Julia laughs. The waitress doesn't. New York waitresses don't laugh.

“Actually I'll just have the strawberry-mango,” I say. It occurs to me a moment too late that this is perhaps not the manliest drink in existence. I should have said something like, “Whiskey and soda. Hold the soda.”

The waitress rolls her eyes and leaves without a word.

“Missed you the other night,” I point out, picturing Shooter slamming a glass on the table and bellowing, “WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU?” Should I be more like Shooter, or more like me? And if the latter: who the hell am I?

“I'm sorry,” she says.

“What happened?” I say.

She doesn't say anything. She just makes a lost-doggy face and lets her shoulders droop. I can see words forming in her green eyes. She can't get them out of her mouth, though. Then something occurs to her. She rootles through her purse for an answer. And finds her cigarettes.

“That's your reply?” I say.

“It's just, boyfriend things,” she says.

I light a match for her.

“Things,” I say. She leans into my flame.

“Things haven't been so good lately. I don't know what's wrong with me. You know?” She blows smoke out of the side of her mouth. Her coat is still on even though it's warm in here. She looks as if she could run away at any moment.

“Can you tell me what things?” I say.

“Not yet,” she says.

Little does she know. I'm a sucker for a good mystery. Or even a bad one, if it has green eyes. One of which is partially hidden by that gorgeous hair. She's a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a truly excellent body.

When I was a kid, my older brothers would scamper off on a Sunday afternoon while my parents dragged me around to flea markets. They were there to rescue woebegone furniture, begrimed wooden survivors that reminded them of stuff their parents had had around the house when they were kids. These soapboxes and pedestal tables they planned to tote back home so they could spend several
devoted days lovingly stripping off the paint in order to unveil the battered piece of junk that always lay underneath. At the flea market I'd mope listlessly through the piles of scratched records and clothes that smelled like somebody else's house. Did I want anything? my parents would ask. No. The macramé lady, the tube-sock king. Did anything catch my eye? No. The hard-candy booth, the land of hand-painted ceramic farm animals. Couldn't they get me anything for being such a Good Boy? No. Until we stumbled upon some merchant-wizard who had a barrel filled with lumps of under-cover merchandise in brown paper sacks tied with ribbons. A Magic Marker question mark was their only label.
GRAB BAGS
, the sign would say. Only a buck. I had to have one, every time. By the time we got home I would have thrown away the Bakelite candy bowl or wooden duck that always lay within.