Tempted (8 page)

Taking full advantage of the wise guy benefits of best friendship
,
I bai
t her by commenting on her post:

Claire Nichole Eden

An
d what are your vices, my dear?

One of April’s Facebook friends, whom I don’t know, chimes in next:
 

Alexander Armstrong

I hav
e three vices.
 
I use them in the
wood shop in my basement all the time.
Not sure what virtues are though.
I’ll ask next time I go to Lowe’s.

Heeheehee, I ‘like’ it and type a reply:

Claire Nichole Eden

AHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH aren’t virtues scantily clad Greek demi-goddesses?

Alexander Armstrong

If so I’ll definitely have to pick one up. April, you fit that description
...
wanna help me with my vices? LOL

My good humor is at peak tonight and I’m in one of those moods when everything strikes me as being hilarious.
 
And though Alexander’s previous comment is only nominally amusing, it catches and tickles me just as I take a swig of coffee, and I choke in an attempt not spit the brew all over my laptop screen.
 
And that cracks me up all the more.

Claire Nichole Eden

Heeheehee Alexander, I can’t drink my coffee and read your responses at the same time :D

Alexander Armstrong

Always happy to share a laugh, Claire!
 
And pleased to meet you! I’m off like a prom dress.
 
Headed outside to write and soak up some sun.
 
I tried to send you a friend request, but I’ve been blocked for 14 days.
 
Send me one if you like. Later ladies.

Claire Nichole Eden

Doh chortle chortle snort!

Ok
ay,
that last bit about the prom dress actually was pretty funny.
 
I’d never heard that before and in my current state
,
I find it a scream.
 

So this friend of April’s tried to send me a friend request
–
interesting.
 
My first thought is to ask April for the lowdown on this fellow.
 
But she just texted me, telling me that she’s going radio-silent, turning off her phone, and that her most recent FB post will be her last for two weeks.
 
Evidently she’s in the car, en route to a camping trip in an area without internet or cell service, causing her kids to threaten hara-kiri.
 

The fact that this man has been ‘blocke
d for 14 days’ by the Facebook G
estapo does not bode well.
 
In my experience, that usually means the person has some sort of personal agenda or self-promotion going on
,
and is adding friends willy-nilly.
 
I am not one to blithely add some stranger to my friend pool on FB, especially one who’s been ‘blocked.’
 
But this person seems fun and entertaining in a light and playful sort of way.
 
And what’s more, he’s a writer.
 
That is enough to bring him to ‘person of interest’ status for me.
 
That means I could ostensibly look forward to posts that employ the proper use of words such as
your
and
you’re
;
there, their
and
they’re
;
to, too, two
...
though that is three
...
or is it six?
 
And just to nitpick:
 
threw, thru
and
through
.
 
In fact, may I be so rude as to add
doughnut
?
 
Ahhhhhhhh
,
the thought is satisfying enough to warrant a visit to Mr. Armstrong’s page.

Okay, so my decision to check out his page may have been a teensy-weensy bit affected by his minute profile picture that suggests a hottie.
 
I click on the icon and the photo magnifies several times over.
 
I gasp my surprise.
 
That
is the fun-loving fellow I was just jesting with?
 
In the photo he looks much more like a rock star than a Facebook denizen
...
or friend of April’s
,
for that matter.
 
Where has she been hiding him?
 
The black and white image shows an artsy man with longish loose curly hair, an arresting, confident gaze
,
and a trimmed, neat beard.
 
He’s not smiling and looks imposing in a romantic, musketeer sort of way.
 
I decide to delve deeper.
 

Reading his profile
,
I learn that he lives in the Catskills.
 
As an undergrad, he studied at Cornell, double-majoring in Anthropology and Archeology.
 
For grad school
,
he went to NYU.
 
He’s considered an expert in his field and is a published writer currently working on a new book, outside his usual scope.
 
He loves fly-fishing and archery and used to collect rare comic books with his dad.
His page posts suggest an affinity with cooking and hiking
,
and his favorite quote is a poem:

One Plus One

Time and space are one, they say

Threads entwined in the tapestry of life.

But they are wrong.

They say that one plus one is two

Th
e math of reason, science, true

But they are wrong.

And maybe some, or all,
would swear

I can't at once be here and there

But they are wrong.

Our life is love,

And love I choose

And one plus one is one, not two

And time, illusion, eternity real

And space the place I dwell with you.

The present is the only realm

Where all that is is known as one

Perfect, simple, grace-filled, new

Our love alone reveals this, true.

And love alone reveals this, true.

AVA

AVA?
 
I don’t know that poet.
 

 
A(lexander) V? A(rmstrong)?
 
The poet is him!

I click the button.
 
Friend request sent.

Enough time has passed since the Bret fiasco that Mom should be back to her cantankerous self.
 
But awkwardly, she’s still being nominally pleasant.
 
What gives?
 
Our Sundays still include a jaunt to Boudin’s, but now gardening has been added to the mix.
 
Whenever I suggest skipping Boudin’s, Mom acts as though I just took away her
binky.
 
T
hough once we are at the bakery, she spends most of the time in constant agitation, barking at me to hurry up, “Don’t you realize there is gardening to be done?
 
The flowers won’t plant themselves you know!”

Deep breath.

Ohmmmmm.

Mom nearly always gardens in white pants.
 
Well
,
not after Labor Day, of course.
 
But from the vernal to the autumnal equinox
...
or is that it equinoces?
 
Anyway, from mid-March to mid-September
,
she can
most often
be found in her whites, either in her garden, or these days, my own.
 
Mirac
ulously, she never gets dirty –
literally!
 
Her gardening gloves are usually a ravaged mess of earth and fauna, but somehow those darn white pants remain pristine.
 
And pristine they are.
 
You have never seen such white whites!
 
To this day, I ask my mom to get stains out for me.
 
She’s better than any commercial laundry service and heaven knows I didn’t
inherit her skill with whites,
or her green-thumb, for that matter.

Being that it’s late February, Mom is into snowdrop crocus, rhododendron and Campbell's magnolia
,
which is a tree, I’ve just learned.
 
I can never remember the names of the flowers and foliage
,
and when we get to the nursery I just point and say ‘Oooooh, pretty!’
 
If I’m out and about and espy something especially lovely, I snap a pic with my phone and then send it to Christian, my cheerleading partner from college, who without ever studying any of it, knows everything about every plant, flower, bird and animal on the planet.
 
It’s uncanny and unnerving.

Come the first Sunday of s
pring, Mom and I are out wrestling with some sort of vin
e
y thing that requires
some sort of stringy thing and a stake
to attach
it
to
.
 
We are in each other’s way and
becoming increasingly physical,
jockeying for position to grasp the vine.
 
 
I have a mind to grab the stake and drive it through her
...
 

Oh, she has no idea how that bell just saved her!
 
Without looking at my cell phone I answer it, relieved to have been pulled away from the petunia power struggle and avoiding the possibility of spending the rest of my
days
wearing orange, when sent to the pokey for murdering my own mom.
 
Though I really wonder at times if any court in the land could convict me if they knew my mother.

After a distracted hello, I freeze.

“Hi baby.
 
I miss you.”

It’s Bret.

And what’s worse, Mom knows it.
 
She adopts a smug smirk as she proceeds to tie down the vine
her
way, appearing quite self-satisfied with her mad gardening skills, as well as her spot-on mother’s intuition.

Without an available hole to crawl into in the garden
,
now that we just finished planting, I slink into the house, searching for privacy and my wits.
 
I look to the menagerie of wise animal faces in the sunroom, and even knock on the chakra shack within, determined to cobble the perfect pithy response to Bret.

“Hey,” is all I can muster.
 
The chakras hold up their score cards.
 
Zeroes across the board.
 
Except for indigo girl.
 
She’s given me a 3.
 
Aww, suddenly indigo has become my favorite color.
 
Wait, what’s that?
 
She’s got a large red Sharpie and has marked a hyphen symbol before the 3.
 
Negative 3?
 
What the heck?

“Claire, when can I see you
again?” he coos with that warm K
ahlua voice of his, as if nothing happened and he was not married.

“When can you see me?” I purr.
 
“Why the moment you’re single, of course,” I add disingenuously.

“Yeh, about that.”

And in that instant I am no longer concerned with Bret and the state of his connubial bliss.
 
No, at that moment
my mind flies back to David, a
s it nearly always does.
 
The memory of the day I found out about his girlfriend is seared into my brain.
 
And I found out from her, no less!

David and I had been close for about a year when I got involved in a charity event he was chairing.
 
He wanted a celebrity name attached and seemed to think I f
it the bill.
 
Me, a celebrity? 
What a laugh.