The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (16 page)

Later in the day, Tammy would tell me that she thought it would be safe to meet her sister at Kate Mantilini, a high-end restaurant in Beverly Hills, since she was driving herself and Veronica was seven months pregnant.

But after a quick hug at the waitress stand, the next thing Tammy knew she was being deposited into a chair across from some entertainment lawyer named Henry. And her sister had grabbed her purse, which had her car keys inside of it, before dashing off.

“I’m just going to go get your car detailed like we talked about,” Veronica had said. Like anyone would ever ask a seven-months-pregnant woman to take her car in for detailing while she went out on a date.

“And I couldn’t leave,” Tammy told me later. “That would have been so rude to Henry.” Like Veronica putting her in that position in the first place hadn’t been rude as hell anyway.

So because Veronica was an asshole and Tammy was too fucking nice, I end up walking into Kate Mantilini on Valentine’s Day and finding Tammy being bored to death by some square-jawed guy who was trying to convince her they should start working out together.

I cracked my knuckles. It was a dirty job being me, but somebody had to do it.

I walked right up to them and slammed my motorcycle helmet on the table. “Hey, are you trying to come on to my girl?”

Both Tammy and Henry looked up at me in all my rocker-grrl glory, looming over the table, and I glared at Henry like I’d just caught him and Tammy having sex or something.

“My girl?” he repeated.

I leaned toward him and bared my teeth. “Yeah, my girl. You got something to say about our lifestyle choice?”

Tammy, who was wearing a very pretty, green A-line dress, covered both her eyes with her hands as if hiding from the entire scene.

“Oh, you two are together? I didn’t know.” He looked little cowed, but not so much so that he didn’t remember that he was still in the entertainment business, and therefore genetically compelled to say, “How about a threesome?”

I stared at him for a long, hot second, then said, “Yeah, I’ve got a gun back in my Harley saddlebag and rage issues. Do you really want to go here with me?”

“I’m leaving,” Henry said, throwing down his napkin and raising his hands, like I actually had the hypothetical gun trained on him.

“Yeah, walk away,” I said. “But leave some money for the bill. Tammy’s a lady.”

Tammy finally uncovered her eyes long enough to say, “No, Henry, you don’t have to.”

He threw down a couple of one-hundred-dollar bills and pretty much ran away, looking over his shoulder a few times as he did.

“Well, that was fun,” I said, dropping into his abandoned chair.

“I can’t believe you did that!” Tammy said as loud as she could without raising her voice.

“What? You sent me a 911.”

“I wanted you come in and pretend that there was some kind of emergency or something. Not—not …” She couldn’t even say it.

“Yeah, you didn’t want me to make him think you were gay like me.” I widened my eyes to simpering and did a high-pitched impression of Tammy. “And we can’t have people thinking I’m gay. That’s so gross! Ew!”

“That’s not how I feel about it. You know that. But he’s going to tell my sister and she’s going to flip out.”

I shrugged. “Just tell her I did what I had to do to get you out of the date she’d stranded you on. You need to learn how to stand up to your sister anyway.”

For a moment, the Disney Princess shutters fell off Tammy’s eyes, and she looked at me with real hatred.

“Can you please take me home now?” she asked, her voice strained.

“Sure,” I said, deciding not to care about how on edge she was about the scene I’d just created. “Right after I order a cup of coffee.”

Then I signaled for a waiter.

If a man really loves you, he’s not okay with you being mad at him. On the flipside, if you really love a man, you let him know when you get mad. When I meet with a couple and the guy doesn’t get that the girl is seething with pent-up resentment, what I see are two people who really aren’t in love with each other like they think they are.

—
The Awesome Girl’s Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men
by Davie Farrell

THURSDAY

O
n Valentine’s Day, Caleb told me he loved me, and I decided to love him back. It wasn’t that hard, really. He was everything I wanted: tall, shaggy, only moderately successful (too successful leads to insurmountable ego issues—ask any starter wife about that), nice, gentle, and, most important of all, nothing like my father. He was decent in bed. He called when he said he would call. He never canceled dates. My friends liked him. My sister thought he sounded great. I could see us together in the future, buying a house in Echo Park and raising hip kids with good taste in music and a certain acerbic wit.

He was everything I had ever wanted, except …

“The apartment thing is bothering me,” I told him one Sunday morning in mid-March.

We were in the kitchen, eating a spinach-and-egg omelet I’d made for us. Caleb was also a vegetarian, so cooking for him felt more like an extension of cooking for myself as opposed to a chore, like it had with my meat-eating one-month stands.

“Is it because of the Benny and Abigail fight?” he asked.

Both of my roommates had left early that morning, Abigail having scored a gig on a one-off March Madness feature show, and the daytime talk show that Benny now worked for having decided to pay everyone union overtime to do a pre–March Madness special. But before leaving for their respective gigs, they’d somehow managed to get into yet another fight about the apartment situation. From what I had been able to figure out from Abigail’s half of the conversation, Abigail had been looking for apartments by herself and found a perfect two-bedroom, except that it was about three hundred dollars over their budget. Abigail thought they should fill out a rental application anyway. Benny thought it was too expensive.

At least that’s what it had sounded like to me when Abigail had yelled, “Stop saying it’s too dear. It’s not too dear. You’re just a right tight Scottish bastard, aren’t you?” I think “dear” meant expensive and “tight” meant cheap, but I couldn’t be sure …

“Why doesn’t she dump him as opposed to arguing with him all time?” Caleb asked, shaking his head. Then: “Do you want me to talk to them?”

“I appreciate the offer, but no,” I said, putting down my fork. “What I really want is for you to let me spend the night at your apartment once in a while, so that I don’t have to wake up to screaming roommates every morning.”

He put his own fork down. “I don’t want to fight,” he said. “I told you why my apartment is off-limits, and I need you to respect that.”

“I do respect your wishes,” I answered carefully. “I just want to see where you live.”

Neither of us was from California, but it was like we were trying to out–California speak each other with this conversation. I had to tamp down the desire to yell, “Who else doesn’t let his girlfriend see his apartment? That’s freaking crazy.”

“Okay,” he said, scooting back from the table. “I have to get back to my apartment and do some work. I’ve got a deadline coming up.”

“Are you angry at me?” I asked, feeling a little panicked by his abrupt subject change.

“No,” he answered. “Just frustrated that we can’t get past this.”

He went to the living room and pulled his jacket off the couch, where he had tossed it the night before. I followed him, trying not to come off as all neurotic and scared, but I was neurotic and scared. This was, I could see now that we were inside of it, our first official fight.

“So you’re just going to leave?” I asked.

“I’m on deadline for this short documentary project,” he said.

“Why didn’t you mention this deadline before?” I asked, hating how whiny I sounded even as the words were coming out of my mouth.

“Because it didn’t come up.” He had made it to the door now, hand on the knob. “Look, I’ll call you later tonight, okay?”

Then he left. And though he had at least promised to be in touch before he left, I couldn’t help but note that he hadn’t kissed me good-bye.

SHARITA

T
hat afternoon, I found myself trying not to get into a fight with Marcus. Since getting back together after our first fight, we had gotten in two more arguments, both of which had ended with him disappearing for a week before deciding to forgive me. But unfortunately, I didn’t see any way to avoid yet another fight that night, especially after Marcus got up an hour before my March Madness bracket-picking party and said, “I’m bouncing.”

He had been watching ESPN all day and hadn’t offered a helping hand or even a few words of conversation while I set up for the party. Though not social by nature, I had been throwing a bracket party ever since I’d gotten promoted to senior accountant. All of my firm’s partners threw at least one party every year. So now, not only did I make sure to dress like the partners, always in a suit as opposed to business casual like some of the less ambitious CPAs at Foxman & Carroll, but I also threw an annual bracket party and invited everyone at the firm and a few of my friends—with a strict warning to Risa to be on her best behavior.

I hadn’t minded Marcus not helping with the party particulars. I understood that he had a demanding job and couldn’t be expected to do physical labor on the weekends. I understood this because one of our fights had been about a shelf in my bathroom that I had asked him to fix, that he’d never gotten around to. He had disappeared for three days after that argument, and I had ended up fixing it myself with the help of an Internet tutorial. And I wouldn’t have minded, except he had been the one who offered to do it in the first place.

“I already went and got ice,” I told him, when he made moves to leave. “You don’t have to go get it.”

“Naw,” he said, grabbing his coat and slipping it on. “I’m leaving-leaving.”

I stood up straight from the black and gray napkins that I had been fanning out on the side table. “What do you mean ‘leaving-leaving’? The party starts in less than an hour.”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m leaving. I’m gonna let you do your thing with your work friends.”

He came over to kiss me good-bye, but I put a hand on his chest. “You’re invited, too. I thought you understood that.”

He smiled, his dark brown eyes twinkling like I was joking. “You want me to hang out with you and your co-workers while you all pick brackets? I’m going to be doing the same thing tomorrow at my own job.”

I felt a little silly for pressing the point when he put it that way. But … “I was looking forward to you meeting Tammy and Risa. They’re my girlfriends and we’ve been going out for three months now. You’re supposed to meet my girlfriends by the three-month mark, right?”

With a small pang, I thought about how I, myself, hadn’t met Thursday’s Caleb yet—but that was only because Thursday was being stubborn and still wasn’t talking to me.

Marcus shook his head, bemused, like my wanting him to stick around long enough to meet Tammy and Risa was too crazy to even contemplate. “Look, I’m tired. I’ll catch your friends some other time.”

The part of me that didn’t want to get frozen out by him again told me to let it go, but unfortunately that other part of me—the part that had gotten me into Smith College and was now in position to eventually become my firm’s first black female partner—wouldn’t let me.

“Can you at least stick around long enough to meet them? I told them you’d be here. They’re even coming a little early to help me finish setting up and meet you.”

“Why did you tell them to come early to meet me?” Marcus asked, his smile disappearing. “I never agreed to that.”

“I didn’t think meeting my girlfriends was something you had to agree to. You’re here almost every night now anyway, and they’re coming over. What’s the problem?”

Marcus scratched his arm underneath his lightweight sweater, as if this line of conversation was giving him an allergic reaction. “Like I said, I’m tired. And I don’t have time for this. I’ll see you later.”

He started to leave, but I grabbed his arm. “You don’t have time for this?” I said. “Strange, you always seem to have time for me when you want to have sex.”