The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (23 page)

I couldn’t have been more right about The Lead Singer’s Girlfriend. I showed up at her art show with my arm slung around Thursday’s shoulder like she was my girlfriend (thanks to the dreadlocks, passing her off as a girlfriend was pretty easy). Then, when Thursday took a break from haranguing me about the real reason I’d invited her to some random art show in Echo Park in order to go to the bathroom, I struck up a conversation with The Lead Singer’s Girlfriend. I told her I liked her art, even though I’d seen the exact same hipster photo-realism painting concept at three other gallery shows that year. But whatever, she believed me and thanked me before admitting she recognized me from the wall of new artists at Gravestone Records. “You’re Supa Dupa, right?” she said. “I hear your album turned out great.”

“Yeah, I heard that, too,” I said. “But that might just be a rumor.”

She checked me out over her wine glass. “So was that your girlfriend you came in with?”

“Yeah,” I lied. “For now. We’ve been having problems lately.”

She leaned in for the gossip. “Oh, really?”

“Yeah, she’s a great girl and everything, but I’ve been wanting to explore the merits of an open relationship and she’s more on the let’s-rent-a-U-Haul-and-move-in-together tip.”

“Oh, really?” The Lead Singer’s Girlfriend said again.

And I said, “Yeah, I was like, ‘Are we trying to live the lesbian cliché?’”

The Lead Singer’s Girlfriend adjusted her green nerd glasses before saying, “My boyfriend and I are sort of in an open relationship.”

Now it was my turn to say, “Oh, really?”

The lead singer of Ipso! Facto! didn’t have to participate, she told me after a few more glasses of wine and after I’d sent Thursday home to her boyfriend, having served her purpose. But he liked to watch her with other girls. Would I be cool with that?

I pretended to think about it, then went all quiet and sincere. This shit I pulled next was why so many musicians think they can easily cross over into acting: “I’ve got to tell you the truth. I’m intensely attracted to you, and I would do just about anything to make you mine. The question is, will your boyfriend be cool with that?”

Her eyes flickered, and she moved closer to me. Every woman wanted to believe she was capable of sparking instant, intense attraction in a broody stranger. Every woman had a teenage girl inside of her still yearning to be Catherine to somebody’s Heathcliff, Bella to somebody’s Edward, The One to somebody’s me.

We ended up fucking back at my place. Then the next week we fucked again, twice. And the week after that, she started coming over whenever her boyfriend was at band rehearsal. Somehow the lead singer of Ipso! Facto! never got invited over to watch.

Halfway through July, I said, “After your boyfriend leaves on his fall tour, this will be easier to negotiate.”

And she waited a guilty moment before saying, “He wants me to come with him.”

And I said, “So you want me to put my need for you on hold for three whole months?”

And she didn’t say anything. So the next time she texted me late at night, I told her I couldn’t because I had plans with Thursday. And then I swung by her gallery with Thursday in tow and bought a seventeen-hundred-dollar painting, which Sharita would have berated me for cuz that’s a lot of record-advance money to spend on what basically amounted to a long grift. So I didn’t tell Sharita. And when The Lead Singer’s Girlfriend
showed up at my door to ask why I’d bought it, I said, “To remember you by.”

And she said, “So you’re back together with Thursday?” And I said, “I think I might need to start making decisions with my head as opposed to my heart.” And, no, I don’t know how I came up with this shit.

She got a little weepy then. “No, your heart is beautiful”—dramatic, like we were in a same-sex version of one of those nighttime soaps where the timing’s always wrong and the leads keep breaking up until the need for ratings pushes them back together.

We ended up fucking again. Afterwards she cried and said, “I’ve got to go, but I’ll think of something. I promise.”

And three days later I got a jovial call from Gravestone, saying that Ipso! Facto! decided some diversity was in order for their tour, so they were inviting me along. Moreover, they were going to put my album out in September so that I’d have something to sell at the shows.

Somehow I managed to sound nonchalant and excited at the same time when I said, “Cool. Sounds good.” Rock Star 101.

But when I hung up, I was not as joyful as I thought I would be. Not just because I had to bang some random chick to get a spot on a tour that should have been mine in the first place. But also because, as a lesbian, I never thought I’d have to sleep my way to the top. And mostly because I was deeply in love with The One, and I was beginning to wonder if this would be enough to make her finally realize how much she should love me back.

It was her legs that I imagined draped over my back when I went down on The Lead Singer’s Girlfriend. And even though The One and me weren’t together anymore, it felt like I was betraying her by pretending to be as obsessed with someone else as I was with her.

But then I snapped out of that sentimental bullshit and decided to call up my girls for a celebration. I started to call Sharita, but then remembered she was at her sister’s wedding, and she probably wouldn’t have come out anyway. Against all odds, she’d managed to become even more boring
lately. Now that she was “dating her Career,” I only saw her on
Dr. Who
nights.

So, whatever. I called Thursday, who said she’d love to come out almost before I was even done inviting her. “Caleb’s working nonstop on another big project, so I’m all free. And invite Tammy, too,” she said. “We’ll do a ladies’ night.”

On one hand I was glad Thursday hadn’t gone to the complete dark side and disappeared from our friendship, Sharita style. But on the other hand, every time I called her up, she was available on short notice because Caleb was working. Something wiggled on the right side of my brain, but oh well, I kept my mouth shut.

When I called Tammy, I got her voicemail. “Hey,” I said, “I know you’ve got your fitness video shoot coming up, but Thursday and me are going out tonight, and we need you to come along, you hot bitch.” Then remembering how much I’d missed her lately, I said, “Seriously, we haven’t seen you in a while. Give me a call back when you get this.”

SHARITA

T
here were probably worse places I could be, I thought. For example, one of the founding partners at my firm had served in Vietnam, and that didn’t sound like much fun. Also, I had read
A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini with my church book group a few years ago, and had thought that living in a Taliban-led Afghanistan as the first wife of a tyrannical and abusive husband would be an awful situation to be in. And there was always Hell. Yes, surely Hell must be worse than serving as the maid of honor at my sister’s wedding.

First there had been coordinating all of my sister’s many artistic friends for the bachelorette party. None of them seemed to have or be willing to spend any money on the bachelorette-night activities, so I had to front the whole thing myself, including a limo. And it would have been different if the four other bridesmaids hadn’t been flaky actresses. But they were, and none of them seemed capable of arranging a restaurant for the pre-clubbing dinner or even figuring out which nightclub Nicole would prefer to go to.

So I had been forced to arrange everything pretty much by myself from over three thousand miles away. And then I’d had to work like a fiend to clear off my desk and front-load my August so that I’d be available to Nicole for a whole week before the wedding.

I did all of this, but here was how Nicole greeted me when I arrived at her apartment after having taken a cab from JFK: “Hey sis, great timing. I’ve got my last fitting, and we can see how the dress looks with Grandma’s pearls.”

Our grandmother had been the longtime maid for a Jewish surgeon and his wife who had lived in one of the redbrick mansions in University City. In fact, the only reason I had applied to Smith College in the first place was because my grandmother was so fond of the doctor’s wife, who had
graduated from Smith in the late fifties. The friendship between my grandmother and the doctor’s wife grew, despite them coming from two such different backgrounds. And they remained close, even after I went off to college and my grandmother had to retire because her back couldn’t handle heavy housework anymore. But even my grandmother hadn’t expected the doctor’s wife to will her Smith Pearls to her when she died. “Smith Pearls” were the traditional gift from Smithies’ parents to their daughters when they graduated. But the doctor’s wife only had sons, so she’d left them to my grandmother.

Of course, my grandmother didn’t have much use for such an expensive gift. I had advised her to sell them on eBay in order to make her forced retirement a little more comfortable—even back then I’d had my head on straight when it came to finances. But much to my surprise, my grandmother saved the pearls and mailed them to me right before I graduated from Smith.

“I was going to wear my gold cross with my dress, not the pearls,” I said. I didn’t even want to talk about the gaudy fuchsia bridesmaid dresses that Nicole had picked out. According to my sister, they were supposed to make the wedding “pop”—whatever that meant—but as somebody who preferred conservative colors like gray, black, blue, and maybe a pastel if I was feeling adventurous, the thought of my image being forever preserved in the dress she had chosen gave my the shivers.

Nicole laughed. “Remember, we discussed this a couple of weeks ago?”

I looked at her blankly. “Discussed what?”

“I said I was having trouble finding the perfect jewelry to go with my dress. And you said that was too bad. And I said you should bring Big Momma’s pearls because then I could wear them as my something old. And you said okay. Then you had to get off the phone because you said you had work to do.”

I could vaguely remember that conversation. But only because that was how all of our conversations went. Nicole would call me in a panic about some aspect of the wedding and I would say that was too bad, while
continuing to do my work. And then Nicole would present some crazy solution, and I would say, “Okay,” because I had to get back to work and it was easier to just pretend to agree with her than argue. I had pretty much the same policy for my phone conversations with Risa.

“Oh, I forgot,” I said. “Sorry.”

“How could you forget? They’re Big Momma’s pearls.”

“Sorry,” I said again. “You’re going to have to go with something else.”

Then Nicole started crying. Just out and out bawling.

I was so stunned by this reaction that I didn’t know what to do, which is why the seamstress ended up comforting Nicole and quizzing me about the pearls in her thick Russian accent. “You have no boyfriend who can send pearls?”

“No,” I answered.

“Roommate? This Los Angeles very expensive, yes?”

“Yes, but I was conservative with my money and was able to buy a house on my own after the market crashed for a really good price.”

Normally this was a point of pride for me, but the seamstress was looking at me like I had purposely decided not to make getting the pearl necklace easy.

“You must send friend to your apartment then. She can send necklace.”

“My
house
, and I don’t think so …”

“What? You have no friend either?”

“No, I’ve got friends,” I assured her. “I just haven’t given any of them a key.”

That wasn’t exactly true. Thursday had a key, but we weren’t talking.

But like a heat-seeking missile, Nicole zoomed in on my hesitant tone. “Not even Thursday?”

“We’re not talking,” I said.

“I need Grandma’s pearls. They’re all I have left of her.”

Unlike me, after Nicole had gone away to college she hadn’t even bothered to visit home, except for the occasional Christmas. Yes, our childhood
home, a one-bedroom house in Kinloch, was dismal and cramped, but if Nicole really cared about my grandmother, she would have made an effort to visit her more often before she died two years ago.

So I lied and said, “Risa told me that Thursday’s away on vacation.”

“Does she have boyfriend?” the seamstress asked, rubbing Nicole’s back. “Maybe he can—”

“No, he can’t. He’s on vacation, too,” I said, deciding to take back control of this spiraling conversation. “Nicole, we’re not going to be able to get to Big Momma’s pearls. I’ll buy you some new wedding jewelry if you want.”

“It’s not the same,” Nicole wailed. “I don’t see why you can’t send Risa with a locksmith or something.”

“I’m not going to have a stranger break into my home just so you can have something old. We can get something from somewhere else.”

“No, it’s more than that. Wearing them down the aisle would be like having Big Momma here with us for the wedding, and I know she would have wanted to be here for this …”

And even more tears came streaming out of Nicole, right on cue.

“We’ll find you something else, I promise.”

“No, I don’t want anything else. Call Risa. Tell her to get a locksmith. This is very important to me.”