Charmed Thirds

  Some people I know think she tries too hard. I mean, the costumes. The singing. The name. (Which is on her birth certificate. Her parents really liked the song “Come On Eileen” by Dexy's Midnight Runners.) The drama of her life can be a bit much. But she's so positive, so fun that it requires more energy to resist her charms than it does to just give in to them. Unlike Jane, who made me feel guilty when I didn't go along, there's no pressure from Dexy. She reminds me a lot of Hope, only without the talent or the personal tragedies that give Hope more depth.

  Dexy's taking an Art History class because she couldn't imagine spending the summer with her family in Pennsylvania. I don't know much about her family, only that her parents are still together and that she has a brother who is a junior in high school. She calls them all “hopelessly unoriginal,” although, in her parents' defense, they must have once possessed a sense of whimsy if they named their daughter after a one-hit wonder about trying to get laid.

  “Really, J,” Dexy said today. “Put the past behind you.”

  “I know,” I said, still gripping the postcard.

  “Don't stop thinking about tomorrow . . . Yesterday's gone! Yesterday's gone!”

  “Please! Not Fleetwood Mac! If I promise to stop obsessing, do you promise to stop singing and come to the hall meeting with me?”

  She took a drag on her candy cigarette. “Dah-ling!”

  Thus compromised, we went. And that's when I discovered that it wasn't going to be so easy to put the past behind me. Because standing in the middle of the lounge was none other than William the Kissing Republican introducing himself as our RA for the summer. Ack.

  “Well, if it isn't Darling, Jessica,” he said, tapping a finger on his alphabetized list. He's mastered the presidential cocky squint/smirk combo, and he didn't hesitate to toss one my way.

  “We should have gone to Tom's,” Dexy whispered.

  So we sat through the meeting as Mini Dub dictated the hall rules and regulations for the summer term in that cocky, cowpunk twang of his. This authority role is one he relishes, one that brings out his most irritating quality, which is his inability to acknowledge any alternative points of view. And that's when I decided that posthookup shame was not to blame for my avoidance of William. No. I just can't stand looking at his smug mug. As the F-Unit mastermind of the Breakup Pool, William is just pleased as can be with his role in my nonbreakup breakup with Marcus. I knew I'd have to try to wipe that smirk off his face if there was any hope of me surviving on his floor for the next three months. So after the meeting was over, I approached him to broker some sort of truce.

  “So . . . ,” he said, oozing smarm. “How can I help you Darling, Jessica?”

  “You can stop calling me that,” I snapped. “Can we talk?”

  “Have you made an appointment?”

  I glared.

  “Okay, let's talk,” he said, unlocking, then opening the door to his room. I followed, then shut the door behind me.

  “Isn't there some kind of rule against RAs hooking up with their advisees?”

  “You're reaching, J,” he said. “I wasn't your RA when it happened.”

  “Well, uh, okay,” I said, defeated. “But isn't there a retroactive rule?”

  “No.”

  And then there was an awkward pause. A pause in which I had time to observe various Columbia College Conservative Club flyers (Go up 116th and Broadway . . . and turn right), a “Don't Mess with Texas” poster, and a framed 8 × 10 of his parents shaking hands with Bush 43 and the First Lady . . .

  “Did you say something?” he asked.

  “No, I just gagged.”

  “What happened between us was no big deal,” he said. “Unless it was a big deal for you.” Then he broke out one of his twisted smiles.

  “Wipe that look off your face!”

  “What look?”

  “That . . . presidential look!”

  “Four. More. Years,” he replied, just to piss me off.

  “Oh yes,” I said. “Four more years of war, unemployment, environmental destruction, soaring deficits, attacks on civil liberties . . .”

  “You've been brainwashed by the liberal media.”

  “ARRRRRGH! I didn't come here to debate politics with you!”

  “That's the problem with you Democrats. You refuse to reach across the aisle in the spirit of bipartisan cooperation.”

  My head was about to launch off my neck and blast into outer space. 10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . I counted down slowly. 7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . . I'd miss my head, you know, when it was orbiting the earth as a tiny, lip-glossed satellite. 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . .

  Fortunately, William got back to business. “J, everything's cool with me if it's cool with you,” he said. “You'll be treated no differently than any of my other advisees. Is that what you want to hear?”

  “Well, yes,” I said, relaxing.

  “This is my job, J,” he said. “I take my responsibilities very seriously.”

  “Okay.”

  “Besides,” he said. “It's not like we slept together.”

  “Right!” I said, making my way to the door.

  “And we were both under the influence.”

  “Exactly!”

  “We weren't thinking properly,” he said.

  “Not at all!”

  “Do you really think I would've hit on you if I'd been sober?” he asked, shutting the door in my face.

  1 . . .

  BLASTOFF!

  the seventh

  Being romantically unfettered is such a swell thing. See, if I was still with Marcus, I wouldn't be able to entertain and enjoy guilt-free sexual fantasies about my hot grad-student partner in the Storytelling Project. If I was with Marcus, such an act would feel like a betrayal. But I can daydream without remorse because I am totally single. If only the same could be said for my hot grad-student partner. He's married. With three kids, all five and under. Yikes.

  But I'm not the other woman in my fantasies. I've conveniently made them adultery-free by getting rid of the wife and kids. I don't kill her off, of course, because any dead wife takes on a mythical perfection, and that is especially true of mommies smote down in the prime of youth. Perfection is something that I simply can't live up to, even in my own sexual fantasies.

  No, in the sexual fantasies I've been having about my hot grad-student partner (whose name, Bastian, I will now use if only to stop objectifying him with pornographic anonymity), his wife and kids are disposed of via a recent divorce, one sought by Bastian because his wife has become a mirthless harpy, a sexless shrew, since the babies came along. She gets full custody of the whole brood and moves to a remote village in Antarctica, befitting her chilly nature. And he, whose only relations have been of the one-handed variety, is primed and ready for the fresh-faced coed who isn't all slunky from childbirth . . .

  “So where should we go at it?” asked Bastian.

  “Anywhere you want me,” I murmured, dreamily.

  “Pardon?”

  “Anywhere,” I said.

  “Why don't we start in a familiar place, so we are not nervous our first time?”

  I have to remind myself that this is real, and not part of the daydream. He's talking about the Storytelling Project. Not sex.

  “Yes, nonthreatening environs,” I said, like a moron, bringing me back to reality.

  “Está bien.”

  Oh, did I mention that he's Spanish, as in from Spain, and that he occasionally slips into his native tongue? (Add your own sexual innuendo here. It's just too easy for me. Really.) He's from Madrid but has lived here for more than a decade, long enough to master English, but without flattening his Castilian quirks. Who knew a lispy accent could be so manly? So damn sexy? I hear those “ths” clinging to his tongue and go loco.

  We headed down Amsterdam on foot, past the dusty ninety-nine-cent stores, the sketchy storefront lawyers, the anonymous delis. He was carrying a camcorder and a sandwich board that says, TELL US A STORY. I was carrying the fold-up
beach chairs we will be sitting in, side by side, all summer long.

  I cannot believe I'm getting paid to spend a long, hot season with this man. He is a man, not a boy. Not a guy. And Bastian's not my normal geek-cute type, either. He's too exotic, too experienced, his dark eyes bruised by a chronic weariness I've yet to know. His nose and mouth are so delicate they're almost feminine, yet his visage is rendered rough and untouchable by a five o'clock shadow no matter what time it is. Bastian usually lets his thick, shoulder-length black hair hang loose. But when it gets too sticky, he occasionally ties it back in what I guess would technically be a ponytail, which sounds really nasty when I call it that, but in truth, that's what it is, and on him it's not nasty at all. He wears his jeans tighter than American guys; lower, too, and almost always with gauzy shirts in pale swirly patterns that become translucent when the sun hits them in just the right way. And if the rays persist and the temperatures rise, a private, peppery scent radiates from his deepest skin, and I get dizzy with . . . what? Lust?

  Yes, lust.

  Why not? Hetero, homo, bi, and ambiguous—everyone in the program wants to fuck him. I could feel envious eyes on me when the Storytelling Project supervisors paired up the undergrad fellows with their grad school mentors. Jessica and Bastian. Bastian and Jessica. All summer long. Dios mio.

  “Here?”

  He stopped between 110th and 111th Streets, right in front of the red-and-white-striped awning of the Hungarian Pastry Shop. This is the “teensy little nothing of a pastry shop” where I had my momentous meeting with Paul Parlipiano, the one that convinced me that Columbia was the school for me. I had no idea at the time that it was a Morningside Heights institution, that dozens of poor students linger inside for hours, making the most of the only free refills on the Upper West Side, and as such, it would have been freakier if I hadn't bumped into Paul at the shop. If he weren't toiling at Kerry's campaign HQ (Paul, via e-mail, told me that he quickly shifted allegiances after Dean's “I Have a Scream!” debacle), I'm certain I would have seen him there today.

  I didn't even realize that I was babbling about all this to Bastian until he held up a finger and said, calmly, “Callate, por favor.”

  Shut up. Please.

  “I am sure you have many interesting stories to tell,” he said, setting up the sign. “But we are being paid to listen to others, yes?”

  I nodded, vowing not to say anything else until spoken to. It didn't take long.

  We were approached by a bent old man wearing a straw fedora, white Bermuda shorts, a sky blue polyester short-sleeved shirt, black dress socks, and white orthopedic sandals. He read each word slowly, deliberately.

  “Tell . . . us . . . a . . . story.” He raised a hefty, overgrown eyebrow. “Why should I tell you hippies anything?”

  I wanted to crack up, but Bastian's stoic composure made me reconsider.

  “Because everyone has a story to tell,” I said.

  “Hooey!” the old man barked.

  “We define ourselves by the stories we tell others,” Bastian added. “It is a revolutionary take on history, in terms of who is making it and who has the power to document it.”

  “Hippie hooey!” he yelled as he hobbled away.

  This time Bastian and I couldn't help but laugh.

  “This is going to be difficult,” Bastian said.

  And it was. New Yorkers are very wary, an instinct that has always been necessary for survival, now more than ever. Hardly anyone believed us when we explained that we were sponsored by the university and that their stories would be archived for educational purposes only. Yet over the next few hours we did attract a few yakkers, most of whom fell into one of the following categories:

  1. People Who Wanted to Pick Fights with Us (“Why the hell should I talk to you? Are you crazy people?”)

  2. People Who Wanted to Prove They Were Smarter Than We Were (“What's so revolutionary about your project when oral historical narratives predate Homer?”)

  3. People Who Wanted to Get on Camera Because They Thought We Were Taping a Reality Show (“Is this network or cable? Can my agent look over this release before I sign it?”)

  4. People Who Wanted to Know How We Got the Book Deal They Were Convinced We Had Even Though We Told Them We Weren't Writing a Book (“Who's your agent? I've got a novel that's Harry Potter meets The Da Vinci Code.”)

  5. People Who Wanted to Mock Us Because They Thought We Were Scientologists (“Hey! Where's my free copy of Dianetics? Can you introduce me to Tom Cruise?”)

  6. People Who Wanted to Have Sex with One or Both of Us (“I'll tell you a story you'll never forget. I'll tell it all night long, know what I'm saying?”)

  And throughout our shift, Bastian maintained a purely professional demeanor. I, on the other hand, barely heard a thing because I was too busy imagining what my hot, married grad-student partner would look like naked.

  If I ever do become a shrink, I'll have to open a very specialized practice, one that only caters to the emotional needs of women and extremely homely men.

  the sixteenth

  Dexy is as tireless as she is exhausting. Every morning she asks the same question, and today was no different.

  “Where are you and your Spanish boyfriend headed today?”

  “Dexy, I'm supposed to talk to strangers, not my best friend.”

  “Come on! I've got a ton of stories! I want to be immortalized in Columbia's archives!”

  “Isn't it enough to be immortalized on television?” I asked, intentionally changing the subject.

  “Yeah, I guess,” she said, adjusting a long platinum blond wig. “Today I'm getting set up with a mechanic who, according to the producers, loves ‘hot rods and cold Bud.'”

  “Sounds like a winner,” I replied.

  “It'll make good TV,” she said.

  Dexy scores extra cash by appearing on any one of a number of cheesy-ass dating shows that are taped around the city. These are the late-night cable staples that make The Bachelor look like high art: Blind Date, Elimidate, Extreme Dating, etc., etc., etc. She's become such a fixture on these shows that she's relied on her talent for clever costuming so the producers won't catch on to her repeat casting. She's not looking for love, just easy money.

  “If you tell me where you are today, I can swing by and introduce you to him . . .”

  “Out!” I shout, literally pushing her through the door.

  I can do my best to prevent Dexy from stalking me for camera time. But I can't stop random run-ins with the most unfortunate acquaintances. Since the first day Bastian and I have gone out of our way to encamp far from campus—from the Lower East Side to Washington Heights—to avoid seeing the same faces. Unfortunately, the steps of the Brooklyn Public Library weren't far enough.

  “Well, well,” Mini Dub said this afternoon, as he approached our sign. “If it isn't Darling, Jessica.”

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “You two are acquainted?” Bastian asked.

  Neither William nor I acknowledged the question.

  “I should have known that you would be participating in this waste of money,” William said. “Oh, I mean this important interdisciplinary yadda yadda yadda.” He opened and shut his hands like two squawking mouths. William was one of many engineering students who thought the money spent on the Storytelling Project should have been put toward what they refer to as the “real sciences.”

  “What are you doing in this zip code?”

  “It just so happens,” William said, “that I'm meeting a friend.”

  “Another date from the facebook?”

  “The facebook,” he said, clutching his hand to his stomach, pretending to laugh. “That's rich.” If you closed your eyes and listened to William, he would sound just like any popped-collar yuppie meanie played by James Spader in the eighties. But then you'd open your eyes and see this person with the powdery-faced, black-cloaked Bauhaus look of the living dead. When combined with a GOP=NRA=USA T-shirt, it is an especially uns
ettling aesthetic, indeed.

  “What is the facebook?” Bastian asked.

  “An online dating service for college students,” I answered.

  “Networking service,” William corrected. “It provides users with connections of both the platonic and romantic varieties.”

  “I think it is sad that even flirting is now done by computer,” Bastian said. “So much of courtship is the unspoken.”

  “So true,” I said, with a serious nod.

  William flicked his tongue stud at me. “That must be why your profile is missing from the site.”

  He was right, my profile was missing. The reason I was hesitant to join the facebook (or CNet or myspace or any similar site for that matter) is because I didn't want to be poked all day long by people asking me to be their “friend.” I didn't want any friends in quotation marks. And I certainly didn't want to get all huffy and hurt when that same “friend” snubbed me a week later by terminating our “friendship.” It seemed to me that too many people joined these sites to collect “friends” and improve their social capital in a way that didn't require them to leave their dorm rooms, like Dexy, who had “friends” that she'd never even met listed on the facebook. (Then again, she has been equally adept at turning electronic pokes into, uh, literal ones.) And yet, despite my skepticism, I was open-minded about the possibility of signing up.

  That is, until I recently checked out Hope Weaver's profile.

  Hope Weaver was a flame-haired, alabaster stunner wearing a brilliant smile and an off-the-shoulder sweatshirt dipping dangerously down to her elbow. Hope Weaver belonged to more than a dozen nonsensical-sounding groups including Super Totally Awesome Chicks & Dudes, Mary-Kate Is Better Than Ashley, Gnomes Are Gneat, and I Hate the Word Panties. Her wall was filled with cryptic messages from names I'd never heard her mention. And no wonder—Hope Weaver had 491 “friends,” through whom she was connected to 4,236 other college students across the country. Looking at the evidence of her life without me at RISD, and now in France, I felt like I wasn't Hope Weaver's friend at all. With or without quotation marks.