‘Mr Mertz’s shop class, 1991, right?’
He nodded.
‘Ohmigod, why didn’t you say anything before now?’ I asked, pulling out another cigarette. I offered him one and he took it, lighting first mine and then his own.
‘I don’t know, I probably should’ve. I just figured you had no idea. I felt kind of weird not saying something at first and then too much time went by. But I remember, when everyone else was sanding and chiseling, you’d always be writing – letters, it looked like – line after line, page after page, and I always wondered how anyone could have so much to say. Who was the lucky guy?’
I’d mostly forgotten about the letter-writing; I hadn’t written one of those in years. It was easier now that I no longer heard my parents asking me what I had done for the world that day. They’d taught me how to write letters when I was old enough to put sentences on paper, and I’d instantly loved it. I wrote to congressmen, senators, CEOs, lobbyists, environmental organizations, and, occasionally, the president. Each night at dinner we’d discuss some great injustice and the following day I’d write my letter, letting someone know my outrage about capital punishment or deforestation or foreign-oil dependence or contraception for teenagers or prohibitive immigration laws. They were always chock-full of self-importance and read like the obnoxious, self-righteous missives they were, but my parents were so lavish with their approval that I couldn’t stop. They tapered off at the end of high school, but it wasn’t until some guy I was hooking up with freshman year in college picked one off my desk and made some offhand comment about how adorable it was that I was trying to save the world that I stopped entirely. It wasn’t what he said so much as the timing. My parents’ lifestyle was already less appealing. I had traded the alternative, peace-on-earth persona for a significantly more mainstream college social life pretty damn fast. Sometimes I wondered if I’d been just a little too thorough in my rejection. There was probably a happy medium somewhere, but banking and – let’s be honest – party-planning hadn’t exactly put me back on the track to selflessness.
I realized that Sammy was watching me intently as I recalled that time and said, ‘Guy? Oh, they weren’t to a boyfriend or anything like that. Guys didn’t exactly dig the dreadlock/espadrille thing I had going back then. They were just, you know, letters to … I don’t know, nothing special.’
‘Well, I always thought you were pretty cute.’
I immediately felt myself blush.
For some reason, this made me happier than if he’d announced his undying love for me, but there was no time to savor it because my cell phone bleated with a 911 text message: Doll, where R U? Need Cristal ASAP.
Why Philip couldn’t just ask one of the three dozen male model/waiters wandering around for that very reason was beyond me, but I knew I should check on things.
‘Listen, I’ve got to get back in there and make sure everyone is drunk enough to have fun but not so trashed that they’ll do anything stupid, but I was wondering: do you need a ride home tomorrow?’
‘Home? To Poughkeepsie? You’re going?’
‘I couldn’t possibly miss the annual Harvest Festival.’
‘Harvest Festival?’ He once again paused to open the velvet rope, this time to let in a couple who weren’t coordinated enough to walk but still seemed in possession of enough faculties to grope each other.
‘Don’t ask. It’s something my parents do every year on Thanksgiving Day, and my presence is required. I’m pretty positive my uncle will bail – he always comes up with some pressing obligation at the last minute – but he’ll lend me his car. I’d be happy to give you a ride,’ I said, fervently praying that he’d accept and not want to invite his aging significant other.
‘Uh, sure. I mean, if you don’t mind, that’d be great. I was just planning on taking the bus up Thursday morning.’
‘Well, I was planning to go tomorrow after work, so if you could go Wednesday instead of Thursday, I’d love to have the company. I always want to drive the car off the road right around Peekskill.’ I cheered myself silently for finally managing to maintain a normal exchange with this boy.
‘Yeah, I’d really like that,’ he said, looking pleased. Of course, I’d be pleased, too, if I didn’t have to endure a four-hour Greyhound ride for a trip that normally takes two hours. I assured myself it was my companionship that convinced him and not just the chance to escape the gross stickiness and claustrophobia of the bus.
‘Great. Why don’t you meet me at my uncle’s apartment at, let’s see, maybe around six? He’s on Central Park West, northwest corner of Sixty-eighth Street. Is that okay?’
He had just enough time to say that he was really looking forward to it before Philip materialized outside and literally dragged me back inside by the arm. I didn’t much mind, though, considering what I had to look forward to the next day. I floated happily around the room, accepting compliments from everyone on staff and listening as guests talked about what a ‘great scene’ we had going on that night. When the party began to wind down around two, I pleaded yet another headache to Philip, who seemed happy to remain behind with Leo and a bottle of Cristal. At home, I curled up in bed with a Slim Jim and a brand-new Harlequin. It was the most perfect evening I could remember.
19
I could barely contain my excitement as I waited for Sammy in the lobby of Will’s building. That day had dragged on interminably. Never mind that Kelly had bought the entire office breakfast in celebration of the previous night’s success, or that she’d brought me into her jungle lair to tell me that she was so impressed with the evening that she was officially making me second-in-command of the Playboy party, reporting directly to her. Elisa’s face tightened when the announcement was made; she’d been there a year and a half longer than me and clearly had expected to oversee the company’s biggest event. But after a few remarks about how she was happy to ‘give someone else a chance’ at overseeing what would surely be total chaos, she plastered on a happy face and proposed celebratory drinks. Newspapers and websites that weren’t even at the party had covered it, breathlessly writing how the ‘slew of celebs and socialites’ had come out to fete the ‘hottest new urban accessory.’ It almost didn’t register when a box arrived directly from Mr Kroner’s office with enough BlackBerries to stock an entire wireless store, the note sounding so effusive I was almost embarrassed. I barely even noticed the few lines in New York Scoop that announced I’d been spotted sobbing in a corner as Philip made out with a Nigerian-born soap star, and I didn’t get the least bit upset when Elisa confided to me that she’d ‘accidentally’ gotten a ride with Philip on his Vespa because ‘she was so drunk and she and Davide had gotten in a fight but that nothing – nothing, I swear on your life and mine – had happened.’ No, none of that had even really registered because none of it made the minutes any shorter or got me in the same car with Sammy any faster. When he walked through my uncle’s lobby’s door wearing a pair of broken-in jeans and a very snuggly sweater, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, I didn’t know if I’d be able to keep my eyes on the road long enough to get us out of the city.
‘Hey,’ he said when he saw me sitting on the bench, pretending to examine the paper. ‘I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said, standing on tiptoe to kiss him hello on the cheek. ‘You’re the one doing me the favor. Hold on a sec, I’ll have my uncle come down with the keys.’
Will had agreed to lend me his Lexus for the weekend only after I’d sworn to uphold the story he’d fabricated to explain his absence. Even though I was just giving Sammy a lift to his parents’ house, he insisted that Sammy be fully apprised of the cover story as well.
‘You promise you’ve got the details down, darling?’ he’d asked nervously upon relinquishing the keys as the three of us stood in his underground garage.
‘Will, stop stressing. I promise I won’t give you up. I shall endure the suffering alone. As always.’
?
??Humor me. Let’s go through it one more time. When she asks you where I am, what do you say?’
‘I simply explain that you and Simon couldn’t bear the idea of spending an entire weekend in a solar-powered house where there’s never enough hot water and the all-natural, undyed sheets are itchy and nothing’s really ever clean since chemicals aren’t used, so instead you decided you’d rather admire the harvest from your comped beachfront suite in Key West. Oh, yeah, and that you find it quite dull when the dinner-table conversation consists solely of ecopolitics. Is that about right?’ I smiled sweetly.
He looked helplessly at Sammy and coughed a few times.
‘Don’t worry, sir, Bette’s got the story down,’ he assured him, climbing into the passenger seat. ‘Simon had a last-minute request to fill in for one of the missing musicians, and you felt it wouldn’t be right to leave him alone on the holiday, as much as you’d like to see everyone. You would’ve called them yourself, but you’re on a tight deadline for your bastard of an editor and will call next week. I’ll get her up to speed on the ride.’
Will released the keys into my open palm. ‘Sammy, thank you. Bette, I want you to pay close attention to the empowerment lectures – women can do anything, you know – and try not to feel too bad for little old me, kicking back poolside with a daiquiri and a paperback.’
I wanted to hate him, but he looked so happy with his alibi and his sneaky plans that I didn’t do anything but hug him and turn on the car. ‘You owe me for this. As usual.’ I tucked Millington’s Sherpa Bag in the backseat and tossed a Greenie inside so she wouldn’t cry or whine while we drove.
‘You know it, darling. I’ll bring you back one of those kitschy fringed T-shirts, or maybe a coconut candle or two. Deal? Drive safely. Or don’t. Just don’t call me if anything happens, at least not for the next three days. Have fun!’ he called, blowing kisses in the rearview mirror.
‘He’s great,’ Sammy said as we worked our way slowly through traffic up the West Side Highway. ‘Like a little kid who got out of school by pretending to be sick.’
I stuck Monster Ballads (ordered from an 800 number in an insomniac three A.M. fit) in the six-disc changer and skipped through until I found Mr Big’s ‘To Be with You.’ ‘He is really great, isn’t he? I honestly don’t know what I would do without him. He’s the only reason I’m normal today.’
‘What about your parents?’
‘They’re sixties throwbacks,’ I said, ‘and they take it very seriously. My mother cried the first time I shaved my legs, when I was thirteen, because she was afraid I’d subjugated myself to the male-dictated cultural expectations of female beauty.’
He laughed and started to settle in, stretching out his legs and putting his hands behind his head. ‘Please tell me she didn’t talk you out of that particular practice?’
‘No, she didn’t, at least not now … although it took me until college to shave again. They once insisted that I alone was responsible for disrupting an entire ecosystem because I bought a snakeskin keychain. Oh, and then there was the time I wasn’t allowed to go to the biggest slumber party in fourth grade because they noticed that the parents of the girl hosting it refused to recycle their newspapers. They thought it was a potentially evil environment for a child to spend twelve hours in.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘I’m not. It’s not to say they’re not really great people, because they are. They’re just really committed. Sometimes I wish I were more like them.’
‘I sure didn’t know you well in high school, but I remember you being more like that than, uh, than this New York thing.’
I didn’t quite know what to say.
‘No, I didn’t mean it like that,’ he hastened to say. ‘You know, you just always gave the impression of being really involved in so many causes. I remember you wrote that editorial on a woman’s right to choose in the school paper. I overheard some of the teachers talking about it in study hall one day – they couldn’t believe you were only a freshman. I read it after I listened to them and I couldn’t believe it, either.’
I felt a little frisson at the thought that he’d read and remembered my article, as though we all of a sudden had an intimate connection.
‘Yeah, well, it’s hard to maintain. Especially when it’s something chosen for you, and not something you come upon yourself.’
‘Fair enough.’ I could see him nod out of the corner of my eye. ‘They sound interesting.’
‘Oh, you have no idea. Luckily, even though they were hippies, they were still Jewish hippies, and didn’t much love the deprivation lifestyle. As my father still constantly points out, “One is no more convincing coming from a place of poverty than coming from a place of comfort – it’s the argument that matters, not the material trappings or lack thereof.”’
He stopped sipping his coffee and turned to look at me. I could feel his eyes on my face and knew that he was listening intently.
‘Oh, yes, it’s true. I was born on a commune in New Mexico, a place I wasn’t totally convinced was an actual state until I saw the 2000 electoral map on CNN. My mother loves recounting how she gave birth to me in their “marriage bed” before all the commune’s children, who’d been brought in to watch the miracle of life unfold before their little eyes. No doctors, no drugs, no sterile sheets – just a husband with a degree in plant science, a touchy-feely midwife who coached with yogic breathing, the commune’s chanting guru, and two dozen children under the age of twelve who most likely went on to remain virgins well into their thirties after witnessing that particular miracle.’
I don’t know what it was that kept me talking. It had been years and years since I’d told that story to anyone – probably not since Penelope and I met during orientation week at Emory, smoked pot in the bushes by the tennis courts, and she admitted that her father knew his office staff better than his family and that she’d thought her black nanny was her mother until she was five years old. I figured there was no better way to cheer her up than to show her just how normal her own parents were. We’d laughed for hours that night, stretched out in the grass, stoned and happy. Though my boyfriends had met my parents, I’d never talked to anyone about them like this. Sammy made me want to tell him everything.
‘That’s absolutely incredible. How long were you there? Do you remember it?’
‘They only lived there until I was two or so, and then they moved to Poughkeepsie because they got jobs at Vassar. But that’s where my name came from. First they wanted to name me Soledad, in honor of the California prison that housed Berkeley protestors, but then their shaman or someone proposed Bettina, after Bettina Aptheker, the only female member of the Steering Committee of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement. I refused to answer to anything but Bette when I was twelve and “The Wind Beneath My Wings” was a hit and Bette Midler was actually cool. By the time I realized I’d renamed myself after the redheaded singer of a sappy Top 40 inspirational, it was too late. Everyone calls me that now, except my parents, of course.’
‘Wow. They sound so interesting. I’d love to meet them sometime.’
I didn’t know quite how to respond to that – it might be a bit unnerving for him if I were to announce that they were his future in-laws – so I asked him about his parents. Nothing came to mind when I tried to recall Sammy from high school, and it occurred to me that I had no clue about his home life. ‘What about you? Anything juicy about your family, or are they actually normal?’
‘Well, calling them normal seems like a bit of a stretch. My mom died when I was six. Breast cancer.’
I opened my mouth to apologize, to murmur something ineffectual and clichéd, but he cut me off.
‘Sounds really shitty, but I was honestly too young to really remember. It was weird not having a mom growing up, but it was definitely harder for my older sister, and besides, my dad was pretty great.’
‘Is he okay now? You mentioned something about him not being well.’
‘No, he’s okay. Just l
onely, I think. He was dating a woman for years, and I’m not totally clear on what happened, but she moved to South Carolina a couple months ago and my dad’s not taking it well. I just thought a visit would be good for him.’
‘And your sister? What’s her story?’
‘She’s thirty-three. Married with five kids. Five kids – four boys and a girl – do you believe it? Started right out of high school. She lives in Fishkill, so she could see my father all the time, but her husband’s kind of a prick and she’s busy now that she’s going back to school for nursing, so …’
‘Are you guys close?’ It was strange to see this all shaping up, a whole world that I never knew existed for him, that I could never have imagined existing when I saw him slapping backs with the various moguls and moguls-in-training at Bungalow 8 every night.
He seemed to think about this for a second as he popped open the can of Coke he pulled from his backpack, offering me a sip before he took one.
‘Close? I don’t know if I’d say that, exactly. I think she resents that I left home to go to college when she already had one kid and another on the way. She makes lots of comments about how I’m Dad’s reason for living and at least one of us has a chance of making him proud – you know, that sort of stuff. But she’s a good girl. Christ, I just got heavy there. Sorry about that.’
Before I could say anything, let him know that it was okay, that I loved hearing him talk about absolutely anything, a Whitesnake track came on and Sammy laughed again. ‘Are you serious with this music? How do you listen to this shit?’
The conversation continued easily after that – just chitchat about music and movies and the ridiculous people we both dealt with all day long. He was careful not to mention Philip, and I returned the favor by steering clear of Isabelle. Otherwise, we talked as though we’d known each other forever. When I realized we were only a half-hour outside of town, I called to let my parents know that I was dropping someone off and would be there shortly.