And whatever Beau wants…
“I’m divorced, Beau,” he says.
Just like that, my burning question is answered.
I’m divorced.
Yippee, I think.
“I’m sorry,” I say, chiding my immature inner self. I mean, what kind of person is exalted to hear about another’s misfortune?
A terrible person, that’s what kind…
I look heavenward for forgiveness, absently noticing cobwebs wafting in the corner where the soffit meets the ceiling.
The kind of terrible person who is fantasizing about committing adultery with said misfortunate person.
There. It’s out there. That’s my fantasy. I am fantasizing about seeing Mike again and having an illicit affair with him. Obviously it can’t happen, and not just because he’s in Florida and I’m in New York.
There are plenty of other reasons.
Like that unsightly ridge of tummy fat beneath my belly button.
Oh, and the fact that I’m happily married and I wouldn’t dream of cheating.
Okay, obviously I’d dream of it.
I just wouldn’t do it.
No, sir.
I picture myself stepping into the Diane Lane role in that movie Unfaithful, a Westchester housewife sneaking around behind Richard Gere’s back with a sensual French lover.
I could never do that.
I’m a Westchester housewife, yes.
But Mike isn’t French.
And my husband isn’t Richard Gere.
Speaking of which, who in their right mind would cheat on Richard Gere?
Still, the fantasy takes hold. I see myself wearing decadent, tummy-bulge-camouflaging lingerie, see Mike having his way with me on a rumpled bed in a SoHo loft lined with bookcases and exposed brick.
“Beau? Are you still there?”
Reality check. The accent in my ear is Southern, not Parisian.
If he knew what I was thinking…
“I’m still here,” I say, wishing Tyler would wake up crying so I’d have an excuse to hang up.
“Listen, I don’t know why I called you,” he says suddenly, candidly. “I don’t even know why I e-mailed you. I just…I guess when I found you, I had to get in touch. And when I got your e-mail back, it wasn’t enough. I had to hear your voice.”
“Well…here I am.” I hate my chirpy, nervous laughter. I hate that I can’t think of anything clever to say. I hate that I feel so giddy and girlie all of a sudden, like a twelve-year-old getting her first phone call from a boy.
There’s an awkward pause.
I study the cobweb overhead. I have to remember to sweep it away before Mike spots it and wants to fire Melina.
“Beau?” Mike asks.
“Yes?” I ask, loving the sound of my name on his lips again after all these years, and thinking that he would never want to fire a poor immigrant cleaning lady over a stray cobweb or two.
“Do you want to hang up?”
“Hang up? No! Do you?” Please don’t want to hang up. Please.
“No…I just don’t know what else to say. I guess I never thought past the hearing-your-voice part.”
I’m not the only one prone to nervous laughter.
“Well, how do I sound?” I ask.
“You sound great. How do I sound?”
“Like you’ve been living in the South for too long. Don’t tell me you eat grits and have a Rebel flag on your car antenna.”
“Hey, that’s all stereotype. No fair.”
“Do you?”
“Yes to the grits, no to the Rebel flag.”
Down the hall, I hear Tyler stirring to consciousness in his crib. I will him back to sleep, not ready to return to motherhood just yet.
As though he’s read my mind, Mike says, “Tell me about your kids, Beau.”
I do. I tell him about earnest, sensitive Mikey; mischievous, full-of-fun Josh; sweet and lovable Tyler. Talking about my children relaxes me. The tension dissipates, on both ends of the line, and Mike seems genuinely interested in my boys.
“So you’re a stay-at-home mom?”
“Yup, that’s me.”
“I’m having trouble picturing that. I really thought you might be a producer by now. Any regrets?”
“Nope. Not really.” Not about leaving work, anyway. Just about…
Leaving him?
No. I love Mike. My Mike. Till-death-do-us-part Mike. I know I made the right choice. Really, I do.
I guess what I regret is ending my other relationship the way that I did. I mean, I basically turned my back and ran away. And suddenly, after all these years, it feels like unfinished business.
“What about you?” I ask, attempting once again to shut out our troubled past—along with Tyler’s increasingly urgent whimpers. “Are you in between jobs?”
“You could say that,” he says, almost sounding coy. “I’m not sure what I want to do next, so I’m taking my time with it.”
“What did you—oh, crap.” Tyler has let out an earsplitting shriek from his crib. “Hang on.”
I drop the phone and run down the hall to the nursery, where my indignant baby lets me know he’s had it with this nap stuff. He’s soaked through his diaper and ravenous with hunger.
Guilt surges through me.
Clutching my crying child in my arms, I return to the phone and say with firm reluctance, “I’ve got to go, Mike.”
“Is that Tyler crying?”
“Yeah, that’s him.” I’m impressed that he remembers his name.
“Okay, well…it was great talking to you, Beau.”
“You, too.”
I hang on, bouncing inconsolable Tyler slightly on my hip, wishing he would quiet down so that I could prolong the conversation. It’s not that I have anything specific to say, just that I’m not quite ready to let go again. Yet.
“Listen, I’ll e-mail you. Okay?”
I grin, relieved. “Yes. That would be great.”
And that’s how it begins. Again.
fourteen
The past
I was fifteen minutes late getting to La Margarita on Bleecker Street.
Not because I got hung up at work, or couldn’t get a cab, or had subway trouble.
No, I was late because I wasn’t sure I could go through with this.
I had made the date with cute Mike from the airport—well, not a date, exactly, so I’ll call it an appointment—impulsively last night.
Twenty-four hours and much soul-searching later, my impulse was to call it off. When I tried to reach him from the studio earlier to offer some lame excuse, the phone just rang and rang. No answering machine, so I couldn’t even leave a message.
What kind of person didn’t have an answering machine? This was 1989, for God’s sake, not the Dark Ages.
I considered standing him up, but Valerie wouldn’t let me. She said the least I could do was show up.
She also pointed out helpfully that it wasn’t necessarily a date. It was just a New Yorker being friendly to a newcomer. That the New Yorker happened to be involved with somebody else and that the newcomer happened to be an incredibly attractive bachelor was moot, according to Valerie.
“You know you’re not going to cheat on Mike,” she told me when I called her from the office to remind her I’d be home late. “There’s nothing wrong with going out and having a little fun with a platonic male friend.”
“He’s not even my friend, Valerie. He’s just some guy I met.”
“Well, he might become your friend. And you can never have too many of those.”
No, you couldn’t. Everybody needed friends, I told myself.
But I couldn’t help thinking about Harry and Sally in that movie I’d just seen. Harry claimed that it was impossible for a man and a woman to be “just friends.” And by the end of the movie, that theory was proven.
Okay, granted, it was just a movie. I mean, I saw Batman last week and I don’t exactly anticipate any leotarded Caped Crusader sightings here i
n Gotham in the near future.
“Besides,” Valerie went on, “you and Mike are having trouble. For all you know, he might dump you and move to San Francisco. It’s good to keep your options open.”
“Valerie! Mike is not going to dump me.”
She was silent. I knew she was wearing that tight-lipped, raised-eyebrowed you never know expression of hers.
So here I was, and there was my possible future platonic friend, sitting at a table by the window munching tortilla chips and salsa.
“Beau!”
He really looked happy to see me. Or maybe it was more relieved.
He stood and clasped both of my hands in his, then pulled out a chair for me. “I was worried you weren’t going to show.”
“Why would you think that?” I asked airily, sinking into the chair, telling myself that my weak knees had nothing to do with those awesome dimples of his, or the fact that we were practically holding hands.
“You’re late,” he said, letting my fingers slip from his grasp all too soon. “And I’m paranoid.”
He was paranoid? He thought I was going to stand him up? Thank God for Valerie, who wouldn’t let me. The last thing I’d want to do was stand up a sweet, gorgeous guy like this.
Not that this was a date.
Because it wasn’t.
It was an appointment.
The thing about the phrase stand up is that it implies a date.
I hoped he didn’t think that was what this was. Maybe I should tell him that it wasn’t.
“I, um, got stuck on the N train,” I lied, because he was still waiting for an explanation. “Why were you so paranoid?”
“Because when I told you to call me if it didn’t work out with your boyfriend—”
“Or if I was casting a sitcom—”
“Or if you were casting a sitcom, right…well, I never expected to hear from you again. And when I did, it happened so fast I think I convinced myself the call must have been my imagination.”
“Oh…well, obviously, it wasn’t, so you can relax now.” I smiled, hoping he couldn’t tell how nervous I was, and hoping he didn’t think this was a date. Maybe I could pretend that I was casting a sitcom.
My mind raced with possibilities as Mike said, looking somewhat sheepish, “You know, I don’t normally react this way to a woman on a first date.”
First date?
So this was a date. Dammit.
You know, this was all Valerie’s fault.
If she hadn’t told me to call him, I wouldn’t have gotten the idea in the first place.
“I guess it’s just that you’re so beautiful,” he went on, sounding crazily sincere. “The second I saw you sitting there in the airport, I wanted to talk to you. And then you said you had a boyfriend, and I figured that was it. I was positive you had gone home and thrown my card into the garbage.”
“Why would I do that?” I asked, kind of shrilly.
“Because you have a boyfriend.”
“Oh. Right.”
Him again.
You know, this whole thing was more Mike’s fault than Valerie’s. Mike, and that stupid Silicon Valley job offer of his. He had called me at least three times since he first told me about it, and every time, he claimed to be wavering on whether to accept it. He didn’t ask for my advice; he almost acted as though any input I gave him was strictly incidental.
Last night was the last straw, when he accused me of sounding like I didn’t want him to take this great opportunity. When I admitted that he was right, I didn’t want him to take it because I wanted him to come to NewYork, he blew up at me. He told me I was being clingy and unreasonable.
I hung up on him.
Then, without thinking things through, I spontaneously dug out the business card and dialed the number on it. I told myself that the would-be sitcom star probably wouldn’t even remember me, but he did.
Meeting tonight for a drink was his idea.
Meeting here, at La Margarita, was mine. They had two-for-one happy-hour drinks, a bonus since I was broke and I figured we’d be going dutch, since it couldn’t possibly be a date, since I had a boyfriend.
An added bonus: I had never been to La Margarita with said boyfriend. He had an inexplicable aversion to Mexican food. You’d think he’d have gotten over that, living in the Southwest, but he hadn’t.
This Mike, however, claimed to love Mexican. The waiter appeared before the boyfriend angle of the conversation could develop any further. We both ordered frozen margaritas and chicken chimichangas with refried beans.
“Gotta love a girl who knows how to eat,” Mike said with an approving laugh. “Can I tell you how glad I am that you didn’t order some fat-free salad?”
“Me? I never order fat-free if I can help it.”
“Good for you.”
I got the feeling there was a fat-free woman in his past, but I didn’t know how to ask without prying.
Our drinks were on the table in record time, another reason I adored the place.
“Cheers,” Mike said, raising his glass.
“What are we drinking to?”
“New York. The greatest city in the world.”
Wow. Was that perfect or was that perfect? I grinned. “To New York.”
We sipped our drinks and smiled at each other.
There went those dimples again. Sigh.
Not wanting to blatantly check him out, I casually noted his black T-shirt tucked into a great pair of orange baggy pants.
He was hot, definitely, and an awesome dresser.
“So, anyway, why did you call me?” he asked, in a strictly no-bullshit manner that caught me off guard.
“I don’t know, exactly,” I answered honestly. I added, “I’m not casting a sitcom for Janelle, if that’s what you were thinking.”
“Damn.” He snapped his fingers. “Then I guess giving you my head shot and résumé is out of the question?”
“You brought your head shot and résumé?”
He burst out laughing. “I was kidding. Do you think I’m that much of a loser?”
“Hey, you never know.” Actually, I didn’t think he was a loser at all. I merely wished he was a loser, so it would be easier for me to call it a night before the sun actually set.
“So if you’re not going to give me my shot at stardom…why did you call?” he asked again, obviously unwilling to let me off the hook.
“I don’t know…I guess because you were new in town, and I figured you might be kind of…lonely.”
“That was nice of you.” Dimple time.
I have to say, he certainly didn’t seem lonely. He seemed like the kind of guy who radiated confidence and charm…the kind of guy anyone would want to be around.
Okay, so maybe that was why I called him. Maybe I simply couldn’t resist his charisma.
Or maybe I was just royally pissed off at my boyfriend and this was my retaliation.
Who knew?
After a pair of margaritas, who cared?
Mike was easy to talk to, and I was having fun. That was all that mattered.
He told me about his Midwestern childhood and his college years at a Big Ten school where he played football and studied acting.
“That’s unusual, isn’t it?” I asked, trying not to slurp the last of my second drink. “Being in theater and sports?”
I was thinking of Gordy, who had a bachelor of fine arts and an aversion to any nonsexual activity that involved sweating and white sneakers.
“Yeah, well, I was a communications major and I had to take a drama class to fill a requirement freshman year. Next thing I knew, I had a knee injury and a minor in theater arts.”
“What happened? You fell off the stage?”
He smirked. “No, the injury was from football. I was sidelined my last year of school, which gave me time to focus on the acting stuff.”
“So you came to New York to be a star?”
“Doesn’t everyone?” He grinned. “Actually, I came to New York because I had
to get the hell out of the Midwest.”
“Why?”
“Have you ever been to the Midwest?” he asked dryly.
I shook my head. “Is it that horrible?”
“Worse.”
I laugh at his expression. “So it was just too…what? Dull? Conservative? Quiet?”
“All of that, and less. Plus…” He hesitated.
“Plus, what?”
“Plus, I went through a bad breakup. I was engaged to my college girlfriend, and…it just didn’t work out.”
There it was: the info I’d been tempted to sniff out earlier. I wondered if she was the one who ordered fat-free salads.
“You dumped her?” I asked, figuring no woman in her right mind would dump a guy like him.
“Other way around.”
“Really.” I tried not to act stunned. Of course, I knew that women weren’t the only ones who got dumped. I mean, look at poor Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything, my former favorite movie of all time. He gave the beautiful Diane Court his heart and she gave him a pen.
Then again, after Lloyd professed his undying love and superior upper-body strength hoisting a Peter-Gabriel-blasting-boom-box for hours on end, Diane had a change of heart. Who wouldn’t?
And who wouldn’t offer a second chance to the appealing jiltee sitting across from me?
“It was a few weeks before the wedding,” Mike told me after a prolonged sip of his drink.
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.”
“So…” He drained what was left of his drink. “I had to get the hell out of Dodge.”
“To get away from her.”
“Basically. So here I am. And I hate to break it to you, but this is my first date since the separation. Boy, does it feel good to be over that hurdle.”
I took a deep breath. It was now or never. Never was preferable, but I couldn’t stand the guilt for another second.
“Mike,” I said gingerly, “I hate to break it to you, but…”
“But what?”
“But you aren’t exactly over that hurdle yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, this isn’t really a date, per se.”
“It isn’t?”
“No.”
He laughed. “What is it? Don’t tell me it’s an audition after all, because I really didn’t bring my head shot or résumé, and I sure as hell didn’t prepare a monologue. Although I feel like I just gave one.”