How to Meet Cute Boys (10 page)

“Did you ask your mom if she’ll drive you to his b-day party?” she asked.

“He’s going home for it.”

“So perfect.” Kiki stretched out, crossed her long legs at the ankles. “You don’t have to stress about getting him a gift
that says you’re into him but not obsessed, and soon he’ll be old enough to go to bars.”

“If you’re going to be glib, I’m ordering a pizza.”

I went upstairs for the phone, brought it back, and dialed the preprogrammed number. I needed a large sausage and mushroom
in thirty minutes or less.

“You wanna free salad with it?” the guy said. “Only two dollars more.”

“Then it’s not exactly free,” I said, rolling my eyes at Kiki.

“Huh?”

“Two dollars isn’t free.”

“Please hold.”

I waited an unbelievably long period of time, which allowed me to ponder possible consequences. As in, maybe I should get
the salad and skip the pizza since the new guy I was dating was four and probably didn’t want to see my fat, tired twenty-seven-year-old
flesh … He came back.

“So, you want a free salad with that or not?”

“Um, okay, yeah. Make it a salad and a pizza.”

I’ll just eat the salad,
I thought.

“What—you’re going to go on a diet now?” Kiki said when I hung up. “Look, everything’s going to be fine. No, better than fine.
Here’s the thing. So he’s a little younger than we thought. That’s not so bad. It’s
society
.”

“Oh
come on
.” I rolled my head from shoulder to shoulder, trying to get my muscles to relax, and my spine made a loud crack. “You’re
not seriously going to turn this into a political issue.”

“No, listen, if you were a male VP at Sony and he were some hot d-girl nobody would even care. They’d give you a fucking
promotion
. Look, I’ve always believed that the right guy is just the right guy. Like if he worked at Kinko’s, but you liked him, his
blue apron wouldn’t matter. Or if he didn’t make a decent living and lived in a shack, you’d just accept it. Remember, there’s
always
something we have to overlook. Back hair, bad parenting, drug problem, weird moles, passive aggression, poor fashion, stamp
collection … I think you should count your blessings. Max is
cute,
okay? He has a good job. He’s got good hair. He might be younger, but what about Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn? They go
out with younger men and they’re
celebrities
. The
fact
remains, Max could be perfect for you. Or not. I don’t think age is the issue. Whether or not he’s boyfriend material is
the issue.”

I tried to get Kiki’s words to make an imprint on my brain. Then I thought,
When Max is thirty-three, I’ll be forty
.

“Have you talked to Good Morning Vietnam?” I asked, opening another beer and hoping a change of subject would do me good.

“Edward? Nooo. But, in a moment of weakness, I called him.”

“You didn’t.”

“Can you believe? Left the most embarrassing message, too—said I had this T-shirt of his and wanted to know if he wanted it
back. Total hell.”

“
Total
hell. And?”

“He didn’t call me back. In fact”—she paused for dramatic effect—“I give up.”

“Oh, come on. You don’t mean that.”

She said she did. No more men, no more dates. I found this hard to believe—Kiki dated more than the Mother, which was saying
a lot. She claimed she yearned for solitude.

“Nobody wants solitude,” I said.

“I do,” she said. “I
fantasize
about it.”

“Knowing that if you do it too long you’ll miss your peak years and end up childless?”

“Oh, I don’t believe that backlash shit.” Kiki shook her hand in front of her face. “From now on it’s work and home. Then
work, then home. I just bought a new DVD player, and I have a gazillion movies on the way from Amazon, so … That’s it. If
I’m meant to meet someone, I will. Frankly, I think the universe will reward me for my restraint.”

“You can’t act aloof so the universe will get interested,” I said. “The universe isn’t a guy.” I paused. “Now who’s going
to go out with me and meet cute boys?”

“Nobody.” She smiled. “Because you already
have
a cute boy.”

After Kiki left, I puttered around, pretending to tidy up. That whole never-leaving-the-house-again thing—she sounded like
she could actually be serious. Then again, only a few months ago she’d said she was going to quit her job, become a Buddhist,
and renounce material goods in order to achieve a higher level of spiritual awareness. Started showing up at my house with
trash bags full of jewelry, black cashmere sweaters, and designer shoes that seemed too dressy for her pilgrimage to nirvana.
I stashed it all in the closet and gave it back to Siddhartha when she came to her senses a few weeks later. I’ve helped Kiki
carry her microwave oven to the trash because she was joining the raw-foods movement, and I’ve helped her go pick out a new
microwave when she ate so many carrots the whites of her eyes turned orange. Whenever Kiki gets one of these plans into her
head, I play along and hope my best friend isn’t about to turn into a raw-foods-eating Buddhist vegetarian social worker.

Anyway. Kiki, somehow, managed to make me feel like everything would be okay. But after she left, a kind of free-floating
anxiety took over. I inspected my face in the mirror, and wondered if the sun gave me wrinkles. I lit a cigarette, and started
to worry about what it was doing to the elasticity of my skin. I put on a clay masque, hoping to undo some of the damage,
and while it dried I thought about those “How Old You
Really
Are” quizzes in
Cosmo
. I pretty much checked off every risk factor in the box and discovered that I was, like,
fifty
. While brushing my teeth, I worried that statistically Max was in a higher-risk group when it came to diseases. We hadn’t
had sex yet, but we’d done other stuff—how risky was other stuff, exactly? And I wasn’t just worried about dying, either.
I made it through my early twenties without getting a single cold sore,
I thought, staring at my reflection in the mirror.
Oh sweet Jesus, what if I get one now?

I turned in early, and had a crazy dream in which I tried to find Max in a murky swamp. I was holding my breath and diving
down into smelly green water. Finally I spotted him. He was drowning. I reached for his hair, pulled him up to the surface.
But when I went to kiss him, all I had was his severed head. I woke up, kicking wildly and screaming, “Noooo head! Noooo head!”

Ten
A.M
. Phone ringing. Me sleeping. Phone ringing. Me pulling pillow over head. Phone ringing. Oh, hell.

I picked up the phone. “Who’s calling before eleven?”

“Yo! Where were you last night?”

Did I forget to mention Ashton?

“Out.”

“Where’d you go to?”

Ashton who ends his sentences in prepositions?

“Uhhh …” I pictured the post-Kiki panic attack and leaned over to pick at the middle-of-the-night pedicure I’d given myself
after that dream woke me up. I hadn’t let it dry all the way though, so I now had a waffle pattern from my sheets on each
toe. “Out,” I lied. “Rock show.”

“Who’d you see?”

“You wouldn’t know. There were no synthesizers, oversize cargo pants, or tabs of X. There were actually people there who knew
how to play a guitar.” I lit a cigarette and rubbed my eyes.

“Gross. So I called you at, like, twelve-thirty, but there was no answer. I called you Saturday night, too.”

Okay. So I’m a bad person. All right? A bad, bad person. But Ashton was Kiki’s idea. We’d met him at a gallery opening. He
asked me if I liked the art; I said no. He asked for my number; I gave it to him. He seemed okay. But once he started leaving
messages it didn’t feel right. I called Kiki at the office and told her I intended to blow him off.

“No, no, no, no,
no,
” she said. “You’re dating now, okay. You gotta give people more of a chance.”

“But you were the one who said most guys in L.A. are assholes,” I said.

“Which is why you have to make sure you’re not tossing out the
one
amazing guy who
isn’t
an asshole. Investigate. Let things breathe. Seriously—you shouldn’t get rid of any potential partner until after you’ve
had the sex.”

So I started dating him, but he was neither amazing nor asshole. The best thing about it was at certain key moments I didn’t
have to be alone.

I got out of bed and tried to wake myself up.

“Let’s go out tonight,” Ashton said.
So the question is,
I thought while pulling my bathrobe on over my pajamas,
is it pathetic to go out with another guy because I haven’t heard from Max? Or is it pathetic
not
to go out with another guy because I haven’t heard from Max?

“Ben—are you there?”

“I’m here.”

I couldn’t make up my mind. What if Max called and I had plans? It was hopeless. “Ash,” I said, “I’m gonna call you back when
I’m not asleep.”

“Word.”

I fed Freak. Drank my morning diet Coke. Read my e-mails, which were mostly dispatches from the Whip,
Filly
’s editor in chief, who thought the tone on my last piece was off. I checked for an e-mail from Max, but there was none.
Oh yeah,
I remembered. He said if we exchanged addresses then we’d just become those people who e-mailed one another all the time
and never actually talked. At the time, I thought this was romantic. Now I think I should have pushed. Because you can e-mail
casually. But you can never, ever call casually.
They see through you
.

By two, there was still no call.
Maybe I should tell Ashton I’m free
… I knew what the Mother would say. (“Just
go
. What are you moping around here for? Get your nose out of that
book
. You’re driving your mother crazy.”) She’d date through a bad case of polio.

I finally sent Ashton a casual e-mail: “We’re on.”

I spent the rest of my afternoon wishing I had a real job. I had a celebrity interview to prepare for, but sitting at my computer
reading bios on upcomingmovies.com and poking at the keys to write questions more interesting than “What was it really like
to work with [insert director name here]?” made me feel like I was wasting my life. I wanted to be
out
. To see the world. I thought about going for coffee, but sitting outside the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf with all those people
circling want ads in
Variety
always makes me depressed. Exercise was out of the question. So I started a load of laundry, which I then forgot about and
left in the washer for half the day. (When I finally pulled it out it smelled mildewed and I had to scrounge up quarters so
I could wash it all over again.) Then I tried to interest Freak in a toy called the “Cat Dancer” that I’d bought at the grocery
store—five bucks for wire with a little piece of cardboard at the end. He just looked at me like,
Why are you jumping around with that wire with a little piece of cardboard at the end?
I started a book about Orson Welles because I want to better myself and not be a total idiot my whole life, but I got bored
during Truffaut’s foreword and realized I just didn’t give a damn. In a last-ditch attempt to jazz up my day I went to Ron
Herman, and Allegra, who’d picked out practically every piece of clothing I owned, did her best to make me look cute even
though I wasn’t really in a shopping mood. She worked on commission, though, so I bought two wool pencil skirts I’d never
wear because I didn’t actually work in an office, a snazzy-looking top I couldn’t afford that was tight and made me feel self-conscious,
and—who knows why?—a wristband. When I walked in the front door with the shopping bags, I had my first pang of guilt over
the money I’d spent.

Maybe I’ll just wear the shirt tonight as a little test run,
I thought, pulling the top out and inspecting the tag.
I can probably just tuck this in my bra
…

“Heyyy, look at you!” Ashton said when I answered the door. He was admiring my new top.

“Oh.” I pulled at it self-consciously, trying to keep my left boob from making an unscheduled appearance. “Thanks.”

“The tag’s sticking out the side.”

He crossed the living room to pet the cat, which I’d told him a million times never to do. Freak happily sunk a claw into
his thumb.

“Ow!” Ashton gave me a pathetic,
Mommy-take-care-of-me
look, so I went to the bathroom to get him a Band-Aid. While I was there, I dug through my makeup drawer for a pair of nail
scissors so I could remove the offending tag. I realized I was going to have to keep the top at the same moment I decided
I hated it.