Getting Over Jack Wagner (25 page)

This is starting to get less funny.

“You're always worried about how things look instead of how things really are,” he says.

“Um, have you noticed my apartment lately?” It is my last stab at keeping this conversation light. “Do you really think I'm worried about how things look?”

“But nobody can see you in here. You're in the bubble. You're in TV land. You invented your boyfriend, for God's sake!”

It's hard to argue this.

“Remember in the car?” Andrew plows on. “Outside your mom's, when you said nothing ever surprises you? You want to know why?”

“Probably not.”

“It's because you never
let
anything surprise you. You're so hung up on the way you think the world's supposed to be, you never even give it a chance to prove you wrong.”

I don't know if it's what he's saying that is so unsettling or the way he's saying it. With such certainty. Polish. Vehemence, even. This obviously isn't the first time Andrew has thought this through.

“Like your sister getting pregnant, or Hannah getting married, or some stupid drummer picking his nose or eating salad with his hands—you can't control every tiny little thing.”

“Who says I want to control every little thing?”

Andrew slaps a palm on the cluttered coffeetable, sending Leroy bounding out from underneath it. “Exhibit A: ‘Words to Outlaw If I Were President.'”

“That's just a stupid list.” My voice is shaky, unconvincing. I miss my imaginary life. “I don't want to control everything. I just want people to be what they appear to be.”

“But nobody is. Don't you get that?”

“I am.”

“Ha!” he snorts. Both of these I mean literally: the “ha” and the snort. “You're the last person who should be making that claim.”

Considering I'm wearing socks that don't match, was just caught watching the Olsen twins, used the word “woo” nine pages ago, and have spent the last week pretending to be dating a neighbor I've never even met, I realize it's not the most opportune moment for the “I am what I appear to be” defense. I forge ahead anyway, with an unoriginal: “What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means you're not a groupie! You're not some angst-filled…cappuccino-drinking…Gen X…” Andrew's so worked up, all he can manage are adjectives. He faces me and grips my shoulders. “That's not the real you, Eliza. Face it. The real you is nothing like what you pretend to be.”

This is a blow, and Andrew knows it. I stare down at my hands, curled in my lap like something fetal. It's as if the light just changed in the apartment, giving everything a different cast. My thumb rings strike me as suddenly silly. The chipped black polish is immature, embarrassing. My fingernails, I notice, are chewed to the bone.

“I mean, the real you is better,” Andrew says, more gently. “If anyone should know, it's me. I met you watching the
Brady Bunch,
remember? I'm the guy who debated with you about the merits of every cereal in the Kellogg's variety pack.”

I have to smile a little at this, recalling how very wrong he was about Corn Pops.

“I think I know the real you by now, and it isn't this brooding rock-star chick.” Andrew's grip on my shoulders relaxes, but his hands stay where they are. “I don't get why you won't just be yourself.”

Even in my chocolate fog, I know these are the most beautiful, but impossible, words I've ever heard. The apartment starts to smudge around the edges. My senses are drying up. All I can feel is the weight of Andrew's hands on my shoulders and all I can think is: here is a guy who is kind and smart and funny and knows me, the real me, the behind-the-scenes me, the artificial-cereals-and-corny-sitcoms-and-neurotic-mother-and-absent-father me, and likes me anyway.

As if watching a movie, I see my face leaning in toward Andrew's. I close my eyes. I hold my breath. I feel my chest collide with his arm, my forehead with the brim of his baseball cap. It is wrong. It is right. It is
When Harry Met Sally
without the bathrobe.

Through a haze, I hear: “Eliza.”

But it is not a breathy, passionate “Eliza.” It is a firm but caring “Eliza.” And the haze isn't steamy or smoky, but sleep-deprived. Malnourished. Lonely.

I feel the pressure of Andrew's hands disappear. I open my eyes and glance around the room, furiously blinking. The world looks gray, fuzzy, kind of like it did in the moments before I fainted in the Blue Horn Mall Food Court, right in front of The Happy Corn Dog, after getting my ears pierced for the first time. I suck some air and wait for the room to resume its normal shapes and colors. Leroy—the one thing that's actually supposed to be gray and fuzzy—is planted in a lump at my feet, shaking his head at me in a remarkable impression of my mother.

“Are you okay?” Andrew is saying. “You're not going to pass out, are you?”

“No,” I manage. It's true, I'm not. I am starting to register color again. I brush at my eyes, feeling ridiculous, as blood and logic rush back to my brain. “Sorry. For a second there, I thought you were a rock star or something.”

I should have known it was too soon for humor. The joke lands limp and sad, like a dropped slice of bologna.

“Forget it,” Andrew says. “I'm sorry I yelled.”

“You were totally right, though.”

“Still. I didn't have to yell.”

“Either way,” I say. “It's time for me to face the music.”

I wait then, staring at my lap, wading in the tension of almost-having-kissed Andrew. What if I've ruined our friendship? What if Andrew feels embarrassed around me forever? What if honor compels him to tell Kimberley what I did and she bans him from speaking to me ever again?

Fortunately, Andrew is far too left-brained for any of that. Out of the corner of my eye, I see his dirty sneakers prop themselves on the coffeetable. “Face the music?” he says. The feet cross smugly at the ankle. “Well, that really all depends on which music. Black Sabbath? Oingo Boingo? Mr. Mister? Because if you ask me”—I can hear the grin appear on his face—“it's always time to face a little Mr. Mister.”

In a feat of inept gratitude, I simultaneously burst into laughter and swipe a hand across my runny nose. And when I manage to look at my friend, full-face, Andrew is just Andrew again. Thank God. Andrew of the squeaky wind pants. Andrew of the L.L. Bean blond hair. Andrew of the knowing, and reassuringly platonic, smirk.

“I think it's time I dump Jacques and go back to work,” I decide.

“No duh.”

I pick up “Words to Reinstate” and blow my nose on it.

 

If my book were a TV movie, it would end with a scene that goes something like this:

• a) Lou shows up at Dreams Come True, washed-up and balding, and as soon as I see him I realize my real father is nothing like the ideal father I've been comparing my boyfriends to for fifteen years;
  
• b) I dial Lou from a highway pay phone, armed with nothing but a knapsack full of Tastykakes and loose change, only to find he is whiny and unfunny and nothing like the ideal father I've been comparing my boyfriends to for fifteen years;
  
• c) Lou and I arrange to meet for breakfast in a highway diner (which, if this were one of my Movies That Smell, would have a tinge of bacon fat and burnt coffee) where he proceeds to drip ketchup on his chin and call the waitress “girlie” and I realize he is nothing like the ideal father I've been comparing my boyfriends to for fifteen years.
  

In the end, though, each of these scenarios feels like too much of a cop-out: father likes music + father leaves daughter = daughter spends entire young life searching for father-substitutes in the form of flawed rock stars. The equation is too easy.

After Andrew confiscates my remaining Crispy Chocolate Wafers and exits my apartment, I return gradually to the world of the living. Leroy. My dinner. Leroy's dinner. I pay bills and eat spaghetti and locate clothes for work in the morning. As I start working on the tower of dishes in the sink, I can hear Andrew's words hovering in the air around me, annoying and obvious, like fake snow settling over the inside of a cheesy plastic snow globe.

With a little food and distance, I can recognize that at least part of what he said didn't come as a total shock (though he did manage to misuse “ironic”). I know I am inflexible. Picky. Difficult to please. I'd always traced it to Nanny, called it “selective,” and considered it one of my better traits. Still, Andrew's words rattled me. Andrew Callahan is the one person in my life who never yells, never psychoanalyzes, never nitpicks. For seven years, our friendship has been based largely on the assumption that we are always, always kidding. The fact that he, of all people, would see me as rigid and unrealistic—and go so far as to tell me so—makes me think I might be worse off than I thought.

Maybe he's right: my pickiness isn't just picky, it's hypocritical. I say I want rock stars for their unpredictability, but really, I want the kind of unpredictability I can count on. I want the impulsive lyrics, the ripped jeans, the deep talk, the scribbled songs on greasy napkins in highway diners at 4:00
A.M.
What I don't want is the unpredictability I usually wind up with—
true
unpredictability, the kind that wears polyester uniforms or stars in community productions of
Oklahoma!
I want the rock star I wrote letters to when I was ten years old, whose face plastered my bedroom walls and watched me while I slept. Who let me love him '80s style: purely, unabashedly, without holding back.

By the time I finish scrubbing the final dish, it's almost nine o'clock. A VH1
Behind the Music
is probably starting, but I am too caught up in my own world to wallow in Sting's or Gloria Estefan's. I make my way to my laptop, buried under stacks of magazines and coupon flyers, flip it open and, for the first time in two weeks, turn it on.

The screen comes to life warily, as if unsure whether or not to trust me again. On the fuzzy menu, I click the file titled “Book?” and there they are: one hundred two pages of me and rock stars, laid bare in twelve-point Times. I start at the beginning and proceed to scroll through the last fifteen plus years of my life, reliving each familiar sequence: a) see band, b) kiss, c) connect, d) find flaw, and e) release.

This time, the story feels different. Instead of honing in on the rock stars, I focus on the narrator. I watch her as if she were a stranger, a person I've seen reading on a ratty couch in The Blue Room or riding on the train. In public, she is aloof, brooding, dressed in black, wearing her silver pierces like a coat of hypoallergenic armor. But in private, she is someone else completely. A worrier, an envier, a burger-eater and TV-watcher, a skeptic, a control freak, a sap, a secret lover of Foreigner's “The Search is Over.”

“That's not the real you, Eliza,” I can hear Andrew saying. “Face it: the real you is nothing like what you pretend to be.”

He's right. Not once have I let my true self show to any of my nonrock-star boyfriends. The way I see it, if I had—and had been dating myself—I would have dumped me a million times over for a) talking out loud to my cat, b) not showering for over two days, c) once wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Jack Wagner's face, and d) on and on and on. Though the rock stars might be the ones up on the makeshift stage, it's always been me performing.

 

Concerns About the Book (Revised):

• a) the more serious the story, the harder it is to be funny
  
• b) the “performing” metaphors could start to get corny
  
• c) the point is starting to reflect worse on the narrator than the rock stars
  
• d) the point is more personal than expected
  
• e) pretty soon, the book will need an ending.
  

B
y the time I hit twenty-six, I was facing the fact that my dating life wasn't working. While all the people I loved were fearlessly growing up—my sister getting pregnant, Hannah getting engaged, Andrew whispering “I love you, too” in the dark on a cell phone—I was facing the rest of my life alone. I was beginning to envision my grown-up dinner parties: Hannah and Alan analyzing each other, Andrew and Kimberley cross-examining each other. Me, somewhere in the middle, serving tuna casserole.

I had spent the last few weeks reassessing my dating strategy. In a panic, I'd agreed to go out with a securities analyst named Donny, convinced it would be the launching pad for the stability and normalcy and financial/emotional security any woman my age would—should—want. All it got me was two weeks of hibernation, a relentless sugar headache, and an inferiority complex about my butt.

But now, after two weeks in my apartment, I felt invigorated. Refocused. I was ready to face the world again: heat, smog, the commuter rail, the mountain of catch-up work I knew awaited me at Dreams Come True, the battalion of Travel Agents who would want to hear every detail of my date with Donny, and Beryl the cheerful receptionist/grandmother of the Donster. Most importantly, I was determined to find an ending for my book.

The original concept was this: the book would be a guide to dating rock stars. It would be part fiction, part nonfiction. It would be part humor, part personal health. It would qualify as sociology, how-to, reference, and the performing arts. Each chapter would focus on a different kind of musician—an ambassador from the instrumental genre, if you will—and what to expect (and not expect) if you date them.

Unfortunately, I hadn't planned the ending. In my mind, the chapters had cycled along beautifully, musically, vocalists and saxophonists and electric guitarists crescendoing to a fever pitch. Maybe they would eventually form a band. At the very least, I'd figured some final words would come to me somehow, sometime—preferably in a burst of passion on a bar napkin, or scribbled on a sweaty palm—some gem of advice for readers to carry with them into the world of black-lit coffee bars and goatees and communes. Or, better yet, the act of writing the book would reward me with a real-life finale that I could conveniently transcribe.

The ideal scenario (and let's be honest, the one with the most mass-market appeal) would be: NARRATOR MEETS HER IDEAL ROCK STAR and they FALL IN LOVE and LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER, symbolically juxtaposed with NARRATOR'S SISTER GIVES BIRTH.

This was all totally unlikely. Not only was my sister's baby not due for another six months, there were only two males in my life at this point: The Piano Man and Andrew. I had never met The Piano Man, yet had already lied about dating The Piano Man which, in terms of endings, made him both humiliating and contrived. And Andrew (most likely the popular favorite all along) I'd recently, firmly established for the second time in my life was just my friend and not my “friend.”

Besides, I didn't want an ending that was predictable. It would be easy to fictionalize Z Tedesco showing up at The Blue Room with a regular drum gig and minty fresh breath, or Jordan Prince resurfacing with perfect fashion sense and tamed eyebrows. The entire book—and, by some unsettling implication, my entire life—had been predictable. Predictability, as it turned out, was one of its unifying themes. On Monday morning, as I headed back to work, I was determined to find an ending that would “light my fire,” “turn on my heart light,” and generally rock my world.

But first, the familiar: breakfast with Hannah. It had been two weeks since I'd seen her, the night she and Alan told me they were getting engaged and I'd responded by downing two carafes of wine and a meatless hot dog. Since then, she'd left several nervous messages on my answering machine. When I finally called her back, last night, she said: “Oh, thank God! I was so worried!”

I'd had a guilty headache, like a peanut lodged between my eyes, ever since.

The place we met, Bagelmania, was a compromise: a cross between franchised pancakes and chamomile tea, at a spot halfway between Dreams and Penn. Bagelmania was no different from any other bagel joint except that everything was bagel shaped: windows, light fixtures, floor tiles. Even the tables had charmingly inconvenient holes in the middles. I bought my coffee and cream-cheesed poppy and found Hannah sitting by a window, picking at a green bagel and nursing a cup of tea. Only she would manage to find a bagel made of vegetables.

“Hey,” I said, collapsing into a chair.

“Hi,” she answered evenly.

Something was wrong. Instead of the anticipated Hannah-esque flood of warmth and relief and affection, she was a knot. Her eyes were fixed on a paper cup of pale tea. Her hair was stuffed under a straw hat, and her freckled hands were folded so tightly they had turned pink at the fingertips. Her engagement ring was perched in the middle of her clenched hands, like a third person sitting at the table between us.

“How are you?” I attempted, operating on the theory that if you ignore problems they just disappear.

“Fine.”

“Oh.” I racked my brain for more words. “Good.”

This was physically painful. Conversations with Hannah weren't supposed to feel this way. They were easy, unpressured. They were one of the few things in my life that didn't require effort and forethought. Apparently she was angrier than I'd thought about the phone calls.

“Look,” I said. “I'm really sorry I didn't call you back sooner. I meant to. I just didn't get a chance.”

“It's okay,” she said, without looking up.

Obviously I never should have left my apartment. There was no tension there, no awkward silences. There were no emotions at all really, just a dull sugar haze punctuated by sappy, happy, sitcom endings. I occupied the silence between us by stuffing my face with cream cheese and eavesdropping on the table/bagel next to us, where two teenage girls were gossiping about tampons, blow jobs, and their respective boyfriends, Joey and Jason. Apparently, Joey was a sloppy kisser. Jason kissed well, but liked to use the term “boobies.”

“So,” I said, groping for the most gossipy topic I could think of. “I survived my date. With the businessman.”

“Oh?” Hannah said to her tea. “How was it?”

I had already prepared my three prerequisite sarcastic answers: “One, he talked a lot of business jargon. Two, he practically had sex with our waitress on the table.” When Hannah didn't look up, didn't even flinch, I sobered. “Three, it was nothing like I expected it would be.”

Hannah finally raised her head, and when she did I noticed how tired she looked. Her eyes were dry, as if worn out from crying. “What had you expected?”

Having met Donny the Securities Analyst, it was humiliating to recall everything I'd hoped he would one day become. A husband. A father. A lawn mower and barbecuer. The kind of man who called going to bed “saying na-nights.” But I sensed Hannah was looking for something more than this.

“I guess I thought dating him would change things somehow,” I admitted. “Put an end to this whole rock star thing.”

“Did it?”

“I don't know. So far all it did was make me sort of, shut down.”

Hannah's forehead wrinkled into a scattering of little lines. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that this, here, today”—I waved a hand at Bagelmania at large—“is the first time I've left my apartment in about two weeks.”

At once, Hannah's tension seemed to give. She unclasped her hands, reaching across the table for one of mine. “Two weeks?” she whispered. “What were you doing alone in your apartment for two weeks?”

“You know, eating Cocoa Puffs. Watching
Dawson's Creek,”
I rattled off, then paused. Sometimes being sarcastic could be more tiring than being real. “I had some things I needed to work out, I guess.”

“Why didn't you call me? I would have come over.”

“I know. I don't know.” I shrugged into my coffee. “I guess I needed to take some time. For myself.” In retrospect, my hibernation was sounding a hell of a lot healthier than it actually had been. “I had some projects to take care of.”

“What projects?”

I repeat: I never should have left my apartment. I hadn't intended to tell Hannah about my book, at least not until it was finished, and now I was trapped. I knew, of course, that I could quickly invent some other project if I had to. As a kid, I was queen of the short-lived but well-potentialed creative project. A Shrinky Dink gallery. The rock star membership cards. An interpretive piece with Loom Loopers.

But this moment seemed to call for honesty. “I've kind of been writing a book.”

Hannah sat back abruptly. Like an afterthought, she snatched her hand back with her. “What kind of book?”

“It's sort of a…I don't know how to describe it. Sort of a rock-star exposé. A dating retrospective kind of a thing.”

At that, Hannah's eyes instantly filled with tears, as if they had been lurking just below the surface looking for a window of opportunity. It wasn't the most positive first review I could have hoped for: mention book, evoke weeping.

“Not exactly a vote of confidence,” I informed her.

“Oh, Eliza, it's not that.” She grabbed at a pink Bagelmania napkin, dabbed at her eyes, and gave her nose a messy blow. At the next table, Joey's Girl and Jason's Girl (but sadly, no “Jessie's Girl”) turned to watch us, as unapologetic as if we were an afternoon soap. “It's wonderful for you,” Hannah said. “Really.”

It seemed rhetorical, but I went for it anyway: “Then why are you crying, exactly?”

“I just feel
sad,”
Hannah said with unusual vehemence. Joey's Girl gave Jason's Girl a “this is getting good” poke in the arm. “I feel sad that we haven't spoken in two weeks. I feel sad that you didn't call me when you needed someone. And I feel sad that you've been writing this, this rock-star exposé”—she waved her hands in a pink paper flourish, sending her napkin fluttering off the table to land on the toe of Jason's Girl's red Skecher—“that I didn't know anything about.”

“Well, you shouldn't.” I spoke carefully. Rarely was I in the position of consoling Hannah, and the times I had been, it wasn't about our friendship. It was about the rest of the world: a documentary she'd seen about the desecration of the rainforest, or roadkill she'd looked in the face (“he was smiling right at me!” she wailed). Personal problems she usually seemed able to process somewhere deep inside her, in a mystical, enviable network of Enya and gingko. “I mean, you shouldn't feel bad. I didn't tell anyone. It wasn't just you.”

This wasn't exactly true; I had told Donny the Securities Analyst (but only to impress him) and Karl the Bass Guitarist (only to get out of spending time with him). I hadn't told anyone important.

“Not even Andrew,” I added, which was true, and seemed to calm her down a little. Sniffling, she fished a tissue out of her tapestry bag. “I just didn't want any outside opinions, you know?”

This proved to be my fatal mistake. Hannah's splotchy, pink face sprung tears again. “Oh God,” she said, chomping down on her lower lip. “You think I psychoanalyze you.”

“No. I don't. I didn't say that.”

“You didn't tell me about your book because you didn't want me interfering. You think I give you too much advice.”

“I
want
your advice. I'm the one who asks for it, remember?”

“You don't have to say that.” She tossed her head back and forth, so some hair escaped the straw hat and frizzed around her face. “You don't have to confide in me about anything unless you want to. Of course not. I'm being unreasonable.” She drew a snuffled breath. “This isn't about you. And it isn't about your book.”

“Then what's it about?”

Hannah looked at me plainly. “Me.”

Oddly enough, this possibility hadn't even occurred to me. For so many years, we'd been Hannah the Capable and Eliza the Mess that to think of Hannah as the one with the problem seemed inherently wrong.

Hannah dabbed at her nose with her tissue, then put the crumpled wad next to her plate. “It's just that lately, I've been feeling like we're not as close as we used to be.”

Now it was my turn to feel alarmed. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, we'll go days without talking to each other. We never used to do that. I've been planning my wedding, and you haven't been a part of it. Not just the food and the dresses, but…you don't even know how Alan proposed. Or how I'm even
feeling
about getting married.” Her lips began to quiver. “And now I find out you've been going through this trauma, and writing a book…” “Trauma” seemed extreme, but I skipped it. Hannah's hands fluttered helplessly and landed in her lap. “I just miss you.”

I ducked behind my bagel. This kind of naked emotion made me squirm in any setting, but especially in a crowded Bagelmania in Center City. I shot Jason's Girl and Joey's Girl what I hoped was my piercing, don't-mess-with-me look.