Keep Calm and Carry a Big Drink (8 page)

S
EVEN

The time flew by. If it hadn’t, we might have thought through a few things.

Such as avoiding a pounding on my door by Seema around 10:00
A.M
.

“Jay, you better not fucking be in there!” she yells through the door.

“I think you may have switched your infinitive and verb there!” Jay yells back jokingly.

Fortunately, we are both still fully clothed (well, relatively) when she bursts in.

“Oh,
hell
no!” Seema says at the sight of Jay jumping off of me, then quickly trotting to the other side of the room.

He puts his palm up to his sister. “Before you overreact…”

Seema ignores him completely, setting her sights on me. “He has a girlfriend.”

“I do not,” Jay insists, grabbing one of my shirts to try to cover himself. “Why does everyone keep assuming that?”

Seema’s eyes bug out at him. “I don’t know. Maybe because Mom and Dad
met
her last year.”

Jay looks relieved. “Oh. That.” He turns to me. “That’s just Jacqueline.”

Ah … the French pronunciation.
Zhah-ke-leen
. It’s a wonder French people ever get anything done with that accent—you’d think they’d just die happily in bed.

“Seriously, with my roommate?” Seema angrily whines at him, walking over to Jay and smacking his arm. “You’re really going to take advantage of a girl who’s depressed about not being married this week?”

Wait—whoa!

I want to yell that aloud, but Jay and his sister are in midfight, and I learned long ago not to try to break up two dogs when they’re snarling at each other.

“Do you
really
think if I had a girlfriend I’d be sleeping with your best friend?” Jay asks his sister self-righteously.

“We didn’t sleep together,” I quietly assure Seema.

Nobody hears me. Instead, Jay continues to make his point, “Don’t you think if I had a girlfriend, she’d be here with me this week? I mean, do you really think I’m such an asshole I’d cheat on my girlfriend? What kind of a guy would that make me?”

“Pretty much any guy she’s dated in the last ten years,” Seema answers.

“Hey!” I exclaim.

Seema turns to me. “I’m just trying to protect you.” Then she turns to Jay, still not buying what he’s selling. “So who is Jacqueline then?”

“It’s pronounced Jacqueline,” Jay corrects her with his French accent.

Seema crosses her arms, not dissuaded.

Jay rolls his eyes. “She’s just a friend I had come to dinner a few times last fall so Mom and Dad would get off my back.” He turns to me. “I swear.”

Good. I feel better, but Seema still eyes him suspiciously.

He continues to make his point. “She’s a lesbian. Her girlfriend’s Genevieve.” He turns back to me. “I promise, I’m telling the truth. If you come to Paris, I’ll invite them out to dinner the first night you’re there. We’ll make it a foursome.”

Seema opens her mouth, but Jay points his index finger at her before she can respond. “I heard it as soon as you did. That is not what I meant.”

Seema stares him down. “So did you sleep with her?”

Jay doesn’t answer for a moment, then rolls his eyes, a presidential candidate not wanting to dignify the question. “Like, a million years ago,” he says offhandedly.

“I think she meant me,” I tell him.

“Oh,” Jay says, relieved. “Then, no. Not yet.”

“Not yet?” Seema and I ask in unison.

Jay shrugs. “Oh, come on. I’m a guy. Do you ask Colin Kaepernick if he plans to score a touchdown?”

Seema squints her eyes and puts out the palms of her hands. “What does that even mean? It’s like you’re just saying random words now.”

Scott appears in the doorway, wearing Seema’s purple bathrobe. “Honey, I’m really hungover. Let’s go out for breakfast.”

“Can’t you see I’m in the middle of something?” Seema tells him.

“Yes. I’m hungover, not blind,” he tells her patiently. “And this is really none of your business.”

“Says the man without any siblings or roommates,” Seema snaps at him. “I’m sorry you don’t get it, but this most certainly is my business.”

Scott turns to Jay. “Dude. You gonna be a dick after the wedding’s over?”

“Of course not. I’ve already invited her to stay with me in Paris for her birthday.”

“Oh,” Scott says, a bit surprised. He visibly relaxes as he says to Seema, “Well, there you go.” Then he disappears from my doorway. “I need bacon.”

“I’m not done here,” Seema yells toward him.

“I’ll let you make another case against my loft,” Scott tempts her from the other room.

Seema clenches her jaw, torn. Finally, she walks up to Jay and wags her finger in his face. “I swear to God, if you hurt her, I will break you like a twig.”

“That’s exactly what I just told him,” I hear Scott call calmly from their room. “I just said it in guyspeak.”

Seema turns to leave. “Yeah, but I actually meant it!” Seema yells to Scott as she walks to the doorway. She turns back around to Jay. “I will be back at two, and then I’m taking you shopping.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jay says a little mockingly.

Seema puts her hands on her hips. “Do you even know what I’m taking you shopping for?”

“Nope. Don’t care. I promise I’ll go wherever you want and do whatever you say at two o’clock. For now, I’m half-naked and in a pretty girl’s bedroom, so go away.”

Seema opens her mouth to speak. Then for some reason she takes a moment before saying sternly, “I’m not kidding. Two o’clock.…” Then she warns “And she better still be intact when I get back.”

“Dude!” I yell at her.

“Sorry,” Seema quickly apologizes to me. “I’m backing off.”

Seema makes a show of putting her left index and middle fingers up to each eye, flipping them toward Jay’s eyes, then back to hers as she slowly backs out of my room and walks away.

The second she’s out of view, Jay races over to the door and closes it silently.

I am still in bed. “How did you know my birthday was on Bastille Day?”

He smiles sexily as he strolls back to bed. Before he kisses me he says, “I think the more important question is … does that get me to third base?”

E
IGHT

Seema took Jay out all afternoon, ostensibly to return some wedding gifts, show him her wedding venues, and have a nice, quiet lunch, just the two of them. I totally understood, she wanted and deserved to spend time with him. But I was disappointed anyway. Jay did text me around five o’clock to ask if I wanted to join them for dinner, and I said yes.

Texting. Man, do I hate texting. I know it makes me old, but I feel so disconnected from someone whose voice I can’t hear. You’re not talking, you’re typing. As if men weren’t uncommunicative enough before, now they’ve invented something that allows them to have entire relationships without ever having to speak to you. (What do you bet texting was invented by a group of guys? I’m just sayin’…)

Scott was still at the house, so at some point I meandered into the kitchen to hang out with him. I watched him as he sketched on a white pad.

“What’cha working on?”

He seems startled. “Hey, didn’t hear you. You want me to get out of your hair?”

“No, no. This is your house in a week. I’m the one who should be leaving.”

Scott raises his eyebrows. “Yeah, well…”

What I want to say is
Yeah, well … what?
But instead, I head for the coffeemaker. “You want some coffee?”

“I’d love some. Thanks.”

I grab two blue mugs Scott and Seema just received as wedding gifts from the cabinet, pour us some French roast. “Do you take anything in your coffee?”

“Nope. Just black.”

I bring his coffee to the kitchen table, place his mug down, then grab an ice cube from the freezer, throw it in my cup, and take a seat. I crane my neck a bit to see what Scott is working on.

On his sketch pad I see a graphite-pencil drawing of a thin, yet curvy, woman dressed in an early-1960s swimsuit. Very
Mad Men,
very cool. Next to her, written in bright red, are the words
I Love Her More Than Anything.
“Wow. That’s amazing.”

“Thanks. This is for my next series of pieces. It’s loosely based on the
Six-Word Memoirs
books. Each piece will be titled with six words.”

The more I look at the picture, the more I realize the girl looks as if the weight of the world is on her shoulders. Yes, she looks great, lounging on a beach chair with a martini glass in her hand, and donning a fabulously stylish hat. But …

“Her eyes look so sad,” I almost whimper.

“They’re supposed to. The person looking at this will hopefully have a whole group of questions in his or her head: Why is she unhappy? Is she a mistress? Is she a beautiful woman who won’t let anyone in? Is she unable to have children? Secretly in love with another? What is it?”

“It’s really good,” I tell him, haunted by her green eyes. I wish I had his passion and talent. I’d love to be able to communicate with people with nothing more than a picture. “What are the
Six-Word Memoirs
?”

“You’ve never heard of the
Six-Word Memoirs
?” Scott says, visibly surprised. “Seems like the kind of book you would have bought. Huh. Well, anyway, these editors at
Smith
magazine, Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser, asked people to write their lives in exactly six words. They put the best six-word sentences into a book called
Not Quite What I Was Planning
. It was on
The New York Times
bestseller list for a while.”

“Hmm,” I say, still looking at the girl. “So why is she so unhappy?”

Scott looks at his picture, purses his lips, thinking. “Not sure. I suppose that’s up to the person looking at her.”

He slowly closes his pad, looks up at me, and forces a smile.

“Are you unhappy?” I finally ask him.

“No,” he says immediately. Then he’s quiet for a while. “I’ll admit, this whole ‘combining of our lives’ thing has been way more stressful than I thought it would be. Seema has so many ideas of what she wants, and sometimes I feel like I’m getting a little lost among the details. But it’s fine. I can ride the wave for a few more weeks.”

“Have you told her how you’re feeling?”

He lets out a mild chuckle. “Yeah, the groom’s feelings? Not something a bride really wants to hear about right before her wedding. Trust me. We’ve been mildly fighting since I put the ring on her finger. Not
fighting,
that’s the wrong word. It’s just—you know—she knew what cake she wanted, she knew what she wanted the invitations to look like, she knows exactly how her mehndi ceremony is going to go…”

“So you’re just fighting about wedding stuff,” I say, relieved.

“Well, it’s a little more than that. It’s little things. Like, she knows I hate going to Burbank because I don’t trust the cops there, but she books our tickets through the Burbank airport anyway just to save money. Or I really didn’t want the sheets that we registered for. But we looked at so many sheets. I mean, seriously, we looked at literally a wall of sheets at the store where we registered. And then she picked, like, the third ones from the top, which were beige, and I wasn’t crazy about them. But she seemed to care so much about those sheets, and I wasn’t willing to die on the hill over linens, so we picked the ones she wanted.”

It doesn’t feel as if we’re just talking about sheets, so I say nothing and wait for him to continue. Scott takes a moment to have a sip of his coffee, then gets into the deeper issues. “And I want kids. Soon even. Like, maybe start trying in a year, give us a little time to be Mr. and Mrs. James before jumping into ‘Mommy’ and “Daddy.’ But she wants to start trying the minute we get married. And … I guess that’s fine. But it’s like, wow, okay, I guess we’re jumping right in. And then we had this huge fight about my loft.…”

“I heard.”

“And I’m sure I came off as an asshole.”

“No,” I quickly assure him.

“Yeah, I’m sure I did. Because Seema has no problem telling people what’s bothering her. But I don’t like doing that—I like to be a little more chill, a little more private. But then people hear about our fight from her point of view, so she looks good, and I’m the thoughtless jerk. But just because I don’t get riled up about every little thing doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions. And just because I’m not telling all of my friends we had a fight doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“No one thinks you’re a jerk. You’re one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met.”

Scott clearly doesn’t believe me, but he gives me a sincere “Thanks.” He takes another sip of his coffee, deep in thought. “You know what happened when I tried to stand up for myself about my work space? Instead of discussing it like rational adults, she accused me of keeping it because I was planning on having an affair. Then she got it into her head that if I wanted to keep the place, this was my safety hatch and represented a subconscious need to stay a bachelor, so maybe she should do me a favor and not marry me.”

I cringe and shake my head slowly. “Sorry. Believe me, she does
not
mean that. You’re her dream guy. You’re the man she pined over and bored all of us about every day for a year before you finally kissed her. ‘What’s he mean by this text?’ ‘He kissed me hello—do you think that means anything?’ ‘If I wore a mask to the Halloween party, do you think I could kiss him without him knowing it was me?’”

Scott rolls his eyes self-consciously at my compliment, but grins. “Really? A mask?”

“I never told you that—” I warn him.

Scott shakes his head, clearly amused. “Did she really think that would work?”

I shrug. “Desperate times, desperate measures.”

Scott, still smiling, nods. “Wow.” He blurts out in amusement, “She is
such
a geek!”

“Such a geek,” I concur.

Scott continues to smile, looking up at the ceiling a moment. “I love that. Thank you. I needed to hear that.”

“Anytime you need stories for how ridiculously in love your wife is, come to me. So are you guys okay?”

“We’re good.”

“Excellent.” I stand up. “Okay, this coffee isn’t working for me. I have
got
to take a nap if we’re seeing Nic and Jason tonight.”