Love and Other Natural Disasters (23 page)

"So you came here for some
information, and I'm silting here asking questions that are none of my
business. Do you have time to get a coffee? I'll tell you everything I
know."

It was the best offer I'd had in
months. That was not a cheering thought.

Ray had done it all: He'd worked
with drug addicts, domestic violence offenders and victims, the homeless,
people at risk for or having already contracted all manner of diseases. He'd
been on the front lines, educating and empathizing and getting people the
services they needed. He'd been behind the scenes, developing and evaluating
programs. He'd worked for the city, the county, the state. And if anything was
clear by the end of our conversation, it was that he felt no one should do that
sort of work if they couldn't give it everything. He'd seen too many people
half-assessing it with other people's lives, and when he saw he was about to
become one of them, he'd gotten out. At first, being a professor felt like
being a traitor or an imposter. Even though the community college was about as
far from the ivory tower as you could get, it still felt uncomfortably close
for Ray. That is, until he saw that he could inspire the students with his
experience and his candor. He never made the life out to be anything other than
what he thought it could and should be: noble work, undertaken by dedicated
people who knew their hands would get dirty and that there was never, ever time
for complacency.

I was, in a word, spellbound. This
was a man who lived by his convictions. This was a man who would leave his
pregnant wife rather than live in deception.

Not that I was comparing him or
anything.

"So you want to karaoke
sometime?" he asked.

It seemed that abrupt to me, too.
"Karaoke?" I repeated.

"On Wednesday nights. There's
this great dive in the city. Some nights you hear one too many drag queens
performing 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road' but mostly, it's a good time."

"I thought they loved 'Candle
in the Wind.'"

He grinned broadly. "That too.
You haven't lived until you've seen some doll of a
tranny
crying her way through it with a tiara perched on her wig."

I laughed. "So,
Wednesday." "Wednesday."

Charlie was staring critically at
the shirts hanging up in the guest bedroom closet. Finally he turned toward me
with a sort of childish helplessness. I got up from the futon to stand next to
him.

"Which of these do you think
she'd like best?" he asked.

He and Lil were having another
"date" after Luke was asleep. Lil was picking up the wine; she knew
she couldn't trust him with that. He still bought Pabst Blue Ribbon because it
tasted good. He affectionately called it PER. They'd been seeing a lot of each other,
and I'd caught him doing things like surreptitiously sniffing his armpits
before going to see her. For Charlie, this was serious.

"Just wear what makes you most
comfortable," I said. Jesus, I really had turned into a mom.

He cast me a glance that said that
very thing.

"Okay, this one." I
reached out and touched a black T-shirt. T-shirts were my only option, and at
least that one didn't have anything written on it.

"Are you serious?"

"What's wrong with it?"

"It's kind of boring."

"It's your shirt."

"I'm just saying, Lil's not
boring. She's hot."

She's
old,
I wanted to say.
It still seemed strange that

Lil was having sex with my kid
brother. Repeatedly. I had adjusted somewhat, but much preferred not to think
about it. I'd be remiss, though, if I didn't ask, "You always use condoms,
right?"

"What the hell, Eve!" A
grimace crossed his face.

"I'm just saying, you
should."

"Nice. Real nice."

"With anyone, I mean. Anyone
you're going to have casual sex with."

"You hang out with the
public-health dude one time and you turn into—Are there any famous
public-health dudes?"

We both laughed, grateful to dispel
the awkwardness.

"It's kind of weird for me to
think of you having a date with Grizzly Adams," he said. "I mean,
you've been with Jon forever."

"He doesn't look like Grizzly
Adams. He doesn't even have a beard."

"Just the brows."

"You don't even notice them
after a while. He's really got presence. He's one of those people who just
means what he says, you know? It's sexy."

"If you say so." He was
fingering other T-shirts in his closet speculatively. "I can't believe I'm
taking this long to pick a fucking shirt. What's up with that?"

I didn't answer. I was thinking
about Ray. And about Jon. It was true that I found Ray sexy, but the thought of
actually having sex with him currently held no appeal at all. Not just because
of his potential furriness—which was a concern—but because of his un-Jon-
ness
.

Ray was what Jon would call "a
real character." I had the quickest flash of an impulse to call Jon and
describe Ray, with his centipede eyebrows and his rechanneled passion, and then
to say, "Maybe I'm going to find some thing to do with my life, something
I can talk about the way Ray talks about his work. Like there's honor in it."
And Jon would say in his "you and me against the world" voice,
"Yeah, let's make that happen."

CHAPTER TWENTY

It was only a split second, but I
saw it. Just before Tamara smiled and told Lil how great it was to meet her,
there it was, a look in the eyes that said so this
is why I hardly see you
anymore.
I knew this wouldn't go well.

"It's really great to meet
you, too!" Lil's sincerity was palpable, and painful.

We seated ourselves at the table,
and I said (with way too much compensatory enthusiasm), "I love
sushi!"

"It's good," Tamara said.
She reached up to smooth her hair, which was pulled into a messy bun. She
glanced surreptitiously at Lil as she did it. I couldn't help noticing how
distinctly unpolished Tamara and I were in comparison with the perfectly
accessorized Lil: we were the work casual chinos to her ultra-low-rise skinny
jeans, the
Dansko
clogs to her Jimmy
Choos
.

Glad for the prop, I consulted the
menu. "How do you guys feel about
unagi
?" I
asked.

"That's eel, right?" Lil
said.

"It's one of the cooked
ones."

"That one's okay." Lil
began to scan the menu. "It seems like if you're going to do sushi, you
should do it raw, you know?"

"I'll split the
unagi
with you," Tamara said quickly.

"Oh, I'd split it." Lil
smiled at us both. "I just think we should get a good balance, you
know?"

Two "you
know?'s
"
in a row. Now that Tamara was here with us, I found myself critical of Lil,
then guilty for feeling that way. Lil was a wonderful person. She'd stood by me
like no one else lately.

No, that wasn't fair. Tamara was
doing her best. She just wasn't as open-minded as Lil was. Truthfully, neither
was I. That was why it had taken me so long to like Lil this much.

The next few minutes passed in semi
awkward negotiation. Sushi for three wasn't my brightest idea. Finally the food
was ordered and we were sipping our sake, smiling with nervous anticipation.

"So you're a teacher,"
Lil said.

"For five years now. Some days
it seems so much longer."

"How old are the kids?"

"It's high school."
Tamara lifted her cup to her lips.

"I think that's going to be my
age," Lil said. "You know how every parent has an age where they're
really great with their kids? Mine's going to be high school."

"You seem pretty great with
Luke now," I interjected.

"Oh, I'm good now. I'll be
great then."

I could see that Tamara was jarred
by Lil's confidence, and unsure how to respond.

"I wonder what my age will
be," I said.

"Eleven," Lil answered
immediately.

"Eleven? I only get to be at
my best for one year?"

"Oh, it'll be more than one
year. I see you being really good with the
tweens
."

"I hate that term,"
Tamara said. Then realizing she might have sounded harsh, she added, "It's
like an advertising demographic, not a stage."

"I kind of like it." Lil
smiled benignly. "You know, it's when they're in between. Not totally
kids, not totally teenagers."

"I understand it," Tamara
said, and I stiffened. I wished she would let the subject go. "It just
seems a little made-up, like how Hallmark invented Mother's Day."

"I like Mother's Day,
too." Lil laughed. "You will, too, someday."

Eager to change the trajectory of
the conversation, I blurted out, "I had a date."

Tamara turned to me, mouth slightly
agape. Lil nodded encouragingly, ready to hear the details. Unlike Tamara, she
already knew of Ray's existence.

"When did this happen?"
Tamara asked, trying (and failing) to sound casual.

"I met him last week, and we
went out last night."

"You didn't even say
anything," she said. "We talked over the weekend. Just for a few
minutes, but..."

"He's a professor," Lil
said. "At a community college, but still a professor. I've always thought
those tweed jackets with the elbow patches were kind of sexy."

Tamara ignored Lil and stayed
focused on me. "Was it a real date?" she asked.

The question was harder to answer
than you'd expect. Ray had offered to come and pick me up, but I'd declined.
Part of it was that I wasn't ready for the formality of dating (the pickup, the
drop-off, the good-night kiss, maybe); part was that I wasn't ready for the
intimacy of anyone seeing where I lived; and the rest was that I didn't want Ray
the Urban Warrior to drive up to my suburban house in my suburban neighborhood
and pass judgment. That's what dating was: It was one person's expectations,
associations, and preconceived notions colliding with another's. It was an act
of hope.

I'd met Ray at the karaoke place.
It was indeed an old-fashioned dive bar; by which I mean, it wasn't some
hipster construct, but was genuinely run-down. The neon lights on the sign
behind the bar were flickering because no one could be bothered to get them
fixed; the exposed brick wall was crumbling for the same reason. The battered
wood floor looked like people had been aggressively moving furniture across it
since San Francisco was a gold rush town.

"Well, hello there!" Ray
said. He was at the bar, drinking something amber from a highball glass. He
spun toward me on his stool, but didn't stand or make any move to touch me. I
leaned against the bar next to him, hoping the maneuver had a glint of sexiness
to it. I felt ridiculous. It didn't help that a man who looked homeless was at
the front of the room mumbling his way through the Beatles' "Money (That's
What I Want)." A dozen patrons were scattered at the tables facing him,
paying no attention.

Following my eyes, Ray said,
"It'll fill up later. I don't like to get up there until there's a crowd.
I feed off the audience."

I smiled politely. The notion that
he and this audience would reciprocally generate some sort of electricity
struck me as absurd. I felt like jumping in my car and speeding home. If I left
right then, I could be the one to give Olivia her bath instead of Charlie.

I forced myself to say, "The
only time I've ever done karaoke, I was a backup singer. I shared a mike with
three other girls."

"The harmony." He nodded
seriously. "Harmony's the backbone of music."

Lil cut into the story. "He's
adorable! I mean, not necessarily physically, but I like this guy." Tamara
just waited for me to continue. Ray and I got a table—"Not too close, but
not too far away from the action," he said. His unwavering belief in "the
action" might have been delusional, but I had to agree with Lil: there was
a certain charm in it, the same indefinable charm that had worked on me in the
classroom and then at coffee. It had to be his charm, because it wasn't his
wardrobe. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with pictures of hula girls
printed on it, and a few wiry chest hairs sprouted from the top. "My
God," Tamara said.

"Hipsters in San Francisco
wear that kind of stuff," Lil rejoined.

"He's forty-four," I
said. "Aging hipsters," she amended.

"My God," Tamara said
again. "It's like he's wasting away in
Margaritaville
."

What I didn't say—because I didn't
want to even say Jon's name in front of Tamara—was that at least Ray was
dressed with a point of view. Whatever else you might think about Ray, he was
undoubtedly a man with a point of view. It was so refreshing that I was able to
overcome my visceral distaste for the hula girls and start telling Ray
everything.