Love Monkey (21 page)

J
ulia took the day off. She and her whole family are driving the little brother to the University of Wisconsin for freshman year. They volunteered to help Al unpack, no doubt to his undying horror.

And Rick, a young man who just happens to be at Wisconsin vet school? He was merely Julia's boyfriend from ages sixteen to twenty-two.

“Are you going to see him?” I say to her on the phone.

“Yeah, I called him,” she says. “He gave me that voice he used to use on other people who called him when we were dating. That ‘It's so good to hear from you!' voice. With exclamation points.”

Rick broke up with someone last spring. He was in New York. But he never called her the whole weekend he was in New York. Possibly he has tired of her.

“Broke your heart?”

“No,” she says. “He just dented it.”

“Does he have a girlfriend?” I say.

“
Prob
ably,” she says, disgustedly. He's the kind of guy who snaps his fingers, and girls waft gently out of the trees to land at his feet.

“You're going to hook up with him,” I say.

“No,” she says.

When she hangs up I immediately start dialing another number.

“Help,” I tell the phone. “I need a lawyer.”

“Any lawyer in particular?” Katie says.

“I'm thinking of someone I know with an intuitive sense of jurisprudence and a nice butt,” I say.

Her laugh is low and naughty. “I'll let you know if I meet anyone like that,” she says.

“How's the paper chase?” I say.

“We just had orientation,” she said. “Mandatory fun, happy hour. They actually made us wear name tags.”

“How were the boys?
L.A. Law
types?”

“I don't know, did they have a spinoff called
L.A. Khaki-Wearing Money-Grubbing Dorks
?”

Exactly what I need to hear right now.

“It doesn't even start until next week,” she says. “And already I've got homework.
And
I'm behind on it. I'll never pass the bar.”

“I never pass any bars without stopping in. Care to join me at one of them tonight?”

“I really shouldn't,” she says. “And I really need a drink.”

“And some dinner to wash it down with,” I say. “If you're going to uphold the cause of justice, you'll need to eat your broccoli rabe.”

“I know this new place on Columbus,” she says.

So we meet at seven at one of those joints where waitresses with pulled-back hair wear tight black ass pants with white shirts and a skinny black tie tucked insouciantly into their shirts. Katie is thirty but at the bar, in a cranberry pleated skirt and a white twin set, she looks like a cute undergraduate. She's halfway through a legal tome and three-quarters of the way through a glass of red.

I sidle up next to her and take a seat. “I've come to examine your briefs,” I say.

“Huh-huh,” she says in that low way that makes me tingle.

When we sit down, our waitstaffer grandly opens our menus for us before handing them over: that's class. Then Katie issues a preliminary injunction.

“I'm not that hungry. And do not,” she says, “get me drunk. I have to get through forty pages tonight.”

Menu girl is waiting with a local-TV-newscaster smile that says:
Sure, I don't care if you guys walk out of here with a $23 tab. I do this job because it is my calling to serve.

“We'll have a bottle of the Burgundy,” I say. I love this place already: the most expensive bottle on the menu is only $40.

“Be right back,” says the girl.

Katie narrows her eyes. “You total bastard,” she says. But she can't help smiling.

“Who said you could have any of it?” I say. “A man's got a thirst.”

The girl comes back and stages her little bottle theater. Presents the label (I peer, squint, mouth the words, finally nod solemnly), wrenches out the cork and pours me half a sip. Now it's my turn to star. I swirl, hold the glass up to the light frownily and swirl some more. Then I get into that whole sniffing business.

“Oh, just drink it, nancy boy,” Katie says.

“Please. I'm checking to see if it has legs.”

She tries to kick me under the table but she has little legs. I grab her ankle and hold it, running my hand up her calf.

I sip. Give the girl a nod.

“You don't need to check out
my
legs,” Katie says. But she relaxes her leg and I hold her calf for a minute. Her sandal falls off.

“Ticklish?” I say.

“Don't you dare,” she says, and her leg is gone.

“D'you ever get tired of dating?” she says.

“Yes. No.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

“It's like a job interview,” I say.

“Okay, interview me,” she says, and sits up, all straight and perky. She starts to drink her Burgundy.

“Can you describe your last, um, position for me?”

“Huh-huh,” she laughs, in that low, growly way of hers. “I won't tell you the position, but I'll tell you the guy. His name was Fred. The second time I went to his apartment? He had weird food. And that was it.”

“Weird food?”

“Goose fat. Smoked turkey necks. Endless cans of clam juice.
Weird food
.”

“Everything else about him was okay?”

“Seemingly.”

“But you dumped him for this.”

“Yup.”

“There is no limit to strangeness when it comes to dating, is there?”

“Him or me?” she says.

“Both. He could have turned out to be a great guy.”

“He turned out to be a serial killer.”

“Really?”

“Well. Not
yet
. But I'm watching the tabloids. I mean, the man had frozen squab. Pork hocks. Oh, and Vegemite. He wasn't even Australian.”

“You tell him the reason?”

“
God
, no.”

“Why is it we can never tell each other the real reason for our breakups? Why won't we grant each other this single moment of honesty when the other person needs it most?”

“What fun would that be?” she says. “Another time I broke up with a guy because I came home and he was, in
volv
ed, shall we say, with some porn. I caught him red-handed.”

“Caught him with his pants down. As it were.”

She laughs again. “Come on. What's the weirdest reason you've ever broken up with someone?”

One time this girl stayed for the night. In the morning she poured herself a pint, a
pint
of fresh-squeezed orange juice bought for the occasion in a moment of anticipatory exuberance and then had, like, one sip. I had to throw it all out, of course. Sex is one thing, but backwash is another. Nobody better use my toothbrush, either. Then there was the girl who, when we were talking about our favorite Simon and Garfunkel songs, insisted hers was “Cecilia.” That was pretty much the last conversation I ever had with her.

“Just the normal reasons,” I say.

“Liar,” she says. And kicks me. I like a girl who can detect my lies.

When we finish the wine, it's a little awkward. I live south of here. Katie lives north of here. But just a few blocks.

“Can I walk you home?” I say.

“Yes please,” she says.

There's another awkward moment when we get to the entrance of her building, the doorman eyeing us.

“I have learned much about you, T.F.,” Katie says, not inviting me in. She's twinkling with merriment, though.

“You better keep it to yourself, little girl,” I say, putting my hands on her waist.

“Or else what?” she says.

“Or you're in for it,” I say, and tickle her.

“Agh! Stop!” she says. “Uncle!” And she smiles.

The kiss. It's a kiss that says: give me three solid, entertaining dates, and
maybe.

E
ight-thirty at night. I'm home watching
Goodfellas
, just in case I missed anything the first twelve times.

My cell phone politely clears its throat. First time it's made a sound all weekend. Secretly I was hoping that the thing just wasn't getting reception in my apartment.

“Hi,” says a female voice. Standard girl greeting. Why do girls always do this? I have no idea who it is. How am I supposed to tell based on one word?

“Hey!” I say, stalling. “How's it going!”

“Fine.” Two words. I still have no idea.

Then it hits me like a mouthful of sauerkraut: Liesl. Haven't talked to her in weeks. I thought we had both more or less silently agreed to just let things slide. Into the quicksand.

“
Wie geht
's?” I say. We have this thing, the German and I, where I pretend to be able to speak the language—I picked up a few phrases
from a Bavarian copy editor at work—and she pretends not to notice I'm pathetic.

She gives an answer that sounds like “
Selbstammerungenfrauverkaufkenkrankenschwesser
,” and I give the audio equivalent of a nod.

“Well,” she says. “I was just finishing up some stuff at work.” Like this is the most normal thing for a person to be doing with her Saturday evening. “I figured you'd be out drinking and I could come have one with you.”

“Actually,” I say, “I was just watching a movie.”

Gaffe!
She doesn't know I'm home. This is my
cell
phone. Right now I could be hoisting beers with literary lions or horny actresses, for all she knows. Why do I have to clutter up my scheming with random acts of honesty?

We agree to meet up at Cafe Frog in forty minutes. It's a ten-minute walk from here. Perfect, I think: I have enough time for a nice relaxing game of Snake on my cell phone, then I'll change.

Fourteen minutes later I tear the game out of my hands with pangs of regret—I'm convinced that tonight I have a shot at beating Bran's best score—and dress in three minutes. (Out come the Banana Republic shirt in a darkish shade of blue, the Banana Republic pants in black, the Banana Republic shoes in black. When the pollsters call to ask about my party affiliation, I will answer: Banana Republican.) Then I'm dashing down the street just like I did when I was a kid: always late. Except now I don't have to allow time to lock up my bike.

Uh-oh. I forgot something. I hurry back upstairs to the apartment and paint my nails with Bite Me. No way am I going to bed the German if she sees me biting my nails.

I arrive, red faced, fifteen minutes late, just in time to spend ten minutes waiting for her. Meeting up with girls, in my experience, is a lot like having sex with girls. I always get there first.

We have some food, some drink. We “catch up.”

“What did you do last weekend?” I say.

“Oh,” she says. “I was with Gigi and Seb, you know them, we all went up to New Hampshire to hang out with Ramona and Bethany, I've told you about them, and we went to visit Shakira, Dora, and Colette, the ones I told you about with the little beach house, and then on Sunday I went to a dinner party with Mariel, Antonio, Robin, and Whitney.”

Who are these people? Being with a new person, it's a memory workout. You try to track the names of her bestest friends and her worstest boyfriends and her siblings and where they live and what they do for a living and who their mates are and what they named their kids. (When uncertain, just guess Alex. Works for either gender, and your odds are about one in three.) That's not even counting everything you have to remember about the girl you're dating. Her allergies. (Once I dated a girl who was violently allergic to every kind of nuts. I kept forgetting. Suddenly everything I ordered seemed to have nuts in it. She took this as a sign that secretly I wanted to kill her, or at the very least, didn't want her to share my food.) Her boss's name. Her dress size. Shoe size. What she likes in bed. (Okay, that one isn't so tough.) How to get to her apartment. Her phone number. Her other phone number. Her other other phone number.

Of course, I have no problem remembering any of this stuff about Julia.

“That sounds great!” I say. I'm past the point where I can ask who these friends of hers are, because the German has explained all of their lives to me in great detail. I just didn't retain any of it. There is very little room left in my hard drive, what with the Bugs Bunny plots, Bogart one-liners, and football statistics stored there.

“Let's stay out all night,” I say. I'm trying to be Impetuous Guy. With a German.

“All night?” she says. “I was thinking, maybe twelve.”

We go to a corny grope shack on Columbus called E-Motion. I pretend I haven't been there before. In front there are tables in little nooks; in back there are giant, comfy, velvety couches. They stretch so far back that people get a drink, take off their shoes, and hurl themselves into the cushions. It's like your parents' basement, minus the carved Polynesian barware and the dusty fondue set that was always missing a fork.

So we have our gin and tonics and let our shoes thud to the carpet. We're leaning back. She's not far. She's not touching me either.

“You're in a very vulnerable position,” I say.

“Oh?” she says.

“I could kiss you at any moment,” I say. Can I drop a hint or can I drop a hint?

She smiles. And I kiss her. But only for a second. Because she bursts into giggles.

“Uh-uh,” she says. “We can't make out here.”

It takes me a while to digest what she's saying. What the hell is she saying?

“Do you want to go back to your place?” she says.

When was the last time anyone said that to me? Has anyone ever said that to me? Breathe. Nod. Calmly. That's it. Just nod.

And I reach down to put on my shoes.

She's got the giggles again.

“But,” she says gigglishly.

This is funny?

“But I don't necessarily want to have sex,” she says.

So we go back to my place and she is as good as her word: we don't necessarily have sex. What we do is a whole lot of very frustrating sweaty stuff in my bed. For two hours. Until finally we're asleep in each other's arms. For one minute.

“I have to get up at nine,” she says, nudging me.

I get up to set the alarm, which I keep on the far side of the room. If I could reach it from bed, I would just hit the off button and go back to sleep. On the way, I notice someone has neatly folded and hung up the German's pants and bra. How did that happen?

“Sex,” Liesl says gravely in the dark, “is very intimate.”

No argument here.

“I guess I haven't kissed anyone this much in about, five years.”

And a big bag of sadness falls on my shoulders. Here is a very pretty, very smart young woman. And she is, possibly, even more miserable than me.