Love Monkey (30 page)

“I hope you understand how painful a position you're putting me in,” I tell Kate, putting a tender hand on top of hers and aiming a gaze at her. “I didn't call Bran because I wanted to have a nice dinner, just the two of us.”

“Which you were going to finish by taking her dessert?” she says.

“Katie, it was just going to be a regular dessert,” I say. “Not an éclair wrapped around my schlong.”

“It's
Kath
erine now. Did you really think we wouldn't find out?” she says.

We? Are they suddenly pulling some kind of sistahs-against-the-world act on me? “Look, I thought
we
had an understanding that
we
weren't going to tell Bran every single time
we
went out.” Meaning:
I thought we had a gentlemen's agreement to act like sneaky little rats
. “You know how weird she can be.”

“I'm starting to discover how weird you can be,” she says. “It's the deception of it.” She looks as if she's about to file a motion to strike me.

I think of all the sneaky things I've done in my life. Nah. This really doesn't rate.

My phone is sitting on the table. It goes off. Saved!

“Hey,” I tell the phone.

“Ah—Tom?” says a familiar voice.

“Yeah, who's this?” I say.

“It's Liesl! What are you doing there?”

“What do you mean? You called me,” I point out. I've got her there.

“No I didn't,” she says.

“This is my—” Uh-oh.

“I called
Bran
,” she says. “Do you know Bran?” And as my gastrointestinal
revolt begins to emit audible pops and moans like distant gunfire, I'm picturing the conversations that will ensue between Bran and Liesl. Bran: How do you know Tom? Liesl: Well, actually, we've kind of been, y'know, going out for a few months? Bran: Well, that's very interesting, because he and I just kissed a few weeks ago. When he wasn't busy hooking up with my best friend.

“We're, sort of, old friends?” I say. Create a diversion! Think! “How was your, um, subway ride home?” Excellent.

“Tom.” It's Bran, looming next to me. “What the fuck are you doing with my phone?”

And I pat my jacket pocket. Yep. My phone. Still there.

The waitress comes over. Lurks behind Bran.

“Uh, it's, uh, for you,” I say, handing it over.

“Hey, who's this?” Bran says. And I watch her. Oh. So this is what angry looks like. That other? Just a dress rehearsal.

“Everything okay?” says the waitress. I look up at her. She's smiling. Then frowning. Scowling. It's my ex-girlfriend Maggie's big sister, Stephanie, the waitress/failed actress. How much of the preceding conversation did she hear? In a moment I'm frowning too. But I can do better than just a frown. For example, I can, I discover, also send a fire-hose-strength fountain of vomit over Stephanie's shoes. And the taste of my puke? It's so disgusting, it makes me want to throw up. So I do. And I do. And I do. My abs are convulsing muscularly—it's a pretty good workout, I am dimly aware—and my gut bucket is emptying out across the floor. I sense people knocking over bottles of soy sauce, scuttling out of splatter range, making noises that I hope but doubt are expressions of sympathy for my plight.

When I look up Kate is handing me napkins with a blank expression. People are calling, “Check, please.” Bran is still on the phone. “Tom just ralphed,” she says. “He's such an idiot. There's nothing wrong with this sushi.”

“Would everyone excuse?” I say, as a speck of barf flies out of my mouth and lands on some sushi. “Not feeling well.”

“Hold on,” says Bran to the phone. To me she says, “You owe me fifteen for the sushi.”

I'm not in the mood to argue, so I pay. Bran is scowling. Kate is scowling. Stephanie is scowling. Liesl's scowling can be inferred. I've just hit some sort of anti-grand slam, like the Bugs Bunny baseball cartoon where he throws a pitch so slowly that three different batters each take three whiffs at the ball before it gets to the catcher's mitt.

I slink home alone nursing only one hope: that I have anthrax. That'll show 'em!

When I get home, I flip through the TV stations. I stop to watch a little Mick Jagger piece on prime-time news shows. There's a guy we can all look up to. What is he, fifty-six? And still shagging everything in sight.

Before the break, the announcer starts with the bloodcurdling urgency.

“Next up, an ex
clu
sive. Inside!
E
vil In
cor
porated. We'll clue you in on what the cold-blooded
mur
derers who plotted the 199
3
World Trade Center bombing told their lawyers—and about how their! damning! statements! are linked to the
thugs
who masterminded September eleventh. When we come
back
.”

So I sit down with my Doritos and watch. It's Bran's TV show. It's Liesl's law firm. So that's how they knew each other. My Eva Braun turned out to be Mata Hari. If I had known she was the kind of person who would risk her job to leak documents to the press, I would have found her so much more interesting.

E
xcept at work, I haven't seen Julia for two weeks. She always comes up with a reason to cancel. Waiting for her at the Marriott Marquis, I think, Wouldn't it be great if you could take someone to relationship court? Plead your case before a neutral observer with the power to make someone quit acting unreasonably? Hate crimes are severely punished. How about love crimes?

Last night I stayed up far too late sifting through evidence: her old e-mails. You can chart the whole history of a relationship on them, can't you? Push a few buttons and they're right there on your screen, like the news ticker on CNN.

Number of e-mails I got from her in February: 9.

In March: 78.

In April: 94.

In May: 105.

In June: 97.

In July: 70.

In August: 22.

In September: 8, all of them in response to mine. Except, I sent her 25.

In October: 2.

In November: 0. In November I stopped e-mailing her. It was too depressing, waiting for her to not answer.

But if I ever get her in front of the nooky judge…Isn't it true, Ms. Brouillard, that on a winter day at precisely 5:37
P.M.
you sent,
unsolicited,
the following e-mail to the plaintiff?

And
by the way,
Ms. Brouillard, were you being completely candid when you sent this memorable note a week later at 4:28
P.M.?

And precisely how, Ms. Brouillard, do you think a reasonable person should have reacted when you sent such nothings as this one on March 9 at 5:44
P.M.?

Isn't it true, Ms. Brouillard, that you fully knew the effect you would be having on an innocent young man when you engaged in this saucy March 23 exchange?

Ms. Brouillard, you have been found guilty of emotional battery of a man who was already socially crippled when you met him. I sentence you to five minutes to life with the plaintiff. He has plenty of room in his apartment, you know.

M
y cell.

“Hey,” I say. “Are you here?” You never know if she's coming. She forces me to ask the same questions repeatedly, like my mother. Can't be sexy. Can't help it.

“I'm at Forty-seventh and Broadway. All my trains were late.”

“I'm at Forty-fifth. I'll meet you at Forty-sixth,” I say.

So she isn't canceling tonight. Not because of me. Because it's the National Book Awards. Hosted by Steve Martin.

Walk north one block. And there she is. All buttoned up in her cute yellow coat. Fishnet stockings peeking out beneath. Don't tell her how fine she looks.

“Hi,” I say.

“Don't hate me,” she says.

“It's okay,” I say. She's fifteen minutes late. I don't really care.

Up the escalators of the Marriott Marquis, all brass and glass.
Check-in is on the seventh floor. I help her off with her coat and rake my eyes down her front. She's wearing a black wool sheath. She has nicer dresses.

“I'm underdressed,” she says. “I was having a fat crisis.”

“Oh?”

“I changed to this one. The other was too tight,” she says.

“I would have preferred that.”

“Yeah. I know.”

Time to find the bar.

“Who are these people?” she says.

I don't know. But Steve Martin is standing right behind me.

Julia goes silent.

We have two glasses of wine. Julia is smoking a cigarette, but she looks as if she wishes she had a second aperture to inhale through. Unfair, isn't it? Two lungs, but only one mouth.

“You look pretty spiffy,” she says.

“I do?”

“You've lost a lot of weight since I met you.”

“Forty pounds, actually,” I say. The vomit diet served me well, although I turned out not to have anthrax.

“You're a catch,” she says.

“Thanks. You're a knockout,” I blurt.

“Aw,” she says.

“So I almost didn't make it tonight,” she says.

A look of hurt darkens my brow. I can feel it.

“Why?”

“I was in this bodega buying cigarettes, and this man—he didn't look like he was homeless or anything, he was just a normal guy in his thirties, leather jacket. Well groomed. He just started to cry.”

I'm running my various sympathetic faces, thinking, This guy's suffering. I'm sorry about that. Why should that mean I have to suffer with him?

“It really got to me,” she says. “That, plus I saw a dog get run over the other day. And the owner just stood there wailing. It was so haunting. It's all just too sad.”

“If the guy was crying in his apartment, that wouldn't have bothered you,” I say.

“I know!” she says. “That's what's so wrong about New York. So communal. I can't breathe.”

“Did you cry too?” I say, creasing my eyebrows and hoping I don't look like a smarmy talk-show guy trying to suck out some Nielsen-friendly pain.

She nods. “I was really shaken,” she says. “I just stood outside for a while, thinking, I can't go to dinner now.”

“I'm so sorry,” I say. “It's really nice to have you here though.”

“Do you think I'm a muppet?” she says. “My brother called me a muppet.”

“I do not. I think of you in black and white, in the early sixties, seen through a rainy windshield. Wearing a shiny three-quarters-length raincoat with matching boots. And a wistful look,” I say.

Yes, I sometimes do talk this way around pretty girls. And empty wineglasses.

She gives me her crooked half smile.

“I thought about you the other day,” she says.

That one is like slamming a double Scotch. Her thinking about me is such a rare occasion that it merits a mention. Did I think about her the other day? Did I breathe air the other day? Since I met her I haven't gone two hours without thinking about her.

“Yeah?” I say.

“I was walking down the street. And I was thinking about how you have this
im
age of me. As this,
per
son, with, all of these characteristics. Like in a novel. And I was thinking that you're one of the only people who thinks of me that way,” she says. “Doesn't that sound stupid?”

“No,” I say. “To me you are a walking novel.”

She doesn't say anything. Her eyes look shy.

“Heard from Rick?” I say.

She slumps.

“Just informational e-mails,” she says.

“You don't discuss the letter you sent?” I say.

“No,” she says. “He hasn't mentioned it. Except to say he got it.”

“You still love him.”

“I think I'll always,” she says. “I've really realized it this fall.”

Yep, sports fans: you never quite get used to hearing that the girl you want is permanently woozy for someone else. She's hopelessly infatuated with someone who has made it clear in a hundred ways that he doesn't want her. Why doesn't she just give up the chase? Can't she see what she's doing to herself? Who could be
that
lame? Who could—Oh. Never mind.

“What did you love about him?” I say.

“He could always, just,
see
things. Like that guy in the bodega. He would have been really upset by that too. He would have felt it.”

Memo to self: start seeing things, and report all sightings to Julia at once.

We sit in the press gallery where they serve cold sandwiches. The swells are downstairs eating $1,000 a plate filet mignon. Steve gives a fabulous introduction to the awards. “Earlier today awards were given out in some technical categories,” he says. “Best glue binding…best page numbering.” The crowd loves it. Book celebrities aren't really celebrities. Here is an actual celebrity, celebritizing the nerdiest art form. A roomful of myopics has never felt so cool.

“The National Book Award is the most prestigious prize a book can receive and still be unknown,” says Steve (wittily,
damn
him).

I start to give Julia's arm the treatment with my nails. She gives a half turn. Smiles.

“The competition has gotten really dirty this year,” Steve is saying. “One of the nominated poets actually went to the printer of one of the other nominees to insert an extra iamb into his meter.”

Julia looks at me with a swoony face every time the guy says something brilliant.

I laugh, smile, hate. The guy's a genius. I don't really measure up. I drink some more wine. Ready. Set. Brood. Occasionally I stroke her back. Mmm. No bra.

There's a long break for dinner. Then the awards are given out. We clap. Steve gives a brief wrap-up. We go.

At the end, we get our coats, go down to Forty-sixth. Cabs and tourists are thrusting in every direction, pummeling the air. Julia looks overwhelmed.

“Let's. Just. Stop,” she says. She lights up.

I wait. She smokes.

“A nightcap,” I say.

She doesn't say anything. She just follows.

We go to Mystery. The same bar we went to that frigid night in March when she got adorably lost and everything seemed ready to happen.

“So I had a little chat with Dwayne,” she says.

“Oh?”

“It wasn't as bad as I thought.”

“Took it like a man?” I say.

“Yeah. He said it wasn't a surprise. He said, ‘If you've been staying with me all this time out of guilt, then that's fucked up. You deserve to be happy.' ”

“So that's all set then,” I say. “Good for you.”

She shrugs.

“What are you going to do now?”

“He isn't kicking me out right away,” she says. “He said I could stay as long as I want.”

“If you need a place…,” I say. Then I stop.

She lets it go.

“I want to read that book on depression,” she says.

The depression book won for nonfiction. The guy who wrote it lives in an old-money Fifth Avenue apartment with twelve-foot ceilings and elaborately book-lined walls. What has he got to be depressed about? He hasn't even met Julia.

“You can still be depressed if you're rich,” she says.

“Are you depressed?”

She nods.

“When did it start?”

“When I was nineteen,” she says.

“You remember it that precisely,” I say.

“Uh-huh. I just started having these panic attacks.”

“And now?”

“I just sort of feel vaguely unhappy. All the time. Like, there's so much
wrong
. You see it every day. Like that guy crying in the deli. And there's nothing you can do about it.”

“It can't be that bad,” I say.

“Plus I'm starting to think everyone is a bomber. Like today, I was smoking outside the building and I saw this, hairy guy go in the bank next door. He looked like he'd just been laid off or something. And he had this box under his arm. I was sort of edging away the whole time. I feel so helpless.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Flee,” she says.

I give her a look.

“Shouldn't everything have been fine with Dwayne?” she says. “I had someone who loves me extravagantly and takes care of me. Shouldn't that be enough?”

“There's just that thing,” I say. Thinking, Extravagantly is my adverb. Dwayne rates no better than
doggedly.