Miss Fortune (20 page)

Saturday night arrives. I'm excited. It's been a long time since I've gotten dressed up. “Mama getting laid tonight!” I yell out from the bathroom. “Clip-clip here . . . clip-clip there. In the merry old land of Oz.” Pubic hair is flying everywhere. David walks by the
bathroom and sticks his head in. He doesn't seem to notice what I'm wearing or my age-inappropriate ringlet hairstyle.

He tells me to take my time in the bathroom because he's not showering. “I showered yesterday before my hike.”

There's a knock on the front door. The babysitter has arrived. Finally, I'm going to be more dressed up than Ava-Rose!

I open the door. It's not Ava-Rose. It's the opposite of Ava-Rose. It's a short man with poufy hair from Long Island. It's Joel.

Joel has never knocked on our door before. Standing next to Joel is a disinterested-looking teenager with long straight hair down to her butt—Crystal Gayle or Mama Duggar hair, depending on your generation.

He's come over to introduce me to his prostitute. How progressive.

“Hey, Lauren. So listen. I got married. This is my wife, Svetlana.” He puts his hand in front of my face so I can see his wedding ring. “There it is, so yeah, I'm married to her.” He points to Svetlana, who nods at me gruffly.

“So if anyone comes around asking, we're married. She lives with me. Like husbands and wives do.”

Is he hinting for presents?

“You seem very in love,” I tell them.

I congratulate them, shut the door, and run to tell David about Joel's mail-order bride. He's in Leo's bedroom setting out his pajamas.

“David, it's the first time he's spoken to me in a nice tone! Last week he yelled at a grandma who was babysitting her grandkids to ‘shut that kid up or I'll shut him up!'”

David wants to know why I'm so sure it's a fake marriage. “You never know, people get married for all sorts of reasons. Look at us!” He laughs heartily.

For the first time since we got married two years ago, I wonder if David really wanted to get married. How odd that I'd never doubted it until now.

A year into our dating we'd gotten engaged but called it off six months later and decided to wait until we felt more “stable.” When I asked him again to get married, I explained that if he got hit by a car, his medical expenses would be more costly than a divorce, and so we should marry so I could add him to the great insurance policy I had through my union. “And of course I love you,” we both quickly added after we talked about the money we'd save on taxes.

I acted like it was all insurance-based, but of course it wasn't.

Now I'm remembering how when I asked him, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Sure.” He'd suggested that it be cheap and quick. I said, “Like your mother?” Like I said, it was romantic.

There's another knock on the door. I half expect to open it and find Joel holding the girl's dead body—“Here! Hide this! Please. I owe you!” Thankfully, it is Ava-Rose this time.

David walks out of Leo's bedroom. He avoids eye contact with Ava-Rose and walks right out the front door. “See you outside.”

I'm in the middle of reminding Ava-Rose about Leo's bedtime when she takes me in her arms for a hug and whispers in my ear, “You're beautiful. I know you don't believe it, but you are.” No. I don't want her to get all heal-y on me. It disrupts the power dynamic.

I take back my control by saying, “
I'm pretty! I'm pretty!
” like Quasimodo, and then proceed to pour out every personal detail about my marriage to her. I tell her that I'm worried David isn't feeling manly enough. I tell her that he didn't say anything about me shaving myself down for date night.

Ava-Rose drops to the floor, crosses her legs, and pats the floor next to her.

“Lauren, come here. Right now.”

Oh shit. Here she goes. She's pulled this kind of stuff on me before. After Leo was first born and I complained about not making enough money, she gave me a gratitude journal so I could attract more of what I was grateful for in my life. I ended up using it to keep track of my weight and make lists of people who had screwed me over.

“I want you to visualize the perfect date night—see it . . .
really
see it.”

This is what I get for trying to trick someone into telling me I'm attractive.

“In my culture, if you visualize in front of another person it's considered rude. Okay, so you don't have to wash Leo's hair—”

“Stop it, Lauren. I know you're into this kind of stuff. I've seen your bookshelves. Just sit down.” She pulls me down onto the floor next to her.

I pop right up—“Done!”

“I know you're being funny to deal with this moment, and that's okay.”

Finally, she gives up and tells me that I can skip the visualization but she just wants me to remember that “if it hurts, it isn't love.” I'm not taking any advice on love from an actress in her early twenties. At that age, I tell her, if it hurts it's an infection, and it is love because now you both have it, and you'll be together forever since your partner is the only one who will apply ointment.

How many more middle-aged bad-marriage jokes can I make? I sound like Erma Bombeck, or a bad sitcom without Asian jokes and canned laughter.

Ava-Rose comes at me for another hug-and-whisper session.

“The only reason I'm not laughing is because I'm not a big laugher, but I appreciate it. You're beautiful.”

Date night is a disaster. Neither one of us has bothered to make
a plan for where we are going. David wants to go to some happy hours he's been researching online. I want to have a night like we used to back in our dating days, where we'd hang out in the photography book section of Barnes & Noble trying to find the most “life-changing” photo we could. We'd show each other the photos of piles of dead bodies or funerals of stillborn babies from the Dust Bowl . . . something romantic.

In the end, we compromise and go to a Woody Allen movie about a middle-aged woman who loses her mind after her marriage falls apart,
Blue Jasmine.
At the moment where Cate Blanchett's character overshares with her young nephews, telling them, “Listen, boys, there's only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming,” I start applauding.

David suggests we skip going out after the movie to save money. We're walking up to our apartment arguing about the apartment and which one of us drinks more alcohol when we get to our front door to find Ava-Rose sitting on the couch drinking hot tea with the door to the apartment wide open.

“Don't you watch horror movies?” I tell her. “Murderers love babysitters!”

She responds in a very calm voice, “My safety and my happiness are under my control.”

I grant her plenty of leeway, but keeping the door wide open in our hood at one
A.M.
is too far. Our apartment has a lot of foot traffic running beside it from the street to the back alley behind the building. We're the only building in the neighborhood without a front gate, making it the perfect shortcut to get from the park across the street to the back alley. There are some things that nobody feels comfortable doing in public that they will happily do in the privacy the alley provides, like changing socks after a long day or shooting up into their scrotum. We've had packages stolen
off our front steps numerous times. Somewhere out there are some beach pirates, as a posse of homeless men who live on the beach like to be called, using Christmas coasters from a year-round holiday store in Indianapolis for their Mad Dog 20/20 and wearing Thomas the Tank Engine toddler underwear.

Ava-Rose is looking at me like I'm being insensitive to the plight of my fellow human beings. I'm not. There is a park across the street from us, and the folks who spend their days there are a part of our community. Some of the regulars I'd consider friends. The lady who spit on Jack on his way to school isn't just the spitting lady; she's
my
spitting lady. The bearded man with the giant beer belly who reads the newspaper saw me walking through the park with Leo once, irritated that there was no room for us to throw a football, counting, out loud, all the bodies that were spread out and sleeping in the park. Right as I got to twelve, he sat up and nudged his girlfriend, who was lying on a blanket next him. “I hope she's counting to figure out how many sandwiches to bring and not bullets.” He called me out and he was right. I'd been walking around wishing I could rearrange the world for Leo like a Nazi propaganda film director.

“Listen, Ava-Rose. Just this week I had a guy, completely drunk, covered in blood splatters and dried pee, come up to me as I was walking out of the apartment and try to grab a cookie out of my hand. And when I told him, ‘I don't think so, buddy,' he yelled at me to ‘fuck off.'”

Ava-Rose asks me the same question that every one of my friends asked me after I told them the story: “Why didn't you just give him the cookie?” The truth was that I'd been saving the last three cookies to eat on my ride to work, but I didn't want to get distracted from the issue, so I tell her, “It wasn't about the cookie; he was threatening me.”

Ava-Rose stands up from the couch and grabs her leg in one hand in some yoga circus move and looks me right in the eyes—like she likes to do—and gives me the report on Leo.

“So, I didn't put the nighttime diaper on because Leo told me he doesn't need them anymore because he just holds his penis shut all night, and I didn't do the dishes because there were some dishes from when I wasn't here and I was scared that if I did them it would be implying that I thought you should do your dishes. Does that make sense?”

David starts to insist on walking Ava-Rose to her car. “This neighborhood can get very ‘land of the zombies' at nighttime,” he tells her, but she peacefully refuses.

“Are you guys trying to act like you live in some tough neighborhood? You live in Santa Monica, come on.”

She gives me
another hug
, whispers, “That must have been a really special cookie,” winks, and walks out of the apartment with her shoes in her hand, barefoot. “And by the way—I love your apartment. I would kill to live here.”

Date night ends with us listening to the sounds of the Florida newlyweds having sex for forty-five minutes.

At three
A.M.
, I wake up to find David not in bed. When I realize that he isn't next to me, my heart starts racing, which seems a bit of an extreme reaction when he could have been having a pee or eating a bowl of cereal. I walk out to the living room, and there he is sitting in the dark watching
The Walking Dead
, wearing his sunglasses with a glass of whiskey on the table next to him.

I ask him why he's wearing sunglasses and he answers me like it was the most ridiculous question a person could ask another person.

“So I can see the TV, Lauren.”

It gives me an awful feeling of dread that seems out of
proportion to the situation. Maybe seeing a man sitting in the dark with sunglasses on in the middle of the night stirs up repressed memories of being date-raped by Stevie Wonder. But I doubt it. Stevie is an angel visiting us from another planet, here to spread love. All I know is that it bothers me far more than it should.

The Florida newlyweds are having sex all the time.

“Okay, she's giving him a blow job in their kitchen right now, so they'll be moving to the bedroom in about ten minutes,” I say to Christina on the phone.

Christina thinks I should write an anonymous note.

“You'd be doing her a favor. They're the kind of people that will always be living in apartments, so you'd be teaching her a life lesson.” She tells me she'd offer to do it but she's super-busy dealing with that “new wannabe singer idiot” who moved in above her. “The police wouldn't let me file a complaint about her singing in the shower but now her dumb-ass cat is knocking things off her bookshelf every morning, I totally have a case, but I have to act fast.”

I write a note on typewriter paper in big block letters that looks like a first grader copied it off a chalkboard for handwriting class.

The note says, “I'm so glad you guys are having a healthy sex life, but I live in the apartment building next door and would appreciate it if you'd close your windows.”

I watch their doorway for them to leave, and once I'm sure they're gone I run out and stick it in their mailbox. My hands are shaking like I'm planting a bomb. As soon as it's in the mailbox, I freak out. Why didn't I write it with my left hand? I forgot to melt wax on my fingers to hide fingerprints!

Today I don't even bother to make an excuse. “I'm going to the garage to weigh myself.”

I pull the garage door open, a spring breaks and the door comes
crashing down on my head. Before I know it, I'm in tears rolling on the ground in pain and hear the sound of Leo laughing. I look up and see him pretending to drink from a mud-encrusted liquor bottle he's pulled out of the bushes next to our building. David must have heard me scream when I hit my head because he comes running around the corner in his sunglasses—“Lauren, you can't leave the front door open like that! Leo went running out and I didn't even know he was gone!”

He walks over to Leo, takes the Mad Dog bottle away from him, and puts it back in the bushes. “David, throw it away—don't put it back.”

“No, my heart goes out to these guys. I'd be mad if my stash was suddenly missing and I had to go to sleep sober,” he says to me, and walks away with Leo.

Have I done something to David that I forgot about? Crashed his car? Had sex with his brother? I follow them inside and wait until Leo is down for a nap to ask him what is going on.

“You told me that you were going to give me credit for helping you when you produced
Bust
, but you never did. My name wasn't in the program.”