Miss Fortune (28 page)

I'm scurrying up and down the long, empty hallways of the Kennedy School. It's like a horror movie, and not just because I can't find a bar. It's the black-and-white photographs of the blank-eyed schoolchildren with bowl haircuts dancing around a maypole circa 1919 staring out at me that are creeping me out. If a kid on a Big Wheel appears at the end of the hallway, I'm not waiting for his finger to say “Redrum.” I'm out.

Finally, I pass by what I think must be a bar. It's so tiny I can't be sure. There are three empty barstools and a young male bartender behind the bar staring straight ahead and slowly cleaning a glass with a white-and-red-striped dish towel. If the lights in the hallway weren't on, I would've had to go back to my “I'm dead and I just don't know it” theory.

Nothing says “I'm a middle-aged white lady from LA” more than ordering a buttery Chardonnay, but I don't care. If this is death, sign me up. This Chardonnay is delicious. A young lesbian couple joins me at the bar. After downing shots of whiskey, they start making out. It's a graphic, slurping make-out. I lean my body to the left to give them some privacy, but it still feels like I've crawled into their mouths; the smacking noises are deafening.

The bartender and I make eye contact. I start sweating because I can't think of a good quip; their passion is so heavy and I'm so close to it. Should I reach over and tweak a nipple or something? They unattach with a
pop!
and I hear one of them whisper, “If I don't get you home right now, I'm going to lose my mind.” Followed by fifteen minutes of clicking noises as they put on all their bike gear. Helmets, shin guards, shoes, reflectors. “Remember the days of ‘I have to get you home, right now'?” I ask the bartender after we've watched them clomp out on their biker shoes. He doesn't answer. “Me neither,” I say and sip my buttery Chardonnay. That was a lot of passion in a tiny haunted bar. I wonder if they
were sneaking around. Recently, anytime I see people being openly passionate in public, my first thought is, look at the people having an affair.

An affair is inherently thrilling. Also, stressful. I imagine it would be the most incredibly exciting thing ever until it was the most awful, depressing thing ever.

“David is the kindest, deepest, most amazing man I've ever known.” The Human Being said that to me one night after babysitting Leo. How sweet, I'd thought. There's somebody out there who worships him. That's got to make a middle-aged man feel good about himself. We all could use a little perk like that once in a while. I'll tell him she said that, I thought. I bet he has no idea she worships him like that. Her gushing about him reminded me of how I'd gushed about him after our trip to Baja.

David took me to Baja, Mexico, in the early days of our dating. Hiking around the Sea of Cortez, I'd suggested to David that we go swimming. The water was the most perfect clear blue I'd ever seen. It would be rude to not take off all our clothes and jump in. David warned me against it. “The cold water could give you a heart attack, Lauren. What if someone threw a lawn mower into the sea and we stepped on it with our bare feet? There are no hospitals around. We'll have a heart attack, bleed to death, and die.” By the time he got to our clothes being stolen and us freezing to death after the sun went down in the middle of nowhere, I'd taken off my clothes and jumped in. The “spontaneous, fearless, adventure-seeker chick” was not a role I'd ever played. I wanted to show David that it was no big deal. That we could do crazy life things together, survive them, and enjoy the afterbuzz of near-death experiences together. The water felt fantastic. I turned back to shore expecting to see David waving his arms above his head and begging me to swim back. Instead there he was, walking over
the jagged rocks in his bare feet—“Ow! Ow! Ow!”—in his tighty whities to join me. He didn't look any less nervous, but he was coming in the water. Blissed out of my mind, I'd started laughing and crying and laughing. The sight of him looking so nervous but doing it anyway busted my heart wide open. He didn't need to be a macho superhero about it. I didn't need him to not be scared to fall in love with him; I needed him to be scared and dive in anyway. By the time we were swimming to shore to check out what the group of teenage boys carrying brooms who were heading toward our clothing were up to, I'd fallen in love with the kindest, deepest, most amazing man.

Sadly, I never cheated on David. (I'm kidding. I'm glad I didn't. Being able to sob “I was never with anyone but you!” like a daytime soap star is so much more satisfying when it's true.) I hope I believe in love again. For Leo's sake. I hope that by the time he's a teenager I stop referring to marriage as “the festival of lies.”

Well, this is fun. Look at me, out on the town. Woo-hoo.

The bartender dryly informs me that I look “very dolled up” this evening. I do? How does he know that this isn't my norm? My god, he thinks I'm a prostitute. What am I doing? I'm a mother on the road. I'm not even officially divorced. It's not appropriate to be sitting at a bar by myself boozing it up. No, no, no. Wipe that paint off your face, Jezebel, and go see a movie. That's exactly what I should do. Go sit in the dark.

Shockingly, I find the movie theater right away without the help of bloody handprints or a child's breathy voice singing “La la la . . . follow me.” It's a living room–style theater where people watch the movies sitting on couches and La-Z-Boy recliners. The sign out front reads
GEEK TRIVIA NIGHT
. I thought it was the title of a movie. It's not. It's a trivia night—but on a level I didn't know trivia could reach. The place is packed. There must be about three
hundred people shoved onto love seats and sitting on recliners. This was the wholesome place to be. It's Portland, so there's a bar. I'm ordering a beer that's described on the menu as “a bong hit in the bar” when the game starts.

“Where do Klingons go when they die?”

A high-pitched male voice calls out for clarification. “Uh, sir, would that be an honorable or a dishonorable death?”

There's no place to sit, and I notice that everyone is on teams. They all know one another. This may not have been the best thing to do when I'm alone. It was the worst thing. I'm old. I'm the oldest one here by far. I must have looked very dolled up to these trivia geeks.

“If you're looking to join a team, you are welcome to join ours.”

A cute blond boy—he couldn't be more than twenty-three years old, maybe twenty-eight, I'm bad with ages—invites me join his team, which includes two other boys who are somewhere in their twenties. Their team name is the Nerdy Sanchezes. Their invitation touches my heart. How kind. I thank them and cram myself onto the love seat next to the cute blond one. You know what? I love people in their twenties. They're so much more open, so much more willing to take risks. In your twenties you want adventure. The Human Being would sit and talk to me for hours after she got done babysitting. I didn't want her to go home. Talking to a young girl was so interesting, I thought. I actually liked hearing about her hopes and dreams for the future, the frustration of living at home with her parents and trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. “Stop talking to her, Lauren, or she'll never go home,” David would say to me.

“What two ingredients were used on the sandwich Ally Sheedy made in the movie
The Breakfast Club
?”

My teammates know every answer. No discussion needed. One
writes it down; the others glance at the answer, give a quick a nod, and wait for the next question. They don't look like they're having fun, but I sense that maybe they are.

A nerd fight over which font was used in the movie title
Jurassic Park
breaks out. The answer was multiple choice and a team has accused the hosts of the game of fraud: “Sir, none of them are correct. How dare you!”

The blond boy who called me over asks me if I'd like to come back to his house after the game is over to drink beer and watch him and his friends play
Magic: The Gathering.
Asking me this appears to be as painful to him as making eye contact. He glances up to see if I've heard him, but as soon as our eyes meet, he looks away. A shy, nerdy geisha. It struck me in the beginning of the evening as being a bit Aspergery but now I'm thinking that maybe it's because I'm simply too pretty for him to look at for any extended period of time. Or maybe that's the bong hits talking.

“I have no idea if that sounds like any fun at all,” he says to me and hurries to put his headphones on, but I answer before he can block me out.

“I'm in! Where do you live?”

This was not the answer he expected. Me neither. “Why not? Sounds fun! I'll grab some snacks and some vodka. Wait a minute, who wants a Moscow mule? Yum. Let's do that, or, no, let's not. You have to get those tin mugs to really make them work. This is insane. What's your address? Don't worry about directions. I'll give the address to the taxi driver—I mean the bus driver! The bus driver!”

I'm writing down all the details, babbling away, giggling, taking orders, flipping my hair, and the Nerdy Sanchez boys are staring at one another with looks of . . . I can't tell what the look is. Shock? Excitement? Stress? Do I seem
amazing
to them?

What the hell am I doing? I'm supposed to be gathering
material for a play. Am I going to write about making out with a twenty-three-year-old boy? No. I'm not. Remember how fun it was to declare, “I was
never
unfaithful to you, David”? Declaring “I never even kissed a twenty-three-year-old boy I met at Geek Trivia!” would be even better. If it was true. I gave him one tiny kiss, told him, “You're way too young. This feels disgusting, nothing personal, but this isn't happening. Sorry, I'd looked forward to telling myself that you worshipped me, but I can't.”

The night ends with us standing in front of the Kennedy School, waiting for a taxi to take me back to my hotel, telling them about my divorce. The cute blond boy can't believe it. “Wow, it's such a Hollywood cliché—the babysitter?”

“She's a human being.”

Back at my hotel, I'm brushing my teeth in the dark, wondering what this weird life zone I'm in is going to present to me next. I'd fooled myself early on into thinking that four years old was the “perfect” age for your parents to divorce. I mean, if we had to do it,
now
was the time. Leo polled his preschool class and discovered right away that he was the only divorced kid. “Just wait until you get to kindergarten,” I told him. “You'll be the wise master advising the others on the perks of a two-house family.” He didn't get it. How could he? He's four.

A few days later, Leo has arrived. David dropped him off on his way to Seattle. We did the handoff in the Portland airport. Leo is proof that I would have made a far better-looking boy. Seeing his face makes me swoon and my heart race like I'm in love. I
am
in love. Before I know what I'm doing, I'm promising Leo cookies dipped in frosting, helicopter rides, a
Skylanders
video game, and seven puppies unless he only wants six.

Leo and I ride the MAX back to the hotel. He complains that it takes too long.

Thank god he's here. Instead of going out in the evenings to gather material, I'd been sitting in the dark, drinking wine and watching
Intervention,
slurring at the TV, “Come on, lady! Get up off the front lawn and get it together! Jesus. Where's her family? Somebody help her!” Lucky for me, a lot of the addicts lived in Portland so I didn't feel it was a complete waste of time. The park bench where the heroin addict made her boyfriend sit and wait while she exchanged sex in the bushes for money was in Washington Park, a Portland area I hadn't yet explored but meant to.

Now we're in the elevator of the hotel heading out to explore the city. I'm fighting back the urge to ask Leo if he saw the Human kiss his dad. Instead, I keep it light and ask Leo if he had fun with the Human Being after I left. He gives me a funny look. I'm calling her by her name, so his confused look isn't because he doesn't know whom I'm talking about. He honestly looks like he's onto me. He knows that I shouldn't be asking him questions that will put him in the middle and that will only cause me pain. He knows.

“Well, did you have fun with her? She's fun. You did. I love her. You love her, so it's fun. To love someone. It's okay. So did you have fun?” Leo stares at me for a moment before he answers, “I don't know what you're talking about.” He says, “You're not making any sense really,” before he changes the subject to how many doughnuts he'll be having at breakfast. He tells me, “I think you're confused right now, Mama.” How does he know not to answer me? It could have been the manic tone of my voice, sweaty armpits, and tears in my eyes that made him feel his mother was unhinged. Or maybe he's a warlock.

Two well-dressed men with their silky gray dogs get on the elevator. It's that expensive breed of dog that is really good about wearing vintage hats and high heels for photo shoots. They are talking about everyone's favorite topic, Portland.

“You know, Portland is known for being one of the cities with the least amount of people procreating.
Thank you, Jesus.
And it's also known to be one of the smartest cities in the world. So . . . you know. Two plus two.”

Portland is actually a pretty kid-friendly place for the most part. They serve beer at indoor playgrounds, so it's easy to go out and feel like you're not just sitting around waiting to be an adult. But people in the Pearl District, a very high-end neighborhood with warehouses converted into fancy condos, where our hotel is, don't like kids. They don't realize that Leo isn't a kid. He's a little person wearing a four-year-old-boy skin suit. Gross, I made him sound like a serial killer. Or the son of one. The Pearl is more of a dog area. Once we're outside the hotel I'm about to encourage Leo to blend in and take a shit on the sidewalk when he says to me, “You don't like her because Dada loves her and not you, so now you hate her.”