Out to Lunch (20 page)

“What was he doing in the living room?” Only took me the better part of eighteen months for my rug guy Mickey at Al-Sahara to find the perfect large rug for the living room. In creams and golds and taupes. Which are definitely not going to recover from dark chocolate dog puke.

“I must have left the kitchen gate unlocked when I went to bed.”

One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .

“Anyhoo, he’s fine, strong as an ox, doc says not to worry I can take him home, it’s just, um . . .”

“Good god, Wayne just spit it the fuck OUT.”

“The bill is more than I have left to spend on my credit card, so I need you to give them your card to pay for it or they won’t let me take him home.”

“Fine. Put them on the phone.”

He hands me off to a nice woman named Cindy who explains that in addition to the ninety-nine dollar emergency after-hours visit charge, my pup has received a stomach pumping, activated charcoal, an IV to replace electrolytes and flush his system, monitoring, some tests . . . grand total seven hundred eighty-five dollars. I give her my credit card number and tell her to put the large idiot back on the phone.

“Hey, cool, all set. So don’t worry at all, I’m gonna take him home, lock him up tight, clean the rug, we’re all good here. You have a great weekend, and sorry I had to wake you, but if I left him here they were going to charge a boarding fee . . .”

“It’s fine, Wayne. It’s fine. Thank you for taking good care of him.” The phrase sticks in my throat, but at the end of the day, even if it is Wayne’s stupid fault the dog ate the cake, at least he did all the right things. I’ve heard of dogs actually dying of chocolate poisoning, and while I would have gladly killed the dog myself more than once in the past month, I find I don’t actually want him dead.

“Hey, no problem! I’ll see you tomorrow! And Jenny, look, I know that Chewie seems to have been something of a consistent problem child, I didn’t really think about it when I got him for you, but if you can’t handle him, you know, if he isn’t the right dog for you, I’ll take him back.”

“We’ll talk when I get home.”

“Okay, just an offer. Have fun. Say hi to the Bri Guy for me!”

I hang up, sit down at the kitchen table, and let my head drop until my forehead meets the cool surface. And then the sweating starts. And the heart racing. And the wobbly legs and the colon spasms and the race to the bathroom. You’d think I ate a whole poison chocolate cake. I’m back in the kitchen, clammy and still sweating and heart fast, but with a somewhat calmer stomach, when Brian comes down, rubbing his sleepy eyes, hair still weirdly perfect.

“Hey. You’re up early.”

“Sorry. Small emergency back home.”

“Let me guess. Wayne burned down the house? Blew up your car?”

“Chewbacca. Ate a whole chocolate cake. Three a.m. emergency vet run, which Wayne couldn’t afford to pay without my okay.”

“Good lord, it never ends. Is the dog okay at least?”

“Right as rain according to the vet. Strong as an ox and twice as graceful.”

“I knew it was a bad idea for you to let him stay at your house.”

“Well, I didn’t have much of a choice. Wayne’s place is being fumigated, and the kennel politely declined our business.”

“Still. I don’t know which is worse, Wayne or the fucking dog he foisted on you.”

“Hey, people make mistakes. Dogs are just dogs. The dog could have died and Wayne did all the right things to save his life, and wouldn’t have even told me till tomorrow except Aimee’s stupid rules meant he didn’t have access to enough funds.”

“Leave me out of this one.”

Have I told you lately about the general direction in which I would like you to fuck?

“Ouch. You’re really not a morning person.”

“I still think you should get rid of that damn beast. Hand him back to Wayne with a ‘thanks but no thanks’ and be done.”

And then something weird happens. I stop sweating, all at once, like flipping a switch. My heart rate normalizes. And I start to cry. And I’m not a crier. Especially with guys. Never have been. But all at once the whole thing hits me, and all I can think of is my poor Chewie, so sick and unhappy and I wasn’t there. As panicked as I was that something might have happened to Volnay without me, there is something that is now just sinking in. Wayne’s offer to take the dog away, Brian’s insistence at getting rid of him; my heart hurts.

I look up at Brian through tears. “I LOVE that dog. He’s going nowhere. And you’d better figure out how to tolerate him, because me and him? We’re a team. We’re family. Package deal. And I would really appreciate if you would, one, stop telling me to get rid of him and B., perhaps show the tiniest bit of compassion for my dog who could have DIED tonight.”

And that? Right there? Was a beginning and an ending. It was the beginning of a deep love affair with a badly behaved dog, and the ending of my lovely weekend away with Brian.

19

N
ancy laughs. I can’t really blame her. “That is quite a tale.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“So the weekend was a bust.”

“Not entirely. Brian was somewhat shocked by my outburst, and disappointed when I said I wanted to go home to be with my dog, but we talked on the ride home, and by the time we got back I think he got it. He ended up spending the night at my place that night, and we’ve been pretty good since then. I got us reservations for EL Ideas for Valentine’s Day, which is damn near impossible, and a place he has wanted to eat forever, and he was really excited, so I think it was ultimately a strengthening thing.”

“So do you consider him your boyfriend?”

“I consider him the man in my life.”

“That’s not the same.”

“No, it’s not. But it feels like enough for me, for now.”

“And for later?”

“I’m living in the moment.”

“That sounds like a cop-out. But today I think we have bigger issues that it brings up.”

“Like?”

“Like this whole distance thing. You fight liking Wayne. You fought liking the dog. You fight getting committed to Brian. You’re keeping things at arm’s length, and I’m wondering why?”

“I think I’m fine. I don’t just open up right away.”

“You’ve known Wayne for almost a decade. You’ve had the dog for two months. You’ve known Brian for six years and have been dating for three months. These are not ‘right away’ situations.”

“What can I say, it is what it is.”

“Why do you think you keep having these panic attacks?”

“Because someone I know refuses to hook a girl up with the Xanax.” I laugh, but it’s forced.

“That isn’t an answer. When do you have them?”

“They just come out of nowhere.”

“I don’t think they do. I think they come when you are scared about being close to someone or something.”

“I don’t think that.”

“You say they started when you were dealing with Aimee’s death becoming imminent, your very best friend in the world, leaving you. You told me you had one the first time you went back to the Library after she died, with your adopted family waiting to be kind to you. At Thanksgiving when Andrea and her mom reached out to say that you could lean on them. When Wayne called to say that the dog could have died. You don’t see a pattern? That you are scared when closeness is involved? That you’re keeping things at arm’s length?”

“I really don’t.” Except that I do.

“Jenna. I know that losing Aimee was, is, so very, very hard. I also know, or at least I infer, that your independence is hard won and protective. That you have always been insular. It was just you, growing up, with older parents who were loving but gave you as much space as your intelligence warranted, and in the process, made you very much a person who did for herself.”

“And this is a bad thing?”

“Of course not. Unless you use your ability to do for yourself to keep you from making strong connections to other people.”

“Then how do you explain Aimee? I could not BE closer to someone.”

“True. But you met Aimee and made that friendship everything for you personally. And your work took care of the rest. You seem to think that if you are weak, if you show vulnerability, if you NEED, that that makes you needy. Unlovable, maybe. But more importantly, I think you have not yet begun to scratch the surface of your loss of Aimee, and unconsciously are working very hard at not getting particularly close to anyone or anything else, because you can’t pile loss on more loss.”

“Again, this is bad why?”

“Until you address what it means to have lost Aimee, you can’t let someone else in your life who might leave you. It’s like refinishing furniture. You can slap another coat of paint on top, but it will bubble and streak and never be right. Or you can do the very hard annoying work of stripping away the finish that is there so that you can start clean, and fresh.”

“Seriously? I’m getting furniture-stripping metaphors? At one hundred and eighty-five dollars an hour?”

She smiles. “I’m redoing a sideboard.”

“Thought so.”

“I’d argue it still fits.”

“I hear you. I don’t really know what to say about it, but I hear you. I don’t think it’s true, but you think it’s unconscious, so I can’t really be sure. I know I’m sick of the whole world waiting for me to fall to pieces.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Fall to pieces.”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“BECAUSE AIMEE IS DEAD.”

“And?”

My voice cracks. “And she is the only person I can fall apart with. She is the only person who can put me back together. Because she is the only one who has ever known my secret heart and my dark places and my deepest fears and she IS FUCKING DEAD. I trusted her. I trusted her with everything I am and was and wanted to be. I trusted her with my whole heart and she promised to be here and she is GONE. I can’t lose it because she is the only one who could bring me back.” The tears are hot and fast on my cheeks. “Don’t you think I would have dearly LOVED to just go to pieces? I don’t have the luxury. If I let myself go to pieces, I’d never get myself whole ever again. Who is going to put me back together? My parents? They’re a thousand years old and two thousand miles away. Wayne? He might not be the devil I imagined, but he can’t remember to put the cake away; he’s going to patch me up when I fall? My staff? I love them, but they WORK FOR ME. I pay salaries, benefits, I know they care, but they can’t see me all broken. Brian too. Who, pray tell, do I really have? No one, that’s who. I am the most alone person in the world. But at least I know me. I know what I can do. I can take care of my dogs, and make sure the people around me are taken care of, but there is no one to do that for me. I know it, and it sucks, but it is what it is. I never got the people who get so angry that they sweep everything off the table to break into a million pieces on the floor. Because when they’re done with their fit, they are going to have to clean that shit up. My dog craps on the floor, I have to clean it up. Why would I crap on the floor myself, knowing I’d have to clean it up. I can’t break into a million pieces, because frankly, I don’t want to have to clean that shit up.”

“And if Aimee were here, she’d clean it up.”

“She’d clean it up. Or we’d clean it up together. Or she’d trick someone else into cleaning it up. And make it better. She’d make it fucking ELEGANT.”

“And if you tried to get close to someone else, to let other people in, to like Wayne, to love the dog, to love Brian, they could also leave you, you could also lose them, and Aimee can’t clean that up either.”

“Every guy who ever broke my heart, every bad grade, every client who yelled, every soufflé that fell, Aimee was there. When my parents moved away, when Jack left, Aimee was there. Now, no one is here. It’s just me. Me and my pain and my fear and my loss and my aloneness, and it may not be what I would have chosen, but I know it and I can handle it. Because I don’t really have a choice.”

“What if you did?”

“Did what?”

“Have a choice.”

“I don’t.”

“Of course you do.”

“Well, maybe I should just get on my magical unicorn and fly to this wondrous land of choices you speak of,” I say, snarkier than I intend.

She raises an eyebrow. “Feel better?”

“It was kind of a good one.”

“Of course it was.”

“Fine. You tell me. What fabulous choices do I have?”

“You think about that, about the choices you do have. The ones that might help you find a safe place to land if you fall apart a little bit. And we’ll talk about it next time.”

Sigh. “Okay.”

“And Jenna?”

“Yeah?”

“Here.” She hands me a piece of paper. It’s a prescription for five Xanax.

“Finally.”

“Here’s the catch. That is the only prescription I will ever write you for those pills. You get five. Total. Forever. Use them wisely.”

Figures.

* * *

W
hen I get home, I walk the dogs and collapse on the couch for a nap. My outburst really took it out of me. When I wake up, it’s after six, and I’m ravenous. I go to the kitchen, and stare blankly into the fridge. Nothing jumps out at me. I wander into the Kitchen Library and look over the shelves of cookbooks. And there, on the bottom shelf, The Notebook.

I pull it out, feeling the cool, soft leather. I take it into the kitchen and put it on the table. I turn the pages, watching my handwriting change, my tastes develop, my palate getting more sophisticated. I look at every page, reading my scrawled notes, until I get to the last page.

I had forgotten about this recipe idea.

Aimee’s Salad Bar Soup

I’d been hanging out with Aimee in the hospice. We were talking about the perfect home-cooked meal. And she said her idea of the perfect home-cooked meal would be a hearty filling stewlike soup that didn’t require any work. The opposite of me. And I came home and couldn’t sleep and came up with this idea and wrote it down, and while I was doing that she was slipping into the pain that would require so much morphine that we would never have a lucid conversation ever again.

I reach up to wipe tears away to find that my cheeks are dry. And then I get up. I grab my coat and head for the car. In ten minutes I am at the massive Whole Foods on Kingsbury. I go to the salad bar. I fill containers with carrots, celery, sliced onions, shredded cabbage, chopped tomatoes. Garbanzo beans and corn. Shredded chicken, peas, chopped cauliflower, and broccoli. Baby spinach leaves. Cooked barley. I check out, with my three salad bar containers, and head back toward home. I stop at La Boulangerie and pick up a baguette. I get home and don’t even take my coat off. I get out one of my big stock pots, and dump all three containers into the pot. From the pantry, a jar of Rao’s marinara. From the freezer, a container of homemade chicken stock. I don’t even bother to thaw it, I just plop it like an iceberg into the pot. Salt, pepper, red pepper flakes for heat. I crank the heat to medium, give it a stir and leave it. I dump my coat, and head upstairs. I get into a very hot shower, feeling my shoulders unclench in the steam. I get out, dry off and get into comfy clothes, throw my hair in a ponytail. I head back downstairs, pour a glass of wine. I set a place at the table, a French linen tea towel for a place mat, a single large silver spoon, both treasures found at Clignancourt market in Paris. I grab the butter from the fridge, and a half a lemon, a wedge of parm, the cheese grater from the drawer, the baguette. I go to the stove, where the soup is bubbling like mad, giving off an amazing smell. I give it a stir, a quick taste, adjust the salt and pepper. It will taste even better tomorrow, but it is still very fresh and delicious. I ladle out a generous bowl and set it at my place. A squeeze of lemon, a shower of grated cheese. I alternate between bites of hearty savory soup and thickly buttered crusty bread. I eat two bowls. Half the baguette. Finish the wine. And think, whatever else there is, this is good. And would have been just what Aimee wanted.