Snark and Stage Fright (5 page)

“Georgia, I can’t bel
ieve
this is the first time you’ve ever been to the Cape!” she scolded, as if I had just found a pile of dog droppings on the lawn and brought it in to show everyone. “That’s just
wrong
.”

“My family’s only been in Massachusetts for two years,” I said, hating myself for explaining my negligence. “I guess we just didn’t get around to it yet.”

“Well,
I
couldn’t live without it,” she declared and smiled at Michael in a way that seemed intended to rekindle a thousand golden memories of their time together on these honeyed shores. Meanwhile, I found myself wishing that I could set her hair on fire with the power of my mind. At the moment, pyrokinesis seemed like a talent worth cultivating.

As she whispered something else to Michael, I heard his uncle Don behind me telling his dad about a phone consultation he’d had with Brad Pitt concerning the restorations he’d done in New Orleans after the hurricane.

“Oh, you do green building projects?” I asked him, grateful to have a polite reason to ignore Catalina and thanking God that I had read about Brad Pitt’s housing projects in one of my Dad’s
Atlantic
magazines. Or maybe it was my mom’s
People
. “That’s so great!”

He beamed at my enthusiasm and started to tell me at great length about a building he was designing in Sao Paolo. Michael’s dad winked at me before walking away because he could tell I was getting a little bored and overwhelmed, even though I was trying really hard to smile the whole time. And then Forrest Ritter appeared, tugging at my elbow, and telling Michael’s uncle, “I must steal this lovely young lady from you for a moment, Don.”

Don grudgingly waved me away and I found myself being propelled from the room through the crowd by the famous writer’s hand on my elbow. As we left, I saw Michael watching me with a concerned look and hoped that he would wrap up whatever he was saying to Catalina really soon and, remembering the last contact I had had with his idol, swoop in like his secret hero, Spiderman, to save me.

Forrest Ritter stopped when we got to a little bar tucked into a hallway between the kitchen and the dining room where no one but the caterers would go; he took my hand and looked at me with big, sad, disturbingly dark blue eyes.

“I want to apologize to you for my lack of gallantry last night,” he said.

“Oh.” I hesitated because I’d written off last night’s transgression by deciding that he had been too drunk to know what he was doing. I wasn’t sure now whether it was better or worse that he had been in full command of his actions and remembered them clearly.

“And I have a little gift,” he continued, “such as it is, to make amends.” He reached into the pocket of his pistachio-colored jacket and produced a book, one of his. “Read the inscription.”

I opened the cover to the title page and found written in a manly scrawl in black pen: “To Georgiana—May she be as gracious as she is lovely.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You didn’t have to do this, but thank you.”

As a waitress with an empty tray nudged past us, he put his hand to his heart and said, “It was most ungentlemanly of me to take that liberty.” He sighed and turned those startling blue eyes, now mournful, on me as he confessed, “I’ve revealed myself to be the scruffy boy from Wichita that I truly am, an interloper in this glamorous world of grace and riches—the turd in the punch bowl.”

I had to laugh at that image—especially if I imagined Michael’s grandmother standing next to that punch bowl, crystal ladle in hand, calling for her smelling salts before she fainted.

“Oh, Mr. Ritter, in those plaid pants you look just as preppie as the rest of them back in the living room,” I assured him.

He looked down at his pants for a second and grinned. “They’re awful, aren’t they?”

“Yesterday, I saw Michael’s uncle Reg in a pair that had little green whales on them. That was infinitely worse.”

He laughed, whirled deftly to grab two cocktail glasses off a passing tray, and said as he handed one to me, “You must call me Forrest. Any girl I compromise has the right to call me by my first name.” Then he clinked his glass against mine, said, "Cheers!” and drained his drink in two swallows.

I sipped mine more hesitantly, but it wasn’t bad, and I looked up at him for his diagnosis.

“Whiskey sour,” he said. “You’ve graduated to the harder stuff, Miss Georgia.”

“Maybe it will help.”

He leaned one hip back against the little sink built into the bar and asked, “Help with what?”

“Oh … fitting in here, I guess. This place is pretty intimidating. And I insulted the matriarch yesterday, right in front of her. I think Michael’s forgiven me, though.”

“Ah, the matriarch. You mean old Iron Knickers Betsy?”

I gulped out a laugh and spilled my drink so much that he took it from me, then shook his hand for a second to dry it before he decided to lick it off instead. I frowned and looked away because this seemed like such an oddly intimate gesture—I felt like I shouldn’t be witnessing it. It weirded me out, so I asked, “Iron Knickers Betsy? Is that what they call Michael’s grandmother?”

“That’s what
I
call her. I think Don and the others just call her Sarge.” He gently maneuvered me closer to the bar to get out of the way of another uniformed servant. This put us deeper into the little nook, me and the sink and the rows of gleaming glasses and the famous writer of incomprehensible fiction. I felt a little dizzy all of a sudden.

“I, um, need to get back to—”

I gagged as Forrest Ritter’s mouth silenced mine and his tongue began pushing its way down my throat. Without thinking, I reached up my hand, still clutching his autographed book, and whacked him on the side of the head with it. He pulled back, sputtering, then spun away and roared down the hallway as I stood there trying to catch my breath without re-experiencing this awful taste of alcohol, cigarettes, and lax dental hygiene. I felt like vomiting and crying and running out of the house and straight into the water, where I’d be happy to float until I forgot all about what had happened and how his tongue had felt in my mouth.

Instead, I stumbled out to the edge of the party to find Forrest Ritter standing with a hand on his cheek, announcing to the world, “That uptight little bitch hit me! She did! She
struck
me!”

As I sunk shaking against the wall, I heard a general gasp and saw people rush toward him. I saw Michael push past Catalina and hurry to catch me. I heard Michael’s uncle Don asking Forrest Ritter “Who hit you?” as Dr. Endicott hurried over to me, right behind Michael, and asked quietly, “Are you all right?” They formed a human wall between me and the rest of the party, but I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t make any noise somehow except a little squeak when Michael put a hand on my shoulder. His dad suggested he take me home and as we left, I felt, rather than saw, everyone staring at me; I wanted to disappear somewhere—after boiling the taste of Forrest Ritter out of my mouth.

Michael waited to ask me what happened until we had walked down the terraced steps to the path to his parents’ house, the cozy-by-comparison gray-shingled bungalow we’d moved into upon his parents’ arrival that morning.

As soon as I managed to gulp out, “Forrest Ritter tried to jam his tongue down my throat. It was
aw
ful—” I broke off and started crying really hard. Michael put both his arms around me and let me cry onto his soft blue cotton shirt until I had calmed down enough. Then, using one arm to steady me, he slowly guided me into the house and onto the blue and white striped couch in the white, wood-paneled living room. He sat next to me, then jumped up and hurried away, returning with a box of Kleenex. I blew my nose and wiped up tears as we sat in silence until I sort of choked out, “It’s so humiliating … first he does
that
and then everyone was staring. Having him jump on me was disgusting, but now your family thinks I beat up some famous old man!”

Michael sat back against the couch pillows. His jaw flexed and he punched one knee with the arm that wasn’t around me. He said, “No one thinks you beat him up, George. I know I kind of joked away when he put his hand on you before but—now I should go punch him in the nose.”

“No!” I cried so fiercely he pulled me into his arms and began stroking my hair like I my dad did when I was a little girl with a nightmare. “I don’t want to upset your family or disrupt Rose’s big celebration any more. I just want Forrest Ritter to stay away from me.”

“We’ll see to that,” Michael assured me. I could see his knee shaking underneath his always impeccably pressed khaki pants. And while he was upset on my behalf, I had a feeling that the rest of the party up on the hill was more upset with me for ruining the pre-wedding cocktail party.

Michael’s mom walked into the bungalow, then into the little kitchen for a glass of water for me. She sat on the edge of the coffee table, put her hand on my knee, and said, “If you really did hit him, Georgia, I hope you knocked some sense into him.” She reached out and stroked my hair for a moment, setting all of her silver bangle bracelets jingling, as she began to explain, “Forrest Ritter used to be a real ladies’ man back in his day. And he hasn’t quite figured out that alcoholism, bitterness, and advanced age have made him significantly less attractive to most of the female population, except the occasional literary groupie. He probably thought you were interested, Georgia. It’s sad, I suppose, but certainly no excuse for his repulsive behavior.” She looked at her son, whose jaw was set in a grim, straight line; I could see a muscle flicker slightly right below his ear. She sighed, then smiled at me gently, asking, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said firmly, hoping I sounded braver than I felt because I didn’t want Michael to keep looking like he was going to run up the hill to demand Forrest Ritter meet him with pistols at dawn. “I just feel creeped out and so sorry that it ruined Rose’s rehearsal dinner.”

“
You
did nothing wrong,” she said with a sad laugh. “Though Reg and Don are probably up there making excuses for Forrest and helping him lick his wounds.”

I nodded and looked down at my feet sadly. I kept thinking about that line from F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The rich are very different from you and me.” And even if Forrest Ritter
had
been a scruffy boy from Wichita once, he was one of them now, the glittering people with houses like glass boats, and I wasn’t. And never would be. And I just kept proving how out of place I was. Someone like Catalina would have known how to deal with drunken literary gods with grabby hands. She wouldn’t have blown up a party as effectively as a grenade.

“I’m sure my dad is setting them straight,” Michael assured me as he stood up. “And I’m going to tell Ritter what I think of him.”

“No! Please. Just stay here, with me, please. I want all of those people to just forget about me and what happened,” I pleaded.

He looked at his mom, who cupped his chin with her hand and said, “Georgia doesn’t need you to ride up there on a white horse.”

“No, please,” I repeated. “I feel bad enough.”

Michael sighed, held out his hand to me, and suggested, “You want to go upstairs and call it a night?”

I smiled a little and said, “Yes,” and he took my hand and squeezed it. In the confusion of the past hour, I had all but forgotten that this would be our first night together—or at least across the hall from one another. That morning, he had shown me to the guest room, bounced a bit on the bed, and declared that he looked forward to tucking me in for the night. That sounded like a sweet way to end a creepy evening.

I said good night to his mom and after changing out of my dress, I waited for him in the hallway outside the bathroom. I had on a kimono over my pj’s and he wore long plaid flannel shorts and a T-shirt with a bear on it, which was close enough to little boy footie jammies to make me smile. He looked beyond adorable.

“You look so cute!” I said, and put my arms around him for a hug, which he returned somewhat stiffly. I stepped back to look at his face and his expression was troubled.

“You’re not mad at me, are you?” I tried to joke. “Just because I whacked a literary treasure in the face with a copy of his own book?”

He sighed, hesitated, and admitted, “I just wonder, sometimes, why you get into situations like that. More than anybody I know … You know I hate drama. I hate big scenes, and you’ve already started a couple, even though we’ve only been here for two days.”

“‘Scenes’ like what? Being molested by a former literary stud muffin who now smells like salami and paint thinner? Yeah, I set
that
scene up masterfully.” I hugged my arms to my chest, barely daring to breathe. “You’re not really blaming me for what happened?”

“No! That sickens me, and I think you know that.” He sighed and leaned against the door to his room, saying, “I mean like the way you were making fun of my grandmother. Yeah, Gram can be a judgmental old crow—but I love her. You don’t have to mock her, especially in front of the rest of the family. And Catalina? She’s a friend. Whatever was going on between the two of you when I went back to the house … That was like a catfight from one of those
Real Housewives
shows. I can’t even watch five minutes of one of those shows—I don’t want to live in one.”

He was right about his grandmother. And probably even Catalina. Forrest Ritter could be consigned to a trash heap in hell for all I cared, but I needed to try harder with Michael’s family and family friends. I was the alien in their world. I had to learn to adapt before I alienated Michael.

Groping for humor at the end of one of the worst days that had ever started out so promisingly, I suggested, “Maybe I have a brain tumor?” I really wanted to see him smile. I really wanted him to hug me and kiss me and tell me that he understood.

But instead Michael rubbed his eyes and peeled himself off the wall, saying, “I think I’m going to go to sleep, okay?” Then he kissed me on the top of my head like I was his little sister and turned toward his room.

I felt tears stinging the backs of my eyes as I croaked out, “What happened to tucking me in?”