Table for Two (3 page)

2

“So I have
news,” I
tell Jack. He dunks a huge piece of his ham and cheese sandwich into his coffee
and stuffs it into his mouth. I make a face and look around at the almost empty
café. Sometimes I wonder if this place is invisible, if Jack and I, along with
a handful of other people, are the only ones who can see it. Sometimes I wonder
if this secret shop is the only real thing we have left in common.

“Shoot,” he says.

“I’m taking a timeout from dating.
For the entire summer.”

“What are you, five?” he asks.
“You teach preschool, but you’re not
in
preschool,
Jill. You don’t need a timeout.”

“Yes, I do,” I insist.

“Says who? Charles? Why are you
even listening to him? He’s in college.” He says this like it’s a bad thing.
“All he has on his mind are the three Bs: basketball, booze, and boobs.”

“Hey,” I say, trying not to sound
defensive. “Charles happens to make a lot of sense. And I always tell my
students, if you’re not ready to do something yet, like listen to a story or
pick up your toys, you take a timeout. Maybe I’m not ready to continue all this
pointless dating.”

Jack laughs. “Dude, you know I
love you, but you’re acting really weird right now.”

I look at him. “Jack. Seriously.
How many times have I been supportive of you, even when you were totally being
an idiot?”

The answer, and he knows this very
well, is
many,
many times
. I know this isn’t exactly
fair—I shouldn’t expect him to be as patient and generous with me as I am
with him. It’s not his fault I’m always sympathetic and available and willing
to run to his side. But surprisingly, he shrugs, giving in. “Okay. You have my
full support.” And then, after a five-second pause: “Are you sure this is going
to work?”

“No,” I tell him. “But I can’t not
try.”

Guys are so
easy to
drive out of your life, especially when their interest in you has mostly been
sustained by your blind, naive, hopelessly hopeful interest in them. Kevin,
Aaron, and Sean weren’t difficult to get rid of at all—it only took a
couple of instances of
I
can’t have dinner,
and maybe one
Sorry, I’m busy.
If anything, I guess they disappeared on their own;
their absence has been waiting to happen for a long time, postponed by my
persistent belief that they could change, or that they could love me, or that
they were just keeping their feelings hidden beneath the surface, waiting to be
discovered and nurtured.

Robbie was a
bit trickier. He wanted to know why I couldn’t meet up with him, why I was
busy. He asked whether I was avoiding him, and seemed to take offense at my
unavailability. So I had to tell him the truth: that I wasn’t dating anymore,
that it was no longer just a stupid dare from my brother. I had to tell him
that I liked having more time for myself, more time to sit and write and think,
and less time being kept on my toes, always wanting to impress. I had to tell him,
“I can’t keep settling for the way you make me feel.” I meant
you
as in boys in general, boys who
never ask me out properly for proper dates and think it’s okay to leave me
hanging while they go and “find themselves” or “figure it all out.” But he probably
understood it as
you
as in him, specifically, because he sounded hurt when he
asked, “Why, how
do
I make you feel?”
Small and second-rate and
insignificant
, I
thought, but didn’t say it out loud. Eventually, he disappeared, too
.

He stayed out of my life until one
Friday evening, a month later, as I walked along a crowded strip of bars and
restaurants hand in hand with Jack, because we were trying to make his
ex-girlfriend jealous. Robbie and I saw each other from afar, and even as we
knew the smart thing to do would be to walk in the opposite direction, we drew
closer and closer to each other. When we were nearly face to face, and the
distance between us was short enough for me to be able to let go of Jack’s hand
and reach out to grab his, he turned his head slightly and fixed his eyes on
the people coming out of the bars and restos, like he was scanning the area for
a friend, or a date.
This
isn’t what it looks like
, I wanted to
clarify.
It’s
just a favor. It doesn’t mean anything.

Robbie kept on walking until he
was lost in the crowd. For the rest of the night, I waited for a tap on the
shoulder, or a hand on my back, but none came. I waited for him to come up to
me and say,
I’m
sorry I never took a real chance on you.
At ten minutes to midnight, my phone rang. It was him on the other
line, slurring, “But apparently, you can settle for the way
HE
makes you
feel.”

“Jack is my best friend,” I told
him.

“So you keep
saying,” he replied. He let out a sarcastic little laugh. Who gave him the
right to take his hasty conclusions and turn them into outright accusations?

“I’m not in love with him,” I said
quietly.
 

“I know
that,” he said. “But I don’t think you do.”

He waited for an answer, or maybe
a denial, but I couldn’t give him anything. I didn’t want to give him anything;
I didn’t want to reinforce him wanting what he couldn’t have. I was ready and
open all those months—where was he then? I heard some shuffling from his
end of the line, and with a short, sharp click, he was gone. Again.

I sat there, watching the ice in
my Vodka Sprite melt into oblivion, trying to resist the urge to get up and go
home. And then I did feel a tap on my shoulder and a hand on my back. Jack
leaned in, his mouth next to my ear, and said, “I’m sorry I never took a real
chance on you.”

3

Today, I woke
up to
gloomy skies and the sound of raindrops crashing on my window. Rainy days
remind me of you: how we shared a cup of cappuccino in our favorite café, how
you held an umbrella over my head and pulled me into the warmth of your arms,
how you lent me your sweater, still hanging in my closet the same way you
always hang at the back of my mind, embedded in every word I say and every
thought I think. Rainy days remind me of you, and when the grey clouds open up
and send their tears down onto our bright lights and big cities, I hope they
wash in memories of me. I hope they make you remember.
 

It is almost the end of summer,
and we are braving the traffic and the floods, driving around in circles until
we get things straight. “We need to decide if we are on the same page,” you
told me earlier, and I thought,
That’s not something you decide on. It’s either
we’re on the same page or we’re not. That’s something you feel.
You tell me, “It’s never going to be perfect. It’s not
even going to be as great as you imagined it would be. You need to be okay with
that. There will be days when I’ll enjoy flirting with other girls, days when
I’d rather hang out with my friends than with you. There will be days when the
sound of your voice will irritate me, and days when I wouldn’t care less what
you’re up to. There will be days when we will yell and fight and I won’t love
you at all.”

I nod, like I am agreeing with
you, or considering agreeing with you, but I don’t think I ever will. Charles
came back from Bohol yesterday and told me, “You spend your time taking care of
all these kids, both the ones in your pre-school and the ones you insist on
dating. But I just want you to find a good guy who will take care of
you
.”

“But I can take care of myself,” I
told him. “Why are you always acting like I can’t?”

“Everyone needs someone to take
care of them,” he replied. Very quietly, he added, “I don’t want you to end up
with someone like Dad.”

Because Dad cheats and lies and
drinks and has lost his sense of family—does that make him a horrible,
unlovable person? What is the measure of a good person? At what point does
compromise become sacrifice, and when does unconditional acceptance for another
person’s flaws translate to shortchanging yourself?

I turn to look at you. You grip
the steering wheel tightly, and I know you can sense me looking, but you
pretend not to notice. I want to take your hand and tell you that we will be
fine after this, but instead, I say, “I think I deserve more than that.”
 

The guy who will understand that
compliments and hugs are more important than flowers and chocolate. The guy who
will not disappoint me when he promises to do something, the guy who will make
my mom laugh and look my dad straight in the eye. The guy Charles will approve of.
The guy who will change everything without changing who I am—I need you
to be this guy. I need you to tell me, right now, that you
can
be this guy.

“I don’t know if I can give you
more than that,” you say, and I am expecting to feel my insides lurch, my heart
shriveling into a sad little ball sinking straight to the pit of my stomach.
But I feel calm and collected, and maybe I have always known that we were never
meant to be together.

You ask me, “Do you think he’ll
make you happy?” and I say, “I have to believe that he will.” You want to tell
me that competition is the only thing that propels him towards me, and like all
other guys, he will lose interest once the chase is over. Maybe you want to
tell me that his efforts are as half-baked as yours are, maybe you want to tell
me that he is just as inconsistent and uncommitted as you are. Maybe you want
to tell me that there will also be days when he won’t love me at all, and that
he should be apologizing for this, but we both know these two truths: One, I’m
the one who should be sorry because I never took a real chance on him, either.
And two, if I make my move now, it might not yet be too late.

For the second time this summer,
you ask me,
 
“Are you sure this is
going to work?”

I give you the
same answer. “No. But I can’t not try.”

We are no longer driving around in
circles, because suddenly, we both know where we’re supposed to be going. You
pull into the parking lot of a secluded café sandwiched between a Korean
grocery and an appliance service center. At a table for two by the window,
there is a boy sitting alone, looking like he’s waiting for someone; he could
be waiting for me.

You tell me, “You belong with
him.”

I hug you goodbye, and you wave at
me as you drive off. Before you reach the street leading you home, the light
will turn red, and you will have to get in line. These days, as the rain pours
continuously, it seems like you spend most of your time in a travel-pause,
stuck in one place until that flash of green gives you permission to move
along. But it is hard to see this as a complete waste. Because at some point,
the waiting ends. You and I are hurtling towards many different directions,
always leaping before looking—we are bound to intersect somehow, someday,
even as we take the roads leading away from each other.

The door to the café is heavy, and
I have to push it hard. The boy at the table by the window looks up as I walk
in, and there is both relief and surprise written across his face. He smiles,
and it is not something he throws out into the world carelessly; it is
specifically for me.

I smile back. “Hi, Robbie. How
have you been?” I sit and listen, and in this cozy café, while the rain pounds
against the window and thunder rumbles in the distance, I finally feel safe.

ALL THE BEST

“Your mission, should
you choose to accept it, is this,” I hold up my best friend Blake’s pristine
white wedding invitation and toss it onto the table, where the twins Martin and
Henry were busy attacking a 24-inch all-meat pizza. Martin grabs the envelope and
gapes at it, his greasy fingers leaving dark oil spots on the paper. “Blake is
marrying that chick Vicky?” he asks. “She is a babe! Lucky bastard.” A blob of
hot sauce drips from his chin and misses the card by mere centimeters.

“Why is this our mission? You want
us to get married too?” Henry asks, without looking up from building his
pepperoni tower. “Dude, forget it. That’s not happening for like, a very long
time.”

Sometimes I wonder if Martin and
Henry watched too much
Beavis
and Butthead
(or
Ren and Stimpy,
or
The Itchy and Scratchy Show—
or any other idiotic onscreen duo you can come up
with) as kids. But then I realize that’s giving television too much credit.

“We’re not letting this wedding
happen,” I tell them.

“We’re not?” Martin takes the
pizza crust and tries to stuff it into his mouth. Horizontally.

“We’re not,” I repeat firmly.

“Carl, I really think it’s about
time you got over Blake,” Henry says, laughing at a joke that has been running
since we were in high school. “You’ll be fine. There are lots of other boys out
there.”

“Or girls,” Martin pipes in. “I
bet you could go back to liking girls if you only set your mind to it. Remember
Tin from grade school? You used to have the biggest crush on her. She had
impressive boom-boom-pows when everyone else had tiny twelve-year-old...”

“Cut it out,” I tell them. For the
record, I have a lovely girlfriend, Kim, and we’ve been together for seven
years. She is perfect.
We
are perfect. And I want nothing
but this kind of perfection for my friends. “Blake has been my best friend
since prep, and I can’t just sit around and watch him make the biggest mistake
of his life.”

“Oooh, biggest mistake of his
life,” Henry mimics me. “How dramatic. I told you to quit all this
freelance-wedding-photography-apprenticeship-whatever nonsense. It’s making you
too girly.”

“Not that you weren’t girly
before,” Martin clarifies. I scowl at him, and he adds, “Not that it’s a bad
thing.” And then he shakes his head, like he’s the one who’s exasperated with
me. “Carl, just let him do what he wants to do. He’s a big guy.”

“Literally,” Henry says. Blake is
almost six feet tall, and has towered over all of us for as long as we can
remember.

“I can’t just let him do what he
wants to do,” I say. “I need to step in. We need to step in. He’s counting on
us.” I am aware that I sound like I’m in a
Mighty Ducks
movie.

Martin and Henry look at each
other, their noses wrinkling identically in confused hesitation. “No, thanks,”
Henry decides. “We’ll stay out of this.”

“Yes,” Martin agrees. “It’s none
of our beeswax. None of yours either, actually.” He’s been saying
beeswax
since he was eight, and he still seems to find it
funny.

I stand up. “Okay. Suit yourself.”

“Let me get mine dry-cleaned,”
Henry says.

“Let me go find my tie,” Martin
says.

“What?”

Henry grins, looking terribly
pleased with himself. “You said,
suit yourself
. So I said,
let
me get mine dry-cleaned
, and Martin
said,
let me
go find
—”

“Never mind,” I cut him off,
wishing I hadn’t asked. “Don’t blame me if Blake ends up miserable.”

“Of course we won’t,” Martin
replies. “We’ll blame Blake.”

“He’s
responsible for his own misery,” Henry says.

“That’s very comforting,” I tell
them, stuffing my keys and my phone into my pocket. “I have to go. Kim’s
waiting for me at her place. I need to see her before I face Blake and Vicky
tonight. She promised to distract me, at least for a few hours.”

“Sexy time!” they chorus, and I
walk out of the room to unsolicited advice like, “Stay safe!” and “Use
protection!” I call back, just before the door closes, “Yeah well, you should
have reminded Blake about that.”

“I’m not pregnant,
Carl,” Vicky says pointedly. She glares at me, then takes a deep breath and
closes her eyes. When she opens them again, she is calm and collected, and she
looks at me with pity rather than anger. She is wearing a necklace of pearls
with matching earrings, and her conservative powder blue polo is neatly tucked
into her jeans and made of some shiny fabric that reflects light at the
slightest movement. Her hair is in a tidy ponytail, and her lips have remained
red and glossy after several sips of water and a few spoonfuls of soup. When
she smiles, her eyes sparkle with generous patience, and I’m thinking this is
what teachers must look like when they speak with indignant, defensive,
borderline violent parents of trouble-making students—radiating sympathy
that stems not from pure and honest kindness, but from a sense of worth that
thrives on Being the Bigger Person:
You are rude and crass but I am good enough to
resist stooping to your level.

I wonder if it requires effort to
act all high and mighty, or if it really does come naturally for people who
have been blessed with better looks, better brains, or more money (in Vicky’s
case, it’s all three) than your average guy. I wonder if it ever gets tiring to
not be average.

Vicky stands up
carefully—she is still calm and collected—and walks out the door
with a clicking and clacking so poised and prim and proper that it is hard for
me to feel sorry, or at least guilty for the things I have said tonight
(basically, I called them both irresponsible and accused her of wanting to rush
into marriage because it gives Blake little time to think things through and
therefore less chances of changing his mind about her. I also told her that if
she wants the baby so badly, she can go ahead and have it on her own; no need
to drag my best friend into her prissy cardboard life.) I wish I hadn’t said
all that, but mostly because I was wrong (factually, not morally) and not
because I regret hurting her feelings. It is hard to feel bad for someone who
seems so unaffected.
 

Blake shakes his head at me and
asks, “What the hell, Carl?” although it is not an actual question and I at
least know better than to attempt giving him an actual answer. So I just shrug
and mutter, “Sorry, man,” and he shakes his head at me one more time before he
gets up and follows his fiancée out the door. The waiter comes with Vicky’s
Greek salad and Blake’s brocolli fusilli, and I think,
Yuck. I’m not gonna eat
all these vegetables.