This Christmas (20 page)

This is why I love you
, I was tempted to say. Jason was all gung-ho eagerness. He even made
me
feel eager, now. And perhaps a little foolish. Isaac was my best bud, and such fun—when he wasn’t trying my considerable patience. Having him along would just add to the festivity. And he and Jason would get to know each other better. They might even become friends!

What the heck had I been worrying about?

You won’t even know I’m there
, he’d said. Ha.

“Where am I supposed to sit?” was the first question out of Isaac’s mouth.

Heroically, I restrained myself from doing the man bodily harm. He had a lot of crust whining first thing, when he had begged me to wrangle this invitation for him.

“You’ve got the whole backseat,” I pointed out.

Jason had double-parked the Saab on Henry Street, and the three of us were now huddled in the freezing cold on the sidewalk. Isaac, whose weekender bag sagged against his knees, looked as if he were going to refuse to get into the car.

“How can you say I have the whole backseat?” he asked. “It’s full of junk.”

I thought we had left it empty. I peered into the backseat through the small passenger window. No, I wasn’t dreaming. All that was there were a lone Tupperware dome and a small paper bag. “All you have to do is share the seat with a bundt cake.”

“And what’s in that other bag?”

“Champagne,” I said.

“What are you taking champagne home for? We’ll be back by New Year’s.”

“Just because.” Even though it was a pathetic answer, I thought I was doing an admirable job of keeping my cool. Actually, I had drained what little was left of my bank account and poured it into a bottle of good vintage Dom Perignon, hoping to impress Jason if we ever had reason to engage in an intimate toast.

“But what about my suitcase?” Isaac asked.

“Put it on the seat between you and the cake,” I said.

“Or set the cake cover on top of the bag,” Jason put in.

Isaac and I wheeled on him as if he’d lost his mind.

“The cake might fall off!” I said.

“And get goo on my luggage,” Isaac added.

Jason shrank back a little, as if to indicate that he had learned his lesson and would no longer make reasonable suggestions.

I propped my mittened hands on my hips and turned back on Isaac. “It’s a pound cake. There is no goo.”

“It’s full of butter. It could leave a grease stain.”

“No, it couldn’t,” I argued. “That cake cover is airtight.”

He didn’t look convinced. He probably didn’t even know genuine Tupperware when he saw it.

Jason bravely stepped into the fray again. “I’ve got an idea.” He reached deftly into the backseat for the cake and the champagne. “I seem to remember a little corner of the trunk we haven’t used….”

He was lying. But he went to the back of the car and gamely started rearranging things. Isaac smiled at me; I glared back.

“I brought music,” he said.

“So did I,” I said, trying to head him off at the pass.

Isaac and I didn’t always agree on music. His taste was more eclectic than mine, and he leaned heavily toward world music. Even if we were just listening to the radio, he’d want to have it tuned to the Latino station. “Everything else is pop swill,” he had told me once.

“This is pop swill, too,” I had pointed out, “only in Spanish.”

“That’s okay. I don’t speak Spanish.”

Which is Isaac all over. He pretends to be Mr. Reasonable, Mr. I Have a Master’s in Chemistry, and then he’ll come out with something like that.

“I brought Christmas music,” I said. “You know—Bing Crosby—to get us in the mood.”

“Me, too.”

I darted a skeptical look at him. “Let me see.”

He pulled two CDs out of his jacket and handed them to me.

“Oy to the World?”
I asked, my voice looping up with horror.
“The Bonanza Christmas Album?”

“That last is a rarity,” Isaac said. “I burned the CD myself especially for this trip.”

Jason slammed the trunk and came around the side of the car. He laughed when he looked at one of the CD covers, a cartoon Santa dancing around with a menorah. “That’s great!” he said. “Let’s give them a listen.”

In other words, bye-bye, Bing.

Isaac grinned at me before he tossed his bag into the backseat and then slid in after it. Then Jason and I got into the front and buckled ourselves in. “Would you mind moving your seat up?” Isaac asked me. “Not a lot of legroom back here.”

“Sure thing.” I fumbled under the seat for the control and then managed to slide my knees right into the glove compartment. The resulting crunch of kneecap against molded plastic made me wince in pain.

“Thanks!” Isaac chirped behind me.

The stereo blared out a Klezmer version of “Winter Wonderland.”

“Hey, this is great!” Jason said, tossing an approving look into the rearview at Isaac. Isaac leaned forward, inserting his head between the bucket seats. There he remained as we hopped onto the Brooklyn Queens Expressway to head out of town.

“Okay,” Isaac announced, “let’s talk about the one that got away.”

He was obviously taking his promise to serve as cruise director for the trip very seriously. Give him a few hours and he would probably break out the Mad Libs. Which would be preferable, frankly. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hold a public airing of my romantic disappointments just now. Especially since romantic disappointment was precisely what this trip was meant to stave off.

Isaac looked into my eyes and laughed silently. “I’m talking about
presents
. What birthday or Christmas or”—he lifted a hand—“in my case, I will include Hanukkah—gift did you ever
really
want and not get?”

“Oh!” I loved games like this. “That’s easy. Twice I asked for an Easy-Bake Oven. Which is basically just a toaster oven with its own little mini cake pans and boxes of cake mix.”

“What happened?” Isaac asked.

“Mom said I didn’t need a tiny oven because we already had a big oven in the kitchen I could use. She said if I wanted to make a cake so much, I should just ask her and she’d help me.”

Jason smiled. “That’s nice. She wanted to make it a shared activity.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t want to make a cake with my mom,” I said. “I wanted to make little tiny ones with my friends, like in the commercials.”

“Scarred for life!” Isaac said, approving my answer.

“I was actually okay until a few years later, when Maddie asked for an Easy-Bake Oven and got one. And she only had to ask once! That was what really left me embittered.”

“And I bet she never used it,” Isaac said.

I shook my head. “Oh, no, she used it all the time. She would invite her little squeaky-voiced friends over and have tea parties on Saturday afternoons. I would have to listen to them through my bedroom wall.”

They laughed. “What was the one that got away for you?” Jason asked Isaac.

“When I was ten, I saw an old Edgar Bergen movie on the television one Saturday afternoon, and I just became obsessed. I
had
to get a ventriloquist dummy. I had this crush on a girl who I was too scared to talk to, but I thought that if I had a ventriloquist dummy, I would be able to wow her with my wit and skill. So I found one in the Sears catalog—it was a Charlie McCarthy replica—and I asked my parents for it for my birthday.”

“And you didn’t get it,” I guessed, since disappointment was pretty much the name of the game.

He shook his head. “I thought maybe they just didn’t understand that I
really needed
a ventriloquist dummy. So I sat them down and explained to them that I really believed my future was in show business, as a ventriloquist. I thought they understood. So when Hanukkah rolled around, I agonized every day, wondering if this was the night when I would finally receive the gift that would start me on my real life as a ventriloquist and great lover. But then the first night, I got a pair of socks. And then the next night, I got a Play-Doh Super Set, which I was entirely too old for anyway. For eight days and eight nights I suffered through the spasms of disappointment, until I realized that I was just going to have to save my allowance money and send off for the dummy and buy it myself.”

“And did you?” I asked.

“No, of course not. He was forty dollars! When I had twenty, I broke down and bought a cheap magic set.”

“Which you never used,” Jason guessed.

“Right.”

“My brother had a ventriloquist dummy,” I said.

Isaac’s eyes widened with envy. “He did?
Ted?
”

“He used it exclusively to terrify me. I thought it was so creepy looking—those expressionless eyes and that painted rubber hair. So Ted would open the bathroom door and lob it at me when I was in the tub, or leave it under my blankets at night to scare me to death when I unwittingly crawled into bed with it.”

I braced myself for Isaac to remark on all the creepy dummies I had crawled into bed with since then. I mean, I had set myself up. But he didn’t. Maybe he
was
trying to behave.

He shook his head in disgust. “What a waste of a good dummy.”

“What’s your gift that got away?” I asked Jason.

He squinted at the road, concentrating. He hummed thoughtfully for a moment. “I can’t think of anything.” He flashed one of those perfect smiles at me. “I guess I always felt lucky.”

Isaac and I exchanged quick glances.
Was he kidding?

Apparently, he wasn’t.

Remembering Jason’s very different history, I felt my cheeks burn, as if we had just been implicitly rebuked for pettiness, like greedy children. I suddenly wanted to repeat that it was a game—Isaac’s idea, not mine—and all in fun. And that I wasn’t
really
bitter about that Easy-Bake Oven. I felt lucky, too. Incredibly lucky. Really.

I hitched my throat. “My
favorite
gift ever was this coat I got when I was nine. It was fake leopard fur. I loved it. I used to take naps in it.”

“My favorite gift ever was my bike,” Isaac said.

“Oh! Mine too,” I said.

Isaac glowered at me. “You already said your favorite gift was a coat.”

“I forgot about my bike,” I said. “But I guess a bike is probably everybody’s favorite gift when they’re a kid.”

“Did you take naps with your bike, too?” Isaac asked snarkily.

I answered him with a brief raspberry, then turned to Jason, trying to rope him back into the conversation. “What did your bike look like?”

“I’ve never owned a bike,” he said.

Isaac and I fell silent.

“It always looked like a whole lot of fun, though,” Jason added.

I felt like weeping. Forget mufflers and watches and boxer shorts. At that moment, I wished I could travel back in time and buy Jason a Huffy with a banana seat.

“So Isaac,” Jason said, cutting through the funeral pall that had settled over us since his bike revelation, “Holly tells me you’re a Knicks fan.”

I had?
I couldn’t remember this, but if Jason said it, it must be true. Unlike most guys I dated, who seemed to filter out 90 percent of conversation, Jason had a fantastic memory. He paid attention, absorbing every word, every inflection. He was amazing.

“My office gets tickets sometimes,” he went on. “I’ll have to snag a few and we can all go.”

“Holly doesn’t like basketball,” Isaac said.

Jason darted a surprised look at me. And no wonder. We had sat through an entire televised game just the week before. It had been numbingly long, but I had been with Jason, so I hadn’t minded. We got to snuggle on the couch, at least.

“It’s not that I don’t like basketball—”

“She doesn’t like
any
sports,” Isaac interrupted. Rather gleefully, too. Like a little kid tattling.

“We’ve had this conversation before,” I reminded Isaac. “I like sports.”

He snorted. “Right. Your last-five-minutes rule.”

“What’s that?” Jason asked.

Isaac propelled himself farther between the bucket seats, until he had almost inserted himself into the front of the car. “Holly thinks the only interesting part of a game is the last five minutes.”

“Well—isn’t it?” I asked. “That’s the suspenseful part if it’s a close game. And if it’s not close, who cares anyway?”

They glared at me as if I had committed heresy, as if I had just insulted the very word
sports
. For the next thirty minutes, they talked about the Knicks and their chances for a championship. (Zero.) Also, their failures of the past. (Innumerable.)

Half listening, I stared out the window at ditches and bare trees. I started nodding off.

Then they moved on to football.

By the time we reached the first rest stop, Jason and Isaac seemed like old buds. As Isaac trudged off to get a cup of machine coffee, I stood by the gas tank with Jason, hopping and slapping my gloved hands in a failing bid to create warmth. I longed to rush inside into the heated rest stop and inspect the aisles of unhealthy snacks as Isaac was doing, but the way things were going I was afraid this would be my only chance to talk to Jason for a while.

“I like Isaac,” Jason said. “I don’t know why you were so hesitant to take him along on this trip.”

I bent my head forward. “Hesitant?” I repeated, all innocence.

I know what you’re thinking. Hesitant was a mild way to describe how I’d felt. I flat out hadn’t wanted him along. But how did
Jason
know that?

“Well, I just assumed…you didn’t ask till the last minute,” Jason said. “And let’s face it. When you
did
ask, you didn’t sound thrilled.”

“Oh, but—”

“To tell you the truth, I wasn’t over the moon about it myself.”

I laughed in disbelief. “You seemed so gung ho when I brought the idea up! You acted like having a passenger would make your day.”

He gave his head a rueful shake. “I don’t know how you could think that. To tell you the truth, I’d always wondered about Isaac. I didn’t know what was going on with you two.”

I leapt on this new tidbit. Was that why he had been reticent about sleeping together?

“Nothing like you were imagining,” I assured him.

He chuckled. “I can see that now. You guys argue so much it’s a miracle you’re still friends at all.”

“We just have friendly disagreements every once in a while.”

He looked at me as if I had gone mad. But I hadn’t, not at all; I mean, yes, Isaac and I argued, but it was mostly in fun. I didn’t want Jason to misinterpret this as genuine hostility. It was as if I had been on a month-long job interview; I didn’t want him to think that I was in any way difficult to get along with.