Underneath It All (16 page)

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Authors: Margo Candela

BOOK: Underneath It All
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42
Papá
D
ress, coiffed and painted. Now I have twenty excruciating minutes to kill before I meet Nate in the lobby. I’ve retreated to the bathroom to give Vivian some privacy as she makes another attempt to reach Curtis in San Francisco.
A voice in the back of my head keeps telling me to take off my dress just in case I get a spontaneous nosebleed or something. But I won’t let it own me.
This is my dress, and if I want to loll around on my hotel bed and carelessly freshen up my lipstick, I’ll do it. Maybe I’ll have a
huge
glass of red wine. I don’t care what my mother would say.
So I call her. I use my cell phone because technically she thinks I’m still either in Carmel or Santa Barbara and not in an exclusive hotel on Sunset Blvd. The only reason I can get away with this lie is my parents (my whole family, really) rarely venture to the other side of Dodger Stadium.
The phone rings and rings. Usually I give it ten rings before I give up. On the seventh it’s picked up and my father grunts into my ear.
“Hola.”
He sounds annoyed, but, then again, I’ve never heard him sound any other way.
“Hi!
Papá,
it’s Jacquelyn!” My voice comes out squeaky from the sheer surprise of him actually answering the phone for once.
“Your
madre
isn’t here.” He’s a charmer, really he is.
“Oh. OK ... How are you doing?” I try my usual method, wondering if it will unleash a torrent of conversation the way it does with my mother.
“Noel drove her to the supermarket.”
“Oh. Wow.” Silence. I can hear some sort of sports match in the background. “Oh. OK ... I’m still in Santa Barbara.”
“Yeah.” Not a question, just a declaration. I could have said I was on the moon and I bet I would have gotten the same response.
“OK. Tell her I called. Bye,
Papá!
” No use dragging this out.
“OK.” Click. Now I see where Yolie gets her phone etiquette from.
43
Vivian
M
oving on.
I sit at the very edge of the tub and try to center myself. Not going to happen. I press my ear to the door to see if I can hear Vivian. Nothing.
“You want me to come out and show off?” I call out. I think I look great, but a second opinion can’t hurt.
“Please! I’m going stir-crazy here. I’m waiting for room service.”
Room service! I love room service. I love everything about hotels, actually. A vacation is not a vacation unless you are booked in a hotel. Nate and I once spent a horrible week in a friend’s cabin in Tahoe. We had to do all our own cleaning and cooking. I was so miserable. It wasn’t a vacation, it was an ordeal. Nate didn’t even notice how unhappy I was.
He was too preoccupied with keeping the woodpile stocked. Every fifteen minutes he’d ask me if I was cold, and whether I was or was not, he’d head outside with the stupid ax. I’m sure if I had said I had a hankering for venison he would have taken the antique shotgun down from over the fireplace and tried to hunt down Bambi’s mother himself.
I sweep open the door, almost hitting Vivian as she stands there holding a covered dish and shooing away the waiter.
“Holy crap. Your ex doesn’t stand a chance!”
“I almost feel sorry for the poor bastard. Speaking of which, you call your husband?”
“Yes! I left a message on his cell and nothing! That’s why I’ve ordered half the room-service menu. If I get fat, it’s all his fault.” She sits on the bed and tries to balance a huge plate of steaming pasta on her left and a slab of chocolate cake on her right.
“Yeah, but room service here is great.” I gingerly lift the lids that cover the surface of the cart.
“True. Are you sure you don’t want to stay here with me and enjoy this spread and some soft core, pay-per-view porn?”
“As tempting as it sounds, no. This might be my only chance to have sex this year and I can’t pass it up.” Though I haven’t ruled out sex with George, I’m sure his wife has.
“I hear that, sister.” Vivian raises a chocolatey fork at me.
“I should go downstairs so I can strategically arrange myself in the lobby.” I look at my watch and sigh. I look at the room-service cart and sigh again.
“Hap ah umg pim, Japs.”
“I will.” Like all sexually frustrated women, I speak chocolate.
44
Nate
“
S
o where are you flying off to tomorrow?” One way to get Nate to open up is to ask him about work. Another way is to mention
Star Trek,
or “Star Track,” as I insisted on calling it throughout our relationship.
“Chicago, then India,” he mutters, looking distracted as the waiter clears away our salads.
“India! Wow. That’s exciting. Bina, you remember my friend Bina?” How could he not? We were inseparable, but Nate never really registered Bina. He seemed intimidated by her drive and success. “She’s going to India.”
“Oh, yeah? How’s she doing?”
“Great. Getting married. She’s having a ceremony in India. I’m invited, of course. Maybe I’ll see you there,” I say as I climb into the car. Nate hands the valet a tip.
“Maybe. India is a big country.”
“Is it?” I ask sarcastically. Nate always complained I had no sense of direction.
“Yeah. Really big.” Nate climbs in next to me and we zoom off.
“I’ll keep that in mind. Where else have you been?” As if I don’t already know.
“Australia, Czech Republic, Greece and, now, India.”
“All that traveling must be hell on your complexion.”
“Huh?” Nate looks confused.
He never gave a second thought to his pores and thought slapping on some sunscreen was the ultimate in skin care. No point in veering the conversation into a dead end this early on in the evening.
“Wow.” I’ll give Nate a pass for now. And empty flattery about his world travels is sure to boost his ego. It’s not like he flew the plane himself, but I don’t need to point that out. I want to make nice so we can make nasty later. “All that traveling must be so exciting.”
“It’s OK. Kind of lonely.” He gives me a sheepish smile.
“I can imagine.” Oh, yes I can!
“Yeah, you just run into the same people working on the same projects. It’s tough to have a real relationship, much less a life. When I first came back, after we ... you know ... I dated a dancer.”
Nate has always had a hard spot for dancers. Ballerinas especially.
“Pole dancer?” I ask in what I hope is a jokey voice.
“No!” From his tone, I can tell she did some pole dancing. His pole probably.
“Uh-huh.”
“She was way too LA for me.”
“What does that mean?” I’m from LA. OK, not this LA but Los Angeles all the same.
“She just wasn’t what I expected. Not at all like you.” He smiles at me again. I smile and look out the window, feeling pretty fucking hot.
Back and forth we go and things are humming along nicely right up until we dig into our entrées.
“What do you think of the food? Every time I eat here, I think of you,” Nate says earnestly as we sit at a fancy Latin American fusion restaurant,
Teatro de Antojos
. The food has Spanish names (names I know), but what comes out of the kitchen is not like anything I’ve ever seen.
“It’s, um, good. It’s not really traditional Mexican food or even any kind of Latin American food, you do know that, right?” I don’t think many people south of the border sit down to $12 starter salads on a regular basis.
“What do you mean? Your parents always gave us jicama salad when we went to visit.”
“Yes, jicama, but not as a salad; it was more of a snack.” My dad would hack it into chunks and drown it in lime juice with a little salt and hot sauce. This jicama had been julienned with carrots and lightly sprinkled with a white vinegar dressing. “Just because they throw cilantro on something doesn’t make it Mexican food, Nate.”
“You don’t like it?” Nate seems genuinely disappointed. “I was sure you’d get it.” I wonder where he would have taken me to eat if I was Asian? Nobu, perhaps, and gone on about how the $20 sushi roll reminded him of my mom’s.
“Sure. It’s good ... but different.” And so is the crowd. Though the restaurant claims to specialize in traditional Mexican cuisine, I can’t imagine a real Mexican family coming here for a Sunday dinner. “I guess it’s just a different interpretation of what, you know, Latin American food is. Whatever that means.”
“Trust me, this place has the best flan in the city,” Nate assures me.
I guess he’s forgotten that I’m not much of a flan person. Now, a vanilla crème brûlée from Moose’s in North Beach,
that
I could imagine him remembering me by. Especially since I made a point of ordering it for dessert every time we went out to eat, which had been a lot.
“So you’ve had lots of short relationships?” Circling the subject hasn’t yielded much so far. No point in being subtle. I don’t have time for subtle. I’m reluctant to turn up the heat before we receive our entrées of puréed yucca root over goat cheese and persimmon-stuffed, roasted poblano peppers. The menu called them
chilies rellenos,
and I’m almost embarrassed I ordered them. I felt stupid ordering my food in proper Spanish, as if I was putting on a big act for the waiter.
“Yeah. Hey! Remember the last time we went out for a nice dinner?” Nate leans forward.
I guess he’s got food on the brain.
“No.” Of course I do.
Our last fancy dinner together was for our fuckiversary, commemorating the day/night we first had sex. This was the only special date either of us could be counted on to remember. We were a few months short of our first wedding anniversary, and even though things were turning sour, we both felt, or at least I did, compelled to give it a try and do something special. So for our fuckiversary we were sitting in this high-priced restaurant—and both of us knew we were in no mood to end our evening with a bang.
We ate in virtual silence, exchanging only a few stilted words. It was all just so sad and made even more so by the fact that we both knew it was over, even though neither of us was ready to call it quits.
“Yeah, you do. It was at that place that did only fish. Man, that was a great meal.” Obviously Nate was on a different planet that night. “One of the best dinners ever.”
“Pardon me?” I sputter. It was a horrible night. I can’t remember what was on the plate in front of me. I might as well have been eating glass. I felt physically hurt after it. It was the first thing I talked to Dr. N about.
“Yeah, I had that fish.” Nate gets a dreamy look on his face. “I hate fish, but that fish was so good. I wish I could remember the name of it.”
“You mean you actually look back on that night
fondly?
” I ask incredulously.
“Sure. One of the best meals of my life. You ate everything on your plate and dessert, too.”
It wasn’t flan, I’ll tell you that right now.
“We hardly said a word to each other the whole night! We didn’t even bother to have
sex
when we got home!” This is unbelievable. Just more evidence that men live in a parallel universe.
“We didn’t?”
“No. We. Didn’t.” I spit. How could he forget our failure to even attempt to consummate our fuckiversary? As soon as we got back to our flat, I headed for the bathroom, put on my rattiest pajamas and my retainers (a sure sign that I wasn’t considering sex), and when I came out, I found him in front of the TV fiddling with the surround-sound system. He didn’t even try to talk me out of my retainers. All he did was kiss me on the cheek and tell me he’d come to bed in a minute. The last time I looked at the clock before I finally fell asleep it was 1:30, and he was still in the living room calibrating the damn speakers.
“Oh, well, it was still a great piece of fish.” Nate smiles stupidly at me as if his revelation is nothing more than reminiscing.
“I’m happy for you and your fish. I hope you find each other one day and live happily ever-fucking after, Nate.” One year in therapy and a good portion of it dedicated to discussing Nate, when all I had to do was throw a good piece of fish at him. Unbelievable.
“Hey, Jacqs, don’t get mad. What’s in the past is in the past.”
“For some of us, obviously.” I feel stupid. I’ve held on this long and now the person I thought I had some nominal hold on has just told me to get over it.
“What do you want me to say? That every day I die a little because I was an asshole and I wasn’t the perfect husband to you?”
“That’s a start.” I do think I deserve an apology. Especially after all I’ve been through and am currently going through sitting right in front of him.
“Please. What about what you did to me?” Nate knocks back his drink and signals the waiter for another one.
“What did I do?” I am shocked, truly shocked, but I’m trying to keep my voice low. I don’t like airing dirty laundry in public, but I hate losing an argument.
“What did you do? I moved to San Francisco for you. I left all my friends—”
“Who all ended up moving to San Francisco anyway.” He can’t blame me for that. It’s really unfair, considering it was his job that took over our lives.
“Whatever. All I’m saying is that you weren’t the perfect wife either.”
“Perfect wife? What did you expect? You were hardly ever home and when you were, you were in front of the TV or your computer.”
“Where were you, Jacqs? Out with your friends or at some party or another. Or holed up in the bathroom.”
This is technically true, but only because he was at work so much I had to find other things to keep me occupied. So I turned to friends, an endless stream of launch parties Nate had no interest in going to and long baths while reading cheap romances. That is what became of my life as a married woman and I didn’t like it.
Even though I sort of do the same things now, at least I’m not married and by myself. I’m single and independent—a huge difference. If I want to spend an hour in the tub, it’s my right, I’m not hiding out from anyone.
“What was I supposed to do, Nate? Sit around and keep the pot roast warm in the oven until you showed up?”
“What’s wrong with that?” Nate scoffs, but I know it’s closer to the truth than he’ll ever admit. “Every time we visited your parents, you were always so nice to me.”
“What do you mean, nice?” I know what he’s talking about, and I knew it’d come back to bite me in the ass.
“I used to joke that those visits were the only times you’d ever, you know, wait on me. Not wait on me, exactly, but take care of me. Like your mom does your dad.”
“Nate, I did that only to keep you out of my mother’s kitchen. And I wasn’t waiting on you!” I hiss.
But I had waited on him, to a lesser degree than the other men had been waited upon by their wives, daughters and girlfriends. But still, while Nate sat in the living room, I had fetched an odd beer or three. OK, fine, and I filled a plate and presented it to him and made sure he had access to warm tortillas. But I only did it to keep my family from giving me that look of shock and disapproval because I didn’t wait on my husband hand and foot. I only did it to be a courteous hostess, not to wait on him.
“Your mom always made sure I had a cold beer or something to eat before we even got in the front door. At home you never even turned on the stove. It wasn’t until she came to visit that someone actually used the oven.”
“You didn’t want a wife, Nate, you wanted your mother.” I sit back and cross my arms. That effectively ends his side of the argument.
“What’s wrong with that?” Nate asks.
He’s either very secure with himself or doesn’t realize how creepy it is to hear from a man that you slept with that he wants to marry his mother. Or rather, my mother.
“Oh, I see. When we were together I got the feeling that you liked me,
loved
me, because I’m me. Faults and all. That’s what you told me,” I remind him. Nate doesn’t bother to look contrite or even slightly upset. “So now you’re telling me you fell out of love with me because I didn’t turn into someone like your mother? Or my mother?”
“We just wanted different things.” Nate shrugs.
It’s like water rolling off his back. What I’m saying doesn’t penetrate, or even scratch the surface of Nate’s untouched psyche. Time to be blunt.
“Yeah, I wanted a sex life. And you wanted your mommy.” Bitter, bitter, bitter. I already knew this; it had come up in therapy, but to have him confirm it makes me so angry and a little sad. I didn’t expect him to declare his still-smoldering love and passion for me, pull out my ring and ask me, beg me, to marry him again. (This time the right way—in a church, with a dress and with all our family looking on.) Still, a girl likes to be asked.
“Whatever ... What’s in the past is in the past. I’ve moved on. So should you.”
Nate’s pearls of wisdom, offered up without a thought to how useless they are.
“What does that mean?” I’ve moved on! I’m wearing white. I have a new job (which he hasn’t asked me about!), I have a (married) boyfriend and tons of other things going on in my life. My life is a hundred times better now than it was with him. If it wasn’t I wouldn’t have invited him out to dinner so he could find out.

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