Charmed Thirds (20 page)

Which, I know, will never be enough.

I imagine that I wouldn’t be driven to such desperate measures if Marcus had written me letters like he said he would. Instead, he wrote postcards. The first was an old-fashioned black-and-white picture of a medical eye chart, postmarked February 22 from Nuevo Viejo, California:

Jessica—

I

—Marcus

That’s it.

Was it a roman numeral one, to signify the first in a series? Or a lowercase
L
to stand for . . . oh, any number of words that start with
L
like in that “La La La” song sung by Bert and Ernie? Lightbulb? Lemon drop? Linoleum?

Or . . . love?

Nope. It’s none of these. Because it’s a capital
I,
as indicated by the homonymal hint on the front of the card. By “I” was he referring to himself, as the writer of the card? Or was I to read it aloud, so the message refers to the first person “I” as in me?

All this conjecture, you see, is exactly what he, being the Game Master, wants.

Today’s postcard is a color photograph of the sky illuminated by stars, postmarked May 31 from Nuevo Viejo, California. The message was more straightforward, yet still indecipherable.

Jessica—

WISH

—Marcus

I
WISH
, I
WISH
, I
WISH
. . . You know those magic photos that look like a blobby nothing, then you stare at it until your eyes cross and suddenly a dinosaur or whatever pops up and reveals itself and you can’t believe you didn’t see it right away? That’s how I felt when I read this word, instantly realizing that these weren’t one-word messages Marcus was sending me, but part of a larger message that he wanted to reveal bit by bit over time.

I
WISH
. . .

I
WISH
I
KNEW
WHAT
THE
HELL
HE
WANTED
.

“He wants me to know that he’s thinking of me, but he doesn’t want me to know
what
he’s thinking.” I was sounding more and more like someone you’d cross the street to avoid. Meanwhile, my friend Dexy was rummaging through the piles of un-put-away clothes on my floor, humming a tune as inscrutable as Marcus’s postcards. She was in a key that Philip Glass wouldn’t even think to invent, like Q minor.

“Am I supposed to use these as mantras for Buddhist meditation or something?”

Dexy held a note. F bumpy.

“At least I know he’s out there somewhere.”

Dexy stopped humming and started singing.
“Somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight!”

Dexy has lyrics for every occasion. She is a very enthusiastic singer. This is unfortunate because she is also a very terrible singer, which, coming from me, is saying a lot about her lack of musicianship. So, so,
so
painful are the sounds that assault us from the depths of musical hell, which, apparently, has a studio located directly inside Dexy’s voicebox. She makes ears bleed, and yet she just loves to sing, and so she sings loudly and often and one day hopes to be good enough to make the bad singers montage on
American Idol.
She was rejected by every a cappella group on campus from the badly punned Uptown Vocal to the even worsely punned Clefhangers. But there were no hard feelings. Dexy is an a cappella groupie and sleeps with tenors and basses and those who “percuss.” Unless Spelling Bee bitches exist, this makes her the geekiest kind of groupie one can possibly be.

“Wanna go to Tom’s for a black-and-white?” Dexy asked, uninspired by my collection of T-shirts and jeans. This chocolate and vanilla shake is the magical elixir, the cure for any problem, be it a bombed exam or the endless aftershocks of a nonbreakup breakup. It must be nice to be such a blithe spirit.

“We can’t,” I said, glancing at my watch. “We have the hall meeting.” Dexy and I were lucky enough to be assigned rooms on the same floor for the summer, and we were supposed to meet with the RA.

Dexy buzzed a loud, wet raspberry in my direction. “There’s plenty of time!”

Dexy is unmoved by such pedestrian concerns as punctuality. She’s always late because she’s always cramming
just one more thing
into a life with a staggering surfeit of places to go and people to see. That I am one of those people still surprises me. I was just one in a classroom full of students fulfilling their course requirement with a Biology class, and I’m not sure what inspired her to sit next to me. For my part, I was kind of looking for a new best friend at school after Jane proved to be less than sympathetic, I daresay enthusiastic, about the nonbreakup breakup.

“He’s so pretentious, J,” Jane had said when I told her about Marcus’s departure. “And so self-absorbed! He couldn’t have been less interested in getting to know me.”

When she was unable to see that she had just effectively and unintentionally described her own heinous boyfriend, I realized I didn’t have it in me to pretend I was her best friend anymore. I cowardly used “stress” (academic stress, work stress, breakup stress, terrorist stress, fill-in-the-blank stress) as a convenient, catchall excuse for not hanging out. It didn’t take long—only a few weeks—before Jane finally gave up and moved on, which pretty much proves how tenuous our friendship was in the first place.

Dexy, on the other hand, lent a supportive, albeit tone-deaf ear.

“Breakups are the new relationships,” she said.

“Uh . . . really?” I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Yes! Consider it an opportunity to discover yourself! To celebrate your newfound freedom!”

And while I didn’t go wild in Single de Mayo revelry, being around Dexy couldn’t help but lift my spirits. While most students—myself included—throw on jeans and a T-shirt that challenge the widely held parental notion that there is
always
a clear demarcation between clean and dirty, Dexy wears what can only be described as costumes. For her,
every
day is sort of like the Glam Slam Metal Jam. For example, today she’s “feeling European,” so she’s wearing black Capri pants, a sleeveless striped boatneck sweater, and ballet flats. There’s a beret perched atop a black bobbed wig (hiding her dirty-blond hair), and her French-manicured fingers clutch a long, lacquered cigarette holder (filled with a candy cancer stick because she doesn’t smoke).

Some people I know think she tries too hard. I mean, the costumes. The singing. The name. (Which is on her birth certificate. Her parents really liked the song “Come On Eileen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners.) The drama of her life can be a bit much. But she’s so positive, so fun that it requires more energy to resist her charms than it does to just give in to them. Unlike Jane, who made me feel guilty when I
didn’t
go along, there’s no pressure from Dexy. She reminds me a lot of Hope, only without the talent or the personal tragedies that give Hope more depth.

Dexy’s taking an Art History class because she couldn’t imagine spending the summer with her family in Pennsylvania. I don’t know much about her family, only that her parents are still together and that she has a brother who is a junior in high school. She calls them all “hopelessly unoriginal,” although, in her parents’ defense, they must have once possessed a sense of whimsy if they named their daughter after a one-hit wonder about trying to get laid.

“Really, J,” Dexy said today. “Put the past behind you.”

“I know,” I said, still gripping the postcard.

“Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow . . . Yesterday’s gone! Yesterday’s gone!”

“Please! Not Fleetwood Mac! If I promise to stop obsessing, do you promise to stop singing and come to the hall meeting with me?”

She took a drag on her candy cigarette. “Dah-ling!”

Thus compromised, we went. And that’s when I discovered that it wasn’t going to be so easy to put the past behind me. Because standing in the middle of the lounge was none other than William the Kissing Republican introducing himself as our RA for the summer. Ack.

“Well, if it isn’t Darling, Jessica,” he said, tapping a finger on his alphabetized list. He’s mastered the presidential cocky squint/smirk combo, and he didn’t hesitate to toss one my way.

“We should have gone to Tom’s,” Dexy whispered.

So we sat through the meeting as Mini Dub dictated the hall rules and regulations for the summer term in that cocky, cowpunk twang of his. This authority role is one he relishes, one that brings out his most irritating quality, which is his inability to acknowledge any alternative points of view. And that’s when I decided that posthookup shame was not to blame for my avoidance of William. No. I just can’t stand looking at his smug mug. As the F-Unit mastermind of the Breakup Pool, William is just pleased as can be with his role in my nonbreakup breakup with Marcus. I knew I’d have to try to wipe that smirk off his face if there was any hope of me surviving on his floor for the next three months. So after the meeting was over, I approached him to broker some sort of truce.

“So . . . ,” he said, oozing smarm. “How can I help you Darling, Jessica?”

“You can stop calling me that,” I snapped. “Can we talk?”

“Have you made an appointment?”

I glared.

“Okay, let’s talk,” he said, unlocking, then opening the door to his room. I followed, then shut the door behind me.

“Isn’t there some kind of rule against RAs hooking up with their advisees?”

“You’re reaching, J,” he said. “I wasn’t your RA when it happened.”

“Well, uh, okay,” I said, defeated. “But isn’t there a
retroactive
rule?”

“No.”

And then there was an awkward pause. A pause in which I had time to observe various Columbia College Conservative Club flyers
,
a “Don’t Mess with Texas” poster, and a framed 8 × 10 of his parents shaking hands with Bush 43 and the First Lady . . .

“Did you say something?” he asked.

“No, I just gagged.”

“What happened between us was no big deal,” he said. “Unless it was a big deal for
you.”
Then he broke out one of his twisted smiles.

“Wipe that look off your face!”

“What look?”

“That
. . . presidential
look!”

“Four. More. Years,” he replied, just to piss me off.

“Oh yes,” I said. “Four more years of war, unemployment, environmental destruction, soaring deficits, attacks on civil liberties . . .”

“You’ve been brainwashed by the liberal media.”

“ARRRRRGH! I didn’t come here to debate politics with you!”

“That’s the problem with you Democrats. You refuse to reach across the aisle in the spirit of bipartisan cooperation.”

My head was about to launch off my neck and blast into outer space. 10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . I counted down slowly. 7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . . I’d miss my head, you know, when it was orbiting the earth as a tiny, lip-glossed satellite. 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . .

Fortunately, William got back to business. “J, everything’s cool with me if it’s cool with you,” he said. “You’ll be treated no differently than any of my other advisees. Is that what you want to hear?”

“Well, yes,” I said, relaxing.

“This is my job, J,” he said. “I take my responsibilities very seriously.”

“Okay.”

“Besides,” he said. “It’s not like we slept together.”

“Right!” I said, making my way to the door.

“And we were both under the influence.”

“Exactly!”

“We weren’t thinking properly,” he said.

“Not at all!”

“Do you really think I would’ve hit on you if I’d been sober?” he asked, shutting the door in my face.

1 . . .

BLASTOFF!

the seventh

Being romantically unfettered is such a swell thing. See, if I was still with Marcus, I wouldn’t be able to entertain and enjoy guilt-free sexual fantasies about my hot grad-student partner in the Storytelling Project. If I was with Marcus, such an act would feel like a betrayal. But I can daydream without remorse because I am totally single. If only the same could be said for my hot grad-student partner. He’s married. With three kids, all five and under. Yikes.

But I’m not the other woman in my fantasies. I’ve conveniently made them adultery-free by getting rid of the wife and kids. I don’t kill her off, of course, because any dead wife takes on a mythical perfection, and that is especially true of mommies smote down in the prime of youth. Perfection is something that I simply can’t live up to, even in my own sexual fantasies.

No, in the sexual fantasies I’ve been having about my hot grad-student partner (whose name, Bastian, I will now use if only to stop objectifying him with pornographic anonymity), his wife and kids are disposed of via a recent divorce, one sought by Bastian because his wife has become a mirthless harpy, a sexless shrew, since the babies came along. She gets full custody of the whole brood and moves to a remote village in Antarctica, befitting her chilly nature. And he, whose only relations have been of the one-handed variety, is primed and ready for the fresh-faced coed who isn’t all slunky from childbirth . . .

“So where should we go at it?” asked Bastian.

“Anywhere you want me,” I murmured, dreamily.

“Pardon?”

“Anywhere,” I said.

“Why don’t we start in a familiar place, so we are not nervous our first time?”

I have to remind myself that this is real, and not part of the daydream. He’s talking about the Storytelling Project. Not sex.

“Yes, nonthreatening environs,” I said, like a moron, bringing me back to reality.

“Está bien.”

Oh, did I mention that he’s Spanish, as in from Spain, and that he occasionally slips into his native tongue? (Add your own sexual innuendo here. It’s just too easy for me. Really.) He’s from Madrid but has lived here for more than a decade, long enough to master English, but without flattening his Castilian quirks. Who knew a lispy accent could be so manly? So damn sexy? I hear those “ths” clinging to his tongue and go loco.

We headed down Amsterdam on foot, past the dusty ninety-nine-cent stores, the sketchy storefront lawyers, the anonymous delis. He was carrying a camcorder and a sandwich board that says,
TELL
US A
STORY
. I was carrying the fold-up beach chairs we will be sitting in, side by side, all summer long.