Eye to Eye (15 page)

“I'd finally gotten used to the kids,” Asa says. “But now there's this policing in place by the university, and it's both distracting and offensive. I was telling my partner, David, about this the other night. Did you know that the university is actually allowing parents to monitor the classrooms? The rationale is that parents are paying for a product and they deserve to see where their hard-earned dollars are going. So not only do I have no one in the administration backing me up, I have to contend with hostile students and hostile parents. I'd have taught high school if that were my goal.”

I grunt in solidarity.

“I really don't know what I'd do without David these days. He's coming by to walk me out to my car this evening. The note on the windshield left me quite shaken. I hate to say it, but there are times when having an evolved, loving man in one's life makes all the difference.”

Maybe I'm just paranoid, or lonely, but the “evolved, loving man” line from a smug partner makes me want to leave the room. I silently vow that if I am ever involved with an “evolved, loving man” I will have the sense and kindness not to rub it in the faces of those around me.

“I wouldn't know,” I say, trying to joke about it. “I seem only in possession of the broken-up-with and virtual kind.”

Asa gives an ever so slightly condescending nod. I know this nod. It is the nod of the person who secretly believes that single women are immature and unable to figure out what they really want. Did I mention that I might be feeling paranoid?

“Doris,” Asa says, gesturing behind me. “I want you to meet David.”

I turn to face a tall, good-looking boyish man whose broad smile deflates within seconds of my facing him.

“David,” I mutter, repeating the name to myself. “David.”

“Uh, yeah,” he says. “Nice to meet you, Doris.”

“Nice to meet you, David. Always nice to meet a David.”

Asa gives me a look like I'm out of my mind.

“But you know what,” I continue, “it's funny, but to me you almost look more like an Andrew. Has anyone ever told you that?”

“Spooky,” Asa says. “Andrew is David's middle name.”

David is giving me a look that's hate mixed with loathing and a side of “ha-ha—you think you're a funny little smart-ass.”

“You know what's weird,” he says. “You look just like this flight attendant that I had when I traveled home the other week. I mean, you're a little bigger than she was, but similar.”

Asa hits him playfully in the stomach. “David,” she admonishes. But I can tell that she likes this gesture of complete and overt un-attraction for me.

“We must both be psychic.” I smile and give a more than knowing gesture in David's direction. “People are always telling me that I look like the fat version of some flight attendant.” Now Asa is looking at me as if I'm truly, totally, out of my mind, but I avoid meeting her eyes and stare straight at him. Because he and I both know that I'm way more than psychic, and what I know and Asa doesn't is that this so-called “David” of hers (he'll always be Andrew to me) is way, way less than evolved.

I miss Doris. It's great to be home, to be near old friends like Bita, but Bita's married, which makes her a different genre of woman. To my mind, there are four genres of women: single/hetero, single/gay, married or mommy. And gay or hetero, once you're in the married/mommy category, the single-with-no-kids category is a distant,
distant
memory. So Doris feels my pain. And I feel hers. We're also two people who see eye to eye about a lot of things. We're both pains in the asses when it comes to books and learning something, for God's sake. If you're a man, they consider you an intellectual. Well-read and well-informed. If you're a chick, you're better off keeping a lid on all that knowledge and keeping your mouth shut—unless you're talking about looking for a man. Unlucky for us, we're both too political for our own good; we're both in charge of folks who do not give one ounce of shit about books or politics, and both of us are pathologically determined to make them give an ounce of shit.

So the next time we talk, a few days after I've given Ian his TV-watching assignment, we trade war stories. I wasn't surprised that she was having a hard time. Okay, really, I'm just using “hard time” as a euphemism for “flipping the fuck
out.
” Teaching is hard and underappreciated. Newsflash.

“If there's a God, I would like him to give me actual students who actually care, and if they don't, they should just sit down, shut up, and do everything I say, anyway,” Doris rants. She has just gotten home from work, so the good times are still fresh in her head.

“D.” I'm thinking about my own special hell with Ian. Who, as annoying and trying as he is, is a smart, interesting kid because his little demented wheels keep turning, even when he doesn't want them to. “That's not true. You'd be bored out of your mind teaching kids like that. Kids who'd agree with you in a robot monotone.” This Paige Prentiss sounded like a doozy. I imagine she and Ian getting together, towering over us, and crushing us with their thumbs. If you're a teacher, kids who don't care worry you about the future, but smart kids who could really do something with their smarts, but choose mediocrity, those are the ones who are really scary. Paige and Ian were scary, but they weren't hopeless.

“Maybe I'd be bored,” she admits. “Okay, yeah, I would, but it would be so much easier. I do have this one awesome student, Jack Moynihan. Not T., my gay fashionisto, but an honest-to-goodness frat boy with a conscience. Anyhow, he came to my office the other afternoon to tell me that he's switching to English as his major. From business, so his parents might hunt me down and kill me, but it's a small victory for critical thinking.”

“Yeah, well. A drop in the ocean.”

“True. I miss you and Earl. The new friend thing is stressful. I keep waiting for the crazy-bomb to drop with all these new folks.”

“Why don't you come to L.A.? Come have a little vacation with me and Earl.”

“And sleep where? Between the two of you? That'd be cozy.”

“Earl wouldn't mind.” Earl would turn at least three shades of red if he heard me joking about this.
You ladies,
he'd say and shake his head as though he didn't know what in the world to do with us.

“No offense, but ew,” Doris says. “Not funny. Like sleeping with my sister's husband, that would be. Besides, I've got my own man, kind of.”

“Details,” I demand, and pour what has to be my fourth Diet Coke of the day. “I have a Coke habit. Ha-ha. I drink like, six a day.”

“Well, quit it for a minute and maybe I'll confess to meeting Mr. In The Meantime, this Maxwell I told you about.” I hear Doris opening and closing refrigerator and cabinet doors.

“What are you eating?”

“What am I
not
eating, is really the question.”

“So vegan is okay, then?” I remember Doris telling me
that
little detail. I, personally, wouldn't know what to do with a vegan. It'd be like dating someone who said they much preferred water to eating, and potato sacks to clothes. So much for my liberal “tolerance.”

“We'll see what the deal is,” Doris says, changing the subject. “Let's just say my expectations are low, low, low.” I catch her up on Earl finally cracking, Bita possibly dumping Charlie, and my conclusion that Ian is a smart, smart little nightmare. She says, after hearing more stories about Ian, that she'll never complain about her sweet angels in Atlanta again and that she had a spare crucifix she could put in the mail for me.

“Promise you'll think about L.A.,” I insist before we hang up. “Our couch is comfortable, I swear. Good to sleep on.”

“You've already slept on your couch? Who pissed who off?”

“No,” I said. “We've not
slept
on it.”

“My second ew,'” Doris moans. “Time to hang up now. And you think about Atlanta. There's lots of good food and not a hipster-with-a-screenplay in sight.”

On the tip of my tongue was the makeup smear on Earl's shirt. But I didn't want to get into it, not really. Doris had already yelled at me once, had convinced me that I was being silly, that it could have been anyone who brushed up against Earl. But I've seen Earl bartend many, many times and he's a stand behind the bar, strictly business kind of guy, not a mingle among the crowd, touchy-feely bartender. The obvious answer is that it's Katie's makeup smudge—he's been fighting her off. But still. It's my Lady Macbeth-like obsession. I can't get it out of my mind. Out, out, damn spot!

“Hey. Did you hear me? I'm hanging up.”

“Yeah. I heard you.”

“What's wrong over there?”

“I saw something on Earl.”

“What. Warts or something?”

“Doris.”

“Well? What then?”

“Lipstick and makeup smudges on his shirt.”

“Okay. That is a little weird. But that's not Earl's style. I know we're both a bit kooky now, being uprooted and all that, but let's not flip out completely. He could have an explanation, right? Maybe there was a bachelorette party or something.”

“He was just so worked up the night I noticed it.”

“Earl's a big boy. Give him some credit. And don't be such a girl. What are you, going to start digging in his pockets now, looking for clues?”

“When did you get so strong and reasonable all of a sudden?”

“Since you and Earl are the only couple in both recent and distant history that are making a shred of sense. My head will explode if you guys start any nonsense. So cut it out.”

“All right,” I promise. “I'll cut it out.” And I try. I really try.

 

Bita's a hard-ass. When she decides to do something, you can't talk her out of it, no way, no how. And I can tell she's had enough of Mr. Charlie. She's not a blabber, though. She thinks a thing through before she says anything about it, but by then, she's already made up her mind. I bet she's thinking of divorce, she's thinking of
half,
as spouses get here in California. She snapped when Charlie didn't even bother coming home a few nights ago, thinks that's just being too careless with her feelings and she's right. About a lot. It'd be time to go, if I were her. But I haven't told Bita any of that, not until I get her e-mail. It's a rare quiet day. A Monday. Earl is down at the bar getting ready to open, and I'm at home trying to come up with ways to tutor Ian so that he won't be bored and difficult. I could tell that he liked that TV assignment and he did crazy-good analysis. It was sloppy and full of grammatical errors, but at the end of the day, I loved that paper. Typos or not, Ian is a kid who's willing to open his eyes and look at the world. True, I had to pry open those eyes, but his ideas are all his own. I'm still considering having Ian watch more television for analysis, maybe some films, too. I'm not making books play second fiddle, but you have to draw in your student in any way you can. I sit at the kitchen table with our one electronic luxury, my seven-year-old laptop, and read what Bita has written:

I'm thinking, oh no,
you
don't leave that house. Somebody else named Charlie Asshole should leave the house. I log off and pick up the phone to call her, but hear a knock on the door. When I open it, Bita is standing there, looking overly cheerful. Weird.

“What's this? What are you doing here? I was just going to call you. And don't say you were in the neighborhood because you are never, ever in this neighborhood.” I grab her hand and pull her into the apartment. She's been to our place only once before, when it was supposed to look small because of all the boxes and junk piled everywhere while we were moving in. Now, though, it looked…small. Bita lied, though, and said, “Hey! The place looks great!” She sat down at our little wooden kitchen table and tried to look comfortable.

“Just getting out of the house,” she says, still looking around.

“Bita,” I say, “for real. What is going on?” It seems like I'm always pulling something out of someone. Ian, Earl, now Bita.

“I kicked him out,” announces Bita, sounding surprised at herself.

Yay! “Wow, Bita.” I don't know what else to say. “Are you okay?”

“No.” She brushes some stray salt off the table, and then wipes her palms on her skirt. I have to be a better housecleaner.

“You'll be okay. You did the only thing you could do.”

“I don't want to go back to my house,” she says loudly. She stands up and hugs herself. “It feels very big now…I want to go driving in my car and shopping and laughing and talking shit like normal, so can we please do that?”

“Of course we can.”

“And can I please have some water or something? It's hot as hell.”

“All right. Take it easy. You going to crack a bottle and hold it up to my neck or something?”

“I might, if you don't straighten up.” Bita's finally grinning at me. In the end, I get her a can of Diet Coke and we hop in her car and drive all the way from Echo Park to Melrose, where Bita buys a ton of overpriced clothes and I buy nothing because (a) I'm broke and (b), even if I weren't, in spite of the fact that I've dropped a pound or two, I'd
still
be unable to fit into anything Fred Segal would be selling. And I don't ask about what happened, exactly. I save that for later.

 

Once upon a time, Charlie was a prince and a knight in shining armor and all that bullshit. When we were undergrads at UCLA, and Bita first met him, he was all right. Not
my
type, but still. He was in a fraternity (strike one), the fraternity known for having money, and though Charlie didn't really come from money, he really, really wanted to be in that fraternity (strike two) and so he rushed it and got in for being an overall good guy. That's what they used to say about Charlie. As the years passed, though, Charlie became more and more “carried away” with himself, as Earl says. Once—just once—I actually went to one of those fraternity parties because Bita begged and begged, and I overheard one of Charlie's “brothers” talk about how they'd really like to bang the curry out of Charlie's “Indian chick.” When I told Charlie about what I'd heard, as I was getting the hell out of there after a night of feeling slimed, Charlie said he was sure it was just some misunderstanding, and kept drinking from his beer (strike three), even though he was already
amply
hammered. It's not as if I expected Charlie to conjure the guts to give his buddies an ass whipping and a lecture on feminism and race relations. But
damn.
If you ain't part of the solution, then you're part of the problem, as the militants say.

In my mind, from then on, Charlie's shining armor got really, really rusty. But one thing used to be true. He loved Bita, no matter what, and she loved her Charlie—even though in their ten years together there has been a lot of that “I'm sure it was just some misunderstanding” business from Charlie. Totally clueless, he is, about that sort of thing—when he wants to be, anyway.

I truly believe that Charlie's determined to make himself as bland and blendable as possible. He's a much bigger fan of the melting pot, not the salad. Hell, if he could turn back time and show up on Ellis Island, he would have
requested
that they fuck up his family name. I can see it now: “Look, I'm fresh from Ireland and I don't want any trouble. Would you please change my name from Flannigan to Jones or something?” And he's the love of Bita's life.

As for Bita's part in all of this, I'm at a loss. In her case, love wasn't blind. It was lobotomized. In the years since they've been together I've seen signs that would have been clear to anyone. I will agree though, that you never know what goes on between two people. As close as I am to Bita, there are things that I will never know about her and Charlie, because it isn't my business to know. And all these things likely add up to reasons why a smart, beautiful woman like Bita was willing to put up with Charlie's shenanigans. I should have been a better friend. I should have talked more trash about Charlie, but I thought it best to stay out of it—at the time. After all, Bita didn't bat an eye when I got off the plane with Earl, who was wearing what he always wears: his tight jeans, his black T-shirt, a gigantic belt buckle and black biker boots. And a hat. He came off the plane at LAX wearing a huge black Stetson.