Five Things I Can't Live Without (16 page)

Alex leaned in to kiss my cheek. “It’s been a while,” he said. “I don’t have anyone to flirt with when I come over here anymore. Bart’s not my type.”

Alex was corny, but harmless. What he neglected to mention was that I never responded to his flirting, except to roll my eyes, though I suspected that was the reaction he actually wanted. He was someone who’d be more comfortable pulling a girl’s pigtails than giving bedroom eyes. “It has been a while. What have you been up to?”

“Different things.” Alex never gave a straight answer. I knew he was some kind of artist with a day job, but I didn’t know what kind of art or what kind of day job. “I hear you’re an entrepreneur now.”

I laughed. “A freelancer, actually.”

“Hey, they’re not that far apart. Get a little more ambitious, and you’re an entrepreneur.” He held up his glass as if to toast me.

“It’s funny you mentioned that, because I’ve been thinking about expanding the business.” I was glad I’d had a few vodka tonics. I was feeling pretty loose. “I know you take great pictures. You’ve taken some great ones of me, and I’m notoriously unphotogenic.”

“Hard to believe.”

“So you know I’m helping people with their profiles for dating Web sites, right?” He nodded. “Well, that’s only part of the battle. The other thing is the pictures. If the pictures aren’t working, no one will ever read the text. So I was thinking that maybe I could help people with their pictures, too.”

“Which is where I come in,” he said slowly.

“I was thinking that when I advertise my service, I could include that as a possible add-on.”

“Like when people are buying a car, and they get options.”

“Right.”

“That sounds great to me. I’m in.” He smiled.

“Really?” I beamed. It just seemed disconcertingly easy.

“Let me give you my number. We can work out the details later.”

The birthday cake appeared at just the right time. Alex and I had exhausted our conversational reserves and it gave us a graceful exit. Everyone moved toward the kitchen, where Bart was carrying the cake, which blazed with thirty candles. I returned to Dan and Larissa. Dan smiled at me and laced his arm through mine, and I rested my head on his shoulder.

Bart started off the singing. “Happy b-day to me,” I jokingly sang in Dan’s ear. The rest of the room sang the real version, and Fara looked completely in her element. She preened and did those “Who, little old me?” gestures. Bart put the cake down on the table, and Fara held her long hair back, positioning herself to blow out the candles. She ballooned her cheeks comically, then blew. The candles flickered, then roared back to life. Trick candles, at the birthday party of a thirty-year-old woman. Bart laughed loudly and pointed at her. He actually shouted, “Gotcha!”

Fara tried again, with the same result. Obviously. She continued to play along, but I could see that she was embarrassed.

I would have expected to revel in this moment: in her humiliation, in her obviously failing relationship with an infantile sadist. But I actually felt bad for her. Was this what adulthood felt like? Well, I didn’t care for it a bit.

“Let’s go home,” I said. I didn’t want to watch anymore. With the candles to light our way, Dan, Larissa, and I filed silently toward the door.

Chapter 10

A
few years back, Larissa, Sonya, and I were nearly inseparable. We all lived in Oakland and even when we had boyfriends, we made sure we saw each other at least once a week, though it was usually more often. It was a pact, actually. That might sound juvenile, but it seemed necessary. We had lost too many female friends to relationships, and we were determined not to go down that road.

But then Larissa fell in love with Dustin, and Sonya got a great job in San Francisco and decided to move there. San Francisco’s just a few miles from Oakland, but the traffic’s often grueling and the bridge became a psychological hurdle. I got tired just thinking about the trek, and Sonya apparently did, too. Soon Sonya and I were every-other-week friends, with long voice mails or e-mails in the interim. After a while, there were fewer visits and fewer messages, but no ill will. Sonya’s social life had migrated to the city, and while I still loved her, there had been some pretty serious drift.

That day, when I got to Sonya’s apartment, she opened the door with a crying baby balanced on her hip. She waved me inside, apologizing. “Palance won’t go down for his nap, so he’s a little cranky.”

I’d heard his wails from outside, so I was prepared. “Don’t worry about it at all,” I said.

Palance was nine months old. And yes, I was shocked, too, when I heard that name. Sonya’s husband, Chris, had this weird affection for Jack Palance, and Sonya defended the name on the grounds that her son was probably the first Palance on record. Someone probably held the record for longest time spent on a unicycle while eating saltines, but that didn’t make it right.

“Can I get you anything? A drink?” Sonya offered. She was jiggling Palance on her hip. “You’re okay, pumpkin. You’re okay,” she comforted him as he erupted into fresh sobs.

“Nope, I’m okay, too.” I settled on Sonya’s beige couch. Directly in front of me was a screened-in fireplace. “New screen?”

She nodded. “Babyproofing. He’s crawling like mad now. This front room is pretty much done. Our bedroom is still a death trap.” She paused. “Did I just say that? I’m becoming a lunatic.”

“You’re just being careful.”

“No, I’m a lunatic,” she said matter-of-factly. She settled herself on the floor and whipped out her breast. Palance finally stopped crying as he suctioned his lips to her. “This is what I do all day long. He cries, and I give him the boob. He’s going to grow up to be a pervert. Tits will be the only things that soothe him.”

I laughed. Palance stopped drinking and turned his head to gaze at me. He was a beautiful baby. I don’t say that about all babies. Some of them are discolored, some are goggle-eyed. I can say that, because I’m not their mother. But Palance had enormous blue eyes and milky skin, which didn’t even seem blotchy from all his crying. Sonya’s breast was still exposed as she waited to see if he’d resume interest, so I kept my eyes locked on Palance. It was disconcerting, trying not to look at Sonya’s engorged breast and erect nipple. I knew her when it was half that size. I was relieved when Palance started feeding again.

“So you’re meeting a client later today?” Sonya asked when she finally snapped her nursing bra shut and pulled her shirt down over it.

“I was supposed to, but she canceled. I asked if she wanted to reschedule, but she said she’d changed her mind.”

“Does that happen much?”

“It’s happened a few times. And there was that guy I told you about, the one who paid me, but then didn’t want to use the profile.”

“He sounded sweet. I wanted to find him a wife myself.”

“I know.” I took a second to reflect on Vincent. “He never wrote me back. I wonder what he decided to do.”

“It’s easy enough to find out. You could just call the botanical gardens and ask for him. If he comes to the phone, hang up.”

“I don’t want to stalk him. I just wonder. I’ve heard back from a few people who said the profiles worked, but not from the others. I guess I should just be glad no one’s asked for their money back.” I’d been feeling more self-doubt the past few days, and that day’s cancellation had me on edge.

“You’re not a magician. You probably did the best you could with what you had.” That comment was Sonya in a nutshell. It was why she never had insomnia.

“It’s just been occurring to me that if my rent wasn’t so low, I wouldn’t even be able to do what I’m doing now. I mean, this isn’t really a growth business.”

“Didn’t you say that you get a better response to each ad you run?”

I waved a hand dismissively. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It doesn’t mean anything because you’re getting scared. You’re scared of success.” Palance was crawling around the floor now, looking content. He stopped every so often to gaze back at me curiously. I smiled at him before he continued on his way.

“Well, the good thing is that a fear of success is one I’ll never have to confront.” I realized how self-pitying I sounded, and told myself to stop it. I could at least stop myself from saying it, even if I couldn’t stop myself from feeling it. Maybe I truly was incapable of sustaining happiness.

“Hey, what are you doing to yourself here?” I thought for a second that Sonya was talking to Palance, but she wasn’t.

“I know, I know. My business is coming along fine; everything’s good; I get to sit here with you and your beautiful baby in the middle of the afternoon. There is no reason on earth for me to feel this pit in my stomach. But I do. That’s what’s so frustrating about it.”

“Maybe you could use an antidepressant,” she suggested.

I tried not to feel offended. She was just trying to help.

“I’d be on one, but I’m worried it would come through my breast milk,” she said.

“Then you’d have one contented baby.” Since when did Sonya need to consider antidepressants?

“Ha-ha. I’d really love to do it. I have a friend with obsessive-compulsive disorder and she went on an antidepressant—I think it was Paxil—and it did wonders for her. She needed to count all the time. Count her steps, count the tiles on the bathroom floor. As you’d imagine, it was totally interfering with her life. But she’s basically cured.”

“Won’t it all start back up the minute she stops taking Paxil?”

“Probably. But she’d rather be on a drug the rest of her life than live like that.”

“Do you think I’m obsessive-compulsive?”

“Of course not.” She watched as Palance tried to stand up using the couch for support. He stayed up for a few seconds, then fell down. “Yay!” she cheered. Palance wavered between laughing and crying for a second, then chose laughing. She said to me, “I’m trying to train him not to cry at every bump. Cheering helps.”

I wanted to talk about me some more, but then, I also didn’t. “What’s so loopy about you?”

“I don’t know where to start.”

I felt like something momentous was about to pass between us. I mean, Sonya was the kind of person who recommended antidepressants, not someone who wished she could take them. She was someone who made a choice and never looked back. Like having Palance. She and Chris had only been together three months when Sonya realized she was pregnant. She was thirty-five, and while she’d previously been fine with the fact that she might never have a baby, she gave it careful thought and reversed her position. With a minimum of fuss, she decided that she’d have her child with or without Chris. And since it was Sonya, it turned out that Chris (who, at forty-two, had never wanted kids before) wanted the whole package. She was also okay with not getting married, and when Chris proposed, in typical Sonya fashion, she took a week to think it over. On her wedding day, she was the calmest bride I’d ever seen, completely unfazed by walking down the aisle with her pregnancy bump. Then during the twelve weeks of maternity leave from her corporate vp job, she decided that she wanted to stay home with Palance and she’d been remarkably at peace with that decision, too. Or so it had seemed.

“Actually,” she said, “I do know where to start. Let’s start with the muffin.”

“Okay,” I said, laughing in advance.

“Palance is still a lousy sleeper, so I’m not sleeping. Let me just make that disclaimer first.” She arranged herself into a more comfortable position on the floor and cooed again at Palance before diving in. “So last Friday, Palance and I go to the supermarket to pick up a few things. On the drive there, I realize I haven’t eaten anything all day and I start fantasizing about a muffin. Like really fantasizing. I can practically taste the thing by the time we pull into the parking lot. We go inside and I pick up one of those muffins from the self-serve bakery case, the kind you put in a waxy bag, and I throw it in the cart. The cashier rings us up, we go out to the car, I settle Pal into his car seat, and I look through the bag. I want my muffin right that minute. I don’t even want to drive home first. I want it now.

“It’s not in the bag, and I figure I just need to run in and reclaim my muffin. So I look at Palance, and he’s all comfortable, and I’m kind of peeved at this point, not at Palance, but at the cashier. I think it’ll just take a second, so I pull into the handicapped space right in front of the supermarket, lock up the car, and run in. And my blood pressure is elevated, my heart is racing, and I don’t know why, but I’m thinking the muffin is the only thing that can help.” She stops. “That’s actually what I’m thinking. Can you imagine?”