Getting Over Jack Wagner (15 page)

Hannah hesitated. I could tell she regretted telling me already. Years later, she would term it
enabling.
“It's kind of a band…function.”

At the word “function,” my excitement dimmed. “What kind of function? Like performing in public? Washing cars? Selling hoagies?”

“More like a gathering.” She was getting more cryptic by the word. “Sort of an end-of-the-year…like…bash.”

Whoa, there. If “function” was unnerving, “bash” was a downright blazing red flag. Obviously, the term “bash” must have come via Eric, which meant it orginally came via the invitation itself, which I was suddenly sure was designed on a home computer and had little musical notes all over it and said something like “Let's ‘Band' Together!”

But the romantic in me knew this might be my only shot at meeting Jordan Prince. Bash, function, bake sale, whatever. I had to go for it.

“Okay,” I agreed. “But how am I supposed to get in the door? Should I pretend I sit way in the back? Act like I play the triangle or something?”

Hannah smiled, her first real smile of the afternoon. “Eliza, you can't pretend to be in band.”

*  *  *

This statement, as it turned out, was truer than I could have known. The minute I was in the door of the all-band bash/function—at the house of a clarinetist named Judy, whose parents were in the Poconos and liked chintz—I was marked as a nonband member. All across the miles of painfully patterned living room, band members were trading band jokes, humming band songs, swapping photos from their band trip to Niagara Falls. The real “Rock Me Amadeus” was playing on the stereo. In front of the fireplace, a tall, pimply boy was doing his well-honed impression of Mr. Franklin, complete with walkie-talkie.

Some kids were wearing cummerbunds, for kicks.

“Are you sure I'm allowed to be here?” I whispered to Hannah.

“Nothing you can do about it now.” This was true, but didn't exactly inspire confidence. Attached to Eric's hand, Hannah was legitimate. I, on the other hand, was a band bash crasher.

“Hey!” shouted a guy by the umbrella stand. He was waving inexplicably in our direction, and wearing jeans, a complicated Escher print T-shirt and a plumed hat. “Yo!” he called. “Boomer!” It took me a minute to realize he was talking to Eric, whose “1812” stint had apparently earned him an official band nickname.

“Hey, it's The Boom!” another guy shouted, and suddenly people were crowding us from all sides. For a guy who didn't know any band members, Eric was a popular man. The three of us were handed plastic cups of pee-yellow beer, half of which I gulped down on the spot. I was starting to have second thoughts about this whole scheme, and having visions of Jordan Prince wearing a chin strap.

As Hannah was getting introduced to Boomer's new friends, I slunk away. I couldn't bear the awkward moment when “The Boom” tried to explain who I was and what I was doing there. I headed for the kitchen, where four girls were blending bright pink daiquiris. They were also wearing straw hats a la “Sailor's Hornpipe,” which felt meanly reassuring. If these were the girls I was up against, my chances were looking good with Jordan Prince.

I aimed for the back door, hiding behind my beer. On my way, I scanned the chintzy dining room on my right, the chintzy den on my left. Maybe, I reasoned, Jordan Prince was too cool to be here. Maybe, like me, he'd rather be somewhere (anywhere) else. But when I stepped too confidently onto the patio, there he was, sitting on the edge of the pool.

He was shirtless, of course. He was also deeply tanned, which made his light hair even lighter and his eyebrows practically invisible. Fortunately, he wasn't wearing any band paraphernalia. Unfortunately, the girl beside him wasn't, either. She'd opted for an orange-striped bikini as big as a Band-Aid.

Damn.

My heart sank as I watched Bikini operate. For the record, there was no earthly way this girl was in band. First she pulled the splash-her-feet move, just enough to get Jordan Prince wet and make him splash her in return (tramp). Then she pulled the feel-my-muscle-I've-been-doing-Cindy-Crawford's-workout-tape-and-does-it-show? move, which required he touch her arm (wench!). When she felt his bicep in exhange, I started feeling nauseous.

I was about to admit defeat, go home, and drown in some Fruit Roll-Ups and slow Sting when the girl's friend came running over. I watched the two of them confer, then Bikini turn and whisper something in Jordan's ear—a sultry “don't forget me when I'm gone,” I'm sure—and scamper off with her friend, probably heading to the chintzy bathroom to discuss boys or tampons or swimming with their periods or whether you can get pregnant just by touching it. If I hadn't been in public, I might have cackled as I moved in for the kill.

Note: this was the boldest move in my rock-star repertoire to date. I had no excuse to hide behind this time. No poem reading. No fake drowning. I had only half a beer in my veins, but was feeling desperate enough to keep on moving. When I was about two feet from where Jordan Prince sat basking in his multicolored Jams, I lowered myself to the edge of the pool, wishing all at once that I had a) shaved my legs, and b) painted my toenails, and c) shown just a little more skin. As I felt water seeping through my cut-offs, I resigned myself to the fact that I might be too embarrassed to ever stand again. I had a vision of Judy the clarinetist and her family waving to me from their den, tossing me spare chicken nuggets, blankets, and last week's
TV Guide
s while I sat rooted to the edge of their pool, growing old.

I stared into the water, praying hard that Jordan Prince would say hi.

“Hi.”

Unfortunately, it wasn't him who said it. But at least the ball was rolling.

Jordan Prince surveyed me through his silvery mirrored shades. This is one of the hazards of dating rock stars; they're often hidden behind their sunglasses, whether black or silver, indoor or outdoor, day or (in the words of Corey Hart) night.

“Hi,” he replied.

Good, good. But where to next? “Great party!” Too fake. “So are you in the marching band?” Too nosy. “Did you know that once I was the drowning victim in my camp lifesaving class?” Too utterly lame. “You were really good in the spring concert?”

“You were really good in the spring concert,” I said, and swallowed some beer. At least I had said it. If things went as well as they had with Z Tedesco, we'd be kissing inside forty-five minutes.

“Oh yeah?” Jordan Prince's eyebrows—they were, in fact, still there—furrowed into an adorably confused V. “Are you in the band?”

I almost scoffed at the idea—
are you fucking kidding me?
came to mind—but caught myself in time. “No,” I swallowed. “I'm just…a fan.”

A fan? A
fan?
Now who seemed pathetic? I sounded like some kind of psychotic band stalker. Which was only a tiny bit true.

Jordan Prince concealed a smile. Just to clarify: it wasn't an “I'm-falling-in-love-with-this-endearingly-eccentric-woman” smile, it was a “this-chick-is-insane” smile. “Wow,” he said, his tone thick with mocking. I am intimately familiar with the thick-with-mocking tone. If I hadn't been the mock-ee, I would have complimented him on his delivery. “A fan, huh?” Jordan Prince said. “A band fan.”

This was not good at all. Not only did Jordan Prince think I was a psychotic stalker, he now thought I was a dork. He was blatantly making fun of me. He had rhymed.

“Well, no, I'm not a
fan,
exactly,” I stumbled. I was starting to sweat in my black T-shirt. “I mean, I was at the spring concert, but only kind of by accident. My friend's boyfriend was, um, in it.”

“Who's your friend's boyfriend?”

I wasn't looking to go down this road, but it was better than anyplace we'd been before. “Eric,” I said, raising my plastic cup and mumbling to the rim. “Eric Sommes.”

Jordan's eyebrows furrowed again, now wondering if I was not only a dork and a stalker but a pathological liar, too. “There's no guy named Sommes in band.”

I glanced toward the house, praying to God that Eric might materialize right then to rescue me. He didn't, of course. God knew better.

I gritted my teeth and offered, “You might know him better as…Boomer?”

“Oh!” Jordan Prince actually seemed to brighten a little. “The 1812 dude!”

“Dude” was an overstatement, but at least we were getting somewhere. I felt my chest unclench. Jordan Prince was smiling. I was smiling. We had survived the “band fan” setback (maybe we'd joke about it later, maybe it would become my pet name someday, when we were forty and married and he was grabbing at my hand as he reached for the Country Crock and murmured, “Good morning, my little band fan”)—but, right now, I just needed to get away from this Boomer connection. I needed to tap into the sensitive side of Jordan Prince, the eyes-closed side, the side that felt “Old Time Rock 'n Roll” in the soles of his feet.

“Plus,” I leaped in, “I just really like music. You know, in general.”

There it was: the spark of interest. Jordan Prince's mocking smile faded. He pushed a shock of blond hair out of his face with the heel of one hand. “Oh yeah?” he said. Then, as if in slow motion, he posed the all-important:
“What kind of music do you like?”

At that point in my dating career, I hadn't yet learned the significance of this question. For a rock star, claiming allegiance to any one “kind of music” was the equivalent of committing to a marriage or a child or, at the least, a large pet. Fielding the question took skill and finesse. An eye for detail, an ear for nuance. Until you knew a rock star's specific preferences, it was best to stay general. Speak in terms of genre only. Never mention a specific band, a specific artist, a specific album or—God help you—a specific song.

Despite all of this, it was
“I like Jack Wagner”
that came marching out of my mouth that spring day, brazen as a hooker. I capped it off with:
“Do you know the song ‘All I Need'?”

I've since spent many hours of my life trying to understand what possessed me in that moment. It's not that I hadn't moved on from my crush on Jack Wagner, or didn't have a respectable CD collection—U2, Sting, R.E.M., etc.—plus Z Tedesco's coolly brooding mix tapes. I just spoke without thinking; it was something like blurting out “your skin on mine” the first time I talked to Z. Maybe I was so overwhelmed with rock-star lust that Jack Wagner, who had once defined the feeling, simply flew from my gut to my lips like a reflex, like the time I saw a Rorschach blotch in one of Hannah's textbooks and yelled out “cheeseburger!”

It was a huge mistake, don't get me wrong. Potentially unrecoverable. I couldn't begin to explain my reasoning to Jordan Prince; it's taken me years to explain it to myself. There was nothing to do but flail “I mean, you know, a long time ago,” while laughing much too hard and much too loudly.

But Jordan Prince had already shifted his gaze to somewhere over my left shoulder. He was probably searching for the bikini girl who, though she might still listen to Debbie Gibson's
Electric Youth,
was at least willing to get almost naked at the all-band bash/function.

I figured I had one small window of opportunity left, if I was lucky. My options, as I saw them, were: a) pretend to drown and hope Jordan jumped in to save me, or b) throw the music ball back in his court. Plan A seemed a touch too risky, relying too much on Jordan's participation. What if he opted
not
to rescue me? What if he just watched me flail? What if I climbed out of the pool alone, soaked, sour, and laughed out of the party by the Sailor's Hornpipe crowd?

I opted for the safe, verbal, and seated Plan B.

“So, Jordan.” Had I more strength left, I would have tried to sound seductive, but at this point it was all I could do to keep my voice from shaking. “What kind of music do
you
like?”

If he wondered how I knew his name, Jordan Prince didn't ask. I watched as his eyes slid back to my face, peering over the tops of his silver shades. I watched as he took a long drink of beer, watched him watch me over the rim as he swallowed, watched as he swiped his glistening lip with the back of his deeply tanned hand.

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.” Yesyesyesyesyes.

He gazed into the pool, at a yellow floaty bobbing forlornly in the deep end. “Jazz,” he said. The word was poignant, perfect. His eyebrows, when he said it, rose and fell in one beat, like a single note.

I felt the back of my neck prickle, and gulped the warm inch of beer left in my cup. Jordan Prince was looking right at me. Suddenly, this was going better than I could have dreamed. I could practically feel the sexual tension mounting between us. And if my Jack Wagner line had been a huge misstep, my next move made up for it in brilliance:

“My dad's into jazz,” I said. My tone was just right: thoughtful, wistful, a touch melancholic. I gazed into the distance—at what should have been a horizon or an ocean, but instead was four bassoonists in a chicken fight—and added, “at least…I think he is. It's been a while since I saw him.”