Miss Fortune (29 page)

I don't know where it's coming from or how or why he says this—I have not mentioned anything to him about the affair, only, “You know how you fight with Riley at school and it's better if you don't play with him unless you want to get sand thrown in your face? Well, that's like Mama and Dada.” Maybe he heard me on the phone or heard David say something?

My phone rings. I'm not in the best of moods, but I am glad to see that it's Lori Jo; hopefully she'll leave a message.

Lori Jo is a friend of mine I met in Seattle who recently moved to Portland. I love Lori Jo. She's an earth-mother kombucha drunk. She's always saying things like “Oh, Lauren, don't let me drive today. I've had too much kombucha. Oh my gosh, I really feel it today.” Whenever she appears in my life it feels like a butterfly landed on my finger, and I don't want to scare it away, so when she calls me up and invites me to her house for a party Friday night, I
accept, even though I'd have to leave Leo with a babysitter and he just got here, so that makes me feel guilty
again
, and even though she referred to it as a “salon.” That's how much I like her.

A babysitter. The last time I was going to leave Leo with a babysitter, I called and canceled before she could get to the house. “You're not babysitting today. You're never babysitting Leo again,” I'd said on her voice mail, hung up, and walked around looking for something to destroy. Five minutes earlier, I'd found the evidence of the affair. My whole life I'd imagined the moment of walking in on an affair and the dramatic scene that would follow. Slashing of tires. Screaming “I hate you! How could you do this to me!” and slapping everyone in the room including myself. Leo was in the apartment watching TV when I found out. Nausea made it impossible for me to even tip over a chair.

They are the two lovers who found each other and I'm the old wife, the employer they escaped from. I'm the putz. My therapist can tell me over and over again, “It has nothing to do with you. What those two did and do is not a reflection of you.” What else is he going to say? “You are older and more demanding and they are scared of you”?

I'm glad to be out of the marriage, but boy do I feel like a sad, embarrassed, heartbroken asshole. He must have really hated me. Telling people what happened, I feel old and ugly. “We fell in love . . . ,” they say. The ones who were cheating and who are now together are the sexy “we can't help it, we're soul mates” ones. I must have been horrible for someone to lie to me for so long. So unlovable. Someone who was easy to hurt. Maybe cheating on me felt like stealing a pen from Citibank. Men probably secretly admire David. And fear me. “What did she do to drive him to that?” I'll come up with an answer. I'll say I was too loving. Too sexual. Too funny. Too driven. And I made fun of him constantly and knew I didn't want to be with him early on but stayed with it anyway.

Months before, the Human had given me a coat of hers I'd admired over the years. A teal blue faux leather coat with a faux fur collar from Forever 21. Or Forever 51, as I like to call it. “I was going to give it away but you've always said how much you like it, so I want you to have it.” I ripped that coat out of her hands, put it on, and ran to the mirror. It felt inappropriate to be wearing a twenty-year-old's coat, but hey, it did look good on me. It also felt inappropriate to take a hand-me-down from the babysitter. Wasn't it supposed to be the other way around?

Whenever David saw me in the coat, he'd give a sweet laugh. “Hey, I have to admit. You look pretty good in it; she was right!”

At the time it struck me as odd not that our babysitter could never make eye contact with me or that often she refused to take money for babysitting, but that at some point she'd said to David, when I wasn't around, that her coat looked good on me. It seemed like an adult thing to be saying to another adult, and she was a kid.

When I found out, instead of slashing tires or slapping anyone, I headed straight for that coat. I grabbed it off the coat rack to cut it up into shreds with a knife, burn it in the alley, tear it apart with my teeth, but instead I hung it up on a hanger and put it in the back of my closet. It was a cute coat. It shouldn't be a total loss.

When I see the babysitter the theater sets me up with, I'm relieved, even though David is nowhere in sight. She's a stocky twenty-nine-year-old with dyed gray hair and nose rings. After she meets Leo, she apologizes for being so low energy and promises to drink some coffee after I go. Right before she came over she'd had an argument with her boyfriend over whether hula-hooping was a career or not. “I don't even understand what we were fighting about. It
is
a career.”

I love Lori Jo's house. It's a classic Craftsman-style Portland house. Smells like verbena and rosemary. The walls are covered with photos of dogs and Buddhas, and Buddhas with dogs. A cool-looking
chick walks by me with a tattoo of a jellyfish swimming across her chest. “I love your tattoo. Where did you get that?” I ask her. With an exhausted sigh she tells me she was born with it and walks away. She's right. I'm being exhausting. Trying too hard. Who's the out-of-towner old lady, chirping, “Hey what's that there picture on ya? Can I snap a photo?” Why am I so uncomfortable? I need to calm down.

This is the most active group of partygoers I've ever seen. There's no standing around talking with a drink in your hands. Everyone is busy doing something. It looks like a commune getting ready for the long winter ahead. People are grinding millet for bread, making homemade candles, sawing wood for extra chairs. I have no skills to offer. We'll be dead by sunrise because of me. I'd offer to put a tablecloth on the table but I don't know how to use a loom. Look out, dating world, I'm a real catch.

David would have been right at home here. He was the cook. Give him some apple cider vinegar and a few cloves of garlic and he's off. God, will I miss his salad dressing. I'll miss all of his cooking.

There's a group of women in the kitchen all huddled around a mixing bowl balling up some earthy mushroom-looking mixture. They all look like different versions of that French movie character Amélie. Quirky and unique. Vintage dresses, flapper-girl haircuts, boots with buttons, and hair with little bows. They look like the kind of women I would be friends with if I lived in Portland. Or rather whom I'd like to be friends with. I shove myself into the circle and offer to help make what Amélie #1 tells me are “energy balls.” I roll the balls in hemp seeds and listen to Amélie #1 talk about how she just got back from getting her PhD on the flora and fauna of Botswana. Amélie #2 is in the middle of converting an old funeral home into a music venue that's going to
have a sustainable food bar, and Amélie #3 just ended a vow of silence she took for one whole year. “I just didn't like what my words had been doing anymore.”

These women are amazing. Yoga Amélie asks me what the play I'm writing is about. “I have a better story than that,” I say and tell the Amélies about my failed marriage. Amélie #1 chides me. “Why did you put candy in front of a baby like that?” Yoga Amélie agrees. “If you are on a diet, do you bring chocolate into the house?” No, I wouldn't bring chocolate into the house, but the problem was that I wouldn't feel I had the right to tell someone else not to bring chocolate in. If that someone wanted a chocolate bar, that was their problem and I simply would have to be strong. The Amélies were right. They all stated it like it was a rule of life that we all knew. If your nose is running, you blow it. If the cops show up, the party's over. If your husband's handsome, hire babysitters who smell like bad butter if you want to save your marriage.

Lori Jo grabs me and leads me to the living room. “You have to meet John. You'll love him. Go talk to him, Lauren. Go!”

John is a handsome silver-haired gentleman standing in the living room with a two-year-old perched on his shoulders. The child is holding on to his head like a monkey. He asks me if I'd like to feed his son a cracker, says something in French to his son, and hands me a cracker to feed him.

“I love you brought your kid to a party,” I tell him as I feed him the cracker. “I wish I'd brought my son, Leo, with me. But I get so worried about his bedtime and—”

“Bedtime?!” John says with surprise. “What, does the kid have a job or something?”

That's a good point. Leo should get a job. Why am I so uptight about stuff like that? Then again, I'm not sure Leo is the type to hang on to my head and eat crackers. He's so hyper.

“Well, children pick up on the energy of their parents,” John says to me with a little smirk.

Don't think I haven't heard that one before, buddy. John is looking at me with a mixture of pity and amusement. Uncomfortable, I offer him a cracker; he refuses. “No gluten for me.”

He asks if he can ask me a question. “Do you ever find living in LA that the concept of fame gets in the way of getting any real work done?”

Dang. I'd like to write that down but I don't have my journal with me. Yes, of course it does, and this is where I'm going to be raising my son as a single mother? If Leo grows up in LA, he'll be good-looking, but I want more for him; I want him to rich, too.

Lori Jo announces it's time for the salon to begin and all the guests are to go sit in the living room. Lori Jo asks me in front of all of her friends whether I'd be willing to go first. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do. Lori Jo says that anything goes. Whatever I'm feeling. Sing a song. Read a poem. Whatever I'm feeling. I ask if it's okay if I get up, take off all my clothes, and stand in front of everybody sobbing? I get a pass. The cool chick with the jellyfish tattoo stands up; I clap a few times but stop when she shoots me a look. She walks to the front of the room and opens her notebook. “I'm going to be reading a poem I wrote called ‘Naked and Sobbing.'”

The next night, I decide, that's it. We are going out on the town, Leo and Mama. I'm taking Leo out to dinner. Sure, it's past his bedtime, but who cares? Does he have to get up for his job at H&R Block in the morning? We get out of the Pearl District and I take him to an old vaudeville theater that's been converted into a pub, the Bagdad Theater & Pub. The minute we sit down at a table Leo starts making a big hubbub about wanting to watch a DVD. I look around at all the other kids with their families who are playing games with their fingers or staring off into space with big smiles on their faces, being surprised by their own thoughts.

“We don't do that anymore!” I loudly announce, but it's late and I'm getting stressed that it's the first night I've taken Leo out past his bedtime. What if he has some sort of awful meltdown and ruins the meal? I want to enjoy our first night out. So I get the DVD player, make a joke to the waitress about how “he just wants to see how
The Omen
ends” and throw my coat over him. He complains he can't breathe but I know he's fine. He's got a sleeve.

A drunken guy stumbles into the restaurant and makes a beeline to sit at the table right next to us, like he came here specifically to meet me. He sits down and starts talking to Leo. “Look at you hanging out with your mama!” He's swaying from side to side and I can feel the eyes of the happy families on us. What's this drunk man about to do? You never know. He's talking with the shrill slur of a drunk doing his best to sound “friendly and harmless.” “You're lucky, hanging out with your mama, aren't you? You are. You are one lucky, motherfucker. One lucky—”

Before he can say it again, I jump in with a friendly, “Oh, we're trying not to call him that anymore! He's just an asshole now. We're gonna wait until he's five to call him that. Make him earn it! Okay, you have a good night!” I shut the DVD player, grab Leo, and leave the pub. Leo's upset but I tell him that we'll get ice cream and I'll buy him a toy. I've got to stop promising to buy him toys every time he seems upset. It's a ridiculous thing to promise. Especially because it's pouring rain outside and it's eight at night.

There's a bookstore across the street. Perfect. Save us, Curious George.

A reading by a local writer is happening. He's in the middle of reading from his new book of poems, entitled
How I Plan to Take My Own Life.

“Come on, Leo, let's go.” I pull him back outside. Leo won't hold an umbrella. He's getting soaked. That guy was right. He is a motherfucker. Hold your umbrella! It's pouring rain. The city
turns into an endless rainy tableau of suicidal people in hoodies smoking under bridges, whispering, “Help me . . . help me . . . ,” as we run past them to find a bus stop, a tram stop, a llama farm, anything to get us back to the hotel.

The next morning, I make an announcement. “Leo, we got to quit smoking and drinking and cheer ourselves up. One last puff, buddy, and we're going to the zoo.”

The zoo is lovely. There is a little drizzle but it's doable. After we see the elephants, we take a break on a grassy hill to have a snack. There's a stage in front of us that suddenly comes to life. College girls in khaki shorts and polo shirts come bounding out onstage. “Welcome, Portland Zoo visitors, to the Birds of Prey show!”

The show is incredible. The perky college girls in the khaki shorts introduce various birds of prey from around Oregon, but when the birds come out, they aren't carried out on someone's arm. They fly in from behind the audience, as if the bird was sitting in a tree and suddenly heard its name. “Oh, that's me—the spotted owl. That's my cue! Got to go!”

They all have very Portland names, like “Deschutes the Hawk,” and they fly in to their own theme music.

Deschutes the Hawk tap-dances in the sky above the crowd to “Fly Me to the Moon.”

Leo puts his arms around my neck and whispers into my mouth, instead of my ear, “I want to come here again. Today.”