Miss Fortune (4 page)

I thought the best way to approach anything in my life that was the subject of failure—marriage, jobs, dog ownership—was to put all the responsibility on myself. That way I'd avoid lawsuits and bitch slaps at public appearances and family gatherings. Aren't
we supposed to bitch slap ourselves in order to grow? Not play the blame game?

Perhaps the guilt I still feel about Carlos made me tell the story from the “greatest mistake from the biggest piece of shit on earth” viewpoint. I didn't want to give myself an out. I wanted to be harsh and awful to myself so nobody else would do it. I'd simply rather not be trying to save myself for the sake of a good story. Why not be the antihero? Why not be the voice of the mistakes we have all made? There's a lot of time to be gained by getting other people to kick your ass for you so you don't have to, and I'm really busy. Some people are scared to admit they've done something wrong, and I'm scared to admit I've done something right.

The woman, Liz, who was going to adopt him was on her way to pick him up. My husband at the time, Mathew, says he's going to the hardware store.

Just say “husband,” Lauren. Jesus, I'm over you. Where are the message boards so I can vent?

And I'm, like, “You can't go now.” I'm stressed getting him ready to get picked up. I've got to get his toys, his food, and his pillow that he would
sometimes
lie on.

Mathew says, “Don't worry, I'll be right back,” and leaves. He's gone forever. Liz shows up and I'm mad. Mathew did this on purpose. Maybe he was too emotional about it. So, Liz comes in and we gather up the stuff. I'm on point. I've got the pillow. Likes the chewy stuff. Here we go.

We go out to the car and start to load up the back of the Subaru.

The minute I put the pillow in the car, Carlos, the cat-poop-eating crazy dog, who was able to communicate only his most basic animal needs, turns into this incredibly wise, communicative animal. He had been faking dumb like Suzanne Somers playing Chrissy on
Three's Company.
She acted dumb because it's the part she had to play to make money and survive, but in reality she was capable of creating hormone therapy and machines that tone the hard-to-hit inner-thigh area.

Carlos sits down on the ground next to the car and I swear to god, he gives me a “That's odd. Why did you just put my pillow in her car?” look. He understands what's going on.

I start to cry, so hard. I'm sobbing. It's embarrassing. Just sobbing. I can't breathe or talk.

Liz says, “Just go inside. Go inside. I'll come back later and get his toys.”

As they're driving away, I see him looking at me through the window.

Carlos was, according to Liz, a perfect dog. Once she changed his diet, he calmed right down and became so sweet and docile he could have been a pug.

He had a good life.

That had been the end, but the producer of the show suggested that maybe I could talk about any regrets I had. Or what I'd learned from the experience. I thought, no, that's not a good story.Let the radio listeners beat their steering wheel and scream at what a horrible person I was. Because I was. I don't need to be liked. Who cares? In fact, if I go on to explain all that I've learned, it will feel like an after-school special or a typical Hollywood
movie . . . “I guess what I've learned is that whales need to live in the ocean and that you don't need to spend a lot of money on a wedding if you're in love . . .”

No, let them feel what they want.

I'm still traumatized from the moment when Carlos got into the car, basically stood up on two legs, took my hands in his paws, and said in the queen's English, “You poor Germanic-looking woman. Don't you see? Dogs don't care where they are. As long as we are with you, we are content. I trusted you. You abandoned me. Your excuse—‘but I'm adopted, I'm all messed up'—doesn't move me. It should have opened your heart to my plight. Good day.”

I'd been his owner. I had taken care of him. Went to obedience class. I slept with him, fed him, walked him, and loved him. I'd put so much effort into playing the “I'm an asshole with a dog who's causing mayhem!” comedy that I hadn't let myself feel what was really going on. I was in love with that dog.

Don't NPR listeners have the liberal sensitivity to understand that if I describe my love, or get too showy with it, if I bring it out into the open, someone will grab it and run away with it? My love will be exposed, hovering in the air in front of me until it's karate kicked away. If I love openly and fiercely, I'll be left looking like an asshole. It's far better for me to tune out the chatter of my heart because what is real is that I don't really trust people, or maybe it's that I love them so much I'm sure that love will destroy me.

Complaining is easy. Admitting to doing awful things is easy. I like it! I'm the one who didn't flush the toilet, who stole from people I babysat for, who did coke in the elevator of the Standard! Loving something is awful. Like that scene in
Harold and Maude
where Harold gives Maude a fancy ring, and she takes it and hugs it to her chest lovingly, then leans back and tosses it into the lake. He looks at her with horror—what did she just do? “That way I'll
always know where it is,” she says with a deep, relaxed sigh. That's how I feel when something I care about, something beautiful, is in front of me that opens my heart. I worry about losing it the entire time I have it. I'd rather throw it away and know that exactly where it landed is where it remains. It won't go on any journeys with me; it won't change. It won't get damaged or sold or lost and it won't age.

Those message-board folks should be glad I didn't throw Carlos in a lake. The joke would have been on them, though: Carlos loved swimming in Lake Washington. He'd leap in and swim and swim and swim. Sometimes, it looked like he was never going to come back. “Will he swim too far and drown?” I asked Mathew in a total panic, watching him swim after a goose that was heading toward the opposite end of the lake by Bill Gates's mansion. “Well, I don't think so,” Mathew had said. “Go after him, Mathew! Go get him!” I'd panicked and made Mathew swim out to get him, which he did. As soon as Carlos saw him, he swam toward him and followed him back to shore. From then on, I didn't take him to the lake because I was too worried he'd swim away and never come back.

Dear god, listening to this story is going to change my entire life. I'm going to let myself love something and admit to it. I've already started with my son, Leo. Next I could move on to a dog, and then a man and after that an outdoor deck. If I can do this—it will change my life. It won't change the story or the message boards from that show, because that shit is on the Internet and written in Internet stone.

I'm not just saying that now to prove to the four people on the message boards that I'm not bad. Well, maybe I am. There's sometimes something to be learned from those four people. But don't get all happy about it, Vermontbeerboy09.

For all the animal lovers reading this, I'd like to add that as I write this there's a black-and-white bunny named Liza under my couch, a kitty named Arthur nursing on my earlobe, a dog named Georgia at my feet eating its own throw up, and a potbellied pig named Inez soaking in my bathtub.
*

D
avid and I are in the car on our way home from a pool party, trapped in a classic 405 traffic jam. It's the hellish kind that makes people either jump out of their cars and start sucker punching anyone with their window down or turn on the radio and listen to
The Dr. Laura Program.
Dr. Laura is a conservative talk show host who loves to yell at young girls. She's the Bobby Knight of self-help, a feminist nightmare, and I listen to her every chance I get.

Today she's taking a call from a young girl from Arkansas looking for advice about inviting her uncle to her wedding.

“Well, my mom doesn't want him to come to the wedding because he used some inheritance to buy cocaine, but it's
my
wedding and—”

Dr. Laura cuts the caller off. “How old are you?”

“I'm twenty-three but I'm—”

“I'm not having this discussion with you.”

“I know you say not to get married in your twenties but—”

Dr. Laura cuts her off in voice so calm it gives me a chill. “Ask me the names of the boys I dated in my twenties.”

“I know, but—”

“Ask. Me. The. Names.”

There's an inhale that sounds like the girl is about to burst out sobbing. “Uhm. What were the—”

“
I don't remember because they didn't matter because I was in my twenties!
”

Normally, when Dr. Laura lays into a caller I start banging my tin cup on the bars: “
Get her, Dr. Laura! Cut her!
” But I couldn't have disagreed more. I'm grateful that I didn't marry any of the boys my path crossed with way back in the 1990s, but I certainly would never say they didn't matter.

David has always maintained that anything that happened to me between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine is either too sexual or too depressing or both. Given a choice, he'd rather not hear about any of it.

I just went to a pool party in a practical, long-sleeved, fully skirted swimsuit made popular by lesbians in 1910, yet David still has this idea of me as a crazy party girl with my shirt flipped up
Girls Gone Wild
–style. Yes, he's found things like “anorexic workout” in my browser history, but I'm still at my core an empowerment feminist. In my twenties, I had hairy armpits and believed that stilettos were invented by men to ensure that women would be rendered wounded animals that wouldn't be able to run away too quickly. I've always found David's image of me as this vapid blond sexpot a little flattering, though, so how good a feminist could I really be?

There
is
one story that I could see him using to build a case that I was a crazy wild child. If he could get past the part of the story that begins “This one time I had sex with two guys in Amsterdam,” he'd see that my three-way story isn't an after-hours story. It's a coming-of-age story. A story about self-discovery and two friends, Emad and Mikhas. A story about learning to listen and Muslim values.

Before I start, let me tell you that having a threesome is not what you think it's going to be.

It's not sexy.

For me, having a threesome was like living in New York. When I lived in New York, I was always having to tell myself, “I mean, look at you. You're in NYC!” A cab could drive by and splash gutter water into my mouth and I'd say, “Sure it's disgusting, but look at me! I'm in New York City.”

•   •   •

My threesome was not planned. At least
I
didn't plan on it.

Once upon a time, I was a twenty-one-year-old American living in Amsterdam with the low self-esteem and poor personal boundaries that only a cult leader could love. My Dutch boyfriend and I broke up, I wanted to go back home but didn't have enough money for a plane ticket, so I stayed. After a few years of doing experimental theater and learning important acting techniques, like how to breathe in through my vagina and out through my asshole while reciting William Blake, I had a regular job at a five-star hotel called the Pulitzer, a converted seventeenth-century canal house.

Initially, I was hired on to work room service, but since I'd learned how to say things like “I'm sorry, junkie, but you can't hide in the linen closet” in Dutch I'd been promoted to the café. The café wasn't as fancy as the hotel's formal dining room, the Sun Flower, where Swiss royals drank thousand-dollar bottles of wine and ate elk. But it wasn't considered as rough as what happened in the hotel's Breakfast Buffet. The Breakfast Buffet was a tiny eatery crammed into the hotel's attic space.

The café people and the Breakfast Buffet people rarely interacted. The Breakfast Buffet had its own little sad space, and its Anne Frank tiny attic working conditions meant they had to hunch over for most of their shifts so they wouldn't bang their heads on the
low-hanging ceiling. Meanwhile, the café staff would complain if they had to actually wait on a table. “I have to have a cigarette before I work. I'm not an animal.” The Buffet Boys, who were all, with the exception of Mikhas the Greek manager, Middle Eastern, started their shift at four
A.M.
and ended five hours later, whistling, winking, and throwing plates up into the air and catching them behind their backs. “Ha-ha!” My theory was that they loved their jobs. My coworker Yolanda's theory was that they partied until the clubs shut down and came to work to get free coffee and sober up before they went home to their families.

She was probably right, since there were many days when they started their shift sweaty, bleary-eyed, and reeking of hashish.

They could hardly keep a grip on the coffeepots, yet they still found the energy to hit on every single hotel guest who showed up for breakfast. The womanizing ways of the Breakfast Buffet Boys were infamous.

“Good morning, beautiful woman. Normally I'm not aroused so early in the day, but hello there. Coffee?”

The daily job of setting up for lunch in the café always included checking to see what the Breakfast Buffet Boys had stolen. Instead of walking all the way down to the supply closet in the hotel's basement, they usually made the shorter trip to the café and grabbed what they needed from us.

My hand was always the first one up when Steffan the café manager asked, “Who wants to go up to the Breakfast Buffet and retrieve the coffee cups, sugar packs, and whatever else you notice doesn't belong to them?”

Nobody else liked having to traipse up three flights of stairs, but even if there had been an elevator I would have volunteered, because only buying a jumbo box of tampons made me feel as solidly female as being sexually harassed by the Buffet Boys.

Being sexually harassed was something romantic that happened
to pretty girls on summer days in Brooklyn whose Love's Baby Soft perfume made the construction workers fall off scaffolding to their deaths. In Indiana, boys would let girls know they thought they were pretty by driving by them and throwing a beer can at their heads, and that had never happened to me. The closest I'd come to being sexually harassed was at the Indy 500 racetrack when a man with the command
SHOW ME YOUR TITS
written across his T-shirt walked past me. It was so crowded I wasn't even sure he was talking to me.

The minute I set foot in the Buffet attic, Mert, the fifty-five-year-old Turkish busser, yelled my name. How he was able to see me at all through his butter-smeared glasses is a mystery.

“In my country you would be a movie star!” he shouts.

Italian guests would look around trying to figure out whom on earth he could be referring to. Mert asked guests to take pictures of me and wrote down his family's address on the place mats so they could send the photo directly to his family back in Turkey. “Just write a note—‘This beauty works with Mert. You see, he is okay.'”

Emad, the headwaiter of the Breakfast Buffet (or head bin refiller, since most of the work in the Buffet involved keeping the
pannekoeken
piled high), looks like an Egyptian Burt Reynolds. Big, wide-open face. Black mustache. Emad had a never-ending look of alertness, which made him a good breakfast waiter. He'd seen me only during the daytime—and he still liked me.

We came from different worlds. According to Yolanda, a stern waitress with no eyebrows and an accent that I'd thought for months was a speech impediment (turns out she was just Belgian), it was forbidden for us to be together. She didn't actually say the words “It is forbidden.” It was more like, “Dey thmell dike hashish! Blah!”

Emad made an effort to come down into the café at least once
a day to tell me, “I like you, Lauren, I really like you.” It made Yolanda furious. She furrowed her eyebrow ridge and told him to “go ayay! Doo can't be dow here!” None of the pale, floppy Dutch depressives I worked with liked the dark Middle Eastern (and one Greek) boys of the Breakfast Buffet. That bothered me. “You guys are racist,” I'd say, and then quickly add, “Just kidding!” for job security.

Emad was funny. He made jokes about being Muslim the same way I made jokes about being American. I ran around screaming, “Everything is just too
different
in Europe!” in a Texas accent and acted like I was going to eat a bowl of ketchup, while he threw napkins at the female kitchen staff and asked them to “Cover your face—stop tempting me!”

The day he tied a tablecloth around my face I fell a little bit in love with him. Maybe it was the contrast between his humor and the café staff's lack of it. The café staff aggressively fought against the idea of laughing. “Ja, you told a joke, so what? Big deal. Am I supposed to lose my mind now? Oh, ha-ha-ha. No, I'm not doing that. Sorry.”

Emad cornered me after his shift one day. “I like you, Lauren, I really like you,” he said, and asked me on a date.

Sure, it was his catchphrase. I'd overheard him saying it to an eighty-nine-year-old, limp-necked German woman, but nobody had told me they liked me, really liked me, in a long time. They'd told me I had the figure of a mole or that I needed to stop laughing so loudly. Mert had referred to me as a movie star, but movie stars are admired from afar. Being asked out on a date pulled me back into the world of hopeful romance and delusional dreams. He could be the one. What if he fell in love with me? (I never thought, “What if I fell in love with him?” because I was very polite and wanted him to go first.) Having a Dutch boyfriend was an item of exotic interest for
three months in Indiana. An Egyptian boyfriend would be exotic forever. Hans taught me how to keep with the flow of bike traffic in Amsterdam and buy hard cheeses. Emad would teach me to ride a camel and buy spices from men in robes with monkeys on their shoulders. I'd come home for the holidays with dusty suitcases full of magic lanterns and beads and dried mice. “They eat them like peanuts over there,” I'd explain. Thanks to Disney's version of
Aladdin
, I knew exactly what my future held.

Best of all, I'd finally have a compelling reason to go to work besides free cookies: to see my boyfriend.

•   •   •

Heading out the door for our date, I was excited because Emad had never seen me in anything except my hotel uniform and I was looking goooood. It was a rare moment where my chin wasn't broken out, my hair was taking the curl, and my skirt and shirt were the same shade of black. The gods must be pleased with the coming together of Emad and me.

My phone rang. It was Emad calling to ask if I could bring a friend for his best friend, Mikhas. “Listen, Lauren, it's Saturday night and Mikhas really needs to go out. I have to bring him.” Mikhas is Emad's boss.

It was flattering that someone from upper management wanted to tag along, but a double date was not really what I'd been hoping for, and it was a little last-minute.

None of my expat, artsy girlfriends were the “Hey, put on your stockings, his friend wants a gal too, Madge!” sort. They were far too busy creating dance pieces about the AIDS epidemic as dreamt by Rumi. For a second, I thought about calling my single friend Rachel, an English painter who had just finished painting a series of “lonely flowers,” but she'd just broken off a relationship because she
didn't like the guy's hands. “He's got funny knuckles,” she'd said. I couldn't remember what Mikhas's hands looked like, so I didn't call, a decision I would deeply regret later that night when Mikhas was behind me in that sexual position made popular by sheep herders and the morbidly obese, and Emad was under me whispering, “I like you, I really like you. I mean, besides all of this.”

Emad is giggly on the phone as he says good-bye. He's nervous about our date, I thought. Or very high.

We met at Rum Runners. Nothing says romance in Amsterdam like Jimmy Buffett blasting in a Caribbean tourist bar. Also nothing says romance like bringing your manager from work with you. On the barstool next to Emad was Mikhas.

Emad continued to refer to the night as “our date” while the three of us sat and did round after round of Laser Beam shots—a neon-green concoction that gives you that “laser beam melting your organs” feeling that the kids love.

Before the Laser Beams liquefied my insides, Emad told me he used to be an agricultural engineer back in Egypt. He lived in Libya for a while, married and divorced a white African woman, and moved to Holland.

I like him.

Mikhas and Emad kept excusing themselves to use the bathroom every few minutes. Any time one was gone the other would scoot his barstool over and whisper, “I like you, Lauren. I really like you. Oh! Here he comes!” It was hard enough for me to think of dealing with one guy falling in love with me, but two! Best friends and on the same night! I'd read about this sort of thing in
Seventeen
magazine, but I never thought it would happen to me!

“Tutti frutti, man!” Mikhas yelled as he ran out of the bar bathroom with a handful of flavored condoms. Mikhas and Emad high-fived each other.