All This Heavenly Glory (9 page)

“Not really. Do you?”

“No,” Rachel says casually, “I just wondered if you did.”

Charlotte Anne, adding everything up in her head (belt-beating + Hollywood + ten years old = not good), is entirely alarmed,
but taking her cue from Rachel says, “How about if we go fill up the pool?” as eager to change the subject as she is to get
out of Ken detail.

Charlotte Anne and Rachel go out to the terrace (actually an unfettered black tar roof partially shaded by a large water tower)
to fill up the plastic baby pool, which they’re admittedly past the age for, but they figure they can cool off and splash
around for a laugh. During a break for Tabs while the hose is filling up the pool, Charlotte Anne gets caught up in a news
story the babysitter is watching (about a woman on the Lower East Side who had been brutally murdered in her apartment, and
as the story unfolded, it turned out that some ridiculous number of neighbors, like seventeen or twenty-five, had heard her
screaming for help, except none of them did, help, and so she pretty much bled to death in her stairwell waiting for help),
Rachel goes to lengths to stop Kenny from throwing the Pekingese off the balcony entirely, and the pool is quickly forgotten
about until Rachel’s stepfather comes across the hall a half hour later, rushing out to the terrace to turn off the water,
shouting that the people downstairs are having a flood, that they should have asked permission to fill up the pool, and that
Charlotte Anne is to go home immediately. Charlotte Anne leaves, knowing that this is one of those times when Rachel Richmond
is not going to have time to go get a book, wishing she’d agreed to be the Ken after all.

T
HE FIRST TIME Charlotte met Nicole’s new boyfriend she’d heard so much about, she wasn’t awfully impressed. Over at Nicole’s, after polite
introductions to Charlotte and her friend Jenna, Jeff the boyfriend picked up where he left off with regard to the outcome
of a Scrabble game they’d just finished and how Nicole could have done better. A sideways glance to the score pad revealed
to Charlotte that Jeff had won by a wide margin, and it seemed glaringly obvious that he was simultaneously not mentioning
any possible score-improving to Nicole’s friend Chloë, whose score was significantly lower than Nicole’s (the implications
not seeming to disturb Chloë in any way). Charlotte had never been a big Chloë fan, so she wasn’t entirely surprised by Chloë’s
low Scrabble score or her apparent lack of concern about it, and she was admittedly kind of judgmental. So when the word
nondescript
came into her mind with regard to Jeff, she didn’t give it undue attention, knowing that her first impressions were often
more harsh than necessary, and also since he’d come with the advance high praise from Nicole. Scrabble weirdness aside, his
looks didn’t make an impression on her one way or the other, and so at first glance, Charlotte naturally considered the possibility
that Jeff and Nicole were representing the standard man-dates-woman-for-sexy-hot-looks/woman-dates-man-for-sexy-hot-mind situation,
except for in this particular instance, Nicole was also in possession of a sexy-hot-Ivy-educated mind contained within her
sexy-hot body. Charlotte knew rules like these expanded and contracted regularly, as well as reversing entirely (although
she never had encountered even one female from the supposedly popular bigger-is-better faction), and that reasonable people
of both sexes found a broad range of combinations of personal qualities and physical attributes attractive. At that moment,
those were pretty much passing thoughts anyway.

Several moments after the introduction, during which Charlotte took notes on his nondescription, Jeff, who seemed not at all
bothered by the current male-to-female ratio (1:4), remarked humorously on a common physical attribute of his present company,
specifically their hair, collectively that they had much of it and that he seemed to be pleased with the variety of color
and texture represented. It isn’t that it was the funniest thing Charlotte had ever heard in her life, so much as it was the
sincere way in which it was said, and in the briefest of moments, Jeff’s desirability became instantly and deeply apparent,
to the point where it seemed preposterous that only moments earlier she had thought of him as nondescript. Charlotte further
assessed his good character on several accounts; pulling out chairs, the way he looked adoringly at Nicole, not merely saying
God bless you
when anyone sneezed but articulating each word distinctly and with meaning, taking care to look at the sneezing person directly,
in the eye, upon offering the blessing. Also, Charlotte could generally tell the assholes from the nice guys instantaneously
(although the presence of this ability hadn’t exactly stopped her from dating them); standard asshole behavior almost always
makes itself immediately apparent (the broad range of such behavior being too vast to itemize), and Jeff was not presently
exhibiting any of those behaviors. Over time, Charlotte had begun to see that some of the ones who had a number of good qualities
also had some qualities that mitigated their goodness, not enough to call them assholes, but to effect the need for some new
classification that allows for a broad range of personality traits not limited to decent or asshole, but representing the
entire range in between decent and asshole. Charlotte felt that there might be room for a modification of terms, such as
semi-decent
or
mild asshole,
thus, in theory, removing the stigma of the asshole name. Nicole’s new boyfriend Jeff was a good deal better than nondescript,
seemed to be on the decent end of the curve, and for sure he was funny and smart, Charlotte noted, defying any particular
asshole categorization, and then the whole group of them stopped hanging out for a while, for no particular reason.

Some time later Nicole got a job out of town and Charlotte and Jeff somehow ended up hanging out kind of extensively. For
a while there had been a poker thing going on within the Jeff/ Nicole crowd, which included Jeff’s friend Al, who ended up
having to go to Gamblers Anonymous, and after that it was sort of hard for the rest of the poker people not to notice that
they were also getting a little out of control with all the poker-playing. Charlotte was pretty glad she came in on the end
of that anyway, because the one time she was about to play, she had a full house in her first hand, and Al said,
Do you know what you’ve got?
to which Charlotte responded kind of defensively, because she did know what she had but also she was suddenly having flashbacks
to when she used to play poker with her stepfather when she was ten or eleven and was the absolute worst kind of loser, stomping
out of rooms and making the whole thing worse for herself, naturally, because the stomping and such just made her family laugh,
which would make her stomp even more, but inside her head. And so Charlotte was perfectly glad that the poker period had ended
before she had any need to join Gamblers Anonymous, except for it was replaced with Scrabble, which, while it had never inspired
in her quite such an extreme stomping mentality, did end up being a kind of high stakes sort of thing, even though they didn’t
play for money. And so the first time she and Jenna were invited over to play Scrabble with Jeff and Al, Charlotte found out
that Jeff had this whole policy about games, wherein he felt that games were an allegory for life, and that everyone ought
to not only play to win but should also do their best to form intelligent words using as many letters as possible on each
play. Charlotte thought that not only was Jeff confusing the meaning of allegory and metaphor, but when you have, let’s say,
HMQJECP
on your little tile holder, it’s not worth taking three hours per turn, not to mention that they weren’t playing in Czechoslovakian.
Al and Jeff were both putting down words like
QUORUM
and still complaining that they didn’t use their extra letter while they were getting like fifty points, or making
ZIGGURAT
(and of course she had no idea what
ZIGGURAT
or
QUORUM
even meant) out of her
RAT
on a triple-word score and thus getting about a hundred and four points or something. Charlotte, with her
HMQJECP
, considered her options and decided the best she could do on her turn was to use her
H
and
M
to make
HIM
, for six points, whereupon Jeff tried to explain that she could have at least made
HUM
, for eight, at which point Charlotte was like,
It’s a game,
and of course Jeff tried to explain further that that wasn’t how he saw it. Al, who had never met Jenna before, was trying
to restrain himself from an inclination to expand on the Scrabble life allegory, because he thought Jenna was unbelievably
cute, even though he was happily married and also believed very strongly in a punishing god. So instead he said to Jenna,
Do you ever see Dilbert?
To which Jenna replied,
Who?
and Al said,
Dilbert, in the paper, the funnies, you know, he works in a cubicle, there’s a little cat that makes fun of him—Jeff, where’s
the paper, where’s Dilbert, I gotta show this to Jenna, god forgive me, I have a beautiful wife, but you’re a beautiful girl,
woman, Jenna, how come I never met you before?
Jenna kind of giggled, and after a while Charlotte noticed that the score was something like 350 to 120 to 46 to 34, and
suggested that maybe she and Jenna could forfeit and they could all just order a pizza instead. Jeff put forward the beginning
of an argument about finishing things, and how it was part of the whole allegorical game-playing thing, and Charlotte just
kind of looked at him like he ought to get a grip, but in a cute way, and he said,
I can’t resist that,
and they ordered the pizza.

Al, who didn’t know Jenna all that well, said,
Jenna, what are your likes and dislikes? Coke or Pepsi?
And Jenna said,
I like Coke,
and Jeff said very excitedly,
Sugared Coke?
appreciative that a woman in our culture might possibly not drink diet soda, and Jenna laughed, and Jeff called over to Al,
on the phone, to order a couple of Cokes, and then Jeff asked her if she preferred letters or numbers, and again Jenna said,
What?
which by now ought to be indicating that Jenna, who isn’t stupid, nevertheless sometimes misses some of the subtle humor
and/or passion for Dilbert/numbers/letters kind of thing when it comes up in conversation. Charlotte made note of Jeff’s effort
to include Jenna in the conversation as being another character asset, and also noticed that one of his socks was more of
an ankle sleeve than anything, with about one stitch holding together the part that covers the foot to the part that covers
the ankle, and she said,
I like letters,
getting back to the original question, and Jeff looked at her like she was the cutest thing ever, but still explained why
he preferred numbers, and which ones exactly, and they ended up agreeing at least that 18 is a very good number, being made
up of two nines, and also that B is one of the better letters, not just because it’s heard as a full word with several different
meanings but because it has a good solid sound. It seems safe to say that at that point the mutual-admiration society was
fully formed. Charlotte added to her notes on Jeff’s character his sharp and sometimes goofy sense of humor and his keen sense
of observation with regard to human nature. She had some concern that he was only hanging around her because he thought she
was cute, which she would also be grateful for but is inclined to question, generally, although in this case she also felt
that since her cuteness might have been overshadowed by Nicole’s gorgeousness, maybe he really did think she was smart, untainted
by any cuteness, which was still a little bit of a drag, because of course she wanted him to think she was cute and smart,
and this led to a circle of thinking that pretty much led nowhere.