Love Monkey (28 page)

I get the bill. Another $72. My plan to hold down expenses this month would almost certainly require unloading one or more of the girls I keep taking out.

We're walking to the corner of Fourteenth and Ninth in a heavy rain. Her poor tootsies are soaked. Her darling little sandals. I've had two carafes of wine on an empty stomach. In case I forget, my head will remind me of all this tomorrow.

It takes a while to get a cab. I put my arms around her and we get good and soaked. When we finally flag down transportation and head toward the West Side Highway, she takes up residence in the southern corner of the backseat.

“Get over here,” I say.

And I pull her over and she buries her head on my chest and this
is nice. And not only because I have the loveliest view down the front of her tank top.

I think for a second about that line, the wrongest line in the history of pop music. It's from a Beatles song on
Rubber Soul,
“You Won't See Me”:

I know, I know. And I mind, I mind.

The cabbie is a Lite FM addict. Maybe he's got woman troubles too. Maybe he just kissed his girlfriend good night. Or maybe he just has bad taste. The radio plays Mariah, Celine, “Rikki Don't Lose That Number.”

“I love this song,” Julia says.

And she moves away. A little.

Rikki. I get it. Of course. Why else would she like Lite-FM-quasi-jazz-geezer rock? The time I spent getting mentally ready for this date. The suit. The tie. Researching the restaurant. I feel like the kid who comes to the SATs with a fistful of impeccably sharpened number two pencils in his hand and all the wrong answers in his head.

“It makes you think of him,” I say.

She doesn't say anything.

“Because you're hoping he calls you,” I say.

She doesn't say anything.

And I hold her all the way home. When I get in my apartment, I head automatically for the bathroom. I want to whack off. But there's no interest. My hand has a headache.

D
ENZEL'S
L
ATEST
: T
HIS
D
AWG
H
AS
H
IS
“D
AY
”
by Rollo Thrash
Tabloid
Senior Film Critic

I'm at my desk when the Toad comes over wielding a galley of Rollo's review. He betrays no hint of noticing the office topic du jour: that the perfect tableau of his bonsai garden has attracted a visitor. Somebody has added the little silver dog from a game of Monopoly. A modified little silver dog. His doggie leg has been cut off and resoldered on his body in a pissing pose. The mini silver terrier is taking a miniature leak on the tiny bonsai tree. Definitely a sign of rewrite at its best.

“Rollo's gotten good,” the Toad says. “Which surprises me because I thought he was a drunken has-been who couldn't fill a cocktail napkin with actual coherent sentences.”

“I combed out a few knots. Smoothed out the split ends. Put in some styling gel.”

“You wrote it,” he says.

“Only the part from the headline on,” I say.

“So why is that blowhard's name on it?”

“He's the superstar. I've been tweaking his stuff for months.”

“ ‘Tweaking'? Joan Rivers has had less work done to her. You know he's going to Afghanistan next week. Who were you going to have write his reviews while he was gone?”

“My orders were to just keep on keeping on.”

“Orders from who?”

“From Rollo.”

“If his byline says he's in Kabul, he can't have his name on the movie reviews too.”

“Maybe he saw the movies before he left? They screen these things pretty far in advance.”

“Wait one second,” he says. And I watch him limp the galley down to Cronin's glassed-in office at the other end of the floor. The Toad
gives Cronin the galley. Cronin looks at it and the Toad keeps talking. He points at something on the sheet, and they both laugh. I got a laugh! A silent one, but still. Then the Toad comes back to my desk. He puts down the galley.

“Cronin says you're very talented,” he says. “Take Thrash's byline off this. Put yours on.”

“With a photo?” I say, dazed.

“No, with an oil painting,” he says. “Get a headshot taken. Try to give them your good side. Wait, you don't have a good side. Put a bag over your head. Get plastic surgery. I don't care. You're our new film critic.” He does the sign of the cross over me.

I'm touched. I don't know what to say. Except.

“Do I get a raise?” I say.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, leaning into me and whispering. “You ungrateful piece of shit, you are the biggest ballbuster I ever saw. I already discussed it with Cronin and you're not getting more than—”

He then names a sum that raises me twice as much as I would have thought to ask for.

I wonder if this means I'll have to start wearing better clothes. If they'll get someone else to clean up the messes in Features from now on. I wonder if I can even do this job.

“Oh, and Tom?” the Toad says, shuffling away. “Don't fuck it up.”

L
iesl and I are walking up Broadway after dinner.

“Do you want to go camping in Utah next week?” she says.

“Camping?” I say incredulously.

Liesl sketches a vision of what this odd activity entails. Hiking. Biking. Sleeping under the stars. Me, I'd rather sleep under the roof. Isn't not sleeping under the stars kind of the point of western civilization?

“Actually,” I say, “I'm an indoorsy kinda guy.” Say what you want about New York, but rarely do you get bitten by a rattlesnake.

“That's too bad,” the German told me. “I was hoping we could go camping sometime.”

“My personal prediction,” I say, “is that it is not going to happen.”

She scowls at me. But we're right in front of my favorite grocery store. Time for a change of subject.

“Hey,” I say. “Let's go in.”

“Do you need groceries?” she says. “Isn't it kind of rude to do your shopping when you're with me?”

“No, it's not that,” I say.

“Then what?” She's putting down roots in the sidewalk. It's going to take a backhoe to dislodge her.

“It's a surprise,” I say, as teasingly as I can. Girls love it when you say this, even if the actual surprise turns out to be nothing much.

I'm in luck. Inside, the light over the produce aisle is out again. At some point you have to start getting suspicious that there is an organized campaign of sabotage. Maybe gangs of young romantics are creeping around here to shoot out the lights with BB guns. It's the New York version of carefully managing your fuel gauge so as to make certain that you'll run out of gas on your date.

I lead her by the hand through the dim. A couple of Japanese tourists with funky blond hair loiter by the Fuji apples. Two septuagenarians get friendly among the Granny Smiths.

“Everything's so juicy, isn't it?” I say.

“What do you mean? Isn't fruit supposed to be juicy?”

“Close your eyes,” I say.

“What?” she says. “Why? What are you doing?”

“Just trust me,” I say.

“Are you going to buy something, or?”

“No, I just—”

“I kinda wanted to get home early tonight,” she says, checking her watch. “
Friends
is on soon.”

“Give me just a second. Surrender to the moment.”

“I don't get it,” she says.

“Here,” I say weakly, and present her with a strawberry.

“Ew,” she says. “Has that been washed?”

“Never mind,” I say, and I eat it myself. It doesn't taste right. This isn't the season.

“Did you pay for that?” she says.

W
hen I walk by rewrite everyone is talking at once. They're all telling the same story. Apparently someone got poisoned by some specks of white powder when she opened a letter, had to be taken to the hospital, the works. “We got 'thraxed,” is how Hoff puts it. The stuff is supposed to be lethal but apparently she only got anthrax lite, the Sanka of anthrax, the kind that only gives you a skin rash. Of course we're wooding with it tomorrow: “TABLOID UNDER ATTACK!”

“Who was it?” I ask Hoff.

“I don't know. That hot little assistant with the belly shirts?”

Burkey laughs. “She has a name, Hoff. Hillary, I think. St. Luke's says she's in Stable. She'll be all right.”

“Hillary? Eli's, um…” I can't bear to say the word.

“Fiancée,” says Hoff.

Ouch. So he went for the upgrade. I didn't know that.

“When did that happen?”

“Ever since This happened, love is in the air,” says Burkey.

Really? I thought the only thing in the air was spores of chemical warfare agents. A couple of guys in space suits walk by us and head for Editorials. They start sealing off the area with large sheets of plastic and duct tape. This seems to accomplish the opposite of its intended effect, and terrifies all of us into brooding silence for a few minutes. News isn't so fun to chat about from inside the body bag.

“Who was it addressed to?” I say.

Burkey doesn't know. “The police impounded it. Evidence. Who knows? She opens everybody's mail.”

“I bet it was me,” Rita says. “My hard-hitting Al Qaeda coverage.”

“Yeah, right,” Burkey says. “I wrote that thing last week about how we're going to bomb Afghanistan out of the Stone Age.”

“No, no, no,” Hoff says. “It had to've been me. I've gotten more death threats than any of you.”

Burkey holds up a hand. “Please. I've gotten all the best death threats.” She starts ticking them off on his fingers. “The Zodiac killer, Colin Ferguson—”

“Wait a minute, the Zodiac I'll give you but Ferguson's was addressed to all of us.”

Burkey is rolling her eyes. “Yeah, right. Al Qaeda targeted the Senate majority leader, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the guy who broke the exclusive about the lady cop who stripped down to her utility belt for
Playboy
.”

“Get outta here, that was a good story!” Hoff says. “I even wrote the hed.”

“Come on,” Rita says. “ ‘THIS IS A BUST'? About ten people thought of that simultaneously.”

“Tom Farrell,” Hyman Katz calls out. “Mommy's on the phone.”

The other hacks make derisive mama's-boy comments as I retreat to my desk and wave at Hyman Katz to send the call over.

“Honey,” she says. “Aren't you worried about the anthrax?”

“Not really,” I say. I pick up a mass-produced corporate leaflet (“NEW YORK NEEDS US STRONG”) that has just been dropped on everyone's desk. Its conclusions for unlocking the secret of post-September 11 health: get lots of rest and drink plenty of fluids.

“Didn't they hit NBC?” she says. This is a good sign: she hasn't heard how they got us yet. Why tell her? This is a woman who worries aloud whenever she sees me opening a package of Hostess cupcakes with my teeth, insisting that the chompers perfected by millennia of biology for ripping into mastodon flesh will be “ruined” if I employ them on cellophane packaging.

“Yeah,” I say.

“You're not anywhere near there, are you?” she says.

“They're way over on the other side,” I say, looking out the window at the deco
NBC STUDIOS
neon sign on the other side of the street.

“Just be careful, honey,” says my mom.

“I'll cut down my breathing to the bare minimum,” I say.

As soon as I hang up there's another worried female on the phone: “Oh my God, are you okay?”

“Never better,” I say. “What are you up to?”

“Page forty-nine of
Civil Procedure
,” says Katie. “If you've read it before, don't spoil the ending.”

“Have you learned to think like a lawyer yet?” I say.

“You mean attorney? Every day is a new exercise in dread. But I have no one to blame but myself. I got into this
sua sponte
.”

“Sua sponte, yum. I had one of those for dessert at Carmine's last week,” I say.

“Huh,” she says. I miss the way she used to say “huh-huh.” But you can save time if you limit your laugh to one beat, can't you?

“Can you spare a few billable hours later?” I say.

“I don't know. I have a lot of studying to do. I mean, a
lot.
”

“Maybe I can help.”

“Stipulate as to how.”

Somehow the instinct to protect a lovely soft sweet female dwindles when said female begins to bark like Alan Dershowitz. On the other hand, Katie still has a great ass. Which is a fact that, it occurs to me, I'd better never mention to her again unless I feel the urge to put my nuts into a Clarence Thomas–sized vice. She can't stop me from looking, though. That's the nice thing about asses; every time you take a peek, she has to be looking the other way. Why'd they have to stick the breasts on the front, though?

“Promise me you won't try to make me drink,” she says.

“Send over a notary,” I say. “I'll sign anything.”

We meet up at Cafe Frog. She's in a rush. I'm sitting on a banquette working on my second beer.

“I'm eleven minutes late,” she announces.

“Approach the bench,” I say, and give her a kiss. At least, I'm kissing. She keeps talking. “I can give you seventy-five minutes,” she says. “Are we going to eat or just drink? Because if we're eating, we need to order right away and we have time for appetizers or entrée, but probably not both.”

I respond to this in the most dignified way possible, i.e., by jerking my head around crazily trying to pin my mouth on hers. Fifteen years ago when I was in the same situation with a date, her head would have been bobbing in mad catch-me-if-you-can circles because she was nervous about not having kissed many guys, or she wasn't sure we had reached the moment of most perfect specialness in the relationship, or a guy she liked better was at the other end of the prom with Linda Mazzucchelli, who was just like this total
slut
who probably had six kinds of VD and serves him right anyway and was he at least
look
ing over here to see what he was missing? Girl crazy, it never goes away, does it? It just keeps mutating into strange and terrible forms. Today she's got a thing for My Little Pony, tomorrow she's getting up at five so she can spend several
hours waiting in line at the Hervé Chapelier sample sale to see how this year's extra-plain nylon handbags stack up against last year's.

The waitress comes over, nearly tripping over a crack in the floor tiles.

“Tort!” Katie says.

“Excuse me?” she says, in a thick French accent. Possibly she thinks Katie just said, “tart,” which would have been pretty close to the mark too.

“I wasn't talking to you,” Katie says, and grabs a menu. I can almost hear the waitress hawking up a loogie with which to flavor our drinks, so I hasten to explain that my friend is a lawyer and keeps an eye open for any excuse with which to crush a hapless small-business owner such as whoever runs this joint.

“This afternoon there was hot coffee? That spilled on my arm,” says the waitress. “Look.”

There's an almost indiscernible pinkness there, about one-tenth as bad as the average Indian burn we used to give each other in seventh grade. It was the thing in seventh grade. Sixth grade, the thing was to give each other flats. You'd sneak up behind a guy as he was walking and step on the back of his sneaker so hard that the heel of his foot came partway out of the heel of the sneaker and then landed on it, crumpling it underneath. So he'd have to stop and, cursing his attacker, take the shoe completely off to fix it. We got Bucky a record thirty-six times one day on a field trip that year. I know for a fact that he never completely recovered from the trauma. Now that I think about it, grade school was the history of escalating violence. It's lucky we discovered girls, because otherwise by the time tenth grade rolled around, we probably would have spent after-school time chasing each other playfully around the soccer fields with chainsaws.

“Oh…that's actionable,” Katie says, examining our waitress-plaintiff. “You should see someone about that. I'm not an attorney yet, but if I were I'd definitely look into your case.”

While she's in the bathroom, I order a bottle of wine for the both of us. The waitress is uncorking it when she gets back.

“What is this?” Katie says, holding up a wineglass as if it's Exhibit A.

“Is there anything sadder than an empty glass?” I say. “Let us utilize it.”

“I'm going to have to estop you from doing this,” she says.

“Estop?”

“You already stipulated that you wouldn't try to get me drunk.”

She orders one of those no-alcohol beers even reformed alcoholics won't drink. Who would ever drink Budweiser if it weren't for the alcohol? Even with the alcohol, it's pretty gruesome.

“So,” she says. “What have you been up to? Why haven't I seen you? How's your job? How are you emotionally?”

“You used to read tarot cards,” I say.

“That was a long time ago,” she says, rearranging her cutlery.

“Three months. Your classmates couldn't believe it when I told them.”

Now she looks up. Her expression is as blunt as a gavel. There aren't many pretty gavels. “Who have you told?” she says.

“It's a joke,” I say.

“Have you told more than one person? When did you tell them? Exactly what did you say? What was the context?”

“I wasn't being serious,” I say.

“What do you mean?” she says. “Either you told them or you didn't.”

“I was kidding,” I say.

“When? Just now or when you told them?”

“Just now. And before. I made up the whole thing. I never told anyone anything,” I say.

“Oh,” she says. She scans her watch, which she now wears to face inward. She has also strapped it around the outside of her sleeve. She must be reaping a bonanza in saved wrist-rotation and sleeve-retracting time.

“But now I will!” I say. Winkity-wink.

“Listen, Tom, I've
got
to make law review, okay? Something like that could be really deleterious to my chances.”

N
ot long after that she releases me on my own recognizance.

“I'm really sorry,” she says as we're walking out. “I've been stressed about this test I have coming up. I just have to do some studying tonight. I'm not really like this. I'm just,
non compos mentis
tonight. You know?”

“Ah,” I say. “That happens so often.”

“Good night, Tom.”

“Good night, Katie.”

“Oh, Tom? It's actually, um,
Kate,
now.”

“Kate.”

“That's right.”

There is no kiss.