The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted (21 page)

“
Was
it shortbread?” Trudy asks.

“Not exactly,” Laura says. “I’ll give you the recipe.”

“Well, it was really good. Really buttery.”

Joyce jumps up so quickly Laura thinks she’s been bit-ten by something. But it’s not that. “I want another piece,”

she says. “I’m going to get another piece.”

“Me, too,” Trudy says.

Laura follows the women into her kitchen, and they all sit back down at the kitchen table and finish off the tart, thin slice by thin slice. Trudy tells them that she has been thinking about old boyfriends lately, and she has decided to call her favorite one up. Don, his name is, Don Christianson, and he’s someone she knew over thirty years ago.

“You haven’t seen him since then?” Joyce asks. Her voice is like Georgette’s, on the old
Mary Tyler Moore
Show,
a high, little girl’s voice, innocent and open. She actually looks a little like Georgette, too; blond, vacant-eyed, and dear.

Trudy, licking off her fork, shakes her head. She looks a little like Lucille Ball, red curly hair always tied up on top of her head, big blue eyes, high cheekbones. She was quite a looker not so very long ago. Joyce and Laura weren’t bad themselves. They have admitted this to one another, each in her own way, how they used to be pretty. These young girls now? Ha. You want to talk about
hot
? Should have seen
them
thirty years ago. Well, forty.

Laura says, “If you haven’t seen that guy for over thirty years, you’re going to have to reconcile yourself to the fact that he might be dead. Lots of my old boyfriends are dead.” She shakes her head and sighs.

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“Who died?” Joyce asks, her hand pressed against her chest as if she might have known them.

“Well, one died of AIDS, one died of cancer, one—”

“You have an old boyfriend who died of AIDS?” Trudy asks.

“Yes.”

“Was he gay?”

“Yes. He was.”

“Did you
sleep
together?” Joyce asks.

Laura tilts her head, thinking. “Isn’t that the definition of old boyfriend?”

Silence, and then the women agree that yes, in the context of what they’re talking about, and also considering that they came up in the sixties, when having sex was roughly equivalent to a handshake, “old boyfriend” means

“slept with.”

Trudy says to Laura, “You slept with a gay guy?”

“He came out after we broke up,” Laura says. “I loved him even more after we were just friends. He was so handsome. We always kept in touch, and once when he was making a lot of money and I didn’t have anything—

I mean, I had
nothing
—he invited me out for dinner at a fancy restaurant. I didn’t have anything nice to wear, so he took me shopping and bought me a beautiful green silk dress at this store where nothing was even
out
—they just brought things to your fancy changing room. Which was way nicer than my apartment. But anyway, he bought me a dress there, and he bought me a purse to go with it, too.”

“Shoes?” Joyce asks, and her voice is a reverential whisper.

“I actually had shoes,” Laura says. “I’d had to go to my aunt’s funeral, and my mom had bought me some shoes 164

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d and some nylons for that. But anyway, he took me to this really great restaurant, and he let me take home all the leftovers, and when we got home my puppy had pooped all over my apartment, I mean all
over
it, he’d gotten sick, and there was Jim in his beautiful gray-green suit looking like the cover of
GQ
and he said, ‘I’ll help. Where are the paper towels?’ And he took off his jacket and folded it neatly over the top of one of my awful chairs, and then he rolled up his sleeves and helped me clean up. On his knees.”

“Wow,” Joyce says. “That was a good date.”

“That was a good boyfriend,” Trudy says. “Even if he wasn’t even your boyfriend then.”

“I know,” Laura says, and she misses Jim so much right then, it is as though all the love she felt for him has been re-delivered to her solar plexus. She remembers the night when he first made exquisite love to her, he was the kind of man who could spend ten minutes describing the beauty of your neck to you, not only with words but with the light touch of his fingers. She remembers the pearl gray light in his bedroom, the moon coming through the window, the clanking sound of the radiator, the brown-and-white-striped sheets on his bed—oh, it’s all so
clear
! She remembers how, after they finished, he ran his finger down the side of her face and asked her to tell him something about her that he didn’t know. She told him she could make good chicken sounds and not only that, she could imbue the clucks with real emotions. “For example,” she said,

“Chicken with a Broken Heart.” And she made long, drawn-out, sorrow-saturated clucks. He laughed so hard. “Now do Chicken Mad at the Rooster,” he said. And she did. Again he laughed. Then he got up and made her linguine with clam sauce because another thing she told him was that she’d never had it and she didn’t see what the big deal was.

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“He
was
good,” she tells the women. “And I miss him so much. It isn’t often you find someone so handsome who is also so kind.” She sighs and unbuttons her jeans. In the back of her mind, she feels happy to be among people with whom she can do this. In the front of her mind, she’s thinking something else, and she asks Trudy, “What if Don is married?”

Trudy shrugs. “So?”

“If you were married, would you want some old girlfriend coming around?” Joyce asks.

Trudy considers this, then says, “Maybe not. But I probably wouldn’t care if I didn’t know about it.”

Joyce’s eyes widen. “So this is going to be clan
destine
?”

“Oh, stop,” Trudy says. “I’m almost sixty years old.

We’ll probably meet in a cafeteria and compare lipid levels. I just feel like calling him up again because . . . Well, because I’m almost sixty. Isn’t there anyone you ever wonder about, that you’d just like to see again? Just to talk to?”

“Only if it doesn’t involve air travel,” Joyce says. “I am so through with airplanes. Last time I flew, I was wearing this really sheer top under a suit jacket, it was just to have that little triangle of fabric at the top of the suit. You know.

And they made me take my suit jacket off to go through security. I would have refused if I hadn’t been running so late. I would have had them pat me down or something.

But I was running really late, and so I took it off and then made my excruciatingly slow way through. I swear I could feel the eyes of the guy behind me just boring into my fat.

Plus my bra straps were showing because of the cut of the sleeves of that little top, which was
never meant
to be shown in public.” She waves her hand, as though pushing the memory away, then says, “Actually, you know what?

There’s a guy I used to date who lives only an hour’s drive 166

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d away. I just heard from a mutual friend that he moved to Indiana. Roy Schnickleman. Not like it sounds, honest. He looked just like James Dean. He drove a motorcycle, too.

God.” She smacks her hand down on the table. “Okay, I’m in. Old boyfriend. Lunch. Let’s all do it this week and then we’ll tell about it at dinner next week.” She looks over at Laura. “Want to?”

“I’m telling you, all my old boyfriends are dead.”

“
All
of them?” Trudy asks.

“All the good ones,” Laura says. Dennis Anderson, who was an artist and a sculptor and a writer, and who asked her to move to Tahiti with him, which she did not do, which was idiotic. But he moved there and married a native, and he had a heart attack at fifty-one and died. Fifty-one! John Terrance died a terrible death from pancreatic cancer. The last time Laura saw him, he was being wheeled about outside on a friend’s farm, and he saw the pond where he and his friends used to swim, where Laura in fact had swum with him just after they had begun their relationship. He couldn’t talk anymore by then, but Laura saw the look of longing in his eyes. She tried to push him down to the water’s edge, but the wheelchair wouldn’t go through the mud, so she went down to the pond and filled her hands with water and carried it back up to him and spilled it out all over his legs, which by then had gotten so heartbreakingly thin. And Ted Sullivan, he was in a car wreck, and he was such a good guy, too. So funny. Once they were walking through a park together, through roses, and they were talking about how beautiful they were.

Then Laura asked Ted about a movie, and he said, “Laura.

The subject
was
roses.”

“Well, maybe . . . your ex?” Trudy says. “Would he count as an old boyfriend?”

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“He wasn’t a good one.”

“I have an idea,” Joyce says. “Think of someone you wish had been your boyfriend. Call him.”

“Right,” Laura says. “ ‘Hello, I used to know you when I was a hot tamale. Now I’m an older woman with liver spots and forty extra pounds, and I wondered if you’d like to have lunch.’ ”

“How about this?” Trudy says. “ ‘Hello, I used to know you back in yada yada yada, and I was just thinking about yada yada yada, and you know what, I just wondered if we could get together just to have lunch. It would be fun, wouldn’t it? Incidentally, I turned out to be a terrific person who makes one hell of a tart.’ ” She makes it sound so perky and possible.

“You know,” Laura says, “we are becoming good friends, but we don’t really think all that much alike.”

“Well, then take a chance on something else,” Joyce says. “Make your dare be different from ours.”

“Why don’t I just do truth?” Laura says.

“We tell the truth to one another all the time,” Trudy says. “Let’s do something different now. Joyce and I will call old boyfriends. You can do something else. You make a lunch date with someone else, okay? Are you in? All you have to do is be scared to ask.”

“All right, I’m in,” Laura says. “I know someone I’d like to ask. If I can get up the nerve. He’s a homeless guy, lives under the bridge on Sumac.” The other women start to laugh, and Laura holds up her hand. “I’m serious. I’ve actually had this fantasy for months, that I’d bring a meal over there and share it with him. I just want to know why he’s there.”

“Don’t give him your address,” Joyce says.

Laura looks over the top of her glasses at her.

168

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d

“So we’ll debrief at dinner at my house next week,”

Trudy says. “Six o’clock sharp.” She stands, stretches, then points at her friends. “No backsies,” she says.

That night, as Laura washes up for bed, she decides that she will just make up something about her lunch date. The other women will never know the difference. She’ll make something up, say it really fast, and then they can move on to the real stories. Already, a false scenario is creating itself inside her head. The homeless man’s surprise at her offering lunch. His interesting anecdote about how he landed there, him a former platinum credit card carrier.

Some highly placed executive thrust out suddenly because of . . . what? Sexual harassment? A criminal act involving a White Hen? She falls asleep imagining various misdeeds, all kinds of things that can take a life and rip it right up.

Then she imagines the man as shoved out of a mental in-stitution that no longer has room for him, for that is the more likely scenario. She imagines saying, “Hi, there. Listen, I know this may seem odd, but I brought you some lunch, and I wonder if I could just sit with you for a while and talk.” And him leaning over to say between clenched teeth, “The descent is upon us, Silverado!” then leaping up and flapping his arms and yelling,
“Helllllllllp!”
so loudly she gets arrested. Then she imagines the man saying nothing, just staring at her and breathing oddly. Then she sees him as a poetic genius too sensitive for the world, someone broken by its unyielding ways, who begins to weep when she touches his sleeve. And then she decides that whatever he is doesn’t matter; she’s not going to approach him or anyone else, either.

In the morning, Laura looks out her office window (she
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works at home, for a spectacularly successful gardening service, doing their billing) and sees a construction worker on the roof of the house across the street. He is very handsome—tanned and muscular, absolutely delicious. Could it be that her time for sex, for sensuality, is not over after all?

Could it be? Or is this some kind of psychic hangover, the result of too much talk about times gone by, too many memories brought once again into sharp focus but apt to fade by lunchtime?

She watches the construction worker for a while, then moves away from the window, sits at her desk, and opens up her computer. Sips her coffee as she reads her e-mail.

Remembers last week, when there was yet another spam filter failure and she had yet another message asking if her penis was big enough. Now she wonders who responds to those e-mails. Who keeps those penis people in business?