by Dan Taylor
“What do you think this means?”
“That you think it’s okay to still window shop even though you’ve spent your allowance.”
“Not that. The fact that the guy who climbed on our roof and fell off is standing over there, posing as a different guy?”
I take a sip of beer, thinking this is ominous, for some reason.
Then Grace says, “They weren’t even particularly big or shapely.”
Putting her mind at rest, I say, “It’s just a weird thing I do.”
“Go round staring at other women’s breasts? I wouldn’t say that’s weird. It’s just par for the course.”
“Not that. Glancing at the name badges of servers and waitresses. I like to know their name, so I can use it and be more personable.”
“But not guys’ name badges, I notice.”
“Not this guy, because I was too occupied with—I don’t know—looking at his face and freaking the fuck out.” Grace still looks pissed, so I say, “Look, honey, I have my hands and eyes more than full with your exquisite breasts. And don’t get me started on your pencil-eraser nipples.”
If this were some bad movie, the argument would move on to how I just married Grace for her looks. She’d sassily say something like, “Here I was thinking I’d married someone who loves me for my brain, but I married a younger Hugh Heffner instead, minus the robe and slippers.”
But Grace isn’t most ladies, at least the ones screenwriter hacks think up, and whether she’d admit it or not, she’s more L.A. than she thinks. So she says, “Thank you, Jacob Hancock. That’s all you had to say.”
“You’re more than welcome. Can we now please go back to freaking out about what’s going on here?”
She thinks a second. “Jesus, you don’t think this could be a side effect of us banging our heads when he had our little roadside picnic, do you?”
Not much food was eaten.
I say, “I feel fine. You?”
“Same.”
“So this isn’t a shared concussion hallucination. Do we agree on that?”
“We do.”
“And do we agree he isn’t the twin brother of Braylon Cutter?”
“I think you’re right. It makes no sense that one would grow up over the pond. And they don’t share the same surname.”
“I have a theory.” I take out my phone, open the Google Maps app, and have a look around the area. Now this is a map I can work with. In fact, why didn’t I use this before?
Never mind.
Satisfied, I put my phone away, and say, “Nope. I was wrong.”
“What were you checking?”
“If there’s a loony bin in the area. There isn’t.”
“So your theory was he’s suffering from some sort of split-personality disorder.”
“Yeah. Either that or he’s a straight-up lunatic.”
“Let me just get my head around this: We ran him over—”
“Technically he ran himself over.”
“Whatever. Then he cleaned himself up, and came to work at the local bar, to pose as a non-English British barman, to serve us peanuts and without even a little bit of sass?”
“Hearing it out loud makes it sound a little silly, I admit, but it’s plausible.”
“How would that explain why he doesn’t have a mark on him?”
“Besides the leg injury, what other noticeable injuries did he have?”
“Well, there was the shoulder injury.”
“I forgot about that one. Can’t imagine it would be easy to pull pint after pint with that one and not raise a few eyebrows, namely ours. He also had a huge graze on his cheek.”
“Did he?”
“Yeah, like the top of a cheap frozen pizza.”
“Why a cheap frozen pizza?”
“All pizza sauce and little cheese.”
“Sounds nasty.”
“It really was. So that settles it. It’s not the same guy, and it’s not his twin. It’s his… what’s that word? Doppel something?”
“Ganger.”
“Okay, so he’s his ganger. Just some freaky coincidence.”
Slow, like I’m a fifth-grader, she says, “Doppelganger.”
“Touché.”
Grace looks at me weird. “I’m not sure you’re using that right.”
“Brass tacks, honey. Let’s get down to them. What does this mean?”
“Apart from being a little freaky, I’d say nothing.”
“Good. I was hoping you’d say that, because I want to order food.”
10.
An hour later, and with more than our fair share of drinks ordered and consumed, at least in comparison to our Japanese friends, who must have a conference or some shit early tomorrow, we’ve forgotten all about the strange coincidence, and talk has moved on to more serious matters.
“I don’t even know why we’re debating this,” I say. “Martin Riggs’s in the first Lethal Weapon is easily the best mullet in Hollywood history.”
“Please. Jack’s got it hands down.”
“I’ll admit, Kurt Russell has the best hair—easy. But when it comes to mullets, at least in Big Trouble…, he’s not even in the same league.”
“How can he have the best hair out of the two, but not the best mullet?”
“The back section, that’s the mullet. Riggs’s is superior. Now if we’re talking about the entirety of the hair, including the front, top, and sides, then we’re debating something totally different, and I’d have to revise my choice.”
She frowns. “It’s the whole haircut.”
“By whose definition?”
“About ninety-nine percent of the people who’ve used that word in the history of its use.”
I take out my phone and google the definition of ‘mullet haircut’ and read the first link I come to. Shit, she’s right, at least according to Wikipedia. But I’m bound to find one search result that agrees with me. Hell, you could find at least one website that argues a surefire way of losing weight is to cover yourself in camel piss and dance around a campfire while singing Annie Lennox’s ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ backwards.
Interrupting my googling, Jenny comes over and asks us again, “Are you guys ready to order yet?”
I glance up at her, say, “We’re almost there. Say, can you help us settle something, Jenny?”
She says sure, but she looks uncomfortable. As a not completely drunk person, I notice this, but as a tipsy person, I go ahead and ignore it. “Which mullet is finer in appearance, Jack Burton’s or Martin Riggs’s?”
“I don’t know who they are.”
“They’re movie characters, played by Kurt Russell and Mel Gibson respectively.”
“From which movies?”
“Lethal Weapon and Big Trouble in Little China.”
She stares blankly at me, so I say, “One. Lethal Weapon one.”
She glances over at the Japanese businessmen, who are toasting their evening with the closest thing they have to Saki in this bar, flaming shots of Maker’s Mark, and then she says, “I should really get back to work.”
With that, she wanders off. As I sneak a glimpse of her ass, I say, “I don’t think she’s seen those movies.”
I quickly realize the mistake I’ve made, that of admiring another woman’s buttocks in front of my wife, albeit briefly, and then pull my eyes away, focus my attention exclusively on Grace. I needn’t have worried, as she’s hanging her head in shame, covering her eyes, as though embarrassed to be in my company.
“What?” I ask.
“I can’t believe you just asked her that.”
“We needed an impartial judge, so I took the opportunity.”
“Not that. I think she thought you were making some semi-racist snide remark about the party of East Asian businessmen over there.”
“By asking about Hollywood mullets?”
“No, by mentioning what movie Jack Burton is in.”
“I don’t think so. She just needed to get back to the grindsto
ne.”
“To stand over there, flicking through her Facebook feed? That grindstone?”
I glance over at where Grace is pointing, and indeed see Jenny slouching up against the bar, staring at her phone with bored, lifeless eyes and flicking her thumb against the screen every one to two seconds.
“Great, now we’ll never get food,” Grace says.
“If she doesn’t come back, I’ll fight my way into the kitchen and make it myself. And I won’t even expect a tip.”
“I thought to myself, as you ordered that whisky cocktail, that at some point you would say that, and mean it. I hoped you wouldn’t, but I thought it likely.”
I say, “Relax, I have the perfect solution.”
This year’s New Year’s resolution was to learn how to whistle by putting my fingers under my tongue, and unlike those wusses who attempt to better their lives in some meaningful way, by quitting booze or getting in shape, I carried through on my commitment.
Using my newfound skill, I whistle to alert Jenny.
She pulls her eyes away from her phone and looks around, so I hold up the menu and smile.
As she saunters over, Grace says, “A little bit of advice. Don’t order the soup.”
I have no idea what Grace means by that, but the joke’s on her, I think, as I wasn’t going to order the soup anyway. Who pays ten dollars for blended vegetable mush in a restaurant? Not I.
“I take it you’re ready to order,” Jenny says as she takes out her pad and pen.
“As it happens, I think we are.” I open the menu and look at it, finding American staples. Then say, “I’ll take the vegetarian option. I’m trying to avoid cancer. It’s a weird quirk of mine.”
Grace smiles sardonically, and says, “And I’d like to order a new husband. Anyone from the menu is fine.”
Jenny looks up from her pad, says, “Oh, you two are married?”
“Yeah. Why’d you ask?”
Just in case you were wondering, Grace is no longer smiling. At least I think she isn’t. Her mouth is frozen in ostensibly a smile-like shape, but I wouldn’t categorize it as so.
“No reason.”
“I’ll take the clam chowder, then.”
I have no idea what the subtext of the addition of ‘then’ is, but it isn’t good. In my experience, often, when two young women talk beyond pleasantries, it’s only a matter of time until I, the dimwitted observer, feel like I’m lost in a disturbing maze of passive-aggressiveness, like that maze in The Shining, only frostier.
With our orders taken, Jenny wanders off. I decide this time it’s best to avoid glancing at her ass. I’m good like that.
“What do you think that bitch meant by that?” Grace asks.
I play dumb, to gain a glimpse into the female mind when it’s at its most raw. “Which part?”
“About not expecting us to be married.”
“You think she meant something by that?”
“Please. Why else would she say it?”
I feign thinking a second. “I’ve got bupkis. You?”
“I could come up with a few reasons.”
I take a long sip of beer, not wanting to push it, but giving her enough time to stew.
Then she says, “Based on her flirting with you, I’d say she was surprised you married me.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
She raises an eyebrow. “So you agree with her?”
Oh boy.
“No.”
“Then why did you ask how it made me feel?”
“I meant, if it were true, how would it make you feel?”
It’s Grace’s turn to take a long sip.
Then she says, sincerely, “Don’t try to psychoanalyze me, Jake. Especially for your pleasure.”
“Was it that obvious?”
“Dr. Phil would’ve been subtler.”
“Then I apologize.”
“Good.”
Good?
Time to play diplomat. I say, “I’m pretty sure it was the other way around, that your being in the league above mine was the source of her surprise, if she wasn’t just chatting waitress bullshit to pass the time. Take it as a compliment, like when the creepy dude in the urinal next to you glances at your penis, making you freeze on the spot and unable to carry on with your peeing.”
“I knew there was a reason I married you.”
Fifteen minutes later, our food arrives. I try to time it so that when I come out of the bathroom, having not really had to pee, the food is waiting for me. It’s never happened to me, and I’ve heard good things about it. I fail and come back too early.
Anyway, as Jenny sets down the clam chowder, Grace forcefully tries to make eye contact. By forcefully, I don’t mean she holds her head in place so that looking anywhere but into Grace’s eyes is near impossible. Grace’s technique involves rubber necking and having a smile on her face that can only be described as a mask for her feral, murderous rage.
Jenny goes through the motions, not noticing, or not caring, whichever one takes less effort.
My food, the vegetarian option, looks like what it is, an afterthought on a menu catering almost exclusively to diners determined to trim twenty or so years off their life expectancy.
Just before she leaves, I ask, “That guy behind the bar, he been working all day?”
“Who, Braith?”
“Yeah.”
She says, “Oh, he owns this place,” as though answering my question. Then she says, “He gets off at closing time, if you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t. Thanks for your help.”
Before she leaves, she glances at Grace, and nods. A strange gesture.
Grace asks, “What was that?”
“I think it used to be a slice of eggplant.”
“Not that. The nod?”
“An acknowledgement of her wrongdoing, and a sisterly act of diplomacy.”
“All that in a nod?”
“Either that or Jenny didn’t consider filling out the application form at this place a proactive career move.”
“I don’t like that woman.”
“I know, honey. I know.”
11.
“I thought it would be romantic.”
“To do that?”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you get a bottle of prosecco?”
“Some of the most romantic evenings I’ve had have been toasted with a big joint of this.”
I’ve been holding up the quarter-ounce baggie of Brain Deep—premium weed I got from my guy in Hollywood—since before I said I thought it would be romantic, and I’m starting to feel a little silly. Just in case you were wondering, what I said before that was, “Voilà,” which was followed by Grace saying, “…The fuck?”
I thought it was a guaranteed homerun.
“Romantic evenings with other women, and now you want to recreate those evenings, but with me?” Grace asks.
“No, honey. Those lesser evenings were toasted with a sativa-dominant strain called Brain Deep. This is…” I think a second. “Love Stink.”
“Love Stink?”
“Love Stink or Skunk. Now that I think about it again, it’s definitely Love Skunk.”
She crosses her arms over her chest and doesn’t say anything. That’s code for I fucked up and I’m beyond understanding the reason why.
“We’ve smoked before, and had some great evenings. What’s different now?”
“We did, watching SpongeBob SquarePants in our pajamas. But this is our honeymoon.”
“Then we’ll smoke and watch the free HBO that we’ve probably definitely got in our motel room.”
“And that sounds romantic to you?”
“What will make you less pissed, if I respond with yes or no?”
“Neither.”
I frown. “I’m not sure what you mean by that, Grace.”
“It means I’m already pissed, and a little disappointed. You said back at the bar that you had a romantic surprise for me.”
“I think I would’ve preferred that.”
“To some premium-grade marijuana called Love Skunk?”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Look, I’m kinda learning on the job, here—”
“You’ve been married before.”
“And I was useless at it, hence the divorce, but this time I want to get it right. Am I going to fuck it up from time to time? You bet. But this time I’ll be taking notes, because I’m determined to get it right.”
She smiles, softening a little.
I take out an imaginary notepad and pen from my polo-neck sweater pocket, mime licking the pen tip, and then start writing as I say, “Weed, fun but not romantic. At least not honeymoon material. Try something called prosecco next time.”
Her smile broadens, and she says, “Put a line through prosecco and write champagne. Prosecco’s for cheapskates.”
“Okay.” I cross out the imaginary note and replace it with champagne, and then I put my notepad and pen away. “As soon as we reach civilization, I’ll be referring to that note. Just remember to take it out of my pocket before you wash this sweater.”
She unfolds her arm and leans over and kisses me on the jaw line. The type you wouldn’t plant on your grandmother’s quivering cheek. Then she says, “Good save, Mr. Hancock.”
“You just wait and see. I’ll fill up that perfect-husband manual in no time.”
“Either that or use your initiative from time to time.”
I go to put the weed back in my suitcase, but she stops me, says, “Not so fast, cowboy.”
“You mean…?”
“Yep. Let’s get into our pajamas and definitely not make any memories tonight.”
As I’m giddily taking out my pajamas—a silk pair with my initials monogrammed on the breast pocket—Grace says, “I have a confession to make,” and then goes over to her suitcase. She gets on her haunches, and says, “Don’t get mad, but I brought my own baggie of weed, and Sir Wanks A Lot,” before pulling them out of a false bottom.
Grace’s guy in Hollywood is actually a chick, a stoned-out smalltime dealer who wouldn’t know good weed if it applied a rear-naked choke hold on her while singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in Mexican Spanish. I’m not close enough to inspect it, but it’s probably garbage, all riddled with seeds, stems, and Alzheimer’s-causing pesticides.
