Mike, Mike & Me

by Wendy Markham

  I almost wish Tyler would start whimpering, just to give me something specific to do.

  When did I get to be this aimless housewife?

  Mike and I have three beautiful sons and a house in Westchester.

  It sounds so fulfilling when you put it in writing. So much better than the reality.

  Reality is—

  I hear a thud overhead, followed by the inevitable “Mommy!”

  “Coming,” I say, heading for the stairs and reality.

  eight

  The past

  Two days into Mike’s visit to New York, he had landed a second interview at a software firm and a lead on a possible commercial-banking position with a decent starting salary.

  Things were looking up.

  Rather, I assumed they were.

  But then, I also assumed that Michael Jackson would always be a superstar.

  And black.

  Anyway, Mike didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about anything other than being with me. He was his usual romantic self, buying me roses, taking me to a fancy dinner at Windows on the World, giving me a full-body massage with patchouli-scented oil he’d brought with him from L.A.

  But nothing about New York itself—not the superior bagels, not the breathtaking view from Windows on the World, not even the two orchestra tickets Janelle Jacques herself had given me for an evening performance of Jerome Robbins Broadway—seemed to thrill him.

  Janelle was always giving away freebies to the underlings, but she’d never offered me anything more valuable than an ugly red nylon fanny pack before now. She definitely had great timing. Now Mike would see that my job was not only fulfilling, but had great perks. Maybe he’d realize that moving to Los Angeles—which he hadn’t officially suggested, but which definitely hovered unspoken between us—was out of the question for me.

  “The great thing about New York,” I told him as we stepped out of the Imperial Theater after the show, “is that you can see a Broadway show whenever you feel like it.”

  “Yeah,” Mike agreed with questionable enthusiasm, leading me through the after-show throng and across Forty-fifth street, weaving between the cabs and limos lined up outside the theater.

  I brushed a clump of Aqua Net-sticky hair from my forehead. After the air-conditioned Imperial, the July heat felt especially oppressive. Kind of like going from a raging blizzard to my grandmother’s overheated nursing home in the dead of winter. Your instinct was to start shedding clothing immediately.

  But I was already sleeveless, with bare legs and open-toed shoes. The only possible thing I could possibly shed was my rumpled blue linen shift dress, and believe me, after a few minutes trudging through that heat, it wasn’t out of the question. The night air wasn’t just hot, it was oppressively soupy. If it were any more humid, we could swim uptown.

  “You want to go get something to eat?” I asked hopefully, thinking an air-conditioned restaurant and a big rare hamburger would be perfect right about now.

  “Now? You mean like an ice-cream cone?”

  “I mean like dinner.”

  He checked his watch. “It’s too late for dinner, Beau.”

  “Aren’t you hungry? You said you were starving before the show.”

  “That’s because it was way past dinnertime then.”

  “It was only six-thirty.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Who eats dinner before six-thirty?” I asked, and decided not to point out that we didn’t have time then, anyway.

  The reason we didn’t have time was because I got hung up in an emergency meeting late this afternoon. Increasingly jealous of Arsenio’s success, Janelle wanted us to implement some kind of audience-participation stunt, on a par with Arsenio’s barking-dog pound. After three hours of brainstorming, one of the assistant producers finally came up with the idea of outfitting the studio audience in matching straw sombreros emblazened with Janelle Jacques’s trademark initials.

  Personally, I think she was kidding when she said it, but narcissistic Janelle loved it. Next thing I knew, Gaile and I were being given detailed instructions for purchasing the sombreros wholesale.

  So I was late meeting Mike, and he wasn’t thrilled to have stood on a street corner for forty-five minutes thinking, as he so eloquently put it, that I had been crushed by a cross-town bus.

  “Who eats dinner at ten-thirty?” he was asking now, acting as if I had a hankering for fresh croissants and was insisting we board a plane for Paris tout de suite.

  Stomach growling ferociously, I gestured around us at the street lined with crowded restaurants. “A lot of people.”

  “Not in the rest of the world, Beau. That’s a New York thing.”

  “Yeah, well, when in Rome…”

  He sighed. “If you’re still hungry when we get uptown, we’ll eat there. I can’t stand the crowds here. Let’s get a cab.”

  I looked around at the traffic-clogged side street that led to the traffic-clogged avenue. There had to be a few dozen cabs in the vicinity, but none of them were moving, and all of them were occupied.

  “No cabs. Are you sure you don’t want to grab a bite here?”

  “Positive.”

  Mike and I headed uptown toward my apartment on foot. He seemed to be brooding, so I kept up a running commentary on the show.

  “I really love that one short bald guy,” I said.

  “Which one?” Mike looked around.

  “The one in the show. Him,” I said, leafing through my Playbill and pointing out the actor’s picture. “His name is Jason Alexander. Wasn’t he great?”

  “Yeah. Great.”

  His mind was obviously elsewhere.

  I tried again. “My favorite part of the show was the scene with the three sailors from On the Town.” I proceeded to sing a few bars about New York being a hell of a town.

  Hint, hint.

  But before my one-woman tourism campaign could launch the lyrics about the Bronx being up and the Battery down, Mike cut in with a brisk, “Beau, we have to talk.”

  “Can’t we just sing?”

  He didn’t laugh.

  I did, but only for a second. Then I saw the look on his face and reluctantly asked, “Okay, what’s up?”

  “It’s just…this.” He gestured vaguely with his hand.

  I looked around, pretending I had no idea what he was talking about.

  There were people everywhere: strolling, gaping tourists with cameras and maps in hand, striding grim-faced locals mowing them down, drag queens, cops that were outnumbered by gangs of wandering thugs and pickpocket types, lone vagrants, food-delivery people, flamboyantly gay couples, honeymooners, dog-walking matrons, weary corporate drones just leaving the office.

  Towering skyscrapers. Neon signs. Open manholes. Con Ed repair crews. Round-the-clock construction sites. Bright white spotlights and blue police barricades that betrayed a movie shoot down the cross street. Honking, bumper-to-bumper traffic. Open cellars in front of all-night Korean groceries; dripping window air-conditioner units overhead.

  Noise. Traffic. Litter. Stench.

  “What?” I asked, all innocence.

  “That.”

  I debated the wisdom of pushing it with another what? I knew damn well what he was talking about.

  But in case I didn’t, he added helpfully, “New York.”

  “Oh. That.”

  “You really want to live here forever, Beau?”

  Uh-oh. I so knew this was coming.

  “Yeah,” I said promptly, with the hometown pride of a Trump. “I really do. I love this city. It feels like the center of the universe.”

  “So does L.A.”

  “No, it doesn’t. It’s only the center of the entertainment industry. Which, if you think about it, Mike, really has nothing to do with you, so I don’t know why you—”

  “It has something to do with you, Beau. I mean, think about it. You’re building a career in television. You should be in Hollywood.”

  Damn, it was hot. I stuck out
my lower lip in an attempt to blow the hair that was plastered to my sweaty forehead, but it didn’t budge.

  “I don’t want to be in Hollywood, Mike,” I told him resolutely, sidestepping what looked like a heap of rags on the sidewalk.

  I realized it was a human being only when it snarled at me.

  “Whoa, Dude, chill out,” Mike said, hustling me past.

  Dude? Chill out? Who was he, Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? I opened my mouth to inform him that things might be different on the West Coast, but here in New York, we didn’t call the street people Dude, nor did we advise them to chill out.

  But Mike was still speaking, and what he was saying was, “That’s disgusting.”

  “What’s disgusting?” I looked around.

  Truth be told, there were plenty of disgusting things to be seen in this neighborhood at this hour. Hookers, overflowing trash cans, discarded syringes.

  “The dude,” Mike said with a shudder.

  Oh. Right. The dude.

  “He was filthy. And he stunk.”

  “Yeah.”

  I was accustomed to the homeless now, just as I was accustomed to the noise level, the crowds, the lines, the waits, the astronomical cost of living.

  I was also accustomed to getting what I wanted.

  I didn’t want to leave New York. And I wanted Mike to be there with me.

  “See, it isn’t like that on the West Coast.”

  “What, there are no homeless? Come on, Mike. I know they’re there. They’re everywhere.”

  “They’re there, yes, but you don’t have to step over them every time you go someplace.”

  “That’s because you have to be in a car every time you go someplace.”

  “What’s so bad about that?”

  “Nothing. I guess. If you like that sort of thing.”

  “What sort of thing? Driving?”

  “I don’t know, Mike…I guess I just think it’s really overrated.”

  “Driving?”

  “L.A.”

  Since I was still in a musical mood, I sang a few bars of Billy Joel’s “Say Goodbye to Hollywood.”

  Hint, hint.

  “Very funny,” Mike said. “I’m being serious.”

  “So am I. I don’t want to move across the country.”

  “I’m not sure I do, either.”

  “But the East Coast is home for you.”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “You know what I mean. You’re from here. You’d be coming home.”

  “I’m not from Manhattan. I’m from Long Island. There’s a big difference.”

  “Why don’t you just see how you do with your job interviews, Mike?” I asked him in what I hoped wasn’t too pleading a tone. “You have great opportunities here. And if you hate living in the city, you—we—can always commute from the suburbs.”

  “What, you mean like Jersey?”

  “God, no. I was thinking Westchester.”

  “There are beaches in Jersey.”

  “Oh. Well then, maybe Jersey,” I conceded, having forgotten his newfound affinity to sand and saltwater.

  “Yeah. I need to have the ocean nearby,” said Mike, who had grown up a stone’s throw from Jones Beach, yet never dreamed of catching a wave until he moved to la-la land. “I can’t live without beach access.”

  The riff from “Surfin’ USA” replaced the Jerome Robbins score running through my head.

  “Well, you already know that Long Island has great beaches,” I assured him.

  “I don’t want to go back to the Island. I spent the first eighteen years of my life trying to get off the Island.”

  You can take the boy off the Island…I thought, trying not to grin at the pronounced accent he had tried so hard to lose. Mike’s “off” was still “oh-awf,” just as “coffee” was “cohawfee.” When I first met him, I had a hard time understanding what he was saying half the time. Now I was used to it, but still found it charming.

  Not charming enough to want to move with him to Long Island and develop an accent of my own, though.

  “The Jersey shore has great beaches, too,” I pointed out, much to my own surprise. I mean, what was I doing? I didn’t want to live in Jersey. I wanted to live in New York.

  “Yeah. I guess Jersey wouldn’t be so bad. Because I know I couldn’t deal with the city in the summer.”

  I attempted to shove aside images of sidewalk cafés in the West Village and Shakespeare in Central Park and the Farmer’s Market in Union Square. Eating hot dogs and watching the Bronx Bombers play at historic Yankee Stadium. Italian ices from street vendors, fireworks over the Statue of Liberty, sunning on a blanket in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow on a Sunday afternoon.

  I’d miss all of that if I had to live in Jersey.

  Then again, anything was better than Californ-eye-yay, per the inside-outside-USA sound track in my head.

  I mean, deep down I knew that I wasn’t always going to have things exactly my way. If a compromise was what it would take to make our relationship work, then a compromise it would have to be. Because if Mike left, I’d miss him a hell of a lot more than anything New York had to offer.

  The suburbs were better than nothing. I had to make him see that we could be happy here. Or at least in a thirty-mile radius of here.

  “Great,” I said with a there, it’s settled gusto.

  “Mmm,” he said with a maddeningly noncommittal nothing’s settled ambivalence.

  But I, in my newfound The Donald mode, needed to seal the deal.

  “You know, maybe we should go apartment hunting this weekend,” I suggested casually as we waited on a corner for a traffic light to change.

  “Don’t you think apartment hunting is still a little premature, Beau? I don’t even have a job here yet.”

  “You’ll get one sooner or later. And I’ve been checking out the ads in The Voice lately just to see what’s out there. I saw a bunch of Manhattan sublets that start in September, which would give me time to give notice so Valerie can find a new roommate. Then we can sublet until spring and move out to—”

  “Whoa, wait a minute. Why would you have to give notice? I thought we were talking about an apartment for me. You already have a place.”

  “I do, but…” I took a deep breath and faced him. “I thought maybe we would move in together.”

  “You did?”

  I nodded.

  The light had changed, but neither of us moved. I was afraid to even let out the breath I was holding, much less take the plunge off the curb, and Mike appeared to be rooted to the spot in sheer horror.

  This was not good.

  This was also not what I was expecting.

  “We never talked about moving in together, Beau.”

  “I know…but I just kind of figured we would.”

  “You just kind of figured that we would…what? Talk about doing it? Or you just kind of figured that we would do it?”

  “I just kind of figured that we would talk about doing it,” I lied, thinking that this wasn’t going as well as it should be. “I figured since you were moving here, and you would need a place to live, it would make sense for us to get a place together.”

  “Oh,” he said. Just, oh.

  Rhymes with no.

  And go. As in, Go away and leave me alone, you clingy girlfriend you.

  “It’s just that rents are so expensive, it’s hard to make a go of it without a roommate.”

  “That’s my point. In L.A., you can rent a—”

  “And if you’re going to have a roommate,” I cut in, not caring that in L.A. you can rent a freaking oceanfront house for the price of a bagel with lox, “I’m the perfect candidate. I don’t smoke, I don’t hog the remote and I don’t leave the toilet seat up.”

  Splat. Another cute quip fallen flat as seventies hair.

  “You already have a roommate,” Mike pointed out.

  “I know, but I’d rather live with you. Valerie smokes, hogs the remote and le
aves the toilet seat up.”

  “Valerie leaves the toilet seat up?”

  “Only when she vomits,” I conceded.

  Still, he failed to crack a smile.

  “The thing is, Beau, moving in together is a huge step.”

  “I know. But we’ve been going out forever, and…” And I just assumed forever was in our future, as well. But I was suddenly afraid to tell him that, because I was afraid, for the first time, that he might not feel the same way.

  “Living together is different. That’s a huge commitment.”

  “I know.”

  “I just don’t think I’m capable of that yet.”

  “Yet? So you will be…soon?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  “You mean, you might not ever be ready?”

  “I don’t know, Beau!” He sounded exasperated.

  No, this wasn’t going as well as it could be. In fact, if it were going any worse, you might call it a breakup.

  “I don’t know what to say, Mike.”

  “I don’t either. But I’m being honest.”

  We walked on in silence for a good five minutes.

  I felt sick inside. All I wanted was to be home. Alone. So that I could cry in my bed.

  But Mike was staying with me, and Valerie was probably there, and I knew I would be trapped once I got there.

  About as trapped as I felt out here on the street with Mike.

  The crowd had thinned now that we were getting away from the theater district. If we headed over to Eighth Avenue and up a few more blocks, we might even be able to catch a cab uptown. I said as much to Mike.

  “You want to go right home? I thought you wanted to eat first.”

  “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  “Well, we can go get a drink and talk.”

  “About not moving in together?” I asked tartly.

  He shrugged. “Whatever. Never mind. I’m beat. Let’s get a cab and go back to your place and just go to sleep.”

  And we did.

  nine

  The present

  I’m curled up on the couch in the family room watching David Letterman and eating lo-carb coffee-mocha ice cream straight out of the container when I hear a key in the back door.