“Burke.” I sighed and slumped back in my seat. “He marched through my head so many times last night you’d have thought he had one of those big high school band drums.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Keep reminding yourself that’s just sexual attraction. It’s not real. It’s not the most important thing.”
“Are you sure?” I challenged. “Because at the moment it feels a lot like the most important thing.”
“So Frank is forgotten?”
“Frank?”
He nodded. “You said he was hot. You can’t totally ignore that in your whole Morrison-fest here. Let’s not play games. You’ve been in bed with both of them.”
“Okay, fine. Yes. And, yes, that was one thing Frank was very good at.”
“Worth keeping in mind.”
No, it wasn’t. Yet, my heart beat faster just thinking about those two brief encounters we’d had. Young as he’d been—at least from my perspective now—Frank was gifted. Now that I had a fairly extensive list of comparisons, I knew it was true.
“Quinn?” Glenn snapped his fingers in front of my face. “You with me?”
“No, leave me alone. I’m basking in the memory. This may be my only chance to have sex again.”
“Stop it. You will have sex again.”
“With who? Some big fat idiot who can’t put his name tag on right side up but still has the confidence to think he can do better than me? A paper airplane engineer? A failed cartoonist who hiccups his way through a seemingly endless description of his main character while his eyes wander the room looking at other women? I’d rather just settle down with a vibrator and a Costco pack of batteries.”
Glenn laughed. “I know what you mean. I went through a long period of time where I was just stuck with this asshole.” He held up his right hand.
It took me a minute to understand, then I laughed. “Too bad you’re gay, huh?”
He shrugged. “Too bad you’re a woman.”
“Touché.”
“Is Frank really that great?” Glenn asked after a moment. “Or do you think maybe you’re romanticizing the past some here?”
I looked him in the eye. “There were things he did that no one else ever did. And the way our bodies fit together…” I actually sighed, remembering. “I can’t even describe it.”
“I’m not sure that’s as rare as you think it is.”
“Then I’m not sure I’m talking about what you think I’m talking about. In my experience, it’s rare. The perfect storm of physical chemistry and emotional combustion.”
Glenn nodded thoughtfully and, after a long moment, said, “That sucks.”
And after that, there was really nothing left to be said about it.
Chapter 13
“This was a complete waste of money.” I put ten lottery tickets in the drawer under the cash register. It was Buy Ten Lottery Tickets! Day, which Glenn had considered soft after Go Commando Day and Speed Dating Night, but he was right, I never bought lottery tickets. They were always a waste of money, but never more than on a day like this. “Money I can’t afford to lose right now, by the way.”
“Then there’s no gentle way to bring this up.” He took out a copy of Washingtonian and opened it to a page he’d marked. Society weddings. Markham-Beasley.
“So what?” I asked, too sharply, I knew.
“Look what it says.” He pointed. “The bride wore an Augusta Jones original.…”
I looked at the picture. “That is not an Augusta Jones! For one thing, Elizabeth Markham was in here a few months ago pricing gowns and she thought I was too expensive.”
“That’s because you work for more than six bucks an hour,” Glenn said, then nodded toward the front window.
“No!” The Sneaky Seamstress struck again?
“Taney,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”
“Well, shit” was all I could say. “One more thing to worry about.”
“Honey, I think your livelihood should be the main thing you’re worried about. Forget the boys, that stuff will work itself out if you give it a little time.”
I doubted that. It had been ten years and apparently it hadn’t worked itself out so far. “I am so completely filled with horrible black energy right now, there is no way I could win anything. Except maybe a bet that not one of the numbers on these ten tickets will come up. Not one.” I raised an eyebrow. “Care to wager?”
Glenn put his hands up, the sign of surrender. “No way, sista. I’m not taking you on right now.”
“Wise,” I said, and shut the drawer. “Very wise.” I sat down and sank my head into my hands. “Oh, my god, he was married!”
“So?”
I had been all ready to dissolve into self-pitying tears, so this answer wasn’t exactly what I was going for. “What do you mean, so?”
“What was he supposed to do? Sit around and mourn over you forever?”
“That”—I jabbed a finger in Glenn’s direction—“would have been excellent.”
“When was the last time you got laid?”
I looked at him blankly. “I beg your pardon, sir?”
“It’s been months, right?”
“I have a perfectly healthy sex life.”
“Maybe I’m not remembering this right,” he said, in a way that suggested he was about to reenact something I’d done or said with such crystal clarity that I wasn’t going to be sure if he was him or me, “but I believe you had a very hot relationship with a certain Arlington bank president for several months earlier this year.”
“It was very casual.”
“If you do that kind of thing casually…”
“Good grief, Glenn, what are you getting at?”
“I’m just wondering if you were thinking about Burke while you were doing that.”
“Probably not.”
“So you actually”—he gestured like he was searching for the words—“went on with your life.”
“Okay, okay, yes, I get your point. I’m not saying he wasn’t within his rights, Glenn, I’m saying it makes me feel like total shit. Can’t you see that? He loved someone else enough to marry her!”
“Yet when he was going to marry you—first, I might add—and you rejected him, you contended that you did that because he didn’t love you. He, who was going to marry you.”
“My head hurts.”
“It should. You’re not being fair to him.”
“Maybe.” I groaned. “It’s just that he kissed someone else, had sex with someone else—oh, my god, what if it was better than it was with me? Is that possible?”
He splayed his arms. “I have not had sex with you.”
“We’re not talking skill here, Glenn, it’s about passion. If there’s one thing we had together, it was passion. I mean, even the night of Dottie’s dinner party…”
“What?”
I remembered the kiss and felt slightly twitchy at the memory. My heart pounded. “He kissed me. I kissed him. Whatever. We kissed. It was searing hot. And then I hated myself afterwards.”
“What? Why?”
“Because that’s not what I want. He is not what I want. In fact”—I meant this—“I’d even go so far as to say he is exactly what I don’t want. I don’t have the emotional cash to spend on that man again.”
Glenn assessed me. “I think there may be a certain wisdom in that, Quinn.”
“You do?”
He nodded. “I don’t know, but maybe—maybe—Burke represents, more than anything else, a past you are clinging to so hard that you cannot have anything new in the present or, worse, anything fresh in the future.”
“You’re right,” I said, the full impact of the misery hitting me. The very fact that I felt so melancholy about Dottie selling the farm, as if with it went all of my dreams of the future, was proof of that. That future hadn’t even been a possibility for me in ten years. “You’re right about everything. I’ve been stuck in this weird rut that allowed me to sleep throug
h day after day after day until what happened ten years ago could have happened two years ago or yesterday. Nothing ever changed, didn’t get better, but it didn’t get worse, and I think that was the imaginary safety zone I was trapped in. Not getting worse.”
“Has it been good?” Glenn asked, without judgment. “That is, honestly, on balance would you say it’s been mostly good?”
I thought about that. Really thought about it. Because it was easy to say “okay” was “good” because it wasn’t bad, but those were three distinctly different states of being. Three.
And I’d only been living in one of them.
“I’m afraid of bad,” I confessed, worried about sounding like a basket case even though this was my best friend I was talking to. “I’ve been to bad before, I don’t want to go back.”
“What do you define as bad? What do you mean when you say you’ve been to bad before?”
I met his eyes. He hadn’t been there in my bad period. I didn’t have a more creative, artistic term for it than that, it was just a depression. Maybe not much different than anyone else ever had. “I went through a couple of months once where I just didn’t want to be alive,” I said. “Not in the bored teenager sort of way, but in the way that I had to remind myself that in a hundred years nothing I was doing or seeing was going to matter anymore. That was the only way I could get through it.”
He looked thoughtful. “So you’re talking clinical depression. Not just the blues. Or the mean reds.”
I would have laughed at the Audrey Hepburn Breakfast at Tiffany’s reference, had it not brought a vivid picture of Burke’s weirdly named wife to mind. But I wasn’t going to broach that subject with Glenn because it would start him on a tear about how lovely Audrey Hepburn was—it was one of his favorite topics—and that would just keep her in my head and it would all be one big mindfuck for me.
“Yes,” I said. “This was way beyond the mean reds. I felt like I was inside a car all the time, looking out at the world but not feeling the sun or the wind or the rain or anything. Just observing it from inside some transparent shell.”
“Was this after Burke, I assume?”
“Directly.”
He smiled kindly. It was sympathy. “How did I know?”
“You have a very keen sense of the obvious.”
He tipped an imaginary hat. “Thank you very much.”
A moment of silence passed, not uncomfortably.
“You know what I’d think about sometimes?” I asked at last. “Princess Diana.”
He frowned. “What did I miss? Are we in a different movie suddenly?”
“I mean, think about it. She was a regular person, given this great opportunity, or seemingly great opportunity, when she was just nineteen. Married the future King of England. Was supposed to be the future Queen of England. And I think she was in love with him, I really do.”
He screwed up his face. “Come on.”
“No, seriously, I used to get my hair done in Georgetown by the same woman who did Diana when she was in town. A Brazilian woman who did the ambassador’s wife, so I think she actually knew her pretty well. And she said Diana really loved Charles right up to the end.”
“So she was nuts, is what you’re saying.”
“Maybe. But whatever the reason, I think she really just wanted love. The simplest thing in the world, or at least the most basic. Think about all the stories that came out later. That she liked hanging out in her lover’s mom’s cottage in some obscure coastal town, or that she was in love with that doctor who didn’t give a shit how famous or beloved she was, he was your classic hard-to-get guy anyway.” I’d actually given this more thought than I probably should have, except that I thought it was a perfect example of how it didn’t matter what it looked like you should be grateful for: if you had a voice, you had a void. “I just think that all the worship was nice, and she enjoyed it, and she probably would have been blown away by the adoration around her funeral, but I also bet she would have given it all up to be a happy housewife in Dover.”
“Your point being that you don’t want to be the Queen of England either?”
“That is exactly my point.” I leveled a gaze on him. “I also don’t want to be queen.”
He smiled. “Your point,” he said slowly, “is that you don’t care about the glory, you don’t want the proverbial big life, you just want the simplicity of love, and happiness, and peace, and that is why you’ve stayed in this little life here without venturing too far away.”
“Right. Because I already know all that glitters is not gold.”
“You think that you’re in this rut because you know what’s out there and you know that’s not what you want, you want exactly what you already have here and now, so there’s no point in venturing out of the cave.”
It was times like this when I was so grateful to have a friend who really and truly understood me right through to the core. “Exactly.”
“Because that glitter might just be pyrite.”
“Exactly.” This validation felt good.
Until he said, “But, baby, nothing’s glittering here.”
Something in me deflated. What if he was right?
“So that’s not really what this is about,” he went on.
“Why not? Why can’t it just be simple? Why can’t I just be right?”
“Because you’re not happy. You have shut down whole huge parts of your emotional life, just boarded up the windows, and you’re hiding inside. You yourself just said love is one of the most elemental wants or needs we have, but you refuse to experience it because of the experience you had with that guy, in this town.”
Maybe. “If you’re right … if … what do I do?”
He tipped his head and considered me. “I wish I knew exactly what you need and could say it, so you can have that forehead-slapping moment of realization, but I honestly don’t know. I don’t believe you want to be alone forever.”
I smiled. “This is the part where I’m supposed to argue that I’m perfectly fine and self-sufficient and don’t need a man or anyone else to complete me, but”—I shook my head—“you’re right, I don’t want to be alone forever. Over all these years, a small part of my brain has been entirely devoted to these echoey watercolor memories of my time with Burke, and I don’t think anyone else could have had a chance of pushing that out of my brain even if I’d let them try.”
“But you don’t know that.” Glenn looked at me intently. “You don’t know that because you never let anyone anywhere near. You have to get out of your head, you have to get out of this fantasy world that’s composed of bits and pieces of the past, real and imagined, and you have to live. Meet new people. Have new experiences. You’re basing everything that you think you want on an ideal you formed when you were fifteen, and there could be so much more to your life than that.”
I heard him. I honestly did. There absolutely was wisdom in what he was saying, but my heart kept saying that what I needed was right here at home. That I didn’t need to be the girl who went out and traveled the world and had adventures with many men. I’d been born into this small part of the world and this was where I was supposed to be.
But that argument wouldn’t hold water with Glenn, and if he’d lobbed it at me, I would have rejected it as well. I would want better for my friend, just like he did.
Why didn’t I want better for myself?
* * *
Leave it to Glenn to take a potentially decent plan—his “do something every day that takes you out of your comfort zone” plan, which had pretty much gone well so far—and make it into something straight-up undoable so, basically, the entire thing was blown.
Like a diet foiled by Girl Scouts Thin Mints cookies.
The instruction paper lay on the counter of my shop next to its little red envelope:
Have a one-night stand.
“This was a Partridge Family song, right?” I asked, not bothering to say hello before launching in when he answered my call. “You’re
telling me to listen to a song, right? Because I know you’re not telling me to have random sex with someone just one night.”
“Of course I’m not!”
I sat down. “Thank God.”
“Not just one night, that’s way too random. You don’t have that sort of time. No, I meant tonight. I happen to know you don’t already have plans, because tonight is like every other night for you.”
“There’s no way I’m doing this.”
“You have to. You agreed to my terms.”
“Show me where I signed off on this, devil.”
“It was an oral agreement,” he said. “That is just as binding in a court of law.”
“And you’re going to sue me if I don’t get laid tonight?”
He made a noise of sarcastic derision. “People have sued for dumber things than that.”
I closed my eyes. “You’re ruining this whole thirty-day plan of yours. You know that, right?”
“No, Quinn, no joke, this is important. I think it’s going to really help you.”
“Not gonna happen,” I said, with absolute conviction. Even if I wanted to—which I totally did not—it wasn’t like I was going to go man-hunting in the D.C. metro area with an eye toward activity that at the worst could give me a disease and at the very best could make me feel weird about myself.
Well, okay, I guess “at the very best” could, arguably, be that it did what Glenn thought and took me further out of my cocoon. But I couldn’t see that happening. Lone girl in the big city, looking for a man? I was likely to find too much more than that.
And I most definitely wasn’t going to find someone suitable sticking around in this tired old town.
Uh-oh. There it was. The proof of Glenn’s point.
I was glad I hadn’t said it out loud.
“Think about it!” he implored, his voice rising with his vehemence. “What a shake-up that would be!”
“I’ll say.”
“From an energy standpoint, you would be shifting everything! This could be spiritual Drano for you!”
Spiritual Drano? Where did he come up with this stuff? “That is too wildly inappropriate for me to even answer, Glenn.”
Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger Page 15
