About halfway through the song, just as I was thinking that maybe after the dance I should make my way to the bathroom, Rob/Todd/Rod leaned his head toward me and then somehow we were kissing.
It felt weird, kissing a man who was definitely not Dave. Dave had always been a good kisser, but so was this guy. But it was very different: slightly wetter, and he had firmer lips.
I was cheating; Dave was the only guy I should be kissing.
I pushed away, my head spinning.
“What? What’s wrong?”
I shook my head as the realization of my new life hit me. “I’m getting divorced.” That was exactly what was wrong. I was getting divorced. I fought sudden tears.
“We’re not married,” Rob/Todd/Rod said.
“No, no, not from you, from my husband.”
“I’m really sorry, that sucks,” he said, putting his hands on my waist. We started moving again, slowly turning and swaying with the music.
I looked up into his face. I couldn’t really focus on his features between the booze and the bad lighting in the bar. Putting my hands on his head, I pulled him to me and kissed him hard, pushing Dave as far out of my consciousness as possible.
Maybe Zoë had been right: a distraction was just what I needed.
When the song ended, so did the kiss, but Rob/Todd/Rod took me by the hand and led me back to the table where my friends were sitting. I’m sure I had a dumb look on my face, but I didn’t care.
He pulled the chair out for me. “Here, you sit down and I’ll get us a couple of drinks.”
I sat down and smiled at him; the words were slow to form in my head, let alone meander down to my mouth.
“You okay there, Vicky?” Kendra asked, sounding motherly.
“Yeah, he kisses good.” I had butterflies in my belly. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had butterflies. Maybe on my wedding day…I pushed the memory away, thinking of the kiss that had ended only moments before. My fingers rose to my lips.
“You be careful,” Kendra warned.
“Oh leave her alone. She’s getting a little action.” Jen slurred, making me wonder if I sounded that drunk. Probably. That made me laugh.
“I just don’t want her to do anything stupid.”
“She’s fine. We’re watching her,” Zoë said, seeming very sober and responsible although I was sure she wasn’t much of either. She had a real knack for seeming perfectly straight when she was actually hammered; a skill that had come in handy back in high school, when she had elevated drunken curfew dodging to an Olympic sport.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I announced suddenly, pushing myself out of my chair. Not only did I have to pee but the conversation was beginning to bring me down.
“I’m coming with you,” Kendra said, following me, her hand on my elbow.
I turned back to Zoë. “Tell the guy I’ll be right back.”
I let Kendra guide me to the back of the bar, glad to not have to tax my brain wondering which way to go.
We had to wait in line in the overly bright room, making me wish I could just go piss in a urinal like a guy. Three stalls? What were they thinking when they’d designed this bathroom? Finally, I was at the front of the line and just before I was going to have to begin the leg crossing dance, a woman emerged from a stall. As I rushed towards it, another woman emerged from the next stall, the one Kendra was waiting for, but I heard the woman say that it wouldn’t flush.
After the most satisfying pee I can remember, I flushed and left the stall so Kendra could use it (no idea what the woman in the stall on the end was doing).
“Wait for me,” Kendra said in her most parental tone. I nodded and headed over to the sink to wash my hands.
The bathroom was too bright and too crowded. It hurt my brain standing there.
“I’ll be out in the hall,” I yelled to Kendra.
“Stay right there! I’m coming out.”
I heard the crinkle of a tampon wrapper and just couldn’t bear to stand there one second longer. I’ll just wait in the hall, I thought and squeezed my way past the growing line.
My eyes took a couple seconds to adjust once I was back in the dark hallway, but when they did, Rob/Todd/Rod was standing in front of me.
“There you are. I was wondering where you’d gotten to.”
“Sorry, I just had to pee.” Like that wasn’t obvious. Duh.
He hugged me, and the butterflies in my stomach took flight again. I kissed him but then looked over my shoulder back at the bathroom door. “My friend is in there, she’s such a bore. If she sees me making out with you, I’ll get a lecture.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Take me somewhere she won’t find me.” I gave him a look that I hoped looked sexy and maybe a little naughty.
He smiled. “Come here,” he took me by the arm, looked both ways and snuck me into the men’s washroom.
Despite my giggling, neither of the men standing at the urinals said anything. I knew they were looking at me, but I didn’t care. We went into one of the stalls and he locked the door behind us. He sat down on the toilet and took my hands. I climbed on top so I was straddling him and we resumed our kiss.
It wasn’t long before his hand was up my blouse and fumbling for the hooks at the back of my bra. He took just long enough to undo it to make me think that he wasn’t a total pro at it, which was a little comforting.
The nagging question of should I be doing this popped into my brain, but I pushed it away, reminding myself that Dave had decided for me that our marriage was over. Dave didn’t want me anymore. Rob/Todd/Rod did.
“Take off your pants,” he whispered in my ear as I nuzzled his neck.
Obediently, I stood up and took off my jeans and panties as he undid his khakis and pushed down his underwear.
“Will you respect me in the morning?” I joked as I resumed my place on his lap.
Chapter 7
I learned the hard way that the true meaning of being grown up is that although you can still do stupid things like you used to, you can’t always do them without regret.
I can’t say I spent a lot of my youth screwing men in nightclub bathrooms, but even if I had, I wouldn’t have cared much about the implications. The girls and I were known as the popular ones, and were willing to do just about anything if it meant we maintained our privileged status. Back then every weekend night (and all too often a weeknight) was spent in a bar or a raucous house party, and even Kendra had been known to whoop it up.
But now, well into my thirties, on the verge of a divorce and suffering a very severe and debilitating vodka hangover, the acute pain of remorse was even stronger than the headache and nausea combined.
“What did I do?” I moaned from my makeshift bed on Jen’s couch. My arm was draped over my face to shield my burning and sensitive eyes from the assault of morning light streaming in through the east window.
“You got laid and really pissed off Kendra in the process.” Jen was never one to mince words. But her tone was that of amusement: not a shred of condemnation. Jen herself was no stranger to the concept of the one-night stand.
“Ugh,” I thought back to the lecture I got from Kendra when the guy and I finally emerged from the men’s bathroom to rejoin my friends at the table. Apparently Kendra had been combing the bar and even the parking lot looking for me. She had even used the phrase “Dead in a ditch” to describe how she had expected to find me. She was going to make someone a good mother someday.
Even when the guy had assured her I was fine, that didn’t suffice. Kendra had then turned on him, giving the poor dude an earful. If only she’d known where we had been and what we’d been doing, the reprimand would have been much worse. But I was almost positive I had told only Jen about my torrid escapade in the bathroom after Kendra had dropped us off in front of the apartment building. And forever forward, my lips were sealed; no one else needed to know. It was bad enough that Jen did.
Zoë had chosen a moment when Kendra
was mid-scold to be a good time for us to leave the bar. I scribbled Jen’s number on the back of an old shopping list I’d dug out of my purse and handed it to the guy.
“I’ll call you,” he had promised before my friends hauled me out of the bar. But even with my brain impaired by vodka, I knew I’d never hear from him.
Now, in the light of day, my behavior seemed so very sophomoric. “I can’t believe I slept with that guy,” I said to Bacco, who eyed me from his perch on the back of the sofa. He admonished me silently; I could tell by the slow wag of his tail, he too thought me foolish.
I slowly rolled over so I could sit up, but had to stop mid-way to keep my stomach from continuing its dangerous roll.
Jen offered her two cents. “Neither can I, that’s so not like you. But I’m glad you did, you needed a good lay to clear your head.”
“I wouldn’t classify fucking a guy in a men’s room to be a good lay.”
Jen shrugged as she bent down to tie her shoes.
I had forgotten it was a weekday. For the first time, I was thankful I was unemployed.
“I don’t know: tomayto, tomahhto. A lay is a lay and with a young guy like that?” she raised her eyebrows, obviously impressed.
I hadn’t realized he’d been so young; the booze had rendered his face a blur in my mind. “It will give you a clean break from Dave. He is no longer the last guy you slept with.” She stood up and grabbed her purse off the coffee table. “Anyway, I’ve gotta go to work, would you mind throwing the glasses in the dishwasher and turning it on?” She made a sweeping gesture of the coffee table where all of the evening’s discarded glassware stood as sticky testaments to the debacle.
It was the least I could do. I nodded, in awe of my friend; she had downed probably twice as many drinks as I had, but here she was, looking fine and ready for work while I was a waste of skin unable to move from the couch. I watched as she put on her coat and left the apartment, leaving me alone to ponder what she had said.
There were some serious holes in her theory. The last time with Dave had been great. The way it always was; fun but at the same time tender and loving. We always laughed in bed, making sex as much a cementing of our friendship as it was a bonding of our love. I didn’t want to replace that memory with the sordid one of me drunkenly bouncing on some guy in a dirty bar washroom. Ugh, I was suddenly a cougar; an over-the-hill divorcee trolling for young guys in bars. It was hardly a consolation that I had been successful in bagging a practical teenager. Ew.
Unable to face the cruel reality of my new role, I lay back down, pulling the old blanket up to my chin. Before the tears came, like I knew they would, before the depression set in, like it was threatening to do, I forced myself back to sleep, maybe to dream about me and Dave and the way it used to be before he had ever mentioned the D word.
* * *
The jingling of my cell phone woke me up. I lifted my head, despite the pounding, to look at the clock on the cable box: ten seventeen. I reached over to the end table to grab the phone, knowing it would be either Zoë calling for more dish, or Kendra calling to continue her lecture from the night before. With her persistence, she could easily make a mint selling used cars.
“Hi, Babe.” I was wrong on both accounts. I should have checked the call display.
Guilt washed over me and hung heavily on my chest like the lead vest Dave’s technician put on patients before taking x-rays. I was unable to shake the feeling that I had cheated on him. “Hi, Dave.” It was an effort just to breathe.
“I just have a second in between patients, but I just wanted to call and make sure you were okay.”
Why did he have to make it so hard? I closed my eyes, swallowing past the sudden lump in my throat. “Yeah, I’m okay.” I managed to say.
He sighed. “I’m not, Babe. I want you to come home so bad.”
You wouldn’t if you knew what I’d done last night. “Dave, nothing’s changed. We can’t keep doing this.”
“I know,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.
“How are things at the office?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood.
“The girls miss you here. It was so hard to tell them what happened. They were shocked.”
“I’ll bet.” I thought of Marg, the dental hygienist. She had been there the longest and although I had never considered her a friend the way Zoë was, she and I had always gotten along really well. “I should give Marg a call.”
“I think she’d like that.”
“Dave?”
“Yeah, Babe.”
“I don’t think you should call me for a while. While it’s still so fresh, I mean.” I paused to wipe at my eyes. “It’s too hard on both of us.”
Dave was silent, but I could hear him breathing.
“I’m so sorry, Dave. I really am.”
“I am too.”
“I’ve gotta go. I’ll call you in a while. I think we both need the space.”
“Okay, whatever you want.”
I hung up the phone, biting my tongue. This was not what I wanted. This was nothing close to how I wanted my life to be; couch surfing at a girlfriend’s while my marriage crumbled and my job became nonexistent.
Hauling my heavy and protesting body off the couch, I made my way into the kitchen and opened Jen’s freezer. I grabbed the pint of Ben and Jerry’s and a spoon from the drawer and headed back to the living room to watch the rest of Ellen.
I was only allowed eight minutes of peace before my cell phone rang again. With a sigh, I got up to grab it from the coffee table. This time, I looked to see who it was and rolled my eyes as I saw my sister’s number flash onto the screen.
“Vicky, what’s going on? I just got off the phone with Mom.”
I was actually surprised that it had taken my younger sister this long to find out what had happened; my mom must be slipping on her speed gossiping. She had always seemed to have a policy that information should never get cold before passing it along to everyone in her address book. Thanks to her latest conquest of Gmail, information could now reach far corners of the globe simultaneously in a manner of seconds. But for whatever reason, not this time.
“What did she tell you?” I asked, wondering how much my mother would have embellished the story.
“Not much, just that you and Dave were having some problems.”
Impossible: my mother was not one to understate. “That’s it? That’s all she told you?”
“That’s it.”
“Wow. Did she tell you how I stormed out of there?”
“No. Vicky, I’m telling you, she didn’t say much. Can you please tell me what’s going on?”
I took a deep breath. “Dave and I are splitting up.”
“What?” Ruby shrieked. “She just said you were having problems but that you guys were going to work it out.”
“She’s in denial. My marriage is over.”
“Oh my God. Vicky, I’m so sorry. Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not really, Ruby. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be a bitch, I’m just not into talking about it right now.” I was talked out and beyond tired of crying, not to mention the incessant pounding in my cerebellum.
“No, it’s okay. You’ll tell me about it later. I’ve gotta get Katie to Gymboree anyway. Listen, I was calling to invite you and…well you to go out with us for dinner tonight. It’s Michael’s birthday and Sam and I are taking the family out for Chinese.”
My stomach rolled at the thought of filling it with any food, let alone Chinese. “I don’t know, Ruby. I’m not really up for…”
“Come on, Vicky. I’m not taking no for an answer so you may as well give in now and save us both the time.”
My sister was nothing if not persistent. So with a sigh, I agreed to meet her and the family for dinner. How bad could it be?
Chapter 8
After stopping at the grocery store to get a gift card for my nephew, I drove myself to the restaurant, wondering who else Ruby had invited. That would d
epend on if my invitation was a pity invite due to my recent news or if she had decided to invite the whole family to her son’s ninth birthday. I was putting my money on the latter.
As I got out of my SUV, I saw my dad’s Chrysler in the next aisle over; there was no mistaking his burgundy sedan with the “GR8TCHR” vanity plate (a sixtieth birthday gift from Mom).
Great. I was not in the mood to see my mother; it would be the first time since I’d stormed out of her house. She had left a few pathetic messages on my cell, but I had yet to call her back. Even though she sounded apologetic on the messages, I knew better and it was hard to get in the mood for what would surely end up being another lecture.
Oh well, too late to turn back now. I hit the alarm button on my remote and took a deep breath to steel myself for whatever was to come. I walked past the few smokers who’d gathered by the front door and into the restaurant.
“Hello, welcome to Chinese Star.”
I smiled at the hostess. “I’m here with the Katz party.” Assuming that meant something to her.
Apparently, it did. “Right this way,” the hostess said as she turned to lead me to my seat.
No wonder she knew: the Katz party was huge. We took up a whole section of four tables, two just for kids and the other two containing various family members including my parents, brother, grandparents and a smattering of Sam’s relatives. Before I had the opportunity to choose my seat, my mother piped up. “Victoria, over here. Come here, honey, I saved you a seat.” She patted the chair beside her; I would be flanked by her and my brother whose emotional maturity had peaked at age twelve. Ugh, was this just going to get worse?
I nodded in acknowledgment at my mother and then made my way over to the kids’ table. My nephew had been oblivious to my presence until I was practically on top of him.
I handed him the envelope. “Happy Birthday, Michael. It’s a gift card for iTunes.”
He finally looked up. “Cool. Thanks, Aunt Vicky.” I was offered a momentary smile before he turned back to his friends.
Life, Sideways Page 5
