He winks at me.
I open the chilled champagne bottle as soon as we’re seated because I’ve gotta get this show on the road.
I hold my glass up to hers in a toast. “To fucking first dates and the assholes who take you on them.”
She drops her head as she laughs. “To fucking first dates and the assholes you take on them.” She polishes hers off in two gulps. “Will you please tell me where we’re going?”
“Will you please enjoy the ride?” I open the sunroof. “You ever driven around in a limo before?”
“Not since prom.”
“Baby, you ain’t lived until you’ve driven around Manhattan in the back of a limo. Sit back, relax, and look up.”
“That’s what she said,” my date mutters.
I had instructed the driver to play Sinatra because I had a feeling it would drive her nuts. I was right. She just shakes her head and laughs until the chorus of “I’ve Got the World on a String,” and then she stares at me.
I smile. “We’ve gone from no-strings to a string. Get it?”
“Yeah. I get it. If you were really clever, you would have played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. That’s a lot of strings.”
“Vivaldi’s more of a third-date move.”
She finally relaxes and lies back with my arm around her shoulder, and when we can see the tops of buildings around Central Park and the midtown skyscrapers, she gets it. All of New York is still out there rushing around and making noise, but it’s just us in here. Taking our time, taking it all in.
I kiss her hand, her arm, her shoulder, her dazzling elongated neck.
She’s the picture of grace and elegance when she’s silent and still.
Half an hour later, I inconspicuously check my phone, and our romantic, sexy, and surprisingly relaxing limo ride comes to an end.
“We’re here,” I say. I wait for the driver to open the door And then step out onto the curb and hold out my hand to help my reluctant date out.
It takes her several seconds to realize that we’re back at the townhouse.
“Wait. What?”
I press a generous tip into the driver’s hand and offer my arm to Bernadette as we head back upstairs. “M’lady.”
She can barely control her excitement. “I’m gonna take my shoes off!” She hands me her strappy heels to carry while she hikes up her gown and runs barefoot up the stairs.
“Wait!” I whisper. “We’re going to a dinner party at Mrs. Benson’s!”
The look on her face is worth every dollar that I’ve spent to make tonight happen.
“I’m kidding. Proceed to 4B.”
She calls me an asshole under her breath and continues upstairs.
In the time since we left, while we were driving around, I had caterers set up the dining area with a three-course meal and dessert, floral arrangements, and candles. Before I left, I’d set up a movie screen and projector that I’d rented. Only Daisy is waiting for us in the apartment when we get back. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is playing on the stereo. I had that set up before I left too.
Strings.
They sound pretty good with the right woman.
Especially a classy one.
“I am so fucking excited that we don’t have to go out tonight!” Bernadette squeals.
She’s even more excited when I tell her we don’t have to eat dinner at the dining table. We load up our plates and bring them to the coffee table in the living room and sit cross-legged on the furry rug while watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
I swear she has stars in her eyes when she looks at me, with a huge cloth napkin tucked into the neck of her dress, eating an ice cream sundae. Daisy is curled up between us, and Hogwarts is glowing on screen. “There is literally nothing else I’d rather be doing right now. And no one I’d rather be with. Thank you.”
This woman.
When she’s sweet, there’s no one sweeter, dammit.
Sunday is just a hazy blur of sleep and sex and laundry. I let her have the night off from dating so she can clean her apartment and “work on some things.” I can only hope she’s working on more beautiful dirty pictures of us.
All day long, all week, we check in with each other via text. We make and keep plans to meet up for lunch downtown almost every day. A few evenings we’re able to meet up and come home from work together, arms wrapped around each other as we keep our balance, leaning against a pole on the crowded subway train.
She’s so happy about me letting her stay in on Saturday night that she invites me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Friday. We walk there through Central Park and eat at the dining room there after she shows me her favorite abstract paintings. Hearing her talk about art history is a huge turn-on. When I tell her about the contracts and deals that I work on as we walk home, she does a really good job of feigning interest.
It feels good and right and easy. For me, anyway. I sense her body tensing up every now and then when I mention the future, see the fleeting looks of uneasiness on her otherwise happy face.
I don’t ask her what’s wrong because I have a feeling that would count as converge-sating.
I can only hope that eventually she’ll get used to dating me. For such an otherwise mature, rational. and stable person, it’s odd that she seems to find the idea of a serious relationship so agonizing.
My friends think she sounds like the perfect woman—what guy would complain about a girl who doesn’t constantly want to have the “where is this going” conversation and check in with their feelings? Lloyd’s theory is that Bernadette escaped from some kind of new age art cult where she was forced to commit to a controlling artist cult leader and share her feelings in group therapy sessions and then the information was used to blackmail her. When I asked him if there was such a thing as new age art cults, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Sure, why not?” I’ve decided to stop talking about it with my friends and just let the delightful mystery of who Bernadette Farmer is unfold before me.
18
Matt
Two weeks into dating, and it looks like I’m going to get a front-row seat to Bernie’s psychological makeup.
It’s Saturday morning. An hour after she’s left my bed for her apartment, I hear her running around. I knock on her door to see if she’s okay. She is almost frantic when she tells me that she called her parents to check in on them since they hadn’t been replying to her texts or emails for a few days, and the guy who’s living with them answered the house phone and said that her parents are at the hospital because her dad fell off a ladder.
I’ve never seen Bernadette like this before. She’s not crying, but I can tell how hard she’s trying to keep herself together. Helping her is the only thing that matters to me now.
“I need to go. They never answer their cell phones, even if they have them on them. I have to get to the airport.”
“Where are they?”
“The hospital’s in Burlington. Farm’s just outside the city.”
“Have you bought a ticket yet?”
“No, I was about to go online for that.”
“Don’t fly there. Let me drive you. We can take Daisy.”
“What?” She genuinely doesn’t seem to understand what I’m saying.
“I can rent a car. I’ll drive you.”
“Matt, it takes like five and a half hours to drive there!”
“Is it imperative that you get there immediately?”
She exhales. “I guess not. I just want to be there if they need me. God! Why can’t they just answer their fucking phones like normal people?”
Yeah, she needs to calm down, but I know better than to just tell her that.
“It would still take about four hours just to find a flight, get to the airport, deal with all the airport crap, and fly there.”
“I guess.”
“It’s a pretty nice drive, right? And this way you’ll be able to keep trying to call them. You wouldn’t be able to when you’re on a plane. Do you need
to come right back, or is your plan to stay there to help out?”
“Well…I don’t know yet. It depends what’s going on. Sebastian’s in Hudson Valley this weekend, so I don’t expect him to need anything, but I can’t ask you to take that kind of time out of your schedule.”
“You don’t have to ask. I’m offering. I don’t have any meetings on Monday. Daisy and I can get a hotel room in Burlington.”
“No. No, you don’t have to do that. They have five bedrooms. I mean, I have no idea how many people are staying with them right now, but there’s plenty of room at the house. It’s not fancy or anything. I’d love for Daisy to run around the farm.”
“Okay, then. Daisy can stay with you and I’ll get a hotel room.”
“No, I want you to stay there too.” She laughs a little and takes a deep breath. “Thank you. Okay, I guess this is happening. You’re going to meet my parents.”
In less than half an hour, we’re in a rental car headed north. Daisy’s in Bernadette’s lap, and I’ve got a premade Spotify road trip playlist on with the volume turned down low. This is not how I saw my weekend going, and I certainly hope her dad’s okay, but so far I’m pretty shocked by how happy I am. My two best girls and I are on a little adventure. What more could I possibly want?
Information.
I want information.
I’m going to extract it from her in as painless a way as possible.
“So…your last name is Farmer and your family owns a farm?”
She smiles and shakes her head. “Yes. My grandfather officially changed his last name after he bought the property.”
“What was it before then?”
She looks at me with a straight face and says, “Banker.”
I burst out laughing. Her timing and delivery are perfect.
“I’m not kidding.”
“Come on! You’re telling me your name could have been Bernie Banker?”
“Laugh it up, McGovern. And don’t call me Bernie.”
“Why not?”
“Because. My parents named me Bernadette to offset the plain Jane-ness of Farmer, but they’ve always called me Bernie. I think if you make a deliberate choice, then you should stick with it.”
“What if I deliberately choose to call you Bernie?” I don’t think I’ve had so much fun teasing a girl I like since I was eleven.
She purses her lips and nuzzles Daisy’s face. “I think Daisy Farmer has a nice ring to it.”
If anyone’s taking someone else’s name, it’s you who will be taking mine, Bernadette.
That thought hits me like a Mack truck that came out of nowhere. I swerve a tiny bit. She looks over at me to see if I’m okay. I keep my eyes on the road, my thoughts on track, and I remain quiet for about ten minutes after that.
I wait until we’re well into upstate New York before getting into the questions again.
“You wanna tell me about your parents?”
She empties her lungs and shuts her eyes. “I guess. I don’t know. I’m sure they’ll tell you all about themselves when we get there. They’re…”
Monsters? Weird? Unconventional? What?
“They’ve been madly in love with each other for as long as I can remember. And they were madly in love with each other long before I was born. But they work at it.”
“How?”
“You know. They think it’s important to connect deeply on a regular basis and talk about feelings.” She shudders. “All the feelings. All the time. Like expressing them through art or sex isn’t enough. They think it opens up the channels. I don’t know. It gives me hives. They’re nice, though. They’re really nice. They’re good parents. They just aren’t good at things like email or paying bills on time.”
“Because they’re so busy talking about their feelings?”
“Because they’re so busy being in touch with each other and nature and their art and the community.”
“Are they Amish?”
She laughs at that. “I wish! They’re their own brand of hippie. They just feel guilty because they had dreams of being famous, successful artists when they were young. They met in New York in the eighties. They both had very middle-class childhoods and fled their suburban lives for New York, and they were into the whole punk CBGB’s scene. They stayed at the Chelsea Hotel and partied hard and made terrible art with lots of black and white and reds, you know. But then they fell in love, ran out of money, and my grandparents left the farm to my dad. So they decided to be hippies instead. You’ll see. They’ll tell you the story, but it’s the version they want people to hear.” She slaps her own cheek. “That came out all wrong. I made them sound like asshats. They’re not. They’re just…probably really different from your parents.”
“My parents are total asshats.”
“Hah! I bet.”
To be honest, her parents sound incredibly interesting compared to mine.
She tries calling her mom’s and dad’s phones again, as well as the home phone, but nobody answers.
“Why don’t you call the hospital?”
She blinks and then looks at me like I’m a genius and she hates me for it. “Oh yeah.”
After ten minutes of calling around different hospitals and clinics in Burlington and being put on hold, she finds out that Steve Farmer checked out of an urgent care clinic half an hour ago. When she hangs up, she is both relieved and frustrated. She looks over at me. “I’m sorry. We’re halfway there. Do you want to just keep going?”
“I definitely want to keep going. I’m glad it’s not serious.”
“Yeah. I mean, I guess it’s not serious. I’ll give them another half hour to get settled back home and try calling them again.”
I reach over to squeeze her thigh. She holds my hand.
“You sure you still want to meet my parents?”
“Just try to stop me.”
She stares at me, incredulous. I don’t need to ask if she’s ever introduced a boyfriend to her parents before. I guess in her mind, this is the string that could strangle someone. I’m not sure if it’s herself or me that she’s worried about. Vanessa and I didn’t meet each other’s families until a year after we’d moved in together. It was fine. We posed for a lot of pictures that got posted on Instagram.
I don’t like thinking about Vanessa now. I’m realizing that it’s the first time that I have in a while. My brain doesn’t have much room for her anymore, although it does make me a little sad that it’s true. How can someone I chose to live with for years just disappear from my life like this? I was so wrong about her. I moved too fast. I don’t want to be wrong about Bernadette.
“When was the last time you visited the farm?”
She looks out her window. “Ages. A year and a half, I guess? I didn’t make it home for the holidays last year because of work. And I never stay very long. Ever since I moved to New York, I’ve been a terrible daughter.”
“You’re not. But I’m glad we’re doing this.”
After filling up the tank, I come out of the convenience store with a bag full of disgusting snacks and find that Bernadette has returned to the car with Daisy, who is now curled up in her bed in the back seat. Bernadette is on the phone. As soon as I open the car door, I can hear her mother’s enthusiastic (loud) voice.
Before we’re back on the freeway, I’ve gathered that Steve Farmer fell from the third rung of a ladder this morning while he was trying to replace an exterior lightbulb. It was just a silly accident, but he has a hairline fracture in his shoulder. It hurts, and he won’t be able to raise his arm for a while.
“Okay,” Bernadette says. “So, he’s basically fine.”
“He’s perfectly fine. He’s just mad at himself for not watching what he was doing. How are you?”
“Actually, Mom, I’m driving to the farm to see you guys right now.”
“What? Wait—what? You’re coming home? Now?”
“Surprise.” She rolls her eyes at me. “We’re about two hours away.”
“
We—who’s we?”
Bernadette whispers into the speaker. “I’m bringing a boy.”
“Who—Tommy?” her mother asks gleefully.
“No.” She looks at me while she talks. “A straight man. A very straight man. His name is Matt. We’re bringing his little dog too.” She covers her eyes and scrunches up her face before continuing. “Matt and I are dating.”
She drops the phone into her lap when her mother starts shrieking.
“Steeeeve! Steve—come over here! No—don’t move! It’s fine—it’s good news! Bernie! Bernie—put him on the phone! I want to talk to Matt!”
You asked for it, she mouths to me.
I nod for her to go ahead. She puts me on speakerphone.
“Hi, Mrs. Farmer. This is Matt.”
“Matt! Oh I like your voice. It’s so masculine! I’m Leslie, and you are so welcome to come stay with us! Bernie’s room is always ready and waiting for her to visit, and the bed should be big enough for two!”
Bernadette lowers the passenger-side window and makes like she’s about to jump out of it.
“Thanks, Leslie. I’m really looking forward to meeting you and seeing where Bernie grew up.”
Don’t call me that, Bernie mouths, frowning.
“Now, do you have any food allergies or preferences that we should know about? We’re mostly farm-to-table vegetarians around here, but we can head over to the store if you need meat. What about your doggy—does she need anything?”
“I will eat whatever you serve me, and I brought food for Daisy. She just needs water and a place to do her business.”
“Awwww, Daisy! I love the name Daisy!”
If Bernadette weren’t sitting right next to me with her mouth sealed shut, I would swear that I was on the phone with her right now.
When Leslie starts to ask what kind of dog Daisy is and why I chose the name Daisy, Bernadette jumps in. “Mom—we should let Matt concentrate on driving, yeah? We’ll see you soon. I’m so glad that Dad’s okay. Love you, bye!”
She hangs up and drops her phone into her bag. “And that was just a taste.”
The Brooklyn Book Boyfriends Page 38
