He stayed out of my life until one Friday evening, a month later, as I walked along a crowded strip of bars and restaurants hand in hand with Jack, because we were trying to make his ex-girlfriend jealous. Robbie and I saw each other from afar, and even as we knew the smart thing to do would be to walk in the opposite direction, we drew closer and closer to each other. When we were nearly face to face, and the distance between us was short enough for me to be able to let go of Jack’s hand and reach out to grab his, he turned his head slightly and fixed his eyes on the people coming out of the bars and restos, like he was scanning the area for a friend, or a date. This isn’t what it looks like, I wanted to clarify. It’s just a favor. It doesn’t mean anything.
Robbie kept on walking until he was lost in the crowd. For the rest of the night, I waited for a tap on the shoulder, or a hand on my back, but none came. I waited for him to come up to me and say, I’m sorry I never took a real chance on you. At ten minutes to midnight, my phone rang. It was him on the other line, slurring, “But apparently, you can settle for the way HE makes you feel.”
“Jack is my best friend,” I told him.
“So you keep saying,” he replied. He let out a sarcastic little laugh. Who gave him the right to take his hasty conclusions and turn them into outright accusations?
“I’m not in love with him,” I said quietly.
“I know that,” he said. “But I don’t think you do.”
He waited for an answer, or maybe a denial, but I couldn’t give him anything. I didn’t want to give him anything; I didn’t want to reinforce him wanting what he couldn’t have. I was ready and open all those months—where was he then? I heard some shuffling from his end of the line, and with a short, sharp click, he was gone. Again.
I sat there, watching the ice in my Vodka Sprite melt into oblivion, trying to resist the urge to get up and go home. And then I did feel a tap on my shoulder and a hand on my back. Jack leaned in, his mouth next to my ear, and said, “I’m sorry I never took a real chance on you.”
3
Today, I woke up to gloomy skies and the sound of raindrops crashing on my window. Rainy days remind me of you: how we shared a cup of cappuccino in our favorite café, how you held an umbrella over my head and pulled me into the warmth of your arms, how you lent me your sweater, still hanging in my closet the same way you always hang at the back of my mind, embedded in every word I say and every thought I think. Rainy days remind me of you, and when the grey clouds open up and send their tears down onto our bright lights and big cities, I hope they wash in memories of me. I hope they make you remember.
It is almost the end of summer, and we are braving the traffic and the floods, driving around in circles until we get things straight. “We need to decide if we are on the same page,” you told me earlier, and I thought, That’s not something you decide on. It’s either we’re on the same page or we’re not. That’s something you feel. You tell me, “It’s never going to be perfect. It’s not even going to be as great as you imagined it would be. You need to be okay with that. There will be days when I’ll enjoy flirting with other girls, days when I’d rather hang out with my friends than with you. There will be days when the sound of your voice will irritate me, and days when I wouldn’t care less what you’re up to. There will be days when we will yell and fight and I won’t love you at all.”
I nod, like I am agreeing with you, or considering agreeing with you, but I don’t think I ever will. Charles came back from Bohol yesterday and told me, “You spend your time taking care of all these kids, both the ones in your pre-school and the ones you insist on dating. But I just want you to find a good guy who will take care of you.”
“But I can take care of myself,” I told him. “Why are you always acting like I can’t?”
“Everyone needs someone to take care of them,” he replied. Very quietly, he added, “I don’t want you to end up with someone like Dad.”
Because Dad cheats and lies and drinks and has lost his sense of family—does that make him a horrible, unlovable person? What is the measure of a good person? At what point does compromise become sacrifice, and when does unconditional acceptance for another person’s flaws translate to shortchanging yourself?
I turn to look at you. You grip the steering wheel tightly, and I know you can sense me looking, but you pretend not to notice. I want to take your hand and tell you that we will be fine after this, but instead, I say, “I think I deserve more than that.”
The guy who will understand that compliments and hugs are more important than flowers and chocolate. The guy who will not disappoint me when he promises to do something, the guy who will make my mom laugh and look my dad straight in the eye. The guy Charles will approve of. The guy who will change everything without changing who I am—I need you to be this guy. I need you to tell me, right now, that you can be this guy.
“I don’t know if I can give you more than that,” you say, and I am expecting to feel my insides lurch, my heart shriveling into a sad little ball sinking straight to the pit of my stomach. But I feel calm and collected, and maybe I have always known that we were never meant to be together.
You ask me, “Do you think he’ll make you happy?” and I say, “I have to believe that he will.” You want to tell me that competition is the only thing that propels him towards me, and like all other guys, he will lose interest once the chase is over. Maybe you want to tell me that his efforts are as half-baked as yours are, maybe you want to tell me that he is just as inconsistent and uncommitted as you are. Maybe you want to tell me that there will also be days when he won’t love me at all, and that he should be apologizing for this, but we both know these two truths: One, I’m the one who should be sorry because I never took a real chance on him, either. And two, if I make my move now, it might not yet be too late.
For the second time this summer, you ask me, “Are you sure this is going to work?”
I give you the same answer. “No. But I can’t not try.”
We are no longer driving around in circles, because suddenly, we both know where we’re supposed to be going. You pull into the parking lot of a secluded café sandwiched between a Korean grocery and an appliance service center. At a table for two by the window, there is a boy sitting alone, looking like he’s waiting for someone; he could be waiting for me.
You tell me, “You belong with him.”
I hug you goodbye, and you wave at me as you drive off. Before you reach the street leading you home, the light will turn red, and you will have to get in line. These days, as the rain pours continuously, it seems like you spend most of your time in a travel-pause, stuck in one place until that flash of green gives you permission to move along. But it is hard to see this as a complete waste. Because at some point, the waiting ends. You and I are hurtling towards many different directions, always leaping before looking—we are bound to intersect somehow, someday, even as we take the roads leading away from each other.
The door to the café is heavy, and I have to push it hard. The boy at the table by the window looks up as I walk in, and there is both relief and surprise written across his face. He smiles, and it is not something he throws out into the world carelessly; it is specifically for me.
I smile back. “Hi, Robbie. How have you been?” I sit and listen, and in this cozy café, while the rain pounds against the window and thunder rumbles in the distance, I finally feel safe.
ALL THE BEST
1
“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is this,” I hold up my best friend Blake’s pristine white wedding invitation and toss it onto the table, where the twins Martin and Henry were busy attacking a 24-inch all-meat pizza. Martin grabs the envelope and gapes at it, his greasy fingers leaving dark oil spots on the paper. “Blake is marrying that chick Vicky?” he asks. “She is a babe! Lucky bastard.” A blob of hot sauce drips from his chin and misses the card by mere centimeters.
“Why is this our mission? You want us to get married too?” Henry asks
, without looking up from building his pepperoni tower. “Dude, forget it. That’s not happening for like, a very long time.”
Sometimes I wonder if Martin and Henry watched too much Beavis and Butthead (or Ren and Stimpy, or The Itchy and Scratchy Show—or any other idiotic onscreen duo you can come up with) as kids. But then I realize that’s giving television too much credit.
“We’re not letting this wedding happen,” I tell them.
“We’re not?” Martin takes the pizza crust and tries to stuff it into his mouth. Horizontally.
“We’re not,” I repeat firmly.
“Carl, I really think it’s about time you got over Blake,” Henry says, laughing at a joke that has been running since we were in high school. “You’ll be fine. There are lots of other boys out there.”
“Or girls,” Martin pipes in. “I bet you could go back to liking girls if you only set your mind to it. Remember Tin from grade school? You used to have the biggest crush on her. She had impressive boom-boom-pows when everyone else had tiny twelve-year-old...”
“Cut it out,” I tell them. For the record, I have a lovely girlfriend, Kim, and we’ve been together for seven years. She is perfect. We are perfect. And I want nothing but this kind of perfection for my friends. “Blake has been my best friend since prep, and I can’t just sit around and watch him make the biggest mistake of his life.”
“Oooh, biggest mistake of his life,” Henry mimics me. “How dramatic. I told you to quit all this freelance-wedding-photography-apprenticeship-whatever nonsense. It’s making you too girly.”
“Not that you weren’t girly before,” Martin clarifies. I scowl at him, and he adds, “Not that it’s a bad thing.” And then he shakes his head, like he’s the one who’s exasperated with me. “Carl, just let him do what he wants to do. He’s a big guy.”
“Literally,” Henry says. Blake is almost six feet tall, and has towered over all of us for as long as we can remember.
“I can’t just let him do what he wants to do,” I say. “I need to step in. We need to step in. He’s counting on us.” I am aware that I sound like I’m in a Mighty Ducks movie.
Martin and Henry look at each other, their noses wrinkling identically in confused hesitation. “No, thanks,” Henry decides. “We’ll stay out of this.”
“Yes,” Martin agrees. “It’s none of our beeswax. None of yours either, actually.” He’s been saying beeswax since he was eight, and he still seems to find it funny.
I stand up. “Okay. Suit yourself.”
“Let me get mine dry-cleaned,” Henry says.
“Let me go find my tie,” Martin says.
“What?”
Henry grins, looking terribly pleased with himself. “You said, suit yourself. So I said, let me get mine dry-cleaned, and Martin said, let me go find—”
“Never mind,” I cut him off, wishing I hadn’t asked. “Don’t blame me if Blake ends up miserable.”
“Of course we won’t,” Martin replies. “We’ll blame Blake.”
“He’s responsible for his own misery,” Henry says.
“That’s very comforting,” I tell them, stuffing my keys and my phone into my pocket. “I have to go. Kim’s waiting for me at her place. I need to see her before I face Blake and Vicky tonight. She promised to distract me, at least for a few hours.”
“Sexy time!” they chorus, and I walk out of the room to unsolicited advice like, “Stay safe!” and “Use protection!” I call back, just before the door closes, “Yeah well, you should have reminded Blake about that.”
“I’m not pregnant, Carl,” Vicky says pointedly. She glares at me, then takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. When she opens them again, she is calm and collected, and she looks at me with pity rather than anger. She is wearing a necklace of pearls with matching earrings, and her conservative powder blue polo is neatly tucked into her jeans and made of some shiny fabric that reflects light at the slightest movement. Her hair is in a tidy ponytail, and her lips have remained red and glossy after several sips of water and a few spoonfuls of soup. When she smiles, her eyes sparkle with generous patience, and I’m thinking this is what teachers must look like when they speak with indignant, defensive, borderline violent parents of trouble-making students—radiating sympathy that stems not from pure and honest kindness, but from a sense of worth that thrives on Being the Bigger Person: You are rude and crass but I am good enough to resist stooping to your level.
I wonder if it requires effort to act all high and mighty, or if it really does come naturally for people who have been blessed with better looks, better brains, or more money (in Vicky’s case, it’s all three) than your average guy. I wonder if it ever gets tiring to not be average.
Vicky stands up carefully—she is still calm and collected—and walks out the door with a clicking and clacking so poised and prim and proper that it is hard for me to feel sorry, or at least guilty for the things I have said tonight (basically, I called them both irresponsible and accused her of wanting to rush into marriage because it gives Blake little time to think things through and therefore less chances of changing his mind about her. I also told her that if she wants the baby so badly, she can go ahead and have it on her own; no need to drag my best friend into her prissy cardboard life.) I wish I hadn’t said all that, but mostly because I was wrong (factually, not morally) and not because I regret hurting her feelings. It is hard to feel bad for someone who seems so unaffected.
Blake shakes his head at me and asks, “What the hell, Carl?” although it is not an actual question and I at least know better than to attempt giving him an actual answer. So I just shrug and mutter, “Sorry, man,” and he shakes his head at me one more time before he gets up and follows his fiancée out the door. The waiter comes with Vicky’s Greek salad and Blake’s brocolli fusilli, and I think, Yuck. I’m not gonna eat all these vegetables.
2
The first time I met Vicky almost a year ago, I actually thought she was kind of cute. And I thought she was flirting with me. Blake asked me to meet him at a secluded café recommended by his younger brother Robbie. “That place makes things happen,” Robbie had supposedly said. I didn’t know why Blake needed to visit some café for things to happen—it seemed good things had been happening for him all his life without him even having to try. He was just one of those people: He was born with good looks and effortless charm and more than enough money; in college, he got good grades and great girls, and when we started working, he never complained about his job being stressful or demanding because like everything else in his life, it was easy and breezy and naturally perfect.
“Why are we here?” I asked him. He pretended not to hear me at first, concentrating on pouring condensed milk into his coffee, and I had to ask him twice. “Why are we here?”
He looked up at me. “I want you to meet someone. A girl.”
I laughed. “Blake, I have a girlfriend. Remember?”
“I know you have a girlfriend,” he said. “So do I.”
“That’s great,” I told him. His last real relationship was back in our college sophomore year. “Since when? Who is she?”
“Since last week,” he said. “Her name’s Vicky.”
I waited for him to add something to make her sound impressive, like “she has amazing lips,” or “she’s a supermodel” or even the generic “she has a great sense of humor.” But he didn’t. I smiled my most supportive smile. “Her name’s Vicky and...?”
He shrugged. “And she’s really something else.”
“I bet she is,” I said. “You’re not introducing her to me over beer and sisig while the rest of the guys crack dirty jokes and ogle her. And you actually seem worried about me getting along with her, or at least worried enough to believe your brother’s claims about this place. It must be serious.”
“It is,” he replied. We were both quiet, absorbing these two little words, until the door opened and a girl with long legs and long straight black hair entered the café. She smiled like she owned
the room and walked over to our table. Blake stood to kiss her on the cheek.
“Sorry I’m late,” she told him. “Work ended fifteen minutes ago, and I had to drive like a madman to get here.” She looked like the kind of girl who didn’t have to work a day in her life, and the kind of girl who never let herself feel any semblance of stress, and the kind of girl who was driven around in a shiny black car by a chauffeur in a uniform.
“No problem, sweetie,” Blake said. “We just arrived.” We did not just arrive. We were there at six PM. It was almost seven-thirty. Blake grabbed a chair from the next table and dragged it towards ours, the legs scraping the wooden floor and making a horrible screeching sound. Vicky sat down and placed her huge white bag between us on the table, almost knocking over my iced cappuccino and leaving me little room to prop up my elbows.
Vicky gave me a little wave. “You must be Carl.”
“Hi,” I said. “You must be Vicky.”
“Nice to meet you,” she said. She tucked her hair behind one ear and I noticed her fingernails were painted a pale shimmery pink that matched her pink pearl earrings and the pearl pendant on her silver necklace. Everything about her looked so...coordinated. She smelled clean and disinfected, like a mixture of baby powder, laundry detergent, and isopropyl alcohol. Blake excused himself to go to the bathroom, and once he was out of earshot, she made a face at the ceiling fan whirring overhead, declared, “It’s hot in here,” and took off her jacket to reveal a sheer white tank top. She leaned forward to take a sip of Blake’s coffee, and her neckline dipped an inch or two. She smiled at me and asked, “What are you doing on Friday? How does dinner and a movie sound?”
Table for Two Page 3
