Dress Rehearsal
Page 13
Robin was halfway across the restaurant before I even made a move to stand up.
“Well, gentlemen, enjoy your evening.” Paige gave the group a weak smile.
I almost felt sorry for Jeremy. He hadn’t said a word since Robin stormed off, but I noticed he watched her move through the crowd until she disappeared.
Finally he turned to me. “You’ve got to understand. My ex came at me with a knife. Does Robin know that?”
“She’s just trying to protect her business,” I answered, reaching for my jester hat.
“I don’t want to take her business.” Jeremy shook his head and stared out the window at the fluorescent Luigi’s sign casting a red tint on the snow outside.
He obviously wasn’t out to screw Robin, like she’d thought. I doubt he’d even be suing her if it wasn’t for his brother in law.
Jeremy looked back at me. “Doesn’t she get that sometimes it just doesn’t work out and there’s not any one reason? I just wanted her to realize that shit happens and that doesn’t mean that you have to blame someone for it or devote hours of seminar time to prolonging the agony.”
Paige was anxious to get going, but I couldn’t just walk away from Jeremy without some sort of response.
“I know. You and everyone else.”
Normalcy and order, Paige had requested. Next time we really had to try harder.
Chapter 12
We packed it in early on Sunday, leaving before the lifts even closed. There wasn’t the usual girl talk on the ride home, and as I sat in the front seat watching the street signs pass by, I kept thinking I should tell Robin what Jeremy said. But when I looked in my visor mirror, Robin was curled up on the back seat, her sleepy breathing interrupted by the rough grinding of teeth, and I figured that saving one friend a weekend was more than enough action for me.
“She sleeping?” Paige asked quietly.
“Yep.”
“Good. She needs it. I thought she’d never go to bed last night.” Paige lowered her voice. “What are we going to do about her?”
I shrugged. “Just let it run its course?”
“It’s been almost two years, Lauren, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.”
Paige and I rarely talked about Robin’s post-divorce trials and tribulations, even though at times it felt like she was auditioning for a guest spot on the panel of a Jerry Springer show. Like last night’s blow out with Jeremy. Between scheming new ways to embarrass and humiliate Mark, and carrying around a chip on her shoulder the size of the rock of Gibralter, Paige and I had tacitly agreed to let Robin get it out of her system. We figured it was her way of working through the divorce process. Of course, we never thought she’d still be going at it two years later like the Ever Ready Bunny with a nuclear powered grudge.
“What are our choices?”
Paige couldn’t come up an answer and we drove on in silence past the Welcome to Massachusetts sign.
We’d all obeyed Paige’s instructions to avoid talking about Steve all weekend. Even Paige’s parents didn’t mention the broken engagement and instead acted like we’d just decided we needed to drive three and a half hours to freeze our asses off. But with reality about to set in when we reached the city, I wanted Paige to know that I was willing to listen if she needed to talk.
“Do you want to talk about Steve?” I asked.
“What’s there to talk about?” Paige kept her eyes on the road.
“The fact that you’ve gone from talking about having children with Steve to acting like he never existed.”
“Why? Because I’m not crying? Or second guessing my decision? Do you really think talking about it will help the situation?” She continued staring straight ahead, her mouth set in a line as flat at the highway that lay out before us. “No, I don’t want to talk about it.”
If she didn’t want to talk, I couldn’t force her.
After a few minutes, Paige’s grip on the steering wheel loosened and she turned to me. “So Maria said that this Charlie guy seems nice.”
I found it odd that Maria was suddenly taking an interest in my love life, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she was hoping I’d get dumped on my ass.
“He is,” I told her, but my voice wasn’t exactly filled with enthusiasm.
Paige wrinkled up her nose and frowned at me. “What’s the problem?”
“Nothing.”
“You like this Charlie, right?”
“As much as you can like someone who tells you that he doesn’t want to marry you.” Did that sentence sound as pitiful as it felt?
“What? He said that?”
“He didn’t mean he didn’t want to marry me, exactly. Just that he didn’t want to marry anyone, at least not in the near future.”
“Do you think he’s afraid of commitment?” she asked.
“He said he’s not; he said he wants a relationship.”
Paige seemed confused. “So, he likes you, he wants to keep seeing you, but he doesn’t want to marry you?”
I nodded.
“Okay, then what’s the problem here? If you asked Robin, she’d probably say he was doing you a favor. Besides, you like him and he likes you. That’s half the battle right there.”
“I know.”
“Look, maybe you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy yourself.”
Robin shifted in the back seat and I waited for her to chime in with her two cents. Instead she rolled onto her other side and fell back asleep.
Paige looked over at me, scrutinizing the look on my face under the glow of the passing highway lights overhead. “So why the long face?”
I shifted in my seat, wishing I could explain it to myself. “I don’t know.”
“Sure you do. You know exactly what the problem is, you just don’t want to admit it.”
“Admit what?”
“That even though you’d like to believe you’re above buying into all the fairy tale crap, you’re just like all those clients you love to make fun of.”
“I am not,” I objected too quickly.
Paige smiled knowingly at me. “What do you do for a living?”
“I bake cakes.”
“No you don’t. You focus on conclusions.”
“But I hate all that wedding bullshit, all that time and energy on something that only lasts a few hours.”
Paige’s face tightened up and I felt like a callous idiot in light of the fact that Robin and I put the kibosh on her few hours just two days ago.
“Sure you do,” she agreed quietly. “Because all that stuff gets in the way of what you really want, the culmination of it all, the big finale – the cake. It’s your version of the happily ever after.”
“So?”
“So, Charlie telling you that there is no conclusion, no final destination, it bothers you, because you’ve been waiting for the big finale and if it’s not coming, then what’s the point?”
“That’s not it at all.”
“Sure it is.”
“No. It’s that we’re two people who watch clients make relationship choices for a living, and we know. We’ve seen first hand when it works and when it doesn’t. We can tell when it’s a mismatch, and yet we still want to see each other. And if we can tell that there’s something there worth pursuing, it’s almost like a guarantee.”
“There are no guarantees, Lauren. Take it from Robin, her guarantee expired when Mark left.”
“But I could have had that with Neil,” I mumbled, a little too loudly.
“Ah, yes, Neil.” The light bulb went off in Paige’s head. “Now I understand. Charlie tells you he isn’t interested in getting married and then Neil walks into the boutique ready to say I Do.”
I felt so transparent Paige could have just called me Casper.
“You let Neil leave without you for a reason, Lauren,” Paige reminded me.
I was sure I did, but at the moment I was having a hard time remembering what that reason was.
I pushed the play button and went into the kitchen to pour myself some juice while the tape rewound. I’d left in such a hurry yesterday morning there were no clean glasses, and so as I hoisted the Tropicana carton to my mouth, I waited by the counter for Charlie’s deep voice to welcome me home. Instead a different albeit familiar man’s voice made its way across the living room.
“Please call me when you get this message,” Steve practically pleaded, each labored word a stab at my heart. “Paige called off the wedding and I just don’t get it.”
Steve’s message ended with a beep and the machine informed me there were no other new messages. I pushed the erase button and wondered how many more times Steve had tried to reach me that weekend, only to hear my recorded greeting.
Poor Steve. He sounded so confused, so utterly at a loss for the sudden turn of events with Paige. I liked Steve. I really did. But Paige was my best friend. She was the one who held my hair off my face as I deposited an evening’s worth of Cambridge’s best tequila into the public toilet stall at the Hong Kong. She was the one who drove three hours to pick me up at a Yale formal when I discovered my date in the stairwell with a look of ecstasy on his face, and then looked down and saw his roommate’s girlfriend on her knees and I realized why he was smiling. Not to mention the fact that I probably wouldn’t even have a business today if it wasn’t for Paige’s support in the beginning. The least I could do in return was try to save her from making a huge mistake.
Without mentioning Steve once all weekend, Paige had managed to convince me that she was taking the intervention seriously. Unlike the desperate message on my machine, Paige didn’t waste her time moping around. She’d summoned up the strength of a woman who didn’t believe in dwelling on things once she’d made up her mind. Unlike Robin, who seemed to marinate in her feelings for ages, Paige seemed almost too resolute, too comfortable with her decision, like she’d decided to redecorate her living room instead of rearrange her life.
Of course, running into Plaintiff Jeremy kind of set the weekend off on a different trajectory all together. There wasn’t much time to mope with Robin ranting and raving about Jeremy the rest of the weekend. But even if Paige didn’t let on like anything in her carefully managed existence had changed, I was sure that it would take more than two days skiing in Vermont to get Steve out of her system.
Tonight, after parking her car and unpacking, Paige would be alone. Not just alone in her apartment, but really alone for the first time since she met Steve. I imagined her going through her date book, crossing out all the appointments she’d made – the florist, the caterer, the band, the travel agent. The months she’d been counting down with anticipation instead seeming to lie before her one after the other until her calendar reminded her to purchase another year.
Was it sad? Yes.
Did I wish Paige and Steve had picked the same cake and lived happily ever after? Of course.
Was I proud of the fact that Steve and Paige were no longer together or that I was the reason they were probably trying to make sense of the last forty eight hours?
Absolutely not.
But if I could save Paige from getting hurt or making a mistake that years from now she’ll regret, didn’t I have to tell her? If I found out that she was about to buy a house that was built on an unstable foundation, wouldn’t I say something, even if it meant she lost her down payment? If she was about to invest in a company that I knew was cooking the books, I’d tell her in a heartbeat. And so that’s exactly what Robin and I did, because Paige was about to invest in one of the riskiest ventures out there.
If only more people learned to recognize the signs of trouble before they got to the tasting table. If only I could point out the indicators that said it was time to call it quits. Now that would be a book worth buying.
Maybe Robin’s editor would be interested in a book about my cake theory instead of the cakes themselves. Plenty of investment advisors wrote books on how to mitigate risk, I could do the same thing – only my advice would taste better.
I could explain how I was able to identify the relationships that were junk bonds. Sure the upside could be huge, but were you willing to risk everything you had on the slight chance it would pay off? Then there were relationships that promised a steady, if average return that was guaranteed - like municipal bonds or certificates of deposit. They didn’t have the excitement of junk bonds, but they also didn’t have the uncertainty. At least when you went to bed every night, you knew that your nest egg would still be there in the morning. I guess using that logic, Neil was my treasury bond.
I knew it wasn’t a coincidence that starter marriages flourished during the dot.com era. I saw so many weddings funded by dot.com dollars and IPO stock options, you’d have thought there’d be a tickertape parade following all the happy couples hopping in their rented Bentley’s on their way to the airport and a honeymoon at Cap Jaluca. Of course it was a time when everyone bought into the propaganda of IPOs without looking too closely at the details or examining if all the hype was warranted. Inevitably, when the bubble burst, these couples were left completely ill-prepared to deal with the fallout of relationships built on flimsy future promises, and we ended up with an entire generation divorced before the age of thirty.
So, when it was all said and done, I was relieved that Paige had decided to take our advice and cash out. And, given her experience with Mark, I wasn’t surprised that Robin had decided to stay out of the market all together. And me, I was banking on an emotional savings account.
If I were writing the Lauren’s Luscious Licks Guide to Emotional Investment, what would my own strategy be? I’d continue waiting for the highest guaranteed return with the least chance of a downside, even if economists would argue that no such thing existed. In a perfect world, I could hedge my bets and put the odds in my favor by exploring things with Charlie and trying to find out if I’d missed something about Neil, something that I’d been oblivious to eight years ago when I let him move away.
Neil and Charlie. Now that was a great idea. It didn’t have to be an either/or proposition, at least not until I figured out who offered the best return. Talk about a sound investment strategy.
That’s why, after I unpacked and gave him another twenty minutes in which to dial my number, I decided to phone Charlie and reschedule our date. This was no time to play coy games or follow arbitrary rules created by women who saw dating as a dance between cat and mouse. I’d been the one to cancel at the last minute, and so it was only fair that I be the one to call him.
“I was starting to think maybe you thought I’d be bad for business,” Charlie joked after I explained the impromptu ski trip. “So you had a good time?”
“We prescribed a little downhill therapy for my friend. She just broke up with her fiancé.”
“That’s too bad. Did your therapeutic approach work, Dr. Freud?”
“Maybe. Anyway, I was wondering if we could reschedule our dinner.”
“I’ve got a pretty busy week, but how about lunch?”
We worked out the details, and after we hung up I resolved to stop worrying about Steve and Paige and Neil and let myself enjoy the prospect of Charlie – the only other man I’d met who shared my insight into the coupling process. Maybe his alter aversion was something that would change with time. After all, he’d nev
er dated me before.
I filled the tub with my favorite French vanilla bubble bath and climbed in, surrounded by all the lotions and potions any self-respecting women felt obliged to waste her hard earned money on. The warm fragrant water melted away the post-skiing soreness in my muscles and as I lay there with my eyes closed, my thoughts grew lazier. I pictured summer weekends on Martha’s Vineyard with Charlie sharing lobsters on the beach in Menemsha – until a sailboat floated by with Neil on the deck watching us through a pair of binoculars. I imagined autumn car rides to Vermont to see the fall foliage – and Neil following us in a state trooper car with a megaphone, demanding we pull over and show him our license and registration. As hard as I tried to make my bath time musings a Neil-free zone, he kept elbowing his way in, like those storm warnings that flash across the bottom of the TV screen and interrupt regularly scheduled programming.