“Whoa,” he says. “I don’t remember your old place having so many stairs.”
“It’s OK,” I say. “I got it, Pop.”
I scoop him up.
It’s not the easiest scoop in the world. I mean, there’s a good reason he’s called Big John, although he is smaller than he used to be.
“You know,” he says, “a third of a century ago, it was me carrying you around.”
“Yeah, well,” I say, “just returning the favor.”
Downstairs, the others are already seated, having reserved two chairs side by side for us. The setup here is pretty much the same as it was in the old place. After GH, Sam and I positioned a huge piece of plywood over the pool table and arranged folding chairs around one half of it. It’s not exactly an ideal way to play poker—the way the chairs are, it’d be way too easy to cheat from the corners or the end position—but it’s how we do things and the only one we have to watch out for cheating is Drew. Really, the only major difference with this setup is that I no longer have a hula-girl chandelier hanging over the table, but I got rid of that shortly after Helen came on the scene.
“That’s some kitchen you got up there,” Billy says as I start to shuffle.
“It’s very yellow,” Drew says.
“Yeah,” I say.
We painted the kitchen on Wednesday. We’re supposed to do the master bedroom this weekend. I don’t really want to think about it.
I’m almost done dealing when there’s a thunder of light-footed steps coming down the stairs and there’s Helen coming through the doorway. She’s got on white shorts, a black T-shirt, and a green visor on her head.
There’s a flurry of “Hey, it’s the bride!” and a lot of hugging and kissing ensues. Helen grabs a folding chair from the small stack left against the wall and sets it up on the other side of Steve.
“Did I miss anything?” she says, scooching her chair closer to the table.
“Um, what’re you doing?” Drew asks.
“What do you mean what am I doing? I’m going to play.”
“You play poker?” I don’t mean to sound so shocked but I kind of am. Helen’s never mentioned an interest in poker before.
“I grew up with brothers. So sure, I’ve played a few times before. Why? Is my playing a problem?”
“Just don’t tell the other wives,” Drew says. “We’ve never had a woman in the game before.”
Helen does a chin jut at Sam. “What about her?”
“That’s just Sam.” Drew does a dismissive wave. “The wives know she doesn’t count.”
This’ll be good, I think. As much as I’ve been looking forward to getting back to my weekly poker game, part of me has been dreading it too. What with having to work all day during the week, it already feels like too much time apart. Now that we’re married, it seems like we should be spending every free second together, so it’ll be good to have her sit in on the game this one night.
Helen’s chin juts out at me this time. “You going to deal or what?”
God, she’s cute.
Turns out my wife can play cards, which we learn when she takes us to the cleaners on the very first hand.
“Well, this is fun,” Billy says. “Anyone need another beer?”
He’s handing beers around from the mini-fridge in the corner when there’s more thumping on the stairs.
Thump. Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.
I look around the table, counting heads. Since no one’s left to go to the bathroom, that can only be…
“Hey, Johnny,” Big John says, “what’s that thing your cat’s got in his mouth?”
We all look at the cat, who’s entering the room, dragging a doll by the hair. The doll is shaped like a Barbie, meaning she’s stacked but has an absurdly tiny waist. And yet she’s not like any Barbie I’ve ever seen so I don’t think she can really be one, except for the hourglass shape. She’s got slightly blue-tinged skin, a blue fairy dress on, plastic wings coming out of her back, and her hair—all ratty from Fluffy dragging her everywhere by it—is a vivid dark blue. No, I don’t think she really is a legitimate Barbie, unless she goes by the name of Slutty Blue-Haired Fairy Barbie, which can’t be right.
“We found her on the side of the street,” I say. “I always take Fluffy around the neighborhood for a walk on his leash after work. One day, we saw the doll lying there. Fluffy was interested but I figured some little girl would come back for it. By the third day, I figured she was just abandoned so when Fluffy was still interested, we brought her home with us.”
We all look at the cat some more.
Since we’re such a mixed group, I refrain from going into the thing where I imitate what I imagine to be Fluffy’s voice growling, “I loooove her.”
“I think he thinks she’s his girlfriend,” I say. “I think he might be in love with her.”
Fluffy’s lying on his side now with the doll’s hair in his mouth, pawing at her midsection like crazy with his back feet.
“That’s kind of sick,” Drew says.
“He’s just a cat,” I say.
Big John deals the cards this time. Helen wins again.
We do the thing where everyone talks about what’s been going on at work.
When it’s my turn, it goes like this:
“Not bad, but one of the jobs was a bit much. It was too crowded.”
“Too crowded?” Steve says.
“New construction,” I say, figuring that explains everything.
Apparently, though, Sam doesn’t think anyone other than Big John and her and me will understand this, because she expounds, “What Johnny means is, there were a lot of other people still doing work there: Paul the Mason, Everett the Window Washer, Bob the Builder.”
I’m half surprised when no one laughs at the last person she names. Well, I thought it was funny.
“It’s not like they get in our way so much,” Sam goes on. “It’s just that they’re always asking Johnny to do stuff with them. ‘Johnny, do you want to go for a drink?’ ‘Johnny, you want to grab a bite to eat after this?’ ‘Johnny, why don’t you come back to the house with me to watch the game?’”
“It’s just too hard when they’re all there at once.” I shrug. “I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings and I can only be one place at a time.”
“I had a great day at work,” Helen says. “Daniel took a case off my hands that I’ve been hoping to dump on someone else.”
“Daniel Rathbone?” Steve says.
Helen nods.
“Great guy.”
“I know, right?”
Drew deals. Helen wins.
“Do you think it’s too late to change the cat’s name?” I wonder aloud. “It’s just that, I’ve been thinking. His personality’s been changing so much lately—Doesn’t he look more like a Yoyo to you now?”
We regard the cat, our heads tilted to one side. He’s curled up with his girlfriend now, asleep.
“Nah,” Drew concludes. “He’s still a Fluffy.”
Billy deals. Helen wins.
At nine o’clock, cell phones begin going off with a few pings signifying text messages thrown in: first Billy’s, then Drew’s, then Steve’s, then Big John’s.
Well, that last one’s new.
Soon, the room is filled with the sound of four people talking on phones and texting, some more loudly than others.
I know I’m a guy and everything—duh—so I’m supposed to be into every tech gadget that comes along, but I’ve never really gotten into the whole texting thing and neither has Sam. We talked about it once and we agreed we like hearing the sounds of other people’s voices. We especially like hearing other people laugh out loud—literally—and we further made a pact: we’re each responsible for killing the other if one of us ever, ever types out LOL.
Helen looks across the table at me. “What’re they doing?”
“It’s the wives,” I explain.
“And this happens every week?”
I shrug.
“Pretty much.”
“It’s kind of annoying, all that talking and texting. Don’t they know we’re trying to play a game here?”
“Hey, I don’t do it,” Sam says. Then she fishes her cell out of her pocket. “They’ll probably be a while. Might as well give Lily a call.”
“So, how’ve you been?” I ask my wife across the table and over the chatter of the others.
“I’ve been good,” she says. “I married this great guy and today I had a turkey sandwich for lunch.”
“White or whole wheat?”
“Rye.”
“Ah, Rye. I’ve painted more than one house in Rye. You come here often?”
“First time, but I’m liking it. There’s this one guy in the game who is hot-hot-hot.”
“Is that a visor on your head or are you just happy to see me?”
And that’s what we do: We make silly as-if-I-just-ran-into-you flirty small talk while the others jabber.
At last, conversations begin to end, cell phones get put away. Now the only one left on the phone is Billy, which means it’s impossible not to hear when he half shouts, “I said, I’ll be home whenever I get home!”
And then he’s off the phone too.
“Problems with Alice?” I ask. I don’t really want to, but it almost feels like it’d be rude if I didn’t, like if you overheard someone saying they’ve got cancer and the next thing out of your mouth is, “Hey, anyone want some more chips?” I mean, how can you not ask?
“We’ve been fighting a lot lately,” he says. “No biggie.”
Isn’t it, though? Alice has always been something of a prickly pear, but I don’t remember ever hearing her and Billy fight before and certainly I never heard him raise his voice in exasperation to her like that. Come to think of it, Billy never gets exasperated. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s been so mellow, like the human equivalent of the way Fluffy used to be before we moved into this house.
“Stacy and me are fighting too,” Drew says.
Well, that really is no biggie. Drew and Stacy fight all the time. They fight so much, sometimes I picture them fighting with each other even before they met.
“Katie’s not in the best mood,” Steve says.
“Your aunt’s a little quiet tonight,” Big John says.
“What?” I say. “Is everyone fighting with their wives?”
“Not me,” Steve says. “I just always do what she wants.”
“Your aunt and me don’t fight,” Big John says.
“Never?” I say.
“Not so you’d recognize. She gets mad about stuff but when she does, she expresses it by coming into the living room and switching the station from sports to something she wants to watch.”
“But doesn’t that piss you off?” Drew says. “That’d piss me off.”
“Not really,” Big John says. “It’s a small price to pay for peace in the house. And HGTV isn’t such a bad channel. Hey, did you know you can get a mansion in Nebraska for what you’d pay for a shack around here? Why didn’t I ever think of moving to Nebraska?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “But you know what’s really weird?” Again with the no waiting. “It’s supposed to be House and Garden TV. But it’s always all houses and never any gardens. Where did all the fucking gardens go?”
I deal again. Helen wins. Yeah, that’s right. She wins and wins and wins.
The game breaks up around ten because no one except Helen has any money left.
We see people out at the door.
“See everybody next week,” Helen says.
“Oh,” Drew says. “Will you be here next week? Playing again, I mean.”
“I was planning on it,” Helen says.
“That’s great,” Drew says. “I’ll bring more money.”
“Now that you guys are back,” says Billy, the last to go, “we should get together and do something—you know, the two couples.”
“That sounds great,” I say, and I think it does. Now that I’m married, what could be more fun than getting together with another couple and doing married-couple shit?
“Fantastic,” Helen says. “Why don’t you and Alice come over here tomorrow night?”
Wait. So soon?
“We’ll make dinner,” Helen offers.
We will???
“I’ll tell Alice,” Billy says. “She’ll be thrilled.”
And he’s gone too.
“That was so much fun!” Helen says, throwing her arms around my neck and laying a loud kiss on my lips.
“It was,” I say, “it really was. But were you serious? You’ll be playing in the game every week?”
“That’s what I was thinking.” She pulls away a bit. “Don’t you want me to?”
I pull her in tight again. “Of course I do.”
Don’t I?
Of course I do. The way she beat everyone—I’m proud of her, aren’t I? I mean, I should think about taking this woman to Vegas!
Still…
“Do you always win like that?” I ask.
“Off and on.” She shrugs. “But pretty much.”
“Well, you might want to try more off than on, at least occasionally, because if you keep winning like that, I don’t think people’re going to want to come here. They’ll think we’ve got a racket going.”
My wife caresses the back of my neck with her hands. I’m thinking: She wants me.
“You know your hair’s getting kind of long?” she says. “Maybe you should get a trim tomorrow.”
Eek, There’s a Hair in My Zuppa
Barbers, in my experience, are not selected for their proficiency with comb and scissors. Rather, they are selected based on their ability to give good banter.
This is why I’ve been patronizing Stavros of Greece for years.
The first time I met Stavros, I was six years old. Big John brought me for a haircut because he said the bowl Aunt Alfresca’d been using to cut my hair wasn’t doing my looks justice. To tell the truth, I was pretty scared. Even back then, Stavros’s hand shook while holding the scissors. But then Stavros started filling me in on the content of his days—“about noon every day, I break to go bang my mistress”—and my fears disappeared amidst his storytelling. Twenty-eight years later, he keeps the same schedule; same mistress, even. The only things that have changed is his hair—once jet black, his thick curls are now almost all white—and now he’s got a lot of lines on his face.
“Johnny!” Stavros shouts when he sees me. When Stavros keeps just looking at me, the patron in his chair starts to look nervous, probably because Stavros’s hands are still flying around his head like a blind Edward Scissorhands. “What do you think? You think Favre’ll make a comeback this year? I think he’ll make a comeback this year.”
“God, I hope not,” I say.
“What do you mean? The guy cracks me up. Remember that time he sent that lady a picture of his junk using his cell phone? What a buffoon! Everyone knows a cell phone makes anything you take a picture of look small!” He shifts the comb to his scissors hand and demonstrates, holding two fingers about a half inch apart.
And welcome to the world of Stavros.
Here, the problem isn’t that an ageing and overpaid quarterback sent an unsolicited picture of the lower part of his naked body to some unsuspecting woman. It’s that he was using the wrong photographic tool to snap the pic of his junk.
“I just hope the Jets don’t go for Peyton,” I say. “I like Sanchez. He just needs confidence.”
With anyone else, I’d mostly be talking baseball this time of year, but Stavros will only talk about football. He says that baseball is for sissies and that in basketball they show too much leg, which makes me think he probably hasn’t seen a basketball game since the ’70s. Stavros says football is the only manly sport. Stavros is big on things being manly. That and junk.
Stavros finishes up with the other customer, who pays, and then it’s my turn to assume the chair. Stavros fingers the hair at the back of my neck.
; “I’m not trying to turn away business,” he says, “but your hair doesn’t seem too long to me.”
“Yeah, well, my wife says I need a trim.”
“Your wife? When did you go out and get yourself a wife?”
What’s he talking about?
“What’re you talking about?” I say. “We’ve been talking about this for months. I got married two weeks ago. I told you about that.”
“You most certainly did not.”
Is he pulling my leg? Once I asked Helen to marry me and she said yes, I started talking nonstop about the wedding to anyone who would listen, meaning I’ve been discussing it with Stavros every time I’ve come in here for the last eight months.
“If my favorite customer had told me he was getting married,” he goes on, “I would think I would remember such a thing.”
I look at him and his face is a combination of confusion and—what’s the word for what I’m seeing?—anger. I’ve never seen him look like this. Stavros may be excitable on everything from politics to Brett Favre’s junk, but nothing ever gets him mad.
And that’s when it hits me: He’s not kidding. He truly has no recollection of the many, many times we’ve discussed my wedding. Could Stavros be getting Alzheimer’s?
What should I do here? Do I insist on the facts, which I know to be true, or do I let it go? And then I think, what good will I do him if I insist?
“What was I thinking?” I say, hitting myself in the side of the head and giving Stavros a how-stupid-am-I look, which I guess I am—stupid, that is—since I just hit myself in the head. “It was the coffee shop where I couldn’t stop talking about it. You’re absolutely right. This is the first I’ve mentioned it here.”
“That’s what I thought.” The anger has mostly gone away, leaving just a trace of self-righteousness which soon dissipates as well into his typical good nature. “So, you got yourself a wife.”
“That I did.”
“And what’s her name? She pretty?”
“She’s beautiful,” I say, something I’ve told him many times before. “Her name is Helen,” I say, which I’ve mentioned many times too.
“That’s great, Johnny. I never married, but that doesn’t mean it’s not right for other people.”
Isn't It Bro-Mantic? Page 11
