There's Cake in My Future

by Gruenenfelder, Kim

  Seema takes a moment to paint the picture in her mind. She shrugs. “I’ll just tell him Friday’s your self-pity night. I get Mondays, Wednesdays, and Valentine’s Day.”

  I try to laugh. It comes out more as a loud smile.

  Seema pats me on the back. “Come on. It’ll be fun. We could have your old room decorated in about a day.”

  I casually look around my old neighborhood. “It would be nice to move back in here,” I admit. “It feels safe here.”

  “Of course it does,” Seema agrees.

  Her cell beeps again. She reads the text, then smiles sheepishly.

  “What’s it say?” I ask.

  “He says that watching a woman smoking a cigar is one of the sexiest sights on the planet, and that watching two should be illegal.”

  I try to smile, but I think those muscles have atrophied. “He’s a good guy,” I tell her.

  “You think?” Seema asks me, smiling from my approval.

  “Yeah,” I say with absolute certainty. “Complete wimp in terms of what he’s going to do with you, but a really good guy otherwise.”

  “If you listen to all those self-help books, they’d say he’s not interested,” Seema tells me as she frenetically flicks her fingers over her BlackBerry’s minikeyboard.

  I shrug. “Not necessarily. You’re with someone, then he’s with someone. At some point, if it’s meant to be…”

  “Oh, God, I hate that ‘meant to be’ crap,” Seema says as she tosses her BlackBerry onto the table again. “If it were meant to be, one of us would have done something about it by now.”

  “Fair enough,” I say, not wanting to fight about it. Seema’s BlackBerry beeps again. She can’t help herself—she’s like a kitten staring at a flickering thread of yarn. She picks it up and reads as I take another puff of my cigar. “Although I must ask: if it’s not meant to be, what’s he’s doing texting you at three A.M. on a Saturday night?”

  Seema looks over at me. Gives me a I have no fucking clue look with an accompanying shrug.

  “Ah, men,” I say. “A mystery.”

  “Wrapped in sharp spikes,” Seema continues.

  “And covered in chocolate,” I finish.

  Seema reads, “He says to tell you that he’s making filet au poivre at my house Tuesday night, and that you need to tell me you’re moving in or he’s not going to make you one.”

  “He cooks?” I ask.

  “He finds it soothing.”

  “Look, if you don’t want him, can I have him?”

  “Oh, honey, I love you,” Seema tells me warmly. “But if you touch him, I’ll break you like a twig.”

  I try to laugh. It is funny. I take a big puff of cigar. “All right, you got me,” I say. “I’ll move in.”

  “Good!” she says cheerfully. “With someone chipping in for rent, I might be able to afford those filets.”

  Nine

  Nicole

  Chester ripped off Penelope’s bodice. Her nipples hardened. But was that from the cold air, or the promise of his

  I drum my fingers on my desk. What’s a new word for penis?

  the promise of his shaft of love

  I actually saw that in a book once. Ick. I highlight shaft, and use my computer’s thesaurus. Rod of love, stick of love, pole of love, shank …

  Good Lord, I’m scraping bottom here.

  I highlight my passage and hit delete. So much for trying to make it as a romance novelist.

  It’s three in the morning, I can’t sleep, and I’m not getting anything done either. I throw my legs up on the desk in my home office and stare at my computer screen.

  Man, I hate writing. I mean, you know, I love being paid to be a writer. I love reading what I’ve written. I love telling people at parties that I’m a writer. I just don’t so much like the writing part.

  As a matter of fact, lately I hate all of it. Seriously—why do people ever want to become writers?

  It’s a weird thing when your job is everyone else’s hobby. Writing’s certainly not the only job like that. It’s just like any other job that, if done well, looks effortless. Jobs people are sure they would be great at (and get rich from) because they do it so well at home. There are the home chefs who make the perfect risotto who want to shuck it all and open a restaurant. The community theater actors in small towns around America who secretly want to shuck it all to try to become the next Cate Blanchett. The bakers who have perfected a red velvet cupcake in the privacy of their own kitchens and dream of opening a little shop. The bloggers who think they’re the next Bob Woodward. Or the people who are sure their lives would make a fascinating screenplay and who even buy a copy of Final Draft and begin typing:

  INT. COFFEE SHOP—DAY

  BLAKE CONNORS, good-looking but doesn’t know it (think John Krasinski), sits at a table drinking his coffee. A beautiful woman rushes in, wearing a wedding gown.

  WOMAN

  You need to hide me!

  Seriously, I have read that opening line in a script on three different occasions. Once the character was described as (think George Clooney). Once it was (think Gerard Butler). Once it was (think Dane Cook). Which is just wrong on so many levels.

  Anyway, I think the reason that most people never actually follow through on their dreams is because on some level they know that it’s not as easy as it looks, it’s not as fun as it looks, and it’s never as lucrative as we see on TV.

  Case in point: actually being a working writer. That sounds pretty glamorous, right? Or at least fairly easy. You get up at noon, have your coffee, tell the world what observations you’ve made about your life. Very Carrie Bradshaw.

  Unless you’re a screenwriter. In which case you get up at noon, go to a studio meeting or two, then hang out with your screenwriter friends in a coffeehouse or bar and talk about what you should be writing. Very … um … well, there are no famous screenwriters I can think of, but you get the point.

  Most of my paid writing has been as a newspaper columnist. Which to most people conjures up a fantasy of traveling the world, putting one’s life in jeopardy while digging up stories, effortlessly speaking to the locals in any of the seven languages one is fluent in.

  God, I wish. I am fluent in one language: English. And at seven in the morning, I wouldn’t even go that far.

  Up until six months ago, I worked for a local Los Angeles newspaper. I was overworked and underpaid. I frequently worked for the Metro section, which meant I was the woman who showed up at City Hall early in the mornings, then wrote about anything from a contentious city council meeting to what was going on at the LAUSD to what zone ordinances were threatening the city’s water supply.

  In short: I had the most boring writing job in the city. And I miss it every day. I worked way too many hours. I was paid so little that up until recently I was still living with a roommate. And I was constantly worried that my job was going to go away because people are more interested in reading about the sex lives of Jon and Kate than whether or not their local charter school license would be granted, or if the mayor would raise the parcel tax another hundred dollars annually.

  Six months ago, during the third wave of layoffs in as many years, the company bought me out, and I was out of a job.

  I was devastated. I was thirty-one and had spent the last ten years of my life building a career that was gone in a ten-minute meeting with my boss. And forget about going to another paper: circulation was down everywhere and no one was hiring.

  So there I was, smack dab in the middle of a midlife crisis, at the ripe old age of thirty-one. I supposed I would die early.

  I called Jason, who was, as always, perfect. He always knows when to listen to me vent, when to ask questions, and when I am emotionally spent and ready to listen to his advice. And that day was no exception.

  “Okay,” Jason said calmly the morning I was let go, after listening to me monologue for at least twelve minutes straight. “How about if you take a few days off and regroup? You can come with me to Portl
and this weekend and think about your options.”

  (Side note: Since Jason is an NBA assistant coach, he travels with his team on road games from October until as late as June. That weekend in February they were in Portland.)

  “I have no options,” I remember whining to him from a locked bathroom stall. (I had gone to the ladies’ room to hide, cry, and use my cell phone to track down moral support.) “I don’t know how to do anything else.”

  “The L.A. Tribune isn’t the only paper in the world,” Jason had said. “Why don’t you update your résumé and see what else is out there?”

  “Nothing else is out there,” I said. “Circulation is down everywhere. And besides, I love you, and I don’t want to leave you. It’s not like I can move to Seattle or New York or anywhere else. You’re here.”

  Jason proposed to me that night. And as far as everyone else knew, I chose to take the buyout from the paper because I wanted to plan my dream wedding, then get pregnant and become a housewife.

  Everything sounded so perfect when I said “Yes.”

  And, for the most part, it has been pretty damn perfect these past six months. Yes, I have been trying to get work as a writer (my latest botched attempt being this romance novelist idea), but honestly I’ve been a bit lazy.

  The politically incorrect thing is, for the most part I rather like being a housewife. I like not having to get up until nine in the morning. I like helping Jason’s girls with their homework during the school year, when they stay with us on weekends. I like having a maid come in once a week to clean the toilets. And I really like having enough money to pay my electric bill and my cable bill in the same week.

  But I’m not so sure I’m going to like helping with homework every day, and I’ll admit I’m disappointed about Italy.

  I pull the silver baby carriage out of my desk drawer and stare at it.

  Babies. Motherhood.

  When do you know you’re ready to start the rest of your life? How do other women know? And is something wrong with me that I’m so terrified of the thought of a person on this planet thinking my name is “Mommy”?

  Everyone says motherhood is incredibly fulfilling. No one I know seems to have ever regretted having kids. Plenty of people I know regret becoming reporters. Why is looking at this damn charm filling me with such paralyzing fear?

  I stare at the baby carriage. Is this my future? Is someone trying to tell me something?

  Jason knocks lightly on my open door. “You working?” he asks me as he yawns.

  I smile at him as I toss the charm onto my desk. “Trying,” I say. Then I turn to my computer screen and sigh. “I think you’re right. I’m not cut out to do romance novels.”

  Jason smiles at me. “I’m not cut out to play point guard. That doesn’t mean I’m not a good basketball player.”

  He walks over to me and gives me a kiss, then pulls me into a hug. “You’ll find your niche.”

  “I found my niche,” I tell him sadly. “Newspapers. I just lost it.”

  “You’ll find another niche,” he says, rubbing my back. He pulls away slightly to look me in the eye. “I really appreciated what you did earlier tonight.”

  I smile at him, then give him a kiss on the lips. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “It was a very big deal,” Jason assures me. “And it makes me love you even more that you’re acting like it’s not a big deal.” Jason notices the baby carriage and picks it up. “What’s this?”

  I shrug and try to downplay it. “Oh, it’s just the charm I pulled at the shower yesterday.”

  Jason’s eyes widen slightly. He smiles at me. “You got the baby carriage? I thought you wanted the work charm.”

  “I did,” I say. “But I rigged the cake wrong. I got this instead.”

  Jason looks at it. “Hmm.”

  “Hmm,” I repeat. “What does ‘Hmm’ mean?”

  Jason does some downplaying of his own. “It just means, ‘Hmm.’ ”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I argue. “That ‘Hmm’ is fraught with subtext.”

  Jason cocks his head, smiling at me in amusement.

  “What?” I ask suspiciously.

  “I love that you think that anything I do could be fraught with subtext. I’m a guy: we are rarely, if ever, fraught with subtext.” He wraps his arms around me and gives me a big bear hug. “You want to talk about it?”

  I lean my head into his chest and say apologetically, “It kinda freaked me out.”

  “Why?” Jason asks me, in a tone of voice that lets me know he suspected as much.

  “I just don’t know if I’ll make a good mother,” I admit. “At least not yet.”

  “Need I remind you, you just cancelled your honeymoon—”

  “That’s different,” I interrupt. “Changing two weeks of your life isn’t the same as changing twenty-four/seven.”

  “That’s true,” Jason agrees. “It’s a good start, though.”

  I’m starting to get uncomfortable. I know Jason would like another kid. We’ve talked about it: buying a cute crib, getting the baby a little basketball, loving each other so much that we want to make a new life. But … I’m just not there yet.

  “Can we talk about something else?” I ask.

  “Sure,” Jason says. And I love him for that. “So what charms did everyone get? Did Seema get her red hot chili pepper?”

  “No, Mel pulled that.”

  “What’s Mel going to do with a chili pepper?”

  Ten

  Melissa

  It’s Tuesday night, and I’m finally starting to feel like maybe I did the right thing.

  I think.

  I’ve just read an article about surviving breakups that instructs you to “journal” how you’re feeling about the breakup. You start by writing down three pages of whatever gibberish goes through your brain. It can be anything from, “I’m hungry,” to “Fred’s a jerk,” to “Why do men cheat?” to “Man, now I really want a cookie.”

  After completing the three pages of non sequiturs racing through your brain, you should begin writing specifically about your relationship, your man, and any questions and fears you have about the breakup.

  The process is supposed to help you see clearly what scares you about being alone, then help you find ways to deal with your fears and move on with your life.

  I’m sitting in my room by myself, listening to deafening silence. Seema and Scott are out getting us filets. They’ve been great, and when I’m with them I can get through the hours, the minutes, the seconds of this hideous week. But when there’s no one else around, I immediately sink back into feeling desperate, sick, and rudderless.

  I grab a blank yellow legal pad from my home desk and fiercely scribble down:

  What’s wrong with me? Why didn’t he want me? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that really was just a client. Maybe I’m an idiot for even entertaining that notion. Maybe if I had just

  My cell phone rings. I pick it up from my nightstand and stare at the caller ID. It’s Fred again. He’s been calling nonstop for days.

  Now I know how addicts feel. I’m sick to my stomach and miserable. I know it’s better for me not to have him around, but I’m not sure how much longer I can stand feeling this way. Fred is my drug. I know he’s bad for me, but I just want to be out of pain at this exact moment. I pick up the phone, succumbing to my fix. I’ll deal with the consequences of my actions later. I’ll have willpower later. Right now, I just desperately need to be out of pain.

  “Hello,” I answer.

  There’s silence for a few seconds on his end. “You picked up…” Fred finally says, a little startled. “I was going to leave you another message. How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” I lie. “What were you going to say on the message?”

  “That I happened to be in the neighborhood, and I wanted to know if you’ll have dinner with me. Any place—you choose.”

  Fred lives and works in Brentwood. We’re all the way out in Hollywood. “What are you doing so
far from home?” I ask him.

  “Driving around your block over and over again, hoping you’d pick up the phone,” Fred tells me.

  Inwardly, that rock that’s been in my stomach for days slowly begins to dissolve.

  Fred continues, “I have a bouquet of roses resting on the passenger seat for you too. Can we go somewhere and talk?”

  The tension in my body slowly, but continually, begins melting away. “Are they silver?” I ask him.

  “Of course they’re silver. But you can’t have them unless you have dinner with me.”

  I glance over to look at the mirror on my wall. I don’t want him to see me like this. My eyes are puffy, my skin is blotchy and red. “I can’t really go tonight. Scott and Seema are out getting us steaks.”

  “And you want to be the third wheel watching Seema not make her move again?” Fred jokes. Then he boy-whines, “Come on. Go out with me!”

  They are going to be so mad if I go out to see Fred. Still—I do need to get the rest of my stuff out of his condo, and it would be easier if I had a bit of closure. “Actually I wasn’t hungry for steak—I was just being polite to Seema. I could go for some seafood, though.”

  “What about the Water Grill in downtown?” Fred suggests.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long for me to brush my hair, throw on a nice dress (the place is rather formal by L.A. standards), and leave a note for Seema and Scott.

  Within the hour, Fred and I are sitting at a beautiful table against the wall in the dark, clubby, Art Deco dining room at Water Grill. We start with some drinks: Fred gets his usual dirty martini made with Grey Goose. I opt for a glass of Ariadne, a wonderful mix of sémillon and sauvignon blanc that Nic introduced me to.