Single-Minded

by Lisa Daily

  Daniel’s dark hair clings to his face, and he shakes the water off his head like a Labrador. Nice arms, I think, as I watch him tread water. Gay guys certainly keep themselves in fantastic shape. He swims easily to the side of the boat and pulls himself up on the ladder, water droplets clinging to his chest and abs. Still hanging on to the rope, he brings himself effortlessly over the side of the railing and onto the deck, and pulls the crab trap up out of the water behind him. His khaki shorts are completely soaked through, and they hang low and loosely on his hips. I have to force myself, consciously, not to ogle him. Seriously, I need to get ahold of myself and quit drooling over gay men.

  “Look at that,” he grins adorably at me and gives a low whistle. “We’re having crab for dinner.”

  “I’m so sorry about surprising you,” I say. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “Don’t you worry, darlin’,” he says, his intensely blue eyes full of mischief. “I like surprises.”

  I must be hallucinating, because it feels like he’s flirting with me. Darcy was right, I do need practice with regular straight men. Otherwise, I’m doomed to repeat history.

  28

  Daniel grabs his shirt with one hand and drapes it over the crab trap. “I’m just going to get changed, and put these on to boil. Are you hungry?”

  I nod, glad I don’t have to pretend like I wasn’t hoping he’d cook for me again. He really seems to like it, and it’s been tough for me to eat dinners at home lately. Something about just me at the dining table. Which means I end up eating ice cream out of the container, or popcorn and a glass or two of wine. Like it’s less lonely somehow if I’m standing up. It’s funny because I’ve always eaten alone with no problems at all. Michael was on the road a lot, and there aren’t too many client dinners in my business, so I ate by myself. But there’s something different about it now; it’s more desolate, because unlike before when Michael was just traveling, now I know for certain there is no one coming home to eat with me. Ever again. It’s weird, the stuff that bothers you when you’re alone, even things that never bothered you before.

  There’s a tiny spiral staircase in the back of Daniel’s kitchen, which apparently goes up to a small studio apartment above the dining area. I’m sitting at the table on the back deck near the railing, the same one where we’d sat last time, when I see him come through the kitchen door. Towel-dried hair, fresh shorts, and a clean green T-shirt that highlights the depths of blue in his eyes.

  “I’ll put the pot on, cher.” The main doors of the dining room are open to the boat deck, and a lovely breeze flows through. Daniel bangs around in the kitchen and I feel all the stress leaving my body, gently kneaded away by the rocking of the boat. Daniel emerges with plates, napkins, and silverware balanced in one hand, and a couple of brown bottles in the other. “Nothing goes with fresh crabs better than beer,” he says. “That okay with you?”

  “Fine by me,” I say. “Can I help you with anything?”

  “Sweet of you to offer, darlin’, but I’ve got it covered.” He places the beers and the dishes down on the table, sets up the silverware and napkins in a few deft moves, and then disappears back into the kitchen. The smell is divine, spicy and delectable. He’s back in an instant with a tray laden with crabs, corn on the cob, and sautéed asparagus. My mouth is watering. It strikes me what an act of intimacy it is to cook for someone—to invite them into your space, feed them, make them to feel welcome. There’s something about how he moves and speaks that is so intriguing and charming, so welcoming.

  He joins me at the table and lifts his beer to mine, “To fresh food and a fresh start.” I clink my bottle against his. I’ll definitely drink to that.

  29

  “So you had no idea that he was gay?” Daniel says. His deep blue eyes spark with interest.

  “Not a clue,” I say, bringing my second bottle of beer to my lips. “You’d probably be able to spot it from across the room,” I say. Gaydar, and all that. I’m probably getting too familiar with him, but there’s something about him that makes me feel like I would tell him anything. He asks these incredibly direct questions, things that some of my closest friends have never even thought to ask, and I’m inexplicably compelled to share all these deeply personal thoughts. He’s like human Xanax or something. “Yeah, I didn’t notice anything and it was right in front of me all these years.”

  He laughs. “Well, when I saw your husband for the first time he was wearing a sparkly pink princess crown and black leather pants, dirty dancing with a drag queen. So that might have tipped me off.”

  “Just a little,” I say. “I feel so stupid.” Tears sting my eyes, and I am mortified. Get it together, Alex! Grabbing my napkin off my lap, I dab at my eyes and force myself to refocus. “I’m so sorry, I don’t usually cry in front of clients.”

  “That’s okay, cher, you’ve earned a few tears,” he says in that soothing Southern drawl. He reaches over and delicately strokes my forearm. “I don’t usually swim in front of mine.” He grins. “I’m so embarrassed.”

  I can’t help but laugh, his face is so open and kind, and I feel myself drawn to him once again. Oh my God, what the hell is wrong with me? I have to get out of here.

  30

  “Seriously,” I tell Darcy. “I’m lusting over my client. My gay client. I have completely lost my mind. I’m going to end up screwing up this amazing project that I’m superexcited to be doing because I can’t stop myself from fantasizing about him.”

  “Which one?” she asks.

  “Sterno Man.”

  “Oh, he’s gorgeous,” she says. “How do you know he’s gay? It’s not like you have a great track record with these things.”

  “He was Carter’s date to my divorce/coming-out party.”

  “Okay, so he’s gay.”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying. I know I wasn’t exactly in favor of this before, but have you and Michael made any progress on finding me a … date? I feel like my mojo is off, like I don’t know up from down anymore, black from white—”

  “Gay from straight?” says Darcy. I nod in agreement. “I think on some level there’s some part of you that believes you don’t deserve a great guy of your own,” she says.

  “Why the hell would you think that?” I ask. “I deserve a great guy. A great job. A great life.”

  “You do,” she says, “but think about it. You marry a gay man. Your first dates as a single woman were with trolls. And now you’re getting yourself tangled up with another gay man, a client, no less, which means whatever neuroses you’re currently afflicted with are apparently spreading to your work.”

  “What’s wrong with me?” I ask. “I’m not doing this on purpose.”

  “You got knocked down. Hard. And sometimes it takes a few tries before you can get back up.”

  “This kind of stuff doesn’t happen to me! My life isn’t some continuous stream of fuckups. I think before I act. I make plans and follow them through. I always have a backup plan, a contingency backup plan, a spare tire, and a sewing kit. This kind of clusterfuck is only supposed to happen to people who don’t have a plan. I have a plan!”

  “Crap happens to everybody. Your spouse is gay, or he cheats with the nanny, or he rips off the IRS. You deal with life as it comes. It breaks you in half or it just feels like it does. I’m all for planning, contingency planning, emergency contingency planning—but you have to grow up. Sometimes, it just doesn’t matter what your plans are. The Universe or God or just the luck of the draw doesn’t cooperate, and you just have to wade through the muck until you get to the other side. Sometimes life sucks. Can you avoid disaster with careful planning? Sometimes. And sometimes the tornado just comes down and rips your house away. And you get the fuck up, and rebuild.”

  “I don’t know what to do anymore,” I say.

  “Make a new plan,” she says. “And stop falling for gay guys.”

  31

  I wake up at five-thirty the next morning to the sound of my cell ph
one ringing, and it sends me into a panic. It’s Olivia Vanderbilt Kensington. The socialite. My first instinct is always to answer a client call, but it’s not even light outside yet, and the last thing I want to do is give Olivia the impression that it’s okay for her to call me at all hours. She’s already blowing up my phone and my e-mail dozens of times a day, much of it with details and questions of things we’ve already covered, or topics completely unrelated to our project. Like the fact that she wants me to go shoe shopping with her to pick out something to wear to the fundraiser. Way outside my scope of work. I’m torn, because she’s a big fish in town, and if she likes my work she can send a lot of lucrative new business my way. That said, I’m working on a flat rate, at a discount because the work is for a charity, and with the number of hours I’ve spent on this project, and specifically on Olivia’s many, many demands, I’m already losing money. I turn the ringer off and flip the phone over so I don’t have to watch it light up, then roll over and try to go back to sleep.

  I can’t stop thinking about what Darcy said about some part of me being convinced I didn’t deserve to be happy or have a great guy in my life. When I turn it over in my mind, it doesn’t feel true, but I’m also having a tough time reconciling the reality of my life as of late with my perception. Maybe there is a part of me that thinks I don’t deserve to be happy. The good news is, it’s not my brain. I know I’m a good person. I’m kind and smart and hardworking. People tell me I’m attractive, that I’m a good friend, and fun to be around. I have wonderful friends and a mostly loving family. I deserve to be in love too. And the fact that my first love didn’t work out doesn’t make it a mistake. It makes it an experience.

  And if I truly want to move forward in that area of my life, fall in love, maybe start a family, I need to get serious about getting myself out in the world as a grown-up single woman. Michael has moved on. I should too.

  32

  I planned to work from home to focus on marketing and cultivating new business, but instead I’ve decided to feng-shui the crap out of my house. Yes, I’m a scientist and much of this is little more than hocus-pocus; but it’s hocus-pocus that’s been practiced for thousands of years. And as a scientist, not only do I know that modifying your surroundings can create a huge impact on your emotions and behaviors, I also know that there is power in setting your intentions—in thinking about what you want to manifest in your life. At least that’s the way I’m justifying spending my entire morning taping long sheets of aluminum foil to the underside of my dining room table; rearranging my photo collages to get wood out of my metal areas and metal out of my wood areas; and trying to figure out how in the world I can incorporate purple, green, and red around my pool deck without making it look like it belongs at a Las Vegas casino.

  This is the dirty little secret of most educated, professional women I know; even doctors and scientists, like me. We still check our horoscopes like the weather; we probably believe a tarot card reader could understand us, and even see a glimpse of our future—but only if she’s naturally gifted, the “real deal” and recommended by a friend. And we are willing to believe in feng shui. Whatever works, we say. Some things cannot be explained. And anyway, what’s the harm in repainting the guest bath blue instead of beige if there is any chance at all, even a small one, that it might help you snag that big promotion?

  I pull a feng shui book called Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life off my bookshelf, a joke gift from Darcy a few years ago. Three hours later I’ve mapped out the bagua of my home, made a to-do list of feng shui offenders that are obviously screwing up my life, and set to correcting my biggest problems through tactical redecorating and odd fixes. The thing I like about feng shui is that it makes you think about what you want in various areas of your existence. Get happy. Find love. Make more money. Get along better with your relatives. And figuring out what you want is the first step to making it happen.

  My toilets are an issue. Apparently, all my wisdom is being sucked down the drain with the scrubbing bubbles. Well, it’s no wonder my life is a wreck. I “cure” the toilets with tiny red ribbons tied around the pipes in the back where no one will see them. Obviously, my biggest need for feng shui falls in the love and relationships area. The love section of my house contains not only a toilet, but Michael’s old office, which has become my dumping ground for all the stuff that reminds me of him, as well as the laundry room, home of Morley’s litter box.

  Cosmically speaking, I think I’ve found my problem.

  33

  I clear out all the junk in Michael’s former office, box it up, and stick it in the garage, which juts forward from the front of the house, making it delightfully exempt from feng shui. With every box that goes outside, I feel freer and more in control of my life. With the boxes out of sight, they’re no longer acting as a constant reminder of my marriage, or clogging up my romantic life either. Clutter weighs you down. Usually I’m kind of a neat freak, but lately my house has devolved more and more into utter disarray. There’s a correlation, of course, between your mental state and your surroundings. Highly stressed people are likely living in a mess. Creative people tend to be cluttered but organized; there’s a pattern to the constellation of stuff even if it is not discernible to anyone else. Super-organized types like to have a place (and a label and an inventory chart) for everything and can’t go to sleep if there’s an unwashed dish in the sink. That would be me.

  I decide to relocate Morley’s cat box to the garage, and call my contractor, Joe, to ask him to swing by or send one of the crew over to install a cat door once they finish work for the day at the psych office job site. I’m hoping there will be no repercussions from Morley. He’s not a fan of change, and it’s not beyond his capabilities to plot and execute some dastardly form of kitty revenge. Once Michael’s office, former office, is cleared out, I head out for a field trip to the home improvement store. I need red paint, stat.

  An hour later my cart is loaded down with a gorgeous shade of tomato-red paint, extra brushes, sunny yellow contact paper for my kitchen drawers and cabinets, a small palm tree and ceramic pot for my fame and reputation area, and the Taj Mahal of cat doors, a $300 contraption called the Royal Door Mount. If they installed cat doors at the front entrance of the Waldorf Astoria, this would be the one they’d use. The sales guy tells me that for Florida this type of door is a must—and I’ll easily recoup the cost in my air-conditioning bills in the first year alone. I’ll have to take his word for it.

  Back at the house, I put the palm tree in its new home, with the intention that my business will grow. I leave the contact paper on the kitchen countertop, and bring in drop cloths, paint rollers, and a tray, and set them on the floor of Michael’s now-empty former office, along with the red paint and new brushes I just bought. The feng shui book says that I need red or pink in this area, and lots of it. I debated doing a fabulous hot-pink room, something uber-feminine and totally glamorous, but I ultimately opted for the red, which I knew from my own research is a little steamier. When we view the color red, our bodies have a physiological response that is similar to sexual attraction. Our hearts beat a little faster, our pupils dilate. If I’m going to feng-shui this joint, I might as well go all in.

  I take off my shoes and slip into an old tank top and cargo shorts, my go-to painting outfit, and pull my long hair up into a bun so I don’t end up accidentally dipping it into the paint. After laying out the drop cloth and removing all the outlet covers, I open the paint, stir it up a bit, and pour it into the tray. The color is gorgeous, and even though it’s a departure from the rest of my decor, which tends to be more muted, I think I’m going to love it.

  I start rolling the walls with paint, my favorite part since it provides such instant gratification. You can see what the room is going to look like when it’s finished almost immediately. That’s me, I guess. Always looking to the end. The office is a pale gray, but I’ve bought really good paint, so it covers easily with the first coat. Three walls done, and I stand back t
o admire my handiwork. Not bad at all. The room is still unfinished around the baseboards and crown molding, but the rolling is halfway done. Michael has a much steadier hand than I do, and it was always his job to do the detail work. Funny the things that make me miss him.

  I’m just about to start on the fourth wall, which is going to be a bit trickier because it has built-in shelves all the way to the ceiling, when my doorbell rings. I put the roller at the top of the tray and pad through the house in my bare feet.

  “Thanks for coming, Joe,” I say as I open the door. But it isn’t Joe. It’s Nate, the tool-belt supermodel drywaller.

  “Hi, Nate,” I say, flustered. “Uh, so sorry, I was expecting Joe.”

  “He had to stop by another job site, some emergency.” Nate smiles, all six foot four of him casually leaning up against the frame of my door. “So I volunteered.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “Um … that was really nice of you.” I lose my concentration, mesmerized by his eyes for a second. Or maybe seven hours. I have no way of knowing. It’s like being abducted by aliens and dropped back in the exact same location you were snatched from.

  “Are we doing some painting today?” he asks.

  “How’d you know that?” He reaches out and gently pulls a fleck of red paint from my hair. His hand so near my face makes my heart race. I can feel myself blushing and hope he doesn’t notice.

  “Lucky guess.”

  I invite him in and he follows me toward the kitchen. As we walk, I realize I have splatters of paint on my toes and all over my arms, and who knows where else. Michael always says it’s a personality paradox that I’m such a messy painter—everything else about me is organized, color-coded, and alphabetized.

  “I just need a pet door installed. Here’s the door to the garage,” I say, then point to the large box on my kitchen counter. “There’s the cat door.”

  “No problem,” he says, “it shouldn’t take too long. I’ll let you get back to your painting.”

  “Thanks. Do you need anything?” I ask. “Screwdriver, glass of water, box cutter?”