Jo Piazza

by Love Rehab

  I sank down on the closed toilet seat and waited for the tears to come again.

  But they had stopped.

  For the first time in a very long time I felt right.

  Having had a spiritual awakening, carry our message to others

  Six Months Later

  “Do you have an extra bathing suit I could borrow?”

  “We’re not the same size, Annie. You have enormous boobs.”

  “I just need the bottom. I’m going topless in Mexico.”

  Of course she was. Annie off the sauce was exactly like Annie on the sauce, except sometimes more polite and at least 90 percent less likely to steal cars. She had taken the train into Manhattan to see me. Soon after The Husband and Prithi’s big day, my editor had demanded I return to be on call for the final publishing schedule of our next release.

  Megan and I were was also in preliminary talks about turning the makeshift rules and steps we had created for LAA into a self-help book. She thought she could get Suze to write the introduction.

  That meant I hadn’t seen or spoken to Joe in six months. He took my words to heart and had maybe even decided he didn’t want anything to do with me after all.

  And that was OK.

  The LAA meetings continued but turned more into social events. We coached Stella on her new gig as “the Wife;” we took little Joey to the park. Prithi decided to scrap med school. She couldn’t keep living her parents’ American dream. She was living hers and Joey’s. For now, they were living in Eleanor’s house, which remained on the market, and Prithi took care of the place while I was back in my old apartment. Annie came to stay with me most weekends, now that working at the bar was less appealing. She was thinking about opening an Indian fusion restaurant with Prithi and had a hot new investment banker girlfriend who was willing to front some cash for it. Dave had been in an actual functioning relationship with an accountant named Mandy for almost four months. He had yet to call her a turkey.

  I had even gone on a few dates. One was a set-up through Megan: the grandson of one of her Tomatoes. He was a really nice architect who lived in Gramercy and had an adorable roly-poly black lab. Not once did I picture myself walking down the aisle with him. I was just letting myself have fun and enjoying hanging out with someone new. I didn’t know if it would go anywhere and that was fine with me.

  The only member of our group we hadn’t seen or heard from in a few months was Katrina, whom we assumed had gone off retreating somewhere, until a letter arrived two weeks ago.

  Before I opened it Annie asked, “Have you seen Tito lately?”

  “No, I haven’t been back to the house. My publisher has had me working every single weekend. Why, does the lawn look like shit?”

  “No, it looks as good as it always does, but Tito’s guys have been working on it, not Tito.”

  “That’s weird. I can call him or maybe Katrina knows where he is. They were really friendly back at the house.”

  “Really friendly,” Annie said with a smile, throwing a gold-embossed piece of tissue paper on my couch.

  Mr. and Mrs. Melberg are pleased to invite you to the wedding of their daughter Katrina to Mr. Tito Juarez III, at his family estate in Puerto Morelos, Mexico.

  “Tito has a family estate?”

  “More like, Tito is marrying Princess?” Annie yelled.

  But it made sense. Love Addicts Anonymous had taught Princess to break her cycle of dating closeted Jewish mama’s boys just because they were Jewish and fawned all over her, fulfilling the idea of some imaginary perfect man that she had kept in her head since the first time she imagined Cinderella and Snow White beginning their happily ever afters under a chuppah. Tito was so outside her wheelhouse she never would have looked at him twice unless she was put in a basement and forced to do karaoke with him on a weekly basis. Even then, if she hadn’t confronted and broken her cycle of falling for men who were never going to love her back, she wouldn’t have been able to realize that someone like Tito was someone she wanted.

  I leaped up and down and clapped my hands like a five-year-old handed a Pixy Stix, or one of those Toddlers & Tiaras girls getting their second Red Bull. “I love this. Let’s book tickets.” We talked to the other girls in the group. Everyone had their tickets booked already, but Jordana was able to use her miles to get both Annie and me a good fare.

  I used Rent-the-Runway to procure a very sexy, hot pink Herve Leger bandage dress.

  It wasn’t until we got on the plane that the obvious occurred to me.

  “Joe will be there.”

  “That’s likely,” Annie said. She had continued to talk to Joe on a fairly regular basis but was careful not to let her relationship with him bleed into her relationship with me after I told her what happened in that hospital bathroom.

  “So he will be there?”

  “Yes, Sophie.”

  “Is he bringing anyone?”

  “I honestly don’t know. He had talked about trying to book a ticket at one point and he said he was having passport problems. I would tell you more if I knew.”

  I said a silent serenity prayer. I may have been a recovering love addict, but that didn’t mean I was entirely cured.

  Puerto Morelos is twenty miles south of Cancun and worlds away from the place where I got a rash during high school Senior Week after a very unfortunate foam party at a place called Coco Bongo. The beaches were pearly white, the water a perfect turquoise, and Tito’s family estate was … HUGE. It was a giant gated compound outside of town with about three entrances and four kilometers of uninterrupted beach all to itself.

  “Why was Tito our gardener again?” I asked Annie.

  “I think he couldn’t get a proper work visa to do anything else, and he and his dad liked being in America better than Mexico.”

  “Do you think Katrina knew about this when she said she would marry him?”

  Annie shrugged. I would later find out that Katrina hadn’t known anything about Tito’s secret monetary wealth until one night three months ago when he took her to the Botanical Gardens in Brooklyn and pulled a Spanish guitar from behind a stately maple tree.

  “I wrote this song when I was seventeen years old,” he said to her, strumming a Latin tune. “I wrote it about a brown-haired girl who showed me that the world I knew was only a small part of the world and how I wanted to spend my life traveling that unknown world with her.”

  As you can imagine, at this point for Katrina it was waterworks central and she was barely able to get her yes out in between her sobs. No man had ever treated her like such a woman, a woman who wasn’t his mother, an object of absolutely pure desire.

  They were later arrested for public indecency in an azalea bush.

  We were immediately handed mojitos—virgin for Annie—as we walked into the open air receiving area at the main house.

  Princess came barreling toward us in a strapless white Alice and Olivia dress and a diamond-studded tiara, nearly knocking Annie over with her hug.

  “I’m getting married!” she squealed.

  We squealed back!

  “This place is amazing, Katrina,” I said, still taking it all in.

  “You haven’t seen the best part yet.” She smiled slyly. “Follow me.”

  We walked through some of the nicest gardens I had ever seen and down a beach past crystal-clear cerulean water. Katrina was leading us to a group of villas about a football field’s length from the main house. We walked through a gate and into another receiving area.

  “Welcome to love rehab!” Katrina squealed yet again.

  “Ha, ha, yeah, of course. We will all be reunited here for the first time since we left one another at my house,” I said.

  “No,” Katrina said. “Welcome to Love Rehab. This is the new love retreat!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sophie, your idea was brilliant. Women, and even men, need what you created. It changed my life. Tito agrees, and he gave me this part of the estate for Love Rehab. Twice a
year we will host the love retreat here. Maximum fifteen people per retreat. Meetings, yoga, karaoke nights, two weeks long. We can really help people.”

  I was speechless. It was brilliant. It was something only Princess could have pulled off.

  “Twice a year?”

  “Yup, twice a year. You’ll come down to run the meetings. Jordana will do yoga. Prithi will cook, and Joe will do the one-on-one counseling.”

  “Joe?”

  “He’s inside, Sophie.”

  “With his date?” I asked.

  “He did bring someone.”

  I didn’t know how to feel or react. I just nodded.

  “He’ll be at dinner, which—oy!—is in an hour. We have to get ready.”

  “Aren’t you ready?”

  “This is my day tiara.”

  Princess moved us back to the main house. I remained in a daze about Love Rehab and about Joe. Who could he have brought? Probably a lovely fellow doctor from the hospital.

  Annie and I showered quickly and got ready. I invested a little more time than usual in my hair and makeup routine until Annie pulled me out to the dining room.

  Joe was already at the table talking to a portly man with darker skin and a mustache, who I assumed was a relative of Tito’s. Joe’s date was nowhere in sight.

  I sat down opposite him and a few seats down. He averted his eyes from his conversation companion, looked at me, and beamed.

  “Hi, Sophie,” he said with an undue amount of enthusiasm.

  “Hi, Joe,” I said almost shyly.

  “It is so good to see you.”

  “You too.” Joe’s neighbor rose from his chair and walked out to the kitchen.

  Then everyone was in the room. It was Jordana and Prithi and Olivia and Cameron and about a billion of Tito’s and Princess’s cousins and extended family members. Nothing is more chaotic than a Mexican-Jewish wedding. Princess had a seating plan, which actually put Joe and me at opposite ends of the table. His date never showed. Maybe she didn’t feel well and was taking a nap or something.

  As the dessert course was wheeled out on a giant cart I began to feel a little sleepy myself. I got up and walked to Katrina and whispered in her ear.

  “I think I need to hit the sack early to be fresh for tomorrow,” I said. She nodded and kissed my cheek, leaving a perfect heart-shaped mark with her MAC Viva Glam 5.

  I walked out onto the beach to get some air and saw a jetty of rocks stretching into the black expanse. That looked relaxing, climbing out to the jetty, being able to hear the waves breaking on all sides of me. I took off my shoes, stacked them under a palm tree, and then carefully made my way out to the end. It was quite a long jetty, stretching the length of at least two city blocks into the ocean. I almost lost my balance a couple of times and was squarely out of breath by the time I reached the end. But I felt like I had accomplished something, and that’s always a good feeling.

  I also felt peaceful. Joe had looked happy, and for once in my life I just wanted the person I cared about to be happy, whether that was with or without me. For Joe it looked like it would be with the date he brought. And if she made him happy, I felt good. I sat down and rested my chin on my knees, enjoying the salty spray that came and cooled my face. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw something fall right out of the sky. Then it happened again. And again. It was a flock of birds. Specifically, it was a flock of pelicans.

  These were the birds Joe had told me about. They were falling to catch their fish. He was right; they seemed to give up flight completely as they hurtled into the sea, but each and every time they swooped back into the sky with their fish. They fell hard and got their fish each and every time. The birds entranced me. It must have been thirty or forty minutes I watched them before I realized that I had been gone quite a long time. I turned around, ready to go back, but I couldn’t see the rocks any longer. In fact the only rocks between the shore and me were the ones directly behind me. The tide must have come in while I was watching the birds. I could swim but I remembered Princess saying something about really bad rip currents and how we shouldn’t go out swimming by ourselves. I wasn’t the greatest swimmer to begin with. The instructor at the Yardville pool had always smelled a little like pedophile and Annie and I would skip swim class and practice handstands in the shallow end. Screaming was probably a better solution.

  “HELP!” I yelled with everything I had. All I did was startle the birds, who decided to stop falling for their fish around the jetty because the squawking lady was ruining their dinner.

  “HELP, HELP, HELP. Anyone, please help.”

  But they were all laughing and drinking and partying indoors, and they thought I had gone to bed. No one was going to help.

  But maybe there was hope.

  There was a light bobbing up and down in the distance. It was a boat. I kept screaming, the salt water stinging the back of my throat. I tried to jump up and down but didn’t want to lose my footing, so I did more knee bends and waved my arms like one of the Village People doing YMCA.

  A white fishing boat with a small blue light on top captained by a portly man with a shock of dark hair pulled alongside the jetty that had become just a couple of rocks in the open ocean.

  “Buonasera, signora. Ciao, ciao. Come stai?”

  What was an Italian fisherman doing off the coast of Mexico? Not that I cared. I took his outstretched arm and climbed onto the little ledge of his boat. Under the blue light he took a better look at my face.

  “Sophie,” he said with a smile.

  “What?”

  “Si era Sophie. Sophie and Joe.”

  What was happening? Maybe I had passed out on the rocks and fallen into the ocean and drowned, and this was some weird limbo or heaven or hell or a fantasy world like Wonderland, except instead of a Cheshire Cat I had this large Italian gentleman to lead me on my journey.

  “Mi chiamo Pippo,” he said, drawing out the Pip like Peep. Pippo. Pippo? How did I know that name? Joe! I knew it because of Joe. Joe told me the story about Pippo, the cuckolded fisherman. Now Pippo was on his cell phone speaking in rapid-fire Italian. He handed me the phone.

  “Joe,” he proffered.

  I grabbed it.

  “Joe?”

  “Sophie! Why are you in the middle of the ocean? Are you OK?”

  “I just took a walk. I climbed out to the jetty and then the tide came and I got stuck and then Pippo came. Why is Pippo here?”

  “Sophie, you’re breaking up. I can’t hear you. Come to shore.”

  Joe would be on the shore when I went back. That was good, and exciting. Of course, he may believe that I tried to drown myself, but I could explain all that away.

  Pippo looked me over again. “Sophie,” he said with a smile.

  “Pippo,” I said, smiling right back.

  When we reached the sand, Joe was standing on the shore with a towel. I ran over to him.

  Pippo stayed on the boat. Joe waved and yelled out what I assumed was a thank you in Italian.

  He threw his arms around me.

  “Sophie, why did you go out there?”

  I couldn’t help it; I buried my head in his neck and soaked in the smell of him.

  “I just took a walk and then I saw the pelicans and I couldn’t stop watching them. I think you’re wrong not to want to be like a pelican. See, they aren’t afraid of falling hard. They know what they want and they dive and they get it. I want you. I want to dive for you. I want to fall for you and I don’t care if I get hurt. I love you.”

  I didn’t know what he was going to say. But I didn’t hold my breath and my stomach wasn’t doing the knotty flip-flops. Whatever the answer was I was going to be fine, but he had to know how I felt.

  He leaned into me.

  “Sophie, I already fell. You’re my fish. The best one.”

  And then he kissed me and it’s cheesy and corny to describe it like this but it was like no other kiss I had ever felt in my life. It was the kind of kiss you read about a
nd the kind that old-time movie stars did in black-and-white films before getting on planes and leaving each other forever to be with some deadbeat spouse they didn’t love.

  When we finally broke apart after what had to be ten minutes, I looked up at him again.

  “Pippo?”

  He smiled. “Is my date for the wedding and the very first client of Love Rehab South.”

  “He’s a client?”

  “He is. He’s part of a group of ten who will do the first love retreat after the wedding. What you did for the women—I think we can do that for a lot of people. Everyone is fucked up when it comes to love and romance. If we can only realize that we’re all messed up in the same way, then we can get better.”

  “Do you think I’m better?”

  “Do you think you’re better?”

  I got quiet. I wanted to be honest.

  “I think I’m a work in progress.”

  He smiled again, and I knew I would never get tired of that smile.

  “I think we all are, Sophie.”

  “Joe?” I asked tentatively. “Are you really leading me to believe that what happened tonight actually, really, and truly was just a hilarious misunderstanding?”

  Joe belly laughed so hard he had to put his hands on his knees.

  “There go your rules. You are living in a romantic comedy right now.”

  I was falling hard. It was both romantic and comedic.

  It can happen, OK?

  But I had to hit rock bottom before I was ready to do it. That was the part they never show you in romantic comedies, the picking yourself up after it all falls apart, when everything sucks for a good period of time.

  I’ll spare you the details. I don’t want to be that person who gives anyone false hope or a practicum guide for how falling in love should and will work. Needless to say, Joe and I walked off the beach that night and had what can only be described as a year’s worth of pent-up and rehabilitated orgasms.

  Katrina and Tito blended Jewish, Mexican, and Mayan traditions into their ceremony, in addition to some things that were simply Katrina.

  She asked that all the guests do a labyrinth walk before convening on the beach where they would be married by Rabbi Scheilman, who had flown down from the Upper West Side.