Nice to Come Home To

by Rebecca Flowers

  “But don‘t put me in pastels,” he said. “Pastels wash me right out.”

  Three

  Rudy was late.

  Pru was standing outside the theater, in her carefully chosen possibly-getting-engaged outfit. She’d allowed herself the fantasy that Rudy meant to surprise her by taking her to the Inn at Little Washington, where he would have reserved the banquette with the velvet privacy curtain and a view of the gardens, in order to renew his offer of marriage. She knew she had very little reason to think this might happen. Rudy was just as likely to ask her to marry him in Joe’s Joe. And maybe McKay was right, and we-need-to-talk wasn’t about anything more than that he’d missed her. But just in case, she’d chosen a pretty skirt and the vintage cardigan she’d found at a thrift store. She would have liked to have worn her kitten-heel shoes, but the kitten heels would put her a fraction of an inch taller than Rudy. She’d worn satiny ballet flats instead.

  But when Rudy finally showed up, he wasn’t dressed for anything special. He wore the French blue shirt she gave him for his last birthday, good jeans, and what he referred to as his “gay guy” glasses. No jacket, no tie. Not proposal wear, as even Rudy would know. He brushed the side of her mouth with his lips and hurried into the theater, saying that he didn’t want to miss the opening credits.

  Pru stood on the sidewalk for a moment, fixing her lipstick with the edge of her thumb. She had forgotten that sometimes she was the most fond of Rudy when she wasn’t actually with Rudy.

  WHEN THEY HAD FOUND SEATS THAT WERE TO RUDY’S satisfaction and had settled themselves, Pru asked, “How was the conference?”

  “Let’s talk later.”

  She was quiet a moment, then said, “Oh, money, your money doesn’t money.” It was one of Rudy’s favorite quotes. Maybe from The Simpsons, she thought. She had no idea what it meant, and she always got it wrong, but it cracked him up.

  This time, however, he forced a little smile and nodded his head, stiffly. “You always get that wrong,” he said.

  They watched an older couple choosing their seats. The pair had to loudly discuss the merits of each one, and finally settled on two a few rows away. Pru thought they looked sweet, but Rudy breathed out a loud sigh and muttered, “Thank God.” Rudy hated unnecessary talking during a movie.

  “I fell in love with a family while you were gone,” she said. “A whole family, even the . . .”

  “Hon, let’s just watch the opening sequence. It’s the best camera work in the film.” He took her hand and kissed it, a moment later putting it back in her lap.

  While he watched the screen, Pru watched him. She wondered how Rudy’s features would look on a child. She decided that they could have his curly, dark hair, his square jaw. Those things from him, and her basic personality structure. Nice, easy kids, not crazy, neurotic ones.

  PRU HAD TO JOG TO KEEP UP WITH HIM, AS THEY threaded their way down Wisconsin toward Joe’s Joe, their usual post-movie coffee shop. She was still feeling a little lost, remembering the scene where Grace Kelly turns on three lights in Jimmy Stewart’s apartment as she recites her full name: Reading from top to bottom, Lisa [click]—Carol [click]—Fremont [click]. Pru was fascinated by that third lamp, a simple pleated shade hanging from the ceiling. She’d never seen anything so beautiful in her life. While she trailed after Rudy she put together in her mind the Google search she’d use to find one just like it. Barrel shade, pendant, pleated? He scooted through the line at Joe’s and sat waiting for her at a small table, near the restrooms. Rudy could be so oblivious. A table by the restrooms! She quickly scanned the other tables, then somewhat reluctantly sat down with her tea.

  Rudy said, immediately, “We have to talk about something.” He was sitting on the edge of his chair, jiggling his foot.

  “God, Rudy,” she said, “you’re as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.” He didn’t even smile at her reference—another one of his favorites. Or maybe it was one of McKay’s. She sometimes got them confused.

  In fact, Rudy looked a little ill. She hadn’t thought he’d be so worked up about asking her to marry him again, having already done it three times before. She reached out and took his hand, and gave it an affectionate, encouraging squeeze.

  He took a deep breath, then said in a steadier voice, “I think it’s time to take a little break, P.W.”

  A girl at a table behind Rudy burst out laughing. For a minute, Pru thought the girl was laughing at them. She was having trouble working out what was happening.

  “What did you say?”

  Rudy shrugged a little, scrunching up the skin on his jaw so that she could see the wrinkles that would one day be etched there permanently. “Not be so dependent on each other,” he said. “Give each other some breathing room. Some space.”

  Pru frowned, and adjusted her glasses. Rudy wanted space? She didn’t want Rudy to want space. She wanted him to want to marry her.

  “If we do this,” she said, “it’s hard to see how we’d go back.”

  “I realize that.”

  She tried again. “To being a couple, I mean,” she said. She lowered her voice. “To sleeping together. I don’t know how we’d go back to that.” He’d been so naïve when she’d first met him, surprised that she would go out with him, then grateful when she’d slept with him. She used to tell him to go easy on that gratitude. The rocky shoals of sexual etiquette were ones only dimly perceived by Rudy. He knew so little about it. She’d had to teach him everything.

  “I know, Pru.” He said it gently, almost . . . condescendingly.

  “A break, that sounds like you want to”—she couldn’t believe she was even saying it—“break up?”

  “Yeah. I guess that’s right. I’m really sorry, P.W.”

  She was still holding his hand, and it was sweaty. Or maybe it was her hand that was sweaty. Rudy reached over and put his other hand on top, sandwiching her hand between both of his. She did not like how this made her feel, like deli meat, like cheese. His hands were not much bigger than her own, but the move was accompanied by a power shift so real she could feel it. She had the wild thought to shift it back again by covering up the pile of hands with her free one. But it was all too easy to picture this game going on forever, each of them pulling out the bottom hand to place it on top, over and over. She tried to slow her breathing, and ease her hand back into her lap in a non-horrified way. She looked at the cardigan folded in her lap. I’m really sorry. Her boss had said that, too. He’d also said, Your services are no longer required. What was she, a garbageman? A hooker?

  She tried to steady her voice. “You know, Rudy, when I tried to break up with you, two months ago, you said your therapist didn’t think it was a good idea.”

  “Do you want to be the one to break up? That’s fine. You can be the one. I don’t care.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What is the point?”

  She couldn’t come up with anything. Maybe it was the point, after all. Goddamn it, she wanted that lamp!

  “I just don’t understand why. This is all coming out of nowhere.”

  “You’re still trying to change me,” Rudy said, putting his cup down so roughly that it clattered in its saucer. “I’m sick of feeling not good enough. I’m sick of feeling like, if I wear the wrong pants, we’re back to square one.”

  She was so relieved that she almost smiled at him. She’d been afraid he was going to tell her she’d become too desperate, too— just thinking about the word made her cringe—needy. “Come on, you haven’t done that in a long time.”

  “Not funny, Pru.”

  She looked at him. He wasn’t really here, she realized. He could barely sit still while she slowly digested what he’d said. “This is crazy. What we have is bigger than all this, right?”

  “I don’t think so. I think this is all we’re about, actually. Me working my ass off to try to please you, who is never satisfied.”

  Working his ass off? Really. How hard was it to l
et her choose his clothes, direct his haircuts? But at least it sounded more like the old Rudy. She knew how to talk to this Rudy—the petulant, almost whiny one. They’d had this same discussion a hundred times.

  Her voice softened. “But I thought you wanted to change. I thought you liked changing.”

  He nodded. “Then I realized that I’m okay, just the way I am.”

  “Rudy.” She leaned forward. “Who told you that?”

  But she knew. The damn therapist.

  Just then, his cell phone rang. He turned a little in his chair, but he was shouting so it wasn’t hard to hear what he was saying, even above the racket of the café’s espresso machine. What were those kids doing with that damn thing, banging it with wrenches? It was like being in a machine shop. “Yeah,” he yelled, “I just told her. What? No, of course not.”

  Pru leaned forward. Of course not what? What hadn’t she done?

  “Who was that?” she said, after he hung up.

  “Just Dr. Schwaiger,” he said, as if it was a perfectly normal thing for your shrink to call you up at eleven o’clock on a Friday night. He closed the phone with a sharp snap, not looking at her. “I better go.”

  What a mistake that damn therapist had been. And it was all her fault! She had persuaded him to go into therapy in the first place, had even found Andrea Schwaiger for him. For the first month, he’d referred to her as “the rapist”—of course, from a TV skit. But then he’d gotten into it. Way into it. Dr. Schwaiger made him feel validated and confirmed. She told him everything he felt and did and wanted was okay. For Pru, Rudy’s therapy had been a bitter disappointment, making him more Rudy-like, not less.

  “Is this about the stupid list?” Pru said.

  “It’s not about the list. Listen, I have to go. Are you going to be all right?”

  Pru straightened up in her chair. She smoothed her skirt with her hands. It was a very good skirt, new, with sharp pleats. It looked solid black until she moved, and then you saw white inside the pleats. It was the last thing she’d bought before losing her job, at Edie’s on Connecticut. How she wished Edie’s was open right now! “All right? Of course I’m going to be all right.”

  “See what I mean?” Rudy said. “We’ve been together for years, and you’re acting like nothing big is happening. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You’re a very shut-down person, you know that?”

  She was silent, stung. Shut-down? She was shut-down? How long had she been waiting for him to come home? That shit. She’d had dozens of reasons to leave him, and she never had. Except that one time, two months ago, when she’d tried, and he had pleaded with her not to, and so she hadn’t.

  Rudy stood. As Pru began to rise he quickly leaned over to hug her, crouched above her chair, in an awkward squat. “Take care of yourself, P.W.,” he whispered. Oh, that stupid nickname. He got it from some Pee-wee Herman movie, and thought it was hilarious to call her that. Pru smiled and said, too loudly, “And you take care of yourself, too!” Her own phony tone rang in her ears.

  She sat back down and made herself slowly finish her tea. The girls at the next table were laughing again. After a minute, she started to relax. Rudy didn’t really mean any of this. It was probably something his therapist had suggested, and he had taken it out of context. Rudy was highly impressionable. When they were calmer, they’d talk things out.

  But in the cab home (screw the cost, she’d thought, flagging it down with her purse) she started fuming. What was she supposed to do now? Damn it, how were they going to make this up? How long would he wait before calling? He never went to sleep without calling to say good night first. Surely, with the sight of her before him, he’d have to think about what he’d done, and call her, begging her to forget it all. Anyway, that’s what the Rudy she knew would do.

  She looked out the window at the passing lights of Dupont Circle. He said it wasn’t about the list but, naturally, it was. He wasn’t supposed to have seen it, of course. It was meant to be private. It was just how she did things. She liked to look at all the angles, laid out in two columns, side by side. She didn’t seem to have strong gut feelings telling her what to do, like other people. And wasn’t who you loved one of the most important decisions of your life? But when she saw him charging out of her bedroom with her planner, his face contorted with rage, she knew she had been wrong to do it.

  “Number three,” he read, his voice shaking. “Unpredictable and sweaty.”

  Pru was horrified, ashamed, and sorry; but also annoyed, and not sorry. She said, in a conciliatory way, “Okay, now, that was when you first started the meds. That’s gotten way better.”

  “Immature and embarrassing.”

  “What about the pros? Did you even look at the pros? Dependable, loving, and committed?”

  “Disaster, nightmarish, possibly sociopathic parents.”

  She didn’t know what to say about that one. Even if she’d been twice as much in love with Rudy Fisch, she would have thought long and hard about joining a family like that. Anyway, Pru had been nice to them. She’d even told Rudy that they weren’t as bad as he’d made them out to be. Wasn’t she allowed some private thoughts? It wasn’t like she’d taken out an ad, for crissake.

  She had the cab driver drop her off at the video store next to her building. She loved her block and instantly felt better just being there. There was a Turkish carpet store, the souvlaki shop, the Korean dry cleaners, where someone carefully wrapped the buttons of her sweaters in foil before cleaning them, and, occupying the corner lot, the Kozy Korner, a divey little eggs-and-coffee shop. McKay had told her that the place was supposed to have been bought recently by Starbucks, but somehow the deal hadn’t gone through. McKay seemed to know, through his network of gay friends, just about everything happening in the city. Pru had been a little disappointed about the Starbucks falling through. It might have driven the offensive Cluck-U Chicken out of business.

  The Cluck-U was on the other side of the video store from Pru’s building. Its exterior signage featured not a chicken, but a flashing neon bantam rooster smoking a cigar. The bird was leaning toward the pedestrians on the street and winking, as its nauseating yellow light flashed away. The lurid sign had almost been enough to make her pass on the apartment, initially. She wondered what it was about a rooster smoking a cigar that said to people, Come on in and eat poultry! She tried not to see it, the many times she was forced to walk underneath it every day. But the rooster had an insidious way of drawing her attention. She could practically smell its disgusting cigar-and-pellets breath. She went into the video store and straight to the “Great Directors” wall. She had a sudden yen for the extreme violence of Don Vito Corleone and his brood. She would spend the whole weekend watching them blow one another’s brains out.

  When she put the trilogy on the counter, Phan gave her a knowing look and said, “Uh-oh.”

  Today Phan’s spiky, usually black hair was dyed green, and he wore a Pat Benatar T-shirt. It showed a pair of red lips and the words HELL IS FOR CHILDREN! Phan’s bony chest was like a rotating billboard of artifacts from Pru’s young adulthood, years and years before his own.

  “What ‘uh-oh’?” she said. She had a little crush on Phan. Mostly it was because of how Phan’s girlfriend looked at him, from her seat on the milk crate behind the counter, where she sometimes sat while he worked. Phan’s girlfriend wore striped knee socks and a pair of ponytails, like a child. Pru thought her name was something like “Chuckie.” She looked at Phan with such open adoration that Pru had to wonder what was behind it.

  “Man, every time you break up with someone, you come in for The Godfather.”

  “No, really?”

  Phan consulted the computer screen in front of him. “Five times in six years,” he said.

  Pru counted them off, in her head. Phil, Jack, Steve, Gay/Not Gay David, and Nate. Now Rudy. Pathetic, wasn’t it, when the guy at the video store knew your own love life better than you? And so many of them! Maybe Patsy was right. Maybe sh
e was indiscriminate.

  “Well, I like the violence. Is that so wrong?”

  “So what’s up with Rudy? Did you toss him out?”

  Pru pulled her wallet from her purse. “I don’t know. We’re working on some things.”

  “Too bad. I liked Rudy.” Phan shook his head, as if recalling something particularly hilarious. “That guy cracks me up.”

  That’s what everyone said about Rudy, even McKay. Until recently, anyway. As much as she hated to admit it, he’d been happier drawing all day and thinking up stupid jokes, with bad hair and glasses and the sloppy clothes. Pru tried to remember if he’d started a new antidepressant med lately. That would certainly account for his behavior tonight. It always took his brain a few weeks to settle down, whenever Schwaiger adjusted his meds. When he was on Wellbutrin he used to chew his fingernails down to the quick.

  “Listen, girlfriend,” said Phan, handing the change to her. “I can get you some good drugs.”

  “Next time,” said Pru. “Anyway, doesn’t that just make you more depressed, in the end?”

  Phan shrugged. “I’m a Buddhist. We don’t get depressed.”

  “What do you mean? Everyone gets depressed.”

  “Yeah,” Phan said, “but not Buddhists.”

  “Why not?”

  “We know how to suffer.”

  She took the videos from him. “Okay. How?”

  “Very carefully?” he said, smiling at her, so she could see the tips of his white teeth. “Also, I like Ecstasy.”

  AT HOME, SHE COLLECTED EVERYTHING THAT HAD BELONGED to Rudy, including two half-eaten boxes of his diet cereal, a SpongeBob SquarePants toothbrush, and three Brooks Brothers shirts he kept in her closet. She put it all in a shopping bag by the door. Brooks Brothers! When she met him he was still wearing “no-iron” shirts from JCPenney. It was all her fault. She’d turned him into a pompous ass. She should have left some of him the way she’d found him, eager and unfinished. That was just the problem: He was unfinished, still. Hot, but unfinished. Or finished badly. McKay was right—she’d created a monster. A hot monster.