by Ian Mark
Copyright © 2018 by Ian Mark
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system,
without prior written permission of the publisher.
Omnific Publishing
2355 Westwood Blvd., Suite 506
Los Angeles, CA 90064
www.omnificpublishing.com
First Omnific ebook edition, February 2018
First Omnific trade paperback edition, February 2018
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead,
is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Mark, Ian.
Love From Amanda to Zoe / Ian Mark – 1st ed. isbn: 978-1-623422-52-3
1. New Adult Romance — Fiction. 2. Lost love— Fiction.
3. New York City— Fiction. 4. Introspection — Fiction. I. Title
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Book Cover Design by Amy Brokaw
Printed in the United States of America
Chapter 1
“Will you marry me?” The words hung in the air like a slowly deflating balloon. As soon as I asked I regretted the question, and I knew what the answer would be. To her credit, Amanda took it in stride. Her pencil-thin eyebrows raised ever so slightly in surprise. I glanced away, wondering if any of the other patrons had heard me. Our waiter, Ramon, walked past as I spoke, and our eyes met. I hated him. He’d talked down to me the whole meal, correcting my pronunciation of arroz con pollo and flirting with Amanda by complimenting her Spanish. She loved that, just about any compliment would put her in a great mood, no matter how small. That’s why I so rarely complimented her.
Amanda continued not to say anything, and I hated silence. I felt the need to fill the air between us. This was not going as expected. I looked her over as she looked me over, and I saw the curly brown hair, the mole just above her cleavage, and the pearly white teeth that were just slightly crooked. She hated wearing her retainer. She tucked her hair behind her ear, a movement she had performed thousands of times in her life, while she prepared to turn down a marriage proposal for (I assumed) the first time in her life.
“I know I don’t have a ring or anything, but-”
“It’s Wednesday,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s a Wednesday.”
“I know the date,”
“We’re eating at El Cantinero, where we’ve eaten at least a dozen times in the year we’ve been dating. It’s a Wednesday night, I’ve been working all day. You don’t even have a ring.”
“I love you.”
“Don’t say that.” She seemed visibly upset at the idea.
“I know it’s not the most romantic-”
“Not the most romantic? Zach, how could this be any less romantic?” She put down her utensils and wiped her mouth with her napkin. Apparently the thought of marrying me had made her lose her appetite for her Tasty Tasty Tacos.
“Do you even want to marry me?” She continued. She plopped her napkin on her food in front of her. She always did that. She never took her leftovers home. Even if she didn’t want them, I would eat them. I always told her that, and she always said, Next time.
“Of course. I wouldn’t ask otherwise.” I cut off a large piece of arroz or pollo, whichever one means chicken, and ate it while trying to meet Amanda’s eyes. My dull brown ones searched for her brilliant blue ones, but couldn’t find them. She looked down at her lap before speaking.
“But do you really? Think about it right now. Do you want to spend the rest of your life, some sixty years-” She knocked on the plastic table painted to look like wood in front of her- “with me?”
I considered it. She was pretty, hell, she was beautiful. A little short, but great legs, a nice chest, and a symmetrical face. But she was kind of annoying. She wasn’t quite as smart as I was, and she would always talk during movies, asking for clarification or wanting me to repeat what Leonardo had just said. And she snored sometimes when she slept over. Not the kind of snore you could ignore, either. I snored like a normal person, consistently making the same sound so that the person next to me could get used to it and still fall asleep. That’s just being considerate. But her, her snores were like a succession of different dying animals calling out, ranging from the low bellows of a wounded elephant to the scared shrieks of a trapped mouse. It was infuriating really. I’d turn over and over again, and no position could get me away from those noises. Even worse, it wasn’t every night, so I couldn’t prepare for it. We’d be sleeping and everything would be fine, then at 3:23 in the morning I’d hear a whinny, and I’d know I was trapped until six, when I could duck out and say I had to work early.
“No,” I conceded, “I guess I don’t want to marry you.”
She softened. She sank back into the plush red booth and took a sip of her burgundy wine. Ramon brought the check over and glanced at Amanda’s mole. I should punch him, I thought, before suppressing my primal desires.
“Look, Zach, I know you’ve been through a lot,” she said after Ramon had finished eye-fucking her. She leaned forward and put her dainty fingers over my slightly-less-but-not-as-less-as-I’d-like dainty ones and smiled a sad smile.
“Brian’s death is making you recognize your own mortality, and that’s normal.”
I sighed. Amanda was a psych major in college, and even though she worked now in a law office, she never let anyone forget that she took two classes in grief counseling. Misinterpreting my annoyance as another sign of my depression, she went on.
“You’re afraid you’ll die alone. And you think marrying me will make things better, make you more secure. But you don’t want to marry me. We haven’t exactly been great the last few months.”
A pause. She leaned back and took out her phone. Ah, a text. Much more important than breaking my heart. I finished my Dos Equis with a swig and reached for the check. I slid my card in and looked for Ramon. Of course, now that I needed him, he was nowhere to be found.
“Sorry,” she said, “Where was I?”
I looked around the sparsely populated establishment for Ramon. An elderly couple a few tables over looked at me, and I stared blankly at them. They must be so happy, I thought. They looked away, and went back to their silent meal.
“You were telling me why you don’t want to marry me.”
She looked at me, the way she looked at me when she thought I was being intentionally stupid. Most of the time I wasn’t, no matter how incredulous she was.
“No, Zach, we were discussing why you don’t want to marry me.”
“I asked, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but you just admitted you don’t want to marry me, because this is just an impulsive reaction to Brian and your newfound mortality.”
“Yeah, and you snore.”
“I what? I don’t.”
Her brow furrowed. The corners of her mouth turned down. I knew I should leave it there. But I didn’t.
“Yes you do. It’s worse than any girl I’ve ever slept with.”
“Stop it, Zach.” I could tell from her voice that she had heard this before. How many men had complained about it to her? How many ways had she tried to make it stop? I handed the check to Ramon as he walked past, and he almost dropped the tray he was carrying. So sloppy.
“It’s awful. It keeps me up even when we’re not together, the echoes of it.”
“Fuck you Zach,” she said quietly. She got up.
“Sixty years of that,
I’d probably kill myself.” There. The last straw. I broke her.
“You selfish, idiotic, fucking asshole,” she said, no longer bothering to keep her voice down. The old farts two tables over looked up, surprised. I waved.
“You don’t care about anybody but yourself.” Her cheeks were red, and her hair was in her eyes. Her mouth contorted into an ugly snarl. She’s really not that pretty, I thought.
“We’re done,” I said. I squeezed a few grains of rice together with my fingers and ate them. She hated when I did that.
“Oh no,” she said, almost yelling, “You don’t get to dump me, I’m dumping you. You asked me to marry you ten minutes ago. I am dumping you.”
“Okay.” I smiled at her. She stormed out of the restaurant. I watched as all the other patrons watched her go, then turned to see what had caused such a ruckus on this quiet Wednesday evening at El Cantinero. I watched them watch me. I smiled.
“Show’s over folks. I apologize if we disturbed your boring lives.”
Ramon brought the check over and grinned at me. He was missing a tooth. I tipped him ten percent. Asshole.
Chapter 2
I lie on the ground. The dirt presses into my back. A voice speaks ominously from somewhere above me. I look left and right. Tombstones. Am I dead? I try to get up and I float in a way that tells me I no longer have a body. The rabbi speaks but I can’t understand him. There is no one else there, so I guess he is talking to me. I look down on my dead face. Lightning crashes, and I float away from my funeral. I see Amanda, home with Ramon. My mother and father are eating dinner nonchalantly. I float to the edge of the table that I sat at for so many years. We are in my childhood home, even though they moved shortly after I went off to college. I search my mother’s appearance for any sign of distress or sadness at my passing. There is none. I glance at my father, and he is the same, stoic as always. Maybe they don’t know. I try to tell them. No words come out of my mouth, because my mouth is miles away in an empty graveyard. The rabbi has left. Two blind men bury me while quoting Hamlet. I float to another room and Ethan Hawke is there. He doesn’t look at me. He says to his wife, “Isn’t it just terrible to die alone?” I try to cry, but no sound comes out. Suddenly, I feel a presence next to me. I turn and Brian is there. He looks at me, his eyes are dead and he doesn’t speak. His nose is red. I try to engage him, but he turns and leaves. I follow. We are at a lake. He grabs me, ethereally, and I am forced under the water.
I rolled out of bed and grabbed my phone off my nightstand. 9:47. One new text message: You wanna grab a beer tonight? It was from Kevin. Sure, I texted back. I found my slippers and trudged to the bathroom. After a luxurious fifteen-minute shower, I looked myself over in the mirror. I looked good. Not too big, not too thin, I had a bit of a six-pack going today and my hair looked sharp. I dressed and was out the door in five. I zipped up my hoodie as the harsh wind hit me. I hated the weather here. I walked the two blocks to the Starbucks on West 4th. I gave a nod to Jimmy, the homeless Jamaican man who hung around there. I pulled open the door and joined the long line of stressed out NYU students. I remembered when I was one of them, just a few years ago. Miranda smiled when I got to the front of the line.
“What’ll it be Zach?”
“I’ll have a grand caramel macchiato with a double shot of espresso and cream.” I winked.
“One large black coffee it is.” We both laughed. I thought of something.
“Actually, could I also get one of those scones?”
“Sure.” I paid and received my order.
“Thanks, Miranda. Have a good one.” I left and removed the scone from the bag. I passed Jimmy and handed it to him. He grinned a toothless grin. He really was an ugly motherfucker.
“Tanks, mon,” he said. “God bless you.”
“Take it easy, Jimmy,” I replied. I shook my head as I walked away. I don’t believe in God, and my life’s not even that bad. How Jimmy, a homeless man who spent his day being ignored and treated as subhuman by stuck-up college kids, could believe in God was beyond me.
I entered through the revolving doors of 200 Mercer Street and nodded to Marvin, the security guard. The warmth of the lobby enveloped me, and I unzipped my hoodie. I put my hands in my pockets.
“Zaaach,” he said, “How’s life? How’s Amanda doing?”
“Dumped her last night. Soooo probably not too well.”
We both laughed, but I don’t think either of us thought it was funny. It’s interesting, the differences between what we think and what we say when we interact with people we’re not that close to. The elevator came, and I nodded goodbye to Marvin. He was already greeting the next yuppie coming in.
I got off at the seventh floor. I worked as a programmer for a small start-up that made social video games. Basically, the founders wished they had come up with Farmville, and were now desperately trying to create the next Farmville so they could profit off the insatiable desire of humans to spend as much time as possible performing strange mundane tasks instead of working.
As a programmer, my hours were pretty flexible. I rarely showed up before ten or eleven, and almost always left before four. I was the fastest programmer there, but nobody knew that. If they knew, I’d have more work to do but wouldn’t make any more money.
I checked my email and found my assignment for the day. There was a problem with one of the games I was working on. Apparently the fish in Hunter-Gatherers: The Game had been exiting the lakes and “swimming” on land. Easy enough to fix. It took me fifteen minutes to figure out what I was going to do and about an hour to write the code. Then it was onto the internet for the rest of the day. I loved my job, but I also hated it. Sometimes I wished it were more challenging. And everything there was just grey. Grey, grey, gray. My cubicle was grey, the walls were grey. Even, Bob, my nearest coworker, was grey. He was in his early forties, and he worked harder than any of us to keep up. Poor guy didn’t grow up with computers. He’s grey. He’s like a normal person with all the color drained out of him, just faded to grey.
I thought back to a conversation Brian and I had had one day early in sophomore year. Neither of us had any work, so we were playing NHL ’09 on our suite-mate’s xBox.
“Have you ever seen Say Anything…?” Brian’s baritone cut over the country music playing in the background as we selected our teams.
“The John Cusack one?” I picked the Bruins and Brian went with the Sharks.
“Yeah.” We advanced through jersey selection.
“I think I saw it a long time ago.” I waited for Brian to press A to start the game.
“You know the buy, sell, process part?” I looked over at Brian. He was looking at me, not talking at the screen like we normally did. He scratched his chest through the pink v-neck he was wearing.
“Press A.” I put my feet up on the edge of my bed and leaned back in my chair.
“What? Oh, sorry.” He hit A and the game went to a loading screen. I looked at him again. His hair, while by no means long, was getting to the point where I knew in a few days he’d start talking about needing it cut, and in a few weeks he’d actually go get it cut. “Anyways, Cusack’s character, he’s asked what he wants to do when he graduates high school. And-”
“He’s the slacker, right? And he dates the valedictorian?” The game started. I won the opening face-off.
“Yes, and he says he doesn’t want to buy, sell, or process anything for a career. He doesn’t want to buy anything sold or processed, sell anything processed, or-”
“Let me guess, process anything bought or sold?” Digital Patrice Bergeron fired a wrister towards Digital Evgeni Nabokov, who caught it in his glove.
“Yeah.” Brian went silent for a few minutes. We had a lot of conversations that went like this: eyes always on the screen, long unmentioned pauses, little coherence to anyone but us. “Give it to ‘em Joe!” He yelled as Thornton beat Rask stick side high.
“Always go stick side.” I started the riff.
“Hell
of an effort, you love to see it.” Even though I wasn’t looking at him, I could tell he was starting to smirk, the right corner of his mouth bending upwards.
“You know, it just looks like the Bruins don’t want it enough out there today.” I started to smile too.
“Coach Claude Julien irate on the sidelines, calls over his star defenseman Zdeno Chara-“
“He’s saying, listen son, I know you’re an all-star, but you gotta show all these fans you’re one.” Brian lost it. He started giggling. I did too. A girl on our floor freshman year had described the way we played these games as “One of you says one word, and you both just start giggling for five minutes.”
“So what’s your point?” I asked midway through the second period, after we had quieted down and I had restored order to the game. I had a 2-1 lead.
“My point is, I’m just like Lloyd Dobler.” Brian answered quickly. He knew what I was referring to, even though we had talked about several other things since he brought up the Cusack movie. “I don’t want to do any of those things.”
“So you’re dropping out and becoming a kick-boxer?” I remembered how the movie played out.
“Shut up, let me finish. I have no major, right? And I figured out today that I don’t want to do any of them. I don’t want one career, I want to do a lot of things, and what I really want is to act.” His normally confident voice got higher here, as if he was asking me what I thought of acting.
“Transferring to Tisch? Don’t go all artsy on me now.” He scored to tie the game with a few seconds left in the period. We both mashed A to skip through the replays and pause screens to get back to playing as soon as possible.
“That’s just it, I feel like it’s a waste of money to do Tisch, but I want to be in Tisch. I don’t know, don’t you ever think you won’t wanna do Comp Sci?” I had declared my major towards the end of Freshman year. I didn’t love it, but it was practical and I was good at it.
“Not really, it’s what I’m good at and there are a lot of jobs.” Rask grabbed the loose puck and froze it. While the game went to a replay, I picked up the scissors on my desk and poked my desk.
