Toni paid her brothers a nominal sum – the most they would accept, which amounted, basically, to gas and tolls, and ordered take-out from a neighborhood pizzeria that made the best Italian fast food she had ever eaten. By the time everyone left, tired, well-fed, sweat stained and stinking, save for Marcella of course, Toni felt as if she were finally home. She looked around at the environment, her smile broadening with every turn, allowing an encroaching calm to wash over her; her heart became infused with love and a sense of belonging. Toni moved to the middle of the living room, her body slowly twirling, her arms stretched wide, head back, laughing giddily.
Rather than overwhelm herself with home design, Toni decided to unpack only those items which were deemed to be an immediate necessity: her clothes, toiletries, computers and kitchen supplies; she’d await Kat’s return and together they would decide on placement of the remainder. She didn’t miss or think about her old apartment even for one minute. She was equally ecstatic to finally be settled with the love of her life and also to be living in the same borough as Marcella and Gene, the distance between them equating to a relatively inexpensive cab ride or a short trip on an express train to the upper west side. She never before felt more at peace or at home.
Kat-Nip
Kat sought to make significant strides toward becoming entrepreneurially self-sufficient in her efforts to preclude being downsized by or beholden to a corporate entity to whom her livelihood would be dependent entirely upon their whimsy, greed and/or bad financial decision making borne of hubris, the most common reasons many of her friends and colleagues found themselves being given a package and sent on their way, adrift with few viable options available to them.
Much to her surprise and amusement, the combination of her budding literary agency, incessant blogging, supplemented by her freelance writing and editing projects became immensely profitable in the aggregate, which is why, after nearly twenty years of toiling away in someone else's limited conception of artistic expression, she was able to bid adieu to a restrictive corporate existence and the behemoth of a major publishing house that her father had pulled strings with a golf buddy of his to provide to his daughter that job opportunity, and make her individualistic mark within the world of the written word. Since she had been fortunate enough to have purchased her condo at a fire sale, her otherwise outsized overhead was reduced to a manageable level, which allowed her to pursue her dream career in which building an audience and turning a profit would not necessarily be immediate.
"One must acknowledge the changing paradigm shifts and respond accordingly or become subjected to the vagaries of a losing end-game," she admonished to Toni on several occasions.
“You know I’m an ardent believer in the concept of forging ones career trajectory toward a pursuit that would be both economically fruitful and creatively satisfying,” Kat continued.
“Lest one subvert their identity and become a corporate automaton incapable of independent, expansive thought,” she added almost as an afterthought.
Toni’s response, whenever Kat began one of her more pedantic life lessons, was to pull out a pen and pad, feigning lecture hall style note-taking. It’s not that she didn’t agree with the concept, rather didn’t think everyone had the ability to be an entrepreneur. She would counter Kat’s line of argumentation by asking who would be following if everyone were to lead.
Conversely, Kat would also present argumentation against every incarnation of newly minted subversive, calling them out as false prophets who were devoid of constructive alternatives on what they had deemed to be society’s ills. Once a group gained momentum, she reasoned, their collective identity would invariably morph into a depressing similarity, sporting the same uniform, speaking with the same ubiquitously annoying verbal ticks, the most recent incarnation of which being the uplift to one’s inflections and employing the same tired lexical catch phrases du jour with such a disturbing repetitiveness that she wondered whether someone had written and widely distributed a series of hipster how-to manuals, designed to provide guidance on blending into the crowd of ones choice which continued to castigate the standard bearer's of society's moral majority as reprehensible slime.
As her distinctive contribution toward aiding in the maturation of the unforgivably uninspired, micro-brewing, artisan-promoting, calculatedly unkempt hipsters that began sprouting from every previously uninhabitable waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn, and furthermore resolute in her belief that she was performing a public service to steer those lost souls toward an experience that can only be described as humbling an otherwise subversive arrogance that was nearly devoid of merit, Kat created opportunities to extol upon them her contrarian views in hopes of luring them into her confidence only to shake up their unjustifiable rage. Although Kat’s parents would have been proud to know that brand of spew had been formulating in her mind, her objectives were not even remotely meant to present a conservative, decidedly more conformist perspective on humanity but rather to shake up what she saw as the formation of a new status quo – the next iteration of despondent youth whose anger against the establishment was justified but whose methods were haphazard and willful as opposed to organized and cogent, hence effective.
The first time that Kat verbalized her contrarian proclamations at a fairly sizable gathering, one in which she was an invited guest, a response to a few tomes regarding herbal remedies that she had been able to sell to a mid-sized publishing house, she became so shocked at the reception her comments received, the furiously nodding heads, the hands clapping and offers of multiple fist pumps in a torrent of impassioned acceptance that she then developed a slight addiction to baiting the perpetually bearded, plaid-shirted, thrift store wearing youth until they bought into her false pretention of making a difference by trampling on and over any and all conventional lifestyles as pedestrian-level cud. She became disturbingly adept at it and although Toni tried, unsuccessfully, to dissuade her from goading those poor, unsuspecting dolts from being subjected to her cajoling, which at its end was a pointed stick aimed squarely between their eyes. Kat was having too much fun in her attempts to incite a riot to stop so carried on with her usual vigor despite the tsk-tsking received from Toni on a regular basis.
One time, when the crowd became dead silent after Kat posed a question regarding how they planned on managing the inevitable fallout from their progeny once they too failed to make the world a better, healthier, greener space in which to inhabit, Toni sought to ease the tension by clapping wildly, muttering comments such as ‘good point!’ and ‘keep us honest!’ but that was the last time in which she accepted an invitation to attend one of Kat’s Brooklyn-based literary events – the level of embarrassment had become unmanageable.
Somewhat cruel and uncomfortable to watch, yet shamelessly funny nonetheless, Toni admitted, only to herself, that she rather enjoyed witnessing those mason jar repurposing, community-gardening, menses-cup using hipsters tripping over themselves with self righteous condescension against a society they had dismissed as having caused the ruination of the world without ever looking at their own extent of culpability; so easy to gripe but rather another thing entirely to construct an alternative solution and effect change on a significant scale. However much she would have enjoyed chewing on that topic with Kat, Toni tucked away all rational, humorous thoughts, to be put on hold for another day because in the present moment, her fury demanded center stage, continuing to gain ground at an alarming rate, supplanting the love she otherwise should have been feeling.
Back to Reality
“Trust is a rare commodity, don’t you think?” Toni seethed, unable to hold back, veins popping, nostrils flared, breathing having become furiously heated and increasingly rapid.
Kat had chosen to keep quiet for so many years precisely because she sought to avoid an ugly confrontation, the accusations of betrayal, the potentially explosive reaction and even worse, the dissolution of a friendship she worked diligently at cultivating, the return for which she had been so pa
tiently waiting. She was happy to have given up the variety of lovers she would otherwise have been enjoying on a regular basis in exchange for the alluring coupling of constancy and unconditional love that Toni gave to her so the thought of losing everything for something she believed to be an inconsequential, meaningless tryst had made her more avoidant than was her proclivity.
She looked over at Toni, who wore her hurt so openly that it forced the muscles surrounding her heart to squeeze tightly, constricting her diaphragm as it threatened to cut off all circulation. Her reflexive reaction was to fold into her torso and wince. Toni noticed, which prompted her to immediately stop whining, guilt over behaving childishly now overcoming her indignation. They just looked at each other for an eye-drying length of time, until Toni once again found her voice, less demonstrably hurt and considerably more rational than the previous thirty minutes had witnessed, but nonetheless visibly wounded.
“If the affair didn't mean anything, then why did you withhold that information from me? It's not like I've ever asked for a list of your lovers and quite frankly I don't want to know, but her? You withheld information about your affair with her?
“If it didn't mean anything to you, then what the fuck!” The volume of Toni's voice increased to a level just below a bellow.
Hearing her pathetically pleading tone echoing back through her now aching head, made her feel slightly foolish. She apologized to Kat for yelling, while placing her head in her hands, pushing her eyes as deeply back as she could without squishing them to a mushy pulp. Toni felt powerless, alone and in fear that her world was about to implode.
“My love – I knew there'd be a scene, so I sought to avoid it. Whether I came clean the first time that you mentioned her – and if you recall, I did refer to her as 'that elitist bitch', which, if you hadn't been so enamored with her scent or preoccupied with boffing her brains out, would have asked how I could possibly have drawn such a conclusion without ever having met her...” Kat stopped speaking without finishing her thought after looking up and seeing Toni's pointed eyes boring a heated hole through her head.
“Oh, Toni, Toni. Please stop looking at me like I just murdered your family. Please. Just stop, okay? Take a step back and get some perspective on this.”
Kat didn’t want to fight about a topic that she found wholly irrelevant but would not be allowed to drop it until Toni was entirely satisfied with her explanation, otherwise it would find a voice at every future altercation. It promised to be a long night and Kat would rather have been almost anywhere else doing almost anything else except being the subject of that confrontation.
“We had the briefest of affairs because quite frankly she and I didn’t get along. Well, we were quite compatible in bed, but,” Kat stopped speaking again when she noticed that Toni had practically levitated from her chair, floating in the direction of the front door. Kat flew out of her seat, grabbed Toni from behind and held her tightly, making escape impossible. Kat’s considerable size advantage worked in her favor. For the moment, Toni was imprisoned.
“I’m not going to stay here and listen to you extol the wonders of your sexual encounters with Monica. I can’t. I won’t.
“There’s nothing you can say to make this right so just let go!” Toni’s anger, fueled by an intractable jealousy and wrapped neatly in a painful tourniquet of implacable insecurity, left her feeling vulnerable and insignificant.
The realization that mockingly repeated within Toni’s panoramic insignificance was that Kat and Monica must have made a pact to hold their union a secret from her in an act that screamed of a hurtful violation of trust. That sickening revelation made her insides twist into a toxic heap, making her feel so ancillary and alone that a full-blown panic began to take shape. Toni’s breathing became shallow and erratic and her heart rate increased in direct proportion to the weakening of her muscles. Her vision streamed out of focus, the sound of every beat pounding out of her heaving chest directly echoed into her aching head, swirling slowly in a nauseatingly elliptical motion. She feared she would either vomit or pass out or both concurrently so, unable to speak and doubting her ability to remain erect without assistance, she motioned to Kat that she was about to go down for the count. Having already felt Toni becoming dead-weight, Kat had begun the movement to prop Toni against her legs while slowly lowering her onto the floor. They sat on the slate tiles of the foyer, Kat holding her closely, tenderly, wiping the sweat from her forehead, lightly blowing air on her face and neck, while coaching Toni to breathe long, slow breaths until she regained her composure. She couldn’t help but smile at her lover, lying prone in her arms, the sensitive soul whose mind, body and heart had been offered to her so completely. She would do whatever was necessary to make it right.
The Worst, Best Dinner Ever
In her semi-conscious stupor, Toni recalled the first and only time that the three of them had gotten together, on her own unrelenting insistence, in her attempt to bring together her lover and best friend so that no animosity would exist between them, leaving Toni free to keep her friend and eat her lover, too. In retrospect, if she had not been oblivious to the obvious signs of tension during that soiree, something she had chosen to write-off as girlish, mutual jealousy, the current dilemma could have been avoided entirely.
The dinner was scheduled to take place three months after Monica’s release from her first internment at the psychiatric facility. Toni needed Kat in her life, especially so to offset the tenuous nature of Monica’s emotional stability, so getting them together to make nice in a new restaurant that promised to knock all three out of their chairs seemed a perfect setting.
Despite Kat’s suggestion that she be allowed to select the venue, Toni had already decided that the meeting would take place on neutral ground to avoid providing any unintentional tactical advantage so suggested dinner at Babbo, the new Mario Batali restaurant as she knew each one of them had been dying to eat there. Coordinating everyone’s schedules had been a near impossibility for the better part of three months, as at least one of them seemed to have other plans, be out of town on business, was leveled by an inexplicable eleventh-hour bout of a mystery illness – the excuses were endless and became increasingly more imaginative.
Toni was insistent that no further roadblocks prevent her from introducing Kat to her beloved inamorata. Toni and Monica arrived together, having spent the night at Monica’s apartment in the city. They requested seating at a table on the main floor, preferring that vibe to the isolation of the upstairs dining area. Kat was uncharacteristically late – especially unusual since she lived not more than a five minute walk from the restaurant. One more clue that Toni neglected to register.
Kat walked through the door looking resplendent in a tasteful three-quarter length coat on which a brocade design of taupe, black and burnt orange had been embroidered, black slacks and three-inch heels that topped her off at an imposing six feet height, sporting a visible trepidation and hesitation that she would normally have been able to conceal. She typically loved meeting new people, exploring their opinions and insights, finding ideas that she hadn’t yet been exposed to, eagerly anticipating a journey into the new and exciting. However, on that particular evening after having walked through the restaurant’s front entrance, realizing that she could no longer believably hold off Toni’s insistence that she formally meet her lover, she felt little more than an unrelenting urge to flee.
From what she remembered of Monica, she thought she had better than a fifty-fifty chance of tacitly agreeing to effectively conceal from Toni their past liaison. Although there were no residual romantic feelings being harbored by either party, both having realized after a terribly torrid yet necessarily brief affair that neither had any interest in further pursuing the other, she knew Toni well enough to know that no amount of convincing would assuage her sensitive, insecure soul.
Monica looked up just as Kat was approaching the table and let out an involuntary gasp, mouth remaining slightly ajar. Even though Toni had described
Kat, she realized only too late that her subconscious had chosen to deny any possibility that her Kat was also Toni’s. Their eyes met and locked – briefly yet with an unstated agreement having been reached that tonight, they would be introduced for the first time. Toni had to stand up on the tips of her toes to reach Kat’s face so she could bestow upon her a two-cheeked kiss followed by a quick peck on the lips; a greeting they had come to accept as an alternative to any other physical affection they were no longer sharing. Toni had forewarned Monica that her feelings for Kat ran deep and she was perfectly happy with the situation but there was no need for concern because they had both accepted the closure of their sexual union and had transformed into platonic friends for life. Toni was so excited to have her two favorite people finally meet that she missed every possible clue on which even a five year old would have been able to pick up.
Kat and Monica awkwardly shook hands while mumbling a few clumsy salutations. Neither one wanted to make prolonged eye contact with the other, preferring instead to comment on their surroundings: the menu options, the tastefully decorated restaurant, the weather – whatever. Anything was preferable to focusing on the continuation of their mutual discomfort.
“Where is that damn waiter?” Kat was visibly irritated and just wanted to get some food on the table to distract them from any further forced congeniality.
Kat had already eaten far too much rosemary infused bread dripping with a richly dark, cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil. Delicious as each bite was, she wanted to avoid filling up on carbs so was looking forward to ordering the bucatini and octopus that she’d read about in the New York Times restaurant review. As soon as the waiter finally made his arrival, commencing the pronouncement of the evening’s culinary options with his lovely Italian accent and dramatic flourish to spare, Kat became so impatient to order that she stepped over his words before he could finish and hurriedly ordered an antipasto of sopressata and calamari for the entire table without even inquiring if those selections were to everyone’s liking. Even her eleventh hour apology for being so rude to the waitstaff and for presumptuously making an independent decision on the appetizers was written-off by Toni as ‘Kat behaving badly’, i.e., how she typically acted when in one of her more ‘I’d rather be somewhere else getting laid’ moods rather than the rush to get the evening over with that it was.
Love Finds Its Pocket Page 2
