So Not Single

by Wendy Markham

  “So far I’ve come up with a few possibilities that my boss really likes,” I say.

  “Yeah? You know what would be a good name for a product like that?” he asks.

  Naturally, I cut myself off on the verge of spouting off my own ideas to ask, “What?”

  “Maintain,” he says, with a significant nod, as if he’s just revealed with absolute certainty the name of the winner on the latest edition of Survivor.

  “Maintain,” I echo, trying to look impressed. “Wow, that’s good, Will. I’ll keep it in mind in case Persist doesn’t work out.”

  Actually, it’s not a bad product name.

  Maintain.

  I go on telling him how busy I’ve been at my glamorous ad agency job, and working for Milos. I don’t linger too long on that topic, afraid he’ll bring up Zoe. Instead, I move right along to provide a pumped-up account of my weekend travels, from the Hamptons to Brookside to Jersey for the wedding.

  “How was that?” Will asks. “Did you have a good time with…what was his name?”

  “Buckley.”

  Buckley, who remembers Will’s name.

  Buckley, who said to call collect.

  “Yeah, we had fun,” I tell Will. “That reminds me, is Jimmy Stewart dead?”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  I notice that he doesn’t ask me what reminded me of that. I wonder if he’s even paying attention to the conversation. Or me.

  And suddenly, I want to tell him about how Buckley and I were wondering about Jimmy Stewart. I want him to know how chummy we are. I want him to be jealous, dammit.

  “Are you sure he’s dead?” I ask Will.

  “Jimmy Stewart? Yeah, he died a few years ago.”

  “Oh. Because—”

  “There it is,” Will interrupts as we round a bend.

  And there it is. The Valley Playhouse. There’s a freshly painted, hand-lettered wooden sign in front of a group of buildings that are set back from the road.

  I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe a quaint, scallop-shingled wooden structure, or even a deco-type circa 1930s place with a marquee.

  Definitely not this cinderblock rectangle surrounded by what looks like a couple of Sears sheds and another lovely matching cinderblock dorm-type building.

  I should probably be glad it’s not a charming country haven upon which Will will look back wistfully in the future.

  But what I’m thinking is…

  He left New York—he left me—for this?

  Instead of a marquee, there’s a glass-fronted sign board on the lawn in front of the theater—the kind of sign you’d find in front of a church or school. It says “Now laying: Sunday in the ark With George.”

  “Looks like somebody’s pilfered your p’s,” I tell Will.

  “Huh?”

  “The sign. The p’s.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” He grunts, unamused, shifting my bag to his other shoulder.

  I feel compelled to apologize that it’s so heavy.

  Will feels compelled to grunt again.

  “It seems kind of quiet around here,” I comment as we approach the cast house.

  “It always is, on Saturday. It’s our only day off. Everyone’s off running errands, doing laundry, stuff like that.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to have to wear dirty underwear for a week because I’m here,” I joke.

  “Nah, I got somebody to do my laundry for me.”

  “There’s a laundry service around here?” Guess the town isn’t as rustic as I thought. I never knew you could pay someone to do your laundry until I moved to New York.

  “No, not a laundry service. A friend of mine from the cast said she wouldn’t mind throwing my stuff in with hers.”

  “What a friend.” I imagine Will’s underwear whirling chummily in a steamy dryer with somebody’s lace panties—perhaps Ms. Self Tanner Slatherer’s lace panties.

  “That’s the theater over there,” Will says, pointing to the cinderblock building that’s not a Sears shed and doesn’t look like a dorm. “This is the cast house.”

  We walk past some flowerbeds and up the steps. The door opens into a dim lobby-type room that I’d call a foyer if the house were more homey. In the foyer are the infamous pay phone, and beside it, a bulletin board with lots of messages tacked up.

  “That’s the bulletin board,” Will points out.

  Gee, good thing he told me, because I thought it was a drinking fountain.

  “The cast leaves notes for each other there,” he adds unnecessarily. “Like phone messages and stuff.”

  I nod.

  It takes a second for that to sink in. By the time it does, we’re in the big rec room off the lobby, and two scantily clad girls are looking up from the couch where they’re giving themselves pedicures.

  “Hi, guys,” Will says.

  The guys are buxom and wearing tiny spaghetti-strap tops that bare their concave tummies, and shorts the size of bikini bottoms. They have tans that are too rosy and freckled not to be the real thing. Apparently I’m the only pasty ghost in town.

  Mental note: Finagle invite to Kate’s beach house. Coat self in oil and sunbathe until golden.

  “Hey, Wills,” says the one with the straight dark hair and the slightly peeling red sunburnt nose.

  Wills? I have to grin at that one. Last I checked, he wasn’t heir to the British throne.

  That my boyfriend seems to have acquired a ridiculous royal nickname here isn’t all I have to ponder.

  Will said the bulletin board is where they leave each other phone messages. Which means the pay phone can get incoming calls.

  Assuming Will’s telephone privileges weren’t revoked before he even got here, he misled me. He could obviously have gotten phone calls all along. He just chose not to.

  I’m steaming.

  Yet, I’m proud to report that I muster a cheery, confident hello when Wills introduces me to the pedicure princesses, whose names escape me once I’ve duly noted that neither of them is Esme.

  “This is Tracey,” Will informs them.

  He doesn’t add the anticipated—at least, by me—“my girlfriend.” This pisses me off even more. Has he even told anyone about me before now? Or is it like Eat Drink Or Be Married, where his co-workers treated me as though I had suddenly materialized out of a cave somewhere to stake my ridiculous Will’s got-a-steady-gal claim.

  I am asked, “How are things back in New York?”

  Which calms me a little, because at least they know where I came from.

  “Hot,” I say.

  “I’ll bet. I can’t believe I was ever sucker enough to spend the summer there,” says the girl who is painting her toenails electric blue, as opposed to the blood-red peds on her friend.

  “Oh, it’s not that bad,” proclaims the only sucker in the room. Namely, me.

  “All I know is that last summer in New York I was wearing sandals when it rained, and I stepped in a puddle and the next thing I knew, I was in the hospital with some disgusting bacterial infection,” Blood Red declares with a delicate shudder.

  Will gives her bare, sun-kissed shoulder a pat and says—no, not and where were your galoshes, young lady? He says, “That doesn’t sound like fun.”

  She nods. “It sucked.”

  “Like I said, summers in the city suck,” says Electric Blue with a laugh.

  “Yeah, they’re for suckers,” I pipe up.

  Everyone looks at me.

  Oops, I guess that came out bitchier than I intended. Actually, I intended it to come out bitchy, but now that I’ve called attention to myself, I realize I’m not putting my best—unpedicured, I might add—foot forward in front of Will’s new friends, so I just shrug like it was a joke and I’m totally in on it, and I say, “Trust me, next summer I’m outta there. So, Will, I want to see the rest of this place.”

  In other words, get me the hell away from these two girls who are looking at me like they’re wondering why Will didn’t just abandon me at the bus-stop-slas
h-luncheonette in the first place.

  We move on to the big dining hall, which consists of several round metal tables with fake-wood brown tops. Beyond that is a kitchen. A lanky geek is there, cooking something on the stove. If I’m not mistaken, he’s boiling his socks. Guess there’s no laundry room on the premises.

  “Are you making that cabbage soup again, Theodore?” Will asks.

  “Oh, shut up, Will,” says Theodore with such a flouncing flourish that I’m immediately aware that he isn’t competing with Will for the fair Esme’s attentions…as if his name, gold earring and Barbara Streisand concert T-shirt weren’t evidence enough.

  “This is my girlfriend, Tracey,” Will tells Theodore, who drops his slotted spoon to offer me a limp-wristed handshake and tell me it’s nice to meet me.

  I tell him that it’s nice to meet him, too.

  Note that Will uses the dreaded G-word when introducing me to a male—and I use the term loosely, but still—and avoided it when introducing me to the twin temptresses in the next room.

  As we leave the kitchen, he informs me in a low grumble that Theodore has an eating disorder and lives on the cabbage-soup diet, which stinks up the cast house.

  Naturally, fastidious Will doesn’t appreciate stink of any kind—even imagined.

  Mental note: Do not mention past ingestion of cabbage soup.

  Getting back to Will’s use of the G-word: as we make our way through the cast house, in and out of the dorm-like rooms upstairs, I keep an ongoing tally. It’s not like he introduces me as his girlfriend to every guy, because he doesn’t. He only uses the label one time other than with Theodore, and that’s with another housemate who obviously is more interested in Will than he is in me. When we meet the two other guys—both apparently straight—and three other girls who are here, he just tells them I’m Tracey.

  Everyone is polite.

  I tell myself that I’m reading too much into it.

  But when we’re walking back downstairs, I can’t help casually asking, “How come I haven’t met Esme?”

  And I swear it’s not my imagination that Will is startled enough to semi-gulp before innocently repeating, “Esme?”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard so much about her. I thought I’d get to meet her.”

  Actually, I’ve heard next to nothing about her.

  But the two toenail-painters from the rec room are just coming into the lobby, and when they obviously overhear my question, they shoot each other a look.

  And that’s enough to clinch what I’ve already suspected.

  Will is screwing around with Esme.

  “She’s in town, at the Laundromat,” Will says.

  “Oh, is she the one who’s doing your laundry?” I manage to ask from amid a cloud of swirling hysteria that threatens to touch down any second now.

  “How’d you guess?” he exclaims, all golly gee.

  “I’m taking a class in deductive skills at the Learning Annex,” I retort.

  “Really? My roommate took that class,” Blood Red announces.

  I shoot her a withering look. She doesn’t notice. She’s exchanging yet another long, meaningful glance with her friend. I’d be tempted to peg them as lesbians if I didn’t happen to intercept the glance and realize that it clearly says, We’d better scram before the obviously deluded Tracey makes a scene about Esme washing Will’s undies.

  The two of them take off.

  Will tells me that he’s going to borrow someone’s car to drive me over to the bed-and-breakfast.

  He grabs a key that’s been thumb-tacked to the bulletin board on top of a note that says simply, “Wills.”

  Wills. What’s up with this? It’s starting to get on my nerves—mainly because it doesn’t seem to be bugging him.

  I would never dare to call him Wills.

  Once, when we first started dating, I teasingly called him Willy. Was he pissed. I thought he was kidding/pissed, but he was really pissed. Kind of like I am now, about the phone and the nickname and oh yeah, Esme.

  As if I’ve let her slip my mind for even a second.

  No. I’ve got a mission.

  Mental note: Seek and Destroy Esme ASAP.

  He takes me and my luggage out to the parking lot behind the cast house. There, we climb into a beat-up green compact car. I’m not good with cars so I have no idea what make and model it is, but I’m confident saying it’s not a Mercedes or a BMW. I’m also confident in saying that it either belongs to a male, or to a disgusting pig of a female, which means despite her being on an intimate enough level with Will that she’d loan him her car, she’s no threat to our relationship.

  He wrinkles his nose and brushes off the driver’s seat before getting in, then hunts for a napkin in the cluttered glove compartment so he can clean some kind of smudge from the inside of the windshield. The small back seat is littered with clothes, scripts, empty cigarette packs and fast-food debris. A Bic lighter lies handily on the floor at my feet, and there’s a lovely ashtray overflowing with ashes and butts in the front console.

  Which means I don’t feel guilty lighting up.

  Not until Will looks over at me and asks, “Can you please not smoke in here, Trace?”

  “In here?” I echo. “Come on, Will, this is pretty much the Smokemobile.”

  “My throat,” he says delicately. “I have to perform tonight.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” I stub out the butt, inwardly grumbling. Then I ask, “How was opening night last night? I completely forgot to ask you about it.”

  “It went well,” he says. “I want to stop and pick up the local paper on the way to the Inn to check the reviews. They should be out by now.”

  He seems to know his way around this place pretty well, I notice, as he maneuvers the green trash can on wheels over winding, mostly unmarked country roads. The lake keeps popping up, and he points out various local attractions along its shore.

  I hate that this place is so familiar to him and it’s so foreign to me. He has this whole life without me. He lives here, and I don’t.

  The thought that in a little over a month he’ll be back in New York is no longer comforting. Not when I know I need to confront whatever he’s been doing while we’ve been apart…and, possibly, whatever he used to do while we were together.

  We stop at a little mom-and-pop-type store, the first place I’ve seen up here that’s truly quaint.

  I buy three packs of cigarettes, a Diet Raspberry Snapple Iced Tea, and the latest edition of People to read while Will is getting ready for his performance later. At this point, I’m pretty much Gulliver’s Traveled out.

  Will buys a newspaper called the Lakeside Ledger and whips through the pages as soon as we’re back in the car. He finds what he’s looking for as I open the Snapple and take a big gulp.

  I realize I’m hungry.

  “Are we going to stop for lunch anywhere?” I ask, thinking there must be a place to get a good salad up here. This is the country. Fresh vegetables. Home-grown lettuce. Deep red, sun-warmed tomatoes…

  My stomach growls ferociously, unsated by the Snapple.

  Greasy fries with tons of salt, vinegar and ketchup. A double bacon cheeseburger. A chocolate shake…

  “Will?” I prod, weak from hunger.

  “Shhh!” He’s busy reading the review.

  If we’re just going to sit here without driving, I’m going to get out and smoke to take the edge off my appetite. I climb out of the car and light up.

  As I stand there, leaning on the car in the gravel parking lot, looking around at the woodsy setting and the tourist types coming and going, I start thinking again about Will cheating. I picture him up here in the country, in the moonlight, by the lake, with somebody else.

  Then I realize that I’ve smoked my entire cigarette and Will’s still sitting silently in the car.

  “That must be a helluva long review,” I say, stubbing out the butt on the ground and poking my head in the open window.

  Will is grim.

  The page cont
aining the review is crumpled on the floor behind his seat.

  Clearly, it wasn’t a rave.

  “Are you okay?” I ask him.

  He shrugs.

  “What did it say?”

  “See for yourself.” He’s looking straight ahead.

  I climb back into the car and fish the review from a litter of ketchup-stained napkins and lipstick-stained tissues.

  Will McCraw, as George, is a comely addition to the Valley Theater cast, but brings little energy to the challenging role.

  Oh. No wonder he’s upset.

  I keep reading, my mind already racing for words of comfort.

  His lackluster performance could not begin to capture the brooding enigma that embodies his character, a passionate artist. His thin, incapable voice frequently seemed to lack the necessary range. However, the dazzling Esme Spencer was perfectly cast as the beguiling Dot, who is head over heels over the career-obsessed George and must ultimately decide whether it’s time to “Move On” in the show’s most haunting musical number. To her credit, Spencer managed to consistently create convincing romantic sparks in her onstage moments with the hapless eye candy that is McCraw.

  I feel like somebody just dropped a hair dryer into my bathtub.

  The dazzling Esme Spencer.

  So she’s his leading lady.

  So their onstage romantic sparks were convincing.

  Don’t do this.

  That comes from a cautionary voice somewhere deep inside of me.

  It’s as effective as the Patrons Only sign on the rest rooms of the Grand Hyatt hotel on Forty-Second and Lex.

  I turn to Will.

  Will is now the brooding enigma that is his character, a passionate artist.

  His arms are folded across his chest, his jaw is stiff, and he glares through the still-smudged windshield.

  In other words, this probably isn’t a good time to bring up our relationship.

  But it can’t wait any longer.

  This has been building for the past few hours, since I got here.

  No, the past few days, since he called me collect from a bar.

  No, the past few weeks, since he left.

  Oh, hell, it’s been building since I’ve known him.