Until the Real Thing Comes Along

by Elizabeth Berg

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe I’ll come over. Should I come over?”

  “Okay.”

  I am such a bad person. My spirits are just soaring.

  “Wow,” Ethan says, when I open the door.

  “Well.”

  He eyes my cleavage. “Are you … is that you?”

  “Wonder Bra. It’s Elaine’s.”

  “Ah.”

  “Is it gross?”

  “No, it’s … wondrous.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So.” He hangs up his coat, goes over to the refrigerator. “What do you have in the way of grief food?”

  “Raw cookie dough?”

  “… umm …”

  “We could make some mashed potatoes.”

  “Yes. Garlic mashed.” He closes the refrigerator door, takes a Dutch oven out of my cupboard. I take out a sack of potatoes, a head of beautiful garlic. It is complete, ours for the having.

  “Patty?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Change your dress.”

  “I was going to,” I say. But I wasn’t. I’d forgotten all about it.

  When the potatoes are done, we sit shoulder to shoulder on the sofa, watching TV and talking and eating out of the pan with my biggest serving spoons. It is very, very good.

  We are getting ready to watch a movie when my mother calls to tell me my brother’s wife is pregnant again. I tell her that’s wonderful, the usual drill, quash the ache of jealousy inside myself. Then, “Can I call you back tomorrow?” I say. “We were just going to watch something—it’s starting in a minute.”

  “Oh, sure. Tell Mark I said hello.”

  “Well, it’s … not Mark. It’s Ethan.”

  “Didn’t you tell me you had a date with Mark tonight?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “But Ethan’s there?”

  “You know what, Mom?” I say. “It’s starting right now. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  I hang up the phone.

  “My mom says hello,” I tell Ethan.

  He nods, smiles; then leans back into the sofa, his hands clasped behind his head, his feet up on the table. His socks are a beige mini-print, lovely to behold. I watch them as much as the movie.

  In the morning, I call Elaine. “Guess what?”

  “You broke up with Mark.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He called me.”

  A moment.

  “He did?”

  “Yeah. To find out what the deal is with you.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said I didn’t know. And I swear to God, I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “What, you love Ethan?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “Patty, you need to stop this. It’s … an excuse or something. What is the point in wasting so much energy on someone who is never, ever going to love you back? Cut your losses and move on”

  “Fuck you, Elaine.”

  She hangs up.

  I call her back.

  “Don’t hang up on me,” I say. “I need you.”

  “Then don’t abuse me.”

  “I’m not abusing you. It’s just … Ethan and me. You don’t understand. If I could just … Listen, I want to tell you something.” I sit down, cross my legs, lower my voice. “Ethan’s cat died, and he hasn’t had sex with anyone for over a year.”

  “Pretty extreme reaction.”

  “No, his cat died and he came over because he felt terrible and we were just, you know, really talking, and he told me he hasn’t had sex in over a year!”

  “And you told Mark to kiss off.”

  “Not really.” I don’t know why she wants to talk about this. That is not why I called her.

  “You did, Patty! He comes over to take you out to this fabulous place and you tell him to get lost. Because Ethan’s cat died.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, Elaine, why are you taking this so personally? I don’t have to love Mark, just because you could!”

  Silence. I play with the phone cord a little, then stop.

  “Elaine?”

  “What?”

  “Could you?”

  “Maybe I could.”

  “Well … so … take him.”

  “He’s not a thing that you hand back and forth, Patty!”

  “I know. But I’m sure if he knew you were interested—”

  “He knows, okay?”

  “You told him last night?”

  “I told him before last night.”

  “You did?”

  “In so many words.”

  “Wow.” This is not exactly what I mean. Well, you bitch! is what I mean.

  “Sorry,” she says.

  “And he didn’t …?”

  “That’s what you threw away.”

  Now I hang up. In my head, I see some random woman in some random ’40s film. She is sitting at a restaurant table with another woman. “Did you get a load of that?” she is saying. “Boy, you think you know someone.” Her hat is on a little crooked. The stream of cigarette smoke she blows hard out of her mouth is dead straight on, however.

  7

  I am out in the backyard of an empty three-bedroom colonial trying to entertain the five-year-old son of my clients, the Dugans, who are inside fighting. He wants it. She doesn’t. This is a waste of time. If the She doesn’t want it, you can count on the couple not buying it. The She has to want it. If the He doesn’t want it, nine times out of ten it’s almost irrelevant; the She will talk him into it. But if the She doesn’t want it, forget it. Still, I told the Dugans to take some time, I’d be outside in the backyard when they were ready. It’s a nice winter day—bright sun, temperature in the mid-forties. The son’s name is Charles. Not Charlie, he informs me.

  “I wasn’t going to call you Charlie,” I say.

  “Everybody does.”

  “Well, I wasn’t. You look like a Charles.”

  He eyes me suspiciously. He’s an ugly child, which normally attracts me, but not in this case. The kid’s stuck-up. Bratty. When we looked at the house before this one, it was all I could do not to escort him from the place. Firmly. He was offering a running commentary in front of the owners: everything was stupid. At least he was succinct.

  “What does a Charles look like?” he asks now.

  “Well, sort of … royal. Do you know who Prince Charles is?”

  He shakes his head no.

  “Prince Charles, of England?”

  He shrugs.

  “Well, you remind me of him. He’s quite … aristocratic-looking. And a good gardener. Do you like gardens?”

  He sighs. “When are we leaving? This is boring.”

  “Your parents wanted to talk about the house a little bit, remember?”

  He turns, looks back toward it.

  “Do you like it? Did you like what would be your bedroom?”

  “No, it’s stupid.”

  “Hey, Charles,” I say. “What’s not stupid?”

  “Not you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Not you are not stupid.”

  “Yes, I understood.”

  He scowls, sits down on the light covering of snow. His shoulders slump; then he kicks his heels against the ground in a halfhearted fit.

  “Do you know you’re kind of a brat?” I say. I don’t care; this couple will never buy anything.

  He looks up.

  “Yes,” I say. “You are. If you were older, you’d be an asshole.”

  I see the couple emerging from the backdoor.

  “Moooooommmmm!” Charles yells, running to her. “She called me an asshole!”

  The woman, Joanne her name is, regards me from under lifted brows.

  “Sorry,” I say. And am not surprised when they ask that I drive them back to the office. But I am surprised when they simply drive away. I thought they were going to tell on me. And I’d get fired. Which might be a relief. And would not particularly matter, since I’m in such a bad mood all the tim
e anyway, lately. Everything in my life is wrong except that Elaine and I finally made up. Sort of. She’s really sorry. I have kind of forgiven her.

  There is a message on my desk from the Berkenheimers. I call them back, and Muriel answers.

  “Patty!” she says. “How nice to hear your voice.”

  “Yours, too,” I say, and it’s true.

  A long silence, and then Muriel says, “So? What can I do for you?”

  “Oh! Well, I had a message that you called.”

  “You did? I didn’t call. Wait a minute.” I hear her cover the phone, then yell, “Artie? Did you call Patty Murphy? Patty Murphy’s on the phone, did you call her?”

  A moment, and then there is Artie’s voice, saying, “I’ll call you right back.”

  “Okay,” I say. And hang up. And wait for about twenty minutes, without getting any phone calls. And then I leave for my manicure, which will be the only good thing that has happened to me for many, many days.

  • • •

  “Don’t start telling me how unrealistic I am,” I tell Amber.

  She looks up. “Did I say anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’m not going to say anything like that. Listen, what are you going to do? We love who we love.”

  “I wish you’d tell my mother that. When I told her I’d stopped seeing Mark, she threw a dinner roll at me.” And delivered a loud lecture about how she had been patient, but what in hell was I waiting for? My father put his hand over hers, and she pulled it away. “She’s ruining her life!” she told him.

  “Okay, Marilyn,” he’d said.

  “Well she is! Someone has got to tell her!”

  “Okay.”

  “Mom,” I said. “You don’t understand. When I kissed him, it was like watching someone else do it.”

  “I don’t think I need to hear any of these personal details, Patty.”

  “But you do! Don’t you see how lucky you were? Don’t you see how hard it is to find what you found?”

  “Well, now, she’s got a point there, Marilyn,” my father said.

  She got up, started bussing dishes angrily.

  “Mom!” I said. “Why are you so angry?”

  “Marilyn!” my father said.

  She turned to him. “What?!”

  “I’m not done!”

  He pointed to the half-full plate she had in her hand.

  She gave it back to him, then left the room.

  “Jesus,” I said, extremely quietly.

  My father raised his eyebrows, stared at me over his glasses. “This is what I mean. Lately, she’ll fly right off the handle, just like that. Ten or fifteen minutes go by, she’s fine again.” He reached across me for another dinner roll. It made him grunt a little, doing it.

  “I can’t do it, Dad. I can’t stay in a relationship just because the guy looks good on paper.”

  “You don’t have to, honey.”

  “Well, she seems to think—”

  “She’s worried about you. She wants you to be happy. She wants you to have a baby before it’s too late. Not that it’s anywhere near too late, Scout, you’ve got lots of time. Lots of time.” He buttered a roll. Generously.

  “Dad.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Since when do you use butter?”

  “Shh!”

  “But your—”

  “Listen, kiddo. You make the most out of a situation, you know?”

  I said nothing.

  “Am I right?”

  “Okay,” I said. And then, “Dad? I don’t really have a lot of time.”

  “Well.” He put his roll down, took my hand. “I know.”

  Now Amber says, “I don’t blame you for honoring your true feelings. It’s very important to do that. I know too many people who tried to talk themselves into love and then suffered terribly for it. Terribly.” She squints at a nick in my thumbnail, tsks, sighs, starts filing it smooth.

  “How?”

  “What?”

  “How did they suffer?”

  She stares at me blankly.

  “The people who tried to talk themselves into it. Into love. How did they suffer?”

  “Oh. Well, I don’t really know anyone like that. I was just trying to make you feel better.” She shrugs, cracks her gum.

  “I just don’t know what to do anymore.”

  “Hey. Get a cat. You know? People who live with cats are 70 percent happier than those who live with people.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “I swear to God.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “It is. Dogs, 40 percent.”

  I stop talking, take some comfort from the sounds of female chatter and blow-dryers. I watch a very thin young woman dressed entirely in black use a wide broom to clean up varying shades of hair. It’s probably all married hair. I look around at the women in the place. Yup, nearly all of them wear wedding rings.

  “I am incapable of having a meaningful relationship,” I tell Amber. “That’s it. It’s a very interesting form of self-sabotage, because what I want most in my life is to have a family. But every time I get anywhere close, I make sure to mess it up. Now why do I do that?”

  Amber sits back in her chair. “This is a nine-dollar manicure. You know?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What color do you want?”

  “You pick.”

  She selects a bottle of colorless polish.

  “What, are you mad at me?”

  She smiles, shakes her head. “I think you’ve got that all taken care of, hon. No, you don’t get color because your nails look like shit. Have you been biting them?”

  “No!”

  “You can tell me.”

  “A little.”

  “Well, cut it out.”

  “Okay.”

  She starts painting my thumbnail.

  “The problem is, I’m in love with a gay man,” I say quietly.

  “I know,” she says. Not quietly.

  I am getting pretty tired of telling this story. But not nearly as tired as people are of hearing it.

  Back at the office, there is another message from Artie. This time he answers. “Is that cottage on Green Street still for sale?” His voice is low, secretive.

  “Yes, I think so. You want to see it again?”

  “No, I want to buy it.”

  “But don’t you want to see it again first? It was a few months ago-”

  “No, I want to buy it. I got the money. What do we need to do?”

  “Well, we’ll need to make an offer first, see what they come back with.”

  “Give them full price.”

  “Oh, I don’t think you—”

  “Give them full price, I’ll be in tomorrow, we’ll do the paperwork.”

  “All right. But you’ll have to give me a check with the offer. A thousand dollars. Earnest money. You know.”

  “Oh yeah, right. I forgot about that. Been a long time since I bought a house. How late are you there?”

  “I can meet you anytime, Artie.”

  “All right. Eight o’clock tonight.”

  “Is Muriel coming?”

  “No.”

  I’d thought not.

  I think about Artie handing me the earnest money and I get a notion, suddenly, that it will be cash. Out of a coffee can. A big stack of dollar bills, bent in half, or maybe rolled up in a rubber band that Muriel took off a bunch of celery long ago. And then I get another notion. That, taking that money, I’ll feel really bad.

  The phone rings again. Mrs. Dugan. Could they see the colonial again, tonight? Sure, I say, surprised. She tells me they’ll be there in twenty minutes.

  An hour later, I am sitting on the kitchen floor of the colonial, admiring my manicure, looking in my purse to see if there’s anything I can play with in there. Nothing. Once more, I go to the window to look out and see if there are any cars coming. No. Well, this could be a couple of things. It could be that Joanne is paying me
back for calling her kid an asshole. Or it could be that she just won’t show up. This happens all the time in real estate. You show up somewhere, the clients don’t.

  I turn out the kitchen light, then walk around the house, turning out all the other lights. Then, in the beautiful light of the full moon outside, I pretend I live here. I go to the door of a bedroom, lean in. “Good night,” I say. The boy, Lego creations lined up on the windowsill. Then I go to another bedroom door, lean in that one, say, “Good niiiiight.” The girl, irresistible dresses hanging in her closet, though she prefers her bib overalls. On which I have embroidered things. Little flowers. A sun with a face.

  I go down into the kitchen, open the empty ice box. “Hon?” I say. “I’m making a sandwich. Do you want one?”

  I close the refrigerator door, lean against it, sigh. I have books on the shelves of the little den; I have a sewing basket in the family room; I have miniature marshmallows in the cupboard. I have whimsically decorated Band-Aids in the medicine chest: cartoon figures, stars, glitter. I have a kitchen calendar with writing all over it. Every day, there are human events for which I am responsible. Things done by and for the children I made, the husband who loves me.

  “Wait for me, okay?” I call out. I’m talking to my husband who wants to start the movie we rented. I think that’s who I’m talking to.

  Back at the office, I turn on the lights and call the answering service. Dugans called. Sorry they missed me. But right before our appointment, they decided on another house. Uh-huh. And Muriel Berkenheimer. What in the hell is going on with them?

  I dial their number. Muriel answers.

  “It’s Patty,” I say.

  “Oh, Patty.” She starts to cry.

  “Muriel?”

  “Can you come over?”

  “I—come over to your house?”

  “Yes, it’s not so far. Thirty, thirty-five minutes. Have you had dinner?”

  “Well, no, actually.”

  “So you’ll come, we’ll have some dinner. We have to talk.”

  “Muriel, did Artie—”

  “I know, Patty. Come over. We’ll talk.”

  8

  Artie and Muriel live in a small but thoroughly charming Cape. When Muriel opens the door and shows me into the living room, I see gorgeous moldings, a fireplace with a carved mantel, a fire burning there. The furniture is exactly what I might have envisioned for them: Sears-type colonial, the upholstery shades of green and rust. A maple coffee table is crowded with photographs, and there is a candy dish full of butterscotch. The lamps remind me of the extravagant hats worn by Victorian women. I can smell beef roasting, and it comes to me that it’s been a long time since I’ve smelled that most substantial of smells.