Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
We went to Max Fish on Ludlow.
The lights were too bright, more suited to an interrogation room than a bar, but the drinks were cheap, Sonic Youth was playing on the jukebox, and the subversive-art-covered walls spoke to me.
“Are we okay now?” I asked when the tattooed bartender served our beers and tequila shots.
She downed her shot and chased it with beer before nodding. “We’re good.” I gave her a skeptical look. “We’re good ,” she repeated, crossing her heart. “I swear.”
I was relieved but couldn’t help but feel cheated.
Just when we’d made up, she was leaving.
“Just to prove how much I love you, I’m bequeathing you my VCR and workout tapes.
” She wagged her finger at me. “Make sure you use them. You don’t want to get all flabby.
Work those buns and abs. You can’t depend on good genes and a fast metabolism forever.
As you get older, everything heads south. ”
Great. Not only was I losing my best friend, but my body was slowly decaying.
Those workout tapes were pure torture. I only did them under duress. So far, I’d yet to acquire buns or abs of steel.
“So what’s going on with you and Gabriel?” Annika asked after our second…third?...tequila shot.
Alcohol. The great leveler. The question didn’t even sound loaded anymore. We might as well have been discussing the bartender or the pizza delivery guy.
“Nothing,” I said, peeling the label off my beer bottle.
“Why not?”
“It just…it got off on the wrong foot. And you know I don’t date musicians,” I said. “Besides, there’s plenty of other guys out there…”
My gaze drifted to the end of the bar where a guy with long, dark hair and a goatee in a leather vest was sitting under the three-foot nail sticking out of the wall. When he noticed me watching, he gave me a cocky smirk.
Okay, maybe not him . He reminded me of Dick.
I craned my neck and tried to get a better look at a cute skater boy in baggy pants and a Thrasher T-shirt. Shaggy hair. Backward ball cap. Bandaged fingers. I could play nurse and he could be the rebel who calls me “babe” and fucks like a stallion.
Annika smacked my arm. My gaze swung to her just as the skater boy started making out with a girl in a hoodie and ripped denim.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
I stared at her. “Why are you even asking me that? You know why I can’t be with Gabriel.”
“I’m over him and have been for months.” She waved her hand in the air like she was swatting away a pesky fly. Just as if Gabriel hadn’t been the reason for our massive argument and her subsequent disappearing act.
“You’re scared,” she said.
I scoffed. “I’m not scared.”
“Yes, you are,” she insisted. “I know how you operate. You’re so scared of getting your heart broken that you go for guys like David and Harry and Stephen?—”
“Who’s Stephen?”
“That guy you dated in high school who was obsessed with Henry James.”
“His name was Seth and he was obsessed with Henry Miller, not Henry James.”
“Whatever,” Annika said. “My point is that you only date guys who are safe.”
“That’s not true,” I protested. “I dated Christopher. He was the opposite of safe.”
“He was a commitment-phobic playboy. The very definition of safe.”
“He was a talented artist.” At least he thought he was. He was a narcissist straight out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. He’d fill glass jars with candy wrappers or condoms, set the jars on a plinth and call it art. I’d call it a collection, but people paid big bucks for it so what did I know?
“Let’s look at your dating history,” Annika said.
“I’d rather not.”
Annika ignored me. “Your first boyfriend was gay?—”
“Seth wasn’t gay.”
“You dated him for six months and he never even tried to get past first base. Look at you… ” She swept her arm up and down. “He was gay. Then there was your college boyfriend. What a huge improvement. I’m pretty sure he was gay too.”
I rolled my eyes. “David wasn’t gay.”
“He wore socks during sex! And he always had to take a shower immediately afterwards. What’s with that? And okay, I’ll admit that he had a certain appeal. If you’re attracted to guys who look like Jeff Goldblum, which absolutely nobody is.”
I jumped in to defend David who kind of looked like Jeff Goldblum, but Annika was on a roll, so she ignored me and proceeded to find fault with every guy I’d ever dated while simultaneously flagging down the bartender for another round.
I was already buzzed, well on my way to drunk, and Jose Cuervo had never done me any favors. But did that stop me from doing another shot?
Bottoms up.
“Which brings us to the bartender,” she said, finally wrapping up my less-than-stellar dating history.
I was only twenty-two and it sounded like I’d already been around the block with every Tom, Dick, and Hairy Harry. Not that I’d slept with all of them. But still. I had kissed a lot of frogs in my six years of dating.
“The bartender was cute, I’ll give you that,” Annika said. “But anyone could see that he was a dine-and-dash kind of guy. Which was exactly why you chose him. You knew it would never amount to anything.”
The bartender was my pathetic attempt to move on from Gabriel after he broke up with Annika. But until she’d rehashed my entire love life, I hadn’t really noticed the worrying trend.
I only went for unavailable men.
On one side of the pendulum were the academics who were more interested in grappling with abstract theories than developing a deep and meaningful relationship.
On the other side of the pendulum were the commitment-phobic playboys who promised a good time and rarely delivered.
If Annika was codependent and fell in love too easily, I was the polar opposite.
She pointed her beer bottle at me. “You know what every single one of these guys has in common?” she asked, proceeding to answer her own question. “You knew you would never fall madly, head over heels in love with any of them. That’s why you’re not with Gabriel right now. He poses a risk?—”
“That’s not fair,” I argued. “I know I messed up but I’m not about to run off with Gabriel and hurt you any more than I already have?—”
“Stop using our friendship as an excuse!” She smacked her palm on the bar for emphasis.
A guy in a trucker hat yelled, “I like your spirit, baby! I’ll bet you’re a tiger between the sheets.”
We both gave him the middle finger and Annika continued talking as if we hadn’t been so rudely interrupted.
“Not all musicians are like your dad, Cleo,” she said softly. “The first man you ever loved basically abandoned you. That would mess anyone up, so I get it. But sooner or later, you need to let your walls down and let someone in.”
There was nothing quite like being psychoanalyzed in a noisy bar when you were drunk. But maybe Annika had a point. And okay, Gabriel had accused me of the same thing. But who could blame me for being scared?
I already knew that Gabriel was that guy. The one who would change the trajectory of my entire life. The one who had the power to break my heart and destroy me just like my dad destroyed my mom.
Anyone with a modicum of self-preservation would run in the opposite direction.
“If I can move to Paris on my own, you can go for a guy who might end up being the love of your life,” Annika said. “You and Gabriel would be perfect for each other. You’re passionate about the same things. Music and books and poetry and art. You need to go for it.”
I stared at her, dumbfounded. “Do you even hear what you’re saying? You didn’t speak to me for a month and now you’re trying to push me to be with him?” I grabbed her beer and held it out of reach. “That’s the liquor talking, not you.”
Annika wrestled the bottle out of my hand and slammed it on the bar. “I was mad that you kept it a secret from me,” she said. “And I was annoyed with myself for not figuring it out sooner. I thought you hated him, but you were just trying to keep your distance.”
“I didn’t want to do anything to mess up your relationship.” And look where that got me.
“I know. And I appreciate that,” she said. “But I don’t want to be the one standing between you and a guy who is perfect for you. I just want you to be happy.”
On that note, she lunged forward and tried to wrap her arms around me, or so I assumed, but instead she lost her balance, slid off the barstool and landed in a heap at my feet.
After I helped her up, we laughed hysterically.
“Oh my god, what was that?” she wheezed.
“A swan dive. So graceful,” I said, barely able to get the words out from laughing.
“Don’t drink and dive.”
That elicited another round of uncontrollable laughter.
When we finally pulled ourselves together, I paid the tab and we stumbled out of the bar and weaved our way up the street, arm in arm.
“I don’t want you to end up being a lonely cat lady,” she said, waving her arm at the Mercury Lounge as we passed it. “Gabriel hangs out there. We should see if he’s playing tonight.”
Annika tried to steer me to the front door, but I yanked her back.
Seeing Gabriel right now had disaster written all over it. I couldn’t trust myself not to throw myself at him and start making out in the middle of the street. I did the very same thing last week when I was stone cold sober.
“I’m allergic to cats so there will be no cats involved in my spinsterhood.”
Annika threw her arms around me. “I love you and I’m going to miss you so much.”
“I love you too.” Don’t go.
We were both crying, two drunk girls hugging each other tight and holding each other up as we vowed to be best friends, through thick and thin, forever and ever.
“I think you should just go for it,” she said. “What’s the worst that can happen? At least you’ll get some good sex out of the deal.”
Just the incentive I needed. A reminder that Annika slept with him first.
When we got home after a double order of Disco Fries and cocktails at Odessa, Annika flopped onto the sofa and looked around the living room, squinting at the wall across from her. “Were our walls always this dirty?”
I fell onto the sofa, laughing.
After all the water damage, I painted the walls charcoal gray. It looked like a battleship but the paint was on sale, and it covered the brown stains so I’d just have to get used to it.
Four days later, Annika and I said our goodbyes at JFK. I deserved a medal for keeping my tone upbeat and my smile firmly in place.
“Go,” I urged when we’d lingered too long and had hugged goodbye at least half a dozen times, claiming that This is it, the last hug, this is really goodbye this time only to go back in for another hug. “Destiny is calling you. You have a plane to catch.”
“Love you,” she called over her shoulder. “I’ll call you as soon as I get settled in.”
I threw her a kiss then stood in the busy departures terminal and watched her get swallowed up in the crowd.
When she disappeared from view, my smile slipped. It felt like the end of an era.
I returned to the city alone.