Misery Loves Cabernet Read online

  “Do you think I need eyelid surgery?” Kate asks.

  The girl has rendered me speechless for a moment. “As opposed to what?” I finally ask.

  “Well, a boob job, I suppose. Or maybe the collagen lips thing.”

  “Trout pout’s over,” I hear Dawn warn in the background.

  “Fair enough,” Kate concedes. “But I have to do something. I haven’t been out in the dating world for nine years. I need something to spruce up my image.”

  “Hey! Size four!” I hear Dawn yell, “For the love of all that is holy . . . put the diet book down!”

  I hear Dawn take the phone from Kate. “We gotta go. I have to get the girl to a hot fudge sundae before she completely loses it. Are you gonna be okay?”

  I stare absentmindedly at Jordan’s e-mail. “Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

  “Good. We’re meeting at your place at eight. Call me if you need to talk. Bye.”

  “Bye,” I say, and hang up the phone.

  I let my bottom lip puff out in self-pity as I read again:

  Charlie, you’re overthinking this. Have fun at the Halloween party. Talk to whomever you want. As you said before, we’ll figure this out when I get home. No worries.

  xoxo

  J

  I stare at my computer, and click on my inbox. An e-mail telling me I’ve just won twenty-five million pounds in the British lottery, and another one trying to sell me Viagra. (I am curious as to how I got on that spam list.)

  I force myself to walk away from the computer, only to see a different pack of unopened cigarettes beckoning me from the dining room table.

  I purse my lips together as I stare at them.

  Cigarettes. I really should quit buying them. Although I’ve decided to quit, I like keeping packs of them around. It’s like a little black book of old boyfriends’ phone numbers: just knowing they’re there in an emergency makes me feel better.

  My iPhone rings. I check the caller ID. My boss, Drew Stanton.

  The butterfly has emerged from his cocoon.

  I pick up. “Hi, Drew.”

  “What does a manic depressive act like?” Drew asks me, sounding like he’s in a state of utter distress.

  “Well,” I begin, trying to come up with a succinct definition. “They act sort of like you, only they get depressed sometimes.”

  “Okay, then that’s not it,” Drew says quickly. “Then I think I’m having a panic attack.”

  “Did you accidentally climb into that crocodile exhibit again?” I ask sternly.

  “No.”

  “Are you hanging three thousand feet in the air without a net?”

  “No!” Drew blurts out. “And I thought we agreed you would never speak of that incident again.”

  “My bad,” I apologize. “Are there any sharks, snakes, or hitmen within ten feet of you?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re probably not having a panic attack,” I conclude. “You only tend to have those when there’s a genuine need for panic.”

  “Okay,” Drew concedes. “So then, what does a heart attack feel like?”

  “You know, this would go a lot faster if you’d just tell me what happened.”

  “I’ve been fired,” Drew says, sounding like he’s hyperventilating. “The head of Pinnacle called my agent to say that they don’t think they should be spending two hundred million dollars to make Men in Motion 2. I’m out of a job!”

  Oh, crap. If Drew is out of a job, that means he’s going to spend the entire holiday season filling his days by trying to find the perfect religion, the perfect woman, or the perfect Pre-Colombian pottery. And he’ll be dragging me along with him on that quest.

  Before I can respond, Drew’s voice changes completely, going from a tone of sheer terror to one of contemplation and calm. “You know, he’s telling the Hollywood Reporter it’s ‘creative differences,’ but, really, I think he’s mad about the hippo.”

  The hippo. I think to myself.

  Drew is silent on the other end, waiting for my response. Finally, I oblige him. “And by hippo you would mean . . . ?”

  “Ida.”

  “Ida,” I repeat, trying to figure out what clever wordplay he’s used for his latest animal acquisition. Last month it was an elephant named Cindy (short for Cinderelephant—isn’t he clever?).

  So Ida must be . . . “Is it short for, ‘Ida thought I wouldn’t do something so insane as to adopt a hippo’?” I ask.

  “Nah,” Drew says, and I can hear by his tone of voice that he’s waving me off with his hand. “I named her after my aunt Ida. They’re both short and fat, and have huge legs. I rescued her from an estate in Costa Rica.”

  I’m dead silent. It’s like joining an in-progress conversation that includes the phrase “Dirty Sanchez.” You won’t be able to catch up, and you won’t have anything interesting to add, so just stay quiet.

  “I was going to name her Hippocrates,” Drew continues. “But then I thought, that’s a little on the nose. Besides, she’s a girl. What would people think if I gave her a boy’s name? Then of course, I thought of naming her after my uncle: but it turns out the word hypocrite has a ‘Y’ in it.”

  I still stay quiet.

  “Are you still there?” Drew asks.

  “Barely,” I say, sighing.

  The next words out of my mouth are words I never thought I’d have to utter in my lifetime. “Didn’t I specifically tell you that you couldn’t get a hippo?”

  “Yes, you did,” Drew says breezily, “but then I remembered that you work for me, I don’t work for you. Which means you’re not the boss of me.”

  Well, he sure told me.

  “In my defense . . . ,” Drew continues.

  “Can you hold on a second?” I ask Drew.

  “Sure,” he says.

  I jot down in my notebook:

  No good has ever come from a conversation that began with the words, “In my defense . . .”

  “Okay, you were saying . . . ?”

  “In my defense, there were a bunch of hippos that were about to be destroyed if no one took them. It was on the news. A bunch of zoos took the other hippos, and the only hippo left was Ida. So, I found this wildlife refuge that agreed to take Ida if I could get her to them, and pay for the ninety pounds of food she eats every day. And all that was supposed to happen was that I was supposed to pay to have Ida transported to the refuge. Only, the company in charge of the move I guess got confused, because they sent her to my house.”

  What the fuck? Who sends a two-ton hippo to the middle of Brentwood?

  “Only, they didn’t actually send her to my house,” Drew continues. “Because I specifically told them I live at 3592 Greenlawn. But they sent her to 3952 Greenlawn. Which, the good news on that is, the owners of 3952 have a pool, and they’ve graciously allowed her to stay for the next hour or two while we get someone to bring her to the refuge.”

  I shake my head and sigh. “And the bad news?”

  “The bad news is the owner of 3952 Greenlawn is also the head of Pinnacle Studios. And I’ve been fired due to ‘creative differences.’ ”

  “And by creative differences you mean . . .”

  “He thought sending a hippopotamus to the head of a studio was not particularly creative.”

  “Ah.”

  Figures. This is just so typical of Drew. Working for a movie star is like working for an unhousebroken puppy with a Black American Express card: You spend part of your life cleaning up after him, part of your life wanting to yell, “Sit. Stay,” and part of your life wondering how someone so stupid can be so successful that they have a Black American Express Card.

  Drew continues, “I need you to come here with one hundred pounds of grass, and by that I don’t mean pot, I mean actual grass. Plus a pastrami on rye for me, light mayo, extra tomatoes.”

  I roll my eyes as I jot down his demands on a notepad. I went to college so I could ask my next question, “You want fries with that?”

  “Yes, the
curly kind. Oh, and call whomever it is one would call to wrangle an amorous hippo.”

  “Wait,” I say, closing my eyes to wince as I unconsciously lift up the palm of my hand in a “Stop” motion. “What do you mean ‘amorous’?”

  “Um . . . amorous. It means lovesick, in heat, horny as a teenage boy on Jell-O shots. . . .”

  “I know what it means,” I interrupt. “I meant, why is she amorous?”

  I hear what sounds like a tuba playing on Drew’s end of the line. “I don’t know,” Drew answers, “but if I wanted to be sexually involved with a hippo, I would date my old high-school girlfriend.”

  I spend the next thirty minutes making arrangements to have Ida picked up and moved to a wildlife refuge, and calling a stable and a deli so that when I get to 3952 Greenlawn, I will be armed with one hundred pounds of grass, and a pastrami on rye with curly fries.

  Well, on the plus side, I haven’t thought about Jordan’s e-mail for two of those thirty minutes.

  Man, why can’t I stop thinking about Jordan? Why am I letting this relationship color every other aspect of my life? It’s becoming like OCD: I’m obsessed with figuring out what I have to do to get him to want me all the time. I have entire conversations between the two of us—completely in my head. All I can think about lately is kissing him.

  I once read that an alcoholic’s brain is set up to always think about finding a way to get more alcohol delivered to the body. No matter how satisfying the job the alcoholic holds, she thinks about happy hour at the end of the day. No matter how fulfilling a family life the alcoholic has, or what hobbies she enjoys, all her brain does is compartmentalize those things while mentally in search of the next drink.

  For me: I’m not appreciating anything great that’s going on in my life because in my mind all I’m doing is killing time until the next time I get to see Jordan.

  I’m a Jordanoholic.

  Sigh. Maybe admitting it is the first step to recovery.

  I look over at the cigarettes centerpiecing my dining-room table with a longing that should only be reserved for high-school crushes and Johnny Depp sightings.

  I pick up the cigarettes from the table, and examine the little cellophane tab on the pack.

  One pull and they could all be mine. . . .

  Maybe some nicotine gum would make me saner.

  Maybe a new relationship would make me saner.

  Goddamn it. I am so tired of being a silver medalist.

  Every two years, I find myself feeling sorry for the person who wins the silver medal at the Olympics. They spend their entire lives focused on one goal: to win the gold medal in an event, in anything from men’s skiing to women’s synchronized swimming. Years and years of training: waking up at five in the morning when your friends are sleeping in; enduring bruises, sprains, and broken bones while your friends are off at the mall. Forgoing school dances, or the prom, so that you can travel to amateur athletic events in states you never had any interest in seeing. So much sacrifice, just in the desperate hope that you will one day attain your goal, the elusive gold medal.

  And that’s what dating is like. You spend years and years training: You work out, (okay, I don’t, but I know I should), you diet, you learn how to wear the right clothes, apply the right makeup—anything to make you look good to the opposite sex. You study; you listen to all of your friends’ theories on how to find the perfect man. You read books about relationships, or how to improve yourself to get a relationship. (This includes everything from diet and exercise books to self-improvement books.)

  And then you train in the methods of dating: The first few years, you order the salad on the first date and barely touch your food. Then, by your early twenties, you realize that men would prefer you to actually eat, so you order the chicken, or the second cheapest thing on the menu if you don’t want to look too obvious. Then you realize they’re onto you about the chicken, and you look ridiculous so, fuck it, you order the steak.

  In other words, you observe your skills in this arena, you adjust your behavior, you perfect your technique. The goal is always the same: Do anything you have to do to get that gold medal!

  And—finally!—you find the guy. The one.

  Only it’s not everything you want it to be, and the relationship just makes you feel like you’re almost there, but not quite.

  A big honkin’ silver medal.

  Why do relationships always have to be so hard? Why must we constantly be tested? Shouldn’t it be enough to find the guy? And what is it about our genetic makeup that even when we have the guy, we still aren’t sure what to do next?

  I shake my head to clear the cobwebs. Hippo, I think as I throw down the cigarettes, grab my purse, and head out the door.

  Maybe Ida can keep my mind off Jordan for a few more minutes.

  Two

  Oh, crap.

  I knew it! Four hours, and one dead iPhone later, I knew I’d come home to a blinking red light on my answering machine.

  I glare at the machine—not so much because I hate the machine as because I hate my boss. I press PLAY.

  “Hey, it’s me!” I hear Jordan yell into the phone. “It’s about midnight my time, middle of the afternoon your time. I tried to call you on your cell twice, but the weirdest thing happened. The first time I heard this whooshing noise, and then the second time I called back, it went right to your voice mail.”

  “Well, of course you heard a whooshing noise,” I say out loud to the machine. “Wasn’t it obvious your call would trigger my cell to play the ringtone ‘Jungle Boogie,’ scaring Ida the Hippo enough to unlock her jaw, and roar so loud that I would drop the phone into the pool?”

  “Anyway, so I’m calling you here, in the hopes you’ll pick up . . . ,” Jordan continues to yell into the phone.

  “Jordan, love,” I hear in a lilting (very female) French accent, “did you want a pint of Guinness or a Stella Artois?”

  “Stella is fine,” I hear him yell to the mystery girl. Then, I listen to the people in the background laughing and talking as Jordan waits for me to pick up. “Okay, you’re not there. Which is not a big deal, I know you have a life and you’re not sitting by the phone waiting for me.”

  Was that a joke?! He says it lightheartedly, like it was some kind of joke.

  “I was just calling to wish you a happy Halloween and to tell you I miss you. They don’t have any pumpkins here, so I turned an orange into a jack-o’-lantern. It’s. Not. Pretty.”

  He pauses for a moment. Maybe hoping I’ll pick up?

  “Anyway, I’m going to have a quick beer with a couple of the crew guys, then head off to bed. Call me if you get this in the next hour or so. Miss you! Bye!”

  And he’s gone.

  “Two oh seven,” the automated voice on my machine tells me.

  Three hours ago. Which means he’s asleep by now, and I can’t call him.

  Or, he’s having sex with that bimbo (or whatever word the French use for bimbo), in which case I could call him, but then I look like the clueless girlfriend.

  Ex-girlfriend.

  Good friend?

  I open my purse, and look at the recently opened box of Nicorette gum I bought from Costco on my way home. One hundred pieces of heaven, each with four milligrams of nicotine.

  I didn’t want to resort to nicotine gum. It just seemed like trading one addiction for another. But when I dropped my iPhone into the pool, one of my many unopened packs of cigarettes went in with it. And, despite Ida’s roar, I almost went in after them.

  It’s when I put my toe into the pool water that I learned that when hippos feel threatened, they spin their tails while pooping, thereby spraying the shit everywhere, including all over me and Drew.

  I then learned that a hippo can get so freaked out if you get near it that it can throw itself on top of you and crush you to death.

  Despite the poop and the threat of death, I was still tempted to go in after my cigarettes. It was at that moment I realized that I might be more addicte
d to the little sticks of joy than I had been willing to own up to.

  After admitting I might be more addicted to cigarettes than a 1930s beat reporter, I bit the bullet, bought the gum, and bit down into my first precious piece on the way home.

  The moment I felt the gum start tingling in my mouth, I was sure the experience would be better than an orgasm. I actually pulled the car over and parked for a few minutes just so that I could enjoy my gum.

  The package said to chew at least nine pieces a day for the first six weeks. That was not going to be a problem.

  I pop another piece of nicotine gum out of its foil prison, and into my mouth.

  Then I take a deep breath, and continue to ponder the mystery of Jordan.

  Okay, on the one hand, clearly Jordan misses me: he called me twice on my cell, then called me at home, then waited for me to pick up. That definitely sounds like he wanted to talk to me.

  On the other hand, he didn’t say “Call me whenever you get this.” And he did say he was having beers with some crew “guys,” but clearly that wasn’t the case—there was at least one girl there, maybe more.

  But maybe he just said “guys” meaning “people.” And, if he were trying to hide something from me, he wouldn’t be so stupid as to let me hear the girl he’s interested in buy him a drink. Right? And maybe that was just the cocktail waitress who was just being friendly. . . .

  I pick up the phone, ready to call Dawn and Kate, to play them the message, and to get their opinions.

  It’s at this moment, staring at my phone, that I see how crazy I’ve become. And even I’m tired of it.

  I hang up the phone, take a deep breath (okay, granted, only after putting my index and middle fingers up to my lips, then inhaling an invisible Marlboro), and calm myself down.

  Tonight, I’m going to focus on me. I’m going to enjoy the party, talk to whomever I want, and get on with my life.

  Three

  Two hours and four pieces of gum later, as I finish applying mascara to my lashes, I hear the doorbell ring.