Love Sick Read online

  He reminded me of Dar. At least until I finished the first margarita. After the second margarita I probably couldn’t have told you Dar’s last name. By the time we’d bowled four games and drunk three margaritas, I proposed marriage to the mozzarella sticks. We sat on a banquette and drank a last margarita, refusing to give up our shoes until we had to.

  “I like the Bingo Players,” he said into my ear, “but not for a bowling alley. People waiting their turn or walking up to the lane, they want to sing along.”

  “Yeah, you were jammin’ on Joan Jett out there.”

  “That’s because I am Joan Jett.” I looked at him skeptically. “Really. My hair is black, I have black eyes, I own a leather jacket.”

  “You’ve convinced me,” I assure him.

  “Bowling should be balletic. Especially when you’re as bad as we are. All we can do is work on presentation. Being that I’m Joan Jett, no one had the balls to look at my score. I rule Bowlmor.”

  “No such luck for me,” I lamented. “I can only say that I throw a beautiful gutter.”

  “Oh, but it’s important to throw gutter balls. It’s Rosie the Robot’s job to retrieve them.” He made two high squeaks. I looked at him blankly, then squeaked back in my Flipper voice. “Don’t change mediums on me here. I can’t make you laugh under water. Let’s stay in Orbit City, daughter Judy, and worry about Spacely’s Space Sprockets. Understood?”

  Maybe it was four margaritas or my string of God-awful dates, or maybe mirth is a dearly loved and dearly missed commodity in my life, but I was rubbing my aching cheeks.

  “Because if it wasn’t for Spacely’s Space Sprockets I’d have to worry I’d drunk to excess and that would defeat George Jetson’s computer, which is very specifically against cruelty to humans. Let’s give our shoes back and take a walk.”

  I was surprised to find a bouncer and a velvet rope outside. I don’t think Bowlmor discriminates according to looks and connections, but latecomers definitely had to wait their turn while Galean picked out a pink ball and sang, “I hate myself for loving you” to it before rattling it into two pins.

  I felt . . . young. The line of pretty people we had usurped was a grandeur I couldn’t have predicted. It was warm but not as oppressive as four hours ago. NYU students and faux-hipsters filled the sidewalk bars.

  “I’m glad I answered your proposal,” Galean said. “Most of the dates are pretty pathetic. ‘How About We . . . walk the High Line!’ It’s ninetyfuckingdegrees outside. How About We take a tour of a crematorium!”

  “Thank God the bowling alley had air-conditioning made by NASA,” I agreed. “What do you usually do on a first date?”

  “You’re my first date-date since I got divorced,” he said.

  I stopped. “Wait. You’re thirty. You went to college. How much bad stuff can happen in a couple of years? And if I’m a date-date, what did you do on your date?”

  “Went out with my best friend and her husband and her best friend. Drank a lot. Went home with the best friend. Now I’m fighting with both my best friend and her best friend.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah. The only good thing I can say about her best friend is that she can hold her booze. I have two requirements about women and the first is that they don’t go slobbery-stupid when they drink.” He kissed me. “You’ve met this first requirement.” He kissed me again.

  He was a great kisser.

  “You’re a great kisser,” he said.

  “Uhmww,” I said as I kissed him.

  “Why dontcha take it inside?” someone yelled, and we laughed, rubbing noses before starting to amble down Thirteenth Street.

  It is two long blocks to Seventh Avenue and we made it longer. We necked, made out, snogged, pashed. We rouler-ed un patin.* When we got to the subway station I announced I was taking a cab home. I gave him my phone number and told him to call me when he got home to Locust Manor in the far reaches of Queens. Galean hadn’t wanted any preliminary chitchat and I thought him a genius for that now.

  He snapped his cell phone shut and hailed me a cab, then stopped the next one for his own long trip to Queens. It was after one, far later than I’m used to being out. By two, we’d both come to orgasm and fallen asleep on the phone.

  • • •

  If the seeming possibilities of that night were true, tonight his best friend, her husband and her best friend would be noshing on guacamole while I whirred up a batch of something from a nice Puerto Rican rum that Galean and I bought on a visit to his grandmother.

  • • •

  I woke, late and hungover, because the phone rang. Galean offered to come to Brooklyn for brunch. I had stacks of essays, which meant I’d given up the niceties of scrubbing the bathroom and dusting. I could give him a clean toilet and bathroom sink and a clean me in the hour and a half before he arrived. When he called from the Clark Street station Daisy and I set out to meet him halfway.

  “Who’s that?” I asked enthusiastically. I half-crouched and pointed. “Who’s that man? Who is it? Is that Uncle Galean?”

  This is our routine whenever we see a friend or, today, a new friend. Her tail turns into a blur of anticipation and her ears go back against her head as she shakes and barks. As soon as I’m absolutely sure she has her target I let go of her leash and she runs in her own half-crouch of submissive love. Her lovers will pat their chests so that she jumps up to kiss. Her true lovers will swat her neck and forequarters in play so that she dances a quadrangle through their legs. For her worshippers, she throws herself on her back and gazes knowingly up for a belly rub.

  Galean looked askance.

  Daisy looked equally askance. She expects that anyone called uncle or auntie will do something. I clapped my hands and she raced back to me.

  “This is Daisy,” I said.

  “I figured. Cute dog. Big.”

  “I thought I’d introduce you before we go out. Are you hungover or are you hungry?”

  “I’m starving. I’m hardly ever hungover. Are you?”

  “Very hungry and very hungover. Twenty years ago I could have drunk you under the table but these days I go months without a drink.” I stopped to take Daisy inside, then took Galean’s arm to guide him toward the pig binge at the Irish bar on Montague. Sausage and bacon. Two kinds of pudding. Eggs and home fries and a free Bloody Mary.

  The perfect hangover antidote.

  And it has booths, a jukebox and, to Galean’s amusement, “eggs Benedictine.”

  I realized he was the first Catholic boy I’d been out with that summer. My heart smiled.

  We ordered and then he dragged me to my feet. “Now comes the important part.” He pulled out a five-dollar bill and studied the jukebox as though it was the LSATs. “We want to introduce Sunday gently,” he said, and punched in some numbers. “Owl City to start. Then”—he flipped through the stiff pages—“we’ll take it up a notch. Ah! Perfect. Now we ratchet it up again but we keep it familiar so that people don’t complain about the noise. Good box. They have Amy Winehouse.” He flipped some more. “Ian Dury—and it’s ‘Lullaby for Francis’! How beautiful is that? Yeah, my boy Ian will bring us down to the Jason Mraz and we’ll finish with”—the pages clicked to the end and he thwacked the entire catalogue back to the beginning—“Yes. Beta Band. It’s feel good, it’s mellow as cream in your coffee and people will be wondering where they heard it before.” He turned and handed me a fiver. “Your turn.”

  I’ve never fancied myself a DJ and know nothing about music anymore. The bands he’d talked about could have been a Chinese dialect. I began turning the pages. I picked “Norwegian Wood,” then Annie Lennox giving up on love. Cyndi Lauper’s “I Drove All Night.” He’d said something about pumping up the beat so I punched in the B-52s and then I was stumped, racking my brain as I clacked from page to page for songs that I liked—and that Galean might like.

&nbs
p; “Break on Through” must have been included for last call when the local stud traders and lawyers were drunk enough to fancy themselves their black sheep uncles who were at Woodstock, man.

  But it’s also an important song to me. I play it when I get stuck writing. It helps me punch through the walls of my self. Would Galean get it?

  “A jukebox is a test,” he said as we tucked in to our pig feast. “I can tell everything about a woman by what she picks.”

  Oh. F-uuuu-ckkkk. Again with “Rhythm and Blues for a thousand, Alex.”

  What had I told him? That I’m essentially stuck in the early 1980s. That I’m pretty girlie, what with all that yearning and desperation to escape. I mean, break on through, get out of that state, I drove all night to get to you, set this spirit free, when I awoke I was alone?

  Yikes.

  His only comment, however, was that he wouldn’t have chosen The Doors, “not for a Sunday afternoon.” I told him why I like the song as we walked home but he was an aesthete rather than a memoirist.

  With a shudder of fear, I realized that only the Orange Rose Guy had been inside my apartment since I’d started this enterprise. The most perspicacious comment anyone has ever made about the Bat Cave is that you should never set anything down because you’ll never find it again. Bette is the one person who truly loves the Bat Cave. She sits on my love seat with Daisy attached to her side and looks around, awestruck. “It’s like a museum in here, Franny. And it always smells like coffee.”

  Most people either say “Wow” or something nice but filled with ellipses.

  Galean was a Wow.

  I didn’t want to go to bed with him but I badly wanted to fool around. I suggested we watch a movie and told him to pick something out while I walked Daisy. He handed me the DVD for Closer when we got back. I looked around at my lack of seating. The love seat isn’t comfortable for two, and my futon was folded over on the floor.

  “This is going to sound weird,” I said, “but the most comfortable and the cleanest way to watch a movie is make up the futon and for both of to take off clothes we don’t want covered in dog hair.” He wrinkled his eyebrows. “It’s July,” I explained. “She’s shedding a small poodle every day. And Daisy sleeps with me, so . . .”

  He nodded and started taking off his shirt and pants, which I hung up in the bathroom where they were most likely to be out of hair’s way.

  “This is a come-on,” I told him as I unfolded the futon, “but it’s a practical come-on.”

  Daisy was thrilled and plonked herself down between us and pushed her nose into Galean’s cheek before turning over for a four-handed belly rub.

  I love the feeling of Daisy against my bare skin. Labs are smooth, silky dogs, not dry fluff or curly like, say, a golden retriever or poodle. To me it’s the difference between satin and gunnysack and I never get tired of the weight of a dog stretched along my side.

  Galean wiped his face and patted her awkwardly. “Nice doggie.”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “This is a Labrador, not some dumb Chihuahua that you can break. This is how you pet a Lab.” I sat up and took a bulging handful of neck and rubbed her with my knuckles. “You don’t pet a Lab. You rearrange them.”

  At the repositioning of her coat, Daisy turned and flirted up at me. I sang, “Oh come let us adore me, I’m Daisy the dawg” to the tune of “Come All Ye Faithful.” Galean laughed anemically.

  If July makes her shed, it also reduces her snuggle time. After ten minutes she went off to the cool tiles in the bathroom. Galean quickly closed the gap.

  I was impressed by his choice of movie and by how much of his girliness he was in touch with. Closer is a thinking person’s film, an exploration of multiple attractions and the limpidity of half-realized love. We laughed when Clive Owens spat at Jude Law, “You—you writer!” But it’s also a very claustrophobic movie, mostly interiors, and some dark ones at that. Doing the hanky-panky helped but by the credits, the Bat Cave looked tawdry and smaller than ever. The light I could sense beyond my windows was thickening and I was exhausted. I told Galean that Daisy and I would walk him to the train.

  “I have to tell you something,” I said as we stepped into the street. I pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “I smoke.”

  “Oh, God,” he said. “That’s terrible.”

  “I don’t have to smoke all the time and there is such a thing as toothpaste,” I said. “We’ve spent some serious time together in the last twenty-four hours and I haven’t lit up.”

  “So why now? I’m leaving.”

  “Dunno. That movie. The low sky. Sunday evenings.” I sighed but put them away.

  We talked through our mutual tiredness in the two blocks to the subway, but I don’t remember about what until Daisy got into a trash bag outside the butcher shop and came up with three (yes, really: three) baguettes. She looked like a rhinoceros that had gotten its horns and bumps mixed up. I was crying with laughter as I tried to pull them out and she deftly turned her head the other way. A man saw my struggle and started laughing, too. “Can I take a picture of that?” he asked.

  He got my email address and left. I turned to Galean. “Thank you so much for brunch and hanging out with me.”

  “It was fun,” he said.

  “Let’s talk soon.”

  He kissed me good-bye, one arm crooked around my neck. I walked my bread-bristling beast home with a smile. I’d had a couple of good dates. I was hoping for another one, with Galean, the next weekend. This was riches beyond riches and I was worried. If I found myself with a boyfriend, would I give up this book and settle for happiness?

  Eight

  Pandas lose interest in sex in captivity because they will only mate with pandas that have personalities like their own. At one time, scientists developed panda porn to stimulate male arousal, as well as dosing them with Viagra.

  “You know the weirdest thing about him?” I said to Will. “He looks a lot like your Rico.”

  “My boyfriend or my Chihuahua?” he said with his Tin Man’s creaky laugh.

  “Boyfriend.”

  “Really,” he exclaimed, his voice turning sharp. “Really” is one of those words that should be in the Urban Dictionary. I first picked it up from Janeane Garofalo and it seems to have gone viral. If you come down hard and sharp on the first syllable—reee—and nearly drop the last and use it as a one-word sentence, it mixes being impressed with irony, expectation with disbelief. It is one of Will’s and my in-words.

  “Send me, send me!”

  I clicked around How About We and emailed his photo.

  “Yeah, I can definitely see it. What kind of name is Galean?”

  “Spanish. He’s half Puerto Rican.”

  “He looks intense.”

  “He is, kind of. No guy’s made me laugh as hard since Dar.”

  “If he can make you get over Dar, I love him already. When are you seeing him again?”

  I yawned. “Not for days, I hope. I haven’t stayed up that late and drunk that much and then followed up a couple of hours later with more booze and more talk in donkey’s years. He’s thirty, I need time to recover.”

  “Do you have his phone number? You should call him.”

  “I have it on caller ID but I want to play it cool.”

  “Nail him.”

  “He almost nailed me. He’s an ass man.”

  Will purred. “Did you leave the deed undone?”

  “I invoked the Third Date Rule, but I could change it to second for Galean.”

  He started laughing. “I got the picture of Daisy. ‘Bread Dog.’ What a hoot. She looks like a pincushion. Did she like Galean?” He pronounced his name in second-grade singsong. Pretty soon we’d be sittin’ in a tree.

  “Of course.”

  “Did he like Daisy?”

  “I think so,” I said slowly.

 
“He has to,” he said firmly. “Anyway, how could he not? She’s loving and funny and gorgeous.”

  “And big and the star of the show,” I added. “You know, it’s perfectly possible that having a big dog would be one of the first things that could attract me to a guy. It’s weird that it doesn’t seem to work the other way around, even though I make a point of her in my profiles and photos.”

  “It’s New York, honey. And don’t forget: You and I have the talent of enjoying dogs. Not everybody does. It’s like a foreign language or something.” I like how our lives mirror each other. He’s an endocrinologist; I write about obesity. He’s a veterinarian; I walk dogs even when I’m adjunct teaching. I feel like a prized Steuben miniature of him when we talk about those things.

  I was pulling stuff together to go see my acupuncturist as I talked to Will, two months since Hero had tried to mix it up with the beagle, Bacchus, and twisted me around in ways a person shouldn’t twist. The pinched nerve in my shoulder made my elbow sensitive to the air conditioner near my desk, and waves of numbness would wash over the left side of my chest and arm.

  “Sounds like myocardial infarct,” my father had said dispassionately. “You better get yourself to a doctor now.”

  It’s a family joke that Dad, a retired doctor with a sixth sense for diagnosis, was serious about aches and illnesses when he A) hauled out antibiotics, or B) sent us to a doctor. I knew he was concerned when my brother called and told me to at least start taking aspirin every day.

  But the numbness in my fingers, like the numbness in my heart, was starting to recede. I was walking Italian greyhounds, an elderly golden retriever and a French bulldog that summer. I could shake my left arm as much as I wanted while walking all that docility.

  “All I can say is that Daisy was loving with Galean and that she eventually went to sleep in the bathroom.”

  “Ah, summer,” Will said. “All three of my bulldogs are asleep on the kitchen floor. It’s tiled, too.”