Been There, Done That (6 page)

“I thought we could go shopping,” he said. “But I can come back.”

“Nuh, nuh. I’ll get dressed.” I motioned him into my living room and attempted a smile, which probably reeked of morning mouth. “Coffee,” I intoned. “Jus’ need coffee.”

Women are so much better than men. A woman would have sensed my discomfort immediately and done her utmost to diffuse it. “Oh! I’m so sorry I didn’t call first! I love sleeping late, too,” she would have confided, assuring me that the only reason she was up before lunch today was because those pesky neighbors next door—or that noisy truck or that high-strung dog—were making such a racket. Then she would have shrugged it off and gotten out of my way as quickly as possible. “You go back to sleep,” she would have commanded. “I’ll give you a buzz later and tell you about all the good shopping you missed out on.”

But Dennis wasn’t a woman. (Which was the problem, now, wasn’t it?) He merely settled himself on my floral plum couch (“Nice pattern,” he did have the decency to say) and told me he’d be there whenever I was ready.

He didn’t even want to buy anything—that was the real kicker. All he’d put me through, and he merely wanted to browse. His company had just gotten a big account with Mission Accomplished, a yuppie furniture store, and he was the account executive.

“The creatives ran some ideas past me, and I’m just not satisfied. I’d like you to tell me what you think.” He walked briskly through the warm city streets. I practically had to jog to keep up with him. Mission Accomplished was in Back Bay, normally a fifteen minute walk from my Beacon Hill apartment, but we reached it in only ten. My stomach gurgled, my head hurt, and I was sweating like a pig. I needed more coffee, preferably iced. I hoped the next guy who had a thing for me would be more into wining-and-dining me and less into furthering his career.

As its name implied, Mission Accomplished carried a lot of mission style furniture, along with other simple, complementary and equally inoffensive items. There were mid-priced Mission tables, ladder back chairs, oatmeal-colored couches. It was like Pottery Barn without the panache. I found it a little too dull, a little too safe—a good bet for yuppies who have no sense of style but want to show they have class.

We stood in the middle of the showroom, thinking, comfortable for once in our silence. “What do you think?” he finally asked. Soft jazz played in the background while young couples dressed in polo shirts and khakis tiptoed across the plush carpeting, hesitantly fingering the furniture.

I tried to think of a nice word for “boring.” “It’s inoffensive,” I finally said. “Doesn’t thrill me.”

“It doesn’t have to,” he said. “How would you sell it?”

“I have no idea.”

He squinted at me for a minute. “The creatives are fixating on understatement. ‘Furniture shouldn’t shout, it should whisper.’ Or, ‘For people who don’t need to prove anything.’ Is it just me, or is that ho-hum?” We stopped in front of an overstuffed beige-and-white-striped couch and sat down. The couch was really comfortable, actually. Surrounded by the right accent pieces, it could really make a room.

I grinned. “It’s not just you.”

He picked up a sage chenille pillow and pulled at the fringe. “But how else do you get the message across?”

I looked around again, searching without luck for a single eccentric, colorful piece. “Define it by what it’s not.”

“I don’t follow.”

“People shop here because they’re afraid of making a mistake, because they’d rather be boring than risk looking tasteless.”

“Catchy,” he said. “But I don’t think management would go for it.”

“No,” I laughed. “You don’t actually say that. I’m just trying to understand why someone would shop here in the first place.”

“How do we tap into that?”

“You tap into their fears . . . and then make light of them. Okay,” I said, thinking as I spoke. “Say you have a picture of this really ugly, really fussy couch. Bad color, lots of flounces. And underneath you have a line that says—wait! I’ve got it! Right in the middle of the couch is this bumper sticker that says, ‘My other couch is a Mission Accomplished.’” I actually clapped my hands and was immediately appalled at such reflexive corniness.

Dennis didn’t say anything. He just smiled and gazed at me with far too much delight.

I settled back into the cushy couch. “Beginner’s luck.”

“You like this. Admit it.”

“It’s fun.” Next to the couch was a vase that I actually liked: sandstone, spherical, simple in the best sense. “But I can’t imagine doing it every day, getting paid to do it.”

“Isn’t that the ultimate goal? To get paid for something that seems too fun to be work?”

I picked up the vase and checked the tag: too expensive for a writer’s budget. “You’ve been reading too many self-help books.” I put the vase back on its glass and wrought iron pedestal.

We went to a fifties style diner for brunch. It was considerate of Dennis to suggest brunch, I thought, when the rest of the city was thinking about dinner. The restaurant’s air-conditioning made me shiver. I hate that about summer: it’s always too hot outside, too cold in. I warmed my hands on my chunky coffee mug and rubbed the goose-flesh on my arms. Dennis asked the waitress to adjust the temperature.

Dennis twisted his neck around to inspect the neon and chrome. “What do you think of this place? Too kitschy?”

I shrugged. “There’s good kitsch and bad kitsch. You get a diner that no one’s bothered to update since the fifties—that’s good kitsch. But at least in a place like this, you know you won’t get hepatitis.”

Our banter felt easy, natural—just as it had before our dinner date. Maybe I was overthinking things. Maybe I should just relax and see what happened.

“What are you doing this evening?” he asked. “There’s this new bar in Harvard Square I’ve been wanting to check out.”

Whoa. Too much, too soon. So much for relaxing.

“Sounds fun, but I’ve got a million things to do,” I said, suddenly anxious to return to my empty apartment.

seven

Monday I headed to Mercer College. I made the mistake of leaving at the height of rush hour, and even the reverse commute on the Mass Pike put me into bumper-to-bumper traffic. Traffic started moving once I hit the suburbs, and I know it was mean-spirited to feel smug at the sight of the inbound traffic, which was still inching along, but hey: you grab your pleasures where you can. A short time later, the traffic cleared and the land opened up, green and even, and I would have driven eighty miles an hour but for my four-cylinder engine and my deeply ingrained fear of speeding tickets.

Shortly before I hit the Mercer, I stopped for fuel because I wasn’t sure the town was big enough to support a gas station. My faded beige Civic got excellent mileage, but I kept the gas receipt anyway. Richard was famously lax about reimbursing expenses. If he ignored enough of mine, I could simply refuse to visit the college again, and he’d start giving me some more of the usual, boring but normal assignments.

Yeah, that might work.

Higher up on my list of worries was finding a parking spot when I returned home. I’d bought my car (used) when I’d turned thirty because I felt that being an adult meant owning a car. Growing up in the suburbs spawns some twisted thinking. I had a Beacon Hill resident sticker for on-street parking, but spots were still scarce, especially in the evening, when people drove home from work; although Beacon Hill is within walking distance of most Boston businesses, a surprising number of residents commute out of the city. If I returned too late tonight, I might have to pay to park my car in a garage only to reclaim it and repark in the morning, when the commuters had left.

At last I reached the “blink and you’ll miss it” town of Mercer, Massachusetts. It was one of those villages where life revolves around the college for the simple reason that there isn’t a heck of a lot else there. After driving past College Cleaners, College Liquors (“We check ID’s”) and College Drugs (Did no one else find that funny?), I stopped at a gas station (there was one, after all) to ask for directions, which turned out to be, “Keep going down the road. Can’t miss it.”

My first step as an investigative reporter was to visit the admissions office and acquire a course catalogue. “I’d like a catalogue,” I told the middle-aged, soft-bodied secretary.

“Sure,” she said, without looking up. I was definitely making progress.

My second step was to scope the place out. In other words, I walked around, using the map in the course catalogue as my guide. Mercer College was green, leafy, brick-abundant in an East Coast, almost-Ivy kind of way. The student center contained worn oak tables and endless bulletin boards. The drama center featured a large stage. The stadium was too far from campus to bother visiting, but I studied the catalogue’s picture for long enough to feel I had been there.

Behind the green, an enormous, blocky building was under construction. Next to it, a heavyweight sign read:

 
So that explained the rising tuition costs. Low student-to-teacher ratio, my ass.

In the student lounge, I partook of a coffee with skim milk and a blueberry muffin and read the course catalogue. On the way out of the lounge I picked up a free copy of the
Mercer Bugle
and stuck it in my briefcase for later perusal.

Throughout the day, I took copious notes, including my muffin among the details because you never know what might be relevant. Since it was summer, there were no students to interview, but I spoke to every university worker who crossed my path. “Nice day.” “Sure is quiet.” “Must be tough to get those coffee stains out of the oak.” To an onlooker, these exchanges would seem insignificant. But I was relationship-building. Finding sources.

 
Tim was unimpressed. “A muffin?”

“That wasn’t the only thing! I was just being thorough. There were eleven pages of notes, in case you missed it.” He’d called just as I had started painting my toenails silver. I knew he would think such vanity silly, especially for someone who was too old for a color out of the red or pink family, and it ruined the moment. I screwed the top back on the bottle. I took the portable phone into the bathroom, where I retrieved nail polish remover and a tissue.

I could hear his mouse clicking as he scrolled through my notes. “I just—it just—I can’t . . . you say here—I’m on page four—that the dormitory beds were maple but the desks were oak. This is significant because . . . ?”

“It wasn’t easy to get admitted to a dorm, you know. They’re all shut up for the season, you know.” Actually, I’d stumbled across a dormitory that had its main door propped open. I tiptoed into the foyer, peeked into a room and scurried out before anyone could see me.

I scrubbed the polish off my two completed toes with unnecessary violence. My voice was getting high and tight in a way Tim undoubtedly recognized from our past. (“I was counting on you to pick up the eggplant for the recipe, you know.” Or, “We’re supposed to be at the party at six, you know, and it’s already six-thirty.”)

“I know,” he said, slow and low. In my naïve youth, I had taken this stock response to mean, “You are right; I am irrational and mean and ever so lucky to have you in my life.” Older now, my interpretation skills had improved. A closer reading: “Just shut up, already.”

“I don’t see any mention of the admissions guy,” he said. “What was his name?”

“Archer.”

“Right. I kind of assumed you’d meet with him.”

“I’ve already met with him. I didn’t have any other questions.”

“You could have asked—” He stopped and sighed. “Oh, never mind. I just thought you’d come up with a little more than this.”

Back in the living room, I found my shoulder bag and dug around till I found my notebook. The
Mercer Bugle
, that thin freebie newspaper, came out with it. I scanned my handwritten notes, looking for any worthwhile tidbit that I may have neglected in my e-mail to Tim. Nothing. Trying to eliminate all traces of shrillness from my voice, I said, “I can’t just go up to a random someone—custodial worker, dean—and ask if they know anything about a prostitution ring. Maybe someone else could. Maybe I’m just not right for this assignment.”

“You’re fine for this assignment,” he cooed, assuming I was looking for his assurances when, really, I just wanted to be fired. “This is a change of direction for you, that’s all. You’ll catch on.”

I shoved the notebook back into my briefcase. The newspaper was still in my hand. I was looking at the back page, I realized, the classifieds. My eye fell on the ads in the personals section. (I read newspaper personals more often than I care to admit, though I’ve never gone so far as to answer one.)