Bad Boy (25 page)

“That was considerate,” Beth said, using the voice that he’d heard all his life. “You’re a sweet guy.”

“No I’m not,” Jon said with more force than he meant to use. Beth blinked the eyes he was not supposed to comment on. Great. Next he’d start babbling about his luggage and the Unabomber. She’d run screaming from the restaurant. Get a grip, he told himself. Beth was saying something about the place and he had to get out of his head and respond. “Are you from Seattle?” he managed to ask. God, that was lame, but at least it got her going. She began talking about each of the places she’d lived. But he got distracted. Because out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tracie enter the place with Phil and take a table on the other side of the restaurant. Oh, no. She had told him she would be there for him, but somehow he hadn’t imagined Phil along with her.

Of course, she wouldn’t be coming alone and he supposed that Phil
‌
—odious as he was
‌
—was better than Laura. In case he blew this, he didn’t want the woman he’d accidentally tried to pick up to
[remove“to”?]
watch him go down in flames.

Tracie surveyed the room, caught his eye, and then waved to him discreetly. She slipped into a chair with her back to Beth and Jon. Then
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Jon realized that Beth was asking him a question.

“Huh?” he asked like a lunkhead.

“What kind of bike do you ride?” she repeated.

“A Schwinn . . . uh . . . Could you excuse me a minute?” he asked as she laughed.

“Yeah, sure, Jonny,” she told him. He gritted his teeth. He hated that stupid name. He got up and started to walk toward Tracie’s table, but Beth interrupted him. “I think the men’s room is that way,” she said.

“Oh, thanks. Yeah, right.” He walked off in the direction that Beth pointed in, then managed to hide himself for a moment in the hallway and doubled back. He crouched, then ran to Tracie’s table. He stuck his head up between Tracie and Phil. He’d just blank Phil out. Phil, and all the smooth Phils of the world. Jon focused on Tracie.

But he couldn’t blank Phil out, because when he raised his head to Phil’s eye level, Phil did a complete double take. If he’d had something in his mouth, it would have been a spit take. Though he was in no mood for jokes, Jon readied himself for the insult.

“Whoa, little dude! Is that Jonny?” Jon didn’t bother to respond, but Phil continued. “Tracie, he looks good. I mean for him, he looks really good!”

Jon just decided to ignore him. “It’s going all wrong,” he told Tracie.

“Oh, really?” she said sarcastically. “Could it have been when you flicked your Bic at her?”

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“It wasn’t a Bic it was a Pez.”

“Well, that makes all the difference,” Tracie told him, but the sarcasm was lost on him.

“Okay, okay. I screwed up but how do I fix it?”

“How do you know you have to?”

“She’s already told me she thought I was a nice guy.”

Phil laughed. “Uh-oh,” he said. “You can take the dweeb out of Nerdland, but you can’t take the nerd out of the dweeb.”

“Thanks, Yoda,” Jon snapped.

“What were her words exactly?” Tracie asked.

“She said I was ‘a sweet guy.’ ”

Phil laughed. “Shit!” Tracie said. She rarely used expletives, so Jon knew it was as bad as he thought it was. He’d tried to do his part. He’d tried to do everything she told him to. He’d tried to follow directions, he really had. The hair, the clothes, the restaurant, the things he was supposed to say, and not supposed to say, but it still wasn’t working. Maybe he should consider a career in a monastery.

Despite his nervousness, he realized he was babbling, but he couldn’t stop. “And she didn’t order veal Parmesan, the waitress is older than my grannie, and when I pulled the beautiful eyes bit, she thought I was being sweet.” He banged the table with his fist. “Why do they always think I’m sweet?”

Tracie tried to reassure him. “Calm down. Don’t worry. They’ll feel you’re heartless
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enough eventually. This is only your first try. Just think of this as a practice. Did you do the phone number trick?”

“What trick?” he asked.

Tracie glanced over at Phil, then glanced back at Jon. “The one I told you about,” she said. She took his hand and wrote on it with her finger.

“Oh, yeah,” Jon said. “Yeah, I mean, no, but I will.” Despite himself, he turned his head toward Phil, who, if he had to witness this humiliation, could at least be useful. “By the way, Phil, do you ride a Yamaha?”

Phil looked at him with disgust. “No, I play a Yamaha. I ride a Suzuki.”

Jon had to get back and had no time to be as snotty as he would have liked. “Great. Thanks,” was all he had time to say before he scurried back to the hallway. There he stood up, looking around for a woman to talk to before he wrote on his hand. But there wasn’t a woman around, and even if there had been, Beth couldn’t see him. He had to do
something,
so he just took out a pen and scribbled a phone number on his hand. Walking the way James Dean did in
Giant,
he swaggered back to the table, where their fish had already been served.

“I started without you,” Beth told him. “I hope you don’t think that’s rude.”

“No. Not at all.” He put his hand out to reach for the tartar sauce and almost knocked it over. Beth caught it and held his hand for a minute. “Oh. Thanks,” he said.

Beth colored and looked down. She noticed
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his hand. “Isn’t that Tracie’s phone number?” she asked him.

Goddamn it! “Uuh . . . yeah. Sometimes I forget it,” he said as smoothly as he could. He figured he’d better change the subject. “So, to answer your question, I ride a Suzuki.”

“A 750?” she asked as she put a piece of endive in her mouth.

Her mouth was very sexy. It was pouty, or whatever word women’s magazines used when talking about fluffy lips. She had a very red lipstick on, and for some reason, it gave Jon a real tug in his lap. “Uh, yeah.”

“I didn’t know Suzuki made a 750. My brother rode a Harley.” She finished her fish. “He said Japanese bikes were all crap.”

“Well, that seems kind of ethnocentric.”

He looked down at his own fish. It was cold, and he’d never wanted it in the first place.

“Don’t you like your fish, Jonny?”

God! Every time she called him that, he thought she was talking to someone else. “Uh, yeah. Well, no. Not really,” he admitted. “I just ordered it because you ordered it. But I’m not a vegetarian or anything,” he assured her. There was a silence for a moment. He had to say
something.
“You have very nice earlobes,” he said at last. “Very shapely.”

Beth laughed. “You are too weird.” She laughed again. They talked for a while. “I like your jacket. Where did you get it?” she asked.

“My girlfriend
‌
—I mean a girl who’s a friend of mine
‌
—I mean a friend of mine who’s a girl
‌
—she thought it would
‌
—”

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She interrupted him. “Are you seeing somebody? I mean in a serious way?”

Had Tracie told him what to answer to that? If she had, he couldn’t remember. “No. No. I
‌
—”

“You’re not living with her, are you?” Beth asked.

He remembered his line for that. “No. I live alone. But you can’t come over.”

“Well then, let’s go to my place,” Beth said.

Jon put down his fork. Had he heard right? He almost asked Beth to repeat it but, with his heart and other parts of him leaping, he figured he shouldn’t press his luck. He gestured for the check and left cash on the table as soon as it was handed to him. (Tracie had told him not to use a charge card, and anyway, he wanted to be quick just in case Beth changed her mind.) Now he just had to get her out the door before she noticed Tracie and Phil at the other side of the restaurant.

Out of anxiety, he took her by the shoulder and gently but firmly pushed her toward the door, turning her body so that she’d be angled toward the bar and not the other dining room.

She turned her head over her shoulder. “That’s sexy,” she said.

Jon couldn’t believe it. As he was opening the door and about to disappear through it, he only had time to give Tracie a fleeting glance. She had her neck craned and, though he couldn’t be sure, the expression on her face looked a little bewildered.

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Tracie lay in the dark, staring up at the ceiling, with both her dinner and Phil’s leg pressing heavily on her. He was sprawled across more than his share of the bed, making the little groaning sound he made at irregular intervals just before he fell asleep. She tried to extricate her leg from under his without disturbing him, but it wasn’t possible.

After Jon and Beth’s quick departure from the Merchants Café, she and Phil had finished their dinner. Phil had also finished the entire bread basket, most of the second one
‌
—except for the piece she couldn’t resist
‌
—along with a large salad with blue cheese dressing, and then a very rich dessert. She thought of one of the Encino sayings she and Laura had used when they were learning the times tables: “I ate and ate and got sick on the floor. So eight times eight is sixty-four.” He had finished up with brandy and two double espressos. Just to keep him company, she’d had one. It must be the espresso, mixed with my natural anxiety for Jon, that’s keeping me awake now, she told herself.

They had come in more than forty-five minutes ago and collapsed on the bed. Since then, Tracie had had trouble sleeping. She wasn’t used to such a rich meal at that time
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of night, and she never ate bread and desserts. But she’d been so nervous, expecting an emergency call on her cell phone to explain what had gone wrong at the restaurant.

It hadn’t been going well. She could tell that from Jon’s feverish questions and his report on Beth’s comments. Beth, of all her friends, wasn’t going to like a nice boy. What went wrong? she wondered. She supposed it wasn’t possible to change Jon, and his true-blue color had shown, despite the camouflage they had tried. Well, Beth’s loss. She just hoped that Jon wasn’t too decimated. She had done this to build his self-confidence, but it seemed it was working the opposite way.

She shifted her weight. Phil’s long leg still hung over hers. Her right foot was going to sleep. She would have to nudge him to get out from under. He was such a bed hog, she wondered why she even wanted to win her bet. He’d been awful at the restaurant, imitating Jon and making fun of both of them. He ate like a pig, he never had any money, and though he was undeniably good-looking, he looked at other girls. Sex was great, but sleeping with him certainly wasn’t easy.

But that didn’t cause her insomnia. What she couldn’t understand was why they’d left the restaurant so soon, why Jon hadn’t called her, and why he didn’t answer when she rang his phone. Of course, she’d told him that he’d have to work at being unavailable, but she hadn’t meant unavailable to her
[“italics?”]
. Knowing Jon, he just didn’t want to bother her with yet
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more bad news. Still, she’d called four times already and let it ring, hoping he hadn’t turned the phone off and that he would pick up so she could comfort him.

She decided to try one more time. As gently as she could, she pushed Phil’s hip with her hand while she tried to wriggle her leg free. She had extricated her knee when he lifted his head. “What time is it?” he asked.

“Sleepy-sleep time,” she told him. “Roll over.” He did, and Tracie got up and looked over his shoulder at the clock. She picked up the phone, dialed Jon’s number, and, when there was still no answer, decided to dial Beth. What the hell. Beth might ream her for setting her up, or for waking her up, but she could always pretend she was upset over Phil. She’d gotten enough calls from Beth over Marcus to make that all right.

But there was no answer at Beth’s, either. “It’s almost two
A.M.
Where are they?” she murmured to herself. Phil grunted. Worry now mixed with her curiosity. Maybe . . .

“Downloading recipes, for all I know,” Phil said. He sounded incredibly cranky. He always did if he was awakened. “Come on, go to sleep. You’re nobody’s mother,” he reminded her. “What’s it to you?”

“Well . . . I just hope they’re all right,” Tracie told him, then sat back down on her side of the bed. She imagined Jon finally giving up and hanging himself in his new, pared-down closet. Or snapping, and attacking Beth like a sex-crazed weasel.

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Phil turned over, but Tracie continued to stare into the darkness. In a moment, she heard his snores.

She was sitting on the sofa in the dark, trying to think of what she’d do next, when Laura got up from her futon and stealthily walked to the side table and lifted up the phone. “What are you doing?” Tracie asked.

Laura jumped in surprise and strangled a scream. “Oh my God! Tracie! I didn’t know you were there.”

“Obviously not,” Tracie said. “Who were you about to call? No one in Encino,” she said accusingly.

“I wasn’t going to call anyone,” Laura said.

“No,” Tracie agreed, her voice mockingly sarcastic. “You just woke up in the middle of the night with a phenomenal need to dust the phone.” Tracie narrowed her eyes, although in the dark she could barely see Laura’s white shape. Has she been doing this all along, while I thought she was getting over it? Tracie wondered. “Since no 900 numbers have shown up on my bill, I have to think that you’ve been calling Peter,” she said bitterly.

“No, Tracie. I swear I haven’t been. This was the first time. It was just that I . . .” Laura sat down beside Tracie. She picked up one of the throw pillows and pulled it to her chest. There, together in their nightgowns in the darkness, Tracie was suddenly flooded with tremendous affection for her friend. It wasn’t easy being Laura. Who could understand a big, funny, smart, wisecracking girl with a passion for
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cooking? Who would want to be with her, to love her as much as she deserved to be? Well, Tracie would, and any man who wouldn’t was losing out. And not just on great dinners.