Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (21 page)

 

 

“So, where’s this
poor girl you’ve tricked into marrying you?” I ask. “Is she locked up somewhere so she doesn’t escape before the wedding?”

“Ha,” says Brian, but his smile feels forced. “She’s on her way. Alan and I came in the van with the equipment.”

The last time Brian got engaged, he would have cracked up at the joke. The last girl was an actress, someone he met at an Exxon convenience store on a road trip right after the play she was in had ended its run. They’d gotten engaged a month later, two weeks before she got called to New York for a better gig. Brian came to see me right after she left, and we’d spent the weekend in bed with each other, him talking about how wonderful she was, me reminding him of all the other women he’d said that about. I’d met Jay two weeks later. When Brian’s engagement inevitably fell through, we joked that if things had ended between them a few months sooner, he could have kept the wedding date and married me instead.

Brian and I almost did get married once, but not for real for real. We were in Vegas, which is a city I’ve always loved for its ability to be at once shameless about its fantasy self and honest about its real one, which is the only reason I’ve ever loved anything. A college friend with too much money had invited us out there for a birthday party, and we were champagne-drunk and tired of the Strip one night. I said I’d always wanted to get married in Vegas, because marriage was just a big flashy spectacle designed to cover up the tacky tragedy of human loneliness, and why would you get married anywhere you could forget that? Brian said he’d always wanted Elvis at his wedding, but only if it was fat Elvis, and anyway, us being us we might as well get our first divorces out of the way early. All of it was kind of a joke and kind of not, and I don’t remember why we didn’t do it, just that we ended up riding those gondola boats around the underground of The Venetian all night instead.

 

 

Brian bounces off
to get me a vodka tonic, extra lime—he doesn’t have to ask what I’m drinking—and while I’m waiting for him to come back, or Chrissie to reappear from the ladies’ room, the fiancée walks in the front door. I haven’t seen her picture, but I know her right away. She’s wearing a vintage Wonder Woman T-shirt stretched tight across her chest, and Brian’s got a thing for both boobs and comic books. She’s cute. Platinum blond hair, layered and flipped up at the ends, a dab of frosted lip gloss. If her look was a smell, it would be grape bubble gum. Her name is Miranda. Brian met her at the go-kart track two years ago, but they’ve only been dating six months. She’s an elementary school teacher who moonlights as a semiprofessional local comedian. Ever since he met her, I get random text messages from him, jokes and one-liners, and I know it means he’s watching her perform.

She obviously recognizes me when she sees me, and even though her smile seems genuine, I resent this girl already—not for having him, but because I’ll have to have her now. She’s like a crayon drawing he’s handing me, and like her or not I’ll have to pin her to my refrigerator for years.

“So, what do you think?” Brian whispers when he returns with my drink.

“Nicely done,” I say.

He looks relieved. When Miranda comes over, she hugs me first, awkwardly smushing into the hand I’d extended to shake hers.

“I’m sorry,” she says, laughing a little as she pulls away. “Was that weird? I feel like we already know each other.”

“No,” I lie. I’m saved from making further small talk when Chrissie finally rejoins us, looking like she’s ready for a glamour shot. She’s let her hair down and combed some sort of glitter through it, and put on mounds of blush and eye shadow and a coffee-colored lipstick that’s a good two shades too dark for her skin tone. I can’t open my mouth to tell her to wash her face, because I’m too busy trying not to laugh at her.

“Your sister?” Miranda asks.

“Cousin,” I say.

“Clearly, good looks run in the family,” she says. Her voice flutters a little when she laughs. “And those are great shoes,” she says to Chrissie.

It’s as if she has studied a playbook on meeting your fiancé’s ex-girlfriend. Chrissie looks at me like she doesn’t know whether it’s OK to accept the compliment. I look away, because I don’t want her to think she needs my permission to like the girl, but I also don’t want to give it. Besides, Chrissie’s shoes are tacky stiletto sandals from Pay-less, and I probably should have talked her out of them this morning.

Brian ushers Miranda and me to a table up front, and then disappears to bring back drinks for her and Chrissie. By the time he gets back, a beer for her and a Shirley Temple for Chrissie, a decent crowd has started to filter in. Before the set he squeezes my hand for luck, then gives Miranda a closed-mouth kiss. Chrissie watches this like it’s a spectator sport, and seems pleased enough that I’ve brought her into my real life that she’s reconciled herself with the indignity of drinking the Shirley Temple.

“This is kind of all right,” she says when Brian finally starts playing, which, given her usual tone these days, is like she’s handing him a Grammy.

Watching Brian perform always makes me feel weirdly proprietary about him, which is stupid, because this is the thing about him that
has
to be public. But I was there when he was making this shit up on his guitar, and when he’d wake up at three a.m. to whisper a song into my ear, and when he was ready to give it all up and get a real job and I told him not to. When Miranda leans forward into the music and closes her eyes like Brian is singing to her directly, something in me snaps. “Isn’t he great?” she whispers to me between songs, opening her eyes again and looking so sincere that I have to look away to stop myself from telling her he isn’t really hers, that she only loves him because she’ll never know him the way I do. It makes me happy when I recognize myself in a lyric, even if the lyric is
I lied, you lied, I lied, to really love something is suicide
, because how I feel about Brian hasn’t been about love in a long time, it’s been about mattering the most, and as I count the songs, I’m confident I’m still winning on that scorecard.

 

 

When the set
is over, Brian and the keyboardist, Alan, disappear backstage for a minute, and Miranda asks a million questions about Delaware. I let Chrissie answer most of them, which means that the answer she gets most frequently is “dumb,” followed closely by “stupid.”

“Still,” says Miranda, “summer’s great when you’re a kid, isn’t it? I get jealous of my students sometimes—they don’t know how good they have it.”

“Summer’s awesome,” says Chrissie. “My grandfather’s dying. And my dad won’t even talk to me about it, and my parents just got divorced, and my mom’s at Bible camp trying to join some weirdo cult thing because she’s lonely and is trying to pretend Jesus is her boyfriend, and
my
boyfriend works at a gas station and has never left the state of Delaware, even though he’s older than me and Delaware is, like, ten feet big and he apparently doesn’t understand enough about sex to make it work right so I can fuck him to get my mind off things.”

She takes an emphatic sip of her Shirley Temple, even though the drink is nothing but melting red ice by now, and stomps back to the bathroom. A guy at the bar reaches for her arm as she passes him, but she doesn’t break stride long enough to notice.

“I’m sorry,” Miranda says,
sliding her chair out of the way so I can go after Chrissie. I stay put.

“She’ll be fine,” I say, by which I mean that I can’t help her. I think of offering to get Miranda a drink, but her first beer is still barely half gone, an observation that prompts me to push my own empty glass behind a napkin holder. The tables in the bar are covered in old newsprint that’s been lacquered over, and I try to make out the words to one of the stories shellacked beneath my drink, but can’t read it in the dim light. Beside it, a vintage ad warns me:
Perspiration Ruins Panty Hose!

“Is this weird for you?” Miranda finally asks.

“Which part?” I ask, and she doesn’t press it. I keep an eye on the bathroom door to see when Chrissie comes out.

“I know about all the nonsense, with him and women,” she says after a minute. “I’m not an idiot. I’m not pretending this is foolproof. But you should see how serious he is about things these days. About his music. About not fucking up the way he has before. About being honest with himself. About dealing with all the stuff he’s not over. You made him a better person. I hope you know that.”

“If I did,” I say, “it was an accident.”

I laugh, and we both pretend I’m kidding.

 

 

By the time
Brian and the keyboardist stop mingling with the crowd and selling ten-dollar CDs with homemade covers, Chrissie and her slightly smudged mascara have rejoined us. Miranda and Chrissie and I are doing our best impressions of people having fun in a bar, and I find it briefly hysterical the work we’re putting into emotionally containing ourselves in front of a guy who prints out all of his song lyrics and sets them on fire in mini trash cans when he gets really angry, until it occurs to me that maybe he doesn’t do that anymore. While a folksinger in a long tie-dye dress sets up her sound equipment, the speaker continues playing the crappy Top Forty that started when Brian went off, and Alan grimaces. He’s taken off the black collared shirt he performed in and is wearing a T-shirt that says I’M NOT A GYNECOLOGIST, BUT I’LL TAKE A LOOK. His arms beneath the cap sleeves are covered in baby-fine hairs, dirty blond like the hair on his head.
Dirty
is the right adjective for him altogether. Chrissie whispers something into his ear that I hope is music-related, but probably isn’t because of the way he turns away from her and licks his upper lip. He whispers something back to her and she smiles.

“Alan,”
says Miranda, while I’m still trying to figure out where to intervene, but he ignores her and keeps talking to Chrissie.

“There’s your smile,” he says. “Not that you don’t have great pouting lips, but something’s gotta give. You’re fourteen, right? Whatever it is, it’s not forever.”

“My parents are splitting,” she says again. “And my grandfather is dying. So it’s pretty much forever.” She does this dramatic half-sigh thing and puts her pout back on.

“Chrissie,”
I say, “stop it.”

It’s not that I doubt she’s upset, it’s that I’m watching her turn into the kind of girl who always needs to assert that something tangible is wrong in order to justify making things worse. Alan knows she’s overdoing it, too, because he smirks a little and raises his beer glass.

“To death and divorce, then,” he says, “which are forever.”

“And marriage,” I say, clinking my drink to his and nodding at Brian, “which is not.”

 

 

Miranda’s looking at
Brian like she’s waiting for him to say something, and he’s looking at the floor like the universe will work this one out without him. I look at Miranda, the startled flicker in her eyes fading to something almost wounded as Brian stays silent, and for a second I feel something like triumph. Then I look at Chrissie. Her pout is gone, and she is smiling at me with a giddy sort of pride. It makes me want to hit something that this is the thing that has finally put me entirely back in her good graces.

Miranda grabs her purse from the back of the chair, and makes a show of fishing out her keys. When she finds them, she holds them aloft for a second, like she’s not sure what happens next.

“OK,” she says, standing up. Nobody looks at her directly. “I’m going home.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It was just a joke. I shouldn’t have said it.”

“I hope next time we meet, you find our engagement just slightly less hysterical,” she says. “I want to like you. Brian wants me to like you.”

Brian still doesn’t look up. “Are you coming with me?” Miranda asks. He throws up his arms as if this decision is out of his hands.

“I can’t leave before Angie’s set is over,” Brian says. “I’ll call you later. I’ll get a ride home with Alan.”

“Yeah you will,” says Miranda, and I want to tell her right then how much I like her, how at this point the last fiancée would have been weeping and begging and making a total fool of herself, but she’s already leaving. Brian doesn’t get up.

“You’re a bitch,” Brian says to me—not like he’s mad, just like it’s an observation.

I turn to Chrissie to tell her to go outside for a second, but Alan is already motioning her toward the bar. I let them go and turn back to Brian.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “This probably wasn’t the best week for this. We’re all a little high-strung.”

“Are you OK?” he asks. He puts a hand on my knee. There’s a faint flicker of a scar below his index finger, from where I accidentally burned him with a cigarette lighter once.

“I’m as OK as I get.”

“I really do love her,” he says. “Not the idea of her, but her. This isn’t like the other times. I’m trying to do something right here.”