Cupcake (15 page)

"I meant with your heart," she said. "For that boy to show up out of the blue means he is probably seriously lost, and looking to you to find his way for him. You work on
your
way, please?"

"I can't believe you're going down this road again," Nancy interrupted. I couldn't believe she knew without me telling her that

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I was in fact going down this road again--not just considering it. "After everything you two have been through. After you'd finally made the decision to move on with your lives." Epic San Andreas fault 7.0 Richter scale Nancy-sigh. "I can't believe we're back to this same place again. But you know what? I don't have the energy to argue this one. I can't tell you what to do, but I will tell you I'm very disappointed in you. I'm disappointed with Shrimp for manipulating your romantic idealism by springing up in Manhattan with no warning. Dad and Ash and Josh and Fernando and Sugar Pie will also be very disappointed not to share Christmas with you. And the baby ..."

Frances Alberta is my new favorite sibling, because her crying in the background of my phone call with our mother distracted Nancy's epic disappointment trying to burst my Shrimp glow-bubble.

Shrimp does not manipulate. He's not capable of it. He's Shrimp. Applying any form of the word "manipulation" in relation to him is a complete oxymoron--he's the most mellow person in the world. "Manipulation" would harsh him into being an oxy-depleted moron, and he would have none of that.

Sid-dad got on the phone in Nancy's place. "Cupcake, what's this I hear about you not making it on the plane home this morning?"
"Ask her why!"
Nancy shrieked in the background as she tended to the baby. But Nancy didn't wait for me to tell my dad

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before spewing,
"Shrimp decided to show up in New York yesterday ON A WHIM."

Onawhim. Would make cool band name. Would also make compelling tryst of Scrabble letters.

Sid-dad took his time before responding to the news my mother hadn't given me a chance to deliver myself. I wasn't sure whether he was directing his comment to me or to Nancy when he said, "Well, she is eighteen. What can you expect?"

Turns out I'm capable of shrieking like my mother. "That's patronizing!" I snapped.

Calmly, Sid-dad answered, "But true."

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***

TWENTY-EIGHT

Shrimp is a liar.

I've got his passport in my hand to prove it. "Your real name is Philip! Or is this passport a fake?" I paused to suck in a deep breath, and to ponder every supposed truth I've ever known about the universe. This couldn't be right. "You told me your real name was Shrimp. You even showed me a birth certificate that definitively stated your legal name was Shrimp."

Shrimp took the passport from my hand and tossed it against my bedroom wall. "Actually, the birth certificate was the fake. My brother had it made for me as a joke birthday present one year. The birth certificate was supposed to be used as ID because I don't have a driver's license. Wallace wanted me to show the birth certificate to get the shrimp birthday special discount to go along with the gift certificate he gave me, good for dinner for two at Red Lobster."

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"That's just mean."

"No kidding. Like I'd eat at Red Lobster?" (Said the boy who proposed marriage to me at Outback Steakhouse.)

"Wait a minute. Your real name is Philip, and you don't have a legal driver's license, either? But you drove your brother's car around everywhere when you lived in San Francisco."

"Yeah. So?" Shrimp nuzzled his head inside my neck from behind me, then pulled the blanket up higher over our bodies. "Its burr-ito in New York. Did you know about this?" His body spooned into mine, I felt no cold draft.

No Jell-O shots had been necessary to bring us back to the ecstasy where we'd left off. We've lost and found each other too many times to bother with the Will We or Won't We mating dance. We know we will. We did. It's, like, predetermined. We waited about as long as it took for Danny to leave the apartment this morning, for him to walk down the five flights of stairs, and for me to see him from our front window down at the street curb, hailing a taxi and being whisked away to the airport.

God, it felt holy-fantastic-great to mind-soul-body merge with Shrimp again. Like all was right with true love and our place within it. Praise Jesus for Christmas miracles!

"Why didn't you write me or call me from New Zealand?" I asked him.

"I was respecting your explicit directions. You told me not to

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contact you at all when I left. You said it would be too painful. Clean break. Your idea. Remember?"

I hate when guys take everything a girl says literally.

Shrimp added, "I noticed you didn't contact me either? So the clean break was an equal opportunity one, don't you agree?"

We'd both agree that we wouldn't dare the real question hovering over our clean break: "Have you been with anyone else?" Neither of us was ready for that answer. Hover elsewhere, question.

I pitched the soft serve inquiry instead. "Phil, what do you want from life now?"

Shrimp pressed tighter into me, and I almost rescinded the philosophical entreaty merely on the grounds of his left hand exploring the right territory. The new fullness of me matched the new leanness of him, like a yin/yang balance reflecting the changes in our lives as a result of what had happened in our lives since our News--York and Zealand.

Shrimp's slow hand definitely appreciated my growth spurt. As his hand surfed my curves, he talked to me, warming me further. He'd never been one for talking in the past. "For right now I want to be here with you. For later, I don't know. Maybe get my GED. Seems like the only job worth having that I can get without a high school diploma is working either for my brother or as a truck driver. Not that I really want a job or a career, but I guess eventually I'm gonna have to sell my soul to make the cash to travel again."

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"What about your art?"

"I love creating art, but it's like you never know when inspiration will strike. I don't want to be obligated to it. I want the canvasses or the sculptures or whatever it is to happen when it wants to happen, and not happen because a car needs insurance or rent has to be paid. I want to live free of all that."

"That's what you want to do? Travel?"

"Seems like a decent and honorable goal to me, spiritually fulfilling and personally satisfying and whatever--the essence of what life's about, I guess? There are beaches I dream about in Vietnam and Kuala Lumpur and Norway and Cyprus, where the surfing is supposedly like--"

I turned over to look at him, to separate our bodies from their tight soul clasp. It's like I had tried to forget what his face looked like so I wouldn't hurt from missing it, and now I wanted to drown in the beauty of it. I placed my index and middle fingers on his full red lips. "Shhh," I whispered.

Seriously, he'd just told me more about himself in the last two minutes than in like the last two years of our knowing each other. It was overwhelming.

Shrimp instigated a silence of kisses, but I strangely couldn't focus on the taste of his mouth. I was reconsidering this new Phil creature whom I'd never known. My head flipped through mental

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images of Phil ten years in the future, long burnt out on surfing, never having bothered to get the GED even though that Cyd Charisse girl who'd been the love of his life back when he was a Shrimp had told him not to drop out of high school, had told him he'd eventually regret that decision. Years after her prophetically brilliant observation, Phil's regret finds him with a new life working as a truck driver, with a not-CC wife and kids in Modesto. Truck driver Phil makes regular pit stops at his favorite refuge along the 1-5, where he'd be all, "Evenin', Polly, I'll have my usual" to the waitress. And Polly would be all perky and like, "Vegetarian quesadilla comin' right up,"
giggle giggle,
because Polly couldn't wait to deliver Phil-not-Shrimp the blue plate special as his reward for steering clear of the strip clubs while on the road and choosing the side trips to Hooters instead--not like the old wife would mind. Wife came from a long line of Hooters waitresses; in fact that's where she met Phil, and he promised on their wedding day while they stood before the Elvis impersonator chaplain at the Reno Chapel of Love with her eight-and-a-half-months-pregnant belly sticking out that he would never love Hooters other than hers, and she believed him. Girls will believe anything when they're blinded by love.

"Where'd you go?" Shrimp asked me, his face pensive and no longer attached to mine.

I had no response. I no longer understood my relationship to truth.

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Shrimp answered for me. He whispered, "I still love you."

I whispered his old standard back: "Ditto."

Manipulation does not spout "I love you." It's not possible. Manipulation does worry that the sentiment, however sincerely felt, might not have been truly earned.

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***

TWENTY-NINE

My mother is evil. She drops these little comments that seem

stupid or insignificant when she's sighing them, yet somehow they have the power to get under my skin. "I hope you know what you're doing letting Shrimp back into your life just when yours seemed to be getting on track...." Nag, nag, nag. Really, what does she know?

Except, sigh, I sort of see her point. Annoying, annoying, annoying.

Theoretically I assumed that if Shrimp and I were together in New York, I would be bursting out of my skin wanting to share this city with him. We'd go ice skating in Central Park, explore art galleries in Williamsburg, eat our way from Chinatown to Astoria, slam with the punks at dive clubs in Alphabet City. And of course we'd fit in the requisite time in my bedroom, hiding out from the

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world, lost in each other. The reality was, I loved that Shrimp came to Manhattan and found me, but I felt powerless about how that choice was made. He just showed up. I had no say in the when and the whim of how our lives once again intersected. My heart burned all these months for wanting him to share my new life, but with him suddenly here live and in the flesh, giving no indication as to whether he planned to settle in or pick up and leave for the next killer curl somewhere else in the world, I really
didn't
know what I was doing with Shrimp. Should I relax and enjoy it for the moment, or expect our reunion to evolve into a new relationship like before, only now we were grown-up and living on our own, accountable for our own choices--and mistakes?

Life seems to sort itself out for me at LU_CH_ONE_TE, so I figured I'd better dip Shrimp into the well there, test him in my new environment and see how he fit in with that part of my new life. Experimenting with how a San Francisco surfer boy adapted to my Manhattan Project could yield important findings.

"What are you doing here, Myself?" Johnny Mold asked when I arrived for a Christmas Eve day shift, Shrimp in tow. "You're supposed to be in San Francisco."

The joint jumped with people, shoppers with all their cheery holiday bullshit gift bags, the yoga mommies and their infinite realms of strollers, and a hella strong gathering of Chelsea boys. Clearly Johnny needed me, regardless of whether he expected me.

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"Then why am I here, Mold?" I stepped behind the counter, intending to show off my pride and joy to Shrimp. But my path to La Marzocco was blocked by a hulking figure standing at the machine, with a pitcher of foam milk in his hand, readying to pour the milk over a pull of fresh espresso. His Hunky Tallness had long, wavy black hair, a chiseled face with big green eyes and long black eyelashes under heavy black eyebrows, a roman nose, and morning why-bother stubble surrounding his mouth. He looked either like the Aramis man or the hero dude of questionable sexuality pictured on the covers of Harlequin romances, except one who wore prayer beads around his wrist and a yellow shirt picturing a happy big-belly red Buddha. All I could say to him was, "Who the fuck are you?"

"Such language!" He laugh-smiled. The Jolly Harlequin Giant looked toward Johnny Mold. "This is the barista you write to me about who bring the buzz back to this place?" He had some weird foreign accent, like maybe Italian, and in his warm eyes and wide grin I knew he was one of those genial, good karma people whom everybody instantly loves. I hate people like that.

Johnny Mold said, "Cyd Charisse, meet Dante. Dante, CC."

NO WAY. Universe is a shambles, crumbling at my feet.

"Why?" I stated, directing my comment to Johnny.
That stupid handsome legendary espresso man is the reason I spent the first six weeks of my new life stranded in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment! And why, oh why, does that espresso pull in his hand smell SO GOOD!

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Johnny said, "I hired him to fill in during your supposed vacation. I've been trying to lure Dante here from La Traviata for the last year, but he didn't agree until now. There's, like, buzz about the buzz of this place, you know? Dante's been in Corsica for the last couple months, but he wanted to spend the holidays in Manhattan, and this time he finally said yes to my invitation."

Lure. Dante. Here.

I suspected the straight-edge celibate of having a not-so-straight crush, but I knew better than to acknowledge the possibility that Johnny could be more interested in a person than, say, his Game Boy, or his band. Instead I grabbed Johnny by his Mikado/Penzance hand and dragged him to the bathroom. We had to shove aside a good half dozen people to get past the line for Dante. Word of the great espresso man's return to Manhattan must have spread quickly.

Inside the bathroom I hissed at Johnny, "I thought you were going to close this place during the holidays."

"I was. But there are like lots of Jewish and Chinese people who need food and caffeine before they go to the movies on Christmas day, and lots of business people who have to stick around for end-of-year business accounting or something like that. Why shouldn't this place be the one to serve the people who don't go away for the holidays? Half the restaurants in this neighborhood close the week between Christmas and New Year's. I figured the opportunity was ripe for us to grab some of their business then."