Jo Piazza (18 page)

He sank back into his chair to pout. Eric wasn’t going to be a grown-up anytime soon. But I had to be. I had a televised proposal to crash on the roof of the Empire State Building in less than an hour.

“Eric, I’m using the bathroom.” He just nodded.

I walked into his stately marble washroom and laughed when I saw the carefully arrayed bottles of skin moisturizer and conditioner. Eric definitely needed a tribe, if only to talk to about his beauty regimen. As I washed my hands I took a look at my watch. SHIT. I seriously had less than forty-five minutes to get to Midtown. I ran out of the bathroom and grabbed my iPhone off Eric’s kitchen counter. Then I walked over to his chair where he hadn’t moved an inch. I leaned down and kissed him on the cheek. “You’re gonna be OK, buddy. I promise.” I really thought he would. Eric is the kind of guy who will always land on his feet somehow. And even when you hope for the worst, it just isn’t going to happen to him. Had those penis pictures somehow leaked onto the real Internet, he probably would have gotten offered a job as a penis stunt double or something. For some people things always turn up roses.

Of course, because I was in a rush there were no cabs. I hopped into one of the black gypsy cabs before realizing that I had no money.

“Shit! Shit! … I’m sorry, sir, I have no cash.”

“Then you leave my cab.”

“But I really need to get to the Empire State Building. We can maybe stop at an ATM.”

“No, no, you get out of my cab.” With that he pulled over onto Park Avenue and made it abundantly clear that I was to exit the vehicle. OK. Subway. I ran to the nearest entrance and fifteen minutes later was huffing and puffing my way into our designated meeting spot in the Heartland Brewery at Thirty-Fifth Street. I ran smack into Joe.

“Hey, you. We were starting to get worried.” His eyes were filled with so much affection that for a moment I considered not telling him that I had been with Eric for the past hour, but then I decided that I didn’t want to start a relationship with anything but total honesty.

“I’m sorry. I was …”

“SOPHIE!” Jordana interrupted before I could get it out. “We still haven’t located her. We have to go to Plan B.”

Plan B was to call Jordana’s producer friend and alert her to the situation. The last thing Stella needed was to embarrass herself on national television.

I sighed. “I agree.” Jordana went out onto the street to make the call, brushing past Princess and Tito, who ran in breathless. I looked over at them, and they just shook their heads. No luck. I was again about to tell Joe about my afternoon but when Princess is around, it can be hard to get a word in edgewise, and after only five minutes, Jordana came back in, her face grim.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Well, I told the producer everything. I told her that Stella was probably planning to crash the wedding and that they should take extra precaution and maybe even shut down the filming. And she asked me for a description of her, so I sent her a picture. And then I asked what she would do and she told me nothing. She laughed like a maniac and said she thought this would give the show the highest ratings it has had in years.”

“Shit!”

“OK, well, we have to get up there. Maybe we can minimize the damage somehow.” The streets around the giant skyscraper were blocked off and we had to show our IDs to the guards at the bottom as well as the e-mailed confirmation from Jordana’s producer friend that we all had seats to the show.

It was a modern-day Coliseum on the roof. Bleacher seats surrounded an interior stage with a grand marble slab divided by a wall. On each side there was a podium with a red velvet ring box perched on top. Of course, we all knew only one of those boxes contained a ring. Flatscreens surrounded the setup so that no one would miss any of the bloody action on either side. Instead of sacrificing Christians to the lions, we were watching single women have their hearts broken for entertainment.

The bleachers were packed, and the desperation in the air was palpable. The host, Danny McMasters, a former child star turned meth addict turned born-again Christian turned reality television hotshot, strolled the set in his pin-striped three-piece suit sans tie. Still no sign of Stella anywhere. The introduction music began to crescendo and McMasters received his final primping, a spritz with an airbrush gun of concealer and some superhold hairspray to ensure his hair never moved an inch against the gusty winds 102 stories above Midtown Manhattan—and we were off. A live television bloodbath was about to begin.

“What you are about to see here tonight will be the most exciting
Husband
finale yet,” Danny McMasters boomed from center stage. “We’ve all watched as Jake has met and gotten to know twenty-seven beautiful women, and whittled them down to the two here tonight. They have had intimate moments. There have been tears. They have met each other’s families, and tonight, Jake will reveal which of these women is his soul mate.” I heard Annie snort at the mention of soul mate. “One woman will go home to plan her wedding, and the other will nurse her broken heart. In just an hour we will know which one is which. But first let’s take a look back at how Jake’s relationships with Erika and Kimberly have progressed.”

Cue “From This Moment On”
by Shania Twain and a three-minute montage of Jake’s relationships with two women. First the meeting where the women step out of a black limousine in their too-tiny dresses and towering heels and try to say something funny to get Jake’s attention so he’ll remember them fondly at the end of the night when he doles out his first round of tulips. Erika spoke to Jake in his mom’s native tongue, Dutch. Kimberly did a backflip upon exiting the limo.

Then their one-on-one dates, where they sip champagne and try to reveal their entire life stories in just a couple of hours while cameras keep zooming in for their close-ups. Then the exotic tropical date where Jake gets to ask each woman if they want to spend the night in the fantasy suite. There’s Jake looking like the prizewinning pig at the State Fair in a hot tub with Erika, kissing on the beach with Kimberly. Then the visits to the families where Jake promises each woman’s parents that he is falling in love with their daughter. Erika’s Texan father is understandably skeptical.

“Don’t you break my little girl’s heart, Jake,” Daddy said as he cocked a shotgun.

And then the screens went dark. In fact, the entire area went dark. And as if by magic, Erika and Kimberly were now on their separate sides of the stage, each attired in a white minidress that I assumed was supposed to signify the possibility that one of them would be one step closer to marriage at the end of the night.

Taking a closer look, I realized that bachelorette number two was not Kimberly at all. It was Stella, resplendent in a white minidress, her hair done in a perfect chignon, green eyes gleaming. The producers must have realized it at the same time I did; I could hear Jordana’s client hiss, “Keep going. Just keep going. We’re live!” The rest of the audience, expecting twists and turns from their reality programming, was ready to go with the flow and watch to see what would happen. I dug my nails into Joe’s arm.

“What’s she going to do?”

“I don’t know, but you have to give her props for getting this far,” Joe stage-whispered to me.

Jake strolled onstage next to McMasters, oblivious that his moment to shine was about to be shut down by an ex-girlfriend on a rampage.

“Jake, it’s been a long ride, hasn’t it?” McMasters asked.

Jake nodded earnestly as if he had just come back from war instead of making out with twenty-seven women.

“Tonight is the big night. Tonight you choose your wife, Jake. Are you ready?”

“I am, Danny. I really am.” At that, Jake lowered his head just slightly and gave a coy smile to the women in the live studio audience, proving that Jake was nowhere near ready for anything resembling monogamy.

“One of these women will be leaving here with a broken heart tonight, Jake. You know how this works. I need you to break up with one of the women gently before you can propose to your one true love.”

Jake reached his hand up to his face as if to brush away an imaginary tear.

McMasters put a brotherly arm around Jake’s shoulder and steered him toward the two women. Which way would he turn? Would it be better for him to “dump” Stella first?

But no. Jake headed in the direction of Erika, and the crowd gave a collective gasp. He walked through the soundproof door. For a moment her face lit up. Poor Erika didn’t know she was first. I noticed her dad in the audience straighten up a little. I wondered if security here was good enough to find concealed firearms. She reached out her arms to Jake in what might have been one of the saddest gestures I had ever seen. You might expect him to give her a signal, a slight shake of his head, a wink—anything so that she didn’t have to experience this breakup in real time in front of a live studio audience and millions of viewers around the world.

Tears of joy (not for long) glistened in her eyes. Jake took her in his arms, looked down into her heart-shaped face, and sighed. It was the sigh of a winner, the sigh of the one who was doing the dumping. It was a self-satisfied sigh all of us, save for some very lucky supermodels like Heidi Klum or perhaps Kate Moss, have heard at one point in our lives. But Erika must not have heard the sigh before. She was young, like, twenty-three, and pretty. It’s entirely possible she had never been sighed at in such a manner, since the glow of expectancy hadn’t yet fallen from her face.

“Erika.”

“Jake.”

“The time we have spent together has been so special.”

“It has, hasn’t it.”

Oh no. She really had never been dumped before; she didn’t understand any of the dumping subtext. This
was
like watching a lamb thrown to the lions.

“But,” and on the
but
, I think she knew, like any human being has the instinct to recognize when something is going bad, when they’ve failed a test or their parents are about to tell them they’re getting a divorce. That
but
changed things.

“But?” she stuttered.

“But I am in love with someone else.” Off to stage left McMasters now pretended to wipe his own single tear from his cheek.

“But you met my parents. You said you were falling in love with me. You didn’t mean any of it?”

“I did. I really, really did. It’s just that I felt something more for Kimberly.” Now Erika was a full-blown waterworks, tears streaming down her cheeks, her face getting red and blotchy. She was an ugly crier, and you could tell Jake was ready to get away from her. He began shifting his feet back and forth like he had to pee. At this point, in the real world, something would happen. The guy would begin inching toward the door, the girl would begin throwing things (the producers carefully kept nothing within arm’s reach), or worse, she would throw herself at him in a pitiful bid to use sex as a weapon to keep things going just a little while longer. But only thirty minutes were left in the show, and Erika couldn’t be left blubbering onstage. This was McMasters’s cue. He swooped in to put his arm around the sobbing girl. But Erika wasn’t giving up without a fight.

“I gave you a blow job in the fantasy suite!” she screamed. Producers frantically began trying to bleep her out. “Blow job” was not family-friendly conversation for prime time, but being so jazzed over the concept of a live breakup, they hadn’t thought to put in a delay, so Erika’s words reached the ears of small children across the land watching
The Husband
with their moms. “You said I had to SHOW you I loved you. I SHOWED you. I SHOWED you for an hour. An HOUR. Who takes an hour?” At this point, the producers seemed to have things under control and McMasters had managed to pull away back to stage left. The camera panned to him, and he immediately plastered on his saccharine sweet smile.

“That was a doozy, huh, folks.”

Behind him it was obvious that Erika was still railing on Jake, but their mics had been silenced.

“Let’s give these former lovebirds some time during a commercial break, brought to you by our sponsors, Durex condoms and Kay Jewelers, and then we’ll come back for Jake’s proposal.” Of course, McMasters and everyone in the live audience knew that no proposal was going to happen because some strange broad had replaced Kimberly. At this point no one had any clue what to think. Not even us.

“We have to stop her now,” I whispered to Joe. “We have to stop her before she makes a complete fool out of herself like Erika.” As I said her name, Erika was being pulled from the stage kicking and screaming like a banshee.

“Check out that security, Sophie. We aren’t getting through them.” It was true; I hadn’t noticed before, but the edge of the stage was lined with what looked like the starting lineup of the New Zealand rugby team, each one bigger than the next, in matching aviator sunglasses.

I harrumphed. “You’d think this was a presidential debate and not some silly reality television competition.”

Joe laughed. “Is there really a difference between the two anymore?” He had a point.

With Erika safely offstage (hopefully sedated) and Jake given a pep talk like he was Rocky Balboa about to go for a final round against Apollo Creed, the lights on set began to flicker and the warning bell chimed that the commercial break was about to come to an end. There was McMasters explaining how Jake was about to propose to his one true love, his soul mate, his best friend. But at this point during the show, when the studio audience would usually be eating out of the palm of his hand, McMasters had to know something was a little off. For once, the audience was skeptical. The mirror had been broken, the pond rippled. Reality television had never felt so real.

“Jake, are you ready?”

What would Stella do? Would she claw him and scream at him the way Erika had? Would she reveal terrible and embarrassing things about him in front of the live audience?

“I’m ready, Danny.” Jake turned and walked through door number two. At first he definitely didn’t comprehend what was happening to him. There was a glimmer of recognition before a look of utter confusion came over his face. I dug my nails into Joe’s forearm.