Love Show (3 page)

I caught my breath. “I mean, I kind
of am a fraud, I’ve realized. So, I'm pretending that it's all good. And so far
nobody's noticed. But I’m a mess. You can probably tell. I'm a drunk mess.
You're way too polite, by the way. You should make a face or something before I
say anything really embarrassing."

"I don't think you've said
anything embarrassing," he said quietly.

"Right. Well, that's because
you have no idea what I'm talking about. It makes no sense."

He grinned and cocked his head.
"It makes some sense."

"Doesn't make any sense."
I shook my head and took a sip of the beer.

"No. It does.” He stepped
closer. "I mean, I don't know about Egypt or Suzanne, but I get that
feeling. Not knowing why you're doing what you're doing? And feeling like a
fraud? I get that way sometimes, too."

He was so goddamn handsome. And
there was something gentle about him and I was cold and drunk and it was
raining and I hadn’t gotten the job and for once I felt really like I didn’t
have anything to lose.

He met my eyes and smiled,
sheepishly. “I mean—”

I stepped forward and kissed him.

Suddenly and impulsively.

Because I wanted to. Because I had
nothing to lose. Because I believed, for once, there
wasn’t
anything to
lose here.

I saw his eyes dilate before I shut
mine tightly. He lifted me off the ground and I wrapped my legs around his
waist and he kissed me back.

I knew I had been kissed before.
Except for suddenly I was sure I had never been kissed at all. Not really. Not
like this. It had never been like this.

I heard someone make a hooting
noise, but mainly I just heard the rain falling and the people running around
us and the soft sound of his breathing.

Mainly I just felt the way he
kissed me and the firmness of his jaw and how he so obviously knew exactly what
he was doing.

After a moment, he lowered his
mouth to my neck and I threw my head back, letting his warm, soft lips press
against the sensitive place underneath my chin while the cold water ran down
our faces. I shivered. From him or the water I couldn’t tell.

We both jumped slightly at a wild
crack of thunder. He set me onto my feet, laughing. I opened my eyes and looked
at him. He stood with his hands open and at his sides, a wide smile on his face
as he watched a bolt of lightning split the streaming, gray sky.

I looked up, too, at the lightening
crackling across the sky like a scar.

He put a hand on my hip. “Hey.
You’re something, you know that?” He breathed.

“Police,” someone shouted. We both turned
to see students running and flashing red and blue lights. The sirens of the
campus police blared loudly.

I came to my senses. I was in the
middle of a parking lot in a thunderstorm, practically in a monsoon, in the
arms of a strange man.
This was so irresponsible.
I stepped back from
him and started to run.

“Hey, wait up!”                                        

I didn’t turn back, though. The
last thing I needed was to get cited by campus police for public intoxication.

The rain came in torrents, and the
students, who were drunk and disorderly to begin with, moved riotously towards
the lot’s gate.

“DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER THE
TAILGATE IS CANCELLED. ALL STUDENTS MUST DISPERSE. DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER THE
TAILGATE IS CANCELLED. ALL STUDENTS MUST DISPERSE.”

"Hold up!"                                     

I jumped as someone grabbed my arm.

“What the hell, Hadley?”

David, it was just David.

“Are you insane? Or have you been
reading a lot of Nicholas Sparks novels?”

“I don’t know,” I shouted at him.
“Let’s go.”

We ran through the rain, so fast
that David couldn’t ask me any questions, so fast that I couldn’t think about
anything but running. When we reached the off-campus bridge, which offered some
refuge from the rain, he gave me a toothy, evil grin.

“That was pretty hot,” he said. The
rain was louder underneath the bridge.

"I cannot believe I did that,”
I said breathlessly.

“Neither can I,” he said.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“He was delicious. Nicely done.”

"Do you know his name?"

“No clue. Was he a good kisser?”         

“Yes,” I said. I closed my eyes. “I
think I’m having a heart attack. Actually.”

“Wow. That is good.”

“From sprinting. Not from him,” I
said. I leaned against the bridge’s rough brick wall, trying to calm my heart
rate and my breathing.

“Well, my plan worked.”

“We are stuck under a bridge in a
rainstorm and I’m not wearing a coat and I’m wet, and guess what? I’m not so
drunk that I can’t feel the cold. I’m cold. If this was your plan, then you’re
going to need to rethink your definition of success. And where is Nigel?"

"With Snookums.”

I exhaled.

“That was extremely sexy.”

"Shut up."

"Epic, almost."

“I’ll hurt you.”

“Like,
The Notebook
.”

“Or maybe I’ll just murder you. I’m
going to murder you. Yep.
The Notebook
with a side of murder.”

He laughed happily. “You looked
like you were enjoying it."

I rolled my eyes. "Well, I'm
drunk."

"Do you regret it?"

No. I didn't. But I didn't quite
want to admit that, either. "Ask me when I'm sober."

I told myself I was just out of
practice. I only thought it had been amazing because it had been so long.

Still, I knew I didn’t want to take
it back. I wouldn’t take it back for anything. I touched my hands to my lips. I
wished I’d told him my name.

The stranger and the kiss stayed with me for an
embarrassingly long period of time. Like, all through my hangover the next day
and right through to the next weekend—the weekend before my very last exams,
when I felt like I was too busy to breathe.

Somehow, it kept coming back. I
thought about his soft lips. His hands on my legs. I thought about it almost as
much as I thought about the
New York Times
.

I hadn't told anyone else that I didn’t
get the job. I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened.

Justin Shelter handed in his piece on
alcohol poisoning on Sunday which meant it would run in the last edition of the
paper. That worked to his advantage. He would be off-campus for the initial
backlash.

Nobody from the fraternity had
offered a comment, but Justin had followed my advice to interview other people
and pulled a few telling quotes. The piece was excellent. For some members of
the fraternity, it would probably be explosive.

Justin had talked to one of the
students who'd been hospitalized, and she said that the hospital had told her
that her drink had been laced with ruphonyl, the date-rape drug. He had even
managed to get a student health administrator on the record, admitting that the
university was only aware of the students who had been hospitalized, not where
they had come from.

I ran through the article one last
time, checking for split infinitives and stray commas. When I was confident it
was flawless, I closed out of the editing window. I scrolled through the pages
once more, saved all changes, uploaded the edition to our website, and sent the
final design files over to our printer. I pushed back from the computer and
sighed.

Done. Last issue of the semester.

 I should have printed out my
Arabic paper and read it one final time, but instead I opened a new tab in my
browser and logged onto Facebook.

I'd done this a few times this
week: logged on and started clicking through random profiles, looking for him.
It was pathetic. And stalkerish. And I kept doing it.

I told myself that if I had his
name the mystery would be solved and I'd stop thinking about it. I told myself
that I'd always been an information addict and knowing nothing about the
stranger I’d kissed forced me to do some research. But, I knew I was deceiving
myself. I liked kissing him and I wanted to know who he was.

Twenty fruitless minutes later, our
printers emailed me and confirmed receipt of the production files. It snapped
me out of my social media trance. I thanked them, shut down my computer, and
printed my Arabic paper.

I felt sorry for myself as I walked
to my car in the cold. I told myself to get a grip—I'd be going back to San
Francisco tomorrow with David for winter break.

Last I'd heard from my mother,
she'd been dating someone new named Sol. That had been in August, but I hadn't
been home since last December. I missed San Francisco. And it would be nice to
have nothing to do for a few weeks.

And maybe there I could forget
about the stranger in the parking lot and
The New York Times
.

Campus was quiet the morning Justin's article ran. I snapped
a photo of the issue and texted it to Justin:
Looks good!!

Haha, on a plane home. Save me a
copy!

I cut through the library and
dropped my Arabic paper in the box outside of Professor Haskell's office.

David was packing when I got back
to our apartment.

"Do I need sunglasses?"

“Do you know anything about San
Francisco?”

He looked at me blankly. “It’s like
in Northern California and you went to high school there.”

“It’s a permanent cloud. The sun is
not a thing in San Francisco.”

“It doesn’t say that on the
Wikipedia page,” he replied blandly. “I’m packing sunglasses.”

“Waste of space.”

“They're very small. And they will
help me sleep at night.” He yawned. “So, have you tracked down the Nicholas
Sparks boy?”

“That never happened. He doesn’t
exist."

“Normally, people introduce
themselves before making out. I don’t think I fully explained the art of the
drunken make out to you.”

I rolled my eyes. "Don't bring
sunglasses.”

“Well, what should I pack?”

“Normal clothing,” I said. “My
mom’s pretty casual about Christmas.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Your
mother is too fabulous to be casual about anything."

"Except holidays," I
smiled at him. I tried not to complain about my parents to David. They were
annoying, but they had never tried to hurt me. David's had. They threw him out
of their home when he was a junior in high school.  He had told them he was
gay, thinking that they might find a new church—one that wasn't so homophobic.
It had backfired.

He'd lived with his sister and her
husband after that. They were kind, but David knew they partly resented having
to provide for him when they had young children of their own.

David still made an effort—every
now and again when he thought they might come around. He'd tried last year at
Christmas and returned from break early, white-faced and quieter than I'd ever seen
him. He hadn't spoken to them since.

"Are we going to your church
or anything?" he asked. "Do I need a suit?"

"No," I smiled.
"Just bring your fine self, no sunglasses, and stop talking about the
stranger. Oh, and don't tell my mom I didn't get the job at the
Times
."

"You didn't tell her?"

"No. And you aren’t going to
either. She'll, like, think I need to see a therapist," I said. I went
into my room and grabbed my suitcase. "Come on. We've got to get
going."

I checked my phone a few times on
the way to the airport while David read Justin's article.

"This is the kid you want me
to date?"

"Nigel wants you to date. I'm
not even sure he's gay."

"He's in the GSA."

"So am I," I pointed out.
"Gay-straight."

"There are no straight boys in
the GSA," David replied. "Girls, fine. Boys, no." He folded the
paper. "Good article, though. He sounds feisty."

I smiled. "I guess."

"He's not feisty?"

“He’s quiet at first,” I said.
“But, yeah. He’s a little feisty.”

"Well, you've got to look out
for the quiet ones.” He nodded. “Like you.”

When we reached the airport, I got
the first and only email complaining about Justin's article—from Alexander
Faulk, the president of the fraternity.

Hi Hadley:

I wanted to let you know that I
saw Justin Shelter’s article in the paper. I'd like to be able to speak on the
record, if possible. I'm the President of the fraternity in question. Maybe we
could do a follow-up piece. Please let me know if we could organize something.

Best,

Alexander Faulk

It was a reasonable request, even
though I knew Justin had given them the opportunity to get on the record a
half-dozen times. I tapped out a reply while we checked our bags:

Alexander, thank you for
reaching out. I've left campus for winter break, and I will not be able to
assign a staff writer to a follow-up piece until January. However, if you would
like to write a letter to the editor, we could post it online until we have a
chance to run a piece with your statement in it in January. Let me know if
you'd like to do that.

All best,

Hadley

I felt reassured by the reaction,
though. Perhaps he had told the rest of the brothers to let him handle it.

When we stepped out from baggage claim in San Francisco, the
damp cooling air whispered across my neck. It felt gentle and clean. San
Francisco’s air was soft—humid, but almost never too hot or too cold. I felt
the tension in my neck and back dissolve underneath its soothing touch.

 I squinted through the haze of
headlights, found a cab, and gave the driver our address in Pacific Heights.

My mother had kept the house in her
last divorce. I had pretended not to care, but secretly I'd been happy. We
usually ended up in hotels or apartments when her marriages ended.

My mother would always say:
“Hadley, darling, the memories in that place just
haunt
me.”

But, really, when you lose five
childhood bedrooms, memories start to sound like bullshit. I mean, don’t
memories live in your head?

We pulled up to the white-brick
Georgian-style house and I yawned as the cabdriver helped carry our bags up the
stairs.

"You good?" the driver
asked.                           

"Yes. Thank you!" I
smiled and paid him and turned to the door.

“This is pretty,” David said.

I fumbled for my keys and frowned
when they didn’t work. "Well, that's weird.”

"You sure it’s the right
key?"

"Yeah. Maybe she changed the
locks." I shrugged and rang the doorbell. "She never stops losing her
keys. Fair warning, I think she has a new boyfriend named Sol.”

"That's what I like about
Veronica. She really gets after it."

"Oh, please," I said,
rolling my eyes.

I smiled broadly as the door swung
open.

A man in a maroon bathrobe, holding
a newspaper, gave me a long, searching look.

I raised my eyebrows. Solomon was
not at all what I was expecting. He was about half-a-foot too short for my
mother for a start, and too old. Way too old.

“Well, hi there,” I said.

“Can I
help
you?”

So, the boyfriend hadn't been
expecting us. Wonderful. Solid start. “Hi, I’m Hadley.” I held out my hand and
stepped through the doorway.

“What—excuse me? Are you selling
something? I did not invite you in.”

“I’m Veronica’s daughter,” I smiled
winningly. I looked around the foyer. The entire place had been redecorated. A
new maid stood by the stairs with her arms crossed.

Solomon still looked totally
confused. “I believe you’re sleeping with my mother,” I said delicately. I
nodded at the maid. “Hi, you must be new, too. I’m Hadley. So, where is she?”

The maid looked like she was going
to faint. “Roy! Who are you sleeping with? What is she talking about, Roy?”

“What the hell are you talking
about?” the man asked me, turning red.

I flinched.
Shit.
I opened
my mouth and closed it. “I—um. Okay. Does Veronica Mapplethorpe live here?” I
squinted. I couldn’t remember if my mother had kept Seth’s last name. “Or
Veronica—”

“Veronica Mapplethorpe sold us this
house,” Roy said. His voice shook with indignation and rage. “And I am most
certainly not sleeping with her, young lady.”

I took a step backwards, grabbing
my bags, and herding David, who was grinning from ear to ear, out the door.

“I am so, so, so, so sorry. I
thought—you see—I mean.” I spluttered. “Nobody told me—there was a—”

“We’re very sorry. This has been a
huge misunderstanding. You have a lovely evening,” David said, gracefully
pulling me out of harm’s way and closing the door.

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”

David burst out laughing.

“Oh my god,” I said.

 “So. That was hilarious. Please
tell me your mother actually lives in San Francisco and we aren’t homeless.”

“I can’t believe she didn’t tell me
that she
moved
,” I breathed.

"Focus. What's your actual
address?"

"That was it!”

"Okay. Maybe time to make a
phone call."

"Ugh," I said to him.

“
What is she talking about,
Roy?”
David mimicked.

I reached for my phone and called
my mother, heart pounding.

“Hello?” she answered breathily.

“Veronica. What. The. Hell.”                           

“Oh, Hadley, darling, where are
you?”

“I am at what I thought was our
house,” I said as calmly as possible. “Except for someone,
not you
,
named Roy lives there now.”

“Oh, darling, I’ve moved.”

“Yes,
clearly
. You have
moved. Where to is what I’d like to know. And where do you get off not telling
me you sold the house?”

“Oh, honey.”

“And our cab is gone!” I exclaimed.

“I’ll tell Solomon to pick you up.”

"Are you fucking
kidding?"

“Oh, Hadley, please don’t swear.”

“YOU SOLD OUR FUCKING HOUSE WITHOUT
TELLING ME.”

David giggled.

“This is so not funny,” I said to
him.

“Well, I did send you a change of
address card in the mail,” she took a shallow breath and exhaled. “The little
pink cards?”

“IN THE MAIL? Who
does
that?
You can’t send me a text message or an email like a normal person? You couldn’t
pick up the phone—”

“Well, I think that’s sort of vulgar—”

“You think it's vulgar to call me?
Seriously?"

"You never answer your
phone."

"That's not the point! Listen,
tell Salmon—”

“Solomon.”

“Whoever the fuck. Tell him to get
here pronto. I mean it,” I said. “This is
so
screwed up.” I firmly hit
the end call button on my phone and huffed.

David started laughing again. I
gave him a severe look.

“Your face, Hadley. My god. His
face. Her face,” he shook his head. “Amazing!”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I growled at
him.

The house we were standing outside
of, the one I’d lived in when I graduated from high school, was on top of one
of San Francisco’s many hills. You could almost always make out the red Golden
Gate Bridge through the billowing fog from my bedroom window. I had loved that
window.

I kicked my suitcase onto its side
and sat down on top of it.

David didn’t speak for a moment.
“Sorry,” he finally said. “I guess it's not that funny. You grew up
there."

“Whatever.” I yawned. “I’m just
annoyed she didn’t tell me the new address.”

“That’s what you’re annoyed about?”
he shook his head. “Man.”

“I mean,
who
doesn’t tell
their daughter that they moved?”

He laughed softly. His parents
probably wouldn’t tell him if they moved, but that would be a conscious,
purposeful decision. My mother had forgotten to tell me. Most of the time,
quite honestly, it felt like she had forgotten she had a daughter at all.

A black Range Rover pulled up.
David raised his eyebrows at me when the window rolled down.

“You Hadley?”

“Yeah,” I said grouchily. Solomon
looked pleasant enough. Older than my mother, just starting to lose his hair, a
friendly smile.

He got out of the car to help with
our bags. He wasn’t wearing a power suit, just sneakers and jeans and a
sweater.

He offered me a hand. “I’m Sol.”

I took his hand and shook.
“Hadley.”

“And this is…”

“I’m David McPhee,” David said with
a friendly smile.

 “Nice to meet you.”

Once we’d gotten our bags loaded
up, Sol tried to make conversation: “So, Hadley, your mom tells me you want to
be a journalist?”

“Yep,” I said.

He nodded. “Very cool.”

“So, how do you know my mother?” I
asked casually. This was a fun question to ask her boyfriends. It always made
them squirm.

“Well, we, um, you know…” his voice
trailed off and I smirked. “It’s been a month since we got married, I guess,”
he finally said.

I whipped my head around to look at
his reflection in the rearview mirror. “You got
what
?”

“Married.”

“Holy shit,” I muttered. My mother
did a lot of crazy shit, but this was a whole new level. I was embarrassed to
have David witnessing it.

“She—she didn’t
tell
you?”
Sol stammered.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said
brightly. “I’m sure the next time that I come home, you’ll be divorced.”

“Hadley,” David said, shocked.

“I can’t believe she didn’t
tell
you!”

“I can,” I said calmly. “So, where
did you say we were going?”

“Belvedere.”

“
Where
?” I demanded in
outrage. Belvedere was
not
in San Francisco. We had
always
lived
in San Francisco.

“Belvedere,” he repeated. “It’s
just outside the city.”

“Oh my god,” I said. That was a
bigger revelation than the marriage or the house. Sometimes it felt like we’d
lived in countless different places, but we’d only ever had one city.

Belvedere.

Unbelievable.

I inhaled thinly and massaged my
temples. This was a total disaster.

Sol’s house was gorgeous, set about an acre back, with
waterfront views. My mother wore a lavender shift dress and beige Chanel flats.
She kissed me on each cheek.

“Darling, it’s so wonderful to see
you. And David, love, I’m so happy you’re here to visit. Let me give you both a
tour.”

“I’ll put their bags in the guest
room,” Sol offered.

“Oh, thank you, dear,” she said.