Perfect Fifths (6 page)

airport reading to the exclamations (BAD BRIT! LOCO LILO!) accompanying tabloid paparazzi shots.

She's tired of using her suitcase as a makeshift dining table, tired of using plastic knives to pop open individual packets of cream cheese to smear on the doughy, flavorless bread products that other states try to pass off as bagels, tired of dropping half of her breakfast on her knee, tired of unsuccessful attempts to paper-towel-and-spit-clean the gluey smudge off her jeans, and tired of having no choice but to wear those jeans all day, all throughout boarding, taking off, accelerating, cruising, decelerating, landing, deplaning, claiming baggage, renting a car, driving, checking in, and unpacking, at which point she's so damn tired that she gives up on getting re-dressed, strips down to her underwear, yanks open the overtucked

sheets, climbs in, and calls it a night. Tired of feeling like a close but imperfect counterfeit self.

Jessica feels another shoulder poke. It's Garanimals again. "It only works if you actually press the numbers," the woman jokes.

"Right." Jessica looks down at the phone resting in her hand. "Thanks." She flips open the cell and is about to start dialing when it lights up. She had unintentionally taken it off vibrate after fumbling for the video from the Virgin Islands. Now the phone plays its customized ring tone, a song that hit number one on the adult contemporary charts in 1978 and has been vilified or deified ever since.

You know I can 1 smile without you ...

Twenty heads turning. Twenty voices overlapping. Twenty middle-aged women wearing "Music and Passion" T-shirts, "COPA" baseball caps, and ticket frame necklaces commemorating the most memorable of all the many thousands of standing ovations for the Showman of Our Time. Twenty members of the Tristate Chapter of the Barry Manilow International Fan Club.

"A fellow Fanilow!"

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"Look how young she is! A mini Maniloony!"

"Headed to Vegas?"

"The Final Farewell tour..."

"Stop saying that. I can't handle it!"

"I really, really can't believe it's his final Final Farewell show and we're gonna miss it..."

"Shaddap! I'm having a mental breakdown over here!"

"He'll be back. He always comes back ..."

Jessica thinks of the Girl who genius-rigged her phone to play Barry Manilow for every incoming call or message, the sixteen-year-old sophomore (now

eighteen-year-old senior) she visited in Pineville last night, and for whom she rearranged her travel plans.

Jessica works hard to remember this Girl as she always knew her—in graphic-print thermals and baggy jeans, dark hair hidden under an assortment of scarves, headbands, and caps until she finally, finally got through the awkward and never-ending growing-out phase—and not as she left her last night. Jessica fought against this most recent memory to see the Girl who claimed that she was so

fiercely against cosmetic enhancements that she refused to get any piercings, not even in her ears, but later confessed to Jessica that the real reason she rejected body mods was because the sight of needles made her pass out. The Girl who described herself as possessing a "postmodern sensibility trapped in a prepubescent body," whose first story for the Do Better High School Storytellers project was about (in the sixteen-year-old's own words):

... the out-of-the-womb chasm separating her from her parents. When Mr. and Mrs. Dae chose to name their colicky then melancholicky daughter Sunny after the opening words to the Sesame Street theme song, they guaranteed there would be no crossing the gulf between parent and progeny. The cheerful opening notes of that song were permanently embedded like DNA, an earworm that burrowed so deep that no matter how many hours she spent with her head phones on, nothing—not even the Sex Pistols—could blast it out... Later, Pineville Elementary School's earliest adopters to irony would rechristen her Sunny Delight, after the refreshing fruit-flavored, heavily fortified beverage that smells like orange juice made with one part frozen con centrate, two parts ammonia—an olfactory revelation that actually made Sunny appreciate the moniker for the first time as being unintentionally suited to her disposition ...

Sunny Dae would find Jessica's situation downright uproarious. Jessica could see Sunny tucking in her arms, legs, and head, shrinking herself into a seed pod as she always did when life's hilarity was too much to handle, before—BAM!—bursting wide-open like a trigger-sprung blossom when she couldn't contain her laughter any longer.

"Who else?" Jessica imagined Sunny asking. "Who else but Jessica Darling would find herself on a line full of middle-aged Barry Manilow fans?"

Jessica grimace-grins at the twenty members of the BMIFC whose spirits have been lifted by the revelation that there is another one of their own in their midst. She presses TALK on her phone.

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"Hey, Hope," she says, having no idea what she will say next to her best friend.

e even

Marcus needs a plan. He can spy on Jessica Darling from behind this bank of pay phones for only so long. Eventually, she will make her way to the front of the line, then off the line, then out of the Clear Sky customer service center altogether. And he must have a strategy for what he'll do when that occurs.

He already has part of the plan in order. That's the part where he follows her wherever she goes next and tries to engage her in a second conversation. It's the rest that needs work. The way he sees it, he has two options: (1) lie or (2) tell the truth.

He could stage another accident. Wow! Here we are again! You were craving a Nathan's Famous pretzel dog, too? Wow. Uncanny. Your next flight leaves in six hours?

Wow. Mine leaves right after that... Uncanny ...

Marcus lowers his head in shame, burying his face in the fake potted ferns atop the phone bank. Dust flies off the silk leaves, tickles his nose, and triggers a convulsive series of sneezes. "AW-CHOO-WAH!"

Marcus has barely recovered when he's overtaken by a second spasm. "AW-CHOO-WAH!"

And another. "AW-CHOO-WAH!"

He's being blessed by strangers on all sides as he stands with his head tipped back, eyes shut, mouth agape, hand waving in a come on, come on gesture as he

waits to be overtaken by the next nasal paroxysm.

"AW-CHOO-WAH! AW-CHOO-WAH!"

He hesitates before opening his eyes, now teary with histamines. But his nose is still tingling, There's still one more in there, he's thinking, when it comes.

"AW-CHOO-WAH!"

The blessings continue, but he is cursed. He surrendered all worries to this unrestrained reflex, and now that the sneezing fit is over, his worries have returned. While he rebukes the urban legend equating sneezes and orgasms, they did serve as a momentary mind eraser, making Marcus consider whether he should escape reality by snorting dust mites the way drug addicts Hoover opiates.

His senses fully restored, Marcus reconsiders his options. An orchestrated run-in? Never! How could he have considered such a preposterous lie even for a

moment? And not only because he has a longstanding policy against mendacity. Jessica would instantly see through the loserish ruse and abandon what remaining

respect she may or may not have for him. And as he catches another glimpse of Jessica through the layers of frayed silk leaves—she's talking on her cell phone now—he can't help but take her side. However, the truth wouldn't fare much better, now, would it? Hey, Jessica. I have no reason to still be in this airport, and I've been stalking you for the last hour ... Too much, too soon, too creepy.

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There is a minor commotion at the Clear Sky customer service center. It's difficult for Marcus to see or hear from this distance, but it appears and sounds as if the women in front of Jessica have linked arms and are sway-bouncing side to side and ... singing? He tilts his ear in the direction of the noise and can barely make out the aaaaaahs, oooooows, and oooooohs, something vaguely musical...

'Tissue?" flirts a voice behind him.

Marcus turns to address the woman possessing this studied, seductive voice. She's attractive in a way that most men would find attractive, but Marcus isn't most men. According to the name tag pinned to her shrunken black suit jacket, her name is Jonelle. Marcus free-associates professions for Jonelle: She's a clinical therapist.

A perfume spritzer. A masseuse. He instantly regrets falling into the trap of snap judgments and tries to make up for it with a smile. He also takes a tissue, out of courtesy, but he doesn't use it.

"You seem lost," Jonelle says.

He knows Natty would lose his mind if he were here right now, as he always does whenever Marcus gets approached by an attractive woman. He would be

particularly amused by Jonelle's reversal of the standard hot-girl gambit.

"You can't go out in public without some hot girl asking you for the time, or directions, or what's good on the menu," Natty once pointed out.

"So?"

"Hot girls are always coming up with excuses just to strike up a conversation with you," Natty said. "It's just like the awkward dialogue before the fuck scenes in

porn."

Marcus shrugged off his friend's observation not because it was untrue but because the truth was an embarrassment. He has been chatted up by attractive women

since the onset of puberty, even more so now that he has stumbled into his current state of dead-sexy dishevelment, which earned him the nickname "The Slutty Professor" by the smitten first-year females who pass by him on campus. He isn't really a professor, of course, but because he's nearly a decade older than the

youngest students, he might as well be. (Had most of their affair not taken place during the summer, when few students were on campus, the moniker might have shifted to describe the infamous anthropology professor. But Marcus doesn't like to think about how close it came to that.)

Before he even started orientation at Princeton, Jessica warned Marcus about the nicknames. She knew they were inevitable for someone destined to become such

an obtrusive, potentially empyreal presence on campus, and she even used them as evidence as to why she couldn't possibly be the girlfriend—or fiancee—of a

twenty-three-year-old college freshman. But Jessica failed to predict just how many women would be compelled to call him by a code name. For a tight-knit study group whose members daydream about him every Monday and Wednesday between 1:30 and 2:50 P.M.

during REL 382 Death and the Afterlife in East Asian Cultures, he's

"The Wounded Buddha." A chattering clique from one of Princeton's oldest and most pretentious secret
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societies refers to him as "The Mark," which is not a misspelled foreshortening of his name but a synonym for "target" because there is big money to be won by the lucky Ivy girl who lands him in bed. Marcus wouldn't know about any of this if it weren't for Natty, who benefits greatly from his friend's refusal to sleep with anyone whose birth doesn't predate the 1990s, and whose ever-present

proximity to Marcus makes him the first and most logical choice for girls who want to save face ("Who does Marcus think he is? He's not that hot!") with a fallback fuck.

If not for Natty, these girls would barely register with Marcus. He's too preoccupied by the ones in his past with whom he shared a genuine—if brief and

debauched—connection. Forty-something girls, or so he has been told. He must rely on secondhand information because his teen years were dominated by

drugged-and-alcoholic fugue-state fuckery Forty-something is a number that he honestly cannot confirm but has never tried to deny. He suspects the real number is maybe half that tally, if only because he cannot live with the idea of so many girls (now women) once fucked and forever forgotten. That he made it through this satyric phase unscathed isn't as miraculous as it seems. Marcus always used protection, but not because he was so concerned about his own reproductive health or that of

his partner. No, he always wore a rubber because an older friend (possibly Hope's own brother, Heath) told him it would make him last longer, and Marcus certainly didn't want to be known as a two-pump chump. It was this own egotistic preoccupation with his budding reputation as a sex machine that, ironically, prevented his contracting what Natty calls "cock rot," not to mention the proliferation of illegitimate Fluties toddling around South Central New Jersey.

"I can help you," Jonelle promises.

The watch Marcus is wearing—the one he's worn and scarcely noticed all day—starts to weigh heavy on his wrist.

t elve

Hey, Jess," Hope chimes. "Happy—"

"Thanks," Jessica interrupts. "But it's already too late. It's not so happy."

"Well," Hope says, her voice taken down a notch, "we miss you here."

"I miss you, too."

Jessica misses Hope more than a roommate logically should. But for the last two years, Jessica has spent far more time on the road than in their subterranean

apartment in Brooklyn. This is the same long, thin, dark space that once served as the former bowling alley of the Swedish American Men's Athletic Club, where Jessica and Hope split two bedrooms four ways with their high school classmate Manda Powers and her genderqueer boifriend, Shea. They were all supposed to lose this apartment once the family on the lease returned from a yearlong sabbatical in Europe, but that one year has turned into four. Manda and Shea moved out after that first year, leaving a spare bedroom for either Jessica or Hope to grab. The two of them flipped a coin. Jessica lost. She agreed to move into the former playground of fetish and flesh only after hiring a professional cleaning service to perform a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling sexorcism.

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