Pink Slip Party (19 page)

“Office slut,” my right one corrects.

“Shut up,” I say.

“Hey,” Steph protests.

“Not you,” I say, sighing.

“You don’t look so good,” Steph tells me as we both stumble out of the bathroom. She has a huge pink streak of lipstick down the front of her chin, where she’s attempted to apply her MAC gloss vertically instead of horizontally.

“I don’t feel so hot, either,” I say, as the room takes a spin.

“Hey, is that who I think it is?” she asks me, looking over in the direction of the bar. I look where she’s looking and see him.

Mike.

To:
[email protected]
From: Mary Kay Cosmetics
Date: April 8, 2002, 10:35
A.M.

Dear Jane,

We’d love for you to become part of the Mary Kay family. However, we insist that all Mary Kay sales representatives use our products. We feel that our products are a superior beauty line, and our representatives must believe this, as well, to make them good sales representatives.

You mentioned in your email that you are allergic to the color pink. This should not be a problem, because while some of our packaging is pink, none of our facial products, excluding some shades of eye shadow and lipstick, are actually pink.

Best,
Elizabeth Van Etten
Mary Kay Representative

12

B
efore I can think about pretending I never saw him and running for the nearest exit, he catches my eye. And even worse, he picks up his drink from the bar and makes his way through the crowd in my direction.

“I don’t feel so good,” Steph says. “I think I’m going to throw up.” Before I can stop her, Steph runs back into the bathroom. That leaves me, alone, to face Mike.

“Hey,” he says.

I am too whacked out to be suspicious of his motives, and too high to deliver the speech I’d planned time and again in the shower, the one that tells him that we’re both adults, and that I knew it was a fling, and that he really doesn’t have to worry about me, because I’m fine. I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.

Besides, he looks even better than usual. Put together, as always, and in control. And even as I tell myself I’m going to resist his charm, I know that part of me needs the attention and wants his interest, especially now that I’ve lost Kyle’s.

“Where’s the fiancée?” I say.

“Smooth,” my right Doc Marten tells me.

“Real smooth,” my left says.

“Ouch,” Mike says. He doesn’t even
look
sorry. He’s unflappable. Completely. “She’s in New York, actually. We’re fighting.”

He leaves this vague tidbit of information hanging in the air, as if I’m supposed to gain some sort of hope from it. Instinctively, I compare him to Kyle. Kyle has a better smile, better eyes. Better almost everything. Objectively, Kyle is more handsome, but Kyle isn’t here right now is he? He’s not the one flirting with me, grazing my forearm with his hand.

“Nice. And I suppose you want me to feel sorry for you, then?”

My right Doc Marten groans.

“No, I should have told you,” Mike says. “I screwed up. I really didn’t think we would be more than a fling.”

“You were right about that,” I say.

“Oh, come on, Jane. I really care about you, I do,” Mike says.

“Save it for someone who gives a damn,” says my left Doc Marten. Mike, however, doesn’t seem to hear it.

“I’m not going to fall for this again,” I say.

“Yes, you are,” my right shoe sighs.

“I can’t tell you how broken up I’ve been about how things worked out,” he says, as if he had nothing to do with the course of events. As if his breaking up with me and his firing me were events out of his control, like natural disasters.

“Yeah, me, too,” I say, trying to keep guarded. I should be angry. Instead, I’m relieved. He’s apologizing, like I hoped he would.

“Here she goes,” my left shoe chirps.

He smells so good, it’s not fair. How am I supposed to resist him when he smells like clean laundry and soap, and the hint of something just a little bit spicy? Mike is like deep-fried food. You know it’s bad for you. You know you’re going to regret it, but you know it’s going to taste so good.

“How are you? How have you been? Do you need anything? Really, let me know if you need anything.”

I want to ask him for rent money, but I refrain.

“Letting you go was the hardest thing I ever did,” he tells me, leaning close to my ear so that only I hear him.

“Do you mean breaking up with me or firing me?” I quip, but the tough girl act is all for show. Inside, I feel my will melting. The pit of my stomach is buzzing. My neck, where I can feel his breath, tingles. And still I tell myself, futilely, one last time, I should walk away. Now. Before I can’t resist.

“You’ve never looked so damn sexy,” he whispers, and I know it won’t take much more before I’m trapped.

Ron is still on stage playing, with Missy dancing in front of him. Steph, who looks a bit woozy, but intact, emerges from the bathroom with help from Ferguson, who seems to be holding her up. She looks up and sees me talking with Mike.

She waves, but it’s no use. My shoes are right. I am easy, and I’m not going anywhere. For a second, I think maybe I should just walk away.

And then I start thinking of Kyle with Caroline, and how they’re probably, right at this moment, a tangle of naked limbs in Kyle’s bed. Fine, I think. Two can play that game.

I do what I swore I’d never do again, I lean over and tell Mike what I’d like to do to him, Monica Lewinsky style. That’s when he puts his hand to the small of my back and we stumble outside and into a cab.

I am giggling because I can’t seem to fit the key into my door lock, and Mike has his hands up my skirt and is yanking on the edges of my underwear. I’m glad I wore the lacy ones and not the grungy gray-white ones with the hole at the waistband. I like to be prepared. As soon as Mike’s confident groping is about to turn X-rated, I turn the key in the lock and we tumble into my apartment.

The floor is spinning and Mike has his hands up my shirt. This is a cause for concern because my breasts are not my best feature. They are relatively flat and grope-less, and I am wearing a bra with some push-up power (i.e., padding) and Mike is finding that out as we speak. But I let him, and we kiss — a sloppy, wet kiss, and all I can think of is, Kyle is one hundred times the kisser Mike is. Kyle’s kisses aren’t rough and off-center like Mike’s are. Kyle is deliberate, gentle, and knows just what he’s doing. Mike is careless, rushed, and even now he’s unzipping his pants, offering himself up like some kind of delicacy.

I don’t bite.

“What?” Mike asks me. “What’s wrong?”

“Maybe this isn’t a good idea,” I say.

“Come on, baby,” he says, nuzzling my neck, planting a trail of kisses down to my collarbone.

“What are you trying to prove?” my left shoe screams.

“And will it be worth the therapy you’re going to need? That’s what I want to know,” the right adds.

“You’re still going to marry her, aren’t you?” I ask Mike.

“What?” he mumbles into my neck.

“Your fiancée?”

“What does this have to do with her?” he asks me, pulling away for the first time.

“Are you going to marry her or not?” I demand. My desire for Mike is dying with each extra second he takes to answer this question.

“It’s not important,” he says.

“It is important to me.”

“Fine,” he sighs, exasperated. “You want me to lie to you? You want me to tell you some fairytale about how I’m going to leave her and be with you forever? Real life just doesn’t work that way.”

“So you are going to marry her.”

“Yes,” he says. “I am.”

I knew this, deep down, all along. The small part of me that clung to the hope that I could change his mind dies. Not that I wanted to be with him, I tell myself. Who would want to be with someone like Mike? Life as his wife would be a life sentence of suspicion — every night, rifling through his pockets for receipts, snooping through his email, obsessed with finding proof of what you know must be the affair happening right under your nose.

“Does she know about me?”

“No,” he says, not looking at me.

“Are you going to tell her?”

His eyes narrow, and his voice drops. “No, and you aren’t going to either.” His voice is cold and emotionless. I don’t know if it’s the shrooms, or if his face is as ugly as I see it — drawn, hard, threatening. The look scares me, and if I had any doubt as to where I fit in his life, I know now. I’m the girl who’s supposed to play nice and keep quiet.

And this hurts — surprisingly, because I didn’t think I could let him hurt me again. And right then, I decide, I’m over him. Done. Finished. This doesn’t make me feel strong or empowered. Instead, I feel brittle, like cracked glass, as if anything he might say now could shatter me into a thousand pieces.

“I think you should go now,” I say to him.

After I hear the front door close, I sit dry-eyed on my bed, knowing that this is probably the moment I should congratulate myself on finally getting over Mike. But I don’t feel like a winner. All I feel is alone. So alone, that part of me feels like calling Mike back, if only for the twenty or so minutes of intimacy, even if it is fake.

“Sometimes the right thing to do is the hardest thing to do,” my left shoe says.

I fall asleep, and wake up to what sounds like a hive of bees.

I then realize it’s not bees at all, but snoring.

My living room is a disaster. There’s a body curled up on nearly every piece of my furniture — the couch and my two chairs. Ron is snoring on his back, with his head on the floor and his feet propped on top of my glass coffee table. Missy is curled up next to him. Steph is lying on her side on the couch, and Ferguson is fast asleep on the floor at her feet.

No flat surface in my apartment is without trash, clothes, or a body. On the bright side, my shoes are no longer speaking to me. And I am too hungover to feel anything but an overwhelming desire for coffee. After five minutes of intensive searching in my refrigerator, I find the coffee — hidden behind an old
TV Guide
and what looks like one of Ferguson’s shoes. Measuring out the coffee grounds feels like doing calculus. My brain hurts.

I find myself staring at my coffee machine in complete amazement. I feel like I have never seen anything so incredible as water being transformed into coffee drop by precious drop.

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t see you leaving with Mike last night,” Steph says, stumbling into the kitchen, yawning. “Do I even want to know what happened?”

“I didn’t sleep with him if that’s what you mean,” I say.

“Thank God,” Steph says, fanning her face like she might faint. “So, it’s really over then?”

“Beyond over,” I say.

We both stare at the coffee machine.

“Did we
both
ingest hallucinogenic drugs last night?” Steph asks.

“Yep,” I say.

“Just checking,” Steph says.

There’s another beat of silence.

“And so I didn’t
really
invent Skittles candies, even though I was sure I did and that I’m secretly worth a fortune?” Steph asks me.

I nod. “That’s right. You didn’t invent Skittles.”

“Dammit,” Steph curses. “And Ferguson isn’t really secretly Luke Wilson in disguise?”

“No.” I laugh, but the motion causes a sharp pain to jolt through my brain.

“The shrooms have made me feel really dumb,” she says.

“Me, too,” I say.

“No, I mean it. I think I’ve lost IQ points,” she says.

“Me, too,” I say.

“Like, what’s that flashing light for?” She points to the red light on my the answering machine.

“Phone messages,” I say. I realize that it’s been forever since I’ve actually checked my answering machine. I got into such a routine of expecting no one to call, that I stopped even looking.

“Oh, right, you’re supposed to press this button.” Steph hits “play.”

Beep.

“Jane, it’s Kyle. We need to talk. Call me.”

Beep.

“Kyle again. Look, I think we should talk about this, OK?”

Beep.

“It’s Kyle. Call me, OK?”

Beep.

I am rubbing my temples trying to figure out why it makes me happy that Kyle has been stalking me. My brain is working two speeds slower than usual. Still, I think I should be mad. There is something I definitely should be mad at him about, but my memory feels like a connect-the-dots picture, only half the dots are missing.

Beep. “Jane. This is Gail Mindy from the law firm and we’ve got some temporary work that I think you’d be qualified for…”

I don’t quite hear the rest. I don’t remember sending my resume, but then I’ve sent it almost everywhere, so I’m not surprised that I applied for a clerical job.

“You’d better call her,” Steph says. “We’re almost out of food.”

Dialing numbers proves too complicated for me in my current post-shroom state, and Missy, the only one of us besides Ferguson who didn’t drink shroom tea, ends up calling Gail Mindy and pretending to be me. She agrees with almost everything she says and adds, spontaneously, that I have good Excel spreadsheet skills. I am not sure I can even open an Excel spreadsheet, much less use one. I can, however, type, because in college I got out of a math requirement by taking Numerical Typing.

“You’re supposed to be there in twenty minutes,” Missy tells me when she gets off the phone.

Under different circumstances, I would be filled with glee that I finally have a job, even a temp one, except that this emotion is tempered by the fact that I don’t think I have enough presence of mind in my hungover state to operate the shower knobs very effectively, much less a telephone, computer, or fax machine. Somehow, I manage to shower and get dressed, despite the fact that I spend ten minutes transfixed by the pull string on my interior closet light. My post-shroom comedown has clearly reverted my brain to its primate ways and fixations on all things shiny.