Second Best Fantasy (7 page)

Soon, Janine

I wished desperately I could pick up the phone and call her, but outside of the city I had no idea where she was or how to reach her. I knew inside I would see her again, I just didn’t know when. But the mere fact she was going to come back amazed me, so much that I had what I believed was a small panic attack. Not knowing how else to medicate anything from the flu to rabies, I poured myself a tall glass of single malt scotch with shaky hands.

Now what? I sat down at my kitchen counter, grabbed the phone, and called my best friend in the whole world, Cindy.

An hour later we were at Sea Salt in the village sharing a pitcher of Long Island iced tea and an enormous cob salad. “I can’t believe you didn’t call me sooner,” she complained.

“Cin, this whole thing only happened less than a couple of weeks ago. Sometimes we go for months without talking to each other.”

42

“I know, I know. Listen, I’ve known you since we were little kids in Milltown. And I’ll tell you something. That look that’s on your face right now? I haven’t seen that since Ellen Trainer when we were in the fifth grade.”

“And what look is that?” I asked. “Terrified? Tortured?

Obsessed?”

“Smitten,” she grinned. “It’s cute.”

Cindy and I had known each other practically since birth.

It was fair to say she knew me better than anyone did, and I trusted her opinion. When I had moved away to the cornfields of Illinois, she was one of less than a half dozen people I maintained contact with besides relatives on the coast. She had done everything I had ever been afraid to do: she was in a rock band when she was 20 and they actually were achieving some local success, but she walked away from that to travel with the Peace Corps for a few years, then she met some sort of guru on a retreat weekend and followed him to live with Buddhist monks in Tibet for a year. She came back to the States and, of all things, went to law school, and now she worked for an elite firm in upper Manhattan.

She was one of the most interesting people I’d ever had the pleasure of knowing, and one of a very limited number of women in my life I had not slept with, thereby maintaining the sanctity of our relationship. I trusted her above anyone else, and I had to tell someone about Janine.

“You know how I feel about bisexual women,” I said.

“Nothing but trouble.” I looked down into my glass.

“Well, it’s not like you just found that out. You knew going in. You always do that, and then want to use it as an excuse later on to bail. I also know you’re enlightened enough to understand it doesn’t really matter.
People
fall in love with
people
, all that gender driven sexuality crap is a bunch of bullshit.”

Of course she was right. I was often drawn to women who were unavailable to me for one reason or another, and being bisexual was my favorite choice. It gave me a way to not commit and an easy out when intimacy became too intense or complicated for my liking. I liked to find women who were 43

emotionally unavailable because, really, it was me who was afraid, me who was unavailable. Cindy knew me too well.

“Yeah, but Cin, I mean, come on. She’s a fucking rock star, for Christ’s sake. That’s a whole new level of unattainable for me. What will I do, sit home and watch porn and hang out with the cat while she’s on tour in Japan, or Australia, or God knows where?”

She gave me the look all best friends have. The one that says, “I know the truth about you.” She lit a cigarette with a match. I found this endearing about her. Cindy was a woman who could afford Zippo lighters made out of gold if she wanted one, yet she was always rummaging through her purse to find a match. She was also constantly quitting smoking, but never quite managed to do it, like it was a project she kept putting off.

“The truth, kiddo, is you have strayed farther and farther from your true self ever since you ended things with Liz. That was nearly ten years ago, for God’s sake. I won’t say just get over it already because I know, I
know
it was the most painful thing you have ever been through. I know she was the only woman you ever really loved. But just because that didn’t work out doesn’t give you license to abandon the hope of ever being happy.”

I flinched when she mentioned Liz, still, after all those years. But it was true, that relationship ending changed me profoundly, and I still wasn’t over it. Or maybe I was, but it was easier to lament the past then face an uncertain future. The end of my one and only failed marriage proposal had come to be something that defined me, built in to my personality and carried into my other romantic relationships.

As if on cue, she said, “You have a chance here to not bring that memory with you. It’s a new day, my friend. And you’ve got to admit, no matter what happens, its damn exciting stuff. This is what we live for! I remember when you were someone who believed in that, fate and chance and the value of experience…what happened to you, Maggie?”

I’ve just become a cynical, emotionally shut down alcoholic
, I thought to myself. “I don’t know Cin, I just don’t know.” I started to cry a little without any kind of internal warning.

44

Embarrassed, I excused myself and went to the restroom. I splashed some cold water on my face and took a long hard look in the mirror and thought,
Jesus, what is happening to me?
I knew the answer. Janine had really gotten to me, deep down under my skin. I didn’t know how, but I knew it had happened.

Yes, it could absolutely be fate, or a past life connection, or something equally esoteric. Whatever it was, I knew Cindy was right, and whatever was going to happen with Janine was like a runaway train, and there was no stopping it.

When I got back to the table Cindy hugged me. “You know, I know you’re right, and, in the end, someone will probably get hurt, maybe you, maybe her. But I also know you would spend the rest of your life wishing you’d taken the chance if you didn’t. Do this for yourself, Maggie. Stop pretending you have some pre-determined path of being alone forever. Fate is what we make it.”

We settled the bill and walked around the village for a while, stopped in Rebel Rebel to browse, then got some cappuccino on the way to the parking deck where Cindy’s Lexus looked out of place in the halogen lights of the dingy garage, like a high-class prostitute in a dive bar. I loved that Cindy didn’t allow her success or her money to turn her into someone else.

She was still genuinely kind, she gave a lot of her money away to various charities, and still volunteered at a domestic violence shelter twice a week. The only thing she didn’t have was the same as me, a partner with whom to share it all. But Cindy’s case was much different than mine. She had found her true love, Joe, on the last leg of her international flight coming home from Tibet. They had a whirlwind romance and got married after only a year, it was the most beautiful wedding I had ever attended.

From the moment she walked into the church, her husband locked eyes with her, and I swear never looked at anything or anyone else for the remainder of the ceremony. Never before had I known two people so much in love, so utterly devoted to each other. Then, one night, he left their Upper East Side walk-up to go to the corner bodega for a pack of smokes and was run down by a drunk driver. It was the most tragic thing that had ever 45

happened to someone I knew. Cindy wouldn’t even talk about it for two solid years.

She was done looking for romance. She said Joe had given her the happiest days of her life, and she knew she would always compare other men to him and that wasn’t fair to anyone.

So, through her personal brand of spirituality and a lot of soul searching, she had found ways to make peace with it. I admired her and I was proud to call her my friend.

The Lexus rolled to a stop in front of my building. “So, I just have one question for you,” she said.

“Oh, yeah, what’s that?”

“When do I get to meet her?” I just stood there and smiled.

* * * *

“Maggie, come to Pete’s office. Maggie to Pete’s office, please.”

I looked up to see everyone staring at me. Usually when you were paged to the big boss’s office it was because you were in trouble. I wasn’t, as far as I knew. I got up, ignored the ogling co-workers, and walked to the front of the offices.

“Yeah Pete?” I popped my head into his suite I envied, more than a little. Although, I didn’t really want the responsibility that came with the suite.

“Come in. Close the door.” He didn’t seem upset but he was always difficult to read.

I sat down in front of his desk. “What’s up?”

“Maggie, we just landed a really big contract with Wolf Creek Records.”

I froze. Wolf Creek was Janine’s label.

“Apparently they want us to do the entire layout for the next Blue Is record, although they don’t quite know when that will be yet. In the meantime they contracted us for design and lyric typesetting for five other bands.”

He looked at me, waiting for me to say something. I wasn’t sure how to feel, let alone what to say.

“I’m just wondering why it is you were requested 46

specifically to manage these projects. Is there anything you want to tell me?”

He waited. Pete was a nice guy and a good boss. Since I’d never been in this position, I wasn’t sure what the next right thing to do was. I mean, it would be one thing if I were sleeping with the actual client, but Janine wasn’t the client, she was the singer
represented
by the client, surely that was a loophole in any sort of conflict of interest mandate.

“Maggie, relax, you aren’t in any kind of trouble.”

Only then did I realize I’d been holding my breath. I exhaled slowly. “Oh. Okay, that’s good, I mean, you know I love my job.”

“I just have one question,” he said. I knew exactly what he was going to say next.

“When do I get to meet her?”

* * * *

I asked my boss to keep the information between us, and I trusted him to do so. I knew if everyone found out, I would become a backseat in every single conversation. My life as I knew it would become completely boring to my colleagues and they would only ever ask questions about Janine. I shuddered to think of it. I was painfully aware there was a part of me that didn’t want her to succeed for that very reason. It was incredibly selfish of me and I knew it. I thought someone should start a support group for the Nobody partners of famous people.

One night about a week after the package, I came home and Janine was on my doorstep. It was one of those snapshot moments, filed in your memory cells for instant recall. I came walking around the corner, and there she was, wearing jeans and a spaghetti strap tank top, not looking like a famous or about-to-be famous person at all. She looked just like any other girlfriend, waiting for me to get home.

“How’s work?” she called out to me, smiling. “Anything interesting happen this week?”

I dropped everything I was carrying onto the steps and 47

kissed her. “I missed you,” I whispered into her hair. “How long are you here?”

“We can talk about all that later. I want to take you out to dinner.”

I assumed that meant not long. I was going to have to get used to this, I supposed. But it sure did feel good for her to hook her fingers through my belt loop and pull me toward her for another kiss.

“
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…
” I started to joke.

“Oh, come on, you wouldn’t really have wanted me to walk into anyone else’s, would you?” She was right. But I couldn’t shake the feeling our relationship was going to look a lot more like
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
than
Casablanca.

“
Let me cook for you instead?”

“What’s on the menu?”

“Linguine. Clam sauce.”

“Red or white?”

“White, why?”

“Do you have a nice bottle of Friuli Sauvignon? Never mind. Of course you do. And if you don’t, I’m sure you’ve got something just as nice stashed away.”

As we climbed the stairs, I wondered how much she knew about wine. Was it as much as she seemed to know about everything else? Her capacity for knowledge amazed me; hell, everything about her amazed me. But the greatest miracle was that she was here, standing smack in the middle of my life. In that moment, holding the door for her, I was suddenly struck with the feeling that it didn’t matter to me who she was, how famous she was, how often she was away, who else she slept with, or anything else she did. I was making a conscious decision to love, for it is only when love is a choice that it even has a chance.

Those addictive emotions of fascination, falling head over heels, even obsession, would always give way when the people in the relationship acted as their adult selves. I wanted something much more real than that. I decided right then and there that when the going got rough, as surely it would, for the first time in 48

my life I wouldn’t run. I wouldn’t abandon her or my heart’s desire, which had in an instant become one and the same.

* * * *

While I prepared dinner, she told me all about her LA trip, working at the Wolf Creek studios out there, how it was different from New York. With each little success, there were people higher up in the industry to meet and to appease.

“It’s frustrating, you know? Me and the guys, we just want to make music. While we’re doing that, there’s some guy in a suit telling you the song needs to have another chorus, or the bridge is too long, or something needs to be six bars and not eight, and so on.”

I couldn’t imagine anyone putting any kind of restraint on what she did, but I supposed if you wanted to be successful you had to follow
some
rules.

We sat down together and ate mostly in silence. I kept admiring her in the flicker of candlelight. She asked me if I had to work tomorrow and I said yes. “Can I see you again after work?”

I chuckled. Seriously? “That depends. Will you make dinner tomorrow?”

“Can we make homemade pizza together? My brothers and I did that when we were little with our parents. I miss it, and haven’t done it in a long time. I would like to do something nostalgic with you.”