The Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club (23 page)

I give up on cleaning and try to sleep, but after tossing, turning, and watching the clock for far too long, I give up and check my e-mail. How could I waste time stewing over Mateo when a stellar job offer might be sitting there waiting for me to come to my senses?

Three form e-mails notifying me that my résumé has been received, a joke from my stepdad that I read about two years ago, a lengthy update from Sam and Trish on everyone we know in Seattle, and a message from C.J.—the new website is ready to go live.

I click on the link to his work in progress. C.J. has outdone himself. I can’t believe this is my website. It’s better than I ever imagined. He’s added tons of new bells and whistles and redone all the graphics. The main color used, as I requested, is a deep red. It’s the color of my apartment walls, the color of my un-Cassie dress, the color of a painting that hangs in El Taller, the color Mateo’s cheeks blush when he’s embarrassed. It is the color of Buenos Aires.

“All it needs is a new domain name!” C.J. proclaims in his e-mail. For some reason, he is enthusiastic about this new home for my silly scribblings. He thinks my website is brilliant.

Could he be right? Maybe the website is brilliant. Maybe Jeff and my old boss were wrong. Maybe I’m fantastic. Maybe Mateo is missing out on the best thing that ever happened to him. Not that I care. I am strong and determined. I am Cassie Moore, and I have a plan.

I also have my website’s new name. I type those five words—Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club—and hit send.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

T
he next morning, over a plate of sweet mini-croissants drizzled with honey, the way I love them, Andrea asks how the dance class went. I tell her, as offhandedly as I can manage, about running into Mateo at the community center.

“Oh, yes,” she says, turning away to fuss with Jorge’s jumper. “I forget he goes there sometimes.” She passes me the platter of
medialunas
again, even though my plate is still full. “So you liked the class?”

“Yeah,” I say casually. “It was fun.”

“Just fun?”

“It wasn’t quite what I expected, but I learned a lot.”

Andrea peers at me over the rim of her teacup, sizing up my response. I don’t expand. We sit in uncharacteristic silence for a while. Jorge reaches for a
medialuna
and attempts to shove the whole thing in his mouth. Half of the pastry sticks out, like a crusty tongue. The tallest dog, Maradona, named for a famed Argentine soccer—that is, football—player, helps himself with one lick, setting off a fit of little-boy giggles. Andrea shoos Maradona away and wipes Jorge’s face with the corner of a napkin dipped in water. I scan the morning newspaper that’s spread across the kitchen table as a makeshift tablecloth. The president is campaigning up north, where support is waning. The local government is trying to get an injunction against a group of workers who have taken over an abandoned factory in the city. La Boca won its last football game. I am halfway through the front page before I realize I actually understand most of what I’m reading.

“Would you do it again?” Andrea asks as she hands Jorge an orange slice.

“What?” Have I been found out? Did she see Mateo let himself in and climb the stairs to my apartment last night?

“Tango?”

“Oh. I don’t think so,” I say, rising to clear the table. “Tango’s a beautiful dance, but maybe too complicated. I don’t think I’m cut out for it.”

“Ah,” she exhales, like a wise sage divining truth, and takes a sip of coffee. “
Entiendo. Entiendo.
”

Jamie, on the other hand, doesn’t understand at all. “I don’t get it,” she says, lifting a pleather miniskirt from the rack. We’re on our eighth store. With the power of the U.S. dollar sinking in, Jamie has gone into serious, and inevitable, shopping mode. She holds the skirt against her waist and does a little
America’s Next Top Model
for me. I laugh so hard, I snort.

“What don’t you get?”

“You say you don’t want to waste your time with something that can’t go anywhere, right? Something that isn’t in your plan, or whatever.”

“Yeah?”

“But in a month you and Dan will be on opposite ends of the U.S.” She slips on a pair of white Elton John sunglasses and makes a face at herself in the mirror. “You know that isn’t leading anywhere. So why is it okay to hang out with him and not Mateo?”

I think of Dan, sweet, stable, safe Dan, with his humongous bouquet of roses, his fumbling hands in the night, his silly jokes that make me giggle against my better judgment. And then Mateo.

Mateo doesn’t come to me as a series of qualities or memories or other essentials that make up normal human relationships. There is no Idealmatch.com profile that ticks through my head. No, when I think of Mateo, it’s not even about thinking. It’s just feeling. That feeling fills me up. There’s no other way to put it.

“I don’t know. It just is.”

“Uh-huh.” Jamie puts the skirt back on the rack, watching me from the corner of her eye. “Care to elaborate?” Jamie, I’ve recently discovered, is one dissertation away from her master’s in psychology. She’d planned her wedding date to coincide with her graduation, but a few chapters from finishing, she realized she didn’t want to be a psychologist or a wife or anything else she had planned on.

“Not really.” She stares at me hard until I give in. “Okay, maybe it could go somewhere with Dan. He could move. I could move. People do those kinds of things when they find the right person.”

Jamie takes a pile of clothes into the dressing room, but she isn't about to drop the interrogation. “And you think Dan might be your Mr. Right?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. He’s pretty much exactly the kind of guy I’ve always seen myself with. He fits.”

“Fits what?”

“The Plan.” I cringe when I say it, though I don’t know why.

“And why is that so important to you?”

“Well, Doctor . . . I think it all began when I didn’t get a bike for my eighth birthday.”

The dressing room door swings open abruptly. “Classic avoidance,” she says seriously. “Though if you want to talk about the bike, I’m all ears.”

“I’m not avoiding. I just don’t see the point in agonizing over something that’s simply not an option.”

“Agonizing—that’s an interesting word. Does thinking about your plan feel like pain?”

“No. It usually makes me feel really good.” Good and happy and safe, but sometimes lonely—kind of like eating an entire Toblerone bar all by myself. But I’m not about to tell Jamie that.

“Usually?” Holding up a sheer blue blouse for inspection, she watches me through it, and I’m reminded of my cryptic conversation with Andrea just a few hours before. Only this time I haven’t got the slightest clue what’s really being said. “Your parents are divorced, right?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Your mom’s kind of controlling?”

“Whose isn’t?”

“What you’d really like to do is pretend nothing’s wrong, and when you get back to Seattle, every piece of the puzzle that is your life will fall magically into place?”

“Yes, please.” I take a big breath.

“And Mateo doesn’t fit into that puzzle.”

“Exactly.”

“Good thing you’re going home soon, huh?”

“Yeah,” I say, puffing my cheeks, and letting out the air in a cartoonlike whoosh. “Good thing.”

Once the hunting, gathering, and analyzing is done, Jamie heads back downtown to her hostel with her bags of booty. It’s been a fun afternoon, but I am left alone with my thoughts again, and that’s no fun at all.

Going home. There’s something I have no choice but to think about. Somehow, amid all my preparations for going home, beneath the comfort of list making and box checking, going home has become a reality. I knew the day was coming, but I didn’t expect it to come so fast. Now here it is, hurtling toward me at breakneck speed. And I’m glad. Thrilled, really. It’s just so soon. Under five weeks to go, and nothing’s in order. I haven’t made any headway in the job department, my savings are running out, I don’t have a solid plan for where I’m going to live once I’m back in Seattle, let alone any idea what I’m going to do with my life when I get there.

What I do have is a lot of e-mail, mostly messages from old blog readers raving about the new site. People love the new chat pages that C.J. designed—many seem to be using them as a makeshift dating service—and there is a daily stream of praise in my in-box. Unfortunately, their praise isn’t going to help pay my rent back in Seattle. Or could it? There is a message from a woman who wants to buy space on the website for a personal ad. If she’s willing to pay me, how many others might be, too? I could definitely use a few bucks in the bank once I’m back in Seattle. Mostly, I like the thought of helping some of these broken hearts fall in love again. I forward her e-mail to C.J., asking if there’s some simple way to automate ad purchase and posting for site visitors. If it works, I tell him, I’ll cut him in for half. Within minutes, there’s an e-mail from him. “Great idea! I’m on it, boss!” I smile at his enthusiasm, then shake my head, worried that I’m wasting more time—mine and his—on some silly website for complete strangers, something that isn’t in The Plan.

When I tell Sam and Trish about the website in our next weekly phone call, they don’t seem to think it’s silly at all.

“Cassie, this is fantastic!” declares Sam, who wastes no time keying in the URL. “You did this by yourself?”

“I’ve had some help from a friend on the technical bits, but basically, yeah.”

“Why didn’t you tell us about it before?”

“There wasn’t much to it until now,” I say, though I’m not sure that’s the real reason. Part of me might also have felt stupid showing my little blog to my career-fast-tracking friends.

“What a great name,” says Trish. “And it looks so professional.”

“Yeah, C.J.’s the best,” I say, trying to sound casual. In truth, I’m thrilled that they like it.

“I love that color red,” Sam pipes in.

“Me, too.” I consider explaining its inspiration but decide to keep that just for me. “It’s the color of that old velvet jacket I had,” I say instead.

“Ooh, yeah. I loved that jacket,” says Sam. “What ever happened to it?”

“I think I might have stashed it at my parents’ place.”

“If I may interrupt this very important discussion,” Trish bursts in, “Cassie, how many hits are you getting?” She is always one for the hard facts.

“I don’t know, exactly.” I think for a second. “I guess it was about two thousand when I last checked.”

“Two thousand hits a month is pretty good.”

“No, I mean two thousand a day.”

“Holy shit! That’s huge for a personal blog,”

“It’s not really a blog anymore. They mostly chat with each other. Some of them have actually started dating.”

“Really . . .” Even over the phone, thousands of miles away, I can tell that the wheels are turning in Trish’s head.

“Oh, yeah, they’re hooking up left, right, and center. I should have called the site Wheretofindyourreboundrelationship.com.”

“That would have saved me a lot of hangovers after my breakup with Joe,” Sam says, chuckling.

“Have you thought about looking for advertisers?” asks Trish.

“Well I hadn’t planned on making money off it. But one of the readers asked to post a personal ad, so my technical guy is working on a way to let people do it.”

“Really . . .”

“What?”

“Crazy idea: How would you feel if we covered the site in our newsletter?” asks Trish.

“Brilliant!” shouts Sam.

“Why would your readers care about my blog?”

“We’re supposed to keep them informed on what’s hot with the twentysomething crowd, especially high-tech stuff. I’d say this definitely qualifies.”

The idea of my blog being featured next to articles on the hottest jeans trends and Apple’s new teeny-tiny whatever makes me feel good. Almost proud, even. And that’s what friends do, isn’t it? Make you feel good about small, meaningless accomplishments like starting a blog or getting your hair highlighted in the perfect shade of blonde. “Okay. Sure. Why not,” I say. Sam and Trish squeal with joy. On this end of the line, I am positively beaming.

Once we hang up, I am filled with a restless energy. I throw on my sneakers and head out for a long walk. I round a couple of plazas, then make my way to the cat park. The cats are lazy from the heat, lolling about under the trees, sleeping in the shadows along the iron fence. Worried that their inactivity will be contagious, I move on to the next park. There are miles and miles of green in this part of the city. Not far from Andrea’s house, the parks are more urban—sparse grass, decrepit wooden benches, ponds filled with questionable water. To the west, flora and fauna gather sophistication. Forty-five minutes into my walk and the grasses are thick and soft, the benches are wrought iron, and the small, man-made lakes picturesque. Walk this far and you exchange the hum of city life for the sounds of birds singing, children laughing, and the occasional oar lapping at water. I’ve read that if you go even farther east, there’s a stunning rose garden, so farther I go.

I wind through the garden, over emerald mounds, under iron arbors painted an optimistic white, between rosebushes. There are dozens and dozens of them, each labeled with its Latin name. It’s a bit late in the season, though, and most hold only remnants of flowers, a drying petal here and there. I try to imagine how glorious they must have looked a few months before, when I first read about the garden. Back then I was too busy fooling around with Antonio. This annoying thought leads to even more annoying thoughts of time wasted on Mateo, and those I do not need. I notice a small white building on the edge of the garden. This must be the Japanese greenhouse I heard about from someone at El Taller. They’re supposed to have great sushi. I haven’t had sushi in forever. I duck inside.

But the building, it turns out, is home to a contemporary art gallery. The last thing I need is a trip down Mateo-memory lane. However, the woman at the desk looks so excited to see a visitor, I don’t have the heart to walk out. I pay the three-peso admission and step into the bright white exhibit space.

A large sign announces a new exhibit featuring local artists from the second half of the twentieth century. Some of these artists, the sign explains, have gone on to international recognition. Others have faded into relative obscurity. All, it asserts, have played an important role in the story of Argentine art.

There are so many beautiful pieces, each as different, I imagine, as the person who created it. Some artists have a whole wall devoted to their work. For others, there is only one painting. How sad, I think, that this might be all the world knows of this person’s talent. I rush through the watercolors—they’ve never held much appeal for me, too delicate and wistful for my tastes—and laze through the acrylics and oils. It’s just me and an older British couple happily snapping their digital camera at everything, so I can take my time winding through the mazelike building, discovering each artist slowly, quietly introducing myself with the respect they each deserve.