The Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club (4 page)

A new plan. The very idea thrilled me to the core, hummed in the back of my mind. I was so young when I came up with the first one. Now I was sophisticated, worldly, twenty-eight, for God’s sake. Not that everything on the old plan was bad, not at all. In fact, I was certain most of it was dead on. But there was always room for improvement. Clearly. Like this break thing. Why hadn’t I scheduled that in somewhere between first college boyfriend and first non-minimum-wage job? I’d never been to Europe or Africa, or outside of the U.S., for that matter. Major flaw in the plan, that one. And Jeff—what was I thinking? A lawyer with a thing for classical music and Japanese minimalism? If I was going to find my ideal match, I would have to put more thought into it. No lawyers. No one who spends more on hair products than I do. No one with ex-girlfriend baggage, especially not in the shape of a cello. But what about MBAs who listen to jazz? Divorced doctors who speak Mandarin? I needed criteria. I needed a contingency strategy. I needed to check out the minibar.

A jar of macadamia nuts, two tiny bottles of vodka, and a list of amendments scribbled on hotel notepaper later, and it was time to get serious. The hotel notepaper, though elegant, would get me only so far. Taking a break was serious work. I needed some serious tools. I called room service.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Moore,” said a pleasant voice on the other end. “What can I help you with?”

“I need a laptop.” I realized as I said it that they probably don’t keep computer hardware in the same place they make your grilled cheese sandwich. Which reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “And a grilled cheese sandwich, please.”

“Certainly, Ms. Moore. They’ll be right up.” Half a rerun of
Friends
later, I was in full research mode and eating the best eighteen-dollar grilled cheese sandwich in the history of mankind.

God, I love the Internet! With one laptop and one high-speed wireless connection, I found everything anyone could possibly need to plan the perfect life break. Or Life Break, as Trish would call it. There are sites for people planning to travel, sites by people who’ve already traveled, sites for people who want to help you travel, sites by countries that want you to travel there. There are apartment rental agencies, language schools, hotels, hostels, homestays. There are cost-of-living numbers, travel warnings, vaccination recommendations, literacy statistics, personal anecdotes, e-zine stories . . . I bet some people look in a brochure and point to the prettiest beach photo. Not Cassie Moore. If I was going to take a break from my life, I was going to do it right. And the fact that the screen was getting progressively blurry as the evening wore on wasn’t about to stop me.

I woke up the next morning to my cell phone ringing. It was my mother, so I let it go to voice mail. My head throbbed “aspirin, aspirin, aspirin.” My tongue felt like it was wearing an angora sweater. My phone rang again. Sam. Probably checking in to make sure I’d made it home okay. It rang again; my stepdad this time. Strange, I thought. He never calls me during the day. He must be really worried about me. I’d get back to him as soon as I was finished throwing up.

When I finally checked my voice mail, there were twelve messages, but I never made it past the first one: “Cassie, this is your mother. I just read your e-mail. Is this some sort of joke, or have you gone completely insane? If it’s the former, I’m not amused.”

E-mail? What e-mail? I went online and checked my webmail, open from the night before, though I didn’t remember sending any messages. Please, I prayed, don’t let me have e-mailed something sappy to Jeff.

My in-box was flooded with messages, each subject line more cryptic than the next: “I am so jealous!” “Way to go, girl!” “Take me with you . . .” And then I saw the one that really mattered. An automatic response confirming my flight to Buenos Aires. My flight. To Buenos Aires. Confirming my flight to Buenos Aires. Where the heck was Buenos Aires?!

My head began to throb again, but I had a feeling that aspirin wasn’t going to help this time. What had I done? How drunk had I been? Clearly drunk enough to do something incredibly stupid, like book a flight to Buenos Aires, but not so drunk that I couldn’t enter the numbers of my credit card onto a Web form.

This had to be the worst hangover in the history of the world.

My brain switched to autopilot. I don’t want to go to Buenos Aires. I don’t want a break. I don’t want another martini to come within five feet of me ever. What I do want is to get back on track. I
need
to get back on track. I need a new job, a new apartment, and a new fiancé. Surely there’s a way out of this mess. Tickets are refundable. I could send a mass message to everyone saying the whole thing was a joke. Ha, ha. “That kooky Cassie,” they’d say and forget all about this in a few hours. Either that, I thought, or I’ll shave my head and join a cult in California.

As I roughed out a damage control plan in my head, my cell phone rang again. I dove to reach it before it went to voice mail, certain it would be Sam and Trish, who would tell me once again that everything was going to be okay. But it was Jeff’s name on the screen, and my thumb hit the talk button before my brain could veto.

“What the hell is this all about?” Jeff’s normally calm and slightly muffled speakerphoned voice was loud and sharp, piercing from right ear to left temple.

“Not so loud, please. Can you talk a bit quieter?” I rummaged through my pocketbook for aspirin. Echinacea, vitamin C . . . bingo.

“No, I cannot,” he said even louder. “Jesus Christ, Cassie. You can’t be serious about going to Argentina. I mean, Jesus Christ.”

Right. Argentina. Buenos Aires is in Argentina. That’s South America, right? “I’m about as serious as you are about Lauren.” I popped two aspirins and forced them down without water. They left a bitter film in my mouth that tasted a hell of a lot better than my morning-after breath.

“This has nothing to do with that. We’re talking about you here.” He took a deep breath and softened his voice. “I’m worried about you, Cassie. You’re upset and clearly not thinking straight.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Come on. Argentina? This is not exactly part of
The Plan
.” The words came out so snide. Jeff had always said he was supportive, but whenever he talked about my plan, I thought I’d sensed a bit of a smirk in his voice. I’d assumed I was being overly sensitive.

“Maybe I don’t have to do everything according to plan,” I said as dryly as possible. I wasn’t about to get emotional, not for him. “Maybe I’m not the automaton you’ve got me pegged for. You’re not the only one who can be unreliable—sorry, unpredictable.”

“So, what, you’re doing this to prove something to me?”

“This might come as a shock to you, Jeff, but not everything in the entire world is about you.”

“Look, I don’t want to argue.” His voice softened. “I’m just worried about you.” It killed me to hear those words from him. They cut into me like a knife—a knife I didn’t want to extract. “Do you even know what you’re getting into? The poverty? The crime? People get kidnapped there, you know.”

“Of course I know what I’m getting into.” Poverty? Crime? Kidnapping? Oh, God, I thought, my heart starting to race, I can’t do this.

“You wouldn’t last two days in a foreign country, let alone six months in South America.” That did it. Whether or not I could do this wasn’t any of his business anymore, was it?

“Who are you to tell me what I can or can’t do?”

“I’m just saying it’s not Disneyland, Cass. Hell, it isn’t even Mexico.” Jeff had talked about taking me to Puerto Vallarta once. He’d said we could stay at one of those all-inclusive hotels with a private beach and do nothing but eat quesadillas, drink margaritas, and make love for days. The knife sunk in deeper. I wrenched it out with both hands.

“Well, thank you so very much for your concern, but it’s none of your business how long I last. You have no say in my life now.” I slammed the cell phone down, but it bounced off the bed and onto the floor with a dull thud. God, I miss real phones sometimes. I looked around the room, but everything had the sheen of major money and the hotel had my credit card number. I picked up a feather pillow and flung it at the wall. It would have to do.

Once my anger subsided, the panic set in.

I couldn’t back out now, not after that conversation. I couldn’t let Jeff think he was right. I couldn’t let Jeff
be
right. Which meant I had to go through with it. “What have I done?” I whispered to myself.

I was going to Buenos Aires, Argentina, South America. Cassie Moore was going to South America. I waited for it all to sink in, but mostly, it hovered at the surface of me. I didn’t know how to make it real. I sat dazed at the edge of the bed until the hotel phone rang. Apparently, I’d asked the hotel for a wake-up call, but Jeff had beaten them to it. I dragged myself into the shower, back into yesterday’s clothes, and straight to the girls’ office.

“For how long?” asked Trish. We huddled in their shared office with the door closed. Sam had run downstairs for lattes, and I’d drawn the visitor’s chair up to the corner where Sam’s and Trish’s desks met. Between sips of coffee, we spoke in whispers like high school girls giggling over rumors and cigarettes in the girls’ bathroom. Only there were no giggles, and I was the one about to become rumor fodder.

“The ticket’s for six months.”

“Oh my God,” said Sam.

“And where will you stay?” asked Trish.

“Apparently, I reserved an apartment.”

“Oh my God,” said Sam.

“And you definitely have to go?” asked Trish.

“I can’t back out now. I told everybody. Jeff knows. My boss—ex-boss—knows. I’ll look like a total loser if I don’t go. This city, my industry, is so small. No one would ever take me seriously again.” As I spoke, my leg began to jiggle the way it always does when I’m stressed, punctuating my words with nervous energy. “And Jeff will have the satisfaction of thinking he turned me into a basket case.” My other leg got in on the action.

“Oh my God,” said Sam.

“You know,” said Trish, leaning forward as if she had a juicy secret to share. “This might be the best thing that ever happened to you.” I looked her square in the eye and gave her our we’ve-known-each-other-too-long-to-bullshit-each-other look. “No, really. I mean it. You hear about these people all the time who experience something really, really brutal—you know, they find out they have cancer or they get a really bad nose job—but they survive it and, voilà, whole new amazing person.”

“Yeah, with a bad nose.” I wasn’t trying to be snarky, only figure out where the hell she was going with this one.

“No—well, maybe. But that’s not the point. The point is you learn from adversity.” Trish’s words sounded ripped from some motivational speaker’s script, but her tone wasn’t that confident, her sentences rising slightly at the ends with the insecurity of a teenage uptalker. But she was trying, God bless her. I felt compelled to play along, at least a little.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?” offered Sam.

“There you go.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said, wanting to believe it, wanting to not just sound but feel confident that there might be something to grasp on to in all these clichés.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Then again, wasn’t this the same sort of Oprah thinking that got me into the mess in the first place?

“Remember Cathy Fischer?” It wasn’t really a question. Of course I remembered Cathy Fischer. She was Trish’s first post-college roommate and our mid-twenties idol. She seemed to have everything together—cool job as a makeup artist, model boyfriend, and a bottomless closet of designer clothes that we assumed she’d gotten through all her fabulous fashion industry connections. Then the creditors started calling. One night Cathy broke down and confessed. She was twenty-seven thousand dollars in debt. The next morning she was gone, leaving unopened bills and empty shopping bags in her wake. We later heard she’d borrowed some money from her boyfriend and run off to London.

“If you’re saying I’m like Cathy Fischer—”

“Well . . .” I knew where she was headed. The summer before, Trish had run into Cathy’s sister, who told her Cathy was doing great in London, had launched her own makeup line or something. “It is sort of a positive story. In the end.” Smiling, Trish leaned back in her chair as if to say,
I rest my case.

“Yeah. She also declared bankruptcy at twenty-three.”

“I’m just saying, maybe things happen for a reason. You can look at this like it’s the end of the world, or you can see it as an opportunity.”

“To do what?”

“Things you’ve maybe wanted to try but never got around to. Write, paint, take up the tango . . . whatever you want.”

The gauzy memory of my Oprah delusions flitted through my mind. Wasn’t there something about discovering my inner brilliance? Or was it peace and harmony? Try as I might, I couldn’t latch on. The vodka dreams were gone, and there was only one thing I wanted. “I want to not go to Buenos Aires.”

There was a long pause while the undeniable truth of this statement filled the room. Extra-long sips of latte were taken. All the clichés in the world couldn’t help me out of this one. Trish shook her head, her forced grin gone. “Never, ever drink and surf.”

“Is there any chance that you might want to go? Even just a little bit?” Sam asked hopefully. “You’ve never really been anywhere, and it might not be completely horrible. You know what they say about Latin men.”