The Muse (12 page)

“Bully me with vague threats.”

“Bully? I’m not a bully.” I stood up and faced him. “How dare you call me a bully?”

“But you are.” He stared down at me.

Everyone stopped their folding, their pouring, and their reading and stared at us. A man reading a newspaper folded the tip of the paper down to get a good look. A mother with her baby stopped staring into her child’s eyes and instead took in our sights. The attendant eased into a lazy stance against the counter and watched us instead of her soap opera on the television above her folding station.

He broke the stare and his chin buckled. “You can be a little mean.” He looked back at me. “It hurts sometimes.” His chin revved into overdrive on the quivering.

I grabbed for his arm. “What’s really going on here?”

He exhaled, not taking his serious eyes from me. “I really like this one, and I want you to be happy for me.”

“I was just messing with you.” I tousled his hair and he backed away.

“Easy. I kind of liked the way it fell into place tonight.” Finally, he broke into a small smile. Not quite big enough to ease my concern that my best friend almost started to cry right in the middle of ABC Wash Center for reasons still foreign to me.

We sat back down and an awkward echo of unspoken words sat between us like a mountain. I thumbed through a magazine. He joined me, and the two of us sat there in silence. I read a short story about a girl who traveled to two different continents in search of herself. She searched for two months in mosques, in poor towns, in overcrowded city streets for a sense of wonderment that would entitle her to the fresh sprig of life and the power of being valued. Plagued by the guilt of bad mistakes, she craved to find the truth and forgiveness that would set her free to indulge one day in love and blessings. When she landed back on her own country’s soil, she finally discovered that she didn’t have to look as far to find her answer. Her answer stood at the baggage carousel with a dozen red roses and a big sign that said “Will You Marry Me?” I tossed the magazine down with an extra hard lashing. “How do these people get this crappy stuff published?”

Larry continued reading his gardening magazine and simply murmured in agreement.

“Let me ask you something,” I said to him. I tore the magazine away from his face. “Do you think the fantasy of being with someone is better than actually being with someone?”

“Depends who we’re talking about. If you mean that guy Jeff I dated, fantasy won on that one.” Jeff kissed like a sloppy mess according to Larry. “Most times, I’m pretty satisfied with reality.”

“Do you think it’s possible for someone to imagine the taste of say a cherry pie if she never in fact ever ate a piece of cherry pie?”

He stopped reading and pondered this with a tilt of his head and a massage to his now stilled chin. “You’d have to have one heck of an imagination. But sure. I suppose if you concentrated on what a cherry pie might taste like, you could imagine the tartness mixed with the sweetness.”

We stared straight ahead contemplating this. Finally, I released my concern on a deep breath. “I wrote a short story I want to get your opinion on before I let anyone else read it.”

A grin stretched across his face revealing deep grooves where his happiness always sat. “It’s about time.” He dropped his head and perused his magazine again. “You know I’m going to love it.” He flipped to a new page. “I love everything you write, darling.”

“This one is very different. I need you to read it objectively.” I didn’t take my eyes from the washing machine in front of us. “This one has some kick to it.”

“All of your stuff has kick to it.” He said this like a father complimenting his young child’s wild, red head full of unruly, untamable cowlicks.

“I want you to read it before you go out tonight.”

He flipped to another page and winced. “I’m picking him up at eight.”

I reached into my satchel and pulled it out. “Read it now.”

His eyes lingered on the stack of papers that my fingers cradled. “Right now. With you sitting right here?”

I needed his reaction. “Right now.”

I sat still pretending to read more of the horrible magazine. I watched Larry from my peripheral vision. My heart leapt when he smiled, soared when he groaned most likely at a conflicting point for the characters, twirled when he shook his head wildly side-to-side in obvious agreement with my characters.

Twenty minutes later, he sighed and said, “Wow.” He stared at the last page with awe.

I sat up tall, allowing my smile to fully embrace the moment. “Wow, as in…?”

When he turned to look at me, I saw the slightest twinkle stemming from his watery eyes and this caused my eyes to spring much of the same. “Wow as in
far
different.”

I fished. “Far different in a good way?”

He cocked his head. “Give me a break. Like you even have to ask that.” His forehead creased. “I take it to write this kind of sexiness that things are going well with that girl Eva?”

I blushed for the first time ever in front of Larry. “A girl’s got to keep some things secret.” I couldn’t even look at him.

He shoved at me. “Tell me.”

“I’ve been flirting with her.” I finally looked up at him. “A lot. You’d be proud.”

His smile said it all.

And, I’m sure mine did, too.

# #

When I returned from the laundromat, I went straight to my computer, logged into Twitter, and sent Eva a direct message alerting her to look out for my short story I had promised her. I did this without taking my pocketbook off of my shoulder. Then, without blinking, I emailed her the story.

Not until I sat down with a glass of milk and some chocolate chip cookies, picked up my mail from the past few days, and thumbed through some bills and advertisements did I really stop and contemplate what I had just done. Eva Handel’s eyes would soon scan my literary work, my words. She would absorb and bury them deep into her subconscious mind.

In a matter of half an hour, if she had already started to read, she would intimately connect to that part of my brain that fired off lustful chemicals.

This thrilled me.

I stared at my laptop from the couch wondering if Eva’s eyes were moving to the beat of my sentences, if her heart fluttered along with their rhythm, if her inner thighs were squeezing together to intensify quivers that could quite possibly be stemming from my words.

I rose and paced my floor. The confidence of a few minutes prior waned along with my milk and cookies. I stopped in front of the mirror, took a good long hard look at myself and wondered what Eva would think of my red cheeks, my messy blonde ponytail with darker roots, my squinty eyes, and the half-moon wrinkle on my chin. One of my bullies once told me I reminded her of a Vidalia onion. Since then, I’d never eaten one and I refused to pass them by at the grocery store.

I didn’t look like a Vidalia onion at the present moment. My skin actually glowed and my eyes sparkled. I fixed my ponytail, blew a few loose strands away from my face and smiled. My lips were rosier than usual. I’d dare say even kissable. These lips needed the moisture of Eva’s. I traced my finger along my bottom lip imagining Eva’s finger in its place. I gazed into my eyes and imagined what Eva would see in them. Currently, my pupils were so large; they took over the blue of my irises. Would she see a woman yearning to kiss her? Would she see a woman craving to run her fingers down the heart of her cheeks? Would she see a woman who wanted to lose herself in her long, thick dark hair? Or had I become so adept at hiding this woman, that all she’d see was fear in my eyes, and an insecurity and a lack of confidence so major that I never could’ve ever pulled off such a thing as a flirty vibe strong enough to send her reeling over the edge of self-control?

I exhaled a shaky breath.

I shook my head, walked away from my reflection and sat at the breakfast bar in front of my computer. Before checking my email to see if she’d read it, I reread my story. I cringed when I found two typos. Surely, she’d see these and see amateur, liar, dreamer, illusionist, idealist, or worse, failure.

In essence, I had failed. I was twenty-nine-years-old and never been on a date, never held hands with someone, and never even, up until recently, flirted. How dare I attempt to write about a kiss convincing enough to curl the toes and fingers of Eva Handel? I’d imagined many people accomplished that already. What would she ever see in me, the coward who used computers as her shield against the cruel and bitter world? What would Eva ever see in someone like me if she ever met the real me, not CarefreeJanie?

What if she wanted to meet CarefreeJanie?

I couldn’t let it happen. I would never be as skillful without my keyboard and computer screen as companions.

CarefreeJanie offered me a chance to taste the sweetness of delivering a compliment, to tickle a girl’s heart without freaking her out with my social awkwardness, to leap like a sexy cat over her and spin her head in wide, wonderful circles at my agility. At least in my mind’s eye, Eva would experience all of this.

What if she read my story and didn’t like it? Would she scan it, looking just for keywords she could later cite when we tweeted again?

If she hated my story, then she would hate my story. Nothing I could do at that moment would be able to affect the way she responded to it. I sat victim to the second hand click on my kitchen wall clock, shaking my legs and staring at my two glaring typos. If she hated it, better to know upfront and create my getaway plan before I got sucked in too deep into her enticing world. Of course, knowing what I knew about her already, if she hated it, she’d never tell me. I guessed by her sweetness that she never critiqued anything more than Old Bay and her own silly mistakes like mismatched shoes. If she read it and hated it, she’d probably send me a direct message saying something like my third grade teacher would’ve said to me, ‘Oh great job, sweetie.’

Living life always in the midst of the shadows of doubt, I could read through the lines. When my mother would write me an email and use an exclamation point, I knew what she really meant was ‘nice attempt’ instead of ‘way to go’. When Doreen would fill her emails with three or more smiley faces, what she really meant was ‘I feel sorry for you so here you go my friend, some smiles to get you through your sad life.’

If Eva responded with anything less than five adjectives, I’d know instantly that she didn’t like it.

My throat dried up and a sense of dread scratched its way up my spine the longer I sat waiting.

An hour later, I decided that if she hated it, I wouldn’t care. I would simply move forward in my life the way I always had, one foot, albeit a clumsy foot, in front of the other in a direction that suited me. If I couldn’t be a writer, maybe I’d go back to school for something completely opposite – accounting or chemistry or something that used the other part of my brain. Maybe I’d spent too much time trying to activate the wrong side of my brain? What if Barbara called it right all those years ago when she told me that I should never put pen to paper because all I ever wrote was icky and gross? Was I that idiot who thought she could sing, tried out for
American Idol
and got placed on the finale for the world to laugh at my naivety in thinking all along that I was the next Mariah Carey?

How would I ever know? How did anyone really know unless she braved all and tossed her work out into the world for strangers to critique? Pen names appealed to me suddenly. They offered writers a way to avoid ridicule and reinvent ourselves, should our first set of books suck. If bad reviews poured in, we could change to a new name and toss another book out into the world and hope it was strong enough to stand on its own and be worthy of literary praise that won awards, gained the attention of high profile publishers, and created a wide gap from where the writer stood financially one month to the next.

I refused to waste any more time worrying about what Eva thought. The longer I worried the more annoyed I became. I braced to launch a full scale defensive attack against her and she was probably dining over a friend’s house getting drunk on cheap merlot and hadn’t even known I sent her a story to read.