The Solomon Sisters Wise Up (17 page)

“Thanks for before,” she said. “Hey, speaking of your mom, have you heard from her?”

“No, but I just got a report of a spotting. Someone saw her in Bloomingdale’s getting a makeover.”

“That’s a good sign, right?” she said.

“I think so. I’m going to head over there now and see if I can find her.”

We wished each other luck, and I slipped out of the bedroom.

I was at the front door when Giselle called my name. Damn. Damn. Damn. I was so close to escaping. For the week and a half I’d been staying in her home, I’d managed to avoid her, except for an occasional family dinner and a pass-by in the hallway on my way or her way out. She usually left early in the morning for school, and I made myself scarce at night.

I turned around, and she was coming toward me, carrying Madeline on a hip. “I wanted to know if you were free for lunch today,” she said.

She’d asked me that every day since I’d arrived.

“Um, sorry, but I just made lunch plans. Maybe some other time,” I said.

I smiled at Madeline, grateful that I had somewhere to look other than at Giselle.

She shifted Madeline on her hip. “I’d really love the chance to sit down and talk, Zoe. If you don’t want to talk about us, about the past, I understand. But maybe we can just put that behind us then and start anew.” All of a sudden, Madeline started screaming at the top of her lungs, complain-screaming. Giselle tried to calm her down, but Madeline screamed more and grabbed a fistful of her mother’s hair. “Saved by the baby, I guess,” Giselle added with a smile.

I involuntarily smiled back, and she disappeared down the hall into Madeline’s room.

Daniel’s almost-girlfriend was pretty.

I sat at the bar, two feet from their little round table by the window, my notebook open, my pen at the ready.

And, boy, was there a lot to write.

Daniel talked too much, too fast, laughed at his own jokes (most of which were, indeed, funny, though the girlfriend didn’t always get them), gulped his drink in the middle of a story, and twice stopped dead in the middle of one of those stories to say, “You are so beautiful,” with absolute sincerity and awe in his voice.

I understood why Daniel so strongly felt her ambivalence. She seemed to like him and find him annoying at the same time. One of those was going to win over the other, and my job was to get him to get her to choose
like.

At the moment he was telling her how much he loved the movie
The Mighty,
and how he walked out fighting tears, mortified that he was actually crying. I smiled. The object of Daniel’s affections, however, Joy Ross, flinched for a half second.

A few months ago, Charlie and I had gone to see a tearjerker, and he’d burst into tears on the street, two blocks from the theater. Delayed reaction. I’d found the movie a little too manufactured, and Charlie’s reaction irritated me, as in how could you be taken in by manipulation? He’d gotten mad at me for not agreeing that the movie was heartbreaking, and we’d gotten into a fight and hadn’t gone home together that night. We’d made up the next day, but the difference between us had bothered us both. I felt it in Charlie’s voice, his slight distance, but a few days later it was gone. We’d joked about how ridiculous it was to let something so silly cause tension between us.

But it had been there and there had been lots of those “differences.” Things that perhaps shouldn’t matter, little stupid things. But they did seem to matter.

“Never go to bed angry,”
my elderly neighbor, Mrs. Guttleman, had said a few times. She lived next door to the house I’d grown up in, and she’d baby-sat me for years.
“I know, I know, you’ve heard it before. But don’t. Abe and I never went to bed angry. In sixty-one years. You love someone, you don’t go to bed angry. You never want to be against the one person in the world who you truly love.”

I’d gone to bed angry at Charlie countless times.

I tried to imagine being angry with Daniel; I couldn’t, really. With that cartoon smile, those ridiculous jokes and story for every occasion, it would be like getting angry at Snoopy.

Snoopy.
When you love someone, really love someone,
Mrs. Guttleman said three or four times,
his voice, his presence, just the thought of him, will make you want to do the Snoopy dance.

And I’d see Snoopy, spinning around in utter joy over mean Lucy, his ears flopping, his black nose in the air, little hearts fluttering out of his chest. And I’d laugh and Mrs. Guttleman would hug me and cut me a piece of checkerboard cake.

The Snoopy dance.

Daniel was sitting across from a woman, doing the Snoopy dance. His eyes were sparkling, he was leaning forward, he hung on her every word and had something either funny or insightful to say in response to everything that came out of her mouth.

As a “relationship guru,” I rarely if ever critiqued a date as though I were the one sitting across from the client. It wasn’t about whether or not the date appealed to me or offended me or bored me; it was about how the client came across universally. Whether the date was uptown, downtown, buttoned-up or goofy, the important point was for the client to learn about his or her own behavior. Did goofy types turn a particular client into a chastising jerk? Did smart types intimidate a particular client into not saying a word lest she appear less than brilliant? Maybe.

As I watched Daniel, though, I heard and saw him through the eyes of a woman sitting across from him, and I liked him. Yes, he did that and this, this and that, but for some reason, it worked.

Except for Joy.

So which was it? Was Daniel supposed to change the way he acted on his dates with Joy to appeal to her? Or was he supposed to be himself, and if she didn’t appreciate it, screw her?

Not literally.

Suddenly Joy glanced at her watch and hopped up, and Daniel also stood.

“Well, I have an early day tomorrow, so…” She kissed him on the cheek. “No, no—stay and finish your nachos. There are a ton of cabs.” And then she dashed out the door, hailed a cab and jumped in before Daniel could even say good-night.

He shoved his arms into his chest as though she’d stuck a dagger in his heart and kneeled down to the floor and fell over.

“Sir! Sir!” a waiter yelled. “Are you okay?”

Daniel popped up, an apologetic look on his face. “Kidding, sorry. No food poisoning. No lawsuit.”

The waiter grimaced and hurried away.

I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing.

“C’mon, kid,” he said. “You can give me the awful report outside.”

He put out his arm and I took it.

I looked like Cousin It. The wind had whipped my hair around to practically cover my face, so Daniel suggested we get out of the windstorm and into a café for dessert and coffee.

“That way, when you explain in detail what a loser I am on a date,” he said, “everyone in the café will hear. I love having my flaws and foibles put out there.”

I laughed and pushed him into Netta’s, a fifties-style coffee bar. With coffees and a crumb cake to split, we sat down on two overstuffed chairs.

“Okay, sister, let’s have it, Ms. Solomon.”

“Honestly, Daniel, you’re fine.”

He raised an eyebrow. “That’s what people pay you two hundred bucks an hour to hear?”

“This is on the house.”

He ripped open three packets of sugar and shook them into his coffee. “I really like this woman, Zoe. C’mon, let me have it. All of a sudden she had to get up early tomorrow morning?”

“Did you ever stop to think that the two of you just might not be compatible, or that she doesn’t ‘get’ you, or that if she doesn’t like your jokes, then maybe she’s not the right person for you?”

He shook his head. “Absolutely not. Well, it’s possible, but—no. I know I can come on a little strong, be a little too loud, tell a little too goofy a story. If it’s going to interfere with a relationship I want to work, then I want to work on how I come across. And that’s where you come in.”

“I thought you were fine, Daniel. More than fine. Really. But I can tell you where I noticed she seemed to zone out a little.”

“More than fine?” he said, popping a crumb into his mouth. “That’s not bad, coming from you.”

“I’m—” No big deal, I’d been about to say. Daniel looked at me, really looked at me, and I realized why I didn’t love Charlie. Why I’d been unable to commit to him.

He wouldn’t have looked at me. Wouldn’t have wondered what I was about to say. Wouldn’t have been curious. Daniel suddenly reminded me of the Richard Dreyfuss character in
Once Around,
a movie that Charlie and I had caught on cable. Charlie had thought Richard Dreyfuss’s over-the-top love for Holly Hunter had been suffocating. And maybe it was. But I’d liked it. To be loved so totally, to feel so safe inside it.

“What are you thinking about?” Daniel asked, and I wanted to jump up and hug him.

“I’m thinking that you were great on your date with Joy. You’re a great guy, Daniel. Why would you want to change to appeal to anyone?”

“Zoe, I have self-esteem, okay? I want to win over this woman. Gimme the skinny.”

I shook my head. “All right. I’ll tell you what I saw from an
objective
standpoint.”

Daniel leaned forward and licked his lips. His mop of thick, silky light brown hair fell over his face, and he pushed it back.

“When Joy came in, you immediately stood up and announced that she looked amazing—twice. And then, a second or two later, you interrupted yourself to tell her she looked
really
amazing.”

He beamed. “She does look amazing, though, doesn’t she? God, she’s pretty.”

I laughed. “Well, maybe you could just tone it down a little. You can tell her she looks amazing, but not with such force and drama. Maybe you don’t have to
stand
to say it.”

“So it’s not a good thing to tell a woman she looks amazing with force and drama?” he asked.

“Hey, I’m the one who said you shouldn’t change a hair on your head, Daniel. But maybe with this particular woman, it’s not a good thing. You said yourself, it’s not about you, it’s about her.”

Suddenly I wondered if the reason Daniel’s high opinion of me had made me so uncomfortable in high school wasn’t because I knew I’d eventually fall off the pedestal he put me on, but because
I
didn’t think I belonged up there in the first place. À la Groucho Marx, if you didn’t want to join any club that would have someone like you as a member, was it because of you or the club?

“So what is it about Joy, anyway?” I asked. “Maybe we should start there. What’s special about this woman to you?”

“She’s smart, has her act together, knows what she wants, has confidence. I like a strong woman. She’s putting herself through college, she really cares about her major, which is teaching. She talks about everything with passion.”

Passion. That seemed to be what was missing from me and my life. I’d once been passionate about graduate school and studying to become a psychologist or a therapist, but now that had become a vague dream, a “one day” kind of thing. Critiquing dates paid too well and was too easy.

When had I become so lazy?

“The other thing I like about her is that she really listens when I talk about something important,” Daniel said. “Yeah, she tunes out my silly side, but when I’m talking about limestone or the boring glass canopy I’m working on for a hospital entrance, she listens and asks questions. The last woman I dated blew smoke in my face and started freshening her lipstick when I talked about architecture. At least I’ve stopped droning on and on about my work the way I used to. I give Joy the brief version—maybe that’s why she listens.”

“But that’s so wrong, isn’t it?” I asked. “I mean, one woman isn’t interested in hearing about your work, so you figure it’s a boring subject and avoid it on dates, when actually that particular woman just wasn’t a good match.”

“I guess so,” he said. “But isn’t that the way anyone learns to do anything? You get burned, you’re twice shy. Did I get that cliché right?”

I laughed. “Yeah. It’s my new motto.”

“Why?”

See, he’d gotten me again. A line like that with Charlie wouldn’t have elicited a
why.
He would have just gone on talking.

“Are you telling me that the boyfriend burned you, and not the other way around?” Daniel asked.

“Burned me bad,” I admitted. “Guess who showed up as a client’s date right before my flight out here?”

His mouth dropped open. “Oh, Zoe. I’m really sorry.”

I burst into tears. I had no idea why or where they came from, but the tears came and my hands flew up to cover my eyes. Daniel shot out of his chair and kneeled down next to me. He pulled my hands away from my face.

“Zoe, he’s a jerk. You’re better off without him. Any guy who wouldn’t consider himself the luckiest man on earth to be your boyfriend deserves to be in a mental hospital.”

I shook my head. “He’s not a jerk. I pushed him to it.”

He cupped my chin. “Oh, you pushed him to go on another date? To cheat on you? Do I need to send you on the Dr. Phil show?”

“He asked me to marry him a bunch of times, and I kept telling him I wasn’t ready. The date was his way of testing the waters for himself, I think. Doing something proactive.”

“Zoe, I don’t give a shit how open-minded you are. It’s not proactive to date other women when you’re proposing to your girlfriend. It’s passive-aggressive, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you,” I said.

“Well, you told me.”

I let out a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Daniel. Charlie really shocked me, and I’m worried about my mother, and I’m staying at my dad’s and so are my sisters, and there’s a lot of tension there and then there’s Giselle.”

“Giselle?”

“My dad’s fiancée,” I explained. “We used to be friends. I’m the one who introduced them.”

“That’s what broke up your parents’ marriage?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Ah. So that’s why your mom’s on the warpath. Not about her, but about you.”

“What?” I asked.

“
You
got betrayed too, Zoe.”