You Love Me(You #3)(2)
Ah, so the Meerkat is your daughter and her glasses are too small for her face and she probably wears them because you told her they’re no good. She’s defiant. More like a feisty toddler than a surly teenager and she lugs a big white copy of Columbine out of her backpack. She flips you the bird and you flip her the bird and your family is fun. Is there a ring on your finger?
No, Mary Kay. There isn’t.
You reach for the Meerkat’s Columbine and she storms outside and you follow her out the door—it’s an unplanned intermission—and I remember what you told me on our phone call.
Your mom was a Mary Kay lady, cutthroat and competitive. You grew up on the floors of various living rooms in Phoenix playing with Barbie dolls, watching her coax women with cheating husbands into buying lipstick that might incite their dirtbag husbands to stay home. As if lipstick can save a marriage. Your mother was good at her job, she drove a pink Cadillac, but then your parents split. You and your mother moved to Bainbridge and she did a one-eighty, started selling Patagonia instead of PanCake makeup. You said she passed away three years ago and then you took a deep breath and said, “Okay, that was TMI.”
But it wasn’t too much, not at all, and you told me more: Your favorite place on the island is Fort Ward and you like the bunkers and you mentioned graffiti. God kills everyone. I told you that’s true and you wanted to know where I’m from and I told you that I grew up in New York and you liked that and I told you I did time in L.A. and you thought I was being facetious and who was I to correct you?
The door opens and now you’re back. In the flesh and the skirt. Whatever you said to your Meerkat pissed her off and she grabs a chair and moves it so that it faces a wall and finally you come to me, warm and soft as the cashmere on my chest. “Sorry for all the drama,” you say, as if you didn’t want me to see everything. “You’re Joe, yeah? I think we spoke on the phone.”
You don’t think. You know. Yeah. But you didn’t know you’d want to tear my clothes off and you shake my hand, skin on skin, and I breathe you in—you smell like Florida—and the power inside of my body is restored. Zing.
You look at me now. “Can I have my hand back?”
I held on too long. “Sorry.”
“Oh no,” you say, and you lean in, closer as in the movie Closer. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I ate an orange outside and my hands are a little sticky.”
I sniff my palm and I lean in. “Are you sure it wasn’t a tangerine?”
You laugh at my joke and smile. “Let’s not tell the others.”
Already it’s us against them and I ask if you finished the Lisa Taddeo—I am a good guy and good guys remember the shit the girl said on the phone—and yes you did finish and you loved it and I ask you if I can ask you about your daughter and her Columbine and you blush. “Yeah,” you say. Yeah. “Well, as you saw… she’s a little obsessed with Dylan Klebold.”
“The school shooter?”
“Oh God, no,” you say. “See, according to my daughter, he was a poet, which is why it’s okay for her to write her college essay about him…”
“Okay, that’s a bad idea.”
“Obviously. I say that and she calls me a ‘hypocrite’ because I got in trouble for writing about Ann Petry instead of Jane Austen when I was her age…” You like me so much you are name-dropping. “I can’t remember…” Yes you can. “Did you say if you have kids?”
Stephen King doesn’t have to murder people to describe death and you don’t have to have kids to understand being a parent and technically I have a kid, but I don’t “have” him. I don’t get to wear him like all the khaki fucking dads on this rock. I shake my head no and your eyes sparkle. You hope I’m free and you want us to have things in common so I steer us back to books. “Also, I love Ann Petry. The Street is one of my all-time favorite books.”
You’re supposed to be impressed but a lot of book people know The Street and you’re a fox. Reserved. I double down and tell you that I wish more people would read The Narrows and that gets a smile—fuck yes—but we’re in the workplace so you put your hands on your keypad. You furrow your brow. No Botox for you. “Huh.” Something bumped you on the computer and do you know about me? Did they flag me?
Play it cool, Joe. Exonerated. Innocent. “Am I fired already?”
“Well, no, but I do see an inconsistency in your file…”
You don’t know about the money I donated to this library because I insisted on anonymity and the woman on the board swore that she would spare me the nuisance of a background check, but did she lie to me? Did you find Dr. Nicky’s conspiracy theory blog? Did the lady on the board realize I’m that Joe Goldberg? Did she hear about me on some murder-obsessed woman’s fucking podcast?
You wave me over and the inconsistency is my list of favorite authors—phew—and you tsk-tsk in a whisper. “I don’t see Debbie Macomber on this list, Mr. Goldberg.”
I blush. The other day on the phone I told you that I got the idea to move to the Pacific Northwest from Debbie Macomber’s Cedar Fucking Cove books and you laughed—Really?—and I stood my soft, picket fenced-in ground. I’m not a dictator. I didn’t command you to read one of her books. But I did say that Debbie helped me, that reading about pious, justice-seeking Judge Olivia Lockhart and her local newsie boyfriend Jack restored my faith in our world. You did say you’d check ’em out but that’s what all people say when you recommend a book or a fucking TV show and now here you are, winking at me.