Things I can’t Explain Page 5

  “Well, what difference does it make? You have a girlfriend,” I say, annoyed.

  But I suppose I was the one who catapulted us from Flirty Talk 101 to casting him in my own little improv version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. I dragged him to Tribeca, nearly murdered him with a plate of shellfish, and subjected him to an entire evening of my dad’s stupid jokes.

  “The thing is, I thought we would get to know each other a little, but this happened way too fast. I’ve thought about you for so long.”

  “I don’t get it,” I say in spite of myself, and then hear the second part of what he said in a delayed reaction like an echo. “You have?”

  “You’re amazing. And if things were … different…”

  Now why couldn’t he have just quit at “amazing”?

  “Hey, I understand,” I tell him, forcing a smile. “And really, I owe you a huge thank-you for going through with this—my dad, my mom … my story.” I hate the hurt look in his eyes at those last words. I’m feeling really bad no matter which way this goes, so I need to just wrap it up. “I better go.”

  “Look, maybe we could…”

  Could what?

  “Be friends?” I ask. “Please. If you say that to me right now I’ll punch you in that beautiful jaw of yours.”

  I reach into my bag for my phone.

  “What are you doing?” he asks, looking confused.

  “Calling a cab. It’s silly for you to drive me home. Especially when you’ve got to get all the way out to LaGuardia.”

  “JFK, actually.”

  “Oh. Well. There you go.” I laugh nervously, although there’s nothing funny to laugh about. I’m frantically punching my touch screen and it’s making me so mad I want to throw it in the river.

  “No,” he says firmly. “I’m driving you home.”

  “You don’t have to…”

  “Come on,” he says and puts out his arm to lift me up onto the bike.

  Maybe it’s his chivalry, maybe it’s guilt, maybe it’s the fact that I’m still wearing his old motorcycle jacket or something else I don’t understand, but in any case, I stop beating the bejeesus out of my iPhone, which seems to have frozen up anyway.

  “Okay.” This time when he pulls me up onto the Harley it just makes me feel miserable.

  My arms automatically encircle his waist, but I catch myself and snatch them back. Those abs are for some other girl to hug.

  “You have to hold on,” he says, and there’s something sad and knowing in his tone. It’s like he’s reading my mind, which makes this all the more depressing.

  Reluctantly, I grasp his midsection. The geological formations that are his abdominal muscles flex beneath the fabric of his jacket. I’m still impressed, but somehow, this position is a hell of a lot less fun than it was on the ride here.

  He kicks the hog to life, and when he gives it the gas it snarls in protest, as though it would have much preferred to just sit here under the Brooklyn Bridge for the rest of the night.

  I know just how it feels.

  We weave our way back through the city streets on the Harley in silence. The neon cityscape looks garish and phony. The ride is bumpy and I’m shaken up as we dodge and dart through the speeding clutter of angry cabdrivers. The growl of the bike, which was so powerful and exhilarating before, now just seems loud and noisy.

  In front of my apartment building, Nick coasts to a stop and cuts the ignition. I slide off the bike. We’re officially back in micro-mode. The boyfriend-girlfriend game is over and we are once again vendor-vendee, if we’re anything at all. Although something tells me that beginning tomorrow, I’ll be giving up coffee entirely and stepping up to the counter at Jamba Juice.

  He called me babe. He shared his river view—our river view—and none of it felt wrong.

  But he’s involved.

  I should hate him, but he did have the decency to tell me before things went too far.

  “Clarissa…”

  I look up to see that he’s removed his helmet. I’m still standing on the sidewalk, like maybe I forgot which apartment was mine, fiddling with the zipper on the pocket of the vintage jacket and thinking about how this ending is almost as wrong and disappointing as the series finale of Lost.

  He sighs. “I wish…”

  “Me too.” I nod and hand him back his jacket.

  On the invisible list in my head, I put a great big checkmark in the “Not the Type Who Cheats” box. As much as I would have loved to have the memory of one kiss to take with me, it would only have made me sadder and angrier. I have to be honest—I admire his integrity.

  I put out my hand and he shakes it, as if his mom were giving him medicine.

  Finally, I turn and take the first step toward my apartment building. I don’t look back when I hear the snap of the kickstand, or when I hear the Harley rev, or when the tires squeal as he races off into the night.

  To JFK.

  Then back to the wilds of Bushwick.

  To his guitar and his dreams and his girl who isn’t me.

  CHAPTER 6

  I didn’t sleep well. And by that I mean I didn’t sleep at all. The roar of the Harley and the lights flickering on the river kept repeating on me. Or maybe those damn jumbo prawns were eyeless after all.

  At six a.m., Elvis is purring and pawing, making biscuits on my head, so I get up to feed him. It’s the wide-eyed wild look he makes as he kneads my hair into knots that stupefies me. Don’t get me wrong, I love my silky black cat. We get a lot from each other. I feed him and he allows me to share my silent inner dialogue out loud.

  Back when I worked for Hugh, I’d set my alarm for six in the morning so I could abuse the snooze button a bit before actually getting up. It wasn’t that I didn’t look forward to going to the Daily Post, but I’ve never been what you’d call a morning person. Although I would linger at the kitchen window to admire the city waking up at sunrise, the stark beauty of the silent silhouetted spires reflecting the sun’s ochre and pink mirrored light between the office building windows felt magical back then.

  Today, it feels early. Elvis is particularly peevish this morning, so I hustle to open the little wet cylindrical pile of cat food that sustains him.

  Determined not to pick over every moment of the hopeless joy and embarrassment of last night—what I call soul scratching—I pad to the kitchen, which for the last several weeks has doubled as Job Search Central. With half-opened eyes I grab the first tea bag in the canister and make myself a cup (the idea of coffee hurts too much) and settle into my desk chair. My laptop stands at the ready, with an array of cyber-career placement and “Transition to Digital Journalism” networking websites already securely lodged in my favorites bar.

  Here I am in my twenties with the prerequisite encumbrance of loans that have long exceeded their nonexistent grace periods, having plunged into the dread realm of forbearance. And no, I didn’t ask Mom to pay them off, though she offered. I guess I’m a bit like my dad that way.

  I decided during my night of tossing and turning that Lou at the “You Don’t Have a Snowball’s Chance in Hell of Ever Finding Gainful Employment” Office is history. In fact, I think he should lose his job and get a real taste of what it’s like, but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. A few days ago, I’d gone to the “Please for the Love of God Hire Me” section of Craigslist and found a few postings that looked promising and posted an inquiry along with my résumé, hoping to find my future employer. I would’ve gone to butivegotadegree.com and workforpennies.com, too, if it would help, but no one’s started those websites yet. All I had to do was wait for those enthusiastic responses to roll in, right?

  So far, bupkis.

  Elvis tap-dances across my keyboard, distracting me, indifferent as always to my suffering. The word pet is foreign to Elvis. He’s more like my “rub against,” if you know what I mean. Or more precisely, I’m his. Which is to say that I didn’t find Elvis. He found me. He showed up miraculously perched on the ledge to my sixth-floor window
with no visible means of having gotten there or means of egress, a bit of witchcraft if you ask me. So I considered naming him Samantha or Sabrina until I realized his gender. Salem, the Cloven One, or just Bub, short for Beelzebub, might have worked, but I thought better of it.

  Don’t ask me why Elvis, my childhood pet caiman, came to mind. Elvis disappeared under mysterious circumstances. It took years to get Mom to confess that she gave away the reptilian Elvis without telling me after Ferguson tried to shove a pocket watch down his throat thinking that would win him the role of Captain Hook in the school play. Actually, I’m pretty damn superstitious about black cats crossing my path and disappearing into the night, so I invited this one in. After all, he hasn’t crossed my path and moved on—yet.

  I put Elvis down on the floor and wonder if I should consider hiring a headhunter. Not to be confused with a headshrinker, who is also someone I could probably benefit from, considering the spectrum of my personal obsessions. OCD, control freak, generalized anxiety disorder, not to mention my own original take on superstitions, which I’ll explain at some point. I believe there’s a thin line between functionality and phobias and that’s a line I tend to grind, to use Norm’s terminology.

  “List Girl”—that’s what Hugh used to call me at the Post. It was the way I systematized his life. As much as he complained, he loved it. I may have been guilty of working on my lists rather than listing my work, but who wouldn’t want a compulsive list maker organizing their lives? Although Hugh made sure I learned that journalistically, a listicle does not a magazine article make.

  It took a long time for me to realize that my list making came up just short of other more deadly disorders like hoarding, hand washing, and lock checking. Okay, I do check the locks and I still have all the hubcaps from my tweenage bedroom stacked neatly in a box somewhere. But what do you expect from a girl who by fourteen had managed to compile a list of every winning word of the Scripps National Spelling Bee for the last fifty years in order to know what word they wouldn’t be likely to ask again? I’ve even made an all-important list of things I could be doing besides making another pointless list. Sometimes, it feels like I’m actually cataloging every form of life’s madness, which seems a form of madness in itself.

  MY LIST OF LISTS

  1. Every winning spelling bee word.

  2. Hottest 90s child actors.

  3. Best Charlie Sheen catchphrases.

  4. Places I hope to never travel.

  5. Tensest WTF podcast interviews.

  6. Things to do while avoiding looking for a job.

  7. Places Elvis might be hiding.

  8. Shoes I’ve loved and lost. *sniff sniff*

  9. Parents’ most gagworthy pet names.

  10. Facial hair I’ve dated.

  11. Things to do aside from making lists.

  And the lists go on …

  Elvis gives me a withering glance. His indifference to my suffering is like a Zen koan of some kind. If only I knew its meaning. Okay, he probably thinks I need the headshrinker, but let’s stick with the so-called hunter of heads, because if I had a job, my obsessions would certainly get in line. One thing’s for sure: If I’m getting a headhunter, it’s gonna have to be on the cheap. Does that even exist? Google will know.

  Shoving the slouchy sleeves of my vintage St. Anne’s thrift shop blue satin bathrobe up to my elbows, I shoot the cursor to the search bar and arrange my fingers on the smooth, square keys.

  H-E-A-D …

  … S-P-A-C-E.

  What? No!

  Delete, delete, delete, delete!

  I am absolutely not going to Google Nick’s studio. That would be the cyber equivalent of riding my bike up and down his street, as if he were the cutest guy in my seventh-grade English class.

  “That surly look is uncalled for,” I say to Elvis, who has invaded my workspace with a condescending glare. “Scram!” I yell, shooing him away, but he doesn’t budge. How unfair is it that cats are both cute and invincible? I try to refocus. “Clarissa. It’s a job you’re looking for, not the deets on the CCG,” I say out loud, secretly hoping for Elvis’s approval.

  … H-U-N-T-E-R.

  Better. Throwing myself into the task at hand, yes, sir! Can’t keep a good Darling down, just ask my mom. (My brother and father might have a slightly different perspective on that, but I am not giving up!)

  I hit enter and muddle through the non-applicable sites. (Wow, look at how much porn avails itself when you type the word head into a search engine. Really? Who knew that Cronut was a position?) But I dismiss that line of inquiry and soon I have a list of highly rated professional headhunters who will gladly pimp me out to all of Manhattan’s and some of Westchester’s and Long Island’s journalistic endeavors.

  Something about the term headhunter rattles my brain. What does it remind me of?

  I see the skull of a tiny head with missing teeth and straw-like blond hair that looks like me in my baby pictures. The head with its frozen smile rattles like a maraca. A guy in a loincloth with some pretty radical Lion King makeup shakes the rattle while stabbing a long pointy spear into the air. He vigorously shakes his head “no” and chants something that sounds like “Curriculum Vitae” but in Swahili. At the end of the spear there’s a piece of paper—it’s my résumé.

  Okay, let’s just postpone the headhunter idea.

  I sigh and take a sip of the steaming tea, not my usual java blend, and I’m immediately punished with a mouthful of Sunflower Spit or Berry Blast or whatever tea-that’s-trying-too-hard variety left behind in my canister by super-slacker Norm. I’m always worried when drinking teas with hieroglyphics on the tin that I’m about to ingest something that could double as potpourri. I flash back to yesterday, remembering that businesswoman who bought an herbal tea from Nick … I wonder what kind she ordered.…

  Stop!

  I take a deep breath and go back to the kitchen, where I dump the horrid tea concoction into the sink and rifle through the cabinets for a more acceptable beverage. As long as I’m here, I decide to organize the contents of the cupboard, beginning with the cereal boxes. My job search awaits, but a quick alphabetical reordering should take no time and I’ll feel so much more accomplished afterward: Granola … Kashi … Post … Quaker …

  Lucky Charms? Must be a rogue box left over from the weekend Piper spent at my place while her apartment was bombed for roaches. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t even consider introducing a single spoonful of such overprocessed garbage into my digestive system (I am Janet Darling’s daughter, after all). But it occurs to me that if I don’t get a paying job soon, those marshmallow clovers might turn out to be the only thing standing between me and certain starvation.

  I shove Lucky, the smiling leprechaun, to the back of the cupboard and move on to alphabetizing the spices. This is sure to be less problematic. Cayenne, Celtic sea salt, chaat masala …

  It makes me wonder if I could land a job at one of Martha Stewart’s magazines. She has, like, twelve or thirteen of them, right? I wonder if Martha Living Omnimedia would go for an article like “How to Cook with Leftovers in Jail.” I’ve heard that M. Diddy (that was her nickname in prison) made crab apple jelly and no-bake cheesecake with crumbled graham crackers, lemon juice, vanilla pudding mix, pats of margarine, and coffee creamer while spending time in the slammer. I congratulate myself on the brilliant idea, but then somewhere between the grains of paradise and the amchur powder, it dawns on my foggy brain what I’m doing.

  Avoidance. Classic technique—ask any job hunter. As you wait for the phone to ring or the e-mail that will change your life, you will do anything to keep from facing reality. If you can’t find work, busy work will do. Distraction is key! Any random act of accomplishment with a beginning, middle, and end feels better than endlessly waiting and hoping for something out of your control. Want to hear just a few things I’ve done while trying to forget I’m looking for a job?

  1. Painted the bathroom—twice. First Ikea yellow and then robin’s-egg b
lue.

  2. Written a novel—okay, only the first two chapters, until I found myself desperately avoiding my chosen form of avoidance.

  3. Researched new cellular service providers—because clearly, the service I have is not working. If it were, the phone would be ringing nonstop, right?

  4. Read every published report about millennials making up 41 percent of the unemployed, having reduced lifetime earning potential, growing up believing we’re special because of Barney the Purple Dinosaur, and suffering through the dial-up age with every bad photo taken of ourselves forever on the Internet. But at least we’ll never have to live without Wi-Fi short of the apocalypse, right?

  Google that for a little while and see if it doesn’t make you physically sick.

  So enough with the spices and the cabinets already! A job! My well-ordered Kingdom of Spice for a job!

  “What did I come in here for, anyway?” Elvis glances around the minuscule kitchen and I follow his gaze. Right. Coffee. Must brew coffee. I fumble through a drawer filled with tiny takeout packets of soy sauce, sweet-and-sour, ketchup, and granola bars until I find the last remaining single-serving coffee pod, and make a mental note to order more now that I’m making my coffee en casa. I take the brightly colored pod and approach the machine on the counter. It’s depressing to say the least—a coffee maker that brews one cup at a time is about as lonely as it gets.

  In an hour or so, Nick will be firing up Frankensteam for the morning onslaught. Those New Yorkers fortunate enough to still be working in that building will be tipping the half-and-half carafe, sharing smiles and making small talk, continuing their micro-relationship in the aura of that cool CCG now known as Nick, aka “the one who got away.”

  As the morning foot traffic picks up, I arrive and ask for tea. He’s shocked that I haven’t asked for coffee; Nick’s face contorts into a mask of horror. He turns and runs. Was it something I said? Had I violated the terms of our faux relationship and very genuine breakup? Was it because I asked for tea?