The Lonely Hearts Club Page 4

  “You’re addicted to being a drama queen,” I say, slamming the door to the bedroom in my wake. That was the best comeback I could think of with half a bottle of sake in my belly. I throw my clothes off in a huff and get into bed. I silently pray that Jesse will bring me a glass of water when he comes in, but he never makes it back to the bedroom. That night, he sleeps on the couch.

  6 - Just a Girl

  “What is that thing on your chin?” Chloe asks me when we’re in the bathroom after the Healthy Foods pitch meeting.

  “A zit,” I say. “And how about: ‘Jo, you were great. That meeting went great. You were riffing like you were a hip-hop rapping genius’ instead of an attack on my personal appearance?”

  “Yes,” Chloe says, dabbing at her shiny nose with pressed powder. “You were better than Pitbull. ‘Healthy Foods puts you in the mood’ was truly inspired.”

  “I hauled my guitar twenty blocks to the meeting and sang all of my ideas,” I say. “The client ate it up.”

  “That part was genius,” Chloe says. “They totally did eat that up. You seemed very legit.”

  “I blame this on Jesse,” I say, jumping up onto the counter to inspect my pimple. “If he hadn’t been such a prick last night, we totally would have had sex, and I wouldn’t have woken up with a pimple on my chin. You never get a pimple the day after you have sex.”

  “Is that the kind of dermatologic advice you picked up from working for your dad?”

  “It’s just common knowledge, Chlo,” I say, a smile creeping onto my lips. “That must be why your skin is always so clear. What time is it?”

  “Funny,” Chloe says. “It’s almost three. Why?”

  “I’m hitting the Long Island Rail Road. I’ve got to get a cortisone shot for this thing.”

  “You’re going out to Long Island to have your father pop your zit?”

  “Yeah,” I say, waiting for her to make a snide comment about running to daddy. “Why?”

  “I thought you were still mad at him for firing you?” Chloe asks.

  “I am,” I say, hopping off the counter, “but he’s still my dermatologist.” Chloe just stares back at me. “What?” I say.

  “I’m coming,” she says. “If your dad’s giving out free dermatologic advice, I’m so there.”

  “Let’s go,” I say, grabbing my guitar. “If we leave now, we can still get an off-peak ticket.”

  “How very frugal of you,” Chloe says. “But if you bring your guitar with you, I’ll bring my sketch pad and we can take a car service and bill it to Healthy Foods.”

  “Done.”

  Forty-five minutes later—you don’t usually hit traffic on the Long Island Expressway before 4 P.M.—we’re pulling up to my father’s office, and we’ve written three different jingles with three distinct commercial concepts storyboarded out. Chloe even brought her pencils, so the storyboards are in color.

  We grab our things and walk into the Manhasset Medical Pavilion, where my father has had his office since the 1970s. Upon graduation of medical school, my father’s father bought the building for him as a gift. Most of the tenants don’t know that my father actually owns the entire building, since he has a management company run the day-to-day operations and make most of the management decisions for him.

  The building was renovated and redecorated in the early ’90s, so it still has a vague ’80s feel to it. There is a small living room setup in the lobby in front of the reception desk that has two cheaply made white leather couches facing each other on a pink oriental rug with a mirrored coffee table in between them. A massive vase on the center of the coffee table is clearly meant to be the centerpiece of the setup: a pastel pink, plastic-y looking thing filled with fake flowers. The management company used to have fresh flowers brought in weekly, but the tenants banded together and agreed that they would rather pay less in rent and have fake flowers on permanent display. My mother, my father’s proxy, was the sole dissenting vote in the matter.

  Every time we walk into the lobby of the building, Chloe starts humming the theme song to Miami Vice and doing the robot.

  Probably because she had so little say over the look of the building itself, my mother, who fancies herself a bit of a design whiz, is the self-appointed on-site design czar for my father’s office. (She sends audition tapes to HGTV religiously each year.) Under her command, the office always looks immaculate. In its latest incarnation, it looks like a homey, welcoming living room, complete with overstuffed couches in lush fabrics and a rich blond-wood coffee table. The reception desk is the same shade of wood. I think that my mother went a bit overboard with the vanilla-colored chenille throw that is draped over the back of the couch, but even I have to admit that it does tie together the entire look of the room.

  And it smells like a home, not like a doctor’s office at all. My father does various on-site laser surgeries at his office, so he wants it to be a comforting environment for some of his more nervous patients. I know for a fact that potpourri is strategically hidden throughout the office so that it doesn’t smell like a doctor’s office, a touch my mother considers one of her more brilliant ideas. (“Martha Stewart’s got nothing on me,” she loves to boast. “I could be on HGTV. I just need a good scandal to get my face out there.”)

  Chloe is still doing the robot as the elevator doors open and we walk into the office.

  “Hi, Jo,” my father’s receptionist says to me. I can’t help but wonder if she knew that my father was going to fire me before I knew it. Or if she complained to him about me, and that was part of the reason I was fired.

  “Hello, Tricia,” I say. The “you little Benedict Arnold” part is implied.

  “Hey, girlies!” Barbie, the Barbie doll nurse, coos at us before we’ve even had a chance to sit down. Barbie likes to call everyone “girls,” as opposed to women. Or even the less PC but more traditional “ladies.” She also wears a nurse’s uniform—the sort of thing one would wear on Halloween to be dressed up as a “naughty nurse”—to work every day, even though all of the other nurses wear scrubs and clogs.

  “Hey, Barbie,” Chloe says and I smile and give Barbie a kiss on the cheek. Barbie is the sort of “girl” (her words, not mine) who kisses everyone hello, and even kisses strangers once she’s introduced to them. She’s just oozing with bubbly cheer.

  I should mention here that it’s not just that we call Barbie “the Barbie doll nurse” because she looks like a real live Barbie doll. Make no mistake—she does look like a Barbie doll, from her button nose to her blonde hair to her freakishly out-of-proportion long, thin legs and large, large breasts—but also, her name happens to be Barbie. And no, that’s not a nickname or an abbreviation of something like Barbara as you may be thinking. Her name is actually Barbie. It says Barbie Johnson on her driver’s license and even her passport (I checked her employee file). I always thought that it was a cruel gamble for her parents to make, giving their daughter such a loaded first name, but luckily for her, she grew up to do the name justice. And then some. But I mean, what if she’d grown up to be ugly or overweight or—gasp!—a brunette! What then?

  “Well, this is a surprise,” my brother, Andrew, says, walking out to reception and placing his hands firmly on Barbie’s shoulders. It’s as if he is using her as a shield so that he won’t have to have contact with Chloe and me.

  “Hi,” I say, leaning over Barbie and giving Andrew a kiss on the cheek.

  “Hey,” Chloe says, keeping her distance. She always acts shy around Andrew. It’s been this way since we were young. I know for a fact that Chloe, along with every other girl in our grade, had a crush on Andrew growing up. I was never sure if it was the lure of the guy who was older than you, or if it had something to do with his Ken-like blond hair and blue eyes (inherited from my mother’s side). When I was younger, I used to marvel at how Andrew’s hair stayed so perfectly in place. My own black hair (inherited from my father’s side) was always a holy terror, so at a certain point, I decided to let it go wherever it wante
d to. When I was younger, I used to call out, “Andrew, hair number 537 is out of place. You’d better fix it” whenever I saw him, which, for some reason, always made his hand instinctively fly to his head. Chloe and our friends used to laugh at this silly quip of mine, but I would always catch them staring at him for a moment too long, under the pretext of watching him fix his hair like the Ken doll that he was.

  “Hey, girlies,” Barbie says, grabbing Andrew’s hands as they sit on her shoulders, “guess what we’re doing this weekend?”

  “What?” Chloe asks. I assume she’s asking to be polite, but I really have no interest in this game.

  “Going to a spa!” Barbie gushes. “How fun, right?”

  Andrew hates spas.

  “So fun,” he says, and gives a closed-mouth smile.

  I know that smile. It’s his “it’s not a fake smile” fake smile. Andrew, for as well-kempt and immaculate as his appearance is, doesn’t actually like that sort of thing—spas and grooming, in general, that is. His hair always looks perfect, but that’s just because it’s very thick and healthy. It doesn’t move or ever get messy. Never has. In high school, he could play forward for an entire three-hour soccer game with gale force winds and his hair would still look the same as when he got on the field. All he has to do is get it cut short every three weeks. If he doesn’t do that, it’s a disaster, but as long as he shows up at the barbershop on time, he’s golden. He may look like a metrosexual, but really, he just hops out of the shower and looks like that. No gel, no products, not even a hairbrush. It’s like a slab of marble—it can be sculpted, but it never changes form.

  And then there’s his skin. His skin, well, just like my father, his skin is always perfect, because skin is his business. His skin not looking perfect is not an option. That would be like a dentist with a front tooth missing.

  So I could understand a woman like Barbie assuming that a man like Andrew would be all about getting pampered for a weekend at a spa, but really, he is more the type of man who would want to go camping or rock climbing for a weekend and risk breaking a bone (he’s broken twenty-six different bones in his body doing such ridiculous activities). I wonder why, after six months together, Barbie does not know that.

  “Jo, you would love it,” Barbie says. “Facials!” For a moment, I’m annoyed at this not-so-subtle dig at the mountain growing on my chin, but I quickly remember that Barbie is so oblivious that she wouldn’t even realize that I might be sensitive about my skin because of the aforementioned blemish.

  “Why don’t I take a look at that for you, Jo-Jo?” Andrew says, walking over to me and tilting my face up to the light.

  “I’ll wait for Dad,” I say, turning my face away from his scrutiny.

  “Dad’s doing some Botox,” he says. “It’ll probably be a while.” He’s still staring at my chin.

  “Botox doesn’t take that long,” I say. “I can wait.”

  “This is why you were so bad at making appointments, Jo-Jo,” he says. “You never gave anyone the proper amount of time. Botox can be very time consuming.”

  “Dad can do Botox in his sleep,” I say, stepping backward so that I’m out of the strong glare of the hi-hat light above me.

  “You can look at my face, Andrew!” Chloe pipes in, breaking the tension. She tilts her face upward, waiting for Andrew.

  “I’d rather have a paying customer anyway,” Andrew says, walking over to Chloe. He winks at her and she giggles like a little girl.

  “Oh, she’s not paying,” I say, matter-of-factly. Andrew rolls his eyes and takes Chloe to an examination room.

  “This is great,” Barbie says, sidling up to me. “We can have more time for girl chat!”

  I pick up a magazine from the coffee table and begin to flip. I’m secretly hoping that Barbie will pick up a magazine, too, and that reading fashion magazines simultaneously will take the place of girl chat.

  “Does this mean you’re not still mad at me, Pumpkin?” my father says, walking out into reception to greet me.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Or are you expecting to get paid for a day’s work for coming here?” he says as he kisses me on the cheek.

  “I have a medical emergency,” I say, pointing to my chin.

  “I thought you were doing some Botox, Dr. Waldman?” Barbie asks, clearly thrown by having the boss catch her sitting in the reception area reading fashion magazines. She hasn’t caught on to the fact that if you’re sleeping with the boss’s son, chances are your job is secure.

  “I can do Botox in my sleep, Barbie,” he says with a gentle smile.

  Ever the good patient, I stand up and position myself under a hi-hat light for my dad to take a peek at my face.

  “Yes, this is clearly an emergency,” my father says, bringing my face up to the light. “I can’t believe you were even able to leave your house.”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m very brave. As a matter of fact, I was recently let go by my evil boss, but I still found the strength to get out of bed today. I’m not the type to let the bastards get me down.”

  “Am I the bastard in this scenario?” my father asks, now examining the other, more zit-free parts of my face.

  “Well, you did also take away my car,” I say.

  “Okay, Norma Rae, let’s go into treatment room number three.”

  We walk back to the examining rooms, with Barbie following closely in our wake.

  “You don’t have to stay,” I tell Barbie as I prop myself up on the examining chair in room number three.

  “Actually,” Barbie says, posturing for my dad, “it’s the law. A nurse must always be in the examining room with a doctor when he’s in with a female patient.”

  “He’s my dad,” I say. “And I probably don’t even count as a patient because I have no intention of paying for this. I think it’s okay if we’re alone.”

  “Barbie,” my dad says, “would you please excuse us?”

  “Of course, Dr. Waldman,” Barbie says and makes a hasty exit.

  “So,” I say as my father goes to the counter to prepare a cotton ball with alcohol, “I got another gig. Now you don’t have to worry about me starving and dying alone in Soho.”

  “Fantastic, Pumpkin,” he says, dabbing my chin with the alcohol. “Let your mother know when it is, and we’ll come into the city that night to see you play.”

  “No, a paying gig,” I say, as he goes back to the counter to get my cortisone shot ready. “A day job.”

  “Already?” he says, coming back toward me. “This is even better than I had imagined! I’m so proud of you, Pumpkin! See, I knew you could do amazing things if I just gave you a little push. Tiny sting here. Aaaand, there we go. Tell me about it.”

  “Ow,” I say as he administers the cortisone shot and then applies pressure to my chin. “It’s a freelance thing at Chloe’s agency. Writing jingles.”

  “Well, that’s fantastic,” he says, handing me a cotton ball to press to my chin once he’s done. “That sounds really nice. A real job, so you get the health benefits and a 401(k) and all that, and you’re doing what you love, writing songs. I think it’s really fantastic, Pumpkin.” He leans in to hug me, and my right arm, holding the cotton ball to my face, gets stuck inside the embrace. It feels a bit forced, and I wonder if it’s because as he’s praising me for marrying together my passion with my work, it forces him to realize that he was never able to the same thing—that he gave up his passion for the piano to instead follow his father’s steady path to medicine—the sure thing. “You’ll be ready to make your first payment on the loft in no time. But you should still do your 401(k), I mean, really max that thing out, don’t defer on my account. I’m not going to evict you and leave you homeless, so you should do the 401(k) for all you can, and then we’ll work out our payments from there.” He releases me from his grip and smiles at me.

  “It’s freelance, Daddy,” I say. “There’s no 401(k), no health plan, no big salary.”

  “I see,” he says, trying to ke
ep an optimistic expression on his face, though he’s giving me the same smile that he gave me when I told him that I didn’t want to go to medical school. “It’s still fantastic. It’s still progress. Once they get a load of what you can do, you’ll be in a corner office in no time flat.”

  “Thanks, Daddy,” I say, as I hop off the table.

  We walk out to reception, where Andrew, Barbie, and Chloe are all sitting on the overstuffed couches.

  “If you two are done bilking the practice for free medical advice and committing insurance fraud, I can drive you home,” Andrew says.

  “Thanks!” Chloe says, her face shiny from whatever glop Andrew put on it.

  “We’re actually hitting some clubs downtown to see some music tonight. Not your cup of tea,” I chime in, “so we’d just as soon take the Long Island Rail Road back home.”

  “Clubs sound like fun,” Andrew says. “If I drive, will you feed me dinner first? Since I moved back to Long Island, I haven’t found Suki-caliber sushi yet. Whaddya say?”

  “Perfect!” Chloe says. “We love Suki!”

  “We just went to Suki last night,” I say.

  “I love clubbing!” Barbie says.

  “And we love Suki,” Chloe says. “We can go to the one on West Houston tonight, since we were at Union Square last night.” She shoots a meaningful glance in my direction, but I pretend to be concentrating too hard on pressing my cotton ball to my chin to notice.

  “Great,” Andrew says. “Then we’re set.”

  “Girlies,” Barbie says, leaning into us and grabbing both Chloe’s and my hands, “we are going to have so much fun!” I wonder if she plans to change out of her naughty nurse getup before we go out. People in the West Village might actually think that she’s being ironic.

  Fun.

  7 - What Have I Done to Deserve This?

  “Jo, we need to talk.” Jesse walks into the kitchen, where I’m eating a bowl of cereal. He has an “I mean business” look on his face.

  “Oh, sweetness,” I say, “did my hair dryer wake you up?” I’ve been going to the supergood offices every morning for a week now, and in my new role as a corporate American sellout, I’ve taken to giving my hair a few good shakes below the hair dryer before going out into the cool winter air.