The Lonely Hearts Club Read online

  Jesse shakes his head. “No, the blow-dryer was fine, but we still need to talk,” he says.

  “I’ve only got a few minutes before I have to leave,” I say, glancing at the clock on the microwave oven. “Wanna meet me in Union Square for lunch?”

  Jesse takes a deep breath. “I’m going on tour with the band.”

  “That’s great!” I say, the corn flakes almost falling out of my mouth in my excitement. I’m shocked that he’s telling me such monumental news with so little fanfare. “When do you leave? What cities do you hit?”

  “We’re leaving next week. We’re starting in L.A. and working our way back.”

  “Jesse, that’s amazing!” I say, jumping up to give him a hug. “I can meet you in L.A. when this freelancing gig is over!” But he stands still and doesn’t return my embrace. He takes my hands and unwraps my arms from around his neck.

  “You’re not going to meet me in L.A.,” he says, his hands still gripping my wrists.

  “Then Nashville. Whatever. Wherever you are. I’ll come meet you,” I say with a smile.

  “Jo,” he says. “No.”

  “No what?” I ask. I can see over my shoulder that it’s 9:02 A.M.—time for me to leave the apartment if I’m going to take the subway to work, which, considering my state of unemployment, I’ve really got no choice but to do.

  “You’re not coming with me. I’m going alone.”

  “Oh,” I say, feeling a wave of disappointment wash over me. We never spend nights apart from each other. And now he wants to spend a whole tour apart from each other? “How long will you be away?”

  “I don’t know, man,” Jesse says, shaking his head. I know that “man.” After two and a half years together, I know each and every “man” that he’s got. This is the “I’m about to disappoint you” man. He lets go of my wrists and we stand two feet apart from each other, just staring. The room begins to spin. I feel my face begin to shine and turn red.

  “What don’t you know, exactly?” I ask, glancing at the clock, which now reads 9:05 A.M.

  “I think that this tour will be a good thing for us,” Jesse says, looking down. “I think we need some time apart. You know, to think about things.”

  “Think about things?” I parrot back. “I don’t have anything to think about. What do you need to think about?”

  “Look, Jo. We’re just moving in different directions lately. I’m trying to move forward and you, you’re just stalled. It’s like you don’t even want to move forward anymore. You just want to wallow in the past.”

  “Wallow in the past?” I repeat back, sitting down on a stool at the kitchen counter.

  “Then why haven’t you done anything for the last two years?” he says, raising his voice.

  “My band broke up,” I say, my face on fire. “You know that.”

  “Jo,” he says, “your band broke up two years ago.”

  “Is this about that girl?” I ask. “That redhead who was here the other night?”

  “No,” Jesse says, seemingly exasperated, as if he’s been asked that question before. “This is not about Cassie. I mean, we’re going on tour with her band—The Rage is the headliner—but this is not about her.” In an instant, I realize that he has been asked this question before. By his band.

  “Are you sleeping with her?” I spit out. I can’t control my tone. I don’t really want to.

  “No!” he says, almost laughing at the thought of it. “No, Jo. I’m not cheating on you. Cassie and I have just gotten to be really close friends lately, and they needed an opening act for their tour, and—”

  And then I realize: Jesse’s either sleeping with Cassie or is about to sleep with her. I’m not sure which. He thinks he’s being a stand-up guy by taking a “break” from me first, but ironically, I think that makes him even more of an asshole than if he’d just been a man and said what he really meant. I tell him this.

  “I’m an asshole because I need some space?”

  “No,” I say. “You’re just an asshole in general. How dare you do this to me.”

  Later, I will look back at this conversation and realize that I was completely on fire, but he was cool as a cucumber. I thought we still had a chance; he’d already made his decision. I was fighting for us; he was not.

  “I think it will be good for us,” he says, speaking in calm tones as if I were a mental patient.

  “Good for us? You mean good for you. Who the fuck do you think you are? You’re lucky to have me. I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. To us. After everything we’ve been through.”

  “We should get out of this thing for a while. See how we do when we’re apart. See where it takes us.”

  “Get out of this thing? Out of what?” I ask. “Out of living in my father’s apartment? Out of my doing everything for you all the time? Out of having a full-time live-in groupie?”

  “I knew you were going to get like this,” he says.

  “Get like what, exactly?” I spit out. I look at the clock. 9:19 A.M.

  “Look,” he continues, “the fact of the matter is that I have an opportunity—my band has an opportunity—and I’m going to take it. Alone.”

  “Your band has an opportunity?” I say, barely containing myself. “You’ve got to be kidding me. I paid for your band’s demo!”

  “Don’t be jealous of our success,” he says, meeting my eyes for the first time since this conversation started.

  “Jealous?” I say, laughing at him. The nerve he has. I may be feeling a range of emotions right now—anger, fury, rage...but jealousy is not one of them. My band was a million times better than his in its heyday. I even have the Battle of the Bands trophy to prove it. I tell him this.

  “I don’t know if I love you anymore.”

  And there it is. Just like that. He doesn’t know if he loves me anymore. After two and a half years. I can barely move. I can barely speak. It literally takes my breath away for a second.

  How can that be, though? We are Romeo and Juliet. David Bowie and Iman. Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale. We are kindred spirits—two halves of the same whole. Except I would never do something like this to someone I loved.

  “Can we please just take a little time apart to see how it is that we feel about each other? Just for the tour. That’s all that I’m asking.” I stare back at Jesse, not knowing what to say. Anger is coursing through my veins, and I can’t formulate a thought. He wants time apart so he can go and sleep with his redhead. And I’m supposed to give him permission to do that? After he just told me that he doesn’t know if he loves me anymore? “Anyway,” he says, “it’s almost nine thirty. Don’t you have to go to work?”

  “Is that why you’re telling me this now?” I ask. “You goddamned coward. You fucking coward!” And then, like the coward he is, he begins his retreat to the bedroom.

  “I didn’t want to make it any harder than it had to be,” he says over his shoulder. Why do men always say that? Why do they always pretend that they’re trying to make it easier for you when what they’re really doing is trying to make it easier for themselves?

  “Any harder?” I say, laughing as I follow him back to the bedroom. “No, you just didn’t want to have a mature conversation about it.”

  Jesse opens the closet door and grabs two duffel bags. I don’t register it at the time, but I will realize later that the bags were already packed. He packed his bags already. Before we had this fight. He’d been thinking about this for a while—who knows how long—and he’s been packed and ready to go. Just waiting for the perfect moment to tell me. A moment when I couldn’t make a scene, didn’t have time to fight back. Time to fight for myself. Time to fight for us.

  “I’m sorry, Jo,” he says, picking up his bags. “I have to go.”

  I think of saying, “You’ll never find another girl like me,” but then I realize—he doesn’t want another girl like me, otherwise he’d be with me. That’s why he’s leaving.

  “If you walk out that door right now,” I yell
from the bedroom as he walks to the front door, “don’t ever think about coming back.”

  And with that, he’s gone.

  8 - You Wreck Me

  Where were you? Chloe writes on a pad after I sneak into the Healthy Foods meeting a half hour late. “Artists!” Chloe’s boss had self-consciously joked as I walked in. Luckily, the Healthy Foods people laughed along with him and I was able to choke out an apologetic smile as I murmured a quick “sorry” and offered a lame excuse about the subway getting stuck between stops.

  Getting my heart broken at home, I write back. Chloe’s face falls. I have to turn away from her—I can’t take the look of pity on her face right now.

  Thankfully, the rest of the meeting is short, and the Healthy Foods people do most of the talking—more strategy talk—and Chloe and I don’t have to present anything. The second we are excused from the meeting, Chloe and I make a beeline to her office and slam the door.

  I take a breath for the first time in what seems like ages. I tell her the whole mess in sordid detail, with Chloe punctuating the story with “that little prick” any time I let her get a word in edgewise.

  “You can cry if you want,” Chloe says. “No one’s going to come in here.”

  “I’m not going to cry,” I say. “I don’t cry.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Chloe says, stretching her arms out to give me a hug. “You must be so upset.”

  “I’m not upset,” I say, gliding past her and refusing the hug. “I’m angry. I am so fucking angry.”

  “It’s okay to be upset,” Chloe says to me as I walk over to her window. Her office has an amazing view of the Empire State Building.

  “Well, I’m not,” I say. “I’m just mad.”

  My cell phone rings and I pick it up. A tiny part of me hopes that it will be Jesse, calling to apologize or tell me that I was punked. Instead, I check the caller ID, and it’s the one person I want to speak to least in the world—my brother.

  I pick up the phone and answer with a very bland, “Yeah?”

  “Hey, Jo-Jo,” he says.

  “Hey,” I say. He never calls me in the middle of the day, and I want him to just get to the point. “What’s up?”

  “Family dinner tomorrow night,” he says. “Can you come out to Long Island?”

  “Tomorrow night?” I ask. We never have family dinners during the week. Much less on Long Island. The most I usually manage is a dinner in the city with my father when he’s lecturing at NYU Medical, or a dinner in the city with my mom when she’s shopping in midtown all day. “I can’t come. I don’t have a car anymore.”

  “There’s a train that gets into Manhasset at seven twenty-two P.M. I’ll pick you up. Be at Penn Station at six fifty.”

  “I can’t,” I start to say, but Andrew’s off the phone before I can get another word in. I look at my phone in disbelief—did he actually just hang up on me? I slam the phone into Chloe’s windowsill.

  “Whoa,” she says, grabbing the phone from my hands. “What just happened? Was that Jesse?”

  “I’m so mad at Andrew,” I say, clenching my fist at my side. “He just called a family dinner and didn’t even give me a minute to make an excuse for why I can’t go!”

  “What can I do?” Chloe says, putting her hand on my shoulder.

  “You can go to this family dinner for me,” I say.

  “I’m not going to your family dinner for you,” she says, walking to her watercooler and pouring me a glass of water.

  “Men,” I say, taking a sip. “This is so like them. They make a decision and you just have to go along with it. No discussion. No question—no checking in with you. ‘What would you like to do? What works for you?’ I mean, what if I had plans tomorrow night?”

  “Do you?” Chloe asks.

  “That’s not the point!” I yell. “The point is—if it’s a family dinner and I’m a member of the family, shouldn’t I have been asked to dinner and not told to be at dinner?”

  “Are you really this mad about the dinner?” Chloe asks.

  “Yes!”

  “I don’t think that you are,” she says.

  “I think that I am,” I say, finishing off my water and crumpling the paper cup into a ball in my hand.

  “It’s okay to be upset about Jesse,” Chloe says, prying the cup from my clenched fingers.

  “I’m not upset about Jesse,” I say, louder, as if she hadn’t heard me the first time. “I’m angry. I’m mad. He bilked me for every penny I had—every penny my dad gave me, anyway—and left me for dead.”

  “He left you for dead? Did he hurt you? I’ll kill him if he touched a hair on your head,” Chloe says, with her trademark five-foot-two tough talk. I turn around and stare back at her. “Oh, you mean dead emotionally,” she says, whispering the word “emotionally” as if she were one of those drug and alcohol counselors from high school.

  “I mean he’s an asshole.”

  9 - Scenes from an Italian Restaurant

  Dominick’s is an Italian restaurant about ten blocks away from the house I grew up in, and due to its proximity, my family spends an inordinate amount of time eating there. In fact, most of my childhood took place while eating at Dominick’s. God forbid we travel fifteen blocks down the road to Morton’s Steakhouse or twelve blocks in the other direction to that Japanese place. The one exception to this rule is Sunday nights spent at the Chinese restaurant. We are still a Jewish family from Long Island, after all.

  When deciding where to go for dinner, the discussion always ends by my father saying, “Well, Dominick’s is right here.” Dominick came over to the United States from Italy when he was only sixteen years old. He opened the restaurant with the money in his pockets and a few of his grandmother’s old recipes. When the restaurant grew in popularity, he brought the rest of his family over—his parents, his grandmother, and five brothers and six sisters. Every one of them worked at the restaurant. When Dominick retired, his son, Dominick Jr., took over. It was still a family place, with Dominick’s family members running every aspect of the joint—his sister running the front of the house, his brother running the kitchen, and his brother-in-law taking care of the delivery and takeout orders. Growing up, any time we would walk in, Dominick Jr. would come out to greet us and shake my father’s hand. Now Dominick the third runs things.

  When my brother and I walk in, Dominick the third shakes my brother’s hand and kisses me on both cheeks to say hello (even though he is the second generation in his family to have been born in this country).

  “The Waldman kids!” Dominick says. “How’s working with Pops?”

  “Great,” Andrew says, and quickly ushers me to our table.

  We sit at our usual table—a big booth toward the back of the restaurant next to the big bay window—and my father has already ordered a bottle of 1990 Lafite.

  My mother grabs me and holds me to her in a way that can only be described as clutching me to her bosom.

  “You were too good for him anyway,” she whispers into my ear.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I whisper back, and I mean it. This show of support is much better than what she was able to choke out yesterday when I told her the news. Then she immediately launched into a discussion about all I have to be thankful for, even in the wake of getting my heart broken. The conversation inexplicably segued into a discussion about the Oprah show she saw on women being sold into sex slavery. So I might be nursing a broken heart, but at least I haven’t been sold into prostitution.

  I’d rather hear that I was too good for him.

  “Now you’re here, where you belong,” she says.

  “I belong at Dominick’s?” I say as I take my seat.

  “With your family,” she says, dragging the word “family” out to its full three syllables as if she is the matriarch of some soap opera clan.

  “Some wine, Pumpkin?” my dad asks me, already pouring the wine into my glass. I stifle the urge to run up to the bar and order myself a vodka tonic, and instead gracefully accept th
e glass of wine my father has poured for me.

  I smile back and wonder why we’re gathered here today. Is my father sick? Is that why my parents have gathered all of us here? Is that why he’s ordering his favorite wine? Maybe he’s just found out that he’s deathly ill and we’re supposed to be making him comfortable and letting him do what he wants in his final moments.

  But my dad’s a well-known doctor who also teaches medicine. The chances of him not knowing that he was deathly ill are pretty slim to none.

  Is my mother divorcing my father? She was really mad at him that other morning when we were on the phone. I mean, she’s always that mad at him, threatening to divorce him, but this time she may really mean it. It would be so like her to make some big huge announcement about it. To gather her whole family around her to tell us the news.

  “Sooooo,” Barbie announces after we’ve ordered and all begun our first glasses of wine, “we have some news to share.” It was Barbie who called this family dinner. Which is odd, considering she’s not even part of this family. She’s just Andrew’s girlfriend. And a paid employee of my father.

  I knew there had to be some reason I was forced to come out to Long Island for dinner on a Thursday. I tried to cancel this morning, using my breakup with Jesse as an excuse, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. First of all, she never really liked Jesse that much. She always envisioned me ending up with a smart, handsome Jewish doctor like she had, or at the very least, a rich, savvy Jewish businessman (which, actually, she had done, too). Second of all, she seems to have this crazy notion that spending time with my family will actually make me feel better about my life.

  “News?” my mother asks coyly. I can’t tell whether or not she knows what Barbie is about to say.

  “Yes, we do,” Andrew says, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead and taking a swig of wine.

  “Excuse me,” my father says to a passing waiter, “could I get a refill on my water?”