How To Judge A Book By Its Lover Page 4

  “Because,” bottle-blonde said with contempt, “Professor Reactionist-Revisionary over here claims that Lacan’s theories are all a result of bad mothering!”

  “He said that?” I asked, hoping to change the subject. “How absurd.”

  “That is not what I said. You completely missed the thrust of my comparative analytical theory…” As their argument resumed, I slipped away.

  A second later, the auditorium lights dimmed, and I grabbed the first seat I could find, certain Lucien would be tapping my shoulder at any moment. But just as the speaker approached the microphone, I spotted him sitting on the opposite side of the room. Who could miss that thick hair? Once in a while he would turn, and I’d catch a glimpse of his intense blue eyes. It was all I could do to stay in my seat.

  Instead of sleeping through the lecture, I survived it by imagining our conversation at the intimate café he would certainly take me to. “So you say you’re a writer?” he would ask, unable to quench his insatiable thirst for information about my fascinating life. But before I could even answer, he’d be leaning across the table to kiss me because my sex appeal was even more magnetic.

  When the final applause died down, I rushed over to see him. I imagined the camera pulling back to reveal me pushing my way through the crowd and him doing the same on the other side of the room, both of us desperately searching for each other. The soundtrack would swell as our eyes met, and the camera would pull in for a tight close-up of our long-awaited embrace.

  The movie playing in my mind was interrupted by a sharp elbow jab between my ribs. “Hey!” I said, nearly ready to respond with a punch, when I saw those baby blues gazing at me.

  “Sorry,” Lucien said. “Laurel, right? Great to see you again.”

  Perfect! I thought. He’d remembered my name and recited the first line I’d written for him in my head.

  “Hey, I wouldn’t miss the chance to see you,” I said, reciting the second.

  “There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said. Wait a minute, I thought. That’s not in the script. “This is Xhana. She’s from Ouagadougou.”

  Xhana was like a supermodel, with flawless skin, aristocratic cheekbones, and a gentle, friendly smile. I was both instantly in love with her and filled with jealousy.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” she said in a lilting accent, extending her beautiful hand.

  “The pleasure’s all mine,” I lied through the biggest smile I could muster. When Lucien’s arm slipped around her waist, I felt the air rush from my lungs and that special pain that only comes when the heroine loses true love. The musical score rose to a tragic climax. Fade to black.

  In the harsh glare of the streetlights, I realized I couldn’t even face being among people on a train or bus, so I decided to hoof it the fifty blocks home. The streets were filled with Saturday night couples snuggling over drinks at sidewalk cafés, coming out of theaters holding hands, and otherwise looking blissful. Meanwhile, I got more witchy by the moment, my face frozen in a frown.

  For the first ten blocks I was in shock. How could I be so stupid? Why would a babe as accomplished and sophisticated as Lucien ever take notice of me? Of course he’d pick someone from Ouagadougou and not Massapequa. She was probably multilingual and bicontinental; I couldn’t even sing Frères Jacques and hadn’t traveled further than one bad Spring Break spent in Cancún. Her look was haute couture, and I was strictly off the rack. Xhana was the kind of woman who haunted men in their dreams; I was the kind they trusted to walk their dogs.

  By the time I hit midtown, I was good and angry. At myself. For being so deluded. I had to admit it wasn’t the first time. My mind could no longer run from the litany of disasters. They flittered before my eyes like images from a dating hell scrapbook. There was Giorgio, the foreign exchange student in high school who I was sure would be my prom date but never even knew my name. And those months I wasted when I worked at the Copenhagen Café waiting for that avant-garde filmmaker to ask me out, only to learn that he was married with three kids. I had suppressed the memory of the one right before Lucien: Kenai, the tortured-yet-successful painter whose Irish setter I walked until that awful night I decided to surprise him in lingerie. He arrived home with his real date and screamed in horror.

  I felt like screaming in horror myself. This has to stop. You are ruining your life. Get your head out of the clouds already. Haven’t you had enough? When are you going to realize that fantasy is not the same as reality? The longer you spend dreaming, the less you’ll have to show for it. Look at your cousin Mindy, who threw away her youth thinking she was the next Lizzo when all she ended up was lonely, unemployed, and living with her parents.

  I recognized my mother’s voice in my head but couldn’t write it off as undermining criticism. Every word rang true. By Twenty-Third Street, I’d come to an important decision: no more delusions. The time had come for me to make a real life for myself in the real world. The nearer I got to Fourteenth Street, the more I knew I needed a plan, and by the time I had trodden the well-worn steps to my crumbling apartment, I knew what it was.

  Once inside, I picked up the phone. Trish answered right away.

  “Hey, it’s me. Quick question: Your kid’s dentist . . . is he still available?”

  The next morning, I emerged fresh from the shower and looked in the mirror to see myself with all illusions washed off—no makeup or product, just me: mousy brown hair limp and lifeless, the artificial sheen gone from my cheeks, and chapped, unkissable lips.

  Meanwhile, somewhere on the Upper West Side, a sexy art critic was waking up next to his exotic beauty. Lucien would extend a muscled arm across the cream satin sheets and stroke Xhana’s lithe shoulder.

  For all I knew, they had already been shopping for rings. No doubt he could afford the pink diamond she’d cherish. Even on short notice, Xhana would have connections who could book her the Pierre Grand Ballroom for their reception, and before they departed for their seven-star honeymoon in Dubai, Lucien would remember old reliable Laurel as the perfect person to care for Xhana’s three purebred Shih Tzus. She’d get a massage in the Jacuzzi while I’d be left holding the bag of Shih Tzu shit.

  In defiance, I decided to throw on the striped boatneck crew top and the cotton mini. To hell with Danny Z.’s precious theories. No amount of wardrobe hocus-pocus would help a plain Jane like me. Lucky I didn’t invest in those sapphire earrings from Thailand he insisted would subliminally erase all fear of commitment in a man. What a joke. Even Trish’s suburban dentist couldn’t be seduced with a trick like that.

  For all her mediocre taste, though, I had to admit that Trish made the guy out to seem like he might be my type. “He loves all kinds of music!” she said.

  “Don’t you mean Muzak? He’s a dentist.”

  “Yeah, and I can’t tell you how many single women in this town wish he was drilling them instead of their teeth.”

  I giggled at the thought of being the envy of all the desperate women on the South Shore. There I’d be at the mall with tacky competitors all around whispering about how the hunky dentist had fallen for the artsy writer from Manhattan: “It’s so unfair, I had a nose job, a boob job, and a six-figure real job, and he goes for a girl who looks like an unmade bed? I should have written a novel instead.”

  If this drill master attracted so many women, he had to have a great bod and super-thick hair, even thicker than Lucien’s maybe. And with the new rage in enamel veneers, I knew he made a good enough living to buy me the dream diamond ring. With his bucks and my good taste, our wedding wouldn’t be held at Leonard’s of Great Neck; it would be at the Conservatory Garden in Central Park.

  While walking Xhana’s ill-behaved, inbred monsters, Lucien would just happen to be passing at that moment. Looking through the great iron gate, he’d be devastated to realize the radiant bride was me.

  Too late, sucker, I thought in my overactive imagination.

  Out of the array of bottles, tubes, sprays, jars, and sample packets crowding every av
ailable surface in my tiny bathroom, I selected a volumizing mousse and applied it from the roots to the ends.

  Determined to tame my mane, I flipped my head upside down and switched on my blow-dryer. Boom! The air conditioner died, the TV shut off, my computer made an awful sound before shutting down, and the lights went dark. I sighed deeply, looked up at the ceiling from between my legs, and faced the hard truth: Too many appliances blow the apartment fuse.

  Standing up and staring at my face in the dim mirror, it occurred to me that, by extension, too many dashed dreams can leave a girl really burned out.

  As I left the bathroom, I had another profound realization: Any dentist in the market for a blind date has got to be a major loser.

  Since my battery-operated phone was the one appliance still working, and my career was the one hope I had left, I dialed José. Portia’s little pizza party had robbed me of the chance to hear any feedback on Chapter 38. José’s opinion was the only one I really cared about, and I needed it badly to revise my manuscript before Anderson could read it.

  Calculating in my head, I counted seven days since I’d dropped it off. Even if Anderson managed to put it down after each chapter, chances were he hadn’t gotten to Part II yet. If I rushed, I could replace the old Chapter 38 before Cadbury’s morning walk.

  I apologized to José for calling at eight in the morning but explained that it was imperative to get his feedback because an industry giant was reading my novel.

  “That’s great news!” he said. “If you don’t mind if I eat cereal while we talk, let’s go.”

  José loved the new chapter title. “‘Toupee or not Toupee’—where’d you come up with that?”

  “My imagination, I guess,” I replied excitedly. There were upsides to my daydreaming. “But what about the crowd scenes? Did they move too quickly?”

  “To tell you the truth,” he said, crunching his breakfast, “I was a little confused. Is anyone really going to believe that Napoleon, a man who just conquered half of Austria, is constantly thinking about his bald spot?”

  “The great general’s brilliance at the battle of Austerlitz can be directly attributed to his subconscious drive to overcome a very common case of male pattern balding,” I declared. “And it was his hairdresser who gave him the confidence to advance with the famous hundred-gun grand battery!”

  There was silence on the other end—even José’s chewing had ceased. “But,” he began softly, “the fields were carpeted with the dead and dying. I have to say, such vanity tests my threshold of believability. You completely discredit Napoleon’s tactical genius, chalking it up to the work of a stylist.”

  “Exactly! That’s my angle,” I explained, disappointed by his lack of insight. “Everybody knows he’s a brilliant strategist, but nobody knows that his hairdresser was!”

  “Well, then you’ve done an admirable job of rendering the implausible plausible,” he conceded.

  “Now, José, I need your criticisms as much as your compliments,” I chided. “This is my big shot.”

  “Okay then, here’s what I think. You’re too obsessed with pre-industrial age homemade hair products. I grant you, it’s interesting to learn that ordinary axle grease covers those unsightly grays, but do you really need to elaborate on the chemical properties of lard mixed with charcoal as a precursor to L’Oréal for three full pages?”

  My brow was knit. I hated to delete a month’s worth of research, but I knew that José’s instincts were correct. “It does slow the action,” I admitted.

  To get the computer—and the rest of my apartment, for that matter—working again, I had to trudge down seven flights to my building’s filthy basement and switch on the fuse box. Feeling half-dead when I came back upstairs, at least everything else had come to life, including my desktop, which displayed an iMessage from Mom.

  “Hi, Cookie. Here’s Uncle Lewis’s number at work. He’s all excited about hearing from you, and let’s face it, you can’t be choosy. So give him a call before—”

  Before reading the rest of that sentence, I closed the screen and sat down at my desk to pursue my true calling, which was most decidedly not being a junior writer at Girdle and Support Hose Quarterly.

  - 5 -

  Half an hour later, with the newly trimmed Chapter 38 safe in my backpack, I set out to do my morning rounds. The moment I opened the door to Anderson’s apartment, Cadbury leapt up and started kissing me on the face.

  “Cadbury, sit!”

  The dog promptly obeyed.

  “Well, you certainly have everything under control,” Anderson said, emerging from the kitchen.

  I thought about asking him if I could replace the old chapter, but after a compliment like that, I didn’t want to look flaky. “Thanks,” I said. “I try to be creative.”

  I studied his face to see if it betrayed any sign that he was deeply immersed in my book and amazed to have discovered such a talent, but all he said was, “I won’t be here when you get back, but have a nice walk.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you later this week?” I asked, fishing for clues.

  “Hope so,” he replied.

  Now that had to be good news.

  The bad news was that my normally enjoyable morning walk got off to a rocky start. The dogs were all crazy, prompting me to wonder what the lunar phase was, because I’ve noticed that during a full moon they act up like somebody slipped Red Bull into their water bowls.

  Right in the middle of Broadway, Lulu insisted on trying to hump Mini, which was ridiculous because the teacup Chihuahua could only get as far as the Great Dane’s knee. I had to stop and lecture them on the center lane island while a bum jeered the oh-so-original observation, “So that’s why they call it doggie style!”

  We got to Eighty-Second Street without incident, but while I was imagining Napoleon’s Hairdresser on sale at every airport in the world, Kingpin relieved himself on an old chair that had been tossed out on the sidewalk.

  At least, that’s what I thought it was until the owner came running over with a furious look on his face. Glancing around, I noticed the area was full of furniture being loaded into a moving van, and I realized that the chair wasn’t just old—it was antique.

  “You idiot! That’s an original Eames chaise lounge! Do you have any idea how much that will cost to clean?”

  “No…” I replied sheepishly.

  “Well, you’re going to, because I’m sending you the bill.”

  Since I survive on reputation, I had no choice but to hand over my business card and pray that I wouldn’t have to pay much more than I did to dry clean a dress.

  “I hope you’re getting a big tax return,” the owner said in a parting shot, “because this is going to cost at least a couple hundred bucks.”

  My day’s pay blown, I tried to cheer up as we approached Riverside Park. After all, the sun was shining, the day was young, and the Chapter 38 in my backpack was sure to blow Anderson away.

  At the corner of Riverside Drive, waiting for the light to turn so we could begin our romp in the park, I was approached by a man in blue.

  “These your dogs?” asked the policeman.

  “No, sir,” I answered cheerfully. “Laurel’s Pooch Patrol – The Upper West Side is Our Backyard.” I handed him a card. You never know where you’re going to get new business.

  “Unfortunately, this is not a backyard,” the officer said sternly. “And you have to clean up after your dogs.”

  As a firm supporter of the pooper-scooper law, I was shocked. No one had cleaned up after more dogs in that neighborhood than I had. “I’m aware of that, sir,” I replied defensively.

  “Then what’s this?” he asked, pointing to what looked like an elephant dropping only inches from my feet.

  “Ugh!” I replied jumping back. “That’s not from these dogs.”

  “Sure it’s not,” he said sarcastically, pulling out his pad. That was the moment that Lulu chose to turn her amorous attention toward the cop.

  “Hey!” he
cried, trying to shake her off his leg. “I was going to give you a warning, but now you’re getting a ticket.” He began scribbling on the pad.

  “Listen,” I said, pulling out my stash of baggies, “I’m a professional! I would never leave that on the street. Besides, that must have been there a while.”

  “I’m sure you know your dog poop, but they didn’t waste any time teaching us that at the police academy. If you want to contest the ticket, here’s the number to call.” He circled a line on the back and left me standing there holding my second bill of the morning, this one for a cool hundred.

  By the time I got back to Anderson Gallant’s, glad to be dropping off my last charge, I was feeling frazzled but ready to go ahead with my mission. Conveniently, after letting me in, the maid went down to the laundry room, so I had the place to myself.

  Now, where would he put my book? Figuring he read it before going to sleep, I tiptoed into the bedroom, where I found a king-sized mattress on the floor, surrounded by various remotes and facing a giant-screen TV. There was a stray tablet nearby but no books in sight.

  This publishing empire heir didn’t seem to have much taste for literature, I thought, retreating to the study. It was immaculate, lined with bookshelves filled with classics that looked like they had never been touched. The beautiful mahogany desk appeared equally unused, with no papers anywhere, least of all my manuscript.

  People do read in the bathroom, I reasoned, entering his, but I didn’t find Napoleon’s Hairdresser there.

  I was starting to feel despondent when it hit me—he brought it to work! Of course! I’d just have to hope he liked the old Chapter 38, because I wasn’t about to go snooping around Gallant Publishing.

  With the place to myself, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to go out on the terrace and sneak a peek at the view. After all, with Anderson’s help, I’d eventually have to decide which park-front building I’d want to live in.

  The fresh air revived me, and my eyes took in the glittering cityscape. Wanting to leave before the maid returned, I pulled open the heavy glass door and began to re-enter the apartment.