Girlfriends (Patrick Sanchez) (6 page)

“Good night, Gina. I’ll talk to you in the morning.” Peter closed the door to go take a shower and left Gina standing there.

Gina muttered something under her breath and headed down the hall to her apartment—another wasted Saturday night. If sitting through Penelope’s wedding earlier that day wasn’t bad enough, she had to walk in on Peter and Cheryl. Penelope had Donny, Peter had Cheryl, and Gina just felt very alone—very drunk and very alone. She passed the elevator just as it was opening.

“Mary, what are you doing here?”

Gina turned around to see the potbellied man who had paid for her drink earlier in the evening.

“I was just on my way home,” Gina said, startled.

“Do you live here?”

“Just down the hall,” Gina said, wanting to kick herself for telling the truth.

“That’s amazing. A friend of mine lives down at the other end of the building. I don’t usually use these elevators, but I couldn’t find any parking near the other side. How long have you lived here, Mary?”

“Why do you keep calling me Mary?” Gina said before remembering she lied about her name earlier.

“Isn’t that your name?”

“No, Gina. You must’ve misheard me.” God, she hoped he’d buy it. After all, it was pretty loud at Rumors. She figured she could convince him that he misunderstood when she introduced herself as Mary, and hopefully he wouldn’t ask about the White House.

“Well, Gina, can I walk you home?” Griffin asked.

“I guess so. Jerry, right?”

“Griffin.”

“Oh, yeah,” Gina said, taking a quick glimpse at his protruding belly, trying to decide if she could really ignore it.

God! Am I that desperate? she thought, heading toward her apartment. She wasn’t sure if it was the liquor or the fatigue, but it was almost as if she were floating outside of her body and watching herself walk to her apartment with a fat, shapeless shlub.

What are you doing? she called to herself from above. No, no, no! But she wasn’t able to stop herself. Somehow, tonight loneliness got the best of her and she needed a warm body, even if it was Griffin’s. It was finally happening. She was settling for whatever she could get. Of course, she could get better, but in the wee hours of a Sunday morning, Griffin was there and available. He would have to do.

The thought of settling always scared Gina. She had seen so many of her friends do it—marry guys who were nice, and made a decent living, and might make good fathers—guys who they felt as passionate about as a doorknob. She didn’t want that for herself, but that was an easy philosophy to have when she was twenty-two. It was getting harder to remain steadfast as the big three-zero approached. She was truly amazed on the rare occasions when she met couples that were truly in love—where both partners were really into each other. With most couples it was obvious that one person was totally in love while the other person was there just to avoid being alone.

There always seems to be a settler and a settlee. I don’t care to be either one, Gina thought to herself as she put the key into the door of her apartment.

“Come on in,” she said to Griffin as she struggled to push the door open.

The Personals

C
heryl closed the front door behind her and dragged into her living room. She was getting really tired of the whole scene with Peter, and having a run-in with Gina certainly didn’t help matters. The whole mess had been going on for far too long. She was tired of being Peter’s
friend.
She was so over hearing him say how much he cared about her and enjoyed her company—how he loved her but wasn’t
in love
with her. She really didn’t know if she was “in love” with him either. That’s how she rationalized the whole ridiculous relationship. It was just as meaningless to her as it was to him, at least that’s what she tried to tell herself. Neither one of them had a significant other, so their arrangement allowed them to have dates to weddings and Christmas parties, kept them from eating in restaurants alone, and certainly provided a sexual outlet for both of them. She knew the moment she or Peter hooked up with someone else, they would adjust their
friendship
to a purely platonic relationship. Cheryl just hoped she found someone before Peter did.

What the hell was Gina doing over at Peter’s in the wee hours of the morning? She’s worse than an ex-wife who won’t let go of her former husband, Cheryl thought to herself as she kicked off her shoes and plopped down onto the sofa. The whole feud between her and Gina was so stupid, but Cheryl had grown weary of trying to patch things up with Gina and gave up trying a long time ago.

Cheryl missed having Gina as a friend. They were so much alike—both attractive, young, smart women who just couldn’t seem to get their act together, especially when it came to men. Cheryl used to think Gina would eventually forgive her, and one day they would be friends again. But, now that several years had gone by since they stopped speaking to each other, Cheryl accepted the fact that her friendship with Gina was history. And what made matters even worse, Cheryl lost Linda’s friendship as well. Cheryl and Linda were never terribly close. In fact, Cheryl couldn’t think of when she and Linda ever really hung out by themselves, but they did spend a lot of time together because of Gina. It was no real surprise that when Gina and Cheryl had their rift, Linda dropped out of Cheryl’s life as well. Gina and Linda were close, worked together, and had a long history between them.

Thank God for
Nick at Nite,
she thought as she clicked on a late night episode of
The Facts of Life
and riffled through a couple of cooking magazines strewn on the coffee table. After skimming through last month’s edition of
Bon Appétit,
she picked up a copy of the
Washington City Paper
that was lying on the floor next to the sofa. Cheryl had never been known for neatness. She wasn’t a complete slob, but most of the time her apartment was pretty much in a state of disarray, and she constantly had trouble finding things. Her place wasn’t dirty or anything, just terribly disorganized.

As she started to flip through the paper, she remembered how she used to comb through it every week to see where the latest hot spots were—which bars were offering specials or had themed evenings. In her early twenties it wasn’t uncommon for her to hit the clubs three or four nights a week. She remembered getting trashed at the Insect Club or Planet Fred, two D.C. clubs that had long since closed. Before she and Gina had their falling out, the two of them were almost a staple at 15 Minutes. The doorman knew them on sight and never made them pay the cover charge. He told them they were both so young and beautiful that their presence alone would draw a crowd. They would spend the night drinking and dancing, rarely being troubled to actually pay for a drink. Cheryl remembered all the ridiculous one-liners she would get from guys at the bars—guys who eventually wanted to know if she wanted them to take her home. In her early days it didn’t quite click with her why the guys rarely offered to take her to their own place, but she soon realized if the guys came home with her, they didn’t have to worry about kicking her out as soon as the sex was over. They could just say they had to get home to let their dog out or something and be on their way. Besides, who wanted some one-night stand from a bar knowing where he lived?

Despite all the free drinks and offers to take them home, Cheryl and Gina usually ended up leaving the bars together. Not because they were morally above no-strings-attached sex. There were definitely times when Cheryl or Gina would leave a club in the company of a young man, but these instances were uncommon. It was just rare that either one of them found a guy who excited them enough to be bothered. Sometimes they were sluts, but at least they were picky sluts.

When she did actually have one-night stands, Cheryl remembered those awkward moments after the sex was over—how awful it was when she didn’t get an invitation to stay the night and had to get out of bed and pick her clothes up off the floor. It was so humiliating, kneeling on the floor, trying to separate her clothes from the guy’s she’d gone home with. She was never a smoker, but after a night at a bar her clothes would reek of cigarette smoke and pulling her shirt over her head would almost make her gag. Just thinking about it all gave Cheryl goose bumps.

Cheryl perused the ads in the
City Paper
for the newest dance clubs, most of which she hadn’t been to. Now that she was pushing thirty, she started to feel a little out of place in many of the local clubs, particularly the ones that attracted the college crowd. Being surrounded by drunk eighteen-year-olds with fake IDs, who were about an hour away from puking their guts up in the bathroom was no longer Cheryl’s idea of a good time.

A few weeks earlier, she went to Mister Days with a couple of the girls from work, when a young college guy approached her and tried to make conversation. Cheryl didn’t have any interest in the kid, but it didn’t hurt to be polite. After a few minutes they actually started to hit it off. He was a psychology major at American University, where Cheryl had graduated from, and they even had some of the same professors. The conversation went along smoothly until he inquired as to when she graduated. When she told him, his mouth dropped just a tad before he tried to recover by telling her how good she looked for twenty-nine. The young white boy then said he had heard that black people aged better than white people and she was surely proof of it. Annoyed and feeling about a hundred and ten, Cheryl joked that she used a lot of sunblock and tried to always get enough fiber. The young man politely laughed at her little joke and said it was nice to meet her before letting her know he was going to roam around a bit and maybe “they’d catch up later.” He then extended his hand, offering a good-bye handshake. Feeling a tad humiliated, Cheryl shook his hand and forced a smile.

It all seemed so ridiculous. In the scheme of things, she was still very young. She wasn’t even thirty yet, but she could remember back when she was twenty-one and thirty was just plain old. She also remembered being twenty-one and telling her friends to shoot her if she was still doing the bar scene when she was thirty. She had one more year to avoid a bullet.

Cheryl read an article or two in the
City Paper
and made her way toward the back. Eventually, she hit the classified section and flipped a few more pages until she reached the personal ads. She looked at the Matches section every couple of weeks and sometimes even circled a few ads she thought were interesting, but she was never able to make that final leap and actually place a call.

As she combed the ads, she laughed at herself. She hated how youth-obsessed people were and how a twenty-one-year-old at Mister Days thought she was an old hag. But this didn’t stop her from immediately bypassing any ads from guys who were over thirty-five. She skipped over the divorced ones, the ones with kids, the ones who said they were hairy, and the ones who said they were stocky, which everyone knew was a marketer’s term for big as a house.

Of course, she also passed on the ads that were specifically looking for white women. These ads annoyed her. It was like she wasn’t good enough for certain men because of her skin color, but a part of her also felt sorry for men who limited themselves to one race. There were so many people out there, and it was just foolish not to give someone a chance because they were African American or Asian or Latino or whatever. Over the years Cheryl had dated men of different races—a few black men, a Latino guy, and a man of Native American descent. But mostly Cheryl seemed to date white guys. In fact, most of the people in her life tended to be white. White people were just what she was used to. She grew up outside Portland, Maine, and was the only black girl in her grade school and one of two in her high school. In Maine she could go weeks without seeing a black person other than her parents.

Now that she had been in D.C. for a few years, she had a few black friends, but when she first moved to D.C. to go to college, it was almost a culture shock. She had never seen so many ethnic minorities in her life, and not just African Americans. D.C. was the epitome of diversity. During the brief walk from her dorm room to the Armand’s Pizza on Wisconsin Avenue she might see other black people, Caucasians, some Latinos, an Asian or two, and sometimes women in full Muslim attire. It took some getting used to, but Cheryl eventually embraced the diversity of her new city. This was one of the reasons she stayed in D.C. after she graduated from college. She felt at home in a city with such a varied population. Now, after ten years in a multicultural city, when she went home to Maine it was almost like the twilight zone—white people everywhere, no one speaking foreign languages around her, and people who worked at McDonald’s and Ames actually spoke English as their first language.

By the time Cheryl reviewed the entire Men Seeking Women section, she only found two that were even remotely suitable. She circled them both with a red marker and set the paper aside. Maybe, just maybe, she would actually respond to one of them this time.

Immediate Regret

“H
ey, pup. Aren’t you cute?” Griffin said to Gomez as he walked into Gina’s apartment. Gomez put on the usual show for Gina’s guest. He yipped and barked and wagged his tail.

“Hush, Gomez. It’s late. You’re going to wake up the neighbors,” Gina said, snapping her finger at the dog. Right then she had a terrible thought. She was talking to her dog the same way Annie talked to that feline beast of hers.

“Would you like a drink or something?”

“Sure,” Griffin said. “Whatever you’ve got is fine.”

Gina brought him a beer from the kitchen and got one for herself too. She was going to need even more intoxication if she was going to spend the night with Griffin. They sat on the sofa with Gomez and made small talk for a while. Griffin complimented Gina on her apartment and all the little knickknacks she had displayed around the living room.

Gina had a one-bedroom apartment that was quite a bit larger than Peter’s efficiency. The building was over fifty years old, but her unit had been remodeled a few years before so the appliances, carpeting, and such were fairly new. She furnished it with traditional pieces and solid colors. The overstuffed sofa was her favorite. It was light blue and almost swallowed her up when she lay on it. She and Peter lived on the seventh floor, but neither of them had views from their balconies. All they could see was the building across the alley.