Jo Piazza (13 page)

“Let’s not let the truth hurt us anymore, ladies. Use the information I have just shared with you to take the control back in your relationships. Don’t imagine yourself walking down the aisle on your first date. Do what we do. Imagine leaving in the morning after having great sex. That is my first homework assignment to you all.”

“The guy you date next should just be the parsley to an already kick-ass dish of risotto. You’re great the way you are. Men are just the garnish.”

Jesus Christ. Dave was Dr. Phil meets Mario Batali.

And then he got a round of applause. I thanked my lucky stars I had banned him from ever sleeping with any of the women in our group. No matter how far they were coming along, every single one of them would have boned Dave that night. Despite his honesty—and he knew it.

I walked Dave out to his car. “Why do you think you treat women so badly?” Watching him in that room of women, actually seeing him enjoy interacting with women he wasn’t actively trying to insert his penis into, left me confused about why he couldn’t treat women he had sex with with the same respect.

Dave sighed. “I got hurt, Sophie,” he said.

“I think I fell in love just once, and it hurt so bad when it ended, I decided I wouldn’t let it happen again. The truth is that men aren’t as strong as women. You deal with your pain by doing crazy things, but you recover. We don’t bounce back the same way. When Maury dumped me right after college, I swore I would never let myself feel that bad ever again. So I go on the defensive. I say ridiculous things to women because then I know they’re rejecting me because I told them they’d look hotter if they lost about ten pounds and not because of me. And I do it no matter how awesome a girl is. Every single time.”

It made sense. We all had our own ways of fending off rejection.

“I listened to all those women in there,” Dave continued. “Really listened to them. I don’t think any of you realize what kind of power you have over us when you just drop all your insecurities. At the end of the day, you choose, and we feel lucky when you make the choice.”

I gave my head a little shake. I never felt like I was the one doing the choosing or the picking.

“Don’t you want to stop?” I asked him. “Maybe settle down? You’re not getting any younger.” I meanly flicked his growing belly.

“Maybe I should start coming to your meetings.”

And that’s how we got our first male member of LAA.

We were all improving. Olivia was no longer getting blackout drunk and going home with inappropriate men. Cameron had let her membership to at least twelve dating sites lapse and replaced her trolling for men by trolling for antiques and collectibles on Etsy. It was a more expensive but healthier habit and we were all gifted with recovered-wood picture frames and T-shirt scarves for being such supportive friends. The house was now a de facto halfway house for the heartbroken and lovesick, but it was turning into a lot of fun. Karaoke had become a staple, and on Saturday nights we often gathered in the basement. Sometimes Tito and Joe would join us. We learned that Tito’s wife had recently left him for the local high school gym teacher, Michael Stern, who at age sixty could still do thirty-seven pull-ups in under a minute. In Mexico, where Tito’s family was from, people didn’t get divorced, so Tito was ashamed to admit to his family that his marriage was over and he was letting her live in the house with him (Michael had cats and she was allergic) until he got the guts to figure out another arrangement. If I didn’t mention it before, Tito was gorgeous. He had mocha brown skin with the lightest crystal-blue eyes you’ve ever seen (the result, he told us, of a Nordic explorer great-great-grandfather who inadvertently landed on the Yucatan Peninsula).

I also learned that Joe was divorced, rather recently, but he was tight-lipped about the details, and I didn’t want to push him since he wasn’t officially a part of LAA, even though he was sitting in on some of the meetings and the girls often sought him out for advice as they continued to work through their personal stuff.

It was during a Saturday night sing-along that I got the call from Megan right in the middle of Princess and Tito doing a really good version of “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” by Elton John and Kiki Dee. I answered right away, figuring Megan was planning to schedule another Suze session for us.

“Are you sitting down?” she asked. I laughed, high off Whitney Houston (although thankfully, not high
like
Whitney Houston).

“Did Suze pull the goalie with Mikey the delivery boy?”

“Huh? Oh, no, not that. I just heard something and I thought I should tell you before you found out on your own.”

“Did one of your Sally Tomatoes finally get you pregnant?” This was always a concern since Megan had convinced herself that older men couldn’t get her pregnant. I kept trying to explain that as unjust as it was, it didn’t work the same way for men as it did for women, but she refused to listen, saying some of her paramours had a hard enough time staying, well, hard and that a condom wasn’t exactly going to help things along. “OK, sure, I’m sitting down,” I said, though I wasn’t, the idea of bad news far away from my thoughts.

“Eric is engaged.”

And all of a sudden it was back. The rubber band in my gut behind my liver. I had forgotten about it. I never even felt it anymore. The Eric cleanse was slowly but surely working. I was so focused on the group and on myself and getting caught up with work that he hadn’t entered my thoughts more than a handful of times, one of which was when I found one of his ratty old gym socks static clung to the lacy black thong I had bought to impress him on his thirtieth birthday; the only thing the flimsy undies were successful in doing was giving me a rash on my backside. Now all the pain came whooshing back. I felt dizzy, and I sat down as Megan continued to tell me how she found out.

“I was having dinner in Midtown and you know I never eat up there, but I bought one of those ridiculous deals on that Groupon site for like a five-course dinner before realizing that it was in the Fifties on the East Side and you know that is no-man’s-land around there. Anyway, I wasn’t expecting to see anyone I knew but then he walked into the restaurant with her. His secretary. What do you call her again? Trashy McReceptionist?”

“Floozy McSecretary,” I quietly replied, but not quietly enough that Annie didn’t hear me from the next room and sit down next to me with alarm.

“Right, Floozy McSecretary. Anyway, obviously she bought the same Groupon. Of course she did. She seems like the kind of girl who always buys things on Groupon, doesn’t she? I only bought it because it said they had two courses of cheese and you know I’m a sucker for good cheese and lots of it. So they walked in and Eric got all bashful and it looked like he was trying to push her behind a banquette or something when he saw me. He was holding her hand really tight too. He was holding it so hard I thought it looked like he was hurting her, and he was, because all of a sudden she broke out of his grip. You know she looks teensy tiny but this was like a feat of superhuman strength. She broke free and began wildly gesticulating and that’s when I saw it.”

“The ring,” I whispered.

“Yeah, the ring.”

I knew the ring well. It was a two-carat princess cut from Harry Winston that had belonged to Eric’s grandmother. After we had been dating for about a year, Eric’s mother told me about it in confidence after she drank too much at his nephew’s christening. She had just assumed that since I was dating her son at a proper age for WASPs to get married and since I was now being invited to family events (I had begged my way into that one and Eric was too hungover from a bachelor party to say no), I would likely be the recipient of said family heirloom.

“They got out of there after that,” Megan continued. “Gave up the dinner and everything. Eric tried to pull me aside, I think to tell me not to tell you—he seems scared of you—but she wouldn’t stop jabbering about how he hurt her hand and how she needed some ice.”

The rubber band ball kept winding itself tighter.

“Sophie, are you OK? Do you want me to come out? You’re not alone, are you?”

“No, I’m not alone. There’s a bunch of people here, actually, so I should go. Thank you for telling me. I’m glad that I know.”

I hung up the phone and laid my head down in Annie’s lap, curling into a tiny ball.

“He’s engaged?”

“He’s engaged.”

“How do you feel?”

“Bad.”

“Do you want a glass of wine?”

“I think that’s best.”

I stayed on the floor. Annie went into the basement, probably to alert the others to my current state. After five minutes of hushed whispers, Annie returned with a glass of Chianti.

I sat up just enough to bring it to my lips and finished it with a gulp. She pulled the bottle from behind her back.

“Just finish it. Your problem is love addiction, not alcoholism. It won’t kill you.”

I had two more glasses before climbing to my feet.

“I’m not going to call him.”

And with that, my phone rang. Speak of the devil.

“He’s calling because he knows that Megan was going to tell you.”

“And he’s probably scared.” I laughed through tears that kept threatening to spill over. “Scared that this time he really will have to take out a restraining order or something.”

For the first time since Eric and I started dating, I let his call go straight to voice mail.

“I don’t want to hear it from him. I don’t want to hear his voice.”

“’Atta girl. See how much stronger you are now? You rock. You’re amazing. You’re all better.”

“No,” I said, pouring myself another glass of wine. “If I were better, I wouldn’t feel so shitty. I’m
getting
better maybe, but I’m not better.”

The phone rang again, this time with seemingly greater urgency, and the tones of “I Would Do Anything for Love” blared from my handset. I had changed the ringtone from “Rump Shaker” weeks ago to remind myself of my moral inventory.

Against all better judgment I took my laptop up to my room and was only alone for fifteen minutes when Annie found me.

“Do you need a refill?”

“What do you think?”

“Well, I see you have a computer and I know how Google works … so do they have a wedding registry?”

“Yup.”

“Fuck the Wedding Channel.”

“Fuck the Wedding Channel hard.”

“What are they getting?”

“A lot of things we liked … that I liked.”

“You were the one with taste in the relationship.” Annie smoothed my hair back like my mom used to do.

“I hate that these things are public,” I muttered.

“I hate that you’re looking at it.”

“How can I not? It was one Google search away. Right there for me to find.”

“Yeah, if you looked. If you put their names in with an
and
. Come on, Sophie. You’re better than this right now.”

I looked up at her, with wine-stained lips and a sad, sad face. “No, I am not.”

She acquiesced. “No, you don’t have to be.” She glanced at my glass of wine with a quick hesitation followed by a determined furrow and a slight shake of her head.

“So what do these assholes want their guests to buy them?”

I proceeded to take her through the Donna Karan Lenox “Porcelain Touch” Sugar and Creamer set and the William Yeoward Country Wine Cooler … all the way to the Kate Spade “June Lane” two-piece dessert set.

“They’re total designer whores,” Annie concluded.

“They’re building a life together.”

“Sure, with a bunch of name-brand shit. You know what’s awesome? You know what is you, Sophie? Not this crap. You may have liked this stuff when you were with him, but I can’t see you in a home with this Vera Wang Wedgewood candelabra. I see you with this stuff.” And she pointed downstairs. “Things that mean something. That have a history and a life and a personality. Those two are people who are trying really hard to create a personality together with a bunch of stuff. I think you liked this stuff when you were with that jerk-off who used La Mer face cream. But it was never you.”

“You never said he was a jerk-off when I dated him …”

“Because I couldn’t. Because you never would have talked to me again. Remember that time in college when I caught that other jerk-off you dated literally getting jerked off on the dance floor of your school’s A-Chi-O man auction?”

“Yes.”

“He high-fived me while he was getting busy with her, but you didn’t return my calls for a month until you finally caught him in bed with two Alpha Chi Omega sisters, one of whom had a very unfortunate mustache.”

“I was young and stupid,” I said very quietly.

“And now I realize that you aren’t anymore. And I can say things that will make you angry and in the morning you can’t get away from me anymore. You have to sit and look at me over the breakfast table and accept what I said. Eric sucked some giant balls. You pandered to him in every way. But you are getting over him. And in the past few weeks, I have seen you be stronger and happier than I have seen you in years, so I need you to stop staring at this list of sad department store consumerist bullshit and feeling sorry for yourself. They may have a life filled with $65 towels, but he will still suck, and I guarantee you that you will not be the last girl he cheated on.”

I nodded slowly.

“If you want, we can buy everything on this registry and then return it so that they end up getting nothing,” Annie said in all seriousness.

“Nope. That’s not the kind of girl I am anymore. Or at least, that’s not the kind of girl I
want
to be anymore,” I said, and I meant it. “But that is a really excellent revenge-filled idea and someday I hope you get to suggest it to someone who has gone through less personal growth.”

Annie kissed me on the forehead and walked out of the room, confident that she would see me at the breakfast table in the morning.

I thought I had drifted off to sleep, but then I heard Joe’s voice. “Hey, Sophie, do you want to talk about it?”