Mike, Mike & Me (14 page)

“So he’s a plastic surgeon?” Mike asked.

“Who?” I looked around.

“Your boyfriend.”

“A plastic surgeon?” I frowned. “No, he just got a master’s in computer science.”

Mike nodded, but he still looked confused. “And he’s living in a teepee?”

I wondered if he’d had a couple of extra drinks before I arrived. “A teepee?” I echoed. “He doesn’t live in a teepee. He lives in a condo in Long Beach. But he wants to move to Silicon Valley to take this job, so—”

“Wait a minute…were you talking about Silicon Valley?” A slow smile was spreading over his face.

“Yes. Why?”

“I thought you meant Silicon…you know…”

“No…What?”

“You know…”

“I really don’t know.”

He was laughing now, shaking his head. “Boob jobs.”

“Boob jobs?”

“Yeah, you know…silicon implants…boob jobs…plastic surgeon.”

“Oh!” I started laughing, too.

“But what about the teepee?”

“What about it?” I giggled, picturing Mike living in a teepee wearing surgical scrubs.

“I don’t know…I thought you said something about a teepee.”

Teepee…

Teepee…

Lightbulb moment.

“TCP/IP,” I announced, and screamed with laughter.

I guess you had to be there.

But trust me, I wasn’t the only one who was laughing.

When at last we stopped cracking each other up with various comments about boob jobs and teepees, it took us a few seconds to recover. You know how, after a really good laugh you wipe your eyes and shake your head and make those little sighing sounds? Well, we were both doing that, and grinning at each other, and it was then that I realized I was having a better time with this new Mike than I’d had at any point last week with my Mike.

In fact, I was having such a good time that I found myself wishing that this Mike were my Mike and the other Mike were…well, old Mike.

That was why, when he walked me to the subway, I asked him if he wanted to hang out again sometime.

And that was why, when he asked me if it could be a date next time, I hesitated only for a second before I said yes.

fifteen

The present

I
t’s been six days since Mike and I started e-mailing each other regularly.

Maybe
often
is a more apt way to describe it.

I guess
constantly
would be even better.

Or worse, depending on how you look at it.

Worse in the sense that I am a married mother of three and I really have no business whatsoever carrying on an electronic flirtation with an old flame.

The key word being
electronic.

Because really, the whole thing is harmless, if you think about it. It isn’t as though anything can come of it, what with fifteen years and a thousand miles lying between us.

I keep telling myself that what I’ve been doing with Mike is the postmillennial equivalent of a seventies housewife batting her eyes at the Maytag repairman.

Less provocative than that, even.

It certainly isn’t as though we’re exchanging steamy missives laced with longing and innuendo.

All right, it’s not exactly like we’re exchanging recipes, either.

There might be a slight undercurrent of longing and innuendo, but believe me, it’s totally innocuous. Here’s a sample:

Hey, guess what? I dreamed about you last night.

Uh-oh. What was it about? Did you wake up screaming? Was it a nightmare?

LOL No! I woke up wishing I could go back to sleep and finish the dream.

So why didn’t you? It’s not like you have to go to work or anything.

No, but it’s not like we’re both single or anything, either. If we were, I wouldn’t just be seeing you in my dreams.

Naturally, being new to this cyber-shorthand stuff, I have no clue what means. I’m dying to know, but I refuse to come right out and ask. Not only am I reluctant to have him make fun of me, the way he did when I asked him what LOL meant, but I guess I’m afraid of what might mean.

The possibilities that have run through my head aren’t exactly harmless.

What if means erotic grope? Or, I don’t know…ecstatic groan?

I can’t help feeling that nobody other than my husband should really be groaning in ecstasy over me. Not even over the Internet, or in a dream. Not even if it’s somebody with whom I have shared many an ecstatic groan in person.

It might not be so bad if my relationship with Mike in the past hadn’t been simultaneous with my relationship with my husband. You know, if Mike were simply somebody with whom I’d had a meaningless fling long before I met the man I was destined to marry.

But I was seeing both Mikes at the same time before everything blew up in my face and I was forced to choose. If Mike—
my
Mike, aka father-of-my-children Mike—knew that I had struck up a correspondence with the man who almost stole me away from him…

No. He isn’t going to know. There’s no way he’ll ever find out. I’m certainly not going to tell him. I’m not going to tell anybody.

Except one person.

The one person I have always turned to when things get dicey.

As far as I’m concerned, things took a turn for dicey at . So here I am, taking advantage of the fact that all three boys are safely captivated by a
Blue’s Clues
video, flipping through my address book in search of a telephone number I’ve never quite managed to memorize.

That’s because I don’t dial it nearly as often as I should. Especially considering that it’s not even long-distance.

“Good morning, Valerie Kenmore’s office.”

“Is she there, please?”

“Who’s calling?” Valerie’s secretary asks crisply, as though she is a pivotal player in
The Life and Times of Valerie Kenmore,
and I am a mere extra.

“It’s Beau.”

“Beau…?” Clearly, she expects a last name.

“Just Beau,” I say, piqued. I mean, come on. The world is hardly populated by hordes of women named Beau. “She’ll know.”

She does.

Take
that,
snotty secretary!

Two seconds after she puts me on hold there’s a click, and Valerie’s voice exclaims, “Hey, stranger! How’s it going?”

She sounds so pleasantly surprised to hear from me that I instantly feel bad that I never think to call her just to chat.

Guilt, in case you haven’t noticed, is my specialty these days.

“Everything is great,” I say. “How about with you?”

“Same old thing. Although, I just got back from Denver.”

“Business?”

“Vacation.”

See, this is what I mean. There was a time in my life when I would have been privy to Val’s vacation plans. As a matter of fact, there was a time in my life when Val and I took annual vacations together.

Without fail, every spring, the two of us would jet off to some spa or resort for a long weekend. I swore, when I got married, that it wasn’t going to change. I promised her we would still do our girls’ weekend every year, no matter what. And, even though it was hard for me to leave Mike for three whole days, I always kept that promise…

Until Mikey came along.

If leaving Mike was hard, leaving his precious newborn namesake was impossible. That first year, I invited Val up from the city to spend a weekend at our house instead. She grumbled, but she came.

We gossiped, we shopped, we sat up late watching chick flicks and drinking wine—same things we had done a thousand times as roommates and on our getaway weekends.

But it wasn’t the same. For one thing, we no longer knew the same people; gossip isn’t nearly as scintillating when it’s about a total stranger.

Plus, I had to bring Mikey shopping because he was nursing and a militant La Leche League lady had brainwashed me regarding the evils of pumping breast milk into bottles. So my girls’ weekend with Valerie was a threesome. A cumbersome threesome, at that. You can’t take the stroller on escalators at the mall, so we had to keep waiting for elevators. The stroller didn’t fit in changing rooms, so we had to take turns trying things on. And I hadn’t lost all my baby weight, so unfortunately for Val, I was more interested in browsing through the racks at Baby Gap than Neiman Marcus.

The evenings were even more challenging. Mikey’s rigorous wee-hour-feeding schedule had left me so zapped that I couldn’t keep my eyes open past the opening credits of even the most compelling chick flick, especially after two sips of wine—which was all I was allowed to have, lest my tainted breast milk transform my suckling offspring into a drunkard.

The following year, when I invited Valerie to join me in mommyland again, she was prepared with an excuse. Thus, the pattern was broken. I think we were both relieved.

In the past, our friendship had worked despite our major differences. Valerie was overweight and underemployed and perpetually lovelorn; I was thin and career-driven and had a steady boyfriend (or two at once). But somehow, the two of us shared acres of common ground.

These days, the chasm between us is considerably more vast than the mere fifty-minute Metronorth ride that separates my suburban raised ranch and her East Side co-op.