Spooning (18 page)

It took me twenty-three minutes to walk from the edge of the park to Hampton's Heiress. My feet were numb and I'd
ruined my knee-high boots, stepping through the week-old snow banks. The chocolate brown suede was stained with white salt remnants. My mother would have said I was inappropriately dressed, but who bothered with tights and a winter coat and such when you were supposed to be inside at a warm restaurant, looking cute no less? My knees had taken on a raw pallor, and as I stumbled across the threshold, I huffed into my frozen hands hoping to thaw my Santaesque nose. My internal homing device steered me toward the back of the restaurant where Mr. J. P. Morgan was chatting with a homely brunette.

“Hey!” I threw out teetering on my frost-bitten feet.

“Beautiful!” he exclaimed. Bye-bye, homely brunette! “I've been waiting for you.” Oh, the love! Should I bother to explain my tardiness, ruddy nose, ruined boots? Nah. A group of his friends approached and prepared to encircle. Must not lose body contact. I didn't need to worry though, since he had moved behind me and draped his arms over my shoulders, nestling me into his chest cavity. Sheer bliss. This was an intimate move, right? He was demonstrating our closeness to others, showing his ownership, and I was just fine being placed up high on his trophy shelf. I reached both arms behind me, back around his waist, and ran my thumb along the inside of his jeans' waist. He had the softest lower back. There was that dimple right where we humans used to have tails. Why hadn't Cosmo expounded upon that region?

“Be back in a sec, Charlie. Gotta run to the bathroom.”

“See ya!” I watched him make his way through the crowd. Cute butt! And when he came back, I would see that gorgeous crooked smile—a smile all for me.

At first I was impressed with myself. Despite frozen inner thighs, here I was holding court with Mr. J. P. Morgan's boys.
We were joking and laughing … getting on so well that I didn't notice Mr. J. P. Morgan's absence at first. About twenty minutes later, my phone vibrated. It was Mr. J. P. Morgan.

“We decided to leave and are cross town at Gladiators.” Huh? Who was
we
? Why wasn't I part of we?

“Come meet me,” he said. I thought I just had. “Or just go to my apartment and get the keys from Tony and I'll meet you back there.” Oh, feeling better. A formal invite.

Still cold and with my ego slightly bruised, I decided to meet him in bed. When I got to his apartment building, Tony, the doorman, looked me over a few times. I smiled, figuring that he just didn't recognize me in my frozen state.

“It's me,” I threw out casually. No glimmer of recognition. “Charlie. C-h-a-r,” I began.

“I know how to spell ‘Charlie,’” he barked in a foreign accent.

“Oh.” I paused to shove some of my well-deserved McDonald's French fries into my mouth. (I'd made a quick stop at the McDonald's on the corner before strolling into J. P.'s lobby— I'd missed dinner after all.)

“You're not on the envelope,” he stated. To gain access to another's apartment, New York doormen tended to write frequent visitors' names on the envelope of extra keys.

“I'm not?” Hmm. Food for thought. I was preferring the French fries though.

“You just saw me the other night!” I exclaimed. “Look, he just called me.” I struggled to pull out my frozen cell phone and scrolled through my list of calls received.

“Never mind. Here,” he conceded, handing me the tiny packet of keys. After that inquisition, I figured I would just hold on to this extra set for future use.

I pushed open the apartment door into a still darkness. I fumbled to find a light switch, finally turning on the matching table lamps next to the couch. For a bachelor pad, the boys' living room was quite nice. Though there were a few errant pizza boxes, the pillows on the couch were plump, the paintings on the walls were framed, and the plants were all alive. I wandered down the hall and turned into the first bedroom. Immediately I zeroed in on no less than five framed pictures of a stunning brunette. As my right arm began to tingle signaling an impending heart attack, I realized that I was in a room- mate's bedroom, not J. P.'s. I ran from the room and stepped into the one next door. No incriminating pictures—then again, none of me either … yet. Maybe I would have to send him a personalized Christmas card. Crawling into his barely made bed, I munched on the few remaining fries. I buried my cold toes under his down comforter and my numbness soon turned into a raw slumber.

The next morning I awoke to something brushing my nose. Ready to kiss Mr. J. P. Morgan's fingers, I realized that my lips were touching cardboard. I rolled over to find myself alone in bed, next to an empty French fry container. Mr. J. P. Morgan had never come home.

“It's a happy day. A happy day,” I repeated as my nose began to leak. It was going to be a horrible, no good, very shitty Christmas.

B
y Thursday I was still struggling to put the incident out of my mind (Note to self: Have sworn off French fries forever!) and I braved the windy hollow of the city streets on my way to Wade's apartment for a night of reality TV viewing. By the
time I arrived and took off my layers, Wade was beating out the reality shows for the group's attention.

“Cookie swap? What's that? Wade, what are you talking about?” asked Tara in her typical sneer. She was bending over backward to embrace her inner-city gal and had a very low tolerance for the domestic traditions of suburban moms. Truthfully, the fact that she had been participating in the Cooking Club at all was somewhat shocking.

“Each Cooking Club member chooses a cookie to bake for our December meeting,” Wade explained.

“I call Toll House!” Syd shouted, interrupting.

“No, you have to go beyond the typical chocolate chip cookies.”

“But I use applesauce instead of butter. Now
that
is creative!” “No chocolate chip cookies!” Wade declared. “Each girl chooses a
unique
cookie and bakes a dozen for each of the other girls. And right before Christmas, we exchange our specialty cookies at the meeting. Hence, the name
Cookie Swap
!” It was so annoying that Wade was a kindergarten teacher. That didactic—and never mind slow—tone got on all of our nerves. It made me wonder if her five-year-olds winced during reading time.

“Look,” I said. “There are six of us, that means we each would have to bake six dozen cookies—that's 432 cookies in all!” Where was my dad? He would be proud. “We can't bake that many cookies in the shitty little Barbie doll stove in our apartment. We'd be baking for weeks!”

“And what am I going to do with six dozen chocolate, peanut butter, sprinkle, whatever cookies from all of you guys?” asked Skinny Sage. For once Sage had a good food point. I could see even the nonanorexics beginning to quake over the
sticks of butter to be used in thirty-six dozen cookies (approximately two sticks per recipe means twelve sticks of butter per six dozen cookies—equaling seventy-two sticks of butter in one room at the same time). That sure was a lot of fat!

“Girls, cookies freeze quite nicely. Throw them in a Ziploc and you can thaw them for guests over the holidays,” Wade assured us.

“When am I ever going to have an army of cookie-eating fiends around?” Sage groaned. Again, she had a point, if not a waistline to watch.

After numerous figures and fat calculations, Macie finally made a sensible suggestion. She figured that we should each bake only
one
dozen of our chosen cookies so that we would each get two cookies from one another's batches. Now that was doable. I could rationalize an eating binge of twelve Christmas cookies—144 cookies was a whole other matter.

“And,” I added, seeing Skinny Sage's still-doubtful look, “any extras can be donated to Wade's little terrors! They'll be gobbled up during snack break.”

“They are children, not terrors,” Wade replied. It was her meek attempt to humanize her job, but all was lost as we began to dream of sugarplum fairies enlightening us all to our fantabulous cookie-baking potential. I knew my heartbroken self would be all over any of those “extra” cookies at our next Cooking Club meeting.

B
y this point, I was starting to suspect that Mr. J. P. Morgan and I just might be over. It was a girl-gut thing. I had felt the blow-off coming with the blustery winter winds. But now that it was here, it had been gentle—more like a retreating tide
that leaves behind those foul-smelling mudflats. Tara had recommended that I remain stalwart and try a new blow job technique; Syd suggested that I try to “talk about it,” but the “it” was the vague part (Tara again seconded her take-action plan); Macie just gave me the sympathetic “it sucks” nod. She was always one to admit defeat and move on. I, on the other hand, found myself groveling in the same old rut.

Later that week when he still hadn't called, I recognized that I had to start facing reality. I quickly put the kibosh on any extraneous depression-fueled eating—tough to do when the Diva's test kitchens were producing delectable holiday treats around the clock. In an attempt to shelter my waistline from such an assault, I began to write a letter to Santa wishing him, willing him, more like threatening him, to bring Mr. J. P. Morgan back to me in a red velvet bag. I didn't care if Santa went ballistic and swept through J. P. Morgan's apartment door (no chimney there), knocked him cold, and dragged him to my apartment in his overloaded sleigh with all the gifts for the other good boys and girls. I just wanted him back and snug in my bed. I had begun describing to Santa what went wrong, but it got a tad X-rated. I couldn't disgrace myself in front of lovable ole Saint Nick by going porno on the old guy! I scrapped that note, and tried to think of who else might possibly understand my pain and grant me my one wish this holiday? Ann Landers? The president? And then it hit me. Why the goddess of love connections, breakups, and makeups herself: J. Lo, but of course. I found a fan club address on the Internet and wrote: