THE BRO-MAGNET (30 page)

A few minutes later, she excuses herself to go check on Mary Agnes again.

And so the afternoon progresses, with Helen periodically checking on Mary Agnes while I sneak peeks at the game and with multiple bathroom visits on both our parts. For me, I claim I had too much coffee that morning – nerves over giving the Best Man’s toast later, even though I have that toast down pat. Helen, she doesn’t give me a reason for her multiple bathroom visits. But she’s a lady – she’d never explain nor should she have to.

Over the course of my various peeks, I see the score seesaw back and forth from Mets down by one to tied to up by one to tied and so forth. 

About four in the afternoon, three hours after the game started, Helen excuses herself to go the bathroom yet again. But this time, she’s gone so long, I begin to get fidgety, what with all the muffled shouting coming from the Community Room.

Suddenly, I’ve
got
to know what’s going on with the game. It’s the Mets in there and it sounds like they could actually be winning.

So I poke my head in, figuring I’ll just take a quick glimpse at the screen. It’s the bottom of the ninth, Mets are up, score tied four all, one on, two out, and Beltran’s making his way to the plate. The stadium’s rocking, the
room
is rocking. Beltran cocks his bat and everything falls silent. And then, into that silence, I hear a female voice shout, “Hit a home run, you overpaid cocksucker!”

I
know
that voice. My head snaps toward the back of the room and there’s Helen –
my
Helen, my Helen who hates all sports and baseball in particular – eyes glued to the World Series like her life depends on it.

“Helen?” I say.

Her head swivels from the screen to me in the doorway. “John?” Like she can’t believe I’m there. Then, “John,” flat, like something’s over with, died.

And it’s while our eyes are still locked on each other that I dimly hear the crack of a bat.

But I don’t look at the screen. I’m too dumbfounded.

An instant later I hear, “Mets win! Mets win!”

OK, I do look at the screen now and Helen does too, just long enough to see the instant replay of Beltran powering a monster two-run homer over the centerfield fence.

And then my eyes are back on Helen and hers are back on me.

The room is pandemonium now with everyone celebrating the return of the magic. But for some reason, I don’t feel like celebrating.

I watch as Helen makes her way over to Frankie and somehow over the crowd I manage to hear her say to him, “Can you delay the wedding just a little longer? You’ve delayed it this long. I just need a half hour, an hour tops. There’s something I need to show John.”

* * *

I just sit in the passenger seat, along for the ride, not knowing where we’re going or what to make of this new information.

Helen drives us to her house.

As we walk through, I’m thinking how I’ve made love to her in every room of this house but then she leads me to the door of a place I’ve never been in here before.

“The basement?” I say. “Excuse me, but your brother’s supposed to be getting married and you want to finally show me your messy
basement
?”

“It’s not really messy,” she says, flicking the switch and gesturing with her hand. “Please. Go down.”

So I precede her down the long flight of stairs only to discover…

Sports memorabilia. Everywhere I look. Signed balls from various sports. Framed posters of the Jets’ Sanchez, the Mets’ Beltran – I think vaguely that if you’re going to hang a guy’s picture in your home, the least you can do is not call him a cocksucker when he’s trying to win the game – one of Wayne Gretzky and even an old one of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar when he played for the Lakers.

“What is all this?” I say.

“This is
me
, John,” she says simply, sadly. “This is who I am.”

I don’t understand. “Why would you hide something like this about yourself?”

Helen sighs. “I’m thirty-three years old and I’ve never had much luck with men. I have a high-powered job. I’m a D.A. and I guess for the most part I come off as no-nonsense.” I think how Helen looked the first time I saw her at that Yankees game. She did come off as being pretty no-nonsense. “Men always wind up thinking my competitiveness and my obsession with sports is too…
manly
.”

Well, it was manly yelling “cocksucker” at the screen. Also kind of cool.

“I just thought, I don’t know,” she continues, “that maybe if I seemed more feminine, maybe if I hid my true interests and got things like floral throw pillows around here, that maybe I’d finally stand a chance.” She sighs again, sadly again. “And I liked you so much, right away. And you said you weren’t interested in sports…” Her voice trails off. 

“But this is who I am,” she says firmly. “I love the Jets and the Mets. I even call up this all-sports station called The Wave on a regular basis. It’s like I’m obsessed with it.”

I
knew
that female voice sounded familiar!

“Oh, and one more thing I have to confess,” she says. “I’ve never watched
General Hospital
, that thing you call GH, in my life. Not even once.”

Wow. How could I have been so wrong about everything?

“I’ve got a question,” I say.

“I’ll bet you’ve got more than one,” she says. “But sure, shoot.”

“Were you actually dating Monte Carlo at one point?”

She looks puzzled for a moment. Then: “I went out with him twice, but those weren’t dates. He just had spare tickets to two Mets games. How could I refuse?”

That I can understand.

“We’d better head back,” Helen says. “We’ve been away long enough.”

As we drive back to the church in silence I’m thinking how Helen isn’t who I thought she was.

Who is this woman sitting next to me? I wonder.

And then I wonder something else: Who am I?

All through the wedding ceremony, as I stand by Frankie’s side, I’m puzzling out those twin questions: Who is Helen? And who am I? Clearly, neither of us is exactly the version of ourselves we presented to the other. I already know about Helen’s deception. She has yet to learn about mine.

I understand why she did it, for the same reason I did it. We were both trying to be the person we thought the other wanted us to be, both living lies in the process.
But does any of that matter? I think now. Strip away those few surface things we changed, and the essence of each other separately, the essence of
us
together, it’s still the same. We never would have come as far as we did together if the basis wasn’t somehow solid, that basic connection that was there from the first moment.

I think about something Leo once said: “You learn what makes the other person happy and you just keep doing it.” I thought that’s what I was doing, but as it turns out, I wasn’t really listening to Helen. If I had been, I’d have seen the signs: the way she shot pool; how good she was with all the games at the circus/carnival; the way she kept going inside presumably to check on her brothers while they watched the game at the cookout at her parents’ house when none of the brothers’ own wives actually bothered to do that; how she’d jump on anything remotely sports-related that I said, with hope in her eyes, just like I did with her; and those calls to The Wave, her being Sexy Caller. I definitely should have picked up on that last. But I didn’t because I wasn’t expecting to, because I was too busy looking in a different direction.

Big John was right, what he said that long-ago night at the poker game, that no one knows what women want. Turns out, no one knows what men want either. No one knows how to get love or how to keep it.

Wait a second. That’s not true. Leo knew.

Leo knew it didn’t matter what foolish games we mortals play over love – things like keeping a present in the trunk three days running to appease someone who thinks she needs to be upset over significant dates; things like who loves sports and who loves GH and who loves both. Leo knew none of that stuff mattered so long as, somehow, you saw down into the essence of the other person and they saw you. And now I see Helen. Like I’ve never seen her before. 

All that time, even when I was missing signs so big they could have been painted on the side of a barn, even when we both thought that being someone other than who we are was the way to make the other person happy, we were still somehow happy together.

And now? 

I know what I need to do.

* * *

“A man’s life is composed of circles,” I begin the toast, the words so familiar to me I could recite them in my sleep. “First, there’s the circle of the entire world, which a man keeps in contact with through reading the papers and watching the news. Or not.” I pause, give my wry smile. “The world can be a pretty depressing place.”
I pause again, wait for the laugh.

It comes.

“Then, if the man is like Frankie and me and he chooses to stay in the same town he grew up in all his life, there’s that town.” I make a slight alteration to the prepared text. “Frankie’s town may not be the same as my town, so please let me interject on my own town’s behalf: It may not be much but,” I raise my glass a little higher, “go, Danbury!”

Some more laughter, with a few answering calls of “Go, Danbury!” – one each from Big John and Aunt Alfresca plus a few people I’ve never seen in my life who are trying to be supportive.

“Then comes the circle of a man’s acquaintances: friends of friends, coworkers, the guy with the little hot dog cart outside the library who overcharges like crazy but makes the best dogs in town. Doesn’t every town have one of those guys? What
is
that guy’s secret?”

Only a polite chuckle for that one. I detest polite chuckles. When it comes to laughter, a person should be all in or all out. But then I hear one loud all-out laugh. I know that laugh. Looking down the length of the bridal party table, I see its source: Helen.

It takes me a moment to remember where I left off.

“And then comes a very small circle: the circle of a man’s dearest friends and family.” I tilt my glass at Big John in his wheelchair. “I love you, Dad.”

I pause again, not waiting for the laugh this time – there won’t be any laughter for the rest of this speech – but rather to get control of my emotions, the tear in my eye mirroring the tear in Big John’s.

Tearing my gaze away from my father, I let my eyes sweep the entire audience.

“Now if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed something. The circles I’ve been describing have been steadily decreasing in size while at the same time increasing in importance. And so now, finally, we come to the last circle, the smallest circle. If a man is extremely lucky, if he’s the luckiest man in the world, he finds the right person to share his life with, to form that smallest circle of two with, and that is exactly what Frankie has done.”

I know I should be raising my glass to Frankie and Mary Agnes at this point, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Not yet.

“You know,” I say, “I have a confession to make. That speech I just gave? It was my ninth time giving it, practically the same exact speech word for word.”

I hear some vague grumbles from the crowd. I don’t blame them. Who wants a used speech? I learned about that from Alice. Good old Alice. But still I go on, raising my voice over the grumbles.

“Despite the speech being a general crowd-pleaser, the words have never really meant much to me, not until today. But now I understand. Now I understand what it really means for a man to be extremely lucky, now I understand what it means to be the luckiest man in the world, now I understand what it means for a man to find the right person to share his life with, to form that smallest circle of two with. Because that is exactly what has happened to me.”

I scan the crowd. “I promise in just a minute I’ll get back to toasting Frankie and Mary Agnes and then we can finally drink our champagne, but first I need to say that, against all odds, I have found my right person.”

I turn to Helen. “She likes the things I like and she’s exactly like me,” I say, “only prettier. But even if she weren’t just like me, I’d love her anyway because I did before I even knew. Helen, will you marry me?”

* * *

My name is John Smith to some people but you can call me Johnny. I like my baseball cap on backwards and my beer cold. If you let me, I’ll leave the seat up in the toilet. I prefer cats that are more like dogs and I don’t like opera unless it’s in a barn and I’m with the right person.

I’ve been known to leave my Christmas tree up until something good happens.

Geez, I hope Helen knows what she’s getting herself into.

My name is Johnny Smith. I’m thirty-three years old and I’m finally getting married.

Lauren Baratz-Logsted is the author of over 20 books for adults (including
The Thin Pink Line
, a dark comedy about a woman who fakes a pregnancy, which was published in 11 countries), teens and children. Like Johnny Smith, she plays a mean game of pool. Lauren lives in Danbury, CT, with her family: her husband, Greg Logsted, who also writes; and their daughter, Jackie, with whom Lauren and Greg write The Sisters 8 series for young readers. You can find Lauren at
www.LaurenBaratzLogsted.com
.