THE BRO-MAGNET (8 page)

“Let me get us a couple of beers,” Billy suggests, leaving me alone with the lawn furniture. See? If Billy were a girl, he’d need me to go with him. And if I were a girl, I’d probably feel the need to go after him whether asked or not. But I’m a guy. I can handle being alone for a few minutes with the lawn furniture. I’m not scared of any mashers, not scared of any shadows –

“Ack! What the hell was that thing?” I say, jumping out of my skin, having felt something rub hard against my calf and then seen a black furry blur run down a hallway toward what I presume are the bedrooms.

Billy pokes his head into the living room. “Did it look like it could be the size of a cat?”

I think about it. “I guess so. I mean, it wasn’t the size of a horse and it wasn’t the size of a spider.”

“Then it was the cat.” He disappears, comes back in with our beers.  

“Why in the world would you get a cat?” I study the label on the bottle of beer he hands me. “Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.” I tip the bottle toward him admiringly. “Nice beer.”

“Thanks,” he says, takes a slug of his beer. “Alice’s idea. The cat, I mean. She says it’s good practice for us. We both want to have kids, but neither of us have any experience, neither of us has younger siblings or ever did any babysitting. Alice says it’ll be good for us to see if we can love something other than each other without fighting all the time about how best to take care of it.”

“Geez, Billy, that’s a big commitment. A cat.” I’m thinking: the crease in his chinos, the practical discussion about furniture buying, the cat – Billy has changed so much in the past month since he got married, I’m half amazed that he’s still drinking regular beer and not some high-brow brand; or even worse, mixed drinks with strange names.

“Here we are!” Three Sheets says brightly as she follows Alice back into the living room like Alice is the lead in a two-car train and Three Sheets is the caboose.

Alice is carrying a square white dish upon which are arranged four appetizers that look to be about one-inch by one-inch square. It’s all very geometrical. And small.

“Sit,” Billy says as Alice sets the plate down on the redwood table that’s got a hole for an umbrella but no umbrella, indicating I should take what is clearly the best piece of lawn furniture in the house, the chaise.

I straddle the end, reach for one of the appetizers – I see now it’s a square of toast with a dab of some kind of pasty stuff on it with a sliver of something else on top of the paste – and pop it into my mouth.

“It’s good,” I say to Alice.

Before she can thank me for the compliment, which I’m sure she would have, Three Sheets starts to talk, making me all nervous again.

“I wanted to thank you in person for what you did at the hotel,” she says.

“It was nothing,” I say, not really sure where she’s going with this.

Nervous, I pop another appetizer in my mouth.

“Really good,” I say to Alice.

“To me it was everything,” Three Sheets says. “I’ve been in that situation before – drunk, really drunk, and then…
stuff
happens.”

“Yeah, well, we all – ” I cut myself off from saying anything stupid by shoving a third appetizer into my mouth. I make the OK sign at Alice with my thumb and forefinger as I swallow.

“And then after stuff happens,” Three Sheets goes on, “what usually happens is the next day I get so nervous worrying that maybe I was too drunk to use birth control correctly and worrying I might be pregnant, the nervousness makes me skip my period and then I get really sure I’m pregnant and I freak out and then – ”

“And then she calls me,” Alice says, “having called me at each stage in a panic, and I talk her through every step of taking a pregnancy test and everything turns out fine.”

“Thank you for saving me from all that panic,” Three Sheets says.

This is too much. Is this what it’s like for Billy now all the time? All this talk of women stuff and periods?

“Um, you’re welcome?” I say.

“Seriously,” Alice says, “thank you from both of us. If you’d taken advantage of Dawn like I originally thought you had, I would have been getting panicked calls all through my honeymoon. When I didn’t get any calls, I knew I was wrong about you.”

“Wait.” I point my finger at Three Sheets. “Your name is Dawn?”

I realize my mistake as soon as the words leave my mouth. Why oh why must I always commit the insanity of doing the same dumb shit – the same dumb shit that falls under the heading of
just being myself
– over and over again.

Alice goes from civil to fishwife in one second flat. “Oh my God, Johnny, you are so gross! You went to a hotel room with my cousin with the original intention of sleeping with her and you didn’t even know her name?”

I could point out to Alice at this juncture that Three Sheets – I mean,
Dawn
– was the one who invited me to that hotel room when she didn’t even know
my
name. But I don’t do that because I can tell Alice maybe doesn’t have the most respect in the world for her cousin already and if Alice thinks I’m a skunk for not knowing Dawn’s name, what will she think of Dawn for not knowing mine?

“Yeah,” I say, popping the fourth appetizer into my mouth, “I’m a real creep that way.” I indicate the empty plate. “Hey, you got any more of these? They’re great.”

“No, I don’t,” Alice says through gritted teeth.

“You don’t?” I feel my eyebrows go up. I was kidding when I asked if there were any more because of course I assumed there were. Who serves just four little square thingies to four people and calls it an appetizer?

“No,” Alice says. “They’re called
amuse bouche
. They’re special miniature hors d’oeuvres meant to whet the appetite. There aren’t meant to be a lot. Just one each.”

Oh.

Oh
.

* * *

“
Amuse bouche
,” I whisper to Billy once the girls are back in the kitchen. “How was I supposed to know?”

“I know, I know.” Billy waves his beer at me. “You’re telling me? It’s like a minefield sometimes. Women. They’re always coming up with something new all the time – cats, periods, little tiny foods no one’s ever heard of before except maybe in France. It really keeps you on your toes.”

“Wow,” I say, “I guess you’ve had to make a lot of adjustments.”

Billy tilts his beer at me. “That I have, my friend.”

I think of the way Billy talks about Alice, like her every word is golden law, and how she looks at him. Even when she looks at him like, “You idiot,” it’s obvious she’s thinking ‘No matter how big an idiot you are, I just love you so much.’ 

“And you’ve loved every second of it,” I say.

“That I have,” Billy says.

Alice and Dawn return with plates and I notice, thankfully, that the plates each have more than four one-inch-square items on them.

“Oh, is it din-din time already?” I say.

Alice’s eyebrows shoot up. “Din-din? Did you really just say din-din?”

I feel the blush in my cheeks. To avoid Alice’s scoffing gaze I look at Dawn. “It’s something Big John used to say every night. Big John’s my dad. See, my mom died having me so my dad felt he had to be both mom and dad so whenever he served dinner at night, even if it was burritos, he’d always say, ‘Din-din’s ready.’ I think he though it made him sound like June Cleaver.”

“Can I get you another beer?” Billy says.

“Din-din.” Alice snorts.

“Aw.” Dawn ignores her cousin as she covers my hand with hers and gives it a little squeeze. “Din-din. That’s so sweet!”

* * *

“Well, that went well,” Billy says.

Dinner has passed uneventfully, meaning I haven’t said anything further to piss Alice off. On the contrary, Alice actually looked pleased when I thanked her for remembering my pescatarian diet by not serving anything with meat. Now Alice and Dawn have gone into the kitchen to fetch dessert and coffee while Billy and I enjoy another beer and a little Mets talk. After Billy complains, yet again, about the annoyance of what was once Shea Stadium now being called Citi Field, a sentiment I concur with wholeheartedly, a silence falls over us, into which I hear drop:

“Lucky finally knows!” That was Alice.

“Are you kidding me?” Dawn says.

“Yes! After all this time. For months I kept wondering: When is this idiot going to realize that his fiancé is sleeping with his half brother, the Greek prince?”

Alice knows someone who has a Greek prince for a half brother?

“So how did Lucky find out?” Dawn asks.

“He caught them together!”

“No!”

“Yes! He went over to talk to Nikolas about something and the door was open a crack. There’s Elizabeth in her black bra and panties, straddling Nik.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“So what did Lucky do?”

“Oh, this is the best part. He quietly walks away before they see him. Then he goes back home and completely trashes the place. And when Liz stops by later? Lucky says he doesn’t know who did it, that he just found it that way, that maybe Luke did it while on one of his benders.”

“He did not blame it on his father!”

“He did!”

“What a dirtbag!”

“I know!”

“So what do you think Lucky’s going to do now?”

“Revenge? Something else? I don’t know. All I know is, whatever he does, he’ll probably have tears in his eyes while he’s doing it. Lucky’s always got tears in his eyes. He’s such a wimp.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Someone they know just caught his fiancée in the arms of his half brother, the Greek prince, and they’re laughing at the poor guy? These women are vipers! I look at Billy, to see if he’s similarly disturbed by all this, but he mostly just still looks bummed about the stadium we grew up with as Shea now being called Citi Field.

As Alice and Dawn return to the room, I can’t contain myself. “What is
wrong
with you people?”

“What?” Alice says, like she doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

“Don’t act all innocent,” I say. “I heard you.” I wave me finger back and forth between Alice and Dawn. “I heard both of you. You were laughing at your poor friend Lucky – ”

“Our
friend
?” Alice says.

“You think they were talking about real people?” Billy says.

“Well, I… What? You know about all this?”

“We were talking about a TV show,” Dawn says.

“Yeah,” Billy says, “a soap opera. It’s called
General Hospital
.”

“Oh,” I say, feeling incredibly stupid. Then, to escape that feeling, I say, “Soap operas are stupid.”

“Excuse me?” Alice has her hands on her hips now.

“I only said – ”

“Soap operas serve an important sociological function.”

“I only meant – ”

“They provide millions of people with escape from their own mundane and depressing lives.”

“OK, but – ”

“They cheer people up because viewers realize that however bad they’ve got it, the perfect-looking and well-dressed people on soaps always have it worse. They give viewers something to bond over with each other in an often confusing and lonely world. They provide a nondestructive form of – ”

“Geez, Alice, all right already. You don’t need to write a thesis on it.”

“Oh, no?” She gives the dangerous head nod here. “Well, maybe I do. You obviously think that soaps are an inferior form of entertainment, no doubt because it’s a genre primarily enjoyed by women. Men always feel the need to devalue anything women admire or enjoy. Well, tell me, how is your vaunted sports some kind of superior entertainment? You talk all the time about earned-run averages and quarterback ratings and how badly the Nets suck – who does any of that matter to?”

I look at Billy, shrug my shoulders. “Us?”

“Do you think,” Alice says, “a hundred years from now, anyone’s going to give a shit that Mark McGwire hit a lot of homeruns while doing steroids?”

She’s got a point there.

“God, you piss me off.”

And, back to the kitchen goes Alice.

“You should never have knocked soap operas, man.” Billy shakes his head.

“You ever watch one of those things?” I say.

“Sure,” Billy says. “Well, now I do.
General Hospital
. You should try it sometime.” He tilts his beer bottle at me, winks. “It’s a good show.”

“No shit.”

“And Alice is right. Lucky’s a douche.”

* * *

I know Billy said earlier that they didn’t invite Dawn and me on the same night to fix us up, that Alice says I’m unfixupable, but as the evening winds down I’m getting this nagging feeling. I get this idea into my head. Billy and Alice are a happily married couple, Dawn’s right here, she looks much better than she did at the wedding, particularly since she’s not half as drunk, she’s Alice’s cousin, if we start dating and wind up – who knows? – getting married, I could spend the rest of my life having evenings like this, just the four of us hanging together. Well, maybe without all the bad and awkward moments of tonight. But other than that? Yup, it could be just the four of us. Billy and Alice. Me and my wife. Men and wives. I’m thinking that, but I’m also thinking: Poor Dawn. Still alone at her age. Someone should throw her a mercy date.

Which is why I lean over and say in a low voice so as not to be overheard by Billy and Alice, “Hey. You wanna go out sometime?”

“You mean like on a
date
?” Dawn says this so loud, the neighbors must’ve heard her. Certainly Alice did.

“Well, I…”

“Aw, I’m sorry, Johnny.” Dawn covers my hand with hers like she did earlier. Come to think of it, that little move of hers coupled with her “That’s so cute” about my din-din story coupled with the fact that it was her idea to have Alice have us over at the same time in the first place – all of that’s what gave me the impression that maybe my invitation would be welcome.

“I already have a boyfriend,” Dawn goes on. “Actually we’re sort of engaged to be engaged, which is another reason I’m grateful for you not taking advantage of me at the wedding. Imagine how awkward that would have been, me having my usual pregnancy scare only this time also not knowing if the baby’s my almost fiance’s or yours? It’d be like something on
General Hospital
!”