The Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club (21 page)

“Well, well,” he says loudly. “If it isn’t the Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club.”

The group bursts into approving laughter.

“It appears that some of you are less heartbroken than others.” With that, he looks at me sharply, then at Dan, his smile flattening into a tight line. A few people snicker, catching the joke. Dan, beaming at the acknowledgment, seems to grow three inches taller in his seat. I want to crawl under the table and stay there until everyone leaves. Instead I sit perfectly still, my beer frozen in the air, a wholly unbelievable smile stretched across my face.

Mateo smiles warmly at the group. “Can I get anyone another drink?” Drink orders erupt from around the table. Mateo laughs and puts his hand on our waitress’s arm as she passes by, signaling her to take over. Jamie, a fun, busty woman from Vancouver with a booming voice, tries to get him to stay. He declines politely. Too much paperwork to do tonight. Yeah, right.

“Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club,” says Tony, laughing. He rarely laughs. “That’s hilarious.”

“Fucking brilliant!” declares Jamie above the din of chitchat and beer pouring. “I love it!” I had considered making Jamie my new Buenos Aires best friend, but I am seriously rethinking that.

Mike from Arizona proposes a new toast. “To the Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club.”

“That’s not the toast,” I whine, but no one hears me.

“To the Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club,” replies a chorus of voices. All around me, glasses clink.

I’m not in the mood for a crazy night out, not that anyone even asks me along anymore.
We know it’s not in The Plan.
When the others get organized to check out the infamous drag show at a local nightclub, I head out the door.

Outside, I feel a hand on my shoulder. Dan. Sweet, well-intentioned, hand-holding, perma-smiling Dan. On the walk home, with Dan as my chaperone, I keep my hands jammed as far as they’ll go into the shallow pockets of my pants. Seemingly oblivious, he chats happily about the tourist sights he wants to visit before he leaves. It gives me time to dissect the scene from earlier. What did Mateo mean by that Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club crack, anyway? Was it supposed to be clever or mean? “Who does he think he is to judge me like that?”

“Who does
who
think he is?”

“Oh, sorry. Nothing. Just thinking out loud.”

“Are you talking about that Matthew guy?”

“Mateo.”

“Whatever.”

“I was thinking about what he called us. It seemed sort of like an insult, didn’t it?”

“Buenos Aires Broken Hearts Club?”

“Yeah.”

“Kind of funny, I guess. He’s your friend, isn’t he? I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it. Things get lost in translation.”

“No. No, it was definitely an insult. And he’s not my friend. Not anymore. Clearly.”

“Oh.” Dan’s voice lifts a notch, and his face brightens visibly. “Well, then, who cares what he calls us?”

“You’re right, Dan. Absolutely right. He can think whatever he wants. I couldn’t care less, to tell you the truth.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he says, looking down at me, earnest and hopeful. I change the subject to my fruitless job hunt. Nothing romantic about that.

A block later, Dan stops abruptly and wraps his hands around my biceps. Those earnest, hopeful eyes again. “Cassie, I—I like you a lot. I’m sure that’s completely obvious to you, but—”

I have to stop him before he goes any further, for his sake and mine. If he says too much, he won’t be able to stand the sight of me again.

“Dan,” I begin gently. “You’re a great guy. I just don’t think of you that way.” Even as it comes out of my mouth, it sounds so trite, I wish I could take it back and start again. I shuffle, search the ground for better words, but they aren’t to be found. “I go back to Seattle in seven weeks. You go back to Boston in five. We shouldn’t get attached.”

“Oh,” he says and lets go of my arms. “I thought maybe—”

“I’m sorry if I’ve given you the wrong impression.” It’s too hard to look him in the eyes. Those earnest, hopeful eyes. They’re kind of nice, a soft brown with bits of gold. Still, I catch myself wondering what he’d look like if they were green.

“No, you haven’t. Not really. But I was hoping.” He stares intently at a spot on the sidewalk to my right.

“I do like spending time with you.” Ugh. Trite again. “But if you have other expectations, maybe we shouldn’t hang out anymore.” I feel like I’m reciting from the Brush-off Manual. “Chapter 1: How to Crush His Spirit in 3 Easy Steps.”

“No, it’s fine. I get it. Hey, I gave it a shot. You never know how these things are going to turn out. That’s half the fun, right?” His eyes dart from sidewalk to tree to hooker on the corner to my elbow to sidewalk. I know it’s bullshit, but I take it gladly. He’s obviously read “Chapter 2: How to Play It Cool When You’ve Just Been Crushed.”

“Sure, I guess.”

“Don’t give it another thought. Anyway, I was thinking we should check out the Teatro Colón this week. There’s all these levels, and you can go backstage and see how everything’s made. What do you think?”

“That sounds like fun.” I encourage his ramblings on medieval costume making for the remaining two blocks, thanking God for the fragile but resilient male ego.

At my door, I can relax. Home free. I turn to say good night and realize midpivot that I have no idea what the appropriate form of salutation is in this situation. Do I kiss his cheek and risk his taking that the wrong way? Do I shake his hand and make him feel like a complete jerk? I settle on a quick one-armed hug. But when I pull back, Dan doesn’t. We stay locked like that, my chest curled away from his, an awkward gap between us, for too long. If I could will myself to want his touch, I would, for his sake. He releases me and steps back. “Is it that guy at the café?”

“Is what the guy at the café?”

“Is that why you . . . Are you and he . . .”

“No, not at all. I told you, we’re just friends.” Why am I always having to convince people of this fact? I see Mateo poised above me, his lip curling smugly as he releases his barb. “Well, we
were
just friends.”

“Is there someone back home?”

I think of Jeff, picture him with Lauren. They’re naked and on my old bed. She plays the cello, her long white legs wrapped around it, Jeff’s long tan legs wrapped around her. There’s a veil on her head. He wears a black bow tie. I wonder briefly if they’re married yet. I let the image slip into the dark night. Goodbye, Jeff.

“Nope,” I say. “No one back home.”

“So there’s no one here and there’s no one there.”

“There’s no one.” I breathe deeply, involuntarily, sucking in the suckiness of my far-from-stellar future. I want to be one of the transvestite prostitutes cackling under the streetlamp at the end of the block. I want to curl up in a ball on the sidewalk and fall asleep there forever. And at this moment, just a little, I want Dan’s arm around me again. “No one at all, really.”

“Then can I ask you something?” Dan inches closer, almost undetectably. Those few cautious inches wouldn’t amount to much if I weren’t, against my better judgment, doing the same.

“Sure. Shoot.”

“Will you at least consider it?”

“Consider what?” I know exactly what he means, but I want to hear him say it. I want someone to want me.

“Consider us. Don’t take it completely off the table? Because I think there could be something really good here. I think you might be the most amazing person I’ve ever met.”

I start to laugh at the idea, but Dan isn’t laughing. Gone are the puppy-dog eyes. He stares at me, focused, intent. He’s rather handsome when he’s serious like this, I note. But it’s not his classic bone structure so much as his resolve. What does he see that I don’t? Am I so blinded by my infatuation with the wrong guy, I wonder, that I can’t see something truly great in front of me?

“Cassie,” Dan says, his voice low and deep. “I think I could really fall for you.”

The words floor me. There it is, right in front of me: the possibility of being loved again.

Dan steps closer, so close we are almost touching. His hands cup my face and draw it up to his. He leans in, slow and tentative, until our lips are touching. It’s not a long kiss or the best kiss—a bit dry from too much wine—but it is earnest and hopeful, and now, right now, I find earnestness and hope utterly irresistible. Without a word, I open the great iron door, lead Dan inside, up the stairs, into my apartment and my bed.

It’s nothing like my nights with Antonio, nothing like how I’ve imagined a night with Mateo might be. Every move, both his and mine, is urgent and hurried, as though he is afraid I will change my mind. As though I am afraid of the same thing.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Did you know that most employers get more than a hundred applications for every job opening? This is just one of the many daunting stats I’ve come across in my job-hunting research. But wait, it gets worse: Even if you’re lucky enough that someone actually notices your résumé in the slush pile, chances are he or she will read only the very top bit and the very last bit. I was thinking maybe I should send out a résumé with the complete lyrics to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” buried in the middle section of my employment history and see if anyone notices. I might not get a job, but at least I’ll grow strong, and I’ll learn how to carry on.

N
o wonder my blog readers have lost all interest in me, with subject matter like this. I’ve tried to add some spice to my detailed descriptions of job hunting or how I’ve decided to spend my first month back in Seattle, but there’s no way to make life under The Plan anything more than it is. No wonder [email protected], [email protected], and the rest of my former fan club are vastly more content to entertain one another via the comment function of my website. At first they used my less than titillating tales as a jumping-off point to splay open their own (generally unrelated) experiences for public consumption and commentary. Now they don’t even bother with the formality of polite illusion. They simply disregard what I’ve written and start in on their own infinitely more interesting lives. They’re discussing heartbreak and healing, and I’m debating the merits of various résumé formats and font sizes. Jeez, even I don’t want to read my blog anymore.

I’d stop altogether, but with almost a thousand hits and hundreds of comments made each day, the site serves a purpose greater than anything I could have imagined when I first put fingers to laptop. This growing family of broken hearts might not need my story to bring them together, but they still need one another.

C.J., my code-writing genius friend back home, has volunteered to build me a fancy new site, one with a designated place where readers can chat with one another. I’ll still keep the blog, I’ve decided—I’m not quite ready to lose all evidence of my time here—but it won’t be the main focus anymore. Like so many other things in my life, my website has outgrown me.

Which means I’ll have more time to plan my return home. Which gives me more dull things to write about. So really, everyone wins.

It did occur to me on a few occasions (like when one of the less sensitive readers wondered why I got “so freaking lame all of a sudden,” provoking a flurry of theories about parental coddling, sexual frustrations, and serotonin levels that I’d sooner forget) that I might catch the attention of my wayward audience with a few titillating tidbits about Dan and me. It also occurred to me that I’d have to embellish a great deal to get those tales to the level of interesting, never mind titillating. Why that is, I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s not that I don’t enjoy Dan’s company. We do have a nice time together, and I generally look forward to our excursions to museums, parks, and other must-see places on our blended lists. He’s a great guy, really great. In a lot of ways, the perfect man. He has direction, good values, goals that are similar to mine. The couple of times we had sex, it wasn’t all that bad. For a broker from Boston, he can be rather frisky. I don’t ache to touch him, though. You should ache to touch someone you’re sleeping with, shouldn’t you?

But then maybe this is what a husband is supposed to be like. Solid. Dependable. Beige.

“Do you want a husband or Jude Law?” Zoey asked over instant messaging the other day. “Wait, dumb question.”

My mother, who thinks Jude Law has something to do with the penal code, would be gaga for Dan. He is everything she holds dear in the world: stability, reliability, security, and every other synonym for “not going to leave my daughter for his secretary.” I should have known better than to tell her about him during my last phone call home. She went from excited to anxious in sixty seconds flat. “Men like this come along once in a lifetime, Cassie!” And then: “For God’s sake, please tell me you’re not wearing that ratty blue sweater around him.” I almost remind her that it’s three thousand degrees here, but why ruin her favorite pastime: imagining how I’m screwing up my life even worse than it already is.

Funny thing is, I think as she swings into the story of how the neighbor’s daughter snagged herself a nice optometrist with a house in Capitol Hill, Dan is sort of like my ratty blue sweater:comfortable, easy, safe. Being with him is like being at home. We speak the same language—that of suburb commutes and CNN, Starbucks, and 401(k)s. Plus, Dan totally gets The Plan.

“I think your plan is terrific,” he said as we waited in line for movie tickets one night. “If you don’t know what your goals are, how do you know when you’ve reached them?”

“He likes The Plan because he thinks he’s part of it,” wrote Zoey in a recent e-mail.

“He hasn’t said anything to even suggest that he thinks this is going anywhere,” I protested.

“Oh, he will. That boy fell hard before you even knew his name.”

“We’re just having fun together,” I shot back. “He’s got a life back home. And I’ve got to get one.”

“And I’m telling you he’s gonna drop the L-bomb any day now.”

“You are so wrong,” I wrote.

“And you are so in DENIAL.”

I didn’t tell Zoey about the CD he made for me. Nor did I mention the morning he got up early, bought groceries, and made me breakfast in bed. But no, Zoey’s just being dramatic. Maybe Dan has fallen for me a little, but it’s only an innocent, I’m-getting-over-my-ex-and-need-someone-to-distract-me kind of crush. Everyone who meets at El Taller is looking for distraction. Besides, how deep can feelings grow when they obviously aren’t returned?

I try not to think about it while I get ready for our afternoon trip to the Teatro Colón, but I find myself dressing even more conservatively than usual, and there’s no denying why. The loose ponytail and boatneck T-shirt are a message to Dan that if I were really into him, I’d be trying harder. The tennis sneakers scream, “Just friends!” My preference for clear gloss over lipstick apologizes, “I’m sorry, but I don’t feel that way about you.”

I’ve done everything I can to keep things as light as possible with Dan. I constantly talk about what I’ll do when I’m home in Seattle. He talks about Boston. No, there will be no soulful gazing into each other’s eyes nor furtive hand-holding nor long, awkward goodbyes at my door late at night. Which I suppose means there will be no more of that for me at all while I’m here. That’s fine, I tell myself. There’ll be plenty of time for romance once I’ve got things sorted out back in the real world.

I offer one last sigh to the mirror and head downstairs to wait for Dan outside. When I open the front door, I can barely see him for the humongous bouquet of roses he’s holding. There must be at least thirty of the small bunches that are sold everywhere on the street. He must have bought out an entire flower stand.

“I couldn’t resist,” he says, grinning like a little boy. “They were so beautiful, I immediately thought of you.”

It is precisely the kind of thing that I’ve always dreamed of a guy doing for me, yet I can feel my face pulling down instead of up, the way I know it should be. I should be thrilled or at least pleased, but I feel mildly annoyed, as though Dan has broken some unspoken pact, pushed me into a corner. Something is wrong with me. I cover my irritation with a brief kiss. I don’t want to hurt his feelings.

“You’re such a sweetheart,” I say, hoping it doesn’t sound as patronizing as I think it does. “Thank you so much. Let me put these in some water.”

I run the flowers upstairs to find a vase. The closest thing I can find that’s big enough to hold them is a giant salad bowl. I shake my head at the sad sight of Dan’s beautiful roses bobbing helplessly in the wooden bowl. I can’t help feeling a twinge of guilt. Dan is a dear, sweet guy. Why am I being so careless with something so precious? So I’m not head over heels. It’s not every day that a guy as great as Dan comes along
. Men like this come along once in a lifetime.
And occasionally, romantic feelings take time to bloom, don’t they? I’m not sure how I feel about the roses—or Dan—but I pull out my ponytail, give my hair a good shake, and swipe on a quick coat of red lip gloss. Just in case.

Aside from the supersize flowers, my day with Dan is, predictably, predictable. We tour the inner workings of the great Buenos Aires opera theater with a group of Germans, Swedes, and other Americans. I play along, the dutiful tourist, listening closely to the guide, consulting the program we were handed at the entrance, nodding and oohing and aahing at this costume dummy or that giant sewing machine. It’s like faking an orgasm.

Halfway through the tour, I remember Zoey’s excitement months ago at happening upon a cheap performance here. Puccini for three dollars. She skipped the tour. Or, more likely, the idea of a tour never occurred to her. The tour always occurs to me.

The theater is certainly impressive, with floor after floor opening onto a world of production, from the massive set design area to rows of sewing machines where meticulous costumes are crafted to make every performance spectacular. It’s a beautiful old building from any angle, and I know I should be more captivated, more thrilled, by it all, snapping continuous photos like the others in the tour group, but it all seems a little empty, a little—pardon the pun—staged.

“Aren’t you enjoying this?” Dan asks, concerned. I lie and say I am, snapping a photo to prove it. He smiles approvingly and turns his attention back to the guide. We might be getting an insiders’ look, but we are still outsiders, viewing it from the outside. It doesn’t come near the way I once felt wandering the streets of Buenos Aires, each turn unfolding something new, something unexpected. The simplest things filled me up. Mateo would point out an interesting architectural feature or maybe a home of someone he’s known forever, and I’d ask a zillion questions about what it was like to grow up in Argentina. Even lazing about at random cafés, listening to Mateo’s stories, meeting his friends on the street, soaking up the city at its own pace, I experienced a cultural immersion you can’t stand in line for or take pictures of.

I begin to explain this to Andrea when I get home from the theater. She nods with understanding.

“Me, I never did any of these tourist things when I come here,” she says, shaking her head emphatically and fanning herself at the same time. I pour a glass of iced tea for her. “But I still don’t do them. That’s not the real Buenos Aires.”

She takes a sip and smacks the table between us, smiling wide. Jorge, napping on the lounge chair beside her, flicks his fist at the air in protest. “I have the best idea for you. You must take a tango class!” Jorge opens an eye. The dogs come running.

“Tango? Oh, no, I couldn’t.” Chico jumps up and nuzzles my hand. He was Andrea’s baby before Jorge came along. I scratch his chin. He loves this. His stub of a tail twitches happily. If only all men were this easy. “I’m a horrible dancer. Three left feet. The doctors tell me it’s incurable.”

Andrea laughs and shakes her head. “No, I don’t believe you. You must go. You must! Don’t you think so, Jorge?” Still sleepy, and mildly accosted by two licking dogs, he crawls over to his mother and up into her lap. He eyes me quizzically, as though we’ve just met. “And there is a class tonight, very close to here. Oh, yes, you must go!”

I want to remind her that the last time she insisted on my taking a class, it didn’t work out so well. Though it’s hardly Andrea’s fault that my inability to dance is surpassed only by my inability to learn Spanish. Reluctantly, I agree to tango, hoping this will absolve me of at least the latter.

But I’m not going alone. No, sir. I call Dan so I have an instant dance partner, warning him to wear steel-toed shoes. I call Jamie, too. She might be a bit brash, but she’s fun. She’s been wanting to meet more locals, so she’s thrilled by the idea. “What does one wear to tango?” she ponders on the phone.

“A rose in your teeth?” I offer.

What does one wear to tango? I pull on a flippy little skirt, a black shell, and strappy high-heeled sandals and twist my hair back into a tight bun. I’ll need a complete field of vision tonight.

Dan and Jamie both show up in jeans. Jamie’s are topped with a revealing black camisole and a pair of swishy earrings. I tell them to wait while I change, but they won’t hear of it.

“You look amazing,” Dan gushes. “Really, really amazing.”

Jamie agrees enthusiastically. “
Mucho
Argentina.” Her compliment makes me smile. She moves up a level on the friend-o-meter.

“Yeah, she’s right.” Dan looks at me as though for the first time, tilting his head, puzzled. “You do sort of look like you belong here.”

That settles it. I don’t change. At the class—held, curiously, in the basement of an Armenian community center a few blocks away—almost everyone is wearing jeans. Only the instructor, a striking older woman who’s had too much plastic surgery—Dan calls it the Tango Special—is wearing a dress and heels. When she spots me, tucked in behind Dan and another tall guy in a blue T-shirt, she looks me up and down and nods approvingly, saying something in Spanish that I can’t understand. Let’s hope she remembers that she once liked the look of me after she sees me dance.

Luckily, it’s easy to hide my footwork in the massive group of beginners on our side of the hall. It’s so crowded, Dan actually thinks I’m good, blaming other couples for the constant assault on his feet. But then Dan’s not exactly Fred Astaire. “If we had a little more room, you could really show them your stuff,” he says.I smile and step on his foot. He grins proudly.