Things I can’t Explain (25 page)

Shouldn't he be here by
now
? This is where things get dangerous. I have been known to step outside my building to test if the downstairs buzzer is working. I've even managed to lock myself out on occasion doing this. I decide not to go down today because I'm terrified Nick might pull up just as I'm ringing my own buzzer, which would look particularly dorky.

Okay, he's still not here and now I'm heading into that nightmare territory of thinking that I gave him the wrong address, wrong time, or the wrong day.

WHERE THE FUCK IS HE?!

Bzzzt!

The sound makes me jump, but it's music to my ears. He didn't forget, get lost, change his mind, get chained to the radiator, or drop dead from a rare and undetectable allergy.
He showed up!

I'm so excited that when I open the door I can't keep Elvis from slipping out. Damn. No time to chase him now. He always comes back in ways I never understand anyway. He wouldn't just leave, right?

I take another deep breath and head out the door.

 

CHAPTER
26

“Wow.”

“Wow yourself,” I say.

We're standing on the sidewalk in front of my building. Somehow we're both astonished. I love what he's wearing beneath his motocross leathers—super-skinny black pants and a narrow-cut long-lined dark charcoal jacket, navy-checked patterned vest, and a pocket square with a complementary white linen shirt. Simple, but all tailored within an inch of its life.

“You look amazing,” he says.

I hadn't realized I was holding my breath waiting for him to say something.

“That dress is dangerous … for a bike. Walking around, too,” Nick says, smiling.

He hands me the same all-encompassing leather jacket I wore the first time and I slip into the luxury of it, feeling as though I have truly rejoined my first pre-spill reality. Somehow fate, the multiverse, or whatever you prefer to call it has pulled that train track switch the other way and events have totally realigned to where they should have been in the first place. Maybe the effects of that tragic unaddressed spill have worn off.

Short dress, high heels, and all, Nick pulls me up on the Harley. The hog practically purrs, happy to welcome me back. Maybe it even missed me.

I am not stupid enough to forgo safety for style, so despite the hours of careful coiffing, I put the helmet on without question.

Nick revs it up a notch and the bike rumbles like a jungle cat, making me feel rebellious and cool.

“Ready?” he asks.

“You have no idea.”

As Nick revs the bike into gear, we glide away from the curb. I snuggle up against him, holding tight around his waist. I've come full circle—holding Nick and riding down the road where I belong.

I don't know why, but as Nick's Harley screams onto the highway, I think about how far I've come. It's one of those leaps of time that make me feel older in a good way, like I've grown up a notch or two. As the Harley accelerates, the city landscape blurs into countryside and I wistfully reflect on the assorted stages of my brief existence:

MY SWEETHEART AGE

When I still snuggled up to Mom and gave her kisses and Dad chucked me on the shoulder and called me “Sport.” Those were the years when everything came down to that old
Sesame Street
song: “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other.” Life was as simple as telling apples from oranges.

MY EINSTEIN YEARS

Those days were followed by My Einstein Years when I explained it all and knew everything. Boys (particularly brothers) seemed oblivious and naive in those days. I remember Mr. Sapperstein, our neighbor and local pharmacist, standing in the kitchen and going on and on to my dad about the differences between boys and girls he saw in the pharmacy.

“If a fourteen-year-old girl comes into my store, she's got money in her pocket and she knows what she wants and what it costs. She knows all the makeup brands and their relative merits,” he'd say. “But if a fourteen-year-old boy comes into my store, he doesn't have a penny on him. He doesn't know what a pharmacy is and he's probably lost or up to no good.”

Now I realize my Einstein period was easy-peasy because I coasted so smoothly through those tween years. I was better than the game. My goal in life was to be the star of my own reality as opposed to being a reality star. These days, everyone is so obsessed with being famous that they've created new categories of fame to accommodate as many people as possible. You can be Tumblr Famous and YouTube Famous. You can be Reality Famous or become a Bravolebrity. Was it Countess LuAnn de Lesseps from
The Real Housewives of New York City
renunion special with Andy Cohen who posed the ontological question, “If you're not famous for something, do you even exist?” Or maybe that was just another quip from Andy Warhol. Warhol managed to say it all about fame and begin the inevitable devaluation of style, fame, fashion, and art for generations to come.

DRAMA QUEEN TEENS

Lucky for me, I lightly skimmed above this stage. Being BFB (Before Facebook) made it a little easier than it is today. Somehow I skirted the sex, drugs, and drama years partly because we were in tiny Springfield and partly because my mom and dad were so different from everyone else's, so I was pretty focused and directed. Some escape the sex and drugs, few escape the drama. By drama I mean all the girls at school holding grudges, throwing fits, bullying, and the shifting love-hate alliances that dominate high school life. The High School Valley of Death, I call it. Girls can be so tough on each other, criticizing each other's bodies way more harshly than any boy.

PREMATURE MATURITY

I hit this phase when I moved to New York. Sort of Einstein Years Lite Redux. As I matured in those first few years in New York City, I thought I was incredibly smart and independent until I got my butt kicked at the newspaper by everyone else—people who were actually experienced.

THE AGE OF INDECISION

That's when I hit my mid-twenties, post-Norm, and found myself unemployed. Every day I'd hope and pray for clarity. All those things that were crystal clear when I was fourteen seemed foggy and confusing. The Great Recession didn't help.

The truth is that it's always a bad time to be a twenty-something. Just think, in the Middle Ages, being twenty-something was peaking and everything after was old age. Charlemagne won his first campaign at twenty-seven, and Alexander the Great was only twenty-two when he conquered Greece. It makes my mind spin.

But right now I don't have to think about all that. I just have to snug up and hold on to Nick while the rising whine of the motorcycle catapults us down the highway. Which brings me to my big decision, arrived at over the course of the week: Today is the day I'm going to come clean with my parents, no matter how much my mother yammers on. Regardless of the obstacles, I'm going to tell them about the
Daily Post
going belly-up (especially now that I have a new job). And most important, I'm going to tell them the truth about the night they met Nick and saw him with Roxie at the airport, especially because he'll be right there standing close to me.

As far as I'm concerned, holding on to Nick and flying down the highway could last forever. Here's hoping that G-Bomb's wedding doesn't ruin this.

 

CHAPTER
27

I'm staring at Botticelli's
Birth of Venus
, aka Venus on the Half Shell—in ice. Genelle wasn't kidding when she said her wedding was going to be posh. I'm captivated by the glacier's worth of ice sculpture and what it says about mankind's inability to come to grips with global warming. There might be more ice here than all that's left on the polar shelf. I notice that even the carver has felt compelled to enhance Venus's proportions significantly. Venus—the goddess of beauty, sex, and fertility—seems to have undergone a breast enhancement and augmentation to the degree that her hand, which never covered much to begin with, now barely covers anything at all. Botticelli might have been appalled at the corruption of his feminine ideal, but after all, it's Genelle's wedding and it's clearly indicative of her revisionist bent, so to speak.

And speaking of things that are bigger than natural, I marvel at the architecture of the country club itself.

When I received the vanilla-scented invitation I couldn't help Googling the venue where Genelle's nups were taking place. Formerly christened Woodlea, “The Sleepy Hollow Country Club” was a Stanford White manse built by a Vanderbilt and incorporated as a club by a Rockefeller. Its members have ranged from J. J. Astor to Bill Murray.

Moments ago we were roaring up the endless driveway until we reached the towering gates.

“Park your Harley?” one beefy attendant asked. Decked out in Armani, the valet staff seemed a bit overdressed. Makes you wonder how much to tip them. Luckily, that wasn't a problem for us, because Nick just roared past and found a safe place to park the self-serve way. He'd never let one of those guys lay a finger on his bike.