Mike, Mike and Me
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I tried to think of something nice to say about the neon-blue spandex bicycle shorts she was wearing with an oversize neon-orange T-shirt, but I was at a loss. Spandex wasn’t the most flattering trend if you weren’t built like a pencil. Which, fortunately, I was. And which, unfortunately, Valerie wasn’t.
“My toes are never going to dry with this humidity. Wouldn’t you kill for a window air conditioner?” Valerie asked, still waving her legs around in the air.
“Maybe we can scrape up enough money to buy one.”
“Yeah, right.” She snorted.
So did I. Naturally, we were both broke. She made eight bucks an hour as an office temp and had yet to land a full-time job with benefits. I had the full-time job and the benefits, but I made a mere seventeen thousand dollars a year. Back in my small hometown, that would have been a fortune. Here, it barely covered the absolutely vital three Cs in every girl’s life: cocktails, cigarettes and chimichangas. At least, those were the things that were vital in mine.
“I suppose you want me to clear out of here tonight,” Valerie said, getting off her bed to join me in the mirror, wielding a tall pink and black can of Aqua Net. She sprayed her towering blond hair liberally, then offered me the can.
I misted my head and handed it back. “Is that all that’s left? Didn’t you just buy that yesterday?”
She shrugged. “I’ll pick up more during lunch hour tomorrow.”
Ugh. Between the hair spray and the sweat, everything north of my neck felt sticky. I stripped off the black dress and stepped back into my own bike shorts—neon pink, with fluorescent green stripes up the thighs—and oversize neon-green T-shirt, which I knotted over my left hip.
“So, like, do you want me to see if I can sleep at Gordy’s tomorrow night?” Valerie asked, taking a cigarette from the open pale green box of Salem Slim Lights on her dresser and offering the pack to me.
Gordy had been our friend since the three of us met at college upstate freshman year. He moved to New York after graduation, same as we did. He was the ultimate cliché: an aspiring actor/waiter who came out of the closet only after his staunchly Roman Catholic parents finished putting him through college. They promptly disowned him, leaving me and Valerie as his only “family.” He had a studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, a scary neighborhood we ventured into only in pairs, and only in broad daylight.
“You don’t have to stay there,” I said around the cigarette in my mouth as I held a lighter to it. I took a deep drag, then told Valerie, “I mean, it’s a work night and everything.”
Naturally, I was hoping she would protest.
She did. Sort of. “Well, don’t you want to be alone with Mike on his first night here?”
“Yeah, I do, but…”
I waited for her to say that it was no problem; that she was absolutely going to Gordy’s. She didn’t say it. She just blew a smoke ring and shrugged.
Dammit.
Don’t get me wrong. Valerie was a great roommate. She didn’t snore, she washed her own dishes, she ogled Officer Tom Hanson aka Johnny Depp on 21 Jump Street with me religiously every Sunday night.
But she didn’t have much of a social life, which meant that unless she was at work—currently a temp job at a textbook publishing house—she was pretty much always home.
That wasn’t a problem when my boyfriend wasn’t coming to visit me for the first time since he’d finished grad school in Los Angeles in May.
Mike, who now had a master’s degree in computer science, had set up a bunch of interviews in Manhattan. I was praying he’d land a job and move back East, because I was starting to realize that the alternative was me giving up my dream job as a production assistant on a television talk show and moving out West. I had been born and bred in New York State, and I had no desire to move to southern California.
I sensed that Mike was going to try to convince me that I should, though. He was from Long Island, but he had fallen in love with California. When I visited him there in April, he kept talking about how I could get a great job in the television industry. When I pointed out that I already had a great job in the television industry, he pointed out that the quality of life on the West Coast was so much better than in New York.
“See, Beau? You don’t have to step over homeless people every time you walk out the door,” he said as we crawled along in his convertible on the 405 one sunny afternoon. He gestured at the blue skies and palm trees overhead. “Everything’s clean, there’s no snow and you don’t have to be jammed on the subway with a million strangers.”
“No, you just have to be jammed on the freeway with a million strangers in a million cars.”
That he so obviously preferred the L.A. traffic to the N.Y.C. crowds scared me then, and it scared me now.
He was really excited about some independent computer research project he and a couple of other grad students had been working on. The project was supposed to end when school did, but it had apparently morphed into something bigger, which was why he was still in California.
He hadn’t actually come out and said that he was considering staying on the West Coast for good, but I got the hint.
But thanks to my pushing, he had arranged these interviews in Manhattan. I had my heart set on living happily ever after with Mike, à la Michael and Hope on my favorite show, thirtysomething, and I was determined to do it right here in New York.
I figured that while he was in town this week, when he wasn’t busy interviewing or spending time with his parents, he and I could do some preliminary apartment hunting. He’d have a job lined up before he flew back West; I’d go with him; we’d load up his car with all his belongings and drive back here together. He could stay with his parents—or, better yet, with me—until our new place was ready. I was sure Valerie wouldn’t protest.
Never mind that our place was almost too small for us two women, and I hadn’t actually checked with her. Never mind that I had already used up my first year’s allotment of one week’s vacation. And never mind that Mike and I hadn’t yet discussed the prospect of living together.
I figured everything would fall into place the second I fell into Mike’s arms. Which, I saw, glancing at my new Keith Haring Swatch—was less than twenty-four hours from now. If the plane was on time.
I felt a ripple of anticipation. After all, Mike was the love of my life. We had met at summer camp in the Catskills during high school and fallen madly in love over roasted marshmallows and color war. We reconnected every summer, first as campers, then as CITs, and finally as counselors. We went to separate state universities but managed to keep up a long-distance relationship all through college.
This last year had been the hardest, though, by far. Instead of sixty-some miles of New York State Thruway between us, there was an entire continent.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
That was what my cliché-spouting Grandma Alice always said. She was—and still is—a big believer in true love triumphing over the odds. After all, she and Grandpa Herman started dating before he was shipped overseas to the Battle of the Bulge. Their relationship survived a world war.
My parents’ relationship survived the Vietnam War—not that my dad was sent to Southeast Asia or anything. But he did serve in the military back then, stationed in Alabama for more than a year when my sister and I were really young.
I couldn’t imagine that Mike and I would ever live through a war in this day and age, but I honestly believed, in my young and foolish heart, that we could make it through anything the future was going to throw at us.
three
The present
Splat.
“Shit!”
No, not literally shit. That would have been even more disgusting, but this is pretty vile. I have just been sprayed with Earth’s Best Organic First Sweet Potatoes.
“Beau! Watch your mouth!”
Startled by the voice, I turn to glower at my husband, who is standing in the kitchen doorway, fresh from his shower and wearing a crisp white button-down and maroon tie unmarred by pureed orange root vegetables.
“Well, I wish he’d watch his mouth,” I snap, gesturing at my squirming five-month-old, whose chubby cheeks are ominously puffed again. “He does this spitting thing because you taught him.”
“I didn’t teach him to spit food. I taught him to do this. Didn’t I, Tyler?” Mike leans over the high chair and blows a vibrating raspberry into our son’s face.
Tyler squeals with glee.
“Stop it, Mike. You think it’s cute, but lately he does that whenever he has a mouthful, and I’m the one who ends up wearing his breakfast, not you.” I reach for a cloth diaper from the basket of clean, unfolded laundry on the table and mop the mess from my face.
“Yeah, well, I’d trade feeding him his breakfast for getting on the train,” Mike says darkly.
Tyler does another loud raspberry.
“No, Tyler, that’s bad, bad.”
“No, don’t say bad like that—he’ll think you’re saying he’s bad,” I reprimand Mike for the millionth time since I read that parenting magazine article that claimed telling your children they’re bad will create self-esteem issues they’ll carry for a lifetime.
“Oh, right. What am I supposed to say again?” Mike doesn’t roll his eyes at me, but I can tell that he wants to.
“Tell him ‘that’s naughty.’”
“That’s naughty, Tyler,” Mike says, even as he strides over to the polished granite counter and peers at the coffeemaker.
A moment goes by. I pretend to be oblivious, focusing on circling the rubber-tipped spoon just below the rim of the jar until it’s coated with orange goo.
“Oh…no coffee?” Mike lifts the empty glass carafe, as if to be absolutely certain that steaming black brew isn’t somehow concealed inside.
I swallow a snarl as Tyler swallows the spoonful of sweet potatoes I’ve cautiously slipped past his drooly pink gums.
“No coffee,” I inform my husband curtly. “I haven’t had a chance to make it yet. I’ve been busy with the laundry and the baby.”
“Mmm,” he says, or maybe it’s “hmm.” Either way, the message is clear. He, the commuting husband, is feeling neglected by me, the stay-at-home wife.
“You can stop at Starbucks on the way to the station,” I inform him.
“You know I don’t like their coffee.”
I do know that. He thinks it tastes burnt, making him the only grown human in the tristate area who doesn’t patronize the place.
“Go to Dunkin’ Donuts, then,” I tell him. “You like their coffee.”
“It’s too out of the way. I’ll miss my train.”
I shrug. What the hell does he want me to say?
I clear my throat. “Sorry.”
That, I know, is what he wants me to say.
But now that I’ve obliged, he merely shrugs and strides to the sink, where he reaches for the orange prescription bottle on the windowsill.
You’d think he’d tell me that it’s okay. That, for once, he can live without his caffeine fix for the hour it will take him to get to his office in midtown. You’d even think he’d offer to get up five minutes earlier from now on and make his own goddamn coffee.
Nope, nope and nope.
He swallows the small white pill he’s been taking for his high cholesterol ever since the doctor prescribed the medication last winter.
You’d think he’d be grateful to me, his loving wife, for caring enough about him to insist that he get a physical after years of neglecting to do so.
Nope again.
If I’m in the vicinity when he takes his daily dose, as I am most mornings, he makes a big show of making a face as he swallows. Sometimes—like today—he throws in a heavy sigh for good measure, as if to illustrate how tragic it is that his very life depends on modern medicine.
Not that it does. His cholesterol wasn’t that high. But early heart attacks run in his family, and I don’t want to be a young widow.
Really, I don’t.
Shoving aside a twinge of guilt, I spoon more baby food into Tyler’s gaping mouth.
The fact that I have found myself fantasizing lately about being single again has nothing to do with wishing my husband dead.
I love Mike. I’ve loved Mike for almost half of my life.
It’s just that I’ve loved him more passionately in the past than I happen to love him right now.
Right now—as in, these days—he gets on my nerves.
Right now—as in, right this second—he’s really getting on my nerves.
“I thought Melina came yesterday,” he says.
Melina is our cleaning woman, and I know where this is headed. Teeth clenched, I scoop more baby food onto the spoon and say tersely, “She did come yesterday.”
“The sink doesn’t look clean.”
“It was clean after she left.”
He bends over to inspect the caulked groove where the white porcelain meets the black granite. “There’s a speck of red gunk that was here yesterday morning. It’s left over from the lasagne pan you washed,” he informs me. “It’s still here.”
“Then why don’t you scrub it off?” I snap.
“Because that’s Melina’s job. That’s why we pay her a hundred bucks a week. Why are we paying her if she’s not doing her job?”
Why, I wonder, are we having this conversation yet again?
“If you don’t want to tell her that she has to shape up, Beau, I will.”
“I’ll tell her,” I say quickly, driven by the inexplicable yet innate need to protect Melina from the Wrath of Mike. “It’s just hard. She doesn’t speak English.”
“Then show her. Bring her over to the sink and point to the gunk. Then bring her to the corner of the upstairs hall and show her the cobwebs that have been there for two weeks. Then bring her to the boys’ bathroom and show her the grunge growing on the tile behind the faucet. Then—”
“Okay! I get it, Mike.”
“Right. So will she, if you show her.”
I sigh. “Yeah, well, I can’t follow her around the house every time she’s here.”
“Then maybe you should fire her and hire somebody who doesn’t need to be shown how to do their job.”
“We can’t fire her. She has two kids to support here and three more in Guatemala. She needs the money.”
Mike shakes his head and mutters something, his back to me.
“What?”
He doesn’t turn around. “I just said, I don’t understand how a mother can leave her kids behind like that.”
I bite back another defense of Melina. I don’t understand it, either. The thought of leaving my babies behind—even when they’re adolescents—to go live and work in another country is as foreign to me as…well, as Guatemala is. Intellectually, I understand her reasons. Maternally, I’m at a loss.
I’d never heard of such a thing until I moved to Westchester and had my first brush with domestic help. In the past seven years, I’ve met countless nannies and housekeepers with children and spouses back in South America or the Caribbean or wherever it is they’re from. I used to find it shocking; now it’s merely unsettling.
I, after all, didn’t think twice about leaving behind a promising career in television production to become a stay-at-home mom after Mikey was born.
All right, maybe I thought twice. Maybe it wasn’t exactly a no-brainer. Maybe I believed I could have it all: marriage, children, glamorous career.
Maybe some women can.
But when my six-week maternity leave was over, I found myself crying daily on the commuter train that carried me away from my precious child. I lasted two weeks, until Mikey—poor sacrificial lamb—caught his first cold from a sick toddler whose working mother sent him to day care with a green runny nose.
That was when I knew the jig was up.
Hadn’t I been weaned on seventies TV? Didn’t I know that if you were going to make it after all, you had to be spunky and single and living in a bachelorette pad with a big gold initial on the wall?
I was never going to be Mary Richards. It was too late for that. No, I was destined to become Ma Ingalls meets Olivia Walton meets Marian Cunningham.
Tyler gurgles adorably and swallows more food.
I smile at him, spoon in another orange glob, and watch Mike try to catch his reflection in the window above the kitchen sink. He fusses with the dark hair that fringes his forehead, a forehead that seems to be getting taller with every passing day.
I never imagined that my handsome husband would have a receding hairline by his fortieth birthday. Most men do, I know. It’s just that Mike has always been as effortlessly good-looking as…
Well, as I was.
On that grim note, I watch him turn abruptly, cross back to the table and take his suit coat and briefcase from a chair. He asks, “Do you think you’ll be able to pick up my dry cleaning today, Beau?”
Oops.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m sorry I forgot yesterday. I took the boys to the mall to get them out of Melina’s way, and I forgot to stop at the cleaner’s on the way home.”
“I need my gray suit for tomorrow.”
“Your gray suit?” I frown. “I don’t remember dropping that one off.”
“I wore it last Friday and then I put it into the dry-cleaning hamper.”
“Well, I dropped off the dry cleaning on Friday morning, so it must still be in the hamper.”
“Beau, I needed that suit by tomorrow.”
“I’m not your wardrobe mistress, Mike,” I snap.
“Fine. Whatever. Bye.” He plants a kiss on Tyler’s head and heads for the door.
“Bye,” I say as it slams behind him, remembering that there was a time when he wouldn’t leave—or come home—without kissing me, too.
Tyler coos. I flash an absent smile in his direction, my thoughts drifting back over the years, remembering the path that led to this place—and wondering what would have happened if, when I arrived at the inevitable fork, I had chosen instead to head in a different direction.
four
The past
So life was good. I was young, pretty, living in New York and madly in love—not to mention happily employed.
I adored my job as a production assistant on J-Squared, aka J2 or the Janelle Jacques Show.
Back when I was fresh out of college and interviewing for the position, I thought I’d be the luckiest entry-level drone in the city if I actually got it—which I doubted I would. Ironically, most of the other candidates competing for the job were huge fans, but I’d never even heard of Janelle Jacques before I moved to New York. She was a fairly well-known soap opera actress, but I rarely watched the soaps, aside from a few months leading up to Luke and Laura’s wedding on General Hospital my senior year in high school.
Turned out, I was wrong about my not getting the job. I was also right about being a lucky drone when I did. My job was one of those too-good-to-be-true things fate throws at you, so good that you just know the bottom is going to fall out somewhere along the way…and then it never does.
A year later, the freshly hired glow had yet to wear off. It was hard work, but I was still fascinated by the whole behind-the-scenes television studio process. Disillusioned, yes, but fascinated just the same. Perhaps even more so as the months went on and I realized that in the entertainment industry, nothing is ever what it appears to be.
As an actress, Janelle Jacques had won a decent fan following and was even nominated for a daytime Emmy. As a talk show hostess, she left something to be desired.
It wasn’t that she didn’t have stage presence, because she did. She was svelte and statuesque, with a flaming-red mane, porcelain skin and delicate bone structure. All she had to do was walk onto the set and the rest of us instinctively stopped whatever we were doing or saying to focus on her.
But when it came to interviewing her guests, she just wasn’t very…good.
Yeah, okay, she sucked at it. I mean, even I knew, courtesy of my high-school journalism class, that you don’t ask simple yes-no questions when you’re conducting an interview; nor do you ask questions that can be answered in one word.
Apparently, Janelle Jacques never took a high-school journalism class. Her Q&A sessions were almost painful to watch.
Janelle Jacques: Did you have fun making your new movie?
Up-and-coming starlet: Yes, I really did.
Janelle Jacques: That’s great. Great!
Up-and-coming starlet: Yes.
Janelle Jacques: Where was the movie filmed?
Up-and-coming starlet: In Paris.
Janelle Jacques: And do you speak French?
Up-and-coming starlet: No. (Beat.) No, I don’t.
Janelle Jacques: So was it hard to live in Paris and not speak French?
Up-and-coming starlet: Yes, it was.
I mean, come on, Janelle! I kept expecting one of her guests to respond to one of her vacuous queries with an eye roll and an exasperated “Duh,” but nobody ever did.
Sometimes, as I watched the show taping from behind the scenes, I could see Janelle’s eyes glazing over and realized that she wasn’t even listening. And sometimes, when I had a clear view of the guest’s eyes—or more specifically, the guest’s magnified pupils—I realized that they’d ingested—and/or smoked—something stronger than Jolt Cola and cigarettes as a pre-greenroom pick-me-up.
But like I said, I was still enchanted by my job. Despite the inept host and the competitive late-night time slot—opposite Arsenio Hall’s new hit show—J-Squared was doing fairly well, so far, in its ratings. It didn’t hurt that the week before the pilot aired, Janelle eloped with Caleb DeLawrence, her former costar.
Naturally, the tabloids were all over the marriage, proclaiming the madly-in-love and stunningly beautiful newlyweds king and queen of daytime television. Almost immediately, the Star had Janelle trying to get pregnant, the National Enquirer had her well into her first trimester, and the Globe had her on bedrest expecting triplets, with Caleb hovering at her side, massaging her swollen feet.
Meanwhile, backstage at the show, an infinitely juicier rumor had it that the marriage was a publicity stunt. Supposedly, rugged heartthrob Caleb had a male lover and so did Janelle—only hers was married to a conservative congresswoman up for reelection in November.
At first, I didn’t believe any of it. After all, whenever Caleb was on the set, he and Janelle were nauseatingly lovey-dovey. Then I caught a reluctant glimpse of Caleb with his purported lover when he thought they were alone in the wardrobe room one night. I may have been a small-town girl who had never knowingly met a gay man before Gordy, but even I knew that straight men didn’t ruffle each other’s hair. And they sure as hell didn’t kiss, which my best work friend and fellow production assistant, Gaile, swore she’d seen them do.
Whatever. I mean, Janelle’s sham marriage was the least of my concerns that summer. I was preoccupied with dreams of—okay, plans for—my own matrimonial future with Mike.
The day of his arrival from California plodded along. The taping seemed to take forever, and when it was over, Gaile caught me looking impatiently at my Swatch.
“You’ve still got an hour to go before we’re off work,” she pointed out as we carried tubs of dirty dishes and utensils from a cooking segment to the kitchenette backstage.
“I know, but I thought I could cut out early and get a head start on a cab to the airport.”
“What are you going to do when you get there and have a couple of hours to kill?”
“I don’t know…read?” I was in the middle of a Danielle Steel novel the hopelessly sappy Valerie had forced on me.
“You could read,” Gaile agrees. “Or get drunk in the bar. That’s what I always do in airports.”
I laugh.
“I’m serious. Then I don’t have to worry about plane crashes.”
“Why did you have to bring that up?”
“Sorry. Don’t worry, he’ll be fine.”
I scowled at her. “That’s easy for you to say. Why did I have to go and rent La Bamba last weekend?”
“La Bamba?”
“You know, that movie with Lou Diamond Phillips as Richie Valens. You know…the day the music died.” I sing a few bars of “American Pie” for her.