Me Times Three Page 7

  Carla Jones looked at me. Was that the slightest glimmer of contempt?

  I stared back, feeling foolish without knowing why. Everyone seemed to know the password but me.

  “He’s engaged to her, too,” she said flatly.

  I waited, as if there might be more. As if that was only the preamble. Carla looked a little let down by my lack of response. I turned my head away, back down at my friend the floor. I was really ready to lie down now. The carpeting could be comfortable, I thought, sort of like a bed. But I sensed that if I sank there, I would choke. I also envisioned, half hidden in the fibers, Bucky’s yellowed toenails. He liked to peel them.

  Trying to raise my head back up, I flashed onto how I’d run into Bucky and Beth just a few months earlier, in midtown, and how jumpy he’d been. She was scowling, I recalled, bargaining, it appeared, for something she wanted that she wasn’t getting. I said hello, and it was all very awkward, and when I asked him about it later he said that they were just going to dinner, she was unhappy at work and wanted to talk, that was it. I truly hadn’t thought about it again, and why should I have? Beth Brewer was a dumpy little thing who sewed. I knew that last part from Bucky. If someone sewed, Bucky knew about it. And she came from someplace like Maine. All of which was fine. But competition? Please.

  Carla Jones was competition. She was every woman’s nightmare come true. She must have been five foot ten, with a showgirl’s body and a model’s face. Her blond hair was lush enough for a Clairol commercial, the kind where she’d hold it up and release it, letting it fan into slow-motion waves that would fill the screen. You couldn’t find a pore on her face without a magnifying glass.

  It turned out that she worked at a competitor of KCW’s, where she was some sort of assistant. She wasn’t quite clear, but said she did business with Ed, who had introduced her to Bucky six months earlier. I heard some of what she was saying as she spoke, but I was thinking again about Beth Brewer, recalling a strange incident when an uncle of Bucky’s had died the previous year. There was a reception at the Rosses’ house after the service, and one of his relatives had come up to greet me.

  “Are you Beth?” he had asked. He was an older man and he smelled of whiskey, so I figured he was just mixed up. But when I said no, quite politely, that I was Sandra, another relative I’d never met before, a woman, appeared and bustled him away, embarrassed.

  I shifted around on the end of Carla’s bed. So, it wasn’t the drunken man who had mortified that woman after all. It was the mention, in front of me, of Bucky’s other girlfriend. The one whom all the descendants of Betsy Ross surely knew about and, given her prowess with a needle, were doubtless rooting for.

  I looked at Carla. “How long have Beth and Bucky been together?” I asked.

  “Almost two years,” she answered coolly, her gaze still level. No matter how much I clutched, she seemed just fine. And why not? What did she have to lose, really? She had invested all of six months in this guy. She could just wake up tomorrow and fan her Clairol hair at the next guy who came along.

  Carla continued to study me, her expression unchanged, intent yet somehow unobtrusive. She had waited a long time to examine me at such close range; she didn’t want to do anything that might scare me off just as she was getting started.

  I tried to concentrate on what she had told me. If Bucky and Beth had been seeing each other for almost two years, then they’d started when I was still at Yale. Then they were already a couple when he and I were at Seven Maples together. Impossible.

  “You and Bucky first met six months ago?” I asked slowly.

  Carla nodded. “We got engaged three weeks ago, right before he left on the Grenadines trip. But that’s when I figured out about Beth.”

  I felt dizzy. “What do you mean?”

  “She went with him,” Carla announced.

  “Beth went to the Grenadines?” I shook my head. That couldn’t be right. But wait! Maybe nothing Carla was saying was right. I looked at the stuffed monkey, lying on its side.

  “Bucky went with JT and the people in his sailing class,” I said calmly.

  Her gaze stayed even. “Beth is in his sailing class.”

  My gaze returned to the monkey.

  “She’s in the class,” Carla went on, “even though Bucky told me she wasn’t. He told me she was afraid of sailing, of the boat tipping over in bad weather. I finally found out the truth from JT’s girlfriend. Anyway, the first stop was St. Vincent. They had to stay overnight before getting the boat. So I called every hotel on the island asking if Buck Ross was there, and when one operator said yes, she rang the room and a woman picked up. That’s when I knew he had been lying. Because I thought it was weird that right after we became engaged, he would just take off on a two-week sailing trip without me, even though I had told him I wanted to go and try it. I also thought it was weird that he made such a point of telling me to keep our engagement a secret until he came back.”

  She smoothed her hair—self-righteously, I thought. Her nails were manicured, with light pink polish, each one a perfect half-moon. Her fingers were long. A two-carat emerald-cut diamond ring would only complete the picture.

  “At first I thought that you had gone with him,” she said. “That’s why I called you.”

  “You called me?” I echoed.

  “Two weeks ago. On a Saturday morning. I wanted to see if you’d answer the phone.”

  That’s where I knew her voice from. The phone had rung about eight-thirty in the morning, and a woman had asked for me by name; she seemed to be an operator. When I said, “Yes, this is she,” the line went dead. I gave it about two seconds of thought before turning over and sleeping till noon.

  Carla opened her file. Time for show-and-tell. “Look at this letter,” she said, handing me a sheaf of yellow legal sheets filled with Bucky’s childish scrawl. I handed it back.

  “What does it say?” I asked weakly.

  She read excerpts. It was practically identical to a letter he had sent me after our engagement dinner: how we would go to Vermont and stay at Seven Maples, our special place, to celebrate, and how he was having that diamond ring sized, and how much he had always loved me. Only in this letter, me was she.

  “Look,” I said, trying desperately to focus, “I’ve known this guy since we were sixteen. He was my prom date. We’ve named all of our children, all of our dogs. He took me to the football dinner. I typed his term papers. Whenever I had a fight with my parents, he drove to my house and picked me up and we went out for ice cream.” I thought of the cherry-vanilla and my eyes filled. “He was my friend.”

  The words hung there. I flushed. What a stupid thing to say. If nothing else, a friend is loyal, caring, true. When was the last time Bucky had acted like my friend? I thought about the day after our engagement dinner, when he appeared in the lobby of Jolie! with a monogrammed black leather Filofax, a present in honor of the promotion he just knew I would get while he was in the Caribbean.

  See? I wasn’t nuts after all. Okay. When else? When time was freely spent, and no thing, no object, was given?

  Shit. I couldn’t remember. Vermont, maybe. Two or three other long weekends since then. Work for him, it seemed, had become all-encompassing. During the week, we usually saw each other only once or twice, for an early dinner. He needed to get to sleep, to be at the office by seven. I didn’t mind. Sure, I would have liked to see him more on weekends, but he played a lot of tennis, which I didn’t, and he liked to watch football games and drink beer with his friends, and this sailing thing seemed to have taken off.

  At the same time, I was fielding a new job, reading tons of magazines every weekend in a crash course in what it meant to be an editor who had ideas, who kept up, and who could still read enough books to catch whatever literary reference Susie Schein threw into the weekly meeting. I was busy, too.

  Truth be told, the entire arrangement seemed like an extension of our college relationship. For me boys had always been like dessert, not an everyday occu
rrence but a sometime thing, a reward. I worked hard. I saw my friends. And Bucky. Everything was fine. Our future, with our wedding less than a year away now, was secure.

  Carla had the phone in her hand.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Calling Minneapolis,” she said. “I want him to know that we’ve met. I’d like to know what he plans to do about it.”

  I stared. What did she have in mind? That Bucky become a Mormon?

  “Do you know where he’s staying?” I asked. It had never occurred to me to ask. He’d be back in the morning.

  She shook her head. “No, but I’ll find him.”

  She got a sympathetic operator who just loved hearing about what an emergency it was while Carla ran through all the hotels where KCW might have a corporate rate. Each chain seemed to have ten local branches, so she started making lists on a pad.

  “What about Beth?” I blurted when Carla finally hung up. “Does she know all this, too?”

  For the first time, Carla looked uncomfortable.

  “Well,” she hedged, “I don’t know what she knows about me. But I’m sure Bucky told her the same thing about you that he told me about you.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “That you guys broke up almost two years ago, but you still couldn’t let go. He said that no matter how much he explained he was in love with someone else, you wouldn’t stop calling. That’s why he said he agreed to see you every once in a while. To help you along. When you would call and I would be there, he would cover the phone with his hand and shake his head like you were crazy.”

  Wasn’t it time for the punch line, right about now?, I wondered. For Bucky to come out from the darkened living room with Ed McMahon and a camera crew and a king-size check for ten million dollars and tell me that this, all of this, was an enormous joke—no, an enormous test, of my will, of my sanity and love, and that I had passed with flying colors? And now I could take my prizes and go home and live happily ever after?

  I tried to laugh. Carla continued to look at me, with a hint of pity now, and I knew it was true. All of it. I had called Bucky a month or so ago, on a Sunday night, screeching, because I had gone into my kitchen to turn on the oven, which I hadn’t done in a while, and a mouse jumped out from behind it. “Can you come over here?” I wailed. “There’s a mouse!” He seemed distracted. “Oh, come on,” he said. But I was genuinely upset.

  “I’m invoking The Clause,” I declared, surprising myself; I hadn’t thought of it in so long. The Clause, as we’d dubbed it, had started in our freshman year of college, during exams, when we were both studying but had had a fight. I was heartbroken. Bucky drove from Amherst to Smith, and we promised each other that no matter what ever happened in our lives, even if we ended up with other people, all either of us had to do was invoke The Clause and the other would immediately come.

  The night of the mouse, Bucky had laughed. “You can’t invoke The Clause for a mouse,” he said.

  “Yes, I can,” I cried. “I’m scared.”

  His tone had remained amused and, yes, now that I thought of it, more than a little patronizing.

  “You should call your super,” he said. “Besides, I have a co-op board meeting tonight that I can’t miss. You’ll be fine, Sanny. It’s only a mouse.”

  And now, staring into Carla Jones’s light green eyes, I could just imagine her as he hung up the receiver, wrapping her arms around his neck, saying, “Oh, Bucky, your old girlfriend loved you so much that even all this time later she still has to call you about a little old mouse. Poor thing.” And she would kiss him and he would laugh, gently this time, and off they would go to have rollicking sex while I stomped around my apartment in the rain boots I refused to take off.

  I looked at the clock on Carla’s bedside table. It was almost two in the morning. She was back on the phone, working her way through every hotel in the greater Minneapolis–St. Paul area. Nothing.

  “About Beth,” I persisted. “Did you meet her? Did you confront her with all of this?”

  Carla shook her head, and I realized that she hadn’t bothered with Beth for the same reason I hadn’t. Beth was a dull little thing who scowled and sewed. Now that I thought about it, she was eerily similar to Mrs. Ross, with her cardigan sweaters and sturdy shoes.

  Okay, I had been raised in a household where psychology was served up with the frozen vegetables. If Beth was Bucky’s mother, and Carla was the Playboy centerfold every twelve-year-old boy wishes was his—

  “What did Bucky say about me?” I demanded artlessly. “Tell me. I want to know.”

  Carla hung up the phone and crossed another hotel off her list. She twirled the pen in her hand, tracing over the doodles she’d made in the margin: daisies. When she spoke, her tone was flat.

  “He said that you always believed in him when he was growing up. That when you looked at him, you saw what he could be. That you always said he had great potential, that he could do anything he ever wanted in his life. That you actually believed that. And because you were always so smart, so much smarter than Bucky, he didn’t want to let you down.”

  I waited for more, but she was silent. “What else did he say?” I pressed. I knew from the look on her face that I should keep my mouth shut, that she had told me the nice part already—but I couldn’t stop. “How did he describe me?”

  She didn’t even flinch. “He said you were pretty, not beautiful. He said that you worked at it. He said that you looked like a finished Jewish girl.”

  “Finished?”

  “Yes, like your makeup was always right and your hair was always done and your outfits always matched.”

  She had the air, it seemed to me, of a court reporter, dispassionately reading back her notes. There was not even any of the gloating that was her prerogative as the resident babe. But there was something else going on, something I couldn’t quite place. She just kept watching me, almost baiting me to figure something out. But I couldn’t; I couldn’t think at all. At that moment, I wasn’t even sure what Bucky looked like. And there I was, hunched at the foot of a stranger’s bed, while she sat, tall, self-assured, in control. Why? Why wasn’t she upset? Obviously, she had had more time to digest the situation, but she seemed so clinical. I mean, this was a girl with bows on her lampshades. You would think she’d be destroyed.

  I looked at her again. She was tapping the push buttons on the phone with her pencil. Maybe she was in shock. It had been her engagement, too, after all.

  “Tell me about you,” I said when she hung up.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked, with a hint of surprise.

  “Well, for one thing, how come you’re not more upset about this?”

  Tears sprang to her eyes. “Of course I’m upset!” she exclaimed. “I thought this was it. That I was going to spend the rest of my life with this man. I was already looking for the dress, and we were about to buy a dog from a breeder in Connecticut. We visited there a few times and fell madly in love with a yellow Lab that was about to have puppies.”

  I felt myself go cold.

  “You were going to name her Snowball, weren’t you?” I asked, and for the first time all night, I watched her jaw drop, her shoulders slump, her mouth twist into what I must say was a most unattractive arc.

  “He told you that?” she half whispered. Her cheeks flushed.

  “No,” I said, feeling instantly less stooped. If I just kept thinking of him as a human copy machine, everything would make sense. This was me times three.

  “It was the same name we were going to give our dog,” I said. “But that one was going to be a Samoyed, which would at least make sense.”

  She looked confused. “What do you mean?”

  “A Samoyed is white. So it would make sense to name one Snowball.”

  She stared.

  “Didn’t it seem like an odd name to you for a yellow Lab?” I prompted.

  She shrugged. “I guess. I just thought it was cute.” Dear God.

&nbs
p; “Forget about Bucky,” I said. “Tell me more about you. Before you met him.” She looked suspicious. “I mean, here we are in the middle of the night,” I went on. “It’s an unbelievable thing. How did this happen to you?”

  I really wanted to know. All night, I had assumed she had all the answers. But the dog thing had wounded her. She had trusted him. Why did he betray her? How? Why had she let him? Why had I? It’s always easier to figure it out on someone else.

  Finally she relented. The chance to talk about herself was too good to pass up. The one thing I’ve noticed about the very few superhumanly beautiful women I’ve met is that they have the same level of entitlement and self-absorption that men do. Nothing on earth is ever quite as beguiling as themselves.

  She was born and raised in Oklahoma, she said. Her father owned a hardware store, and her mother was deeply religious—only her religion was always changing. She had tried everything, including being a Jehovah’s Witness. Then one day she up and joined the Hare Krishnas. Carla’s father took up with a neighbor woman then, so Carla dropped out of community college and moved with a friend to Hilton Head, where she got a job bartending.

  I tried not to gulp. The descendant of Betsy Ross was going to marry a bartender from Oklahoma whose mother chanted at airports?

  Carla kept on. She liked her story. It starred her as Everywoman, who, to hear her tell it, might as well have looked like Godzilla for any good her looks had ever done her. In Hilton Head she had had a boyfriend twenty years her senior, a former professional baseball player. He was wealthy and he wanted to marry her, but she—toss the hat high, now—had wanted to make it on her own. She moved to New York. She zeroed in on advertising and landed herself an assistant’s job at one of the top firms.

  Then along came Bucky, American royalty with his big blue eyes and impeccable manners. They were instant soul mates, she said. Not only did they both love the business, but (incredibly enough, in spite of those tits) she even played tennis and liked nothing better than to get up at six on a Saturday morning and start bouncing. And when they were done, they went straight to the gym, where they both worked out as hard as they could. Sometimes they would have a rollicking night out, like when the Judds played Radio City. And even though the old baseball player flew to New York to implore her to come back to him, she stayed loyal to her new true love and was even considering leaving the firm to get down to the serious business of making little Betsy Rosses.