Confessions Of An Ex-Girlfriend. Lynda Curnyn

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СКАЧАТЬ to effortless-and-elegant hor d’oeuvres? Working in the warped little world of wedding planning had led me to one conclusion: If you don’t get married in this world, you get nothing. Once, in an editorial meeting, I jokingly suggested that a woman should get a bridal shower when she turns thirty, wedding or not. Everyone looked at me as if I were some kind of nut. I am thirty-one years old, am I not entitled to free Calphalon yet?

      The phone rang, saving me from starting the dreaded article.

      “Hey, Em,” came Jade’s voice over the line.

      “Jade. Thank God.”

      “Were you expecting someone else?”

      “I was hoping for anyone who is not getting married.”

      “No fear here. What’s going on?”

      “Nothing, nothing. You know, the usual. Deadline pressure high, motivation factor low. How did the date with Ted Terrific go?”

      “Terrific, of course. We did drinks, went to shoot some pool. Did I mention that he has the most beautiful forearms I’ve ever seen? Nice and thick and just the way I like ’em. He’s even got a couple of tattoos. And you know how I feel about a man with tattoos.”

      “Uh-oh. You’re finished.”

      “If I don’t sleep with him, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

      “Marry him?”

      “What’s gotten into you this morning?”

      “It’s my mother. She’s getting married again.”

      I held the phone away from my ear as Jade shrieked with joy. “That is so wonderful! She and Clark are too cute together. Oh, I have to call and congratulate her. I should probably pick up a card at lunch….”

      I should have figured Jade would be my mother’s biggest champion. After all, she’d known my mom since husband 1. “Jade, am I the only person in the world who’s not excited about this?”

      “Well, you should be,” she said, censure in her tone. “She’s your mother! Don’t you want her to be happy?”

      “Happy, yes. I’m just not too clear on the fact that marriage is the way to get happy. You do realize that this would be Husband 3, almost 4?”

      “Em, I think you need to get over that. Not everybody lives a cookie-cutter life. So what if your mother has spent a lot of her life searching? As long as she finds what she wants in the end.”

      “I suppose you’re right.” I let out a sigh. “Maybe I’m not looking forward to the Big Day, especially since she’s got the whole family cruising to the Caribbean together for the ceremony. And guess who will be the only guest in the single cabin? Of course, my mother doesn’t know that yet.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about Derrick. I don’t know why…I just…couldn’t.”

      “You’re going to have to tell her eventually. When’s the wedding?”

      “She’s hoping to get something together by the end of September.”

      There was a silence, as if Jade was pondering. “That’s not much time, but who knows what could happen before then. You might be in love with someone else. Or you might find yourself a cute waiter on the cruise ship to share that single room with.”

      “Somehow I doubt it. But maybe I can dig up someone to take with me.”

      “Ah, yes. The old Boy Under the Bed.” This was our term for the ever-present male friend who was suitable to take to such events as weddings or office picnics, though for one reason or another not someone you had any sort of desire to truly date. Mine used to be Cal, who’d been a fellow waiter at Good Grub, the restaurant I waitressed at during grad school. Cal was a perfect Boy Under the Bed—a great dancer, tall enough so you didn’t tower over him in heels, and just unattractive enough not to cause any instances of drunken groping on the dance floor that might later prove embarrassing. The problem was, Cal had up and gotten married during the Derrick Years. Men were such bastards.

      “I just realized my Boy Under the Bed went AWOL. Cal got married last year, remember?”

      “Oh, yeah.” She paused, and I heard her inhaling on a cigarette. “What about Sebastian?”

      Sebastian was always a possibility, of course. But he was more a Boy Out of the Closet than a Boy Under the Bed, which made choosing him as a wedding date a bit of a problem. “I don’t want to be the fat older sister turned fag hag at this affair.”

      “You’re not fat.”

      “Well, you never know what could happen by September. I ate an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough over the weekend. And not even the frozen yogurt version. I went for the gusto—twenty-four grams of fat per serving, four servings per pint.”

      “Big deal. Don’t worry, Em, we’ll find you someone. There’s always that model I told you about.”

      “You know how I feel about models.”

      “Well, you don’t have to marry him. And consider how good you’ll look together in the wedding pictures.”

      “I’ll think about it,” I said, reluctantly.

      “Now there’s the Emma I know and love. Don’t worry. Everything will be just fine.”

      Confession: I would marry for a below-market one bedroom.

      I somehow managed to muddle through the rest of the week without any major emotional disasters. And after making it through a second weekend alone without completely falling apart, I felt almost proud of myself. In fact, as I walked down my tree-lined street on my way home from work on the verge of week three of the Post-Derrick Period, it suddenly occurred to me that being single in the greatest city in the world wouldn’t be all that bad. I even lived on the nicest street, I thought, as I passed the pretty brownstones on West Thirteenth Street.

      Then I reached my building, with its faded facade of peeling paint and row of dented garbage cans and I couldn’t help but sigh with dismay. Why, oh, why, couldn’t Derrick and I have made it as far as shared real estate? He would never have left me if we had landed a below-market one bedroom downtown. No man in his right mind would walk away from that kind of find.

      And no woman, I realized now, hating Derrick more for denying me my real estate dreams. With another sigh, I started up the steps.

      Derrick was fond of calling my twenty-four unit apartment house The Building of the Incurables, because it was filled with tiny studios that housed—other than students struggling through until graduation—old people with ailments either mental or physical, which kept them from moving on to apartments with a living space large enough for an area rug that didn’t say Welcome on it. There was Beatrice on the first floor, for example, who had been hit by a piece of scaffolding on West Thirty-ninth Street sixteen years ago and whose injury required a metal plate in the head that had put her on the permanently disabled list. Now in her fifties, she was collecting social security and painting watercolors, which СКАЧАТЬ