That Guy

The post-show meeting had run well past the time his stomach clock normally kicked him into getting lunch, but when their meals arrived, Charlie’s appetite vanished.

“What’s up with you?” Liza asked. “Too many donuts on the set?”

Charlie poked at a California roll and glanced out the window of the small Japanese restaurant that faced Eighth Avenue. He didn’t know if it was a conspiracy or a coincidence, but the streets of Manhattan seemed inordinately packed with happy couples that afternoon. Clinging together as they moved briskly through the January chill, they seemed to underscore his current undercurrent of angst. “I don’t want to be that guy.”

She looked up from her miso soup. “What guy?”

“You know. That guy. The guy in the movie. He’s sitting in the coffee shop like a schmuck when the love of his life runs off to meet Mr. Wonderful at the top of the Empire State Building.”

“Well, for one, he’d have to be a schmuck to leave you behind in a coffee shop…”

“Thank you.”

“And two…aren’t we being a little dramatic?”

He sniffed. “Says the girl who cried at the end of Gone with the Wind.”

“I cried because I was bored to tears and wanted it to be over. Frankly, I didn’t give a damn.”

“Philistine.” He grinned and gave her leg a light tap under the table with his foot.

“So where’s this coming from?” Liza set down her spoon and nabbed a slice of avocado from his plate.

Charlie shrugged. “Just a feeling. Things have been a little…quiet lately on the romantic front. And odd.”

“Define odd.”

He sank back into his chair and absent-mindedly drummed his fingers against the tablecloth. “If someone gave you the keys to a candy store after you’d been held prisoner for, say, almost twenty years, what would you do?”

“Dig in and find a good dentist?”

“Funny.”

“What, you think The Congressman’s taking his, um, business elsewhere?”

“It’s crossed my mind. Who stays with their first—” He realized what he’d said a second before her eyes registered it. “Sorry. I didn’t mean…”

“I get it.” The small, dark cloud dissipated from her face and she lowered her voice. “You were a nice first. Still, I think he’d be a schmuck. And if he hurts you, I might just have to kill him.”

“You’re sweet.” Then he pulled out his phone. “So, this is what confuses me. Zero contact for three days, and right before I left for work….”

He scrolled to the message and pushed the cell toward her.

Her brows flew up, brown eyes widening, and when she smiled, so did he. “Expect big news usual time?”

“It’s code,” Charlie said. “We do code. It’s kinda cute.”

“Adorable.” She slid the phone back. “I wish my guy sent me fortune cookies.”

Charlie stared at the screen, reconfiguring the pixels into a more positive line of thought. “Last time we talked, he said the divorce is almost final. You think…?”

“That he wants to take your relationship up a notch?” Liza’s eyes glowed. Actually, her whole face glowed. It wasn’t just a Hollywood myth. “Will I finally get to meet him?”

“I don’t want to jinx it,” he said.

She made a face at him. “How does meeting me jinx it?”

“Oh, god, I don’t know. I’m sorry. It’s just that…” He remembered how his insides had twisted up when he’d looked into Joshua’s eyes for the first time. Their gazes meeting over the man’s askew tie knot. Knowing, somehow, that something more profound than a flash of lust had passed between them. “He could be the lid to my pot. Like Mom said. And I don’t want to screw it up.”

As she pressed a hand over his, Liza’s phone warbled with Adam’s ring tone. “Speaking of pots, there’s my lid.”

Charlie gestured that she should take it.

“Hi, hon.” He heard his brother’s voice. “Uh-huh. Sure. No, I don’t mind. I won’t be too late. Oh, and please don’t forget to clean the litter box. No, really. The doctor said I shouldn’t touch it.” She laughed. “No, he’s not just making that up to get you to do more stuff around the house.”

Whether a result of the pregnancy or the couples counseling, it warmed Charlie to hear his brother and Liza getting along a little better. He excused himself to the men’s room to give them some privacy. After he’d lingered long enough over washing his hands, he paused at the mirror, molding a few strands of dark blond hair back into his careful coif. Glancing around quickly to make sure no one was watching, he practiced a few surprised faces. Stop it, he thought. It’s too soon. Even if the divorce is final, cut the guy some slack. Expect big news usual time. Maybe that is his big news. The papers have been signed, so one day we might…

Lifting his blue-green eyes to his reflection once more, he gaped at how tired he appeared. Maybe if he could sneak away from the studio early, he’d have time for a nap before Mr. Big News landed. Right. Like he could sleep.

The Laurie Boris Emotional Idiot Grant

(This is a piece I wrote to perform at the Woodstock Writers Festival Story Slam. The topic, "I am an emotional idiot" was inspired by the work of author Maggie Estep, who died earlier this year.)

When it comes to breaking up with men, I am an emotional idiot at genius levels. Maybe that’s why I’ve been with the same guy for over twenty-five years.

See, I don’t want to HURT anyone…so I string out the breakups. I procrastinate. Maybe until… one of us moves to another city…or he gets married…

Breaking up with the average guy was hard enough, but I’m partial to creative men.

Creative men are so sexy. They sing songs about you, they write poetry about you, they want to paint you naked…holding fruit, for some reason. Or a kitten. Yeah, because when I’m hanging out naked, I relish the idea of eighteen razor sharp claws gripping my bare flesh. Or…fruit salad.

Creative men are great…or at least the ones I’ve chosen were. Until I had to break up with them. Until my vagina, that traitor, no longer wanted sonnets and glitter, but that angsty guy in the corner who smelled like turpentine. Or the one with the suspiciously long fingernail that could double as a guitar pick.

Oh, they were all basically nice about it while I was slipping the equivalent of a passive/aggressive butter knife into their hearts. I’m sorry for wasting your time, one said …I’m sorry, you need someone more assertive…I’m sorry, you need someone heterosexual… One of them who liked to cook for me told me I would starve without him. I did a particularly bad job of breaking up with that one.

But then, these spurned creative men went home and started … processing…and talking to their therapists. Or their men’s groups. Who told them to sublimate their pain into their art. I have inspired so much post-idiotic-breakup art that someone should name a grant after me.

I broke up badly with a comic book artist, and somewhere out there I am a she-devil of a villainess with a butt-ugly costume and the smallest rack ever seen on a comic book female.

I broke up with a musician, and I’m the subject of a song where the guy’s best friend runs off with his girl and he really misses him.

I broke up with a painter, so, in some avant-garde gallery in Boston, I’m naked with six eyes and three breasts and seven pieces of fruit and a double-pawed kitten.

I broke up with a writer and now I’m a series of evil bitches whose names begin with “L” in thinly veiled autobiographical fiction.

I even broke up with my husband while we were dating. In a case of pre-emptive emotional idiocy, I waited until he painted my portrait and carried it from New York to Boston on a train to break up with him.

If he dismembered me on canvas afterward, he was nice enough not to share it with the world.

Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for the hopeful recipients of the Laurie Boris Emotional Idiot Grant, the creative guy who would become my husband took me back a year later. The portrait still hangs in my writing room, fully clothed, without kittens, without fruit. Partly as a gift…and partly as a warning. Because there’s a hell of a lot of room on that thing for a few more breasts and eyeballs.

The Baptism

As if a stranger lived within the silvered glass of the master bedroom’s mirror, Adam Joshua Goldberg watched the reflection straighten his tie. The man’s chest rose and fell rapidly. He looked pale, a frightening contrast to his dark hair, eyes, and suit. His lips moved, pressing into his memory what he planned to be a short speech for the cameras and microphones at Gracie Mansion.

What would happen after that, he had no idea.

“Joshie, you don’t have to do this.” Deidre's words, and the nickname only she and his mother called him, fell softly on his ears. She sniffed and reached toward the nightstand for a tissue, dabbing carefully beneath her eyes to preserve her makeup.

He almost laughed. Don’t have to do this? Yeah. I do.

“We could…just,” she threw her hands up, “disappear. For a while. Until it blows over. People do that. Move upstate. Find a new school for the kids…”

“Deidre…it’s…” He turned to her, knelt beside her, and rested his feverish head against her pink-skirted knees. “Something…I need to do. If you want to disappear, I wouldn’t blame you. I can handle it on my own.”

“A promise is a promise,” she said. “I agreed to stand beside you.”

The laugh strangled in his throat. “Isn’t that how we got into this in the first place?”

Her face softened.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just…ready to jump out of my skin, here. After…hiding…for so long, I need this.” Like a baptism, he thought. Washing away my sins.

She patted his head. “Adam. Come up here. Sit with me.”

Reluctantly he rose and perched next to her on the bed. Her bed, technically. He’d been sleeping in the guest room for the last two years, brought in his favorite things, made it to his taste. The move was not out of her anger; on the contrary, she’d offered it to him as a courtesy, out of respect.

He took her hand, squeezed it.

“It’ll be okay, Deidre.”

“It most certainly will not be okay. Do you have any idea what they’re going to do to you? To your family?”

“Dad already knows.”

Her eyes widened.

“That’s where I was last night. You were asleep when I got home.”

She patted his arm as if to convince herself that he was still there. “Well. He didn’t kill you, so I guess that’s good.”

He felt a corner of his mouth crook up. “I can’t say that he was thrilled. But we had a nice talk. Of course, after he tore me a new one about keeping it secret for so long. And what it would do to his grandchildren. And you, of course.”

She didn’t answer.

He turned to look out the brownstone’s window at the terrace garden. “I can keep the press away from you. Anything they want to ask, they can ask me.”

She didn’t answer.

“Like I said, you can keep the house,” he said. “I won’t contest it. I’ll move into that apartment Dad’s firm keeps near Columbus Circle.”

“That’s such a horrible little place,” she said.

He shrugged. “It’s just for now. I…I want you to be happy, Dee. You deserve so much more…”

She didn’t answer.

“I know I’m in no position to make demands, but I’d like one thing. I want to see the kids. I want to be part of their lives.”

Her lower lip began to tremble. Tears streamed down her face. It undid him, and he curled her into his arms and cried with her. After a while she sniffed and said, “You’ll be late.”

“For my own hanging?” He smirked. “I think the press will stick around.”

When Deidre went off to freshen her makeup, he found his phone and sent a text, a favorite quote from Ben Franklin: They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither.

The reply from Charlie came within moments. He glanced down, expecting a quip, but nearly teared up again when he read: When strength and fear shake hands, it can move mountains. Go move mountains, my friend.

The words pulsed in him, confirmed that he was doing the right thing. Trying to keep his hands from trembling, he wrote back: When they speak of me, remember me well.

The phone trilled with a reply: Unforgettable…that’s what you are. (smiley face)

He grinned. That was the Charlie he knew.

High heels clicked into the doorway. She was staring at the phone in his hands, the remnants of the smile on his face.

Her voice barely broke into sound. “I envy you.”

“Aw, Deidre…don’t.”

“No. It’s true. When this is over, you’ll have…support. You’ll have a community. I’ll have…pity. Contempt. People looking at me everywhere I go, wondering how in this day and age a woman could be so clueless not to know that she’s marrying a gay man…or…worse, that I did it on purpose. That I’m some kind of political golddigger…”

He crossed to her and took her in his arms. “Screw what they think. You’re none of those things, and I’ll defend you with my dying breath.”

She pushed away. “Stop. I don’t want to fix my makeup again. Just…let’s go.”

Adam the Explainer

Their chatter about school and basketball had kept Charlie from thinking about what he’d come into Adam’s room that night to say. Then the conversation suddenly stopped. Adam was sprawled out on the bed, plunking his old guitar. He could never play; he just thought it was cool to have a guitar.

The worry built, like steam with no release valve, until Charlie feared his chest might explode. Lightheaded, he sank into Adam’s orange beanbag chair. It sighed and squeaked as the stuff inside conformed to his shape. At that moment, Charlie wanted it to swallow him. When they were kids, Adam the Explainer told him about the world. He taught Charlie how to get extra cookies from Mom. He told him how to deal with school and teachers. Now Charlie had something to explain to Adam that he didn’t think his older brother would ever understand. Sometimes, most of the time, Charlie didn’t understand it himself—why God had made him attracted to men, when nearly every guy he knew was dating some girl, and had pinup calendars, and shoved their elbows into his side when they saw a girl’s cleavage at school. Charlie thought girls were pretty and sweet; he liked that they smelled nice and he had a few friends who were girls. Not because they were girls but because they liked each other.

Charlie shifted in the squishy beanbag. Adam kept plucking the strings, and each one vibrated through his head like torture. Finally Charlie pushed through his fear and just said it. “How do you know if you’re gay?”

Adam smirked at Charlie, who expected some kind of homophobic insult. Their father was like that. Always calling guys he didn’t like fags or pussies. Then Adam’s face softened and he looked at Charlie like an adult would look at another adult, not a child. “Do you think you’re gay?” he said.

“Sometimes.” All the time.

“Ever fool around with a girl?” Adam asked.

Charlie shrugged. He’d kissed a few girls, but they’d kissed him first.

“That guy at dinner?” Adam said. “The guy on your team?”

Charlie sighed and felt like he was letting out all the breath in his body, every breath he’d taken in his entire seventeen years on the planet. “Kinda sorta,” he said.

Adam nodded. “Ma know?”

Charlie shook his head. “I’m so not ready for that discussion.”

“His folks know?”

He shook his head again. And his brother went back to messing with the guitar. Adam wasn’t flying the rainbow flag, but he wasn’t making fun of Charlie, either, and in that moment, Charlie loved him so much. He was Adam the Explainer again, the Protector.

“I had a feeling,” Adam said.

Charlie felt blood rushing into his face, not from anger or shame but from relief. “Well, you could have told me.”

Excerpt from Sliding Past Vertical

“Okay,” Sarah started quietly. “You have five seconds to explain how your friends knew I had it.”

Jay turned on her with an evil sneer. “They’re not my friends. I don’t know how they knew.”

She wanted to slap him. “Bullshit. What are they, telepathic? Have super-human scent glands, they could smell it from the Pike?”

“Sarah—”

“They killed Dee Dee’s parakeet.”

He gaped.

“And I won’t even tell you what they did to the shirt you gave me. It’s like they were sending you a message.”