With a Little Luck: A Novel Page 13

  “You’re right,” he says, and I think reason is finding its way into his less-than-reasonable brain. “We should get closer.”

  My stomach drops as the whirlybird does the same. I grab onto Ryan’s arm, and he places his hand over mine.

  “That’s not what I was saying,” I tell him.

  “Buddy,” Ryan says, “chances are really strong that even if there is anything going on with your wife—and I’m not saying there is—she wouldn’t do anything under your roof.”

  “He’s right,” I say, picking up his rationale, hoping we can convince him using the tag-team approach. “I can speak from a woman’s perspective. You don’t cheat in your own home.”

  “That would be an outward act of aggression,” Ryan adds. “Not starter-cheating.”

  “Starter-cheating?” I parrot, concerned that this is even a thing. Is this a thing? Ryan just bulges his eyes out at me, and I get his point: Now is not the time.

  “Your wife doesn’t hate you, does she?” I ask.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Oh, you’d know,” I say. “It takes a very angry woman to behave like that.” Of course, I’m thinking, if she happens to notice a helicopter hovering overhead every single night, she’s bound to be getting at least a little bit perturbed.

  “It’s true. She’s not cheating in your home,” Ryan says.

  “How do you know?” Dan asks.

  “I know,” Ryan says.

  “But how?” he presses.

  Ryan looks at me, then back at our pilot. “Because I have ways of knowing. It’s what I do. I’m a psychologist. And if you turn around and land this chopper right now, I will tell you everything you want to know. Just because she’s not cheating in your house tonight doesn’t mean she isn’t cheating. Take us back right now and I’ll give you five surefire ways to find out.”

  Dan turns the machine around so fast, I practically get whiplash. Ryan winks at me as we head back to base. My heart rate starts getting back to normal, but it’s not at my resting tempo until we are on the ground and out of the helicopter.

  Ryan offers his hand and helps me climb down safely before turning back to Dan.

  “You’re lucky there was a lady on that plane,” he says, putting his arm around me and turning us to walk away.

  “But wait—” Pilot Unstable shouts. “What about the five things?”

  Ryan doesn’t even stop walking, he just swivels his head around enough to say, “Number one, get close enough to smell her. Preferably not from the cockpit of a hovering helicopter. But smell her. And if that stink on her isn’t her or you, figure out who or what it is. Number two, if you do something incredibly stupid—and be imaginative on this—and she doesn’t get really pissed off, it’s usually not just a highly evolved capacity for forgiveness. It can be, but it’s usually not. She’s unwittingly giving you one back, throwing you a bone, trying to restore the cosmic balance. Number three is simple. If she says she’s doing something somewhere or with someone, call there, or call that person. This will at least exhaust her alibis over time, or piss them off enough to push her to find someone else to cover until she finally runs out of people. Number four, ask yourself, Am I a big enough dick that I deserve to be cheated on? Number five, if the answer to number four is no, try asking again. You’re probably not being honest with yourself.”

  While I don’t consider it exactly profound, and I’m sure he was making almost all of it up on the fly, I’m impressed. Especially because I’m almost positive we’re back on the freeway and halfway home before Dan gets it. Casualty of a life spent not being able to hear a damn thing anyone is saying.

  Well, remember what you said, because in a day or two, I’ll have a witty and blistering retort! You’ll be devastated then.

  —CALVIN, OF CALVIN AND HOBBES

  Chapter Eleven

  Since the contest took place on KKRL and Bill and Wendell have already completed what I can only imagine were some very juvenile negotiation rituals, Ryan and I are broadcasting the follow-up to our date during my show. Once we were safely on the ground and away from that maniac, I barely even said a single word to Ryan. I was literally shaking during the whole ride home, and when he dropped me off I coughed up a “thank you” for at least the dinner part of the evening and headed into my building without looking back. I can’t wait to skewer him for endangering my life with not just a helicopter but an unstable pilot.

  Ryan walks in with his usual swagger, and I want to roll my eyes at him but my body doesn’t cooperate. Instead, I end up grinning like a moron the second I see him. Stop it, mouth!

  “Hello there, pretty lady,” he says.

  Pretty lady? That’s new. A bit cheesy, but good cheesy. He hasn’t ever flattered me before. Except on the radio when he told people I was cute and they could Google me—which, for the record, never stops sounding dirty to me, but I suppose that’s because I’m actually a twelve-year-old boy. Apparently. Ah, he also said I had nice “chompers.” That one isn’t quite as dirty-sounding, but I’m not sure it counts as flattery.

  “Hello,” I say back, flashing my chompers.

  “Has your heart rate returned to a normal resting tempo yet?” he asks.

  It had. Until he walked in. “Yes,” I say.

  “Good,” he says with a wink as he pulls his headphones out of his messenger bag and puts them on.

  Maybe I’m not alone in my superstitions. Lots of DJs have their special headphones, and they will never use any others. Even if they’re old, broken, and put back together with duct tape and bobby pins, people are loyal to their headphones—and yes, some of the old-timers do still call them “cans,” which always makes me giggle. I’ve heard of crazy stories—people stealing headphones of rival DJs, people taking their headphones with them out of town, even if they aren’t doing radio, just so they aren’t out of their sight—I mean crazy stories.

  “Are those your lucky headphones?” I ask.

  “Only because I wear them,” he replies, cool as a cucumber.

  “Maybe you should have worn them on our date, then,” I say.

  “Mrrrowr!” he growls.

  “No,” I blurt. “That didn’t mean you would have ‘gotten lucky’ with me. I meant maybe then we wouldn’t have had Psycho McFlyer as our pilot.”

  “Turn on the mic!” Bill’s voice echoes, like the Wizard of Oz’s. “This is gold!”

  I look at Ryan and smile, now able to roll my eyes.

  “Let’s do this,” he says.

  “And we’re live,” I say into the mic. “Good evening, my friends. Welcome to Classic Rock With a Little Talk. I’m Berry Lambert, your barely-still-alive-after-a-disaster-date host, and with me is special guest KKRL’s Ryan Riley—also known as the Man I Will Never Go Out With Again.”

  “I beg to differ,” Ryan chimes in.

  “Don’t beg, Ryan. It’s just embarrassing.”

  We lock eyes, and my heart speeds up a little. Damn it, heart, relax, would ya?

  “So,” Ryan says. “Who gets to start? Because I thought it was a pretty good date, all in all.”

  “You would,” I say. “The station paid for it, and you got to live out a videogame.”

  “Okay, first of all, I paid.”

  “They’ll reimburse you.”

  “Second of all … maybe that helicopter ride was a bit atypical, but there were no upside-downs and no guns, so that hardly qualifies as a videogame.”

  “Upside-downs?” I tease.

  “We went in circles,” he says. “We didn’t do tricks.”

  “I know what you meant, you just sounded like a six-year-old boy. And the ‘trick’ was staying alive.”

  “Our pilot was going through some stuff,” Ryan says.

  “Our pilot was insane,” I clarify. “Clinically. Criminally. And, folks, if you think I’m making this up, think again. He thought his wife was cheating on him, and we were basically stalking his house from a helicopter. At one point he thought he saw ‘movement,’
and I thought we were going to dive-bomb through the roof. It’s a white, heat-reflecting roof, just in case his wife or her enormous stable of boyfriends are listening. Also, he was wearing a shirt that was hands down the most hideous shirt I’ve seen since Magnum P.I. was on the air. Boy, I don’t usually wish bad things on people, but I hope his wife is sleeping with the entire USC offensive line. And speaking of ‘offensive’ lines, Ryan, nice planning. Would five minutes of due diligence on the flight crew have been so hard?”

  “I got us out alive, did I not?”

  “Am I supposed to thank you?”

  “It would be the polite thing to do.…”

  “I tend to define ‘polite’ as ‘not endangering the life of your date.’ ”

  “That doesn’t sound like a thank-you,” he says.

  “Thank you, Ryan,” I say. “Thank you for the cardiac arrhythmia I’ll probably have for the rest of my life.”

  “See, folks? I made her heart skip a beat.”

  “You damn near caused it to stop beating altogether. All thanks to a truly memorable date that I hope to never repeat again.”

  “But you’d go out with me again.”

  “Says who?” I ask.

  “If there was no psychotic aviator involved? You had fun. You had fun at dinner, and even in the helicopter you had fun.”

  “I did not have fun in the helicopter.”

  “But you did at dinner,” he says. “You can admit it.”

  “It was … moderately tolerable. The food was good.”

  “So good that you spit it in my eye while laughing at my brilliant banter. Such a crock!” Ryan says.

  “You certainly are sure of yourself,” I say.

  “I only call it like I see it.”

  “Perhaps you need glasses,” I say.

  The phone lines are ringing off the hook, and Bill is frantically motioning through the glass for us to take a few calls. I pick up line one.

  “This is Berry. You’re live on KKCR.…”

  “Hi, Berry! Hi, Ryan!” the caller says. “Sounds like you guys had quite the date. But, Berry, if Ryan asked you out on a real date … no publicity stunt, no debriefing, would you go?”

  I’m completely flustered by the question. Before it was just shtick, but now this is sounding real. My real life is personal and none of her business, and Ryan is, of course, leaning in now, waiting for my answer.

  “What would you do, Berry?” Ryan asks.

  The caller perks up again. “What would Berry do if Ryan asked her out on a real date?”

  Really? What would Berry do?

  After what feels like an eternity but is probably only about twenty seconds, I finally speak.

  “Well, caller,” I say, “that’s extremely hypothetical. Plus, it’s hardly a real date if we’re plotting it on the radio. And, Ryan, I’m sure you don’t normally ask women what they’d say if you asked them out, so we’ll just pretend you’re not losing your touch and just got caught up in the moment.”

  He leans back in his chair and kicks his feet up on the table, placing his hands behind his head.

  “I was just having fun watching you squirm,” he says. “The truth is I already know what your answer would be.

  “Let me give all you fellas out there a little tip,” he goes on. “You never ask the question if you don’t already know the answer is yes. That goes triple when proposing. If you don’t know the answer is yes, you don’t ask. Why put yourself through it? Why put the girl through it? We’ve all seen the YouTube video of that poor guy asking his lady to marry him on the Diamond Vision screen at a filled sports stadium, and what happens—she runs off crying. That’s not just a no. That’s a humiliating virtual kick in the crotch. You. Don’t. Do. It. You only ask … when you know the answer is yes. End of story.”

  “So what would my answer be?” I say.

  “You’d say yes,” he answers.

  “There goes that sure-of-yourself thing. Too bad it’s based entirely on delusion.”

  “I stand firm on my answer,” he says.

  “You mean my answer,” I say. “We’ll just have to cross that bridge if we get to it.”

  “Berry?” he says, and my heart starts beating faster. Is he really about to do this? Publicly? The brat in me wants to say no, just to prove him wrong, but then again—we know that he’s Guy Number Three, and since I already know it won’t work out with him, I should say yes just to get him out of the way and make room for Mr. Right. Plus, truth be told, if I did say no after that speech of his, Dr. Love might find himself instantly unemployed and unemployable.

  “Yes, Ryan?”

  “Would you like to go out on a date with me?”

  Was.

  Not.

  Expecting.

  That.

  Even with all the windup, I still somehow didn’t think he was really going to do it. “Are you asking me out?” I challenge. “Because that almost sounded like you asking if I’d like to go … if you asked me out.”

  “I would like to take you out on a real date,” Ryan says. His tone is absolutely earnest and a little unsure. I think I even detect a little quiver in his voice. Surprising. “Will you go out with me?”

  “Sure, Ryan,” I say. “I’ll go out with you. Even if only to see what you do when left to your own devices.”

  “I don’t usually incorporate devices until later in the relationship. You know, to spice things up.”

  “Yeah, that’s not what I meant.”

  “Right,” he says with a smile.

  “Well,” he says. “I for one am looking forward to our date.”

  And I … am looking forward to not having to discuss it on the radio.

  Like a river flows surely to the sea

  Darling, so it goes

  Some things are meant to be.

  —ELVIS PRESLEY

  Chapter Twelve

  I’m struck by the irony of just escaping serious injury in a helicopter mishap only to experience a massive cardiac arrest when the cute guy you’re desperately trying not to fall for asks you out—live, on the radio, of all places. My mom used to say (constantly), “When you least expect it, expect it,” which is probably the closest thing I have to a mantra, even though it basically leaves you expecting the worst nearly one hundred percent of the time. Rule number one in the superstition handbook: Bad luck never sleeps. Okay, I’m not one hundred percent sure which rule that is, but it’s definitely in the top ten.

  So after I inhale two Diet Cokes in my office, I gather my things to meet Nat—very uncharacteristically—for a jog. This we’ve decided is going to be our new routine. Rather than meeting at the diner every night and packing on the pounds, we’re going to take up exercising three nights a week and potentially take off a few.

  “You so like him,” she says between heaves of out-of-shape breath.

  “False.”

  “It’s me, Ber. You can be honest here.”

  “I can’t like him,” I say. “He’s the third asshole.”

  “That’s gonna be hell when you become incontinent.”

  “This is serious.”

  “I know it is. Third asshole. Come to think of it, I may have read a novel with that title.”

  “My autobiography.”

  “Then you can write your own ending,” she says, and then gags. “Wow, that was cheezalicious. Forgive me for saying that.”

  “No can do.”

  “But really. Maybe you should give this guy a chance?”

  “No,” I say, standing firm.

  “Then go out with him once more and then dump him. Get it over with, and then Asshole Number Three will be out of the way.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Just keep in mind what they say about best-laid plans.”

  “I forget,” I reply. “Was it something about friends not just being cheesy but also turning into walking clichés?”

  “Yes, I think it was,” she says, and makes a face at me. But I’ve
made my point.

  “So,” I say, trying to change the subject. “What else?”

  “I think Victor is stealing food.”

  “Victor?”

  “The line cook. You know him, Berry, he’s the one who always makes you chicken paillard. He’s always been really good—he’s one of my best. But I’m pretty sure he’s a thief. Which sucks.”

  “What’s he stealing?” I ask.

  “Does it matter? Stealing is stealing.”

  “No, I get it,” I say. “But … there’s a difference between grabbing a handful of grapes at the supermarket when you’re not buying grapes and loading your pockets up with cans of Wolfgang Puck soup.”

  “That’s pretty specific, Ber.”

  “I’ve never stolen soup,” I clarify. “But … I’ve been known to swipe a grape or three.”

  “I get it. You know they’re unwashed, right? Given any thought to where those grapes have been?”

  For as much of a slob as she is in her apartment, there’s a difference between being messy and being dirty, and Nat is a total germophobe. She could single-handedly keep the antibacterial-hand-sanitizer companies in business. I stand by my theory that the main ingredient in hand sanitizer is paranoia.

  “Okay, Nat,” I say, and sigh. “You’ve just successfully detoured me from my life of fruit crime. Now spill.”

  “What?”

  “What do you mean ‘what’? I’m dying to know what he’s stealing.”

  “You really need a hobby,” she says. “He’s stealing staples.”

  “Staples? Staples are cheap. You can get staples for less than a dollar at Office Depot. Or, for that matter, Staples.”

  “Not staples staples. Food staples. Pretty much everything. Eggs, milk, pasta, tomatoes, cheese, flour—”

  “Flour?”

  “Eggs, milk, pasta, tomatoes, and cheese are fine, but you draw the line at flour?”

  “No,” I say. “None of it is fine, but you said ‘staples’ first of all. Those other things qualify. But flour … I mean, it’s bulky.… It’s not a staple per se, unless you’re a baker. I don’t know, it just seems odd.”