Forget About It Page 20

  “Yeah, I ran into La La at the roof deck at Bed.”

  He ran into her. Right. I’m sure he tripped and fell right into her. Meanwhile, I shouldn’t have even remembered who the hell La La was, considering I had amnesia. This would have been a major slip if Dirk wasn’t such a major dolt. But he was. Thank God.

  “So you’re gonna make us rich, huh?”

  “Us?” I asked, cocking my head backward like I was dodging bad breath.

  “You and me, baby. We’re gonna be livin’ large.”

  “Hate to break it to you, but I’m not suing anybody,” I said, and thought out loud, “I thought I’d put the kibosh on that when my over-eager, money-hungry mother brought it up the first time.”

  “Actually, your mom confirmed it.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “She did.”

  “Why are you talking to my mom?”

  “I was checking on you. Just wanted to see how you were doing . . . and she knows I know how to lay down the law . . .”

  “If you were checking on me, why didn’t you just ask me?”

  “Well, I ran into her.”

  “You ‘ran into’ my mom as well? You are doing a lot of running into people, Dirk.”

  “Sam had an after-party the night I ran into her and La La. At your mom’s place.” Images of Dirk, Samantha, and La La having a threesome were running rampant in my brain. It was making me feel ill.

  “Well, I’m not suing anyone,” I clarified.

  “Jordan, you should. It’s such an easy win. Trust me.” Right. Trust you. Did he really think I was going to get rich off Travis? And that he was going to reap the benefits? He deserved every single herpe that was coming to him.

  Dirk took a step closer to me. “Hey,” he said, and then without any warm-up, he placed his hand on my right breast. Was that supposed to be foreplay? I started to crack up. “What’s so funny?” he asked, and I just shook my head. I couldn’t stop laughing. He reminded me of a monkey. I thought I was going to stop breathing, I was laughing so hard. Needless to say, Dirk wasn’t at all amused by my hysterics. “You’re whacked,” he said, and with that he walked over to my door and let himself out. I actually laughed for a good five minutes after he left. I felt a teensy bit guilty about bruising his ego, but that was the most asinine attempt at seduction I’d ever seen. So perfectly conceived and executed, too—what with the “hey.” Pathetic.

  21.

  foghorns be damned

  “Hello?” I said, half into the phone and half into my shoulder as I scrambled to choke off the electronic gurgle.

  “I’d like to speak to Jordan, please.”

  The unmistakable tone and din of background voices, engaged in the same pursuit, told me it was my financial shadow, Cindy from Citibank. “I believe this is she.”

  “Yes, o-oh,” the perky voice said, confused for a moment. “This is Cindy from Citibank.”

  “I didn’t realize we were on a first-name basis, Cindy.”

  “Yes, Jordan, I’m calling again about your credit account, which is now nearly ninety days past due,” she said, suddenly sounding a lot less perky. I knew there’d be a reckoning eventually. There was always a reckoning for me. But I just wasn’t up to it. I wasn’t dressed for it. I resented the calls, and I resented Cindy for being in the right. Besides, I still didn’t have the money. So I decided to let my amnesia do the talking.

  “Kimmy,” I said. “I’m sure you know what you’re doing, and you may even have good records to back it up. But the problem is, since the accident, I have no memory of you or your credit card or your company . . .”

  “I’m calling from Citi—”

  “Or any purchases I may have made on a credit card. I may not have, or if I did, I may not have been me exactly.”

  “When we talked before, you—”

  “There you go again, Candy. I don’t remember ever speaking to you. I have amnesia.”

  “Well, I . . . ” She was flustered and took a moment to regroup. “That’s not . . . Your account has been turned over to collection, i.e., me. And I’ve left several messages and we spoke months ago about this.”

  “I know you believe that, Carrie. And it may be true. But I can’t remember, so I can’t be of any help until I get my memory back.” She was silent.

  “Well, someone needs to be accountable for charges on your card,” she chirped.

  “I guess that’s true. And come to think of it, it’s still not me.” Then I plunged boldly forward. “Maybe if you called my legal guardian. If you really need to get those bills paid, I suggest you take it up with her. Judith Landau. In Nassau. She’s listed.” It was a reprieve only, I knew, and not a noble impulse, but it beat a bankruptcy filing at that moment. “Oh, and . . . Cammy?” I added.

  “Cindy.”

  “Lose my number.”

  I hung up and did a little victory dance. Yes, it was irresponsible, but getting rid of Cindy was so damned fun. Then the phone rang again. Maybe I’d danced too soon. I picked it up with major attitude.

  “What part of lose my number didn’t you get?”

  “Is this a bad time?” It was Travis. Yummy, delicious Travis. And I’d just bitten his poor head off.

  “Travis! I’m sorry—I thought you were someone else.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I thought I was someone else once too, but I worked it out in therapy.”

  “Funny.”

  “Bring a heavy jacket to work with you tomorrow. I’m picking you up when you get off and taking you somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “Good night,” he said in an I’m-not-telling voice and hung up. I fell back into my bed and tossed for about a minute or an hour. I wondered where he was taking me.

  * * * * *

  I spent the next day at work watching the clock, nervously anticipating my date, waiting for the incredibly slow-moving day to end. And the hands weren’t moving. Literally painted on, it seemed. When it finally hit five o’clock, I flew out the door, through the halls, into the elevator, and outside, where I saw Travis with a picnic basket in his hand and a smile on his face.

  “I know you,” I said as I walked over to him.

  “Hi, gorgeous.” I think I turned every shade of red. And he could tell too. He laughed at me blushing and put his arm around me and I kind of nudged him and burrowed into his side.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Let’s go.”

  We walked over to the train station and took the subway to Penn Station. We watched the board for one of the trains of the Long Island Rail Road, and at that point I pretty much could guess where we were going, but I didn’t give it away that I knew.

  * * * * *

  When we got to the lighthouse it was even more breathtaking than I’d imagined. A picturesque ocean-side view . . . sand dunes; a jetty; jagged gray and oatmeal-colored rocks. In fact, the dune atop the wall of rocks atop the water reminded me of a Napoleon dessert. A three-layer cake for the eyes. The lighthouse itself was magnificent—if a bit phallic—and certainly more awe-inspiring than I’d anticipated. It was like a tall, skinny castle, which reeked of girlish symbolism because Travis was, of course, fast on his way to becoming my prince. Anyway, the place was the height of cinematic romance.

  “This is it,” Travis said, arms outstretched.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “You’re beautiful,” he said, and it made my insides feel like a gooey marshmallow. I loved the way he said it. He didn’t say I was beautiful to him, or I looked beautiful in this dress or with my hair that way . . . He just said it simply, matter-of-factly. I was beautiful. And it was probably the first time I ever believed it to be true. “I just wanted to see you blush again.”

  “I don’t blush,” I said, suddenly feeling less beautiful and more like a turnip.

  “How do you know? You don’t remember anything about yourself,” he teased.

  “Well, I don’t think I do.”

  “I’m sorry t
hat you don’t know for sure—and that it’s my fault.”

  “It’s such not a big deal,” I said. “Really. Plus, not all memories are good ones. Maybe you did me a favor.”

  “I still feel bad.”

  “Can’t you just forget about my amnesia?”

  “Forget about it. Good one.” He laughed.

  We got quiet for a minute. “This place is incredible,” I said at last.

  “So what do you think? Good spot for a restaurant?”

  “I think it’s perfect. I mean, it’s a little remote, but that’s the point, right? What are you going to call it?”

  “I think, The Beacon,” he said. “I was thinking about Safe Harbor, but that sounds too much like a halfway house.”

  “Or a bad TV show.”

  “Or that.” He smiled. “But I wanted it to be symbolic, so I think I’m going with The Beacon.”

  “I like it,” I said. “It has a warmth. Ships lost at sea, looking for a safe dock . . . and here it is.”

  “That’s right.”

  He moved in close to me, and there was some serious first-kiss tension in the air. I felt the usual kaleidoscope of excitement in my stomach, but he didn’t lean in and go for it, so my nervousness forced me to just keep talking. My heart could take only so much.

  “I think it works on so many levels,” I said. “I mean it’s perfect for your restaurant, but it’s such a metaphor for the most basic human needs.”

  “Speaking of basic human needs . . . I’ve been wanting to do this for a while now . . .” He leaned in to kiss me, and I could tell it was going to be heaven . . . and just as our lips were about to touch, the most deafening foghorn on the eastern seaboard let one rip. I’m talking an earsplitting, earthshaking horn blowing right that second. We both started to laugh. “Of course that wasn’t exactly how I’d planned it,” he said. I looked up at him and kind of bit down on my bottom lip, waiting for what would happen next. “I’m almost scared to try again.”

  “Don’t be,” I said, although it came out more like a whisper. And he leaned in and our lips touched, and the foghorn blasting my insides generously outdid the one we’d heard moments prior. In fact, all the foghorns in the entire world could have blown at that second and I don’t think either of us would have noticed.

  We came out of our kiss smiling.

  “So, now comes the inevitable question,” I said. “How come you don’t have a girlfriend?” He looked thoughtful, then smiled before he answered.

  “I think I do. I hope I do,” he said with a shy smile. That? Was so the right answer. But not what I meant exactly. I was grinning nonetheless.

  “You know what I meant.”

  “I could have asked you the same thing,” he said.

  “I beat you to it.”

  “I’ve had my share of relationships . . . but I haven’t found someone that I really felt comfortable with. Or if I thought I did . . . it turned out . . . you know?” Oh, I knew. It was like he had read my mind. “And that’s really important to me. I need to be able to just totally be myself and know that this person knows me inside and out, character defects and all, and loves me anyway.”

  “I’m sure that wouldn’t be hard.”

  “You’d be surprised,” he said with a hint of something creeping in. He’d been hurt. And that was the first glimmer of his past that I’d ever really seen.

  I had no doubt that the more I got to know Travis, the more I’d fall for him. I was starting to have a needy moment. “So are you comfortable with me? I mean, I know we don’t know each other that well yet, but . . .”

  “Yes. I am. This is going to sound funny, but I was comfortable from the first time you opened your mouth. When you were lying on the street after the accident and you made that joke in the midst of everything . . . I swear I just felt something. Like I was meant to meet you.”

  “Well, you could have just introduced yourself,” I teased.

  “Where’s the fun in that? I like to scrape my women off the sidewalk.”

  “Nice.”

  “You cracked me up that day,” he said. “You always crack me up. Don’t get me wrong, I think you’re a knockout and attraction is important, but so is feeling like you can be buddies. And I feel that way with you.” He got quiet for a minute. Then turned it back on me. “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” Hello, reality check. I did have a boyfriend. I told myself that Dirk was just a technicality at this point and that I’d take care of that soon.

  “Well, I don’t remember really. You know . . .” My convenient new fallback. “But I think it would be really important that someone get me.”

  “I think I get you,” he said.

  “Oh, you’ve got me all right,” I said back. He smiled a mile wide and motioned to the picnic basket.

  “Hungry?”

  “Starving,” I told him.

  * * * * *

  Travis got lucky. It was a case of perfect timing. I don’t mean “got lucky” got lucky—although that did happen in due time (three weeks in, after date number five, with the window slightly cracked to let in cool air and the heater running on low speed in a probably futile attempt to cover the sound of our delirious joy and the bed frame knocking against the nightstand). I meant he’d got lucky by having the very good fortune to mow me down with his car at the precise moment when I’d hit bottom, when I’d lost all faith in love and its mirages. So even a so-so performance from him might have earned my approval. But his was a tour de force of originality, cleverness, thoughtfulness, and happy coincidences.

  You can say that I was the hungry diner to whom everything tasted good—fine; then my advice is to go into every relationship hungry. Fed up as I was with Dirk, Travis seemed like the antidote or rather . . . the anti-Dirk. A good deal of it may have been ordinary early-courtship glow, but you could pretty much slap any adjective beginning with in- or un- on Dirk, then strip the prefix and you’d have Travis. Uncaring, inconsiderate, intolerable, unfeeling—the list is endless.

  We ate Moroccan food with our hands at a canopied private “kissing booth” table in a notoriously romantic restaurant—dark wood and tapestry decor and belly dancers scattered about. There was the option to close your canopy to the rest of the room, and from the sounds wafting from our neighbors in the next booth over, we were pretty sure the couple in question’s main course was inter. Travis signed us up for a one-night-only cooking class, so that I could embarrass myself attempting to do something more than my famous pasta dish—a dish whose secret ingredient started with RA and ended in GU.

  This started our phase of what we called One Night Stands. Each of us would choose something we’d never done or at least not with any regularity, alternating turns, and we’d make a night of it. His job was easier than mine because all he had to suggest was anything and I’d pretend I had no memory of ever having done it.

  On my next turn I took us on the Staten Island Ferry at sunset. Travis claimed to have been purposely trying to avoid Staten Island but agreed to the round trip since technically, if we didn’t deferry, he wouldn’t have been on the island. We held hands, took in the breathtaking view, and watched a drunk guy puke over the railing. You sometimes forget to factor in the bonus joys of public transportation.

  Inspired by the lush, I took us back to my apartment where I had a bottle of wine, a foreign film—sans subtitles—and informed him that the night’s activity would be to make up the dialogue in English as we watched. I somehow managed to turn the film into something Ed Wood might be proud of. Travis insisted it was a Western.

  Back and forth we’d take turns outdoing each other with firsts. We’d make plans for “sometime in the next few days” but end up together nearly every night. One bitter-cold evening in mid-December, he gave me his theory.

  “Romo,” he said.

  “You have a dog?”

  “Romantic momentum,” he said. “Good things tend to get better. They pick up speed. Zing!” he said, shooting his hand directly past my right temple.
“Things that are going nowhere get worse.”

  “Zing?”

  “Don’t fight physics, baby.” He tilted his cup of hot chocolate toward me.

  “Have you had this theory for long?” I asked him.

  He sipped his drink. “Thought it up in the cab on the way over.”

  I didn’t dwell too much on the theory, though it was typical, charming, offbeat stuff from him. And I kept secret my own theory: If you spend enough time with someone who treats you like a precious commodity—say, an open gas station when you’re running on empty at 3 A.M.—and every time you see that person turn away, you want to tap him on the shoulder so you can see him again, there’s a word for that too.

  * * * * *

  It wasn’t just my love life—work had been going great too. Lydia stayed out of my way, and I was getting credit for my own ideas, sort of. The truth was, as a junior copywriter (my title was “copywriter”), it was my job to make the senior copywriters look good, but at least I was working toward something and I was definitely on the right path. I was working on a new campaign for an Italian coffee press and I’d just come up with a brilliant campaign.

  But before I could write it down, and just as I was thinking how nice it had been, not having to deal with Lydia, she walked into my office, smiling this tremendously awkward smile. I wasn’t used to her smiling at me period, so it was totally creeping me out. She was looking around my office like she was all of a sudden interested in my life. She picked up a picture of Todd and me and looked at it. That picture had been on my desk in my cubicle outside her office for two years. She’d never paid it a moment’s notice. I could tell she wanted to ask about it. She probably wondered if he was my boyfriend. I could have screwed with her and said he was my husband, which technically was true, but I didn’t want her to even be in my office to begin with, so the idea of messing with her lost its appeal.