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“Gross? It’s okay. You can say it. I know he is.”
“I knew I should have come over last night. You’re not to be trusted. How many times do I have to tell you? Holly Hastings good. Bicycle boy bad.”
“I was working late, and he was there picking something up….”
“Mmm-hmm…”
“Look, I finally finished the piece about that new parking lot on Broadway and I wanted to celebrate! Is that so wrong?” Very occasionally, when they tired of my constant begging for assignments or felt a hint of guilt after turning down yet another one of my story proposals, one of the editors will ask me to fill a few very unimportant inches, usually sandwiched on some back page between the calls to tender and the previous day’s corrections.
She peers at me skeptically. By now, George has long since inhaled her salad and has moved on to eating her dressing-on-the-side with a spoon.
“Well, I was home alone, and would have been delighted to go out for a drink.”
“Umm…didn’t you have that coven thing with your mom last night?” As the product of a mixed lesbian marriage, George was half Wiccan, half Jewish.
“Oh please, Holly.”
It was worth a shot. I knew full well that the next Wiccan day of worship wasn’t until the fall equinox.
“Okay, so maybe I just needed to be held.”
“But by Jean-Jean?”
“What can I say? I’m pathetic,” I groan. “What’s wrong with me?”
“You’re just a lonely, lonely woman. You know, I bet if you found a job you liked better, everything else would fall into place. And one that uses FedEx instead of that shitty messenger service.”
Oh, if only it were that simple.
“There’s nothing really wrong with my job. I can think of at least a half dozen people who would kill to work there. It’s me, G.I know it is! It’s like all of a sudden, I’m so bloody bored and frustrated and negative about it that I don’t know what to do with myself. And it’s not like I’d be able to find something better in Buffalo, anyway… I’d have to move to New York for that, and God knows that would be a little more than I could handle right now! Besides, I’d rather be at the Bugle even if there’s no chance of me ever getting promoted to anything, ever, than at some boring software company or bank writing internal newsletters. My job’s fine. It’s me that isn’t!”
“Well, that’s a relief. Because frankly, just being bored at work isn’t a good enough reason to drive you into the arms of Jean-Jean.”
“I’m teetering on the brink!” I shriek. “I’m playing Russian roulette with my love life…. God! I must be insane. Who knows what else I’m capable of!?”
She nods sympathetically and glances around to see if my ranting is disturbing any of the other patrons. “I know, Holly. It sucks.”
But there’s no stopping me. “You know, up until a couple of years ago, everything was fine…. I liked work. I was proud of my job. Yeah, I was! I learned something new every day, even if it was just useless stuff like how much Sabres tickets were going for, or how to spell the names of rare diseases. And you know what else? I was even able to write. Not that I always did, mind you, because usually I didn’t, but I could, you know? When I wanted to…”
“Calm down. I remember. There was that short story about the big empty house with all the locked doors and the kid with the key-shaped fingers. It was very Twilight Zone. You could have submitted that somewhere, you know. It was good. Really good.”
“You think?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Maybe I should have written a whole book of short stories,” I sigh. “It was totally my genre.”
“Still could be.”
“Don’t you ever just feel like things used to be better in general? Like weekends. Weekends used to be so much fun, remember? Clubbing Fridays and Saturdays. Sometimes even Thursdays. Waiting in line at Blaze all night. Who cares if we even got in? That was fun! Why don’t we ever do that anymore?”
“Blaze burned down. And I think you might be romanticizing things a little…. We mostly just got drunk at McGinty’s. There was never any lineup there.”
I laugh. “Probably because there were no doors on the stalls in the bathroom. What a dive! Still, it was great, wasn’t it? But now whenever we go somewhere, I feel like everyone’s five years younger than me and five times hotter and has better clothes and better jobs. Don’t you find?”
“Um, this is still Buffalo we’re talking about. You may very well have one of the best jobs in town,” she points out. “And nobody has good clothes.”
I raise an eyebrow at her.
“Except you,” she corrects herself.
“Thanks. But I have to buy everything over the Internet because you can’t find so much as a Louis Vuitton key fob in this town, not that I can afford one, anyway. I hate Buffalo, I feel like I’m over the hill at twenty-eight and…oh, screw it—I’m just going to say it. I want a boyfriend! I know it’s wrong, but I want a boyfriend. I want to be in love. So badly. It’s pathetic, I know, but I’m ready for my man. I really am. I’m tired of being above it all.”
George stares at me blankly. I’ve broken a sacred secret contract, and admitted That Which Should Never be Admitted by enlightened twenty-first-century women.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“Sorry. I was just wondering what a key fob is.”
“I guess I thought that once I truly stopped caring about being alone, I wouldn’t have to be.”
“Like attaining nirvana the moment you shed all of your worldly concerns?”
“Exactly.”
The waitress, who has been listening in on most of our conversation, pops over to strike while the iron is hot. “Dessert, ladies?”
“Cheesecake,” I manage faintly.
“And two forks,” George adds. “You will find him, Holly. You’re both just doing your thing until you’re ready to meet, remember? And when you do, it’ll be forever. Isn’t that your theory?”
It is, but the whole Someday-My-Prince-Will-Come thing just isn’t working for me anymore. What I need is a warm body. With a heart. And a head. And a… Hell, who am I kidding? I want the whole damn package.
“All these years…” I moan weakly. “All these years, and I’ve just been sitting on the shelf, like an unwanted carton of milk about to expire.” The painful truth is that I’ve only had one long-term relationship, and that was back during my first year at Erie.
“That’s not exactly true…”
“Jim doesn’t count. Our relationship was based on a lie.”
After the crushing disappointment of graduating from high school still a virgin (I was pretty enough in a plain sort of way, just ridiculously shy around guys), I allowed myself to be tricked into a relationship with one of my brother Bradley’s loser friends. Jim was four years older than me, something that impressed me to no end, and still a virgin, too. I would later discover that as part of Bradley’s continuing efforts to get poor Jim laid, he and his friends decided I would make the perfect sacrificial lamb, since apparently none of the girls his own age would have anything to do with him and my thoughtful brother had overheard me crying to a friend about the humiliating prospect of entering college never having gotten any myself.
Bradley told me Jim liked me, and I eagerly fell in love with him before our first date. Things really blossomed from there. Jim and I were both glad to finally be having sex, so much so that he was even willing to endure the constant ribbing from his friends at not kicking me to the curb the morning after I gave it up, precisely seventy-two hours into our courtship. For my part, I was happy to overlook his dubious career goals—any job that allowed him to collect a paycheck while still being able to smoke pot all day long, a plan that came to glorious fruition in a part-time gig he landed driving one of those mini sidewalk-snow-removal buggies. Naive young thing that I was, and because Jim wasn’t exactly an evil person, I was also able to overlook those defects in his hygiene and intellect that had likely offended every other woman he’d met prior to me in order to experience the joys of couplehood for the first time.
Alas, the beautiful thing that was us casually dropped dead at a New Year’s Eve party about a year and a half into our romance, when Jim’s beer-soaked buddy Wojack marveled aloud at how much money had changed hands over the consummation of our relationship. I dumped Jim on the spot, after he high-fived Bradley instead of trying to lie his way out of it. And if I could have dumped Bradley that night, you can bet your life I would have. Making book on the Sabres was one thing, but your sister’s virginity? It’s no wonder my self-esteem’s a little shaky when it comes to men.
“The years are flying by, G. By the time someone wants me, I’ll be rotten and lumpy.”
“Lumpy’s not so bad,” George says. “I’m already lumpy.”
“But you’re good lumpy.”
My best friend’s waist-to-hip ratio is fairly generous, though it certainly doesn’t seem to bother anybody except her. When we walk down the street together, George’s jiggles and curves and curls garner far more lustful stares than my straight lines do. Still, she’s pretty timid when it comes to men, and almost completely oblivious to her effect on them. Her “sort of” boyfriend—one of our old creative-writing profs, a serial student-dater who’s been toying with her for years—isn’t helping her self-esteem much, either.
“Good lumpy? I wouldn’t go that far.” She snorts at the suggestion that such a thing might actually be possible. “I’d take an A-cup any day. You don’t know how lucky you are.”
“So why hasn’t it happened for me yet?”
The closest I’d ever come to a relationship since Jim (and now Jean-Jean, I suppose) was a string of three one-night stands with the same guy. Over the course of two semesters. He was a fairly cute bartender at a popular club just off campus—quite a coup, but I could never shake the feeling that Freddie thought I was a different person each time.
“Just give it time, Holly. It will. I promise. For both of us. And we’re in it together till then…”
At least I have that. With George around, I know I will never really be alone. We sit in silence for a bit, finishing the cheesecake. Good old cheesecake. How can you be sad when it’s giving you a great big hug from the inside?
“Maybe I just need to regroup,” I say finally. “Get a handle on things. Figure out where my life is going.”
“That’s the spirit!”
We pay the bill and head outside. It’s late August, and very, very hot. Three blocks away, the mirrored windows of the Buffalo Bugle tower shine brightly before the mostly older buildings of the city skyline. Inside, I know exactly what’s going on: absolutely nothing of any interest whatsoever. Today is exactly the same as yesterday, which was exactly the same as the day before that, and the day before that. I want to walk in the other direction.
“I haven’t taken a holiday since Christmas, you know.”
“Nobody could fault your work ethic.”
“It’s not doing me any good. Nobody notices. I’m there late all the time, working on all kinds of things that aren’t even part of my job description.”
“They notice, Holly. You’re really good at what you do. Look, call me later and we’ll figure it out. Just promise me you won’t start smoking again! At least not today…”
“Smoking, drinking, snorting—what’s the difference?” I laugh. “Remember, I know how it’s all going to end, anyway, so I may as well have a good time now. In fact, we should probably go out tonight and toast my long, lonely life. Like a premortem wake!”
“Oh, yeah!” She grins. “Now, that’s my girl!”
We part ways and George heads back toward the dingy bookshop and her own lame job, which is just as boring and futile as my own, although, it suddenly occurs to me, she never really seems to complain about it.
Fortified by diner food and the promise of a good night out, my optimism surges. And thinking about John Michael Whitney reminds me that my life—even the sad and lonely one I’d envisioned for myself that morning—reads like an absolute fairy tale. My obituary will be a call to arms; things are going to change.
Cy will have to understand. Though ground down by years of unpaid overtime, he rarely takes a day off, opting instead to live and eat and sleep in his office and take it all way too seriously. It’s not that Cy’s nasty, or even sexist—something I’d heard implied more than once by my oft-over-looked female coworkers—but he just doesn’t seem to get that not everybody can give one hundred and ten percent for $24,500 a year and no dental benefits.
“I need to take some personal time,” I tell him as soon as I get back from lunch.
Personal time, I am fully aware, does not count toward employees’ vacation time, of which I still have one week left and am hesitant to squander before Christmas. Though a right guaranteed by law, taking personal time usually imparts a faint whiff of mental instability, unless of course there’s been a death in the family. If Cy perceives my asking for it now as crazy or, even worse, frivolous or lazy, it might move me down a notch in his books, and I need him on my side if I am ever to get ahead at the Bugle.
“I see,” he says without looking up from his screen. “How much?”
“A week.”
“When?”
“Starting Monday?”
He glances at me. “That’s soon. Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” I sigh. “But I’m a bit…burned out.”
That oughta work.
Most of the senior reporters and editors I know seem to regard journalism as a sort of religion, with cynicism standing in where faith should be. It’s their lives, twenty-four/seven, and it’s easy to become weary under the weight of it all, whether you’re reporting live from the trenches of a war-torn Iraq like Christiane Amanpour or penning “The Buffalo Entertainment Beat” like the Bugle’s own Bucky Jones. In theory, it should be no different for me. Invoking a burnout, like losing the faith, is a serious admission, and one not to be taken lightly. Plus, it might even have the added benefit of suggesting to him that I take my job more seriously than I actually do.
“Okay,” Cy says. “Just get that intern whatsisname to cover you.”
“That’s all?”
“Yup. Have fun. And shut the door on your way out—I can’t seem to get a fucking moment’s peace today.”
So that’s it. I am so easily replaceable that an unpaid intern whose area of expertise is photocopying his ass is able to do my job on a moment’s notice.
I back out of his office and shut the door. His name, stenciled in stout black capitals, stares me square in the face: CY THURRELL, SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR. Cy had finished school nearly two years after I did, though he was only one year younger. He’d started at the Bugle as a lowly free-lancer three years ago and moved up the ranks at the speed of light.
It has actually turned out to be a pretty big news day for Buffalo—a small warehouse fire and a hit-and-run involving a monster truck and a traffic light downtown—so the frenzied comings and goings of my coworkers are more than enough to distract me. The prospect of an accidental death or two has whipped me into stand-by mode, and I await intelligence of any fatalities with my usual combination of concerned journalistic professionalism and detached personal curiosity.
Now I suppose I should ask anyone who might find my anticipation of tragedy distasteful or inappropriate to please keep in mind that this is what I do, day in day out, and am no more eager for news of someone’s death than a garbageman is eager to see the can on the curb. But I will admit that five years at this gig may have hardened me a little to the whole concept of death and dying, to the point where I can probably think of it and speak of it with more ease than most. I consider this a blessing of sorts, since it has freed me from the usual hang-ups and sentimentality associated with the whole mess, provided the death in question is not my own, of course.
The key, in my line of work, is to strive for balance. And what could be more life-affirming than someone who makes you thank heaven you’re alive? Jesse, a reporter for the City Desk and deliverer of a crush that comes and goes, scoots over on his chair to apprise me of the situation.
“Fire’s not too bad. Team’s there now,” he says, with a crack of his gum. Normally, that sort of terse sexiness would be enough to send me into a tizzy of stuttered responses and imagined wedding-planning, but today I’m not up for it, even though he is in Abercrombie & Fitch from head to toe.
“What about the monster truck?”
“No word on any casualties yet, Hastings.”
“Except for the light, of course.”
“Ha! Except for the light, yeah.”
I’m always my bravest around Jesse when the crush is in its dormant phase. Nevertheless, I half hope my sympathy for defenseless city property and humor in the face of senseless tragedy might awaken him to all the many wonders of me, but instead of asking me out, he just grins and propels himself backward down the corridor on his squeaky old office chair, quads bulging suggestively through perfectly worn-out khakis.
I long ago dismissed the possibility of anything ever happening between us, owing in equal parts to his gorgeous girlfriend and the fact that he rarely gets my jokes, which I know make me come off as an absolute idiot. Still, I can’t resist, meaning the better part of my interaction with Jesse consists of awkward explanations. So the traffic light quip was a significant achievement, and by the end of the day, I’ve decided that we’re going to have exactly four children: two boys and two girls, all black-haired and blue-eyed like him, but the girls would have my adorable freckles.
In the end, the monster truck claimed no human victims, so I have no subjects today other than the usual cancer-stricken and myocardially infarcted—and myself.
chapter 3
Goodbye, Norma Jean
Saturday afternoon and it’s Madison’s sixth birthday party. I have spent the past week trying to change my future and this is my reward. I brought George along to dull the pain, since I’ve already spent three out of the last five weekends watching my various nieces and nephews blow out candles and tear through stacks of gifts like tornadoes. Don’t get me wrong—I love each and every one of the little brats dearly (except for maybe the twins), but they do try the patience. To complicate matters further, I am seriously considering hooking up with the usual entertainment: the guy in the furry purple Barney suit. Not that I’ve ever seen his face, but that’s part of what intrigues me about him.
In addition to the possibility of seeing my mystery man, I am also hoping the party will give me a chance to talk to my brother about his job. Cole works at a car-parts factory in a depressed little rust-belt town northeast of the city.
“If I’d known there was going to be so much food, I would have stayed home,” George complains sullenly as we settle into lawnchairs as far removed from the mayhem as possible. “I’ve resolved to lose ten pounds by Thanksgiving or else.”
