The Dirty Book Club(22)
“What is it?” Easton asked just as a postcard of the Eiffel Tower slipped out and drifted toward the floor. It read:
Pact #34
MEN COME FIRST, MEN GO FIRST.
See you soon!
All my love and air miles,
—M
Much like stubbing a toe on a coffee table, there was a brief delay before the impact was felt, at which point Gloria leaned against the wall of family photos and muttered, “My God.”
* * *
“YOU’RE BACK!” DAN said, relegating his laptop to the floor like a lumpish cat. He was sitting inside the blue-taped border that was meant to be their couch, back against the wall, as if laying claim to the coveted L seat.
“Seer’sly?” M.J. slurred, the champagne from Gloria’s having gone straight to her tongue.
“I was just about to call you.”
Why? To tell me about the boy band you joined? M.J. might have said to the unbuttoned dress shirt that pooled around his pelvis. But only the Jaws of Life could pry her sense of humor from the wreckage of that afternoon. So Dan got M.J.’s bitchy face instead, followed by her wild-eyed insistence that a phone call was not what she had needed; anything short of an emergency airlift would have been a waste of his time.
“Dan, that wasn’t a funeral, it was a fever dream,” M.J. continued, “and you left me there.” She forced the back strap of her sandal over her heel as if it were a Madden, not a Moschino. “So next time you want to feel Jewish guilty about something, feel Jewish guilty about that.”
He lifted his gaze to her swaying torso. “I do; I feel terrible. It’s just that Randy called and—” A gust blew from his nostrils. “You’re not going to believe this—”
M.J. cocked her head, an invitation to motherfucking try her.
Face suddenly wide with hope, or maybe it was fear, Dan stood and took her hands in his. “Wanna go to Java?”
“Coffee?” M.J. withdrew her hands. “I’m not drunk, Dan, I’m pissed.”
“No.” He laughed. “Java the island.”
“In Indonesia?”
He nodded.
“I’m confused.”
Pacing, Dan admitted that he had also been confused. Not about the date of the trip—he was right about the thirty-first—it’s the month he got wrong.
Panic smacked. “May thirty-first?” M.J. shrieked. “As in forty-eight hours from now?”
“If Randy hadn’t called to make sure I got the water filters . . .” Dan sighed with his entire body. “The point is, I messed up. We’re supposed to leave on your birthday.”
“?‘Supposed to’?” M.J. asked, following Dan to the fridge, where he removed a beer, twisted off the cap, and tossed it in the sink where it landed with a hollow plink.
“I’m not going,” he mumbled into the bottle.
“Can’t change your flight, huh?”
“Actually, I can,” he said.
“Oh.” M.J. reached for his beer and took a swig as a tsunami of insecurity crashed over her. One she had always associated with teenage hormones and thought she’d outgrown decades ago. But being away from Dan, and alone in Pearl Beach, would be unbearable. Was unemployment the new PMS? “So why aren’t you going?”
“I can’t leave you on your birthday,” he said with a pitying pout. “We could fly up to San Francisco so you could meet my family. It’ll be fun. Of course, Randy won’t be there, but you’ll meet him some other time. Unless . . .” He reclaimed his beer and drained it. “You come with me.”
“On a guys’ surf trip?”
“Why not?”
“For one, I’m not a guy, and for two, I don’t surf.”
“And for three, Java is insanely gorgeous, so who cares? We can travel around Jakarta, check out the temples.”
“Aren’t you going to be surfing?”
“Not all day.”
Dan lifted himself to sit on the kitchen counter and began knocking his ankles against the cupboard where pots and pans would go if they had any. “And when I am, you can explore. Check out the volcanoes and the rain forests, learn to surf. Actually, I can’t think of a single reason why you shouldn’t come.”
“I can,” M.J. wanted to say, because the boards she favored met in climate-controlled conference rooms; sharks wore suits, waves were greetings made in passing, and surf was an outdated term for trolling the Internet. And what about pride? She’d have to recuse herself as an independent woman, at least until she stopped living Dan’s life and learned how to live her own. She’d read enough Judy Blume novels to know that.
“So?” Dan asked. “Whadd’ya say?”
M.J. opened the sliding glass door and gazed out at the restless ocean. On the beach, couples were taking lazy all-the-time-in-the-world strolls under the dusking sky. It was time for rosé on the deck, chips, dips, and perfumed conversations about where to go for dinner. Not this. “I don’t understand why you have to go all the way to Java when there are perfectly good waves right here.”
“It’s an adventure.”
M.J. stepped onto the deck and lifted her face to the setting sun, a sun that could just as easily make her feel lonely as it could feel loved. It depended what was inside her when the light hit, what it illuminated. And in that moment it shined on a dozen good reasons to give Dan her blessing and let him have that adventure with his friends. But a dozen wasn’t enough.