I was on the phone with a friend. I could hear my daughter’s TV program in the other room. My friend was saying her husband was acting funny around her. I was telling her that from a man’s perspective she shouldn’t worry. I had the newspaper open to the classifieds and I was circling ‘Driver Wanted’ ads. I specially starred jobs where the listing said ‘Previous Experience Not Necessary’. My friend’s husband had been on long business trips but my instinct was that they weren’t affairs. Was something else the matter? When the doorbell rang I put the phone down to answer it.
The pizza delivery boy turned out to be a girl of about eighteen with dark hair pulled back. Her face was beautiful and honest. My wife and I were separated although not divorced. Still, I knew I shouldn’t linger over the girl’s face and body. But when I paid for the pizzas and the box down she stepped into the house, saying, ‘Are these Rothko?’ They were just hobbyist paintings my wife had liked. They came from an upstate craft fair where my daughter had gotten a bad bee sting. I said,
‘Yes, do you like his work?’
She smiled at the two prints. Her nose wrinkled. She told me she loved art and that she was learning to paint. Her keys jangled from a clamp on her belt loop. Sylvia, my daughter, opened the pizza box without noticing the delivery girl. We smiled and said good night to each other.
That Saturday I went to the car show by myself, which is one of my activities when Sylvia is with her mother. The pizza girl and her boyfriend were there looking at cars. We passed each other along a row and she saw my face. As I was leaving, we bumped into each other. ‘Thanks for the tip, that made my night,’ she said. They were there for the record show next door. They came to look at the car show because, what the hell. Today, she wore just a little makeup around her eyes. She was tall enough that her mouth came to my chest.
She left to grab something and there we were, myself, a forty-two-year-old man with no steady income and a pending divorce, balding and maybe getting an issue with my prostate, and Greg Pinzcek, her boyfriend, who turned out to be the son of a realtor I had done graphic design work for the previous year, an honest and even-tempered guy I might get more business from. But if I ever turned on the computer in my study I would have to look at the iPhoto CD my old college roommate Geoff had mailed to me in March, The images all showed the co-ed I went with and was in love with when Geoff and I roomed together, only she was a porn actress now, breast implants, hard-core. For four weeks I hadn’t entered the study. I was behaving irrationally.
Greg was out of high school but didn’t have college plans. He was going to tour with his band around
‘Look at her, man’, he said as we watched the pizza girl, ‘she asks everybody every single question that pops into her head.’
‘She’s great,’ he was saying. ‘She just doesn’t really get me. She thinks I’m some kind of burn-out because I don’t want to go right back to school,’ he laughed.
I said, ‘You know what, Greg, she really likes you, and that’s what’s important when you’re your age, she’ll stick by you.’ I liked that we were speaking intimately. ‘I can tell you’re somebody who’s going to follow his dream no matter what, and if she really cares about you she’ll be behind you.’ I never spoke to my daughter this way.
Recognizing the record under his arm, I said ‘You’re probably not going to believe it but I went to see that band in
“No shit, I mean...”
“No shit. Actually, coming home on the train back, that’s where I met my wife.”
“You married?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, Chrissie. She’s with my daughter right now.”
He was studying an engine for a long time, and finally said, “If I ever got married I’d want to know everything about life first. To know, like, what I was missing.”
“That’s how I felt, too,” I said.
He glanced over his records and we saw the pizza girl approaching. “Because, like, I could never give up certain things, I feel like,” he said.
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