Remember When 2 Page 4

  We had a whole wonderful night ahead of us. I decided that there wasn’t any point in going out of my way to try and sabotage it.

  Chapter 5

  SUBCONSCIOUS CRUELTY

  Do you remember that song, “Summer in the City”? There used to be a 4H or Young People’s Day Camp commercial or something with that song in it that played all the time back in the seventies, advertising their summer program, showing all these blissful, New Yorkian children playing in the sun. It was supposed to be happy and fun and showing what a city kid could do with their summer vacation, with a little help from their organization.

  But I used to watch that ad from the confines of my refrigerated suburban living room thinking that I had it way too good. The kids in that commercial always looked like they were about to melt into the scorching, steaming blacktop. They spent their summers cooling off at a busted fire hydrant, while I had an entire swimming pool at my disposal right in my own backyard. I used to break out into a heat rash just from watching that commercial. Plus, I could never get the lyrics about the back of my neck getting dirty and gritty out of my head.

  I mean, that line pretty much summed up the entire seventies. Just take a look at any Norman Lear TV show, and you can see what we were surrounded with. All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Good Times... So much of the seventies was just so dirty. Men wore their hair too long and nobody’s clothes matched. It was like everyone was suffering from the effects of all those drugs they took in the sixties. Porn ‘stache, Scotch plaid pants and a purple turtleneck? DYN-O-MITE!

  I’d lived in New York for close to nine years at that point, but still, a hot day never passed without The Lovin’ Spoonful’s song invading my brain.

  During late August in New York, the heat was practically a solid. A thick, squishy, gelatinous muck rising from the blacktop of the street and the grates in the sidewalk, only to be inhaled into its inhabitants’ tired lungs. The car exhaust and pollution would settle over everything like a sprinkling of gothic fairy dust, sticking to the beads of sweat on my skin. There were days when I could swipe my face with a tissue, and I would actually see the ashy residue evidenced right there on the Kleenex.

  New York City was the most awesome place on Earth.

  I loved the energy, the noise, the very living and breathing pulse of it all. The rough edges of its hurried citizens only added to the appeal. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Song lyrics as fact. Art as life.

  More specifically, Greenwich Village was the most awesome neighborhood in the most awesome place on Earth. I felt more cozy and at home down there than I did amongst all that glass and steel uptown. There were no skyscrapers at our corner of the world, just our low-rise brownstones and architecturally interesting squat buildings. It was so incredibly artsy-fartsy and cool; a people-watchers paradise. It offered its own unique backdrop, between the music and the smells and the food and the people. Mere steps outside my door, there were art galleries, ninety-nine seat theaters and trendy boutiques, not to mention the beatnik coffee houses, swinging jazz clubs, and super-hip bars.

  My apartment was in the West Village on the top floor of a fourth floor walkup. It was certainly no penthouse, however, but I did have a fire escape balcony—where my plants lived and died—with a staircase that led to the roof. When the weather was just right, I’d station my lawn chair up there for a day of sunbathing, and if I closed my eyes, I could almost pretend I was at the beach. Cocktail in hand, blessed breeze blowing, I’d change out the sound of cars grumbling and horns honking for undulating waves and yipping seagulls.

  But it was Sunday, so I knew I wouldn’t be lounging around the rooftop oasis. Lisa and I had a standing lunch date every week, and this particular Sunday would see me in Jersey.

  She and I had been meeting as a weekly ritual since her recent move back to Norman that year. Even though I was in New York, we were still able to see each other a lot more often, being that we were only a short car trip away from one another. Sometimes, she and her husband Pickford would come into the city for a night out on the town (where they wound up crashing on my futon a time or two), but we had a standing appointment every Sunday regardless. It was awesome to have her back in Jersey.

  Lisa and Pickford had spent what felt like forever out west. Pick had played four stellar years with the Bruins at UCLA, then was drafted by the Suns in an early round. They’d barely settled into their new house in Phoenix when Pick was diagnosed with a shredded Achilles tendon during his second season. It turned out he had bone spurs that had gone undetected for years, eventually doing a number on his right leg. The damage laid him up in the hospital during the rest of the season and required no less than three surgeries over the following years. Even with extensive rehabilitation and months of physical therapy, the injury turned out to be a career-ender.

  At least as a player.

  Thankfully, it wasn’t long before the New York Knicks came calling. Turned out, Van Gundy was a fan, and asked ex-local-boy Pickford Redy if he’d like to join the assistant coaching staff of the Knicks. He barely had the offer on the table before Pick and Lisa were on the road and on their way home to the east coast. I figured it was a bit of good luck—during a really bad time—that finally got the two of them back home again. Lisa said it was more like a godsend, because the offer in itself was enough to jostle her husband out of the depressed funk he’d been in since the injury.

  They took up residence in the most charming little waterfront home on Lenape Lake, coincidentally built by my cousin Jack. He and his fiancée Livia had just bought a place not far from there, and was the one who tipped them off to the property.

  * * *

  Lenape Lake was a private, wooded community within the larger town of Norman. There was a cute little pub on the west side where a peninsula jutted out into the water, giving beautiful views from either the deck out back or through the three glass walls inside the restaurant. It was a place my father had brought Bruce and me sporadically over the years, and had become Lisa’s and my most recent favorite lunch destination.

  I walked out onto the deck where she was already waiting at a shaded table at the edge of the water, reading the Daily News. It was a gorgeous day outside—sunny, but cool—and I was grateful that we’d be able to take advantage of the outdoor seating.

  She saw me from across the deck and folded her paper onto the seat next to her. Before I could even sit myself down at the table, she said, “Lemme see that thing!”

  She immediately reached out and grabbed my hand once I was within her arms’ range, and spent an exorbitant amount of time appraising the diamond on my finger. I’d had a manicure a few days prior in order to display the ring to its proper advantage, and I was grateful that it had held up long enough to pass Lisa’s inspection.

  She let out with a low whistle. “Wow. That is some ring. Your man has good taste.”

  I reclaimed my hand and looked down at the shiny, foreign object on it. I still hadn’t gotten used to the feeling of it on my finger, the way that it would tangle in my hair when I ran a hand over my scalp, or the way its sparkle still managed to catch me off guard. I took a moment to stare at the alien entity on my left hand, trying to take in everything about it, from the large, round center stone... to the teensy tiny black dot at the very center of it.

  Huh. I hadn’t noticed that before.

  It was a beautiful ring and the flaw was miniscule, really. But for some reason, my eyes managed to zero in on it until I could see nothing else but that one, stupid speck. I thought about pointing it out to Lisa, but she’d already launched into a Q and A.

  “So, what are our plans for the wedding?”

  Of course Lis would refer to the wedding planning as ‘ours’. It went without saying that she’d be my Maid—er, Matron—of Honor. I bit my lip at her across the table and replied, “Um, I hadn’t really thought about it yet. I guess we’ll have it somewhere in Jersey, right?”

  “Don’t ask me! It’s your wedding, dopey.
Haven’t you even thought about that at all?”

  I remembered Lisa’s wedding from a few years before. The ceremony was a beautiful but simple affair at the Redys’ church, but the reception took place in a much more elaborate setting down in West Orange.

  She’d driven me crazy with every detail about the big day, and I spent less time helping her plan and more time trying to chill her the hell out. We’d visited practically every reception hall in New Jersey over a two-week period, trying to find the place with the highest ceilings (in order to accommodate Pick’s NBA buddies) and the prettiest grounds (in order to accommodate Lisa’s “vision”).

  Oh. And a staircase. It was crucial to have a flipping staircase for the pictures.

  She must have tried on fifty dresses before narrowing her choice down to the ultimate victor (It had to be cream. Not off-white, not beige, cream), and I must have eaten forty thousand calories worth of cake samples. Thankfully, the silver bridesmaid gowns we had to wear were corset-style. Not very comfortable, but they matched Lisa’s ideal of “traditionally modern”, and made me look even skinnier than I did pre-cake.

  And the flowers. I swear, I’d never seen so many flowers in my entire life! Should you ever find yourself in a life-or-death situation where it is absolutely imperative to make the distinction between “dusty rose” and “fairy pink”… call Lisa. She’s the girl for the job.

  As amazing as Lisa and Pickford’s wedding was, I didn’t think I wanted anything that involved.

  But still. I guess I should have figured that at least some forethought would be expected of me before walking down that aisle.

  “Well, sort of. Not really, I guess.” I laughed and added, “We just got engaged four days ago! Guess I’m just not the super-planner you are, Bridezilla.”

  “I was not a bridezilla!”

  I started to crack up, watching Lisa getting all defensive. “You’re right. Bridezilla’s probably too harsh. You were more like Princess Di on acid.”

  Our waiter came out to take our order even though neither one of us had even cracked open a menu. Not that it mattered. Lisa always got the Nicoise Salad—without anchovies—and I always got the Cobb.

  After our server took his leave, I sank back into my deck chair, looking out over the lake. It really was a beautiful day- bright and clear and breezy; a nice departure from the perpetually grey and noisy city that I called home. Lisa knew how much I enjoyed some quiet every now and then—even if she rarely respected that aspiration—so it was a good thing that she’d cracked open her newspaper instead of blabbering my ear off. Silence was easier to obtain when she was engrossed with the Style section.

  I decided to join her, reaching a hand across the table and asking, “Hey, gimme the crossword, will ya?”

  Lisa rifled through the paper as I dug around in my purse for a pencil. She handed it over and went back to her article, and I displayed some rudimentary origami skills, getting the page folded just the right way for optimal cruciverbalism...

  ...when right there on Page Six was a picture of none other than my old high school boyfriend, Trip Wilmington.

  I immediately gasped at the sight of him, but it’s not as though I hadn’t experienced that scenario before. It seemed he’d been popping up sporadically in those days. I would pick up the occasional copy of People, or Entertainment Weekly, or Us, and every now and again find his gorgeous mug staring back at me from the pages. But mainly, I encountered him on movie screens, and most recently, he’d invaded my home via my dream.

  I still couldn’t quite believe that my high school sweetheart grew up to become a Hollywood movie star.

  He’d started going by the name Trip Wiley by that time, and I was well aware of the fact that he’d been making his living as an actor. I know I may have been a bit more attuned to that information than your average entertainment-seeker (given our prior association) but he was actually starting to become kind of famous. And there I was, looking at his picture right there on Page Six.

  “Holy shit! It’s Trip!”

  Lisa spun her head around, looking behind her before realizing I was talking to the newspaper. I slid the page across the table and showed her the picture.

  She said, “Mmmm. Trip Wilmington. He was yummy.”

  Don’t I know it.

  “Jesus. I still can’t believe he’s like, getting famous.”

  Lisa took a sip from her Sprite. “I know. How weird is that? We know a famous person. You had sex with a famous person!”

  Does it still count if he and I hooked up before he was famous? It’s funny, but the last time I even saw him in person was the morning after we’d slept together, the morning I was leaving for college.

  I didn’t see his face until years later, when I went to see Failing to Fly, an aptly-named piece of garbage that almost had me walking out of the theater. But all of a sudden, Trip popped up onscreen and almost gave me a heart attack. It was a throwaway scene to the rest of the world, a silent appearance of about ten seconds total. It happened so quickly and unexpectedly that I wasn’t even sure I’d really seen it.

  I wrote him in L.A. to ask him about it, but my letter went unanswered. It turned out to be the last one I ever sent him.

  In the summer of ‘98, Devin had taken me to see The Fairways for our very first “date”. About midway through, Trip showed up in a speaking role. He wasn’t onscreen very long, but I almost fainted dead away. I didn’t say anything to Devin about it and just kept the revelation to myself. He and I barely knew each other at the time, and truly, Devin knew so many famous people. His mother was a Tony Award-Winning Choreographer for crying out loud. He grew up around all that crap—actors and dancers and artists and writers—all the most creative and world-renowned personalities that New York had to offer. He probably would have laughed at me for making a big deal out of knowing “guy at bus stop”.

  Soon after that, around Thanksgiving, Trip had a small but meaty role as a male escort in Bonded. I hadn’t seen that one in the theaters, but the commercials for it ran nonstop and the buzz was pretty big. Even though Ella Perez was the big headliner star in that film, Trip was the one that ended up getting all the attention. It was a small part in a pretty big movie, and was a major turning point in his career (and apparently a major turning point for my subconscious, since my dream from the other morning was practically a shot-for-shot reenactment of his sex scene in that film).

  The following fall, he had another supporting role in The Bank Vault, a huge Tarantino ensemble which was nominated for all sorts of awards. I watched the Golden Globes and the Oscars that year, hoping to catch a glimpse of Trip in a tux. But he wasn’t at either event and Bank Vault walked away with only a gold statue for sound editing.

  According to the Page Six in front of me, he was the lead actor in Swayed, which was scheduled for release on October 5—my birthday—and was currently wrapping up filming on something called ReVersed down near Washington Square Park in the city.

  Trip’s been in New York all these weeks?

  I’d known that he was filming a movie “on location”, but I didn’t know that the location was New York. And not just New York, but Washington Square Park! The square was mere steps away from my apartment down in The Village and basically served as the backyard for my alma mater, NYU. I knew the area well. I’m sure I must have registered the white trucks and production equipment throughout the park, which were a telltale sign of yet another movie being filmed in the neighborhood. But between the big budget Hollywood flicks, independent features and New School student films, that scenario wasn’t so out of the ordinary on any given day in the city. A person learned to become immune to such things pretty quickly.

  Lisa’s babbling broke through my daydreaming. “Wonder if he’ll be at the reunion. You got the save-the-date, right?”

  “I did. I was going to ask you about it. Are we going?”

  As Lisa prattled on about our former classmates, thoughts of my Bonded dream played through my mind. I’d ear
lier settled on the idea that I merely hallucinated about the movie because I had just seen it on DVD. Combine that with the reunion reminder, and my mind had simply sparked a memory about Trip’s and my personal sex scene from years ago.

  But then I started to wonder if maybe I was actually psychic. Maybe I’d telepathically sensed his proximity and subconsciously invited him to slip down the street, seep through the cracks under my door and plant himself right into my waiting mind.

  Wow. One mere mention of my ex-boyfriend and it already felt like my brain had begun to melt. I was starting to lose it. Bigtime.

  “Jesus. Ten years,” Lisa finally sighed.

  “Yeesh, I know,” I said, trying to reconstitute my grey matter. “Wanna start placing bets on whose asses got fat now, or should we wait until it gets closer to the event?”

  Lisa folded her newspaper back onto the empty chair next to her, saying, “Hey. Lay off fat asses. Mine’s been expanding lately.”

  “Yeah, but you can get away with it. You’re married to an ass man.”

  Our salads came, and the two of us immediately attacked them with abandon. Mmm. Looked like I got some extra crispy bacon on my Cobb. The Westlake Pub made the best salads in the world, but the rest of their menu was pretty spectacular, too. I happened to think they made the most awesome pizza in Jersey. And that was saying a lot.

  Lis suddenly gestured her fork in my direction and gave me the stinkeye. “Ya know, you didn’t have to agree with me.”

  I was preoccupied with my mental menu perusal, and had no idea what she was talking about. “What?” I asked mid-chew.

  She calmly placed her fork next to her plate and swiped her napkin across her mouth. “Most normal best friends would have made a point to dispute the proportions of my ass.”

  I started to crack up, offering a, “Sorry,” through my mouthful of food.