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I wish I could say the same.
Thursday, September 9, 8 p.m., the Ritz
Have to write fast—Michael is tipping the room service guy. Everything is going perfectly…we got out of the building without anyone suspecting a thing. Michael thinks we’re just having a romantic good-bye dinner for two in my grandmother’s abandoned hotel suite (which, thank God, they’ve cleaned since she left. I don’t think I could go through with this if the place still reeked of Chanel No. 5, as most rooms tend to after Grandmère’s been there). He doesn’t know I’m about to make him the recipient of my Precious Gift.
Ooooh, he’s coming back. I will drop the bomb after dinner…the sex bomb, I mean.
Hey, isn’t that the name of a song?
Thursday, September 9, 10 p.m., taxi home from the Ritz
I can’t believe he—
Oh my God, how am I even going to write this down? I can’t even THINK it, how can I WRITE it???? I really can’t even SEE to write it, the light in here is so bad. I can only see the page when we’re stopped in traffic under a streetlamp.
But since Ephrain Kleinschmidt—that’s my cab driver’s name, according to his license in the bulletproof screen between him and me—took Fifth Avenue and not Park, like I asked, we are stopped in traffic A LOT.
Which is good. No, really, it’s GOOD. Since I guess it means I can hopefully get all my crying out of my system before we get to the loft, so I don’t have to face the Big Interrogation from Mom and Mr. G when I walk in looking like Kirsten Dunst after the hot tub scene from Crazy/Beautiful. You know. Crying hysterically and all.
The crying is really freaking Ephrain Kleinschmidt out. I guess he’s never had a sobbing sixteen-year-old princess in his cab before. He keeps on looking back here in his rearview mirror and trying to hand me Kleenexes from the box on his dashboard.
As if Kleenex is going to help!!!!!
The only thing that’s going to help is getting this down in some kind of lucid manner to help me make sense of it. Because it makes no sense. None of this makes any sense. It CAN’T be happening. It CAN’T.
Except that it is.
I just don’t understand how he could never have TOLD me. I mean, seriously, I thought we had a perfect relationship.
Okay, maybe not PERFECT because no one has a PERFECT relationship. I will admit the computer stuff really, really bored me.
But at least he KNEW that, and didn’t bore me with it. That much.
And I know the princess lessons stuff really bored him, too. I mean, the stuff about who to curtsy to when, and all. So I tried to spare him, too.
But other than that, I thought we had a good relationship. An OPEN relationship. A relationship where we could TELL each other things, and didn’t have any secrets.
I had no idea Michael has been keeping something like this from me the WHOLE TIME we’ve been going out.
And his excuse—that I never asked—is BOGUS. I’m sorry, but that is just—OH MY GOD, EPHRAIN KLEINSCHMIDT, NO I DO NOT WANT ANY KLEENEX—stupid. You don’t NOT tell your girlfriend something like that, even if she never asked, because she just ASSUMED….
Although I should have known. I mean, what was I THINKING???? Michael is way too hot not to have—
Okay. Lucid. Right.
Everything was going great. At least, I THOUGHT everything was going great. The throw-up feeling had even gone away. It’s true I couldn’t eat very much—I ordered the bluefin tuna two ways with artichoke salad with fava beans and scallions and Parmesan shavings for me, and the chicken à la moutarde, fresh pe
as, cipollini onions, baby carrots, and pea “cappuccino” sauce for Michael, plus milk chocolate mousse to share for dessert. I was kind of worried about the scallions but I had a Listerine Pocket Pak in my bag—because I was so nervous about what I knew I was about to do.
But just BEING with Michael and in the vicinity of his neck and therefore his pheromones calmed me down so much that by the time we got to the mousse, I felt like I really could go through with it.
So I went, summoning all my courage, “Michael, remember that time my mom and Mr. G went to Indiana and I got to stay in that hotel room at the Plaza and I invited Lilly and Tina and everyone to stay there with me, and not you, and you got so mad?”
“I didn’t get mad,” Michael pointed out.
“Yeah, but you were disappointed I didn’t invite YOU to stay in it with me.”
“That,” Michael said, “is true.”
