“Man, every time you break up with someone, you come in for The Godfather.”
“No, really?”
Phan consulted the computer screen in front of him. “Five times in six years,” he said.
Pru counted them off, in her head. Phil, Jack, Steve, Gay/Not Gay David, and Nate. Now Rudy. Pathetic, wasn’t it, when the guy at the video store knew your own love life better than you? And so many of them! Maybe Patsy was right. Maybe she was indiscriminate.
“Well, I like the violence. Is that so wrong?”
“So what’s up with Rudy? Did you toss him out?”
Pru pulled her wallet from her purse. “I don’t know. We’re working on some things.”
“Too bad. I liked Rudy.” Phan shook his head, as if recalling something particularly hilarious. “That guy cracks me up.”
That’s what everyone said about Rudy, even McKay. Until recently, anyway. As much as she hated to admit it, he’d been happier drawing all day and thinking up stupid jokes, with bad hair and glasses and the sloppy clothes. Pru tried to remember if he’d started a new antidepressant med lately. That would certainly account for his behavior tonight. It always took his brain a few weeks to settle down, whenever Schwaiger adjusted his meds. When he was on Wellbutrin he used to chew his fingernails down to the quick.
“Listen, girlfriend,” said Phan, handing the change to her. “I can get you some good drugs.”
“Next time,” said Pru. “Anyway, doesn’t that just make you more depressed, in the end?”
Phan shrugged. “I’m a Buddhist. We don’t get depressed.”
“What do you mean? Everyone gets depressed.”
“Yeah,” Phan said, “but not Buddhists.”
“Why not?”
“We know how to suffer.”
She took the videos from him. “Okay. How?”
“Very carefully?” he said, smiling at her, so she could see the tips of his white teeth. “Also, I like Ecstasy.”
AT HOME, SHE COLLECTED EVERYTHING THAT HAD BELONGED to Rudy, including two half-eaten boxes of his diet cereal, a SpongeBob SquarePants toothbrush, and three Brooks Brothers shirts he kept in her closet. She put it all in a shopping bag by the door. Brooks Brothers! When she met him he was still wearing “no-iron” shirts from JCPenney. It was all her fault. She’d turned him into a pompous ass. She should have left some of him the way she’d found him, eager and unfinished. That was just the problem: He was unfinished, still. Hot, but unfinished. Or finished badly. McKay was right—she’d created a monster. A hot monster.
She’d thought it was so clever of her, fixing him up. But now she felt twinges of something having been not quite right. Maybe it just didn’t work that way. Like how her grandmother could never eat the food she herself cooked, never enjoying a meal as much as when someone else cooked it. Maybe it was impossible to look at your own creation the way Phan’s girlfriend looked at Phan from her seat behind the counter in the video store, mute with admiration.
In the bottom of her linens trunk she found a set of sheets, pale green and purple flowers, that she couldn’t remember using with Rudy. She changed her bed, throwing the old sheets in the wash. It was almost midnight. He still hadn’t called.
She watched The Godfather until Moe Greene got it in the eye, then put on clean pajamas. The pajamas refreshed her, as did cleaning up her apartment and watching Moe Greene get it in the eye.
She lay in bed listening to the bass thrum from a passing car seven floors below. Her windows looked over the busiest part of the busiest street in Adams-Morgan, what some hopefully called the “Greenwich Village” of the District. It was a stretch, even Pru had to acknowledge. There was no Cluck-U Chicken in the Village, as her friend Kate McCabe never tired of pointing out. Kate was a true New Yorker who happened to have grown up in Ohio, two streets over from Pru. A couple of times a year Pru would take the Chinatown bus to see Kate, or Kate would visit Pru. Between D.C. and New York it was only $14 each way, and someone always gave you a greasy homemade dumpling in a paper bag.
The phone rang. Pru saw Rudy’s number come up on her caller ID display, and something she’d been holding in her belly seemed to settle. She put the handset on her chest, and let it ring again. She knew he would call. Knew it. Knew Rudy really wouldn’t leave her.
After all, that was the whole point of Rudy.
She let her voicemail pick up, waited a decent interval, then dialed the voicemail access number. This would be good for them, she thought, listening to the mechanical voice telling her there was one new message. The ebb and flow, the up and down of the grown-up relationship. It was something Rudy had only very limited experience with. He’d see how going through a rough patch together, swallowing their pride and forgiving each other, could deepen their relationship. They’d see the tender goodness in each other, how they were each, in their own way, doing their best.
She wondered what she should say. Should she call him right back and forgive him tonight, or wait until tomorrow? It depended of course on his apology. He’d absolutely have to find another therapist, that was the first thing . . .
“Hey,” said Rudy’s voice, “how are you? It’s Rudy. Listen, I forgot to ask you about the TV. I know you don’t use it much, anyway, and it set me back a couple K. I guess I could pay you for it, if you wanted. It’s used now, but, well, let me know what you’d want for it. But I’m also happy just to come and take it off your hands. I know you don’t
