“See what I mean?” Rudy said. “We’ve been together for years, and you’re acting like nothing big is happening. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You’re a very shut-down person, you know that?”
She was silent, stung. Shut-down? She was shut-down? How long had she been waiting for him to come home? That shit. She’d had dozens of reasons to leave him, and she never had. Except that one time, two months ago, when she’d tried, and he had pleaded with her not to, and so she hadn’t.
Rudy stood. As Pru began to rise he quickly leaned over to hug her, crouched above her chair, in an awkward squat. “Take care of yourself, P.W.,” he whispered. Oh, that stupid nickname. He got it from some Pee-wee Herman movie, and thought it was hilarious to call her that. Pru smiled and said, too loudly, “And you take care of yourself, too!” Her own phony tone rang in her ears.
She sat back down and made herself slowly finish her tea. The girls at the next table were laughing again. After a minute, she started to relax. Rudy didn’t really mean any of this. It was probably something his therapist had suggested, and he had taken it out of context. Rudy was highly impressionable. When they were calmer, they’d talk things out.
But in the cab home (screw the cost, she’d thought, flagging it down with her purse) she started fuming. What was she supposed to do now? Damn it, how were they going to make this up? How long would he wait before calling? He never went to sleep without calling to say good night first. Surely, with the sight of her before him, he’d have to think about what he’d done, and call her, begging her to forget it all. Anyway, that’s what the Rudy she knew would do.
She looked out the window at the passing lights of Dupont Circle. He said it wasn’t about the list but, naturally, it was. He wasn’t supposed to have seen it, of course. It was meant to be private. It was just how she did things. She liked to look at all the angles, laid out in two columns, side by side. She didn’t seem to have strong gut feelings telling her what to do, like other people. And wasn’t who you loved one of the most important decisions of your life? But when she saw him charging out of her bedroom with her planner, his face contorted with rage, she knew she had been wrong to do it.
“Number three,” he read, his voice shaking. “Unpredictable and sweaty.”
Pru was horrified, ashamed, and sorry; but also annoyed, and not sorry. She said, in a conciliatory way, “Okay, now, that was when you first started the meds. That’s gotten way better.”
“Immature and embarrassing.”
“What about the pros? Did you even look at the pros? Dependable, loving, and committed?”
“Disaster, nightmarish, possibly sociopathic parents.”
She didn’t know what to say about that one. Even if she’d been twice as much in love with Rudy Fisch, she would have thought long and hard about joining a family like that. Anyway, Pru had been nice to them. She’d even told Rudy that they weren’t as bad as he’d made them out to be. Wasn’t she allowed some private thoughts? It wasn’t like she’d taken out an ad, for crissake.
She had the cab driver drop her off at the video store next to her building. She loved her block and instantly felt better just being there. There was a Turkish carpet store, the souvlaki shop, the Korean dry cleaners, where someone carefully wrapped the buttons of her sweaters in foil before cleaning them, and, occupying the corner lot, the Kozy Korner, a divey little eggs-and-coffee shop. McKay had told her that the place was supposed to have been bought recently by Starbucks, but somehow the deal hadn’t gone through. McKay seemed to know, through his network of gay friends, just about everything happening in the city. Pru had been a little disappointed about the Starbucks falling through. It might have driven the offensive Cluck-U Chicken out of business.
The Cluck-U was on the other side of the video store from Pru’s building. Its exterior signage featured not a chicken, but a flashing neon bantam rooster smoking a cigar. The bird was leaning toward the pedestrians on the street and winking, as its nauseating yellow light flashed away. The lurid sign had almost been enough to make her pass on the apartment, initially. She wondered what it was about a rooster smoking a cigar that said to people, Come on in and eat poultry! She tried not to see it, the many times she was forced to walk underneath it every day. But the rooster had an insidious way of drawing her attention. She could practically smell its disgusting cigar-and-pellets breath. She went into the video store and straight to the “Great Directors” wall. She had a sudden yen for the extreme violence of Don Vito Corleone and his brood. She would spend the whole weekend watching them blow one another’s brains out.
When she put the trilogy on the counter, Phan gave her a knowing look and said, “Uh-oh.”
Today Phan’s spiky, usually black hair was dyed green, and he wore a Pat Benatar T-shirt. It showed a pair of red lips and the words HELL IS FOR CHILDREN! Phan’s bony chest was like a rotating billboard of artifacts from Pru’s young adulthood, years and years before his own.
“What ‘uh-oh’?” she said. She had a little crush on Phan. Mostly it was because of how Phan’s girlfriend looked at him, from her seat on the milk crate behind the counter, where she sometimes sat while
