Queen Of Babble: In The Big City

Chapter 11

The dwarf is singing “Don’t Cry Out Loud.”

“I don’t know about anyone else,” Chaz says, “but I find his performance exceptionally moving. I give it an eight.”

“Seven,” Luke says. “I find the fact that he’s actually crying a little distracting.”

“I give it a ten,” I say, blinking back tears of my own. I don’t know if it’s that all Melissa Manchester songs make me a little nostalgic, or if it’s the fact that this particular one is being sung so poignantly by a weeping dwarf dressed like Frodo from Lord of the Rings, complete with a Gandalf staff. Maybe it’s the three Tsingtaos I had with dinner, and the two Amaretto sours I’ve downed since, here in the booth. But I’m gone.

The same can’t be said of my best friend Shari, however. She’s picking at the label of her Bud Light, looking distracted—pretty much how she’s been all night.

“Hey,” I say, nudging her with my elbow. “Come on. How do you rate his performance?”

“Uh.” Shari sweeps some of her curly dark hair from her eyes and peers at the man on the little stage at the back of the bar. “I don’t know. A six.”

“Harsh,” Chaz says, shaking his head. “Look at him. He’s singing his guts out.”

“That’s just it,” Shari says. “He’s taking it too seriously. It’s karaoke .”

“Karaoke is an art form in many cultures,” Chaz says. “And, as such, should be taken seriously.”

“Not,” Shari says, “at a dive bar called Honey’s in Midtown.”

The tenor of Shari’s voice has changed. Chaz is just being playful, but she sounds genuinely annoyed.

Then again, she’s seemed that way ever since she and Chaz arrived at the Thai place downtown where we met to have dinner. No matter what Chaz says, Shari either disagrees or ignores him. She even berated him for ordering too much food… as if there is such a thing.

“It’s probably just stress,” I had said to Luke, as the two of us walked slightly behind Chaz and Shari on our way toward Canal Street, dodging fish guts that had been tossed into the gutters by the Chinese markets on either side of the street. “You know how hard she’s been working lately.”

“You’ve been working pretty hard yourself,” Luke had replied. “And you aren’t acting like a grade-A—”

“Hey, now,” I’d interrupted. “Come on. Her job is slightly more stressful than mine. She’s dealing with women whose lives are at stake. The only thing the women I work with have at stake is whether or not their butt is going to look big on their wedding day.”

“That can be stressful,” Luke had insisted with touching loyalty. “You shouldn’t put yourself down.”

But the truth is, I don’t actually believe what’s bothering Shari is work stress. Because if it was just that, the delicious piles of pad thai and beef satay we’d just consumed—not to mention all that beer—would have helped. But it hadn’t. She’s as cranky now, after dinner, as she’d been before dinner. She hadn’t even wanted to come to Honey’s. She’d wanted to go straight home to bed. Chaz had prac tically forced her into the cab with us, instead of letting her find a separate one to take her back to their place.

“I just don’t get it,” Chaz had said to us after Shari excused herself to go to the bathroom between courses at dinner. “I know she’s unhappy. But when I ask her what’s wrong, she says everything’s fine and that I should leave her alone.”

“That’s the same thing she says to me,” I’d said with a sigh.

“Maybe it’s hormonal,” Luke had suggested. Which, considering all the bio he was taking, was a natural leap.

“For six weeks?” Chaz had shaken his head. “Because that’s how long it’s been. Ever since she started that job… and moved in with me.”

I’d swallowed. It was all my fault. I just knew it. If I had just moved in with Shari like I’d promised, instead of ditching her to live with Luke, none of this would have happened…

“If you think you can do so much better,” Chaz is saying now, shoving the songbook across the table of the booth we’re sitting in, “why don’t you give it a whirl?”

Shari looks down at the black binder in front of her. “I don’t do karaoke,” she says coldly.

“Um, that’s not what I recall,” Luke says, waggling his dark eyebrows. “At least, not from a certain wedding I remember… ”

“That,” Shari says dourly, “was a special occasion. I was just trying to help out Big Mouth over there.”

I blink. Big Mouth? I mean, I know it’s true and all… but I’ve been getting better. Really. I haven’t told ANYONE about meeting Jill Higgins. And I’ve managed to keep from Luke the fact that his mother’s lover (if that’s who the guy even is… which, more and more, I’m starting to suspect) has called theapartment yet again . I’m a veritable vault of incendiary information!

But I decide to cut Shari some slack. Because I did leave her in the lurch and all.

“Come on, Shari,” I say, reaching for the binder. “I’ll find us something fun to sing. What do you say?”

“Count me out,” Shari says. “I’m too tired.”

“You can never be too tired for karaoke,” Chaz says. “All you have to do is stand up there and read from a teleprompter.”

“I’m too tired,”Shari says again, this time more adamantly.

“Look,” Luke says, “somebody has to get up there and sing something. Otherwise, Frodo is going to perform another ballad. And then I’ll have to slit my wrists.”

I’ve started flipping through the binder. “I’ll do it,” I say. “I can’t let my boyfriend commit suicide.”

“Thanks, honey,” Luke says, winking at me. “That’s so nice of you.”

I’ve found the song I want and am filling out the little slip of paper you’re supposed to give to the waitress if you want to sing. “If I do this,” I say, “you guys have to do one, too. Luke and Chaz, I mean.”

Chaz looks solemnly at Luke. “‘Wanted Dead or Alive’?”

“No,” Luke says, shaking his head vehemently. “No way.”

“Come on,” I say. “If I’m doing it, you guys have to—”

“No.” Luke is laughing now. “I do not do karaoke.”

“You have to,” I say gravely. “Because if you don’t, we’ll be subjected to more of that.” I nod toward a group of giggly twenty-somethings, each wearing the light-up penis necklaces and slackly drunken expressions that give away the fact that they are part of a bachelorette party—as if the fact that they’re screeching “Summer Lovin’” from Grease into a single microphone is not evidence enough.

“They are making a mockery of the karaoke,” Chaz agrees, pronouncing “karaoke” with the correct Japanese inflection.

“’Nother round?” the waitress, wearing an adorable red silk mandarin dress, with a not-so-adorable metal bar through her lower lip, wants to know.

“Four more,” I say, sliding two song slips toward her. “And two songs, please.”

“No more for me,” Shari says. She holds up her mostly full beer bottle. “I’m good.”

The waitress nods and takes my song slips. “Three more, then,” she says, and goes away.

“What did you mean,two songs?” Luke asks me suspiciously. “You didn’t—”

“I want to hear you sing that you’re a cowboy,” I say, my eyes wide with innocence. “And that on a steel horse you ride… ”

Luke’s mouth twists with suppressed mirth.“You—” He lunges at me, but I shrink against Shari, who goes, “Stop it.”

“Save me,” I say to Shari.

“Seriously,” she says. “Cut it out.”

“Oh, come on, Share,” I say, laughing. What’s wrong with her? She used to love goofing around in dive bars. “Sing with me.”

“You’re so annoying,” she says.

“Sing with me,” I beg. “For old times’ sake.”

“Get out,” Shari says, giving me a shove toward the end of the bench we were sitting on. “I have to go pee.”

“I won’t get out,” I say, “unless you sing with me.”

Shari pours her beer over my head.

Later, in the ladies’ room, she apologizes. Abjectly.

“Seriously,” she says, sniffling as she watches me stick my head beneath the hand dryer. “I am so, so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”

“It’s okay.” I can barely hear her above the roar of the hand dryer—not to mention the keening of the bachelorettes on stage. “Seriously.”

“No,” Shari says. “It’s not okay. I’m a terrible person.”

“You’re not a terrible person,” I say. “I was being a jerk.”

“Well.” Shari is leaning against the radiator. The ladies’ room at Honey’s is not what anyone would call the height of chic decor. There is one sink and one toilet, and the walls have been covered in vomit-beige paint that does little to hide the layers of graffiti beneath it. “You were being a jerk. But not any more than usual. I’m the one who’s turned into such a massive bitch. I seriously don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Is it your job?” I ask. The hand dryer is solving the problem of my wet hair. But it isn’t doing much for the beery smell coming from my Vicky Vaughn Junior minidress. That’s something I’m going to have to tackle with the Febreze bottle when I get home.

“It’s not my job,” Shari says mournfully. “I love my job.”

“You do?” I can’t hide my surprise. All Shari ever seems to do is complain about her hours and workload.

“I do,” she says. “That’s the problem… I’d rather be there than at home, any day.”

I open my double-flap seventies Meyers handbag (in stunning lime-green vinyl, only thirty-five dollars with my Vintage to Vavoom employee discount) to look for something—anything—that I could spray on myself to get rid of the beery smell. “Is that because you love your job so much?” I ask carefully. “Or because you don’t love Chaz anymore?”

Shari’s face crumples. She puts her hands over it to hide her tears.

“Oh, Share.” My heart twisting, I step away from the hand dryer to put my arms around her. Through the door, I can hear the thump-thump-thump of the bass as the bachelorettes shriek that it’s up to you, New York, New York.

“I don’t know what happened,” Shari sobs. “I just feel like whenever I’m with him, I’m suffocating. And even when he’s not around… it’s like he’s smothering me.”

I am trying to be understanding. Because that’s how best friends are with each other.

But I’ve known Chaz for a long time. And he has so never been the suffocating or smothering type. In fact, it would be hard to find a more happy-go-lucky guy. I mean, except when he’s jabbering on about Kierkegaard.

“What do you mean?” I ask her. “How is he smothering you?”

“Well, like he calls me all the time at work,” Shari says, furiously wiping away her tears. Shari hates it when she cries… and consequently doesn’t do so very often. “Sometimes even twice a day!”

I blink down at her. “Calling someone twice a day at work isn’t all that much,” I say. “I mean, I call you that many times a day. A lot more than that, actually.” I don’t even mention how many times a day I’ve started e-mailing her, now that I spend so many hours at a workstation with an actual computer, on which I’m supposed to record any notes and messages for the lawyers I work for.

“That’s different,” Shari says. “Besides, it’s not just that. I mean, there’s the whole cat thing.” My revealing to Shari that Chaz was thinking about adding a four-legged friend to their domicile had resulted in her being “diagnosed” with a previously unknown dander allergy, and the sad admittance that she would never, alas, be able to live in a house or apartment with anything furry. “There’s also the fact that when I get home from work, he wants to know how my day went! After already having talked about it on the phone.”

I drop my arms from her. “Shari,” I say. “Luke and I talk to each other about a million times a day.” This is a slight exaggeration. But whatever. “And we always ask each other how our day went when we get home.”

“Yeah,” Shari says. “But I bet Luke doesn’t spend the whole day you’re gone lying around the apartment reading Wittgenstein, then going grocery shopping, cleaning the apartment, and making oatmeal cookies.”

My jaw drops. “Chaz goes grocery shopping, cleans, and makes oatmeal cookies while you’re at work?”

“Yes,” Shari says. “And does the laundry. Can you believe that? He does the laundry while I’m at work! And folds everything up into these perfect squares! Even my underwear!”

I am looking at Shari with suspicion now. Something is wrong. Very wrong.

“Share,” I say. “Are you even listening to yourself? You’re mad at your boyfriend because he calls you regularly, cleans your apartment, does the grocery shopping, makes you cookies, and does your laundry. Do you realize that you’ve basically just described the most perfect man in the world?”

Shari scowls at me. “That may sound like the perfect man to some people, but it isn’t to me. You know what would be the perfect man to me? One who was around less. Oh, and get this: he wants sex.Every day . I mean, that was all right back when we were in France. But we were on vacation . Now we’ve got responsibilities—well, some of us do, anyway. Who has time for sex every day? Sometimes he even wants it twice a day, morning and then again at night. I can’t take it, Lizzie. That’s just… that’s just too much. Oh my God… can you believe I just said that?”

I’m glad she asked that, because the answer is no, I can’t. Shari’s always been more sexually aggressive—and adventurous—than me. It looks like the tables have finally turned. I have to keep myself from blurting out that Luke and I often have sex twice a day—and that I quite enjoy it.

“But you and Chaz used to, um, do it that much all the time,” I say. “I mean, when you first started going out. And you liked it then. What’s changed?”

“That’s just it,” Shari says. She looks truly upset. “I don’t know! God, what kind of counselor am I, when I can’t even figure out my own problems? How can I help people with theirs?”

“Well, sometimes it’s easier to help other people with their problems than deal with your own,” I say in what I hope is a soothing voice. “Have you talked about all of this with Chaz? I mean, maybe if you told him what was bothering you—”

“Oh, right,” Shari says sarcastically. “You want me to tell my boyfriend that he’s too perfect?”

“Well,” I say. “You don’t have to put it quite like that. But maybe if you—”

“Lizzie, I am perfectly aware that I sound like a lunatic. There’s something wrong with me. I know it.”

“No,” I cry. “Shari, it’s just… it’s hard. It’s my fault, really. Maybe you guys weren’t ready to move in together. I should never have bailed on you like I did and moved in with Luke. I deserved to have beer poured on me. I deserve to have a lot worse than that done to me—”

“Oh, Lizzie,” Shari says, looking up at me with her dark eyes filled with tears again. “Don’t you get it? It has nothing to do with you. It’s me. There’s something wrong with me . Or at least with the concept of Chaz and me. The truth is… I just don’t know anymore, Lizzie.”

I stare at her. “Know what?”

“I mean, I look at you and Luke, and how perfect you two are together—”

“We’re not perfect,” I interrupt quickly. I don’t want to remind her about the woodland creature thing. Or the fact that I’m pretty sure Luke’s mom is having—or was having, anyway—an affair, and I haven’t told him. “Seriously, Shari. We—”

“But you seem so happy together,” Shari says. “The way Chaz and I used to be… but for some reason, it’s gone.”

“Oh, Shari.” I chew my lower lip, frantically trying to think of the right thing to say. “Maybe if you two got couples counseling… ”

“I don’t know,” Shari says. She looks—and sounds—hopeless. “I don’t know if it would even be worth it.”

“Shari!” I can’t believe she would say that. About Chaz, of all people!

“Lizzie?” Someone bangs on the door. A woman’s voice calls my name again. “You’re up!”

I realize it’s the waitress and that my song’s waiting to be played—and performed.

“Oh no,” I say. “Shari, I… I don’t know what to say. I really think maybe you and Chaz are just going through a weird phase right now. I mean, Chaz is a great guy, and I know he really loves you… I’m sure things will get better with time.”

“They won’t,” Shari says. “But thanks for letting me unload on you. Literally. Sorry about the beer.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “It was kind of refreshing, in a way. It was getting hot out there.”

“Are you coming?” the waitress demands. “Or not?”

“Coming,” I call. Then I appeal to Shari. “Will you sing with me?”

“Not a chance,” she says with a smile.

Which is how I find myself all alone on the stage at Honey’s, assuring the bachelorettes, who are drunkenly catcalling me, the dwarf, who is glaring at me angrily for robbing him of yet more time in the spotlight, and Chaz, Shari, and Luke that young girls do get weary of wearing that same old shaggy… and that when they get weary, it would behoove everyone to try a little tenderness.

A piece of advice that, sadly, Chaz seems to have already employed… with less than satisfying results.