Tony and Guido always managed to show up at the worst possible times, usually when I’m in a hurry and about leave. So right on schedule, after I had spent ten minutes debating about whether I should get another beer or just go home, they appeared. Before I could sneak out, Tony saw me.
“Hey, Shades! How ya doin’?” he called from across the cafe. He more or less shoved his way past the few people standing between me and him.
“Hi,” I said, forcing myself to be polite.
His grin broadened even more. Tony probably couldn’t have detected the strain in my voice if I had yelled at him. “Haven’t seen you here in a while, at least not alone. Where’s your girl?”
I winced slightly. “You mean Holly?”
“Yeah,” Tony said, “the spunky chick.”
“Avoiding me.” I don’t think I could have said that politely if I had wanted to.
“Ah,” he said, giving me a knowing nod. “Playing hard to get.”
I glared at him, but I didn’t feel like continuing the conversation. “So where’s Guido?”
“Getting the drinks.” He noticed my empty glass. “You want anything?”
“No. I’m fine.”
“C’mon, Shades. Don’t give me that. Since when do you get just one drink? Or even three, for that matter. Guido!” he yelled across the room. “Get another one.” He didn’t check to see if he had been heard. Hell, I don’t think it even occurred to him that he might not have been.
Tony sat down across from me. He took out a cigarette and offered me one, but I waved it away. He shrugged slightly, then lit his up. He took a drag, then blew the smoke out, banging the ash off the tip. “So,” he said conversationally, “Holly’s playing hard to get all of a sudden?”
I gave him a look like he was crazy. “No,” I explained, “she’s avoiding me. As in, she doesn’t want to talk to me anymore.”
“Nah. No girl does that.”
“Well, this one is. As in, taking off from work so she can avoid me.”
“Hmm…” Tony thought for a second, pulling from his cigarette. “What’d you do, cheat on her? I’ve lost a chick or two like that. They take it personally, or something.” He sat back in his chair, making himself more comfortable. “The thing you gotta understand is, girls, they take a lot of things personally. Like calling their friends ‘bitches’, or not phoning them. Even forgetting their birthday or anniversary or something pisses them off. It’s like, I’ve got 366 other days to worry about. How am I supposed to remember that that particular one is special? But cheating on them?” He shook his head. “Nothing makes ‘em mad like that. Still haven’t figured that one out.”
He gave me a respectful grin. “Damn, Shades! I didn’t think you had it in you! It’s just like my Uncle Louie always told me: ‘You have to fool around on your girl-friend to fool around on your enemies’ or something like that.” Tony spent some time thinking again. “But you know, I never quite figured out what he meant by that.”
I rolled my eyes, but didn’t feel like fixing the old saying in Tony’s convoluted mind. Instead, “I didn’t cheat on her.”
Tony looked at me blankly. “You didn’t?”
“I didn’t.”
I could see Tony thinking again. “Then did you forget her anniversary?”
I ground my knuckles against my forehead. “We weren’t even dating, dammit!”
Tony stared at me for a good thirty seconds before answering. I was wondering if he would give me some kind of new enlightenment. Instead I got, “You weren’t?”
“No, we weren’t.”
“So why’d you spend so much time with her?”
“Maybe because I liked to? Or aren’t we allowed to be platonic?”
“Okay, okay… So now she’s avoiding you?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm… You know what you need to do, Shades?” Tony said suddenly. “You need to buy her a few dozen roses. Then you need to go by her house and sit on her doorstep, waiting for her. And then, when she gets home, you need to stand up and shove them into her hands and say, ‘I love you! I need you back. I’ll never do – whatever it is you did – again.’”
I gave Tony a long look. “Done that a lot, I take it?”
“Yup,” Tony answered with a nod. “It works at least three times on every girl. A fourth or a fifth if she’s really into it.”
“And what if that doesn’t work.”
“It will.”
“For the sake of argument here, let’s say it doesn’t, okay? Let’s say it just makes her madder. What then?”
Tony considered that for a moment. “Well, is she any good in bed?”
“I don’t know. Didn’t I just tell you we weren’t dating?”
“Well…” Tony seemed torn about what he wanted to say. “In that case, you try the rose thing and if it doesn’t work, just get rid of her.” Tony shook his head fatefully. “A girl that bitchy just isn’t worth it.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“No problem,” he answered cheerily.
“So that’s it?” I asked him,wishing I had another beer.
Tony frowned, realizing he hadn’t really helped me. “I just don’t know what else to tell you.”
Big surprise there. “Yeah, well, I don’t either.” I couldn’t keep the disgust out of my voice. “It was just a joke. And she took it personally.”
“Women do that,” Tony said sagely, going back to contemplating his cigarette.
I nodded. “Yeah they do.” Holly hadn’t taken it as a joke. She had heard something in it that she wasn’t supposed to, something I hadn’t meant. And it hardly seemed fair that she wouldn’t at least let me explain before she shut me out. For not the first time in the past two weeks, I found myself wishing I had been more careful with my words. I hate losing people, especially for something as small as a bad joke.
Tony had finished his cigarette and was quashing it out of existence. “Well, you could always ask the guy in the back.”
I rolled my eyes. “Why does everyone swear on this guy?”
“He’s smart,” Tony said seriously. “Real smart. He makes me feel stupid sometimes.”
Oh, that’d be hard. Out loud, I said, “But don’t you have to buy him a pizza or something?”
Tony shrugged. “This late? I bet a beer would do it. Guido!” Tony turned around to find Guido right behind him. “Oh. Uh, we’re gonna need another beer.”
Guido blinked, looking around. “Brent here?”
“Nah. We’re going to go ask the Guru.”
Guido frowned, but before he could head back to the counter, I stood up. “Don’t worry about it. I didn’t want another anyway.” Inwardly, I frowned at myself. “So this guy can help me? You’re sure?”
Tony grinned, glad to be helpful in his own way. “If anyone can tell you what to do, he can.”
* * *
I could tell by the look in the Guru’s eyes that he didn’t like me from the start.
That was fine. I didn’t much like him, either.
“Tony. Guido.” The Guru greeted them gravely, each with a half-bow. Then his eyes focused on me. “Who is your friend?”
“This is Shades,” Tony explained hastily, actually trying to sound polite and formal. “He’s having trouble with his girlfriend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
But the Guru took no notice. “And is he the one who makes this offer of beer.”
“Yes,” Tony answered.
“I see.” The Guru turned to me and gave me a rather forced smile. “So then, tell me your story.”
Story? I thought, What the hell? Why can’t he just say ‘What’s the problem? I took a deep breath. After all, what could it hurt? “Well, you see my friend,” I emphasized the word for Tony, “has been avoiding me and…” I trailed off when I noticed the Guru was shaking his head.
“No,” he said, subtly annoyed. “I said, ‘Tell me your story.’ If you tell me what happened, I will find your problem for you.”
It took a moment to formulate an answer. “You think, for some reason, that I don’t know what my problem is?”
“No, I don’t,” he answered flatly. “You can get angry and leave if you want – But, you’ve already paid with your beer.” He shrugged to show he didn’t care one way or the other.
I ground my teeth. “You want it to start ‘Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away’ maybe?”
The Guru frowned at me again. “Maybe I should start telling it for you. So you have a friend and she’s a girl. I assume that something has happened between the two of you, otherwise, you wouldn’t be here. Now, let me make another assumption; she’s obviously a very close friend, maybe more than just a friend, otherwise Tony here wouldn’t be so insistent she’s your girlfriend.”
I didn’t say anything, just gave him a curt nod.
He gave me a smug grin. “Then let’s continue, shall we. You don’t think of her as your girlfriend, but it’s not the same with her, is it? Maybe she thinks of herself as your girlfriend? And that’s the problem right? She doesn’t understand why you’re not a couple, when you so obviously should be. So, something set her off; something that emphasized in her mind that you’re not dating? I could make some guesses; maybe you told her about some other girl you like, or maybe canceled on her one evening?” The Guru’s grin widened a bit. “Well? Would you like to tell me the rest of it?”
I stiffened a little, but kept my face as placid as I could. “Two weeks ago, I picked her up after work. We watched a movie back at the apartment and she fell asleep. I told her I probably should have just taken her home, if she was just going to pass out.” I gave him a thin smile. “She took offense to that.”
The Guru gave me a know-it-all smirk. “Just like I thought.”
“But she knows we’re not dating.”
“Sure she does.”
“She does!” I didn’t know why, but he was getting under my skin. “We’ve talked about it before. She knows I’m not looking for a relationship. She’s not looking for one either.”
“Sure, she isn’t.”
I reigned myself in. “She’s told me she isn’t.”
The Guru just looked at me and shook his head. “Tony, my friend, bring the beer over.”
“Uh, sure,” Tony said, a little surprised. He hastily brought the pint glass forward and, with a mild bow to the Guru, placed it on the table before scurrying back to where he had been standing.
The Guru took a healthy drink from the beer, savoring the taste, then deftly returned it to its place on the table beside him. “Can I ask you something?”
At first I thought he had meant Tony, then I realized he was looking at me. “You just did.”
He ignored my remark. “Is she attractive?”
That was not what I expected. “What?”
The Guru rolled his eyes. “Is she pretty? Is she sexy? Would you sleep with her?”
I glared at him, but I knew he couldn’t see anything through my sunglasses. “Yeah,” I admitted, finally.
“Then what is it? Emotional baggage? Past trauma? Mental illnesses?”
“She’s a schizo,” Tony pointed out from his spot to the side. “Well she is! Her co-workers told me.”
The Guru turned from him and looked back at me.
“She isn’t,” I answered. “They just say that. But she is an emotional basket-case. I don’t date her because I don’t feel like getting bitched out because I forgot the milk.”
“Whatever.”
“What do mean, ‘whatever?’”
The Guru shrugged. “I mean, that’s not a reason. If it mattered that much, you wouldn’t even be her friend. Look at yourself! If you were worried so much about her temper, you wouldn’t be trying to get on her good side again. But you are. So there’s a different reason that you don’t want her, isn’t there? A problem with her? Or maybe with you?”
I didn’t answer, just stood there, keeping my face as expressionless as possible. He smirked at me again. “Well, believe whatever you want. For whatever reason, you’re the one driving this wedge between the two of you. And until you get that taken care of and decided, you’re not going to solve anything.” He went silent, taking another drink from his beer.
“Wait a minute,” I said angrily. “That’s it?
The Guru looked at me, surprised I had spoken. “That’s what?”
“I mean, I bought you a drink, and all your advice is ‘you figure it out.’”
“You didn’t buy this drink, Tony did.” He laughed at my incredulous expression. “It’s his favorite kind. And no, my advice isn’t ‘figure it out.’ My advice is: ‘Be decisive.’ You have to be honest with yourself and follow what your emotions are truly telling you. Anything else, and you’re just going to find yourself alone, drinking beer, and wondering what the hell you just did. Now,” he smiled at me pleasantly, then nodded to a girl that was marching towards him, a cheesecake in hand, “I seem to have another customer. Be sure to come back with any questions.”
“Great,” I muttered, “just great. Hey, you’re lucky I didn’t pay for that beer! I’d be demanding a refund.” I turned and stalked out, a confused Tony walking out after me, followed by an annoyed Guido.
“Man,” Tony said, a little pale, “you can’t be talking to him like that. He knows everything, and-”
“Look, I have to make a call, okay? I should have been home an hour ago.”
“Uh, sure. Me and Guido’ll be out front… if you need us or anything.” A weak smile flickered on his face. “Hey, uh, I’ll see you around. And just do what he says; I promise you, it’ll work.”
I forced a smile on my face, just to re-assure him in the hopes he’d go away. “Yeah, don’t worry. I know exactly what to do.”
Tony looked at me a little uncertainly, then that stupid grin of his was plastered on his face. “See Shades? I told you he knew what he was talking about. I’ll be seein’ you.”
“Sure.” I waved good-bye as he walked off. I opened up my cell-phone, which was almost out of batteries, but dialed Holly’s number anyway. She didn’t answer, of course, but at least I got to her answering machine. “Uh, Holly. It’s me.” I stopped, uncertain of what to say. “Look, we need to talk. Give me a call, will you? I miss you.” It felt a little weird to admit that part, but maybe that’s what she wanted to hear. “Bye.”
I hung up and took a deep breath. All right then, I thought to myself. Nothing to do but wait. I slipped out the back and got in my car to drive home. For a moment, I considered dropping by an all night grocery and seeing if they had a few roses in stock, but then I decided against it.
If I didn’t hear from her by Sunday though, I might just do it.
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