Loose Screws

Could somebody hand me a tissue?

My mother tried to convince me to ride back uptown with her and my grandmother, spend the night with them in my mother’s Columbia University-owned apartment. Since I’d basically rather put out my own eye, I declined. Which may seem extremely disrespectful to those of you who have someone other than Nedra Cohen Petrocelli as your mother.

Okay, I suppose I’m being just the teensiest bit unfair. Nedra means well, she really does. It’s just that she tends to suck the life force out of anyone unfortunate enough to find himself or herself within a city block of her.

Sometimes, when I look at a photo of my mother when she was younger and skinnier, I swear to God it’s like looking into a mirror. The same black springy hair, dark eyes, high cheekbones, long limbs, a wide mouth that often gets us into trouble. Personality-wise, though…well, let’s just say genetics took a dive into the deep end of the pool there. While Nedra literally goes limp if she’s deprived of human company for longer than two hours, I need solitude in order to recharge. Her reaction to tragedy or stress is to invite a dozen chums over for dinner. Mine is to clutch my mortification—and in this case, a bottle of very expensive champagne—to my flat little chest (genetics played a nasty little trick on me there, too) and retreat to my lair.

A lair that, though miniscule and un-air-conditioned, I am now exceedingly glad I did not give up, even though I’d moved most of my clothes and stuff to the Scarsdale house last week (note to self: new clothes?). So. Here I sit, in a frothy heap in the center of the pseudo-Turkish rug I bought three years ago at one of those Fifth Avenue emporiums that’s been going out of business since 1973, swigging the bubbly like it’s diet Coke and entertaining myself by counting how many times my answering machine has beeped. Since I’m sure at least half the calls are from my (disgustingly stereotypical) mother, I have no interest in hearing who they’re from. Not even if one of them’s from Greg.

Especially if one of them’s from Greg.

I should really get out of the dress. It itches like hell, for one thing. But I can’t. Not yet. I know, it’s stupid. And it’s not as if I think that Greg’s suddenly going to show up, all smiles and profuse apologies, and we’ll just zip right back to the hotel and get married as if none of this ever happened. Which we couldn’t do anyway because the guests are long gone and the caterers already took away all the food and the judge had another wedding later this afternoon and I’ll never get my hair back the way Alphonse had it—

You know what really fries my clams? (I stare at the bottle as I think about this, finding a certain comfort in the predictability of the oscillating table fan’s intermittent, albeit ineffectual breeze.) Before I met Greg, I was perfectly happy. Didn’t feel like anything was missing from my life, you know? Oh, sure, I suppose I assumed I’d get married one day, since most people do, especially if they want kids. Which I do. I mean, hell, even my mother had gotten married—to my father, conveniently enough—and this is a woman who redefines the term “free radical.” But I hadn’t been stumbling around, desperately searching for my other “half” and crying in my latte because I’d reached the ripe old age of thirty without finding him. Dating has never been goal-oriented for me. No, I swear. I went out on the odd occasion, had sex on even odder ones, but you know, there’s something to be said for being able to rent any damn video you want, watching it when you want, wearing whatever you want, eating whatever you want without getting grief from whoever else is in the room with you. And if I’ve never exactly been the type to make men salivate…so what? I have a flourishing career, this fabulous East Side studio I’ve been illegally subletting for five years, and a hairdresser who hadn’t gasped in horror when I’d removed my hat that first time.

So things were fine. Before Greg, I mean. Then he goes and does this, leaving me with that fresh roadkill feeling.

But why should I feel this way? Am I any less whole than I was before four o’clock this afternoon? Is my sense of self-worth any less diminished because some idiot has seen fit to screw up my life for the foreseeable future? Is my hair kinkier, my nose bigger, my chest smaller?

I look down to check; reassured, I take another swig of champagne, right from the bottle. No muss, no fuss, no bubbles in the nose.

Hmm. I seem to have lost all feeling below my knees.

Oh, hell…there must be a hole in the screen, ’cause there’s a pissed off mosquito in here somewhere…no, wait. That’s my intercom buzzer. Which means either I ordered Chinese and don’t remember, which is very possible, or somebody—most likely my mother, which is a depressing thought—has come to bear witness to my degradation.

I hoist myself upright, willing sensation back into my feet, after which the dress and I float over to the intercom. After only three or four tries, I manage to poke the little button and grunt, “Go ’way.”

But wait. The buzzer is still buzzing. I finish off the champagne—I feel the need to interject at this point that I am not a drinker, that in fact this is the first serious alcohol to pass my lips since my cousin Shelby’s wedding in 1996, which is probably why I am seeing multiples of everything right now—on the off chance that it will clear my head. I was wrong. I also realize that the pissed-off mosquito is not trapped inside my intercom but is, in point of fact, hovering outside the front door to my apartment.

I burp delicately, gather up as much of the dress as I can catch, and embark on a zigzag course toward where I last saw the door. I possess just enough…something to peer through the keyhole. “Whoozit?”

“Ginger Petrocelli?”

I steal a moment to wonder, as I do from time to time, what on earth possessed my parents to name me Ginger, before clunking my forehead against the door and peering through the peephole, which affords me a distorted glimpse of a vaguely familiar clefted chin, hooded blue eyes and a very male hand with neatly trimmed nails clutching an official-looking ID. The guy says his own name, I think, but a fire truck chooses that moment to blast its horn eight stories below my open window, so I don’t hear it. I also almost wet my pants, which, considering the amount of champagne I have consumed, could have been disastrous.

So, I try to read the ID. Only there is no way I can focus enough to see the name, let alone the face beyond it. But I sure as hell catch the N.Y.P.D. part.

My stomach lurches. Until, always one to see the bright side to things, I console myself with the thought that at least it’s not my mother.

Ohmigod. My mother.

Images of a taxi door slamming shut on my mother’s Lion King tent and dragging her for ten blocks through midtown traffic spur me to fumble with the first of the three locks I’d bothered with when I came in—

Waaaaitaminnit.

“How do I know…” I brace one hand against the wall. When the dizziness passes, I say, “How do I know you’re really the police?”

Through the three-inch-thick door, I hear what sounds like a very patient sigh. “Dammit, Ginger—did you bother looking through the peephole? It’s Nick Wojowodski. Open up.”

With a gasp, I undo the rest of the locks and swing open the door. A hand darts out to catch me as I stumble out into the hallway, tripping over a foil-covered something on the floor and straight back to June 16, 1992. “Holy crap,” I breathe, snared in a pair of eyes the color of the New York sky that one day in October it’s actually blue.

Nicky tries valiantly not to wince from the fumes while I, equally valiantly, try not to wince from the memories.

My father’s cousin’s daughter Paula’s wedding to Nicky’s older brother Frank. I was one of twelve bridesmaids. The gowns were hideous and I was in serious vengeful mode. And old Nicky here was the best man.

Well, he sure as hell was the best man I’d ever had, up to that point. I didn’t stand a chance, not against those lethal eyes and all the champagne I’d lairped up (do we see a pattern here?) and a hundred-eighty pounds of solid, uncomplicated maleness with an equally solid, uncomplicated erection the size of Cincinnati plastered against me when we danced. Especially in light of the fact that my boyfriend…Jesus, what was his name? Doesn’t matter, I forget now, but he’d just ditched me in favor of some female Visigoth from Hunter College with serious bazongas and even more serious mutilation issues, and I was feeling lonely and horny and boring and Nicky was all too willing to do what he could to bolster my sagging self-esteem. Not to mention relieving me of my virginity, which was beginning to get a little frayed around the edges anyway.

Which he did, all righty, in a storage room about twenty paces behind the altar.

“I’ll call you,” he’d said. Only he hadn’t.

I don’t think I’ve seen Paula more than two or three times since then. We were never really close, anyway; she just asked me to be a bridesmaid to make an even dozen. Besides, she lives in Brooklyn. We do, however, touch base from time to time whenever there’s a family crisis or something, since her grandfather and my grandfather were brothers. So I know Nicky lives on the third floor of the Greenpoint house Frank’s and his grandmother left to the guys a couple years ago, that he went through the police academy, eventually became a detective. What I didn’t know was that he was assigned to the 19th Precinct. Which would be mine.

Trying to work up a good head of anger, I watch as Nicky squats down to pick up the foil-wrapped whatever, which I’m gathering is something homebaked from Ted and Randall across the hall. There’s a black satin ribbon tied around it.

Nicky straightens, frowning at the ribbon for a second before he hands me the package. I shift the empty bottle, which I can’t seem to let go of, to take it. A comforting, lemony smell drifts upward. Wow. Ted must’ve gone straight into the kitchen the minute he got home from the wedding.

“Hey, Ginger,” Nick says in this gruff-gentle voice, and the anger just goes poof along with the fear that my mother’s body parts are scattered all over 57th Street. I mean, really, like I’ve got the energy to be ticked about something that happened ten years ago when I’ve got a much juicier, more recent affront to my pride to deal with.

My eyes narrow. “Why are you here, Nicky?”

Nicky plants his hands on his hips—ever notice the interesting places men’s jeans tend to fade?—his eyes like blue flames under thick, dark blond hair, his mouth turned slightly down at the corners, and I think, is it me, or is this weird? That I’m standing here in a wedding dress my husband will not be tearing off my body tonight, holding consolatory, still-warm baked goods from my gay neighbors, whilst strolling down memory lane about a quickie in a church closet?

That I’m staring up at the iron jaw of the man who ten years ago annihilated a pair of brand-new, twenty-dollar Dior bikinis and who, it pains me to admit, I would probably allow the same privilege today? That is, if I were not of the current opinion that all men should be shot.

“Look,” the Virginator says, “this is sort of…unofficial. I’m not even on duty, in fact, but…” He grimaces. “Mind if I come in?”

I wobble out of the way, let him pass.

All available air in the apartment has just been effectively displaced. Nicky doesn’t seem to notice, probably because he’s too busy taking in my crushed-moth look, my frizzled hair, the fact that I am slightly swaying, as though to music only I can hear. He then crosses his arms and dons a troubled expression, which I decide he practices in front of his mirror at night. I also decide we are both going to pretend ten years ago didn’t happen.

“I’m really sorry,” he says, “but I gotta ask you this…the guy you were gonna marry, Greg Munson? When’d you last see him?”

I hug the bottle, tears cresting on my lower lashes. Oh, God, no. Please don’t tell me I’m a maudlin drunk. “Th-thursday night.”

“You sure about that?”

“I’m d-drunk,” I say, indignantly, still swaying, still clutching the empty bottle to my stomach. “Not lobotomized. Of course I’m sure about that.”

Nicky gently removes the bottle from my grasp, as if it’s a loaded gun, and glowers at it. “Christ. You drink this whole thing by yourself?”

“Every stinkin’ d-drop.” He suddenly tilts off to one sside, just before I feel him clasp my shoulders and turn me around, steering me toward my sofa.

“Sit,” he says when we get there.

Not that he has to ask. I drop like a stone, the dress whooshing up around me. I also feel like giggling, which, since a policeman is questioning me about my fiancé’s whereabouts, is probably an inappropriate reaction. I look up to see Nicky and his twin doing that glowering thing again, his—their—arms crossed. I will a sober expression—as it were—to my face.

“Seems nobody else has seen Munson since then, either,” he says. “His parents just filed a missing persons report. Tried to, anyway.”