Nicky was furious. He hadn’t minded Mike Barker quitting after he and Chloe split, but Wade was actually good at what he did.
“Don’t date nobody else that work here,” he commanded, when she came in from the alley, puffy-eyed and dumped. “In fact,” he called out to the rest of the staff, “From now on, nobody is allowed to date nobody else working in this club.”
He actually put the rule on the books, he was so mad, and whenever some bold staff member would ask him about me and him, he would answer, “Grandma clause, muthafucka. Now get back to work.”
The rule worked with Chloe for a while, but then we got a new chef. A freelance writer from the L.A. Weekly came to do an article on him, and Nicky told Chloe to show him around, since she was our best waitress, and real pretty to boot.
I was there. I saw when she came out of the kitchen to greet the tall writer, who looked like he had been born from dark brown storks.
I saw their eyes meet . . . and lock. And I thought, It’s like he’s handing her an Invitation to Crazy.
I myself had been crazy about James. I had stalked him and constructed fairy tales about us that went beyond the realm of imagination. But to my credit, I had never accepted another boy’s Invitation to Crazy.
And watching Chloe at that moment, I vowed I never would.
THIRTEEN
Five years into my relationship with Nicky, things came to an unsettling end. I nicked my thumb while cutting an apple in my apartment. I went downstairs to get a Band-Aid out of the supply closet. And that’s where I found Nicky fucking a light-skinned cocktail waitress from behind, his pants down around his ankles.
“Damn it,” Nicky said when he saw me standing there, sucking on my bleeding thumb.
“I ran out of Band-Aids.” I wish I could have thought of something cooler than that to say, but my thumb hurt.
He and the cocktail waitress stared at me, and I walked out, closing the door behind me. This was the supply closet that used to be my dressing room before Nicky upgraded me, which struck me as kind of funny for a few seconds, but then the anger set in.
Except for getting a perm, I had done everything Nicky had ever asked me to do. For five years, I had gotten up early and made him breakfast, even though most days I didn’t even have to be at work until six in the evening.
And you know what else? I had blown all my college savings back in 2001, because I had thought we’d be together for the long haul. Now the past five years lay behind me like a joke, a wasteful joke. How could I have given up college for a guy who would cheat on me with a cocktail waitress?
I had thought my love for Nicky was the opposite of my love for James Farrell. Practical and, this time, not based on delusion. Nicky, for all his quirks, had not seemed like a man who made sudden and unexpected moves. But apparently I had been wrong about him.
As soon as I got into my apartment, I unplugged the thirty-six-inch television that Nicky had gotten me for my real twenty-fifth birthday and heaved it right out the window. The television landed in pieces outside the back entrance to the club, which gave me some satisfaction. But not nearly enough.
An image came to my mind: Nicky mesmerized by the television’s broken pieces when he walked out to the parking lot that night. Then I saw myself jumping out of the shadows and stabbing his trifling ass with the same knife I had accidentally cut myself with earlier, the same one that had sent me down to the supply closet in the first place.
I will never let a man hand me an Invitation to Crazy.
The vow that I had made two years ago came floating back to me. And the knife plan faded just as quickly as it had come.