The Frog Prince

Chapter Two

C hapter T wo

T wo strong margaritas and three hours later, I don’t think I can drive home, even if it’s only fifteen minutes across town. I have this thing about driving in San Francisco as it is (scary steep hills, runaway cable cars, foreign tourists snapping photos, unaware that I’m behind the wheel), and I take a cab home instead of my own car.

The cab drops me off in front of my building, the sun having disappeared sometime when I was in the bar, leaving my street of Victorians dark. I check the mail. Nothing good.

I head on up the front steps to the house, needing to enter the front door to reach my door. The owner of the house, Cindy Lee, rented me the apartment after the most exhausting background check ever. But then, as she explained to me later, she lives above me, so she has to be careful. She needs a good, quiet tenant because she often works at home, and fortunately my background check said I was good and quiet, so I got the apartment. Even if I’m not exactly financially solvent.

But who is solvent these days? Economics are brutal. Everyone’s trying to keep ahead of the tax man and MasterCard.

At least I have a job. And an apartment (for now). Which makes me better off than 99.99 percent of the people in the world, and right now strong fresh-fruit-juice margaritas are creating a nice little buzz in my head.

Unlocking my apartment door, I hear footsteps descend the staircase above my head, and I try to shove myself into my apartment before I’m seen.

“Holly.”

I stop shoving myself. I turn, watch hiking boots appear. Jeans. A man’s muscled thighs. Hips. Chest. Indecently broad shoulders. It’s Drew, Cindy’s significant other, and he’s carrying a bike on his shoulder. The guy’s a sports freak. And so good-looking it makes my eyes hurt.

“Hi, Drew.” I wish I’d escaped. Cindy’s not tall, but she’s lean, mean, looks killer even in padded biking shorts, and I look nothing like Cindy. Besides, Cindy’s a savvy decision maker. She’s aggressive. She plays to win. I don’t know that game.

“How are you settling in?”

“Fine.” Drew and I have bumped into each other only a couple of times, but he’s always really nice, very friendly—not that Cindy appreciates the friendliness. She’s never rude to me, but she doesn’t invite conversation. She doesn’t want conversation. She’s made it clear on several occasions (like when two weeks after I first moved in, when I asked if I could borrow an egg since I’d dropped one) that I’m her tenant. I’m just business. Nothing more.

I look at the bike on his shoulder. “Going for a ride?”

“I did earlier. Heading home now.” He smiles, great smile, great teeth, little creases at his eyes from all the sun exposure. “The offer still stands. If you ever want to join me—”

“Right.” Right. Like I need to get evicted. “Thanks.” I tense, hearing footsteps on the stairs again. Cindy’s on her way down. I’m not in the mood to deal with her tonight. “Good night.”

“Night.”

I disappear into my apartment, shut the door, lock it. Cindy’s shadow passes by outside the frosted glass. “Who were you talking to?” Cindy asks, and I hesitate inside my door before turning on my hall light.

“Holly.”

“ Why? ”

I move away from the door. I don’t need to hear more. My apartment’s got a great big bay window with lovely crown molding, but it’s also got Cindy, and I don’t like living beneath her apartment. It’s okay if I can hear her music, but she doesn’t want to hear mine. She can have guests, a wild party, but I have to get permission before I have anyone stay overnight (like who would be overnighting?). She gets three parking spots, and I get the street. I know it’s her building, but maybe that’s the problem—it’s her building. It’s her everything. I’m paying a fortune, and yet I don’t even feel as if I belong here.

In my kitchen with the cute little table in front of the window, I stand there and look around. The kitchen’s fine, everything’s fine, and yet I don’t know what I’m doing in San Francisco. I’m not a city person. I’m a small-town, angle-parking, everybody-knows-me kind of person.

I grew up riding my Schwinn bike with the plastic floral basket on the handlebar down Main Street, waving to everybody I knew, and I knew a lot of people. We bought our cakes at Bothof’s Bakery, medicine at Main Drug, shoes at Dick Parker’s, stationery at Togni Branch. It was a one-horse town, and I loved it. People knew me.

And then, when my dramatic whirlwind marriage to the handsome foreign husband fell apart, people knew. Too many people knew. Which is what drove me out of the valley and into the city. Too many people knew me, and every one of them had an opinion.

No one thought I’d get married and divorced in less than ten months. No one thought I’d be the one unable to honor a commitment.

Least of all me.

I strip off my clothes in my bedroom, and just when I’m naked, the doorbell rings.

With a robe wrapped around me, I answer the door. Cindy.

I open the door, smile my tired, tight smile that I only know how to smile anymore. “Hi.”

“Holly.”

Is she mad at me? I open the door wider, when I want to shut it in her face. “Want to come in?”

“No.”

We look at each other for a long minute. Cindy’s five years older than me. She went to Stanford. She’s a successful money manager. In fact, she makes a lot of money. She’s attractive in a serious, hard-ass kind of way, and she’s got Drew, Mr. Fit, and I don’t know why she doesn’t like me better. Maybe it’s because I didn’t go to as prestigious a college as she did; maybe it’s because I studied English, not finance and international economics; maybe it’s because she’s very thin and doesn’t overeat and it’s obvious from my pants size that discipline isn’t my forte.

“I’m going away this weekend,” she says, and her gaze stays fixed on a point behind my shoulder. She’s checking out the fireplace. “Make sure you keep the front door locked at all times.”

We share a common entrance and front door. “I will.”

“And please don’t let your guests park in the driveway.”

What guests? “I won’t.”

Her forehead creases. She stares harder at the fireplace. For a moment she says nothing, and then, “Is there a crack in the surround?”

I turn around, look at the fireplace and the pink marble surround that’s original to the place. The apartment looked so much fresher and prettier in the sunshine that very first day I saw it, three months ago, than it does now. But three months ago I was desperate for a place of my own, and right now all I want to do is close the door and be alone. “There’s always been a crack.”

“There was never a crack.”

The good margarita fizz is wearing away, leaving the bad margarita fuzz. “The marble’s been cracked since I moved in.”

“No.”

I don’t want to do this anymore. Any of this. I’ve had it with people I don’t like, people I don’t know. I want the Marshes back, who ran Main Drug and let us charge everything to our account—Band-Aids, toothbrushes, grape sodas, Jean Nate perfume sold in sets. I want Mr. Parker, who always gave us balloons when we bought our shoes. I want the short, stocky lady at Togni Branch, who could get any filler for any academic planner, you just watch. I want my brother and sister and the sprinkler in the front yard, and most of all I want my dad back with my mom and to have him happy that we’re his family again.

“I’ll pay for it,” I say, hating Cindy, hating Jean-Marc, hating growing up and what it did to me and my heart. I used to like me. I used to believe in me. I used to believe in happy endings. What the hell happened?

Where did Holly go?

What happened to my future?

Why isn’t life more like fairy tales?

I was never going to live in San Francisco. I was never going to wear turtlenecks seven months a year. I was never going to be ruthless and severe.

I was supposed to be charming and fun, lively, entertaining, a cherished wife who’d wait a year or two and then have adorable children.

“You said it was already cracked.” Cindy’s voice snaps.

I take a quick breath and look away to stare down the dim hall that seems to wind forever to the back, where the bedroom and kitchen are. “It was,” and my patheticness just grows. I’m drowning here, I think, and I used to be a good swimmer. I was the strongest swimmer I knew.

“Then forget it.” She turns, walks out, her tiny heinie marching toward the stairs, leaving the door wide open.

I hear her climb the steps back to her apartment, the two-story apartment that dominates mine. Shit.

Shit, shit, shit.

I let the door shut, harder than I’m supposed to, and in my bedroom I throw myself face-first onto my queen-size bed with the girlish headboard. I bought the bedroom set when I left college, when I got my own first apartment and thought it was pretty and grown up, and it wasn’t until I was divorced and forced to use it again that I realized the furniture set was never grown up. It’s a princess wannabe set, with a pale pink princess headboard, the kind of headboard I never had as a kid.

So I bought it as an adult.

For the adult I wanted to be, the adult I was trying to be. Oh, God. I’ve spent my whole life kidding myself.

I thought if I just played my cards right, if I did what I was supposed to do, I’d end up like one of the heroines from the stories my mother read to me as a little girl—beautiful, clever, happy.

Happy.

And it hits me, harder than ever before, that I’ve screwed up, that I’m just possibly the most screwed-up woman on the face of the planet (North American continent, anyway) and that those fairy tales my mother read me (she loved them) and the lessons I take away from them (I loved them) were simply fiction.

I’ve based the most important decisions in my life on fiction. So not-good.

I pick up the phone, dial a number with a never-forgotten area code.

He answers on the third ring. There’s music playing in the background. Voices laughing. “Jean-Marc?” I say, and my voice, which is never particularly strong, wobbles.

“Holly?”

“Hey.”

“I can hardly hear you.”

It’s your music , I want to tell him. But I don’t, because I can see his rambling storybook ranch house, with the set of French doors that are open onto the trellis-covered patio, where guests must be lounging in comfy chairs near the pool. It’s summer in the valley, which means hot. And moonlit. And scented with the unforgettably sweet fragrance of orange blossoms.

I should be there. I would be there. If he had let me.

I close my eyes. Why am I calling? Why am I doing this? I must like torturing myself. “Do you have a second?”

“Sure. Let me go into the house.”

So he was outside. A rock falls from my throat to my stomach and lands hard.

I can hear him talking to others, his voice muffled as if he’s put the phone to his chest, and then I hear footsteps, a door closes, and a moment of silence. “Holly?”

“Hi.” Be calm, be calm, be calm.

“Something wrong?”

God damn it, yes .

You once said you loved me. And you married me. In front of God and my family and everybody.

I see us at my family’s old-fashioned church in Visalia with the marvelous stained-glass windows, the same church I attended every single Sunday from birth until I went away to college. I see us in St. Tropez in lounge chairs on the pier, sunlight glinting madly off the perfect turquoise water, me obsessed with Jean-Marc’s indifference while Jean-Marc is obsessed with Rimbaud’s poetry. I see us stiff and silent, signing the divorce papers at the ugly Fresno courthouse, the building more suitable for a prison than for an office building.

“No.” But I’m going to cry; I’m going to break open fast. Jesus. How can it be so easy for him? How can it—we—have been nothing at all? “What happened?” I ask, and I know I’m a fool, know that this is ground that’s been covered a thousand times without any insight gleaned, but I still need answers, something definitive, something to save me. Make me human again. The truth is, I have to understand how his feelings changed. I need to know what makes love fade, or if it was something I did.

“Oh, Holly.” He sighs. “Are you having a bad day?”

Stupid tears sting my eyes. No, Jean-Marc , I want to scream, not a bad day, just a bad life. I thought you were my Prince Charming, and instead you were a toad . I sniff unattractively, and somehow, thinking of him as a toad, a really awful warty, stinky toad, makes me feel marginally better. “Are you having a party?”

“Just a few friends over.”

I say nothing. What can I say? I was the one who filed for divorce. I was the one who played bad cop to Jean-Marc’s good cop. I was the one who moved. He got to stay behind. He got to keep the friends. Even better, he got the great Waterford glasses—a complete set, minus the eight white wine I have, which he doesn’t miss since he has twelve red—so he ought to be having parties.

“It takes time to settle into a new place,” he says, his accent suddenly becoming thicker, more Gallic. The guy knows when to play his French-foreign-hero card. “You have to be patient. Give it time.”

“Yeah.”

“Starting over is never easy.”

I nod, not that he can see, and scrub my face dry.

“It was the same for me,” he adds. “When I left Paris, came here, everything was so different. I felt like a fish out of water.”

Oh, shut up.

Jean-Marc’s a professor of French literature at Fresno State, the local university. When we met at the Daily Planet in Fresno’s Tower district, I fell for him hard and fast. I loved everything about him: his Frenchness, his style, his incredible accent. He was so different from anyone I’d ever met, so interesting, so romantic. Our dates were like something out of a romance novel—champagne ( French champagne, not Napa Valley sparkling wine), intimate little restaurants (Continental cuisine, of course), expert seduction with real French-kissing.

“What went wrong?” I repeat, growing angry all over again. Why did you stop loving me?

He sighs, a heavy Gallic sigh. “I don’t know, Holly. These things happen.”

Do they? Why? How?

I used to phone him more often, a call every two or three weeks under the auspices of checking in, and every call is like this. We have conversations of nothing. I ask hopeless questions, and he has no answer; he gives me no help. I’m desperate. And he’s a stranger.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. I’m still shocked. Mortified. I was always the good girl. I was the one who worked so hard not to make mistakes. I was the one who made sure everyone else was happy first. But here I am in a drafty apartment in a city that feels strange, trying not to fall apart.

No one told me this part. No one talked about what happens after the happily-ever-after. Fairy tales usually conclude with “The End,” but in my case, there was another page that said, “The Beginning Again, PartII.”

PartII.

How awful.

I know Olivia says I must get out, meet people, start dating, but dating again scares me to death. What do I tell people? What do I tell them about myself?

A Cancer, born in the year of the rat, I like sushi, Italian food, movies, travel, and hiking. Oh, and I’m divorced. Yeah. We lasted just under a year. But hey, that’s life; it’s cool.

No.

You can’t tell people that. You can’t just spill stuff like that. I know. I’ve tried. And people freak. First they say, “You’re so young!” and when I don’t elaborate (how can I?), they get that frosty look, all frozen and cold, and I feel more alone than before.

So now I don’t say anything about the divorce to anyone, and I just smile. Even though on the inside my eyes are stinging and my jaw aches because, honest to God, I don’t want my own apartment. I had a house—a home —with Jean-Marc. I had a squashy down-filled sofa and bookcases filled with books, yellow climbing roses on the trellis, flagstone pavers from the patio to the pool, and a perfect little gated side yard with lush green grass that would have been perfect for a child’s swing set.

I thought I had a future, a husband, a life. I wasn’t prepared to be starting over. Wasn’t prepared at all.

“Jean-Marc,” I croak because I’m thinking of the lawn where I’d pictured the swing set and the little guest room off the master bedroom, where there’d be a bassinet and a changing table. Baby clothes are so small and sweet, and babies after a bath smell so good, and I really wanted the whole thing—the family. The love. The happiness. “ Please ,”

“Give it time, Holly. You’ve only been in San Francisco a couple months.”

I don’t want to give it time. I want him to say he’s sorry, that he’s made the worst mistake. I want him to say he’s lonely and his bed feels empty and that no one makes him laugh like I do, and no one is as fun, and no one looks as cute eating an orange as me, because those were the things he used to say to me. Those were the things that made me feel beautiful and special.

But he’s never once said he wants me back, not even when he admitted—very quietly a couple of months ago—that he never meant to hurt me. Apparently things just got carried away. He should have put a stop to the wedding plans before they got out of hand. Sadly, he didn’t. He couldn’t.

“Cherie, forgive me,” he says now, “but I’ve got to get back. They’re calling me.”

He’s sorry. But for all the wrong reasons. He’s sorry because he’s going to hang up on me.

Why did he let this get out of hand in the first place? He didn’t need a green card. He didn’t need money (not that I have any). He didn’t need a social life.

What was I?

But he can’t tell me that, or won’t tell me that, and I’m left tangled up in knots, knuckles white from gripping the phone so hard.

“Don’t go, Jean-Marc—”

“It’s going to be okay, Holly.”

It hurts so bad; his words hurt endlessly. It’s like when my dad left my mom, but it’s worse because this is Jean-Marc leaving me.

“Holly.”

But I don’t speak. I can’t. My chest burns. My heart, even with the hole, aches, and I screw my eyes closed even tighter. I feel like shit, like the worst person alive. I did love him. I really believed in him.

I believed in us .

“Take care of yourself,” he says, and then he’s gone.

Gone.

For thirty seconds I think I’m going to be sick. For thirty seconds I want to rip my heart out and throw it in the street and hope some goddamn cable car runs over it, but that’s really dramatic, a little too Gladiator , not to mention Lorena Bobbit.

Before Jean-Marc, I was the most romantic person I knew. I was going to be the one who never got divorced. I was going to be the one who did it right. I grew up on Barbara Cartland romances (with some Erica Jong and Xaviera Hollander thrown in for good measure), and I believe in soul mates. Marriage. Commitment.

Being good doesn’t really pay off.

And I didn’t know it until now. My mother (God forgive me) not only read me the wrong books, but told me a pack of lies. Everything she passed on to me had to do with being good. And there were so many goods I can’t remember them all, but in short, these were some of the biggies by academic year:

Kindergarten: Good girls don’t show boys their underpants.

Second grade: Good girls eat their lunch quietly.

Fourth grade: Good girls go to church on Sundays.

Sixth grade: Good girls don’t backtalk their parents.

Seventh grade: Good girls sit with their knees together.

Eighth grade: Good girls do all their homework.

Tenth grade: Good girls don’t kiss on a first date.

Eleventh grade: Good girls don’t go past second base.

Twelfth grade: Good girls don’t get reputations.

And I did it all. I was the ultimate good girl. I followed the rules, made my mother, my teachers, my high school guidance counselor happy. I wasn’t a problem. I didn’t need attention. I didn’t require energy. I took care of myself. I managed my needs. I was so damn good.

And it was a mistake. I shouldn’t ever have been good. I should have been bad. I should have broken every rule and made up my own rules and experimented like crazy and spent the summer between high school and college on my back…

Well, not really. But close. I should have at least messed around. Being a good girl screwed me over.

To hell with the good girl. I hate her/me right now. I hate reality. I would prefer to return to fantasy.

I need some fantasy because I can’t be divorced. I can’t be the person who is sending out little apology notes so soon after the wedding thank-yous. I can’t be the person who is stopped on the street by the second cousin of the soon-to-be ex-husband, who says, “We’re just so surprised, Holly. It doesn’t seem like you. You were the last person we ever thought would do this.”

And, of course, I just stand there with my stupid tight little smile, trying not to cry, trying not to shout, Do you really think you’re helping things? Do you think I like being me right now?

Finally my survival instinct kicks in, and I can breathe again. I exhale and inhale while I’m trying to get a grip.

Why do I call him? Do I like pain? Do I need pain? Is there any reason to continue torturing myself like this?

I might as well take a whip and beat myself. I’d probably get as much enjoyment. There’s an idea. Holly Bishop’s Guide to Self-Flagellation.

Suddenly I have to know how bad it is. Not just the relationship with Jean-Marc, but everything, all of it. My body. My life.

I strip off my robe, stand stark naked in front of the mirror, and look. And look. And what I see isn’t exactly pretty. There’s a lot more of hips and thighs than I remember, and I’ve grown a stomach where there never was one. Happily the breasts are bigger, but so is the roll on my ribs where my bra strap would hit.

The knees still look good. The shins and calves are reasonably shapely. Shoulders are fine. Upper arms rather heavy, but the forearms are presentable. I need some work, but the body is salvageable.

(There’s no point in being too hard on me. It’s going to take time to get in shape—can’t hate myself forever.)

Resolution: Stop eating so much crap.

Resolution #2: Start getting more exercise.

In fact, why not start getting more exercise right now?

Push-ups. Right here. Right now. I drop to the floor. Let’s do ten.

I manage two.

That’s okay. Let’s finish them off girl-style. By seven I think my arms are going to fall off. I roll over onto my back, start my crunches. I heard somewhere that basketball great Karl Malone does a thousand crunches every day—surely I can do fifty.

Or forty.

By twelve my abs are burning. By sixteen I know I’m scaling back my goal. Forty was a little ambitious. I’m just starting out. I have to be practical.

I die at twenty.

Reaching for my robe; I cover up, enthusiasm waning a little. It wasn’t a great start for the rest-of-my-life fitness program, but it’s a start.

And that’s the key thing.

I shower, dry off, avoid the mirror. Diet plans always say to avoid the scale and mirror in the early weeks of any new program (I’m sure they said the mirror, too), and in my favorite ratty winter pajamas—we wear the flannel winter stuff year-round in the city—I head to the kitchen, open the freezer, look at the carton of Dreyer’s Rocky Road Light ( not Chunky Monkey, Olivia). I know I shouldn’t have ice cream. Even the light stuff isn’t on the diet plan. But ice cream isn’t really crap food. It’s dairy. Calcium. Protein. Strong bones. Helps with sleep.

I eat right out of the carton. Three bites. Four. I should stop. I really only need a taste. Anything more than a taste is just empty calories, and the experts say it’s the sensory we’re wanting when we eat anyway. The texture. The flavor. The oral need. One bite and we should have met that need.

But I don’t seem to have met the need yet.

Just a couple more bites. Let me just get a couple of extra marshmallows (I love marshmallows), and with my mouth full of nuts and ice cream and sticky marshmallows I see myself the way others would see me: wet-haired Holly standing at the fridge with the freezer door still open, ice-cream carton clutched to her flannel-covered breast, right knuckles smeared with melted ice cream, cheeks packed, stretched, eyes glazed. And I’m appalled.

I’m no better than an animal. It’s disgusting. I have two sets of dishes—everyday Mikasa and my gorgeous Rosenthal—and I still can’t use a bowl?

I take one more bite and hurriedly put the ice-cream carton away. Feeling very guilty at the moment. All those good intentions are already out the window.

No. It’s okay. You’ve had a momentary lapse, a stumble, but not a big fall. I’m back on the diet plan. I’m serious about losing weight.

In fact, I’m going to do three more push-ups right now.

On the kitchen floor I squeeze them out: one… twooooo… thhhhhrree.

Back on my feet, I dust off my hands because the floor is surprisingly dirty, and glance around the kitchen.

It crosses my mind that I really need a roommate. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing push-ups for. I’m so lonely I’ve become my own source of entertainment.

Holly beats herself.

Holly needs a life.

At least Jean-Marc was company. One of the advantages of sticking together almost a year despite knowing he didn’t want me anymore (besides being able to keep the wedding stuff) was not being alone. But now I am alone. In the kitchen.

I’m suddenly so tired.

My kitchen is so quiet. The street noise doesn’t reach the back of the apartment, and I can’t even hear Cindy’s music tonight. It’s just me. Me alone with my thoughts.

How did I get here? Moving truck, yes. But how did I get to be twenty-five and divorced? I don’t even remember ever dating.

Slowly I put the tea kettle on the stove, grab a box of herbal mint tea from the cupboard, and sit down at the cute table by the window to wait for the kettle to boil.

The panes of glass are cold, and all the warmth in the kitchen rises to the ten-foot, ceiling. I hunch over the table, stare at the green tea box with the picture of a bear in a nightcap. I like the idea of a sleepy bear, and when the kettle finally boils, I fill a big mug with hot water, drop in my tea bag, turn off the kitchen light, and head back to my room.

I sit in the middle of my princess bed, hold my big mug, and think of Goldilocks. I think of all the different bowls of porridge she tried, all the different beds she lay down in before she got it right.

Maybe I need to take a page from Goldilocks’s book and get out more.

Maybe one bowl, one bed, isn’t enough. Maybe you have to try lots of porridges and lots of chairs and lots of beds before anything feels right. I never really sampled different chairs and beds.

Was that the mistake? Was that where I got it all wrong?

I think more on Goldilocks, think about how angry the bears were when they returned and discovered the little human-being girl asleep in Baby Bear’s bed. I don’t remember Papa or Mama Bear saying, “Oh, how sweet, let’s keep her.” If I remember right, they chased Goldilocks away, threatening to eat her.

What a bad story to read to little girls. Talk about passing on erroneous information.

I need better info.

I also need a life. As Olivia pointed out none too gently, I need to start meeting people, making friends, settling down into my single life in the city. I suppose that means I’ll even have to test the dating scene—not that I know where I’ll meet single guys.

Oh, God. A spike of panic. Am I really going to put myself on the market again? Yes.

I take a deep breath, hold a mental picture: Holly smiling, Holly laughing, Holly looking killer in tight brown suede pants and spike-heel boots.

Maybe tight jeans and spike-heel boots.

Maybe comfortable Levi’s and medium-heel boots in case the Bears come home and get pissed and threaten to eat me, and it becomes a Nike ad—you know, Just do it.

Anyway. The visual isn’t about wardrobe. Or bears. It’s about taking risks. Going for it. Putting myself out there.

I’ve been legally separated for six months, but I’ve been alone far longer than that. Jean-Marc and I slept in separate bedrooms since returning from St. Tropez. For ten months we tried to play the part; for ten months we kept the pretense going, but I’m done. Can’t pretend anymore.

The marriage is over. There’s no going back. The divorce isn’t final yet, but you could call me Holly Available.