Just Not That Into Billionaires Read online

  “Is it possible that on one night you weren’t haterators?” she asks.

  I’m staring at the piece of paper. “Umm…it’s possible,” I say.

  “Gulp,” Noelle says, waiting for more. “Do tell.”

  I trace the little fiberglass lines in the molded chair. “We had a drunken escapade.”

  “Like a one-night stand?” she asks.

  “No, we didn’t have sex. It was more that we were both really drunk at the closing night party, and we had this kind of fun, wild night together. Benny was singing this really hilarious version of ‘Alejandro’—the whole show was built around ‘Alejandro,’ that Lady Gaga song—and Benny singing it, in my mind, it was the most wonderful thing ever, and then there was more tequila. And then Benny and I were somewhere else, having energetic conversations, and everything was fun and funny and new and exciting. Then I woke up in his bed the next morning.”

  “But you didn’t…”

  “No, I had my clothes on. He was on the couch. I tried to make the moves on him, though. It was so…Uhh! He was not into it!” I cringe at the memory of him peeling my hands from his chest like they were giant barnacles. “I was so mortified when I remembered what I’d done! The show was over anyway and I definitely didn’t want to hang around waiting to see whatever snarky, annoyed thing he’d have to say. Or worse, his pity or disgust. I got out of there as soon as I woke up.”

  “You left?”

  “Well, the show was over and I was mortified! I moved up my plane ticket, even.”

  “Is it possible he liked you?”

  “No way. Benny was all about computer games and robotics and making it clear I annoyed him. Or vexed him—that’s the word he’d use for things that annoyed him. ‘This router is entirely vexing,’” I say in my exasperated Benny voice. “‘This router is ninety-eight point five percent pure vexaciousness!’”

  “Come on, Vexerella,” Noelle says, pulling me up from the seat. “I have to get back to my route, and you have a husband to find.”

  “A husband,” I say, following her to the ancient courthouse elevator.

  “I can’t believe you were married all these years and didn’t even know it! That is so you.” She hits the down button and turns to me. “But in a good way,” she adds in the face of my frown.

  “If I’m even married to him. Maybe this is just somebody’s idea of a joke?” I say hopefully. “Maybe one of our mutual friends from the show out there arranged it.”

  “A bit much for a joke,” she says. “Filing fraudulent documents and so forth.”

  “I have to fix it,” I say. “This tour is everything.”

  Married to Benny!

  We step out onto the busy sidewalk. It’s late April, that blissful time before the heat starts baking the dumpsters.

  “You thought he was Filipino,” she observes. She knows about my trick, that whenever I see somebody who I think is Filipino, I ask “Pinoy?” and if they look confused, I know that they aren’t, but if they grin and engage me, it’s a connection and maybe even a fun conversation.

  “I thought maybe,” I say.

  “I completely forgot you had spent time in Vegas,” Noelle observes once we’re in her mail truck and on our way back. “You never talk about it.”

  “It was just a summer,” I say, googling Benny. “My thirty-four-month contract with Nevada Met had ended, and I had my sights set on Gotham and some of the other companies out here, but auditions weren’t until winter, so I had a summer to work and save up money. Beau Cirque Fantastique was hiring and they paid really well.”

  “Is that like Cirque Du Soleil?” she asks.

  “Yeah. A ballet-heavy version of Cirque. More leaping, less trapeze. Super glam with elaborate lighting.” I scroll through the endless Benjamin Stearneses. “This is bad. There are a lot of Ben Stearneses out there! How is that name so common?”

  “There are 365 million people in the US,” she says. “Pretty much every name is common that’s not Podunk Kurtzweiler.”

  “Who would name their kid that?” I ask.

  “You don’t wanna know.” As a mail carrier, Noelle knows these things.

  “Maybe he’s still in Vegas. Maybe if I try Facebook…” I google Ben Stearnes and Las Vegas on Facebook. I find a few, but the pictures are wrong. A lot of the accounts have no pictures. What if one of them is Benny? He’d be just the kind of guy to not have his picture on Facebook. Maybe he’s not even on Facebook. He was never big on social interaction.

  “Isn’t his Social Security number on the marriage license?” she asks.

  “Oh, right,” I say. “How do I search with that?”

  “We’ll get Willow on it,” Noelle says. “Or even Lizzie. Cookie Madness hires people all the time. She probably has a service that does background checks.”

  “How could this happen? It’s probably my fault. I was super crazy then.”

  “We’re all crazy when we’re twenty-one,” she says. “But, dude! You were in a big glam Vegas show? That is unbelievably cool!”

  “I was just a backup dancer. Benny had the big job—he ran the technical stuff. There’s a crazy amount of robotics and computerization involved in a massive light show like what we had at Beau Cirque.”

  “Do you think he could still be in the theater world?” Noelle asks. “Maybe he moved out to Los Angeles or something.”

  “I don’t know. He hated being told what to do, hated working for other people. Most people hate bosses, but Benny…” I find myself smiling at his surly awkwardness. “Benny hated people in general.”

  Even the idea of touching him seemed strangely forbidden, as though he had an intense force field all around him. A force field that I could never breach. Until that night I acted like a sex-addled asshole.

  “All I know for sure is that he probably ended up doing something totally technical. And I definitely can’t imagine him married with a family or anything like that.”

  “Well, Francine, according to the piece of paper you have, he’s married to you.”

  “No, that’s not real.”

  “It’s real, and what’s more, a current marriage is the sort of thing that would have gotten caught if he’d applied for a marriage license. Just like with your visa. He’ll probably be as surprised as you are.”

  I hang on for dear life as she rounds a corner.

  “Don’t you think?” she shouts over nearby jackhammers. “Maybe he’ll be surprised. Maybe he’ll even think it’s funny!”

  I sit there, watching the buildings go by. “He won’t think it’s funny.”

  Three

  Francine

  * * *

  Tabitha stands over me with a pitcher filled to the brim with sparkling pink liquid. She gestures for me to hold out my glass. “Come on, Francine,” she says.

  “Yeah, you’re drinking for two,” Mia says. “This is your bachelorette party and your wedding shower.”

  “And your pre-divorce party!” Tabitha says. “And the congrats on your one-night-stand Vegas wedding that you totally don’t remember.”

  “Ummm, thanks?” I say. I hold out my glass. I only let her pour an inch, and then I fill the rest with bubbly water. Hot Pink Barbie, her signature cocktail, has lord knows what in it, and it tastes like candy. I avoid alcohol when I’m in rehearsal mode. I like to stay sharp.

  There’s a knock at the door and Noelle pops up to answer. News of my nuptials has traveled quickly around the building and even beyond to our friends who have since moved out. I’m kind of glad. It’s taking my mind off the possibility of my dream being utterly crushed.

  Lizzie bursts into the room clutching her coat and a large white box. “I understand congratulations are in order!”

  I raise up a hand. “Please,” I say. “I don’t even know what to say.”

  “Don’t worry, we’re going to track down that missing Vegas husband of yours!” She sets the box on the coffee table and flings open the lid. It’s full of frosted cookies in the shapes of doubl
e bells. “Happy wedding! And impending divorce! Woo-hoo!”

  Antonio, our resident hot Italian model, strolls in with a six-pack of beer and an eight-pack under his shirt. “Off the market,” he says sadly, adding something in Italian. He claps a dramatic hand to his chest. “My heart breaks, stellina!”

  “Only a million girls left for you to serial-date,” I say. “Whatever will you do?”

  Mia grabs a cookie. “The good thing about Hot Pink Barbies is that it’s the kind of alcoholic drink that goes perfectly with cookies. You have to appreciate that in a drink.”

  “Agree!” Tabitha grins. “I appreciate it very much.”

  Lizzie sets up her laptop at the kitchen table. “Okay, I brought all my stuff for a background check. You got his social for me?”

  I slide the paperwork over to her and take a chair at the other side of the table.

  Kelsey comes over and sits next to me. “Don’t worry, we’re going to figure this out. You’re gonna go on your tour.”

  “I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t,” I say.

  “Well, if you don’t go, at least your knee will be happy,” Kelsey says.

  I give her a dirty look. “The knee is happy now. The knee is eager to tour.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Kelsey says. “On the bright side, you got an unexpected day off!”

  Kelsey’s a dancer, too—she’s in the big production of Anything Goes with Mia. She knows how brutal a dancer’s schedule can be—hours of classes and rehearsals, back-to-back. She knows what a knee injury can mean, but nothing is going to get in the way of my international tour. Unless we can’t get this divorce paperwork pulled together in time, but I don’t let myself think that.

  Noelle is telling everybody what I said about Benny and his nerdy ways. I fill in with some additional Benny details. His glowering glare when I’d laugh with the other cast members. His sullen attitude at the morning meetings. The different types of extreme annoyance he would exhibit. “There was DEFCON level, nuclear level, quantum level, platinum level, though that’s not the order of extreme-ness.”

  “You had names for his levels of annoyance?” Tabitha asks. “Hardcore!”

  “We need a picture! Was he cute?” Kelsey asks.

  “I can’t say.”

  “How can you not say?”

  “Because he was so…” So Benny, I want to say. “He was just this perfect grump, glaring out at the world through those big glasses. He didn’t give you a chance to decide if he was cute, you know? Even the way he spoke—no niceties, just so abrupt and rude. And he moved with zero grace.”

  “Clumsy?” Antonio asks.

  “No, more like, weirdly efficient and without grace. He typed hard and freakishly fast, and you’d look at the computer screen and it was all these crazy lines of code, like something from another planet. When he adjusted his little robotic things, his fingers would just fly, all knuckles and hard angles.”

  I look down at my drink, remembering the way he moved through the world, all gangly intensity. But then he’d come up with such brilliance. People saw him as this nerd, but I knew his abruptness grew out of one-pointed intention, a singular passion that excluded everybody.

  I could relate. Fixating on something to the exclusion of all else is the way I’d lived my life since the tender age of five. It’s how you have to be to rise to the top of the ultra-competitive ballet world.

  So I spent a lot of time wondering what it would be like to be friends with him, wondering what it would be like to be lovers with him. I couldn’t help it. Something about all of that harsh passion.

  “Features vaguely symmetrical?” Mia presses. “Hair color?”

  “Umm…dusty-brown hair, bedhead style, like he’d fallen asleep at his keyboard and woke up with five minutes to spare. Tawny skin that would get bronze in the desert sun. Light brown eyes. He kind of had this whole tawny, dusty-brown color scheme going except for his oversized and very severe black glasses, all the better to glare at you through.”

  “Literally glaring?” Lizzie asks.

  “He even hated my weird T-shirts.”

  “How can anyone hate your weird T-shirts?” Kelsey asks.

  “You’ll have to ask Benny. Or maybe not.” I smile, remembering it all. “He hated nonsensical T-shirts the most. He’d be like, ‘What does that even mean?’ And I’d be like, ‘I know you want this T-shirt so bad.’ Whatever he hated, I’d pretend he wanted it so much.”

  “I bet you did,” Tabitha says.

  “The only time we really related was when he would say annoyed things to me. Well, we also had these fake humblebrag children that would compete.”

  “Wait, what?” Kelsey asks.

  I’m not sure if I should try to explain, but everyone’s staring at me now.

  “One of our really mean stage managers would humblebrag all the time, so then I started humblebragging about my daughter, Monique, that I pretended to have. ‘Oh, I stayed up all night knitting while Monique translated the works of Balzac into Chinese for her third-grade project. She just wasn’t happy with the current translations on the market. She’s such a picky child!’”

  “Seriously can’t imagine you doing that,” Noelle says—sarcastically.

  “I’m lucky I didn’t get fired. But it was totally hilarious and people would always ask me about Monique whenever they were mad at this jackhole stage manager. Of course, Benny would just glare. It’s not that he liked this guy any better than the rest of us liked him, it was just annoyance. And then one day, Benny seemed so angry with me when I was humblebragging…” I’m grinning thinking about it. “I was going on like, ‘it’s so hard to know what to do with a child as brilliant as Monique—people don’t understand how problematic a gifted child can be. The French studies alone…’ And suddenly Benny goes, ‘My boy, Igor, is so creative he doesn’t want to have anything to do with French so I have enrolled him in Klingon language studies. It is so tedious, though, to have such a precocious child who doesn’t care to follow the herd.’ We were all totally shocked because he never engaged with us. And suddenly he’s humblebragging back to me. And it was good humblebragging, too.”

  “And he never talked to you before that?” Kelsey asks.

  “Not much! We were all stunned, like, does Mister Socially Awkward have a sense of humor? And it went on from there. We’d humblebrag-compete. I thought it was fun, but for him, I think it was more like an extension of his extreme displeasure with me.”

  “Huh,” Antonio says.

  “Sometimes, like if Benny was glowering at me, I’d do this fake concern about Igor having Victorian diseases. Like I’d ask about Igor’s scurvy, and he’d be like, ‘We were only grateful that Igor’s very mild condition didn’t become a case as tragic as Monique’s rickets. No offence, of course, we were all very concerned.’ I was stunned,” I say. “Chronically annoyed Benny Stearnes joining in on the joke!”

  Noelle narrows her eyes. “So the main communication between you two was that you had imaginary children that would compete with each other?”

  I nod.

  Mia flops back on the couch. “So basically you were both weirdos with a weird sense of humor. That’s what I’m getting here.”

  “Pretty much the only communication! Though there were also glowers and grumbles,” I say. “And I asked him to coffee this one time and he was like, ‘Huh?’”

  Mia widens her eyes. “You asked him to coffee?”

  “I just liked him, I don’t know. We had that quirky Igor and Monique thing going. Considering that he was the opposite of my type who found me annoying, I don’t know what I was thinking. I blurted it out one day. I was like, ‘That coffee place is having a two-for-one, you wanna go?’ and he was stammering out his no. He couldn’t say no fast enough.”

  “So you asked him out even though he was the opposite of your type,” Mia clarifies.

  “Yeah, I couldn’t help it, and then I felt like an idiot. My attraction to him was weird, anyway. And of course it woul
d’ve deprived him of being able to criticize my dates when they came to pick me up.”

  I explain how Beau Cirque had this cheap-rent deal with this apartment complex for the workers, so we all lived there. Benny liked to do work out in the courtyard, escaping a building full of loud theater people.

  “I could always count on him to roll his eyes when guys picked me up,” I add.

  I have everybody’s attention. I never talk about my Beau Cirque days, mostly because of how they ended: shamelessly glomming on Benny.

  “You think he was jealous of your other dates?” Tabitha asks.

  “No, it’s just how he was. He’d make these little comments like, ‘Somebody needs to check the hair product factories for recent robberies!’ Or, ‘Nice douchebag shirt.’ And I’d be like, ‘I love that shirt, and we’re going to have a fabulous night on the town.’”

  “You goaded each other,” Tabitha observes.

  “I guess.” I shove at the half-melted ice in my drink. “Or he’d be especially scathing if they came in limos. He’d be like, ‘Oh, look, you’re getting picked up in a low-self-esteem mobile…I mean a limo.’ He definitely ruined a few dates with his jackass opinions.”

  “Record scratch!” Lizzie says.

  “What?”

  Everybody is just staring at me now.

  “You dated guys in limos?” Mia asks, shocked.

  “It was a weird time for me,” I say.

  “I’m sorry, this is completely blowing my mind,” Mia says. “You think rich guys are the worst. All of them—millionaires and especially billionaires. In fact, I seem to remember you saying last year that billionaires are the scourge of the earth!”

  My face goes hot. I did say that billionaires are the scourge of the earth, which is super embarrassing now that a few of my friends have hooked up with billionaires. “I don’t hate your billionaires,” I clarify. “Just the rest of them.”