Gerry's Corner: Yes, I know - once again, it's been a long time since my last blog entry. I don't know how people do this every day for weeks and months (and years?) on end. And, for that matter, for what purpose - there can't
possibly be something interesting that needs to be said every morning to everyone you know (and to many who you don't know). That said, I promised to update more regularly, and here I am not doing that. So please, just consider today's entry as one big sorry for all future lapses.
Anyway, I'm still in New York with my unicorn, Lassie. She and I are in a cute little apartment in Hell's Kitchen (Dan Quayle came by a few weekends ago and helped me re-decorate, thanks to the many wares of Bed, Bath, & Beyond), and I'm pursuing two leads in terms of what to do with myself. First, I'm trying to find an internship that'll help keep me occupied. I've applied to one so far - it's with the Center for Ridiculous, Asinine Policy (CRAP), and it sounds perfect for me. The office is tiny - only three or four people - and they were all born in the Carter administration or later, so I doubt any of them will recognize me. Plus, I'm definitely overqualified for the position. I mean, the director of CRAP went to Hampshire College, for crying out loud. My only fear is that I'll end up yelling at the poor hippie girl who I think is going to interview me over the phone - she sounded really incompetent when we spoke a few days ago. I'll probably avoid mentioning that I was once President of the United States; I don't want to sound overly-impressive, in case they think I'll be bored.
Trust me, a few boring hours of work won't bother me, since I'm using my whole brain for my other pursuit: writing my novel. I've always known I had one in me, but Not-Betty thought that too many authors were on drugs, and thus, I'd probably fall into drug addiction if I wrote and published a book. Still, I miss her, and so the novel is an homage to her. I think it's a winner so far, though I had to change our names so that she wouldn't be able to tell that I wrote it (and about her, no less). Let me know what you think - the first chapter is below.
Gerard and Not-BettyChapter 1: Why Not“But why,” Gerard managed, turning beet red beneath his two-month-old beard and nervously eyeing the concentric cube doodles littering the page of his yellow legal pad. “You can’t be right. Why would she...you know?”
“Got me,” Duke shrugged. “Some girls have weird taste.”
“Yeah, but...” he trailed off, his blue eyes downcast. “I just don’t...well, you can’t be right, that’s all.”
“Look,” Duke said, flipping his thick, steel-wool-thick eyebrows over one shoulder, “all I’m saying is, I’ve seen the way she looks at you all through class, and she lights up like an eighty-watt light bulb when you walk in — late — every day. I don’t get it either, but it’s obvious to everyone in the whole world except you.”
“Well...what should I...” Gerard's struggle for words was cut short by the reappearance of the girl in question: one Not-Betty Bloomer, a petite redhead with a high IQ, low self-esteem, and a smile like an eighty-watt light bulb.
Plopping a pair of over-sized books on the desk, Not-Betty took her place with the group without making eye contact with either of her fellow members. “Whew, I didn’t think I’d make it back before the break was over,” she said, finally flashing her eighty-watt smile, first at Gerard, who was once again intent on his doodles, then at Duke.
“What’s with the books,” asked Duke, who was functionally illierate, nudging Gerard to break the monotony of his gaze.
“Oh, I’m reading up on various forms of addiction,” Not-Betty replied, rolling her big brown eyes to disguise enthusiasm. “You know, crystal meth, vodka, glue-sniffing, stuff like that.”
Gerard examined the spines. “
Leonard Maltin’s Movie Encyclopedia and
The History of the Movie Musical. What do those have to do with addiction?”
“Leonard Maltin, if you must know, has a terrible drinking problem, I've heard, and most movie musicals would drive anyone to substance dependence. Besides, I'm minoring in film studies - that’s why Dr. Teasdale asked me to do the presentation.”
Damnit, she thought.
That sounded so awful! When, o when, will I learn to keep my stupid mouth shut? I always sound like such a know-it-all and genius, simultaneously. “Oh,” Gerard responded, deciding (with the help of another insistent nudge from Duke) to attempt conversation. “I, uh, I drank a handle of gin by myself once. For a while I really thought that’s what I wanted to do.”
She must think I’m an idiot.“Really?” Not-Betty asked, but he couldn’t tell whether she was interested or just being nice. He imagined she was always nice to goofballs like him. She was a nice person.
“Isn’t that my pen?” Duke interrupted, indicating the blue Sharpie that Gerard was now chewing absent-mindedly. He had a habit of picking up other people’s things, especially when he was nervous. This obviously meant that he was an incurable kleptomaniac. He was surprised, later in life, that none of his friends had ever called him on it.
“Uh, yeah, I guess so,” he nodded sheepishly, handing Duke the pen and fishing another out of his beaten old gray book bag. "I like the taste of Sharpies, I guess," he said, cringing internally. Professor Teasdale resumed the class.
*
Dr. Nicolette Teasdale’s upper-division course on “Cultural Representations in the Post-Colonial World” was notoriously one of the most difficult classes in the International Affairs program at American University, but Not-Betty wasn’t worried. A member of the honors college, soon to graduate summa cum laude, she was the kind of student who seldom slipped academically. She always spoke intelligently in class and volunteered for special projects, inevitably winning the good opinions of her teachers, who never suspected she might not be completing all the assigned readings. And if Not-Betty ever did receive a grade lower than she felt she deserved, just a few shots of that eighty-watt smile plus one or two strategic excuses usually brought it right up.
Gerard Chevrolet, on the other hand, was mostly quiet in class and only infrequently considered challenging a professor. He signed up for Dr. Teasdale’s course, despite reports from friends about her overwhelming work loads and curve-less grading scale, because the description mentioned an emphasis on film, and he thought it would be interesting, since he'd never seen a film before he'd gotten to college. But he had no expectation of receiving a high mark at the end of the term. This being his second-to-last semester, he felt his GPA could sustain one more minor blow before his final release from the confines of academic existence.
Although not a Prince Charming by any imaginative (or non-imaginative) stretch, Gerard was at least honest about what he did and didn’t know, and this was a characteristic that, lacking it herself, Not-Betty respected. When called upon to answer a question, she noted, Gerard would simply admit his uncertainty, rather than inventing a convincing answer on the spot, as she did. And when he did have the answer, his thoughts were usually so garbled on their way from his mind to his mouth as to necessitate translation from a peer or the professor. This would not be the case later in life, unfortunately, during a debate against Jimmy Carter on the state of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, but Not-Betty had no way of knowing that then.
Not-Betty was all too happy to play translator when she could. She felt — and quite astutely — that beneath his occasional stammering and his less-occasional stumbling, Gerard had a brilliant mind and quick wit. The few times he had been induced to give presentations to the class, his matter-of-fact references to the stupidity of world leaders kept his peers near tears with laughter. Once he got going, Gerard seemed to bounce off the walls with personality, and he had the uncanny ability to be funny without trying to be funny at all.
While confident in her academic abilities, Not-Betty imagined herself completely lacking in sense of humor, among other positive traits. She could count on her fingers the number of times she had made jokes at which people actually laughed (she was good at counting), but couldn’t begin to guess at the significantly greater number of instances when she had experienced the humiliation of jokes at her expense. She trained herself to be serious and smart in her classes in an attempt to mute such criticism and overcome her self-image of being everything her immature primary and secondary schoolmates had told her she was — short, fat, ugly, stupid, bald, cheap, lazy, ignorant, oblivious, Jewish, and frumpy.
She was, indeed, short. At 5’1,” Not-Betty spent a great deal of time determining compensatory measures for what she considered a serious personal deficiency, including ridiculously tall platform shoes and an unwaveringly forceful voice. Moreover, she had a tendency to choose romantic interests who were close to her height, though this dating pattern had yet to yield positive results.
But although correlation existed between Not-Betty's choices of the vertically challenged and her lack of romantic success, there was no causation. That Not-Betty was neither fat, ugly, stupid, bald, cheap, lazy, ignorant, oblivious, Jewish, nor frumpy was in fact the root of her troubles, like a thorny bush that refused to be pulled from the ground, since her insecurity bred an aloofness many guys her age found intimidating or mistook for arrogance. Older men not put off by her demeanor accumulated thickly on her dating resume, in the section between Hygiene and Bases Reached, but they inevitably broke her heart. Despite the evidence of these patterns, however, Not-Betty read in every rejection a non-existent subtext that she wasn’t tall enough, thin enough, smart enough, cool enough, awesome enough, radical enough, or uber-heady-gnar-gnar enough.
Gerard had no serious confidence issues; he was comfortable with who he was even with all his idiosyncrasies. He was a “nice guy,” and he knew it. He was on the tall side, and with perfect teeth and the gift of blue eyes, not unattractive as we've said before (though perhaps the beard, which he was growing out superstitiously as long as the Michigan Wolverines kept winning - Go Blue! - detracted somewhat from his looks). He wasn’t the nerd who got teased all the time, and he wasn’t the football player with all the girls, though he
was the center for the American University squad. He was just Gerard, a smart, nice, creative, handsome, friendly, fantastic, affable guy who happened to have pretty eyes. He had trouble finding a girl who met his high standards and who was interested in him, as well, but he wasn’t looking very hard.
He had his share of girlfriends, for his still-young age of 22; three, to be exact. But one of those relationships lasted two years, and another for 16 months. The third had been in sixth grade, but he usually counted it anyway. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t had other opportunities; he just wasn’t interested in the bubble-headed, blonde sorority girls to be found in droves at local bars. Well, actually, he
was interested in them, but in addition to being smart, nice, creative, handosome, friendly, fantastic, and affable, Gerard was also shy. Besides, he was looking for more than a hackneyed one-liner and a “catch ya later”; his type of girl was the kind who stayed home to read on a Friday night. Not because she didn’t have options, mind you. That was just what she wanted to do.
Somehow he could tell Not-Betty was that type. He remembered, while she did not, that they had been in a university-required chemistry class together the previous spring. He had noticed her then. How could he not notice her? The girl stood out like a red rose in a sea of dandelions, a walrus in a forest of seals, a troubadour in a chorus of lounge singers. She couldn’t walk into a room without all eyes transfixing upon her. Even on days when she seemed down (which were frequent), she had something – a presence, a way about her that made her interesting.
At that time, the thought of talking to her barely entered his mind. How do you go about striking up a conversation with a goddess? To do so awkwardly would be an insult. Instead, he glanced her way every now and then, noted her frequent and always intelligent comments, of which he kept a tally in the margins of his college-ruled, spiral-bound notebook, and wondered what was going on behind those sometimes angry, sometimes sad, sometimes half-closed, three-quarters-of-the-time stormy, occasionally misty, sometimes teary, once-in-a-while sparkling, always beautiful brown eyes.
Most days, though, she sat at a table in front with her back to the class, and he concentrated on taking notes and making doodles on his signature yellow legal pads (they were the cheapest kind of notebook, and his ex-girlfriend Bo Derek once informed him his chicken-scratch writing was an insult to anything of higher quality - of course, he still kept that tally of Not-Betty's comments in the other, slightly more handsome notebook, mostly to spite Bo Derek). After the semester ended, he almost forgot all about Not-Betty in the chaos of law school applications and his semester spent studying kangaroo poop in Canberra, Australia.
But when they met again in Professor Teasdale’s class the following fall, he remembered every thought he ever had about her. Arriving five minutes late, as he always did since no matter how he tried he could never seem to be organized enough to get to class on time, he chose one of the only empty seats. It just happened to be next to the remarkable Not-Betty Bloomer.
She seemed in an unusually pleasant mood that day, discussing a class from the previous semester with a girl seated on her opposite side. Coincidentally, it was Chemistry 201.
“What did you get?” he asked Not-Betty, forgetting both how obnoxious it is to ask that question at any point past the sixth grade, and his resolve not to talk to her in the wake of her radiant smile.
“I got a 3.5,” she replied, clearly annoyed at the grade. “You?”
“Same.”
“That’s just what I mean,” she pointed out, more to the girl on her left than to Gerard. “See, everyone I talk to says they got a 3.5, so I am wondering, did Lee even give any 4.0s? I can’t find a single person who got one!”
“I heard the college won’t let her give 4.0s since she tried to give them to every kid in a class once. They’re really cracking down on grade inflation around here.” Gerard mentally kicked himself for sounding lame.
“I heard that too,” Not-Betty pouted, like an intransigent baby. “And it makes me mad because some people in that class really did deserve 4.0s. I probably didn’t, since I know I bombed the final. But some people, like you, I mean, you really deserved it!” Actually, she barely remembered him at all. But he looked familiar, and she had a vague association — probably because she was confusing him with someone else — that he was intelligent.
He blushed. “I don’t know about that, my final paper wasn’t very good.”
“I’m sure it was,” she grinned, noticing for the first time the ocean-blue hue of his glasses-obscured eyes. Close to the pupil, they were like the deepest part of the ocean, near the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, but further away, near the whites of his eyes, they were the color of Caribbean waters. Oh, how Not-Betty longed for a white-sandy beach in Barbados!
As his flush deepened, he began to thank her for the compliment, but was cut off by Dr. Teasdale bringing the first class to order.
Immediately the professor had her twenty-three apprehensive students count off into small “collaborative learning” groups, and just as quickly Not-Betty moved her desk so she and Gerard would end up in the same group. Her mind manipulated that way; she was just as quick to decide she liked someone as she was to dismiss the next person, and she could usually arrange to be in contact with the people she liked and avoid those she did not. Years practicing the avoidance of her high school tormentors made her quite skilled, in fact. She was thus pleased, though not surprised, when her spur-of-the-moment planning resulted in her sitting across a table from the oblivious Mr. Chevrolet, just as she had intended.
This intuition proved to be a stroke of genius for Not-Betty, who found Gerard to more than live up to her ideal of a “collaborative learning” group member. He almost always did the assigned readings, while she often only had time to look them over briefly between part-time jobs. He was witty in his textual criticisms, lightening the atmosphere since she had a tendency of being too serious. She relished the challenge of deciphering his often complex and confusing thought processes, and he appreciated her ability to do so.
Mike Duke, a thick-eyebrowed grunt with a pleasant disposition and keen intuition, couldn’t always keep up with his partners intellectually, but rounded out the perfect group with pointed questions and “group recorder” duties. And, as a dual-degree student with the School of Journalism, he rather enjoyed manipulating their fascinating dialogues into notes submitted for a grade.
Meanwhile, Not-Betty increasingly found herself falling for Gerard. She listened carefully to everything he said without interruption (a respect she denied most others), and hardly worried about making enemies by voicing objections, since she rarely had any. He even saw things she didn’t, looked at events from a different point of view, and provided insights she had not considered. Adding into this equation that he was terribly charming when he felt comfortable enough to make jokes, and she was not only falling, but falling hard, like a president falling down a flight of steps leading from Air Force One.
Of course, he wasn’t the best-looking guy in the world, even though he was okay looking, at least, and deemed himself handsome enough. His light brown hair was usually hidden beneath a dirty baseball cap or ski hat, depending on the weather. Only his nearly constant and always noticeable blushes tinted his fair complexion, and his nose was just a little bit bigger than the standard size for his otherwise indistinctive oval-shaped face. And he desperately needed a shave. On top of everything, he was at least six feet tall, a height well above Not-Betty's somewhat arbitrary boyfriend limit of 5’8.”
And yet, behind his glasses, he had beautiful eyes, and she regarded them unequivocally as windows to his soul, doors to his inner being, and gaping construction holes to the windows to his soul to the doors to his inner being. At several points, she nearly decided the best way to communicate her attraction would be to pass him a little note saying “you have gorgeous eyes” or “you should leave your baseball hat at home, so I can see your eyes better,” but for all the chutzpah she regularly demonstrated in her classes, for that she never had the nerve.
But beginning with his eyes, Not-Betty grew to admire all those traits of which she had previously been critical: his nose, though somewhat large, gave him character; when he did take off his hat, his hair, though rapidly thinning, looked soft and golden and just long enough for her to run her fingers through; his blushes were absolutely endearing; and his height was not so noticeable, so long as he stayed in his chair.
But the more she felt attracted to him, the more she convinced herself he couldn’t possibly like her back. Why would someone so smart, cute, and funny ever want a short, fat, know-it-all girl like me, she scolded herself. But she always concluded it didn’t hurt to look, and since he seemed (and indeed, was) completely ignorant of her gaze, it was even safe.
So she sat there, right across from him, watching whenever she was certain he was intent on his doodles or note-taking. And she imagined ways she could talk to him, rejecting every option in self-defense. And he never noticed.
*
Not-Betty made her presentation as brief as possible and rejoined her group, desperate not to embarrass herself further in front of her crush. The few times she had glanced in his direction while she was speaking, he had been busy either doodling or taking notes on his legal pad. She couldn’t tell which from the front of the classroom. Oh well, she thought, it’s better he wasn’t looking so maybe he didn’t notice how short I am.
Actually, Gerard had been writing a lengthy response to a note Duke had passed him at the beginning of the presentation. It was something silly about “Not-Betty and Gerard, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.” His first, winsome response was, "Really, Duke? We're in college, are we not?" His much more serious response was a point-by-point listing of all the reasons Duke could not possibly be right about Not-Betty:
1. She’s gorgeous, and she could have her pick of any guys at this school, so why would she want someone like me.
2. She’s brilliant, and she obviously thinks I’m an idiot, look how she’s always correcting my spelling and stuff.
3. We had chem together last year and she never even looked at me.
4. If she looks at me at all, it’s because I’m funny looking, not because she’s attracted to me. I mean, come on.
5. She’s just a nice person, she’s not flirting with me. She’s like that with everyone.
6. I heard she’s a lesbian. I don’t necessarily believe it, but it’s possible she’s hitting on YOU, not me, even though you're also a dude and my best friend, Duke. Shake'n'Bake, right, Duke???
7. You’re just saying she likes me to be mean. I know how you work and I am not going to fall for it.
8. Even if you’re right, if she really knew me…
He was going to make it an even ten points, or even nine, but Not-Betty finished her presentation before he could think of any more. So, to Duke's extremely extreme disappointment, he hurriedly crumpled the note and shoved it into the recesses of his backpack. Maybe he would finish later.
Dr. Teasdale dimmed the lights and began the set of film clips meant to demonstrate unfair portrayals of cultures under colonial rule. As she did so, two gazes wandered from the silvery-lit projection screen, lingered a while on unlikely diversions — a random passer-by in the hall outside, a classmate upsetting a water bottle — then locked each on the other with an intensity suddenly melting away all questions of “why.”
Not-Betty was first to turn her eyes away, smothering hopes of mutual attraction with a list longer than Gerard's of ulterior reasons for his brief attention. But the "why not" continued to run through her mind, and when she looked back up from the neat, tiny notes she had taken, his gaze had not wavered, partially because he had thought it was a best-two-out-of-three staring contest.
Without a word, he folded a small scrap of paper into an imperfect triangle and flicked it, football-style, with his index finger to her side of the table. He was a natural at football, after all.
With significant apprehension, Not-Betty un-compacted the note and read its dire though barely legible message —
“good presentation”
— followed by a malformed though lovable smiley face.
It was dumb. But somehow at that moment it seemed to be the best compliment she had ever received, and her face melted into a giddy grin. Taking her lucky black pen in hand, she neatly printed her reply —
“Thanks. I don’t suppose you’d like to get coffee or something sometime?”
— to which he responded,
“Why not.”
