The Scattered Monologues of Jessica Leland: Dinner

The uniqueness of my position is that I am naturally a neurotic, often maliciously suspicious motherfucker—not literally of course! Though one past girlfriend accused me of having a mother complex while we were dating, which was I think a bit off base since Mother owns a string of hotels and she was a graphic design major learning to be a tattoo artist. Obviously, these two ladies were very different.

Ahem.

So now that we've established that I am neurotic, suspicious, prone to tangents and lesbianism, or rather bisexuality I guess—mother didn't like Lupa anyway, which was a shame since Lupa was fantastic—ah, right, anyway, I'm at dinner kind of.

Not actually. I'm writing this but I'm not literally at the table right now. But I'm going to write like I am. Okay? Okay. It makes more sense that way or something.

So, the uniqueness of my position is that I am a neurotic, suspicious motherfucker who is in the position of interacting with a certain kind of person (wait—that's not right. Interacting with a certain class of people. That's it. But that's a fragment. Sentence fragment. Anyway.) who hires bodyguards to keep such people away.

I majored in journalism in college, and Mother told me that was fine because she would be sure that her connections in the industry saw that I could get a job after college.  Which, in a way is great—people knock nepotism way too damn much, okay? Like, okay, so I got an internship because Mom is richer and more successful than your mom, but so what? Who's getting the last laugh in this situation. There's plenty of things in life that are geared towards rewarding you specifically for your own effort, and I plan on learning from my mistakes—okay I'll be honest, I'm listening to The Mountain Goats right now and typed a lyric I was listening to, I can edit that out later. Right. Anyway, I believe in benefitting from my own skills and who I'm related to. It only seems fair—I must be related to them for some reason, right?

So I'm at dinner. Super fancy restaurant, the kind where you have to know how to work silverware coming in, but I've got this, I know what I'm doing, also Mom is part owner of this place, so the host at the podium knows that the secondhand converse tennis shoes I'm wearing with my evening dress is a quirky display of my own individuality and nothing to make comment at. It's class enough—they were once black, and it's not like I'm wearing socks with them.

Right. The date. Interview. Thing.

So Ma wants me to have a honeymoon in Santa Monica—I mean Morocco—soon because she's got this new hotel there specifically for rich honeymooners and she wants me to break it in and tell her all my candid thoughts because she loves me and wants me to be the first one to stay in the royal suite, but she wants me to be married for it. It's cool, we've agreed it's totally cool for me to divorce whoever I go there with as soon as I want to, but first I have to get married up proper, right? So that's what this is about. Kind of. You know? It's complicated.

But also, with the magazine I work for—because I'm a strong, independent 21st century woman with a job and my own income and I don't need my mother for anything, but I'd never leave her because she's perfect and we're family and we love each other—I do the interviews of superich people, that's superrich with only one r, because Mother can essentially just tell them "Hey, my professional nonfiction writer daughter wants an interview, you should do it and there will be fancy vegan cake," and then we do.

So, mostly this interview is to see if I should briefly marry this guy for a proper Santa Morocco honeymoon, and partly for a business interview.

Crap. I forgot my questions.

Crap. I'm writing this a whole bunch later and I only just remembered I forgot the questions. I'm as embarrassed now as I was then. I remember slamming my hands flat on the table and hissing "shit" to myself about five or probably six times as I figured out whether I should run or not, and then I was checking to see if I'd emailed them to myself when he came up, and Mom if there was ever one thing she would never tolerate it was phones at the table, so I hid my phone and pretend for the whole evening that I didn't even own a phone and at one point it got really awkward because he just wouldn't believe me, and okay it was a lie but that's rude right?

So his name was Leslie, and even though it makes me feel embarrassed like I did while it was still happening, I'm going to go back to writing like I'm still at the table.

So his name is Leslie. He's like, Danish or Irish or something, and his family has a couple fancy not-bed and breakfast deals that are like really small super fancy quaint hotels in specific locations at places. I can't remember his name, not gonna lie, but I'll figure it out by the time the wedding comes. Okay, this isn't as bad as it sounds, it's just really hard to google something when you don't have a name and you never remember it when you're around the computer and you now have to pretend that you don't know what phones are and they're like against your religion or something most of the time now and I'm just going to call him Leslie Elisnore until I figure it out because we don't use names when we're interacting and I think I'm going to have to ask him about getting it tattooed on the inside of my thigh in order to figure out what his name actually is.

Okay, so anyway, when I commit to something, I commit all the way, but it's cool—we can get divorced in, like, two weeks. It's cool.

So he comes up, and he's not as handsome as he could be, and I don't know what his hair is supposed to be doing, but one time in college Lupa and I did The Top Gun Challenge, where you get a whole bunch of the cheapest alcohol you can and make a whole bunch of pancakes and you try to watch Top Gun on repeat as many times as possible in 24 hours while consuming nothing but cheap beer, pancakes, and pancake fixings.

It has occurred to me, not for the first time, that Lupa is the love of my life.

So anyway Leslie looks like Iceman.  And nobody's had that hair since the 90s and shouldn't today. I mean, it's cool, do whatever you want to with your body and no one should shame you for that, but don't have the Iceman haircut past like 1996, tops.

So we talk and flirt and drink and the maître-de is super nice and reminds me of Lupa and I slip him this card that says to always put a bit of hard liquor in Leslie's glass whenever he refills the wine—except at the time I knew what Leslie's name was (I wasn't THAT drunk. Whoops I'm bad at formatting, sorry.) So anyway, Leslie is getting suuuuuuper drunk and we're eating lobster ravioli in this butter sauce that tastes like cheese-fried butter, and it's great, and I strip like some of this one noodle and dip it in the wine and write all casual like with it on the napkin and I'm like "YEAH I CAN TAKE NOTES IT'S TIME TO INTERVIEW THIS SHIT!" So I start asking him all these business questions and he's just giggling and I'm writing that in shorthand on the napkin,

And at this point all of that is immaterial because I lost the napkin when I tossed it on the plate at the end of the night because it was covered with red wine stains, and who wants to drink that? I mean read. Anyway, I was writing this because Lupa was in the shower, and right now we're in our honeymoon suite in it turns out the Bahamas, which is neither Santa Monica nor Morocco though it is Hawaii—no it's not—And now that she's out, we can go and do things because we're married now, because after I showed Leslie our marriage tickets from that night, he ripped them up and told me I was crazy and left and I never had the notes anyway, so I figured I should write this as one important episode in the grand love story of how Lupa and I came to be together.

I'm sponsoring—well, Ma is—her current exhibit. It's like kinetic art or something.