How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad Read Free Book Online

mic and finally gets on it: “And so, a few of the celebrities who will be attending next week –” He’s off. Camera lights flare up, pens scratch. Funny, that Tanzanian fruit-fly guy doesn’t quite get the attention of the Paltrows and Crowes and Cruises.
    I’m not taking notes. I’m barely listening, in fact. It’s the same list as last year and the year before: Americans, a few Euros, a handful of Asians, and Atom Egoyan. I can just tweak some titles and run the same piece I run every year. I can’t remember the last time anyone spotted an error in the entertainment section of
The Daily
, or even read it at all. Mohsen may be our sole subscriber.
    Instead of writing, I’m thinking about Theo McArdle’s laundry soap smell when he leaned over to open the cab doorfor me, which leads me to think about the same thing I’ve been thinking about pretty much non-stop since I was eleven. Here’s how it works with sex these days. There’s the night sex, and the brunch sex. The night sex starts around ten or eleven when you meet the guy at the launch or the bar or the party and you zero in and he’s zeroing in and if he’s still around after you finish eviscerating whatever or whoever needs to be eviscerated that day, then you let him buy you the drink, then you move into the corner for some privacy, then one of you says, “Wanna get outta here?” It’s the perfect line. I highly recommend it. If the answer is, No, I don’t, you go: “Well I do. See you later!” and they end up feeling rejected. Chest-pass the pain whenever possible.
    If the answer is yes, then you get the night sex.
    The night sex is what it’s like with Ad Sales. You always go back to his place so that you can leave early and avoid breakfast. Because rarely is the breakfast guy also the night sex guy (okay, once the night sex guy became the breakfast guy, and it lasted twelve years. But that’s an anomaly).
    Brunch sex starts sober. It’s the guy who knows a friend who knows you and he calls and you say, Brunch? Because brunch means if it doesn’t go well, you shake hands and have the rest of the day to analyze obsessively and tell everyone you know how bad it was.
    If it goes well and he doesn’t humiliate the waitress or order something weird (“Heated lemon, please. No, that’s it.”), then you can add the walk past the cafés and galleries of Queen Street, past the textile shops and the lofts bumping up against the mental institution that used to mark the edge ofdowntown. The walk could turn into a movie, which could turn into coffee at your place, which could mean sex just as the sun is setting and the light in the bedroom is that flattering mossy colour so you don’t feel like backing out of the room in a lame attempt at hiding your ass, going, “I always walk like this. Better for the shins.” And afternoon sex is imaginative, creative sex that ends with a nap and a goodbye hug (no kiss), then a long, solo bath with some good music. The difference between night sex and brunch sex is that with brunch sex, the next day, your skin is always better.
    Theo McArdle looks like a man who could brunch.
    I have a shadowy recollection that after my failed rescue of the kid from the speaker, Theo took my cellphone, and I took his cellphone, and we entered each other, so to speak. Then he stuck me in a cab and placed a folded ten-dollar bill for fare in my jacket pocket. So he has my number, but he hasn’t called. I’ve checked a few dozen times in the last hour. Well, maybe I’ll call him. We could meet next Sunday, see how he holds up sober. Then again, if we met up late enough in the day, we could have mimosas, or wine, or beer, or maybe a date. I’d be willing, I think, to risk nighttime with Theo McArdle, if he agreed to bring those hands.
    The Czar finally gets his big round of applause, which snaps me awake and I move faster than I have in months to get the hell out, elbowing past the grabby publicists and Allissa Allan, who