Strange and often inexplicable things can and do seem to happen when you fall in love.
Two weeks before Jonny’s arrival, he had yet another commitment to fill. An online friend from Atlanta had contacted him, saying he was going to be in Toronto for a weekend, and had asked Jonny to join him and show him around town.
“I probably won’t be able to talk as much,” he said during a video chat a few days before he was scheduled to meet his net friend in Toronto, “but I’ll get out some texts to let you know how things are going and when I get back to school.”
As you probably can imagine this news did not sit well with Griselda. Her innate, adolescent sense of feeling threatened began to rise. As I had yet to spend any time actually in the presence of the man, I must admit part of me shared those feelings.
The weekend of the Toronto visit by Jonny’s friend Damon arrived. I kept busy with my ongoing scrubbing, sweeping, dusting, and laundry. Remember, thanks to my bouts with the Black Dog, I hadn’t really done any cleaning since moving in five months earlier. However, that didn’t stop me from taking a break every so often to check in on Facebook.
Jonny is a true son of social media. In addition to his profile on GROWLr, he has an Instagram account and, of course, a Facebook page. We had early on become friends and followers of one another, and, since we liked and commented on each other’s posts often, virtually every time either of us posted anything, it appeared in the other’s news feed.
Interestingly enough, while Jonny had posted something early Friday morning on his timeline about giving a friend a tour of Toronto that weekend, there wasn’t another post from him the rest of the day. I had received one of his sweet little messages, “Hi Mister. Classes done for the day off to play tour guide in Torana (only tourists pronounce it Toronto) chat soon. Be good,” with a “thumbs up” picture of him from inside his car, but that was it.
This was the weekend I’d chosen to shovel out, scrub, and mop both the bathroom and kitchen. By early afternoon Saturday, I’d worked up a good sweat and still had at least a couple of hours more of work ahead of me.
I took a break and brought up my Facebook news feed. A few posts down from the top I ran across a post from Damon McFarland. Damon is not on my list of friends or followers; his post was part of my feed because he’d tagged Jon in the post. It was a selfie taken by McFarland of him and Jonny somewhere in downtown Toronto.
“Fascinating,” Brain said, doing one of his best Spock impersonations.
“How so?” I asked.
“Take a closer look, especially Jon’s expression. Notice anything different or unusual about it?”
Scrutinizing people’s expressions, intuitively reading between the lines, and generally being hypervigilant are all hallmarks of a classic “over-thinker.” They were also hold-over habits from having grown up in violent alcoholic home. On the bright side, I had managed to put them to good and effective use during my years as an online journalist.
“He’s smiling but he’s not smiling,” I said.
“Precisely,” Brain replied.
“What are you two talking about?” Griselda asked, now moving in to join the conversation.
“Look closely at his face,” I told her. “Describe his expression.”
Looking more than a bit confused, she focused on the part of the picture with Jonny’s face. “He’s smiling…” she said hesitantly as if she knew she was supposed to be seeing more but wasn’t quite sure what, and then it hit her.
“That’s not his regular smile. Yes he is smiling but it looks kind of uh, uh…,” she was groping for a word.
“Perfunctory?” Brain asked.
“That’s it,” she exclaimed. “Perfunctory! It’s not the same smile he has in almost every selfie he takes. “What does it mean?”
“Nothing,” Brain replied. “This is just an isolated moment in time. There are dozens of possible reasons he could appear less than at his best and there’s no evidence to support any of them. It’s just an interesting anomaly.”
It was also my mind’s way of letting Griselda and I know that, despite the boyish glee he was experiencing, joining in the preparation for Jonny’s visit, he was, nevertheless, still watching this man like a hawk for the slightest possible indication of dysfunctional behavior that might prove harmful to me.
His comment on the photo read, “All you need is love.”
The following day by the time I’d finished Sunday brunch, there were a couple more less-than-interesting posts from McFarland, and I’d grown rather weary of opening my Facebook page and finding them.
“Jealousy?” Brain asked as we returned to getting the apartment in order.
“No,” I said. “I have no claim on this man, and even if I did, if I learned anything during those years of therapy, it’s that jealousy is a one-way ticket to an unhealthy relationship, if not plain old-fashioned disaster.
“No, my job, if I get it, is not to tell this man who he can and cannot see. It’s just to love him.
“The real problem is, given his popularity online and unending line of suitors, I feel like I’m at the DMV holding ticket 287 and the sign behind the desk says ‘Now serving Number 31.’”
Before taking a break from cleaning and heading off to Oscar’s Sunday afternoon Tea Dance, emotional masochist that I am, I decided to take one last look at Facebook.
At the top of my news feed was a post from Jonny’s timeline. It was a picture of him standing underneath the sculpture of a huge red heart, arms flung wide open and with a huge—genuine—beaming Jonny Bear smile on his face. His comment on the photo read, “All you need is love.”
The post had been up barely 20 minutes and his legion of fans and followers had wasted no time in posting a chorus of over 40 of their usual fawningly insipid remarks. Many of which focused on his bare navel and furry midriff, exposed when the t-shirt he was wearing rode up with his out stretched arms.
Over the weeks, and now months we’d been corresponding, I’d frequently teased Jonny about his list of admirers and how every time he posted a gym, or shirtless picture of any kind, they’d fall all over themselves seeing who could verbally drool over him the most. And every time there was a series of these posts, I’d find something snarky to post to let the air out of them.
But this time I was at a loss. Everything that came to mind at the least smacked of sour grapes, or at the worst jealousy. I wanted desperately to post something smart and sassy but just couldn’t think of a thing.
All afternoon as I toiled away like a scullery maid, I had the Pandora soundtracks channel playing in the background. As I was racking my mind for something to post, I became increasingly aware of hearing a series of lyrics from contemporary love songs being sung by Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman.
I knew at once the medley was from Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 film Moulin Rouge but I couldn’t recall the title. A quick Google search and then to YouTube and I had my response.
I went to the comments section of Jonny’s heart image post and pasted, without comment, a link to Elephant Love Medley, perhaps one of the most overproduced and over orchestrated, complete with an opera tenor solo, paeans to love you’ll ever hear.
Much to my surprise what Brain and I thought was a rather clever response to Jonny’s Beatles song reference Griselda had embraced with open arms as an anthem for our upcoming weekend with Jon.
“Just what we need,” Brain said shaking his head in dismay, “a theme song.” Griselda, who’d just purchased the Moulin Rouge soundtrack on iTunes, ramped up the volume as the orchestra swelled beneath McGregor and Kidman belting out, “We could be heroes for ever and ever…”
Next Up: Wonderful
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