Meanwhile at Club Med...

The baby's hungry and the money's all gone. The folks at home don't want to talk on the phone. We sent a long letter, get back a postcard. Times are hard. (Image courtesy of Dolph.)

Love In The Lost City of Atlantis

We're in the elevator on the way down to the pool. Emerz is readjusting the drawstring of his Vilebrequin Salamander trunks. Toni is upset that we are all sharing a room. Trouble in paradise. Literally. "What's he even doing here?" she asks in a stage whisper.

"Blog fodder," says Emerz.

"Bog flodder," says Toni.

The weather is here, I wish we were beautiful.

You know me and Emerz, always finding cities and parties we were told never existed. This pool is no exception. Toni finds a frenemy from Dwight. I'm suddenly hungry for Jell-o. "Virgin pina colada," says Emerz to a cabana boy. "I really can't stress virgin enough."

If you like pina coladas... Well, let's see. Forecast calls for oppressively sunny skies, no one's making love at midnight unless one of us orders a cot, Toni's heavy into yoga and the last half of her brain seems to have crawled inside a bottle of Xanax. For the flight, she says, clearing a nostril.

I get nice and lobstery and head back upstairs, buy the full porn-pass (can't afford not to), but soon I'm roaming the channels. There's the old, familiar back-and-forth: porn, Love Actually, porn. Lather, rinse, repeat. Cable's been taken over by romantic comedies, supposedly as fluffy as the pillows on our bed. But they still pose a threat. That hidden stinger of romcoms--copious and lengthy bouts of infidelity on behalf of the woman who is not sure that what she thought she wanted all along is really what she actually wants. It just sort of happened, she says. I tried to tell you, she says. Didn't you notice my declining interest in the flower arrangements for the wedding we've been planning? My growing ambivalence over the decorating scheme for the house you bought me?

Well, you know me and Emerz. The completely acceptable, hoodwinked alternative.

Emerz Biopic

"Man on Wire" says Emerz, drawing question marks on his chin. "Unauthorized biopic?"

"Why not?" I say. Like, who hasn't wished that they could still feel that monstrous breeze?

Mayer Seating Tests Emerz' Team Aniston Status

"This is important," says Emerz. "I mean, the second row? In front of God and everybody?" He has Toni dialing her godfather's contacts. Full-steam ahead on this one.

"Since when does John Mayer get Jack Nicholson's Oscar seats?"

Spectator Sports, Spring Break '09

Emerz followed my advice and now he's hooked. Sometimes I forget about his addictive personality and introduce him to what would be a benign or even positive influence for anyone else and he turns it into an excuse to trip the blinds and hit the message boards and splash photos of Aimee Teegarden all over his desktop screen saver. I mean, remember when we had a Bangbros password?

But this is a good time to get into Friday Night Lights. Smash is gone, safe at school, Saracen is demoted to part-time QB and full-time BF, Riggins is experimenting with the power of his position and home-ownership. The economic climate of Dillon, Texas allows the show to delve into and comment on things as they are right now. Emerz prefers The Real Housewives of NYC. After all, he expects to be one someday. But for now he's slumming it and enjoying it, the pick-up trucks and Applebees and soft-serve smiles.

Emerz has time for this because Toni is busy planning our Spring Break. Spring Break '09, baby. Last year I spent Spring Break speed-dialing drug dealers and slipping in and out of cabs, looking for the last laugh of the night. This year we are going to Atlantis. I tried to invite Kenzi, but she's going to a Club Med somewhere with her grandmother. We'll be swimming with dolphins, she'll be swimming with some guy named Dolph.

After Saracen and Julie roll to the ground by the lake and make things official, the whole show took on a glow, that secret glow that follows any non-regrettable devirginizing. The whole world has opened up to the two of them, and no one's the wiser. Making furtive eye contact in the dusty church, that glow seemed to spread to Emerz' den as well. After all the windows are nothing now but thin cracks of afternoon light. We've got tears in our eyes. My Summer Glow moisturizer got in mine; I don't know what Emerz' excuse is.

Driving Mrs. Emerz

Toni gave Emerz a split-heart pendant for Valentine's Day, 14 karats. Awkward, I gave him nearly the same thing. A chain of broken-heart-shaped charms around Emerz' neck, one soon to green after a shower or two. "Semi-charmed kind of life," says Emerz.

Emerz wants me to teach him to drive. He's got a new S4; a triumphant, sneaky purple, with a tight gearbox that Emerz can't make heads or tails of without wince-inducing grinding noises and knee-bruising stop shorts after stalling out. We take to the streets. I'm driving, he's riding shotgun, fiddling with the balance and fade. I take the corners hard, squealing, fishtails and exhaust and skid marks marring the quiet of the vacant summer neighborhoods dotting the Connecticut coast. "You see that?" I say, pushing and pushing, feeling the G-force settle in my stomach. Shuttered clapboard houses blur out the tinted windows. "You see that? That's how you do it." Emerz grips his seatbelt, rethinking the purchase. Maybe next he'll get the Mini-Cooper. He hears they are surprisingly roomy and spry.

Later, we watch Days of Thunder in the den, dazzled by the careening curls of Kidman, tight and sprawling and golden in the dusty light of the hospital, in the clinical light of the racetrack.

"That's a woman in love," says Emerz, after she issues another ultimatum to Cruise; young, dumb and full of...himself.

"You're the expert," I say.

Toni's in Southampton with her godfather, admiring the cold winter surf, discussing a possible summer position at Christie's, overhearing two twenty-something male assistants canoodling on a back porch. Emerz and I prefer the shapely and shiftless Long Island Sound to the endless expanse of the Atlantic. Call us pragmatists--we like to see what comes next, what's speeding around the corner. We like to know we're not alone. We like to be able to water-ski most anywhere, shredding over ferry wakes, twisting between lobster buoys, skipping over schools of blue fish. We forgive the oily sand, the murky beaches, the possible Plum Island fall-out, the yahoos on jet skis, the occasional power plant. The preemptive penicillin makes my skin sensitive to sunlight. Good thing the sky is dust gray, empty and dull through the moon roof.

Emerz climbs into the driver's seat, pops the clutch and we stutter back towards home. We watch The Door in the Floor, Something's Gotta Give and Cruel Intentions, admiring the colors; the green of the high hedges and rolling lawns, the blue of the ocean and sky, the crisp white of Bridges' and Keaton's and Philippe's untucked Oxfords, but telling ourselves we've made the right decision. To celebrate I drive us to Dairy Queen. It's closed, which we suddenly realize we knew it would be.

A Late Lunch at Emerz'

We make Lean Cuisine Spa Classics. Kenzi eats Toni's after Toni complains about the texture of the pumpkin ravioli. We've been watching a gay man's Youtube channel of cats sneezing for most of the afternoon. Kenzi's car won't start. This is after the GFE, upstairs. Thank God Emerz' parents are in China; Kenzi was loud, an over-the-top attempt to mask her contempt. I've never liked that. Emerz and Toni seemed annoyed when we came down the stairs, but Kenzi and Toni have been at it all day, like a rabbit and a snapping turtle caged up together, sharing the same water bottle and pellet tray; Toni's red-eyed stares and Kenzi's rough neck and darting tongue.

The GFE, well, short on the cuddling, if I was to write a review. You pay for the cuddling more than anything else. One hundred dollars worth of cuddling, with an amateur, I would say buys you four to six minutes. Kenzi shrugged out from under my arm after maybe two-and-a-half, and then its off to the bathroom: Scalding hot shower, knees to the chest, rocking back and forth. What else is new. I'm doing the same thing, only in the master bath, with the Jacuzzi jets and Epsom salts. Kenzi doesn't know what she's missing, for once.

It's only after the tow truck arrives and we wave good-bye from Emerz' drive-way that my blood pricks a bit. Like, what did I expect? It happens all of a sudden even though Toni says finally. She's exhausted, brushing the buttery pages of my Men's Vogue with a credit card, looking to salvage the rest of the night. Emerz locks the door.

"Leave it open," I say. "Just in case she needs to come back." Emerz tosses me a bottle of preemptive penicillin and double-bolts it.