Dating : Pirate’s Treasure

It started with national Talk Like a Pirate Day in September. Jake was all argghs and ahoy mateys which made me laugh. Not that hard but, still, I did laugh. At first.

Then one Wednesday after work, we met for happy hour at this great little pub Jake discovered. I ordered wings. Jake wanted the fish and chips. After the waitress took our order, I leaned across the two-top.

“Babe, I don’t think you should refer to her as a wench. It’s rude.”

“Must be the grog,” he said and raised his beer.

“Jake?”

“Yaar?”

“Just stop. Please.”

My boyfriend went on these episodic kicks. Like the time he insisted on wearing a red acrylic sweater with a big green Christmas tree on the front — in March. He found it in the bargain bin at the Goodwill for three bucks. It was missing most of its Velcro-backed detachable ornaments so Jake decorated his tree sweater with political buttons and safety-pinned a broken Pez head of a dog at the pointy top, referring to it as a Dogstar.

“It’s ironic,” he said.

“It’s almost April,” I said.

He finally put away the sweater when temperatures hit 80-something. The trouble with the pirate thing was that it wasn’t weather-dependent. Also, it kind of sneaked-up on me. When Jake stopped shaving, I didn’t think that much of it. I mean, I did note his upper lip looked like a nesting place for skinny-legged spiders, but I didn’t immediately think, uh-oh, pirate phase.

“What’s that on your face?” I teased one morning in bed. “Are you thinking of growing a mustache?”

“I don’t have to think about it,” he said. “It just happens.”

I laughed. Jake pulled me close and kissed me on the mouth. He smelled of citrus and cloves; nice, if a little grandpa-y. He’d rubbed vintage cologne into his face stubble.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Bay Rum,” he said and made like a pirate swigging from a jug.

Jake’s hair spread shaggy across his pillow. A good cut cost good money and he didn’t have any. He really wanted to contribute to the rent, I knew he did. He just couldn’t right now. I contacted the unemployment office for him but they said Jake didn’t qualify because he’d been fired. He said it wasn’t entirely his fault. Customers misunderstood his pirate expressions, specifically; bunghole. It only sounded dirty.

I pushed his hair from his eyes, eyes so intensely brown I couldn’t distinguish his pupils from his iris. His lashes were gorgeous.

“You know, in college I cut all my friends’ hair,” I said scissoring my fingers toward his head. “Let me have a go at it!”

“Nay, lass!”

“It’s almost to your shoulders. Come on, just a trim.”

He grabbed my wrists, playfully, but firmly to stop me messing with his hair. I breathed in the skin of his neck and that warm, spicy-boozy scent.

A couple nights later, we were on our way to a party. It had been a sucky week but I had a couple comp days coming and was looking forward to kicking back. I drove. Jake’s car was giving him trouble. “A leak in the bilge,” he said. I knew there’d be a lot of people from my office at this party and I needed to ask Jake to cool it with the pirate talk. We stopped at an intersection. The streetlights shone on the oily arachnids that were his beard. That’s when I saw that he’d strung glass beads in his hair and wrapped the strands with ratty red stings like Johnny Depp in those pirate movies, only not cute. Then the light changed. I hit the gas.

“Jake,” I said. “This pirate thing.”

“It’s not a thing,” he said.

“It’s becoming a thing.”

“It would be a thing if I got a parrot or a peg leg or wore an eyepatch,” he said.

“Are you considering any of those things,” I asked.

He didn’t answer. The dashboard dials glowed an eerie green. The sound of the tires on wet asphalt, the thwap of windshield wipers, and the click-click-click of the blinker when I signaled to turn, all sounded then like warnings. Be careful! Danger! Breakdown up ahead! Even the pine-scented air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror, a leftover of Jake’s lumberjack phase, waved about like a forest green manifestation of a red flag. I knew, on some level, Jake felt it, too.

“Jake, you know my concerns.”

“I do.”

“How can we resolve this?”

My question hung thick in the air like that artificial pine scent. It did no good to point out the ludicrousness of the life themes he occasionally latched onto. Jake did best when he came to a conclusion on his own. But I could nudge him.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“I think…”

“Yes?”

“I was wondering…”

“What, Jake?”

“Do you think I could do an eye-patch?”

I completely lost it. I’m not proud of that, but it’s my truth.

“Are you fucking kidding me? If you start wearing an eye patch, I swear to God, I will yank it off and take your eye with it,” I yelled. “Stop this insanity!”

“You’re speeding,” he said.

If the radio had worked, I would have blasted the roof off. Instead, I sped on with my every thought screaming in silence. When we got to the party, I hit the brakes so fast and hard Jake jerked and banged his forehead on the dashboard. I. Did. Not. Care. I grabbed the six-pack of Lone Star and stomped inside leaving Jake rubbing his forehead and fumbling with the seat belt buckle.

I was on my second beer in the kitchen with two girls I recognized from corporate whose names I could not recall, and their friend, a hulking ginger-haired guy introduced as Flame, when Jake finally came through the front door. He paused in the entryway, looking around for a familiar face. He wore yoga pants tucked into a pair of beat up Frye boots that he thought looked Depp-ish but were just plain weird. I leaned into the kitchen counter hoping he wouldn’t spot me. Granite cooled the small of my back. Icy cold beer soothed my throat. The girl with undeniably killer abs raved about her personal training sessions with Flame, something about the wonder of free weights and reps.

“I can help you discover deep muscle tone,” Flame said softly to me. “Real deep.”

He smiled to make sure I caught the double entendre. Like a fly ball, I thought. The guy was a total douche bag. He had a huge rhinestone stud in one ear. Had it been an actual diamond, somebody, possibly me, would have snatched it from his ear, hocked it, and used the money to buy a ticket to someplace far, far away from him. Still, when Jake spotted me across the room, I instinctively moved like a moth to Flame.

“Thar be my beauty,” Jake boomed as he swaggered into the kitchen.

“Oh gawd,” I groaned and stuck the neck of the bottle halfway down my throat. With luck, I would choke and pass out.

“You know that tool,” Flamed asked me.

“Sort of.”

Jake approached grinning. A bruise the shape of the dashboard was already forming purple on his forehead. He was about to swoop in swashbuckler style to claim his booty — i.e. my personal booty — when Ms. Fitness broke the spell.

“Jake,” she asked uncertain. “Jake! O-M-G! It is you!”

Jake stopped in his Frye boot tracks.

“Crystal?”

Oh crimey, I thought. Of course, Crystal! Crystal from communications!

“Look at you,” Crystal shrieked standing on tiptoe to hug Jake and kiss the air on either side of his head. “How are you?”

“Oh, you know, OK,” he said both arms limp at his sides. “Fine. How about you?”

“What are those things in your hair? She batted at the beaded strands. “Is that something elves wear?

“This is the guy,” she said to her friends. “The elf guy? Who speaks Elvin. This is him!”

The three hard body buddies exchanged knowing smirks. I look at Jake. I took a long slow pull from my beer, raised on eyebrow in a manner that said, Elvin? Really?

“Are you still into that?” Crystal all but squealed. “All that Munchkin talk?”

I’ll admit, I snickered. Jake stared down at the scuffed toes of his boots. Good! I wanted him to be uncomfortable. I wanted him to squirm.

“I still have that necklace,” said Crystal, “the one engraved with those three little words every girl wants to hear: Ni mele tye.”

That was apparently the most hilarious thing Flame had heard in his entire life. He and his fitness groupies belly laughed to build core strength.

“Jake, say something in Munchkin,” Crystal said. “Come on, I know you know. He’s fluent!”

This cracked them all up again. I will never understand people who laugh at their own jokes. Do the words coming out of their own mouths take them by surprise?

“I’m not into that any more,” said Jake.

For the first time in weeks, Jake did not sound like a drunken pirate. He sounded like the Jake I knew before the aarghs and ayes, and after the Christmas tree sweater incident. The in-between-Jake, the just normal, boring Jake. Everyone blathered on about this and that. Nothing was said. After a while Flame, Crystal, and the other girl saw someone they thought they knew from somewhere and wandered off leaving Jake and me standing alone in the kitchen.

I opened two more bottles of Lone Star, handed one to Jake. We drank our beers in silence until the party fell away to background buzz and everybody sounded like nobody at all.

Vivian McInerny is a journalist and writer. Her short stories are published in 805 Lit+Art, Dunes Review and The Cardiff Review. Her first children’s book THE WHOLE HOLE STORY was published by Versify, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in January 2021. The UK edition is forthcoming March 2021.