True Love With Three Olives and a Twist
The Martini Fairy
Tell me a story, he said. A happy one. Your stories are always so sad.
It’s what I’m good at. Besides, it’s hard to write a happy story, I said. But I’ll try. What kind of story?
One with fairies, he said, after thinking for a moment. The kind with wings. I already know too many stories about the other kind.
We were in bed, with only our toes touching. We weren’t looking at each other but instead were gazing out the window overlooking the front yard. We had argued earlier and weren’t really mad anymore, but we were still trying to figure out how to make up.
The fight had started when his sister asked him to take his mother to the doctor, even though his sister doesn’t work and has plenty of free time. I had merely said he shouldn’t always be so willing to help, because he got taken advantage of. I don’t know why we were fighting, but for some reason I thought it was important to get him to admit he couldn’t stop doing it, even though I liked that he was always so giving. And he felt it was important to insist he could always refuse to help if he wanted, even though he never would. Such is the stupid way that even people who love each other communicate sometimes.
Do you know about the martini fairy? I asked.
That sounds more like that other kind of fairy, he said.
The martini fairy is a wonderful fairy. He’s the wittiest fairy. The most charming. Often in a tuxedo or white dinner jacket. He lives in our front garden, between the dogwood and the pink azalea, beneath that floppy lavender. He likes to lean against a mushroom, smoking a blade of grass, chatting with the gin-and-tonic fairy and the Manhattan fairy. And his nights with the champagne fairy are always special, but he thinks the pinot noir fairy is pretentious. He is suspicious of the white burgundy fairy and barely tolerates the beer fairy. And he loves staying up until dawn, swinging in a hammock made of spiderwebs, listening to the whiskey fairy unwind tales of lost love and forgotten empires.
Sounds like a lot of lushes in fairyland, he said.
Don’t interrupt. One night he was drinking a Pelligrino and looking sad and the Limoncello fairy, the most sensitive of all the fairies, asked what was wrong. And the martini fairy said they had run out of olives. They only had lemon twists and pearl onions. So the other fairies fanned out to search for olives in trash cans and dumpsters but all they found were black and kalamata olives, which clearly wouldn’t do. Some fairies tried to sneak into a pixies’ bar, but pixies are fairy-phobic and refused to share their olives.
He turned towards me now with a look of concern.
The Limoncello fairy came over and gave the martini fairy a hug. The Vermouth fairy, who understood the martini fairy in ways that no one else could, offered words of consolation, but the martini fairy would not be consoled. He felt suddenly incomplete. And, in truth, his white dinner jacket had started to wrinkle and the air of sophistication that always clung to him was beginning to evaporate.
I stopped there and looked out the window.
That’s as far as I got, I said. His foot moved away from mine.
That’s not a happy story, he said. The martini fairy needs his olives.
Unfortunately there aren’t any and all the fairy liquor stores are closed, I said. The only way to make it a happy story is for someone to get the martini fairy some olives.
You’re only stopping there to prove a point, he said. I shrugged.
He looked at me, clearly irritated, and shook his head.
You suck, he said. I shrugged again.
He pulled the blankets off and got up, leaving a small indentation in the mattress. I heard the refrigerator in the kitchen downstairs open and close. Then I looked out the window to see him walking barefoot across the damp grass, shivering in his boxer shorts and ragged t-shirt, holding a toothpick with three green olives speared on it. He squatted and slipped the toothpick gently underneath the lavender.
It’s a happy story now, he said, when he came upstairs.
Because of you, I said.
