by Laurie Graff
“Maybe. You are a little off.”
“Oh, you have no idea how far. Maybe it is me. Maybe it’s over. Maybe no one will ever smile at me again,” I said, enjoying the lightness of the dark conversation as I left Lincoln Center.
I stepped off the curb and onto the paved road made for taxis to drop people off when they arrived. There were no taxis, but a guy on a bike rode by. I looked up as not to collide with him, and he smiled at me. Well, not just smiled. First he looked at me. Then he rode to the end of the road quickly looking back, and back again, in a double take fit for film. And from the distance he smiled, wide, genuine and generous.
“Okay, Fred, I take it back,” I said, having smiled back at the guy while continuing to watch him ride, watching the bike move forward before it made its descent down to Broadway. “A guy just rode by on his bike and he smiled at me.”
“So what did you do?”
“What do you think I did? I smiled back!”
No sooner had the words come out of my mouth, the guy and the bike rode back, stopping in front of me, smiling again, and—
“Hi.”
“Hi,” I said to the guy on the bike. “I’m on the phone to my friend in L.A. and I just told him that no one smiles at me anymore.”
“What’s going on?” asked Fred, both of us suddenly feeling like he really was three thousand miles away.
“Don’t you think that’s really weird timing?” said the guy on the bike or the guy off the bike; he wasn’t on it anymore. He had jumped off and was holding the handlebars while he talked. His blond hair was combed back straight and he was wearing a silver Santa Fe bracelet, jeans and that same, big smile. “I mean what were the chances of me smiling at you just as you said that? What are the chances of something like that happening?” he asked.
“Pretty good, if you’re me in my life,” I answered.
“Oh, Karrie, please,” said Fred, who I practically forgot about, and was overhearing this scene while riding a public bus in L.A. “Suddenly everything’s coming up roses? Who is this guy? Give me the phone, I want to talk to him.”
“Who’s that?” the guy asked, pointing to my cell phone.
“Oh, that’s Fred,” I said, turning back to the phone as if I was at a cocktail party and had ignored one guest in favor of another. “Fred, I’m going to talk to this guy and I’ll call you back later,” I said before pressing End so I could begin.
“How soon they forget! Have fun, Little Lulu!”
“So who’s Fred?” he asked, pointing to the phone. Looking at me, whoever I was, a new character in the next scene of his life. “Who’s the guy?”
“Fred is my friend in L.A.,” I said.
It was a hot night and at least five buttons on his shirt remained open, revealing a nice, strong chest. Looking at him more closely he looked a little like Kevin Costner, which was really like a pretty nice thing.
“Your friend,” he repeated. “Your boyfriend?”
“My gay friend.”
“Your gay friend. Cool!”
We stood waiting for the next batch of talk. It was imminent, as we could feel that neither of us would be walking away.
“So here you are, out tonight. You’re alone.”
He waited for corroboration. Instead of running over the fountain in the middle of the plaza, grabbing the microphone and making an announcement for everyone to hear that yes, I, Karrie-Still-Kline, was here tonight alone, I just nodded my head, encouraging the guy on the bike who had come off it to talk to me to continue, because he only wanted me to be alone so I could be free for him.
“Yes. I’m here alone.” I smiled.
I could see he had a lot of questions and settled on the one that would give the most information fastest. “What do you do?”
“Guess,” I said. I was curious to see what he would say and he answered quickly.
“Lawyer.”
“Lawyer? Interesting.” Those dates with Edward must have rubbed off on me! “No.”
Lawyer? I chalked it up to the black tailored pants and the scoop necked black-and-white striped top. My mother liked that top. Jane said she liked it because it was smart, and looked like something you’d wear to go sailing on a yacht.
“Singer?”
“Closer.”
From lawyer to singer. The guy had an interesting mind.
“Artist? Writer...? Actor?”
“Got it.”
So what next? I knew. The question. The infamous question.
“So are you in anything now?” he asked.
Would Frogaphobia scare him? I hoped he wouldn’t ask for dating advice; the idea of all that, again, sure as hell was beginning to scare me. But I had nothing here to lose. I spilled.
“That’s your show? You wrote that?”
“Well, more like an oral history, but it’s mine. Every word belongs to me.”
“I know that show. I can’t believe it. I was going to see that. This is unbelievable. You’ll have to e-mail me,” he said, as he reached into his pocket and took out a business card. I looked at it and saw an image of the New York City skyline with women’s legs crossed across it. In the center it said, Women and Manhattan.
“What’s this?” I asked, looking at the card long enough to see his Chelsea address, e-mail and phone number.
“I made a film. Wrote it, shot it, raised all the money. It’s about this guy in this city and all his dates. His women. His stories. I have interest now from a production company in Europe. In fact, via a short holiday in France, I’m leaving for London for an extended time on Friday.”
We looked at each other and began to laugh as if we were co-starring in an animated film and both saw the bubble with our dating potential burst.
“We have a couple of things in common, here, don’t we?” I observed.
“This is pretty weird, huh...? Oh. I’m Paul. Paul—”
“Schroeder. I saw your card. Karrie Kline,” I said, handing him mine.
The sun set that night like a ripe orange melon, and the luminous moon lit up Count Basie’s music that could still be heard in the distance. I believed the elements of a romance dead-ended was what prompted Paul to ask.
“What is it with men and women? What do you say about it in your show? Why can’t men and women connect?”
I wondered if men were going to ask me that question when they met me for the rest of my life. Women never asked that, only men. But none of them seemed to stick around to figure out an answer.
“I have to tell you, Paul, I met a guy at a wedding and when he found out about my show, well, it was similar sort of to you, and he asked me the same question and...” I told Paul the story.
“You know why he never called you?” Paul asked, leaning over as if to share a secret. “Because over the day he had revealed so much, it was like he saw the whole relationship like a movie in his head. And it had already gotten to the too intense part where he was about to get weird, so what was the point of even starting?”
“So what you’re saying is that when I got out of the cab that night we had really just broken up.”
His theory, however, made some sense to me. I looked down at the pavement and I thought of the guy from the wedding. Doug. The guy who couldn’t call. The lawyer I met online. Edward. The guy who couldn’t stay. I looked up at the guy on the bike. Paul. The guy already gone. Who were these guys? And who was I when I was with them?
“Let’s say, Paul, you weren’t going to London. Let’s say, you were staying. And you took my card,” I said, indicating that he already had. “And you told me you would call. Would you do that to me, too?”
I expected him to get back on his bike and ride away. But he laughed a big laugh. He looked at his watch and said, “We know each other, what is it? Seven minutes! Nine? Nine minutes and it’s already come to that!”
“It gets there very fast.”
“It’s tormenting, isn’t it?” said Paul. “And trying to get it can be worse.”
“You go
t it,” I said.
I laughed, too, but it was tormenting. It was wild. I lifted my head to look at him, and saw Paul intensely looking straight into my eyes.
“But you can get it,” he said. “You can make it work for you. You seem pretty smart. You may not know what’s good for everyone, but you know what’s good for you, right?”
“Yeah...” I said, though I didn’t yet know what he was talking about.
“Find out.”
“I don’t know what you—”
“I’m not giving you a plan. Figure out what works for you. You have questions, so go get your answers. Fuck what anyone else says or the right way to get them. Go out there like you did with your show and get what you need to get.”
I looked at him, quizzically.
“You’ll have to think about this, Karrie Kline, and figure out what it means to you, because there’s no right way and there’s no one answer.” My phone started ringing on his last few words. “Don’t get that,” said Paul, putting up his hand. “I don’t have a cell phone anymore. I got rid of it. I threw it in the river.”
I pictured him riding there on his bike, taking the thing out of his pocket and chucking it into the water, as the sounds of his own drummer beat and rippled across the waves. I noticed Paul noticing that I had drifted off. He reached across to me with care and precision. Slowly, he used his thumb to sweep a piece of hair covering my eye off my face, over to the side. The gesture was simple. And it moved me. This gesture. My eyes began to fill, and I felt the brim begin to water. Paul noticed that too, and this time used his thumb to wipe away a tear. He kissed his thumb before placing it on my lips and smiled.
I looked at Paul through my less blurry eyes. I looked at this guy who came off his bike to talk, and watched as he climbed back on. I watched Paul ride away to another land. To a place he would ponder his questions on film, while I pondered mine here on stage. We would ponder the same questions, the same ocean between us.
I stood still, looking at the fountain and watching the dance in front of me. The dance between men and women. I would try to get answers, but not just yet. Right now I could not move. So I stayed, touching my fingers to my lips as I relished this random act of romance.
Eighteen
A distress call may put a frog on red alert, but it will not spur him into action.
I just read one of those books that tells you how to hook a man. Well, not hook exactly, just how to set the bait to get him swimming to you. The book practically guaranteed that a woman who cast her line with flattery and flirtation could reel a man in, even if she later chose to throw him back. Fishing through the chapters helped tackle my doubts, and brought me around to the possibility that Doug Fox wasn’t really off the hook.
Understand that the book did not suggest women call men. Nor did the book suggest if you met a man at a wedding six weeks ago and he had never called you, it would be any kind of a good idea for you to ever call him. Yet I’d been thinking intently about what Paul had said, and I did have a question. A monumental one to which I desperately wanted an answer. And desperate times required desperate measures.
“Karrie! Finally! It’s been weeks and you haven’t returned my messages. It’s not like you. What’s going on?”
How could I tell Brooke I was just embarrassed to call her because Doug Fox had never called me? It sounded so completely adolescent, especially the part that it was absolutely true.
“Oh, Karrie. Why would you feel that way? We don’t think less of you because he didn’t call, we think less of him! I don’t want to tell you what to do, but I don’t know if it’s really such a great idea to get involved with the Fox to begin with.”
I forgot to mention the other embarrassing part was after all this I still wanted to get involved with the Fox to begin with.
Then I got a brilliant idea.
“I don’t want to get involved with him,” I lied. “I just want to talk to him. Like, uh...research. You know. For my show. Yes! It would be great for my show! In case I ever need more material. You know in case I ever, like, want to...expand.”
Truth? I had tried, again, to find Doug’s number on my own. And this time I had even done searches with his name and architectural firms in Manhattan. Unfortunately, each one came up empty leaving me no place to go but to Brooke.
“Good,” said Brooke. “It’s just that I think he’s in his forties and never married for a reason and I wouldn’t want to see you get hurt,” she said, giving me Mitch’s number at work because she didn’t have Doug’s, so now I would have to call Mitch! Punching in the numbers I wondered if I’d even get far enough to get hurt. Well, if I did I’d just have to make sure that Brooke didn’t see. But the shield of research was a good one to hide behind, and I made sure to have it up when I was holding for Mitch as the receptionist in his office rang me through.
“Hmm...” he said, when I told him I needed the Fox’s number so I could interview him to get some new material for my show. “I don’t know if he would go for that,” he said, pondering whether or not he thought it a good idea.
“Well, then, what do you think I should do?” I asked because I didn’t know.
“I think you should appeal to his ego. I think you should flatter him,” said Mitch, causing me to wonder if everyone had read the guy/girl fishing manual but me. “If he doesn’t go for being research you’re sunk, but he might want to be asked out. If that fails, you can always pull out the research thing as backup.”
“Are you kidding me, Mitch? How could I do that? I mean, for starters I don’t call men and ask them out on dates. And I especially don’t call men who not only never gave me their number, but never called me when they said they would. How could I do that? After all this time how could I possibly call Doug and ask him out for a drink?”
“Hi, is this Doug?” I asked after I called Doug’s work number and hung up on his voice mail and then hung up when I called his cell phone so I could call back the work number just to be sure he hadn’t come back to his desk before I tried his cell again, totally surprised when after almost five rings he actually picked up. “This is Karrie,” I said, when he answered me by stating his name. “Karrie Kline. We met at Brooke and Mitch’s wedding. Do you remember me?”
“Yes,” answered Doug, in a dark, dead monotone. “I remember you.”
Silence.
“How are you?” I asked, a little too perky. “How have you been?”
“Busy,” said Doug. “Very, very busy. Lots of work. Very busy.” He paused for a big one. “And you?”
“Oh, me? Busy. Really, really busy. Never worked so hard in my life. The show, you know...it’s keeping me, well, busy.”
“Good.”
So far it was safe to say we were not having a very good conversation. It wasn’t as if Doug didn’t sound excited to hear from me. It was more like the only way I might have elicited any positive response was if I’d hung up. But I didn’t.
“Is this an okay time to talk? Did I catch you in the middle of something?” I asked. I was not only polite, but hopeful I had caught him coming off a big fight with a client and he was secretly thrilled to hear from me. He just hadn’t as yet gotten the chance to reveal it.
“It’s fine,” he said. “But could you call me back on the landline? The office number?”
He gave me the same number I had already called, which helped push away the fear that he had been cursing the caller ID with annoyance each and every time his work phone rang. I hung up and redialed. So certain I would be sent to voice mail and it was Doug’s passive-aggressive way to get rid of me, that when he answered the phone and said “Hi,” I had calmed down enough to recoup a little confidence.
“Listen,” I said, before the smidgen I had might be washed away. “I just spoke to Brooke and Mitch today. For the first time, in fact, since the wedding.”
“Really?” I took Doug’s interjection to be a good sign. One that meant he now knew I had not been talking to them for weeks about never having cal
led me. This, at least, was true.
“And I remembered what a great time I had at the wedding, Doug. Mainly because of you. How much I enjoyed meeting you, and I wondered if we could get together and I could take you out for a drink?”
Man. I was good. I was slick. Now that I did this I saw it wasn’t such a big deal thing after all. Now that I had called and asked a guy out first I thought it felt kind of powerful. I wondered if men deemed it that way because it really was kind of fun.
“Well, that’s very nice, Karrie, but as I told you I’m busy. I’m really, really busy. So why don’t I take your number and if my schedule allows I’ll call you and we can schedule something.”
Well, it had been fun, but it wasn’t anymore. And I had to see him. I had to ask him my question. What had Paul said to me that night? Forget the right way—just get out there and get what I needed.
“So do you think that might be within the week because I really want to see you, Doug. I mean I really want to see you.”
“I’m not sure, I mean—”
“I can meet you somewhere, I’m flexible. It can be short. An hour is fine. I just want to see you. I mean I really want to see you,” I said, suddenly laughing at myself as I spoke. “I really, really want to see you,” I said, like I was playing a scene and I was also the audience and the joke was on me. This was all so ridiculous and by this point so was I. What was I doing? I needed to stop. I really needed to shut up. I must have sounded like a complete—
“Okay, how’s next Wednesday?” asked Doug, totally shocking me. “Five o’clock. The Campbell Apartments at Grand Central?” he said, appeasing me, making a plan, and even sounding...nice!
“That’s great,” I said. “I’ll be there. Wednesday at five. Thank you.” I took a breath and for the first time felt the desperation replaced with a more familiar feeling. “I really appreciate this, Doug.” I flirtatiously cooed into the phone.