by Greg Ames
It was good while it lasted, she thinks. This date got you out of your apartment, and you’re finally seeing Queens or Long Island through the food-court window. Another guy will come along soon.
Unless he doesn’t. And the truth is none will if she’s too passive. So why give one up when he’s already here?
Addie watches Rob pace outside Sbarro with his greasy fingers pressing the phone to his ear. Clearly Rob needs an attentive woman. He can’t take care of himself properly. He needs comfort and nurturing and disinfecting wipes for his sticky hands. But that’s not her job. Best to end this thing before she gets too deep.
Addie drapes her cardigan over her shoulders like a shawl and walks toward Rob, prepared to tell him that she’s taking a taxi home. Maybe he’ll protest and drive her back to Manhattan, and maybe they’ll make out for a while in front of her building, but that’s it. He may kiss her, but he’s not coming up. Well, he can come up for one cup of coffee, but the bra is not—not!—coming off. Sorry, Rob. And even if it does become unhooked somehow, even if it falls to the floor by mistake or divine intervention, no way are they crossing the threshold to her bedroom. Two condoms are hidden in her bedside drawer, in case of an emergency. Unprotected sex is not even an option. Rob will have to wear a condom. That’s non-negotiable.
“Rob?” she says, her voice barely a whisper.
“Why?” he says into the phone, unaware of her. “You told me I could keep it until dinnertime. Yes, you did. You did. Fine. I’ll bring it back in an hour. Please?” His voice climbs a register as he says, “Dad, please. I’ll finish my homework later. I’m on a date with a girl.”
Addie backs away from Rob into a sporting-goods store, where she hides behind a display of dangling baseball mitts to collect her thoughts. She glances at her watch: 4:18 p.m. A steady progression of days, months, years has dragged her to this very spot. She’s twenty-six years old and evidently on a mall date with a high-school kid. Utterly humiliating. But how could she have known? After all, Rob does look like he’s in his mid-twenties. And, in her defense, she still looks “fresh” and “tight” at twenty-six, if the opinion of InsaneSexxxClown666 (Suitor 30) counts for anything. In grocery stores and bodegas she still has to show her ID to purchase alcohol. So this is all easily explainable.
A man in a green polo shirt steps around the display of baseball mitts. His nametag reads WADE. “Help you find something?”
My God, she can’t escape them. They are everywhere, men and boys, these prowling animals with their hairy faces and big hands. “No, thank you,” she says. “Just looking.”
“The Mizuno is a great glove.” He grabs a black mitt from the wall, plunges his hand inside it, and punches his fist into the leather. “Big pocket. Good action. Want to try it?”
“I have to go,” she says. “Thanks.”
“Any time,” he calls out. “Come back, ask for Wade, and I’ll take care of you.”
She exits the mall through the store’s side door, her face burning. She wants to view this as a wake-up call, a chance to make some positive changes in her life. She should call Rob later tonight and thank him. No, he should never know the truth. Let it be a mystery. Besides, he has homework to finish.
There are no taxis in the parking lot. She can’t see a bus stop anywhere. Just sit for a minute, she tells herself. Breathe. Sit right here on this bench and don’t look at your phone. Yes. That’s good. Shut your eyes. Relax. Feel the wind on your face.
A month later, Addie revises her online-dating profile, answering every question honestly, no lies at all, and giving a straightforward appraisal of her life and what she’s looking for in a partner. Four weeks removed from the Rob debacle, she recognizes the importance of complete honesty from the get-go. She provides her real age and favorite movies and TV shows and reveals her true personality, not some imagined ideal that she thinks will appeal to someone brilliant and successful. Dozens of men in the tri-state area contact her.
Suitor 237: “Have you tried the dating scene and found it lacking? Me, too. So let’s save each other from any more awkward situations. Meet me at the YMCA swimming pool. Wear that little two piece [wink-wink], and we’ll just see what we’re made of. Afterward maybe we’ll smoke some hash. I’m sober, but AA doesn’t say jack about drugs. Let’s get together.”
Suitor 245: “BIG! Trust me.”
Suitor 251: “I read your profile with no small amount of interest. You seem kind. In case you’re wondering about my photos, yes, that is an authentic Austrian woodsman’s hat from the Kingdom of Bavaria. Bet you’ve never seen a hat like that before. Have you?”
Ultimately, Addie chooses to reply to Suitor 263 in Brooklyn, who wrote: “Hey. You’re pretty. Wanna meet for coffee?”
“Sure,” she writes. “Can you come to Manhattan?”
He doesn’t write back.
At work on a Monday in early March, when winter is still at war with spring, Addie takes a break from data entry and opens an issue of Us Weekly. Dimitri once said, “Why do you always gotta read that rag? It’s trash.” And she told him it was the same to her as watching professional baseball or soccer was to him: a diversion. “But the difference is,” he said, “I don’t imagine I’m one of the players. You act like you know them, Addie. It’s messing with your mind.” It was the wrong thing to say, however truthful. She stood up and walked out of the room, slamming the door behind her. “Why don’t you update your blog,” he shouted, “or write another chapter of that novel you’re supposedly working on?”
After a few minutes’ thought, she puts down the magazine and approaches the office of Marge Pistorek, her boss, who has always intimidated Addie. Perhaps it’s the way she barrels through the office, a plump cannonball ready to smash into anything, looking over shoulders to see what’s on people’s screens.
Marge looks up from the papers on her desk and says, “What’s up?”
“Hi. I’m really sorry, but I think I might want to leave.”
“Leave where?”
Addie coughs. “The job. My job.” She coughs again. “I’m considering moving on.”
Her boss sighs. “Fine. But you’re staying two more weeks, right?”
“I guess I’m more, like, looking for advice.”
“Two weeks is standard.”
“Do you think I should stay? Am I doing a good job? No, what I’m really wondering is: is there a way for me to do more creative work for the company? I’m an ambitious, thoughtful—”
“Tell you what: stay another week. In fact, I can probably replace you by this Thursday, Friday at the latest. Can you stay three days? Can you give me that?”
“Yes,” Addie says. “I mean, no, I can stay the full two weeks. You know, I don’t even have to leave.”
“Not necessary. Two, three days, tops. Thanks for letting me know.”
At Brown University, Addie had a close friend, Robin, who, like Addie, had lost her mother at an early age. As juniors Addie and Robin became the youngest co-editors in the history of The Round, the undergraduate literary magazine. They often stayed up drinking red wine in Slater Hall. In Robin’s dorm room they smoked weed and blew the smoke through a toilet-paper roll stuffed with fabric-softener sheets to hide the smell. Then they ordered Peking duck from the place around the corner. They liked trudging stoned through the snow in their parkas and boots, talking about the latest submissions, vowing to publish more women writers, more writers of color, more innovative stuff. The food was always cold by the time they returned, but it didn’t matter at all. Addie spent three nights in Robin’s narrow dorm bed. Afterward, when it became clear that they were compatible only as platonic friends, neither spoke of it again.
This rupture wounded Addie more than she ever admitted, especially when Robin began dating Ava, a talented visual artist who lived off campus. Addie’s co-editor and best friend couldn’t find time for her anymore. It had only been a fling, she told herself then, a failed experiment.
At Martini Navratilova, the hole-i
n-the-wall bar on Avenue B, she drinks oily red wine at eight dollars a glass. Within minutes of her arrival, she falls into a conversation with an attractive gray-haired woman in her early fifties. When it’s time for a refill, the woman, Susan, ignores Addie’s request for red wine and buys her a “real drink”: a Jack Daniel’s, neat.
“I wouldn’t touch the wine they serve here,” Susan says. “I don’t know what’s in it exactly, but it ain’t grapes.”
Addie learns that Susan edits a popular series of chick-lit novels. Susan lets out a derisive laugh when speaking about it. Pink and lime-green covers, a lot of bad writing inside. Susan says she has toyed with the idea of calling the series For Masochists Only.
Addie had read one of the books at the Hamptons house her friends rented a few summers ago. She’d found it on a living-room shelf, a single spine-cracked volume amidst miscellaneous tchotchkes. The truth is, she’d enjoyed how light it was, perfect for skimming while sipping wine under an oak tree.
“Actually I read one of your books,” Addie says. “I liked it.”
“They’re garbage.” Susan assesses Addie over the rim of her glass with her pretty, narrowed eyes. “They’re cotton candy.”
“But sometimes you’re in the mood for that.”
“If you have no taste.”
Addie coughs. “Then why do you edit them?”
“Oh, I don’t know. A little thing called a mortgage?”
“But you seem so intelligent. Couldn’t you—”
She raises her hand to stop Addie. “You’re cute but annoying. Have a good night.”
“Who is this?” Old Fat Beard says in a low voice, almost whispering into the phone.
“It’s me,” she says. “I’m drunk and just left a lesbian bar and everything is shit.”
“Mom?” he asks.
Addie hangs up, horrified, but then calls him right back. “Dimitri?”
“That was a joke,” he says.
She lets out a tired laugh. She does not yet know the thirty-six-year-old Addie who will become managing editor of Nylon magazine, the forty-four-year-old first-time novelist, the sixty-two-year-old breast-cancer survivor. These future versions of herself are as hard to reconcile with who she is today—a drunk young woman on the corner of 7th and B, her phone pressed to her ear—as the five-year-old child who fell down the stairs and sobbed into her mother’s papery neck, the angry eleven-year-old who refused to speak at her mother’s funeral, the fourteen-year-old who won a writing award for a short story about a dying pet but didn’t bother to show up at the after-school ceremony to claim her prize.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” Dimitri says.
Her legs are carrying her toward his apartment. “Good thoughts?”
“Hells yeah. You know I love you, Addie. Come over?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been drinking, and it’s late.”
“Uh-huh.” She can hear his enormous TV on low volume in the background. “Well, your contact-lens case and saline solution are still in the bathroom.”
“Aw. That’s sweet.” Also quite strange, because it’s been over six months since he broke up with her.
Dimitri coughs into the phone. “I have a cold. Just warning you in advance.”
She doesn’t care. They can be sick together, cuddled under a blanket. “I’m sick, too,” she says, as if this confirms their compatibility. “I’ve been coughing all night.”
She hears the TV’s volume grow a little louder. “Would you mind bringing over a twelve-pack?” he says. “The fridge is kind of empty.”
She stops on the corner. Her kitchen and her desk and her friends and her life are in the other direction. It’s raining now. Freezing cold. Her ankles are soaked.
She knows she shouldn’t go to him.
She knows that.
Please. Tell her something she doesn’t know.
A DOMESTIC TYRANNY
The new puppy entered without knocking. He trotted right past us in the living room, his pink tongue flapping spit on the carpet. He was a stout white dog, about knee-high, with a brown blotch on his back. The kids were thrilled. “I love him,” my son said. “A new puppy,” my daughter said. “He’s beautiful.”
After my children and wife had gone to sleep, I slipped out of bed for a glass of water. Despite the lateness of the hour, the puppy’s bedroom light was still on. I knocked, two light taps, then opened his door. “Everything okay in here?” I said in a friendly tone, peeking my head in the room. “How are you settling in? Need anything?”
The puppy was reaching his paw under the bed. Clearly he was concealing something under there, pushing it in deeper with his paw.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I said.
The puppy spun around and barked with terrible ferocity. He lunged at me, his sharp teeth bared. Startled, I pulled the door shut and retreated down the hall.
The following morning, at breakfast, I called a family meeting. I wanted to nip this puppy situation in the bud. My wife Mary Ellen claimed that she had a stack of student papers to grade. She was already way behind on her work. “Not now, honey,” she said. “I’m really really busy. Rain check?”
But I was adamant. Call me old-fashioned, but I still preferred the traditional way of choosing a dog. Once upon a time, you took your wife and kids to the kennel or the pound, and you shook hands with the candidates, rubbed their bellies, checked them for infirmities or open sores. You tried to imagine if this one or that one would be a good match for your family. But this brash new puppy circumvented this time-tested democratic system. By inviting himself into our home, he seemed to be setting a dangerous precedent. I considered it my duty to point this out to my family. We had to act swiftly. The children, I could see, were already smitten. The puppy reminded them of themselves: he was clumsy, playful, and indifferent to any rules that impeded mindless fun and instant gratification.
As a human resources manager, I had learned to confront possible misunderstandings head-on, ASAP, in a straightforward and adult fashion, bringing opposing parties to the negotiating table. I scheduled another family meeting for that same evening, an unprecedented “two-fer” that I hoped underscored the urgency of the situation.
I opened the meeting informally, ignoring the conventions of Robert’s Rules. “I think you all know why we’re here.” Normally, of course, I would have followed the proper order of business, but I wanted to address the hot-button issue immediately. The puppy couldn’t hear us, I hoped. Who knew what he was doing behind the closed door of his bedroom? Concealing bones beneath the bureau, I imagined. “We have a situation on our hands,” I said. “It’s this new puppy.”
“Let’s call him Tex,” my son Charlie said. “Tex is a really good name for a dog. Brian has a new dog—and guess what his name is? Tex.”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so, son.” I placed my palms flat on the table. “You see, naming a dog only breeds familiarity—”
“Tex, Tex,” echoed Alice. She had a brown smear on her cheek that might have been dirt, might have been chocolate.
“All in favor?” asked Mary Ellen, her green pen lodged behind her right ear. Three hands raised. “Motion carries.” She rose from the table, papers tucked under her arm, and left the room. “Meeting adjourned,” she said over her shoulder. The kids hopped down from their chairs and ran into the kitchen, seeking popsicles and hours of puppy play.
Admiringly, I watched my wife return to her apple-shaped indentation on the sofa, where she would grade papers for the rest of the evening. Nobody said Mary Ellen wasn’t efficient. She was a veritable Who’s Who in our family, a woman who scored off the charts in the Expected Value Ratio and McKinsey’s 7-S Framework. A tremendous motivational speaker, a thirty-four-year-old dynamo known for her quick wit and willingness to work overtime, Mary Ellen had made my list of Ones To Watch for the coming year. I had done my due diligence, held out for a full buy-in partner with more than just core competency, and was reaping the rewards.
Willy, our previous dog, an ASPCA acquisition, used to leave his bedroom door open. You’d pass in the hallway and it was nice to see him in there working. “Hiya, Willy,” you’d say chummily. Or, “Warm out tonight, eh, Willy?” It was comfortable. He was about as laid-back a pet as a family could hope for. Part yellow Lab, part mongrel, Willy spent hours licking his testicles, keeping everything polished and up to snuff.
This new puppy ignored me when I talked to him. He yawned until I was finished speaking, his long curling pink tongue jutting from his mouth. His entitled behavior suggested that I was the interloper in the house, not him. It unnerved me, but nobody else seemed to notice. That was the brilliance of his plan. He knew that the others would think that I had the problem, that I needed help. It was crafty, I grant the puppy that. Willy, for all his slobbery charm, was far less calculating.
After watching Tex act out all week long, ignoring every single law I had devised, making unilateral decisions about slipper destruction and invasion of bedrooms, I called another family meeting. Mary Ellen groaned, took off her glasses, and rubbed her eyes. “Not a chance,” she said. “I’ve got thirty papers to grade.”
But I was adamant. Everybody showed up.
Charlie and Alice climbed up onto the big-person chairs and awaited further instructions. I viewed them as reliable team members with excellent attendance numbers and high scores in the most valuable areas of family life: love, loyalty, and punctuality.