Me Times Three

by Alex Witchel

  I returned to the table in time to see Howard Barad, M.D., aim his fork at my just-served veal scallops, spear one, and fold it whole into his mouth. “Mmmm, good,” he pronounced. “You’ll like that.”

  I looked at the long drips of sauce on the tablecloth and then, as surreptitiously as possible, at my watch. It wasn’t even eight o’clock.

  A full mouth proved no deterrent to Dr. Barad’s conversation, which encompassed radios (he actually collected them) and snorkeling, one of his favorite pastimes. I groaned inwardly. Another water sport that had never appealed to me. At least it wasn’t sailing.

  I looked out the window as Howard droned on. The horse-drawn carriages were lined up in the street waiting to take tourists and romance seekers for a twilight spin through the park. I had never done that with Bucky, I realized, though we had always planned to.

  When I’d returned from Palm Springs, I must have picked up the phone to call him a hundred times, but always managed to stop myself. I got into the habit of calling his desk at work, just to see who answered. He never did, and I always hung up.

  I also called his home machine during the day and found that he had changed his message. Suddenly he was sporting some sort of country-western twang, saying, “If you would be so kind as to leave a message,” he’d call you back. I didn’t get it. Here was a guy trying to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger who talked like Kenny Rogers and, with his new wardrobe of custom-made suits, dressed like James Bond. Who the hell was he, anyway?

  He left me a few more messages—at times of the day when I would never be home—but I didn’t return them. Finally, they stopped.

  Which is how I ended up in the Edwardian Room with Howard Barad, who, unfortunately, was still talking. Over coffee, the conversation turned to food, which was at least a step up from radios.

  “What would you say is your favorite meal?” he asked.

  “Pizza,” I said immediately. “Double cheese, pepperoni, and mushroom.”

  He clapped his hand on the table. “Well, if I had known that, I could have saved a lot of money,” he exclaimed, vexed.

  “Sorry,” I said, narrowing my gaze, but he was already searching for his car keys, insisting on driving me home.

  “Actually, I’m going back to the office,” I said quickly.

  He looked at his watch, aghast. “But it’s almost nine-thirty,” he said. “The office is closed now, isn’t it?”

  I sighed and shook my head mournfully. “Not for those of us on deadline,” I said. There went my bonus points. “Actually, in Los Angeles, it’s only six-thirty, and I still have to call someone and interview them, because the piece has to ship tomorrow. But I had a lovely time. Thank you.” I got up and started to walk.

  “Well, at least let me drop you there,” he said anxiously. He must have promised his father he’d see me home. “That would be great,” I said, and this time I put on my seat belt without being asked.

  I managed to elude the wet lips in the driver’s seat and ducked inside the Jolie! lobby. The nighttime doorman looked up. “Forget something?” he asked amiably, so I said yes. My dignity.

  I waited until I was sure the car was gone, then decided it was probably against my better judgment to walk into the Limelight, alone, for a party inhabited by the kind of people Coco Church hung out with. But I was also desperate to prove to myself that there was more to life than Howard Barad. I forced myself back outside.

  When I arrived at the club, there were a handful of people at the door who didn’t want to be told that a private party was in progress, and they were none too happy when I handed over the slip of pink paper Coco had given me to gain entry.

  Inside, it was very dark and very loud and, in truth, very empty. It didn’t take me long to find Coco.

  “Hey, you made it, how great!” she enthused. “Was the date just pitiful?”

  “That’s the word for it. I’ll give you the gory details tomorrow. Where is everyone?”

  “Oh, it’s early yet,” she said, not even looking at her watch. “They’ll start coming soon. But in the meantime, you know, we have some fabulous coke.”

  I shook my head. “No thanks,” I said. I may be the only person in New York to have lived through the eighties without ever trying cocaine. The idea of inhaling something directly into my brain simply unnerved me. If it had come in suppositories, I might have considered it.

  “Okay, then come meet some people,” she urged, dragging me toward a small gathering. “This is Sandy, everyone,” she announced. A few of them smiled and said hi, though most of them ignored me.

  “Is Pimm here?” I asked, but Coco was already off with some musician type, arm draped around his neck, laughing and dancing. Her halter top was almost untied.

  This had been a mistake. I started sidling toward the door.

  I had almost made it outside when someone called my name.

  It was Peter Darby, who I knew from drama school. He was gay and used to accompany Paul to some of New Haven’s finer bacchanals, when he wasn’t practicing transcendental meditation. He had always seemed the picture of calm to me, but now that he had taken a job with a Broadway producer, he said, he found spiritual nirvana more elusive than ever. He was a friend of the architect, it turned out, who hadn’t arrived yet for his own birthday party. We talked for a while, until a large group poured in, pushing past us, drunk and rowdy. One guy practically mowed me over, stomping on the heel of my shoe, pitching me forward. Peter caught me by the wrists.

  “Jesus!” I bellowed indignantly, though the guy never even turned around. “I think it’s definitely time to go home,” I told Peter, working the mashed shoe back on. Another man came through the door and approached us with a tentative smile.

  “Um, hi, is this the party for Claire?” he asked pleasantly.

  “If it is, she has some rotten friends,” I said curtly, turning my back on him. “Give me a call sometime,” I said to Peter. “Gotta go.”

  After almost breaking someone else’s foot in a struggle to get a taxi, I sat back and made a post-Bucky resolution. No more parties. I was too old to feel this meaningless and humiliated.

  At thirteen you have no choice, but as a grown-up you do, and goddammit, I was going to be a grown-up if it killed me, as it certainly promised to. Blind dates, I decided, were a definite maybe from now on, depending on the referral. My parents, however, were permanently disqualified.

  In the following weeks I discovered that, my parents aside, it seemed that everyone I knew had someone I had to meet, the perfect person just for me. It was like a community project in New York to fix people up, play fairy godmother and get all the credit. It had nothing to do with love, and it had nothing to do with the hapless souls involved. It was all about the fixer-uppers savoring the ultimate control freak’s triumph: deciding what was best for everyone else.

  The procession of dates seemed endless. First, there was the real estate entrepreneur—highly recommended—who sent me a bouquet of balloons at the office with a note telling me how much he looked forward to our dinner. As the balloons bobbed along the ceiling, we all spent the better part of an afternoon planning my wedding—and then the guy stood me up.

  Next was a book editor who took me to Memphis, a loud, happening restaurant on the Upper West Side where everything was served with the Cajun spices that were so trendy then. But before the blackened redfish arrived, he left the table to do coke—without telling me and without offering—and returned twenty minutes later with a bloody nose. So much for the redfish.

  Then there was the lawyer from Sullivan & Cromwell whose name I actually forgot by dessert. I did my best to cover it up, but when he walked me home and called me “Sandy” twice and all I could come up with was what a great time I had had and thank you so much, I think he figured it out. I was so mortified that, once inside, I ate an entire bag of Mint Milanos.

  Another night I had to go to a silly event for Jolie!, a screening of some public-television thing at the Guggenheim Museum, where
a semi-famous actor, very tall with a long face, sat next to me and eventually asked me to dinner. That was fine until he insisted on driving me home. While stopped at a red light he reached over, took my hand, and started kissing my palm, picturing himself the soul of romance. He looked so much like a nag going for a sugar cube, it took all my willpower not to laugh.

  In retrospect, of course, I should have dated no one until I had regained some sense of equilibrium. No matter where I went or whom I was with, I always had the sensation of being outside myself somehow, watching, and none too acutely at that. I wasn’t happy alone, and I wasn’t happy with anyone else. Though my instinct was to stay away from men in general, everyone insisted that that was the wrong choice. And having made the wrongest of all wrong choices imaginable, well, I didn’t consider myself much of an authority. So I kept dating, believing that the ritual would heal me eventually, like antibiotics.

  Next up on the hit parade was Bart Canaday, an Australian business executive recommended by my drama-school friend Dara Richards, another theater refugee who was now an aspiring movie producer. Bart was a year or two younger than me but very smart, Dara insisted. And because he gave money to struggling nonprofit theaters in leaky basements in the Village, she declared, he had the soul of an artist.

  I met him at a charity polo match, of all places. It was in Connecticut, and a group of us drove out there, dressed in our drama-school idea of polo-match finery: large hats that looked stagey—there were tents to keep out of the sun—silk dresses we sweated through, and high heels that sank into the grass and were stained forever. We looked ridiculous. The real habitués, who were dressed in cotton, khaki, and Keds, stared us down, so except for occasional forays to the buffet table, we kept to ourselves. Bart met us there. He seemed older in the way that most non-American boys did, better educated somehow, wiser in the ways of the world. He was pleasant company, he did like the theater, he even knew about Jolie! And if he realized that our hats were stupid, he never let on.

  He and I met a few nights later, for dinner. It was perfectly fine, but that was also the problem. Our date, like so many of these dates, felt no different than a business lunch. Everyone always says you know when it’s right with someone, which may be, but when it’s not exactly wrong, there’s the trap. You start thinking, Shouldn’t something be happening here? And when it’s not, you think, Maybe I’m not giving it a chance. (When in doubt, always blame yourself.)

  So then you agree to two or three more of these completely eventless evenings where both of you gamely stick it out though he would rather go home and take off his tie and you would rather go home and take off your pantyhose. But you order coffee while he talks about how Outward Bound changed his life, and you wonder what kind of life can be changed by a camping trip.

  After dinner, Bart and I walked along Columbus Avenue. It was a beautiful night.

  “Look,” I said. “There’s the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper. It’s so rare to actually see them in the city.”

  He followed my gaze, seemingly confused. “Where?” he asked. I laughed, thinking he was making a joke, but he shook his head. “In Australia, we have a different set of constellations,” he said.

  “What?” I couldn’t tell if he was putting me on.

  “Yes,” he continued. “Our stars aren’t like these. The whole setup is different.”

  I felt unexpectedly crushed. Lackluster dinner conversation was one thing, but how could I fall in love with someone who didn’t even know the same stars I did? He called, but I didn’t call back. There are just some givens in life. A pulse and the Milky Way. Next.

  By August, my patience with the entire dating process was running out. I was bored to death and hadn’t had sex in months, a strange and unappealing situation. Dara Richards then introduced me to Roy Toner. Roy was a development executive at TriStar Pictures, which meant that he spent his time doing pretty much what Dara did, turning up at meetings with just about anyone with even the slightest crackpot idea for a screenplay. Though he at least had a few pictures actually threatening to go into production, and had co-produced one already, albeit a flop.

  Roy was very smooth, tall and slim and nattily dressed, with a handsome face and the unctuous manner of a Hollywood executive—no depth and no apology—which, at that moment, beguiled me. Beside the fact that he seemed to disappear periodically, I decided that the time had come to sleep with someone who wasn’t Bucky.

  I made the monumental effort to clean my apartment—I actually folded the futon up off the floor for the first time in months—and invited him over. Beforehand, we got suitably smashed at dinner at Orso, a showbiz hangout, where Roy shook hands with just about everyone at every table while I smiled from a distance. Back at my apartment, things moved right along—though, of course, I had to pull the futon right back down again. As I did, I willed myself not to think, just to do it. I hate to say that I wanted to get it over with, but I did.

  Meanwhile, Roy Toner had no sense of what I was thinking or feeling, because he seemed suddenly possessed by the ghost of Errol Flynn. He was quite the swashbuckler, all pose and swagger and a well-choreographed technique, which, in his defense, included a clitoral homing device he could have marketed to a fare-thee-well.

  But, alas, sex with Roy Toner was about Roy Toner, expert seducer, with none of the sloppy authenticity or charm of an inadvertent tooth or an errant elbow. What an operator he was. And what a bore.

  When he had finished his performance, we settled onto the pillows and under the covers. I turned to him, alarm clock in hand. “What time do you want to get up?” I asked. He flinched, as if I’d slapped him.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said formally, as if addressing the Queen Mother, “I have such an early breakfast meeting tomorrow, I won’t be able to stay.”

  I thought I might die of humiliation. I had no idea that I could be a one-night stand for someone who didn’t even stay the night.

  We spoke on the phone a few more times but never managed to actually connect, and then Dara called me. “I thought I should apologize, but I had no idea,” she said timidly.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, about Roy,” she said.

  “What? What about Roy?”

  “I found out from someone he works with that he’s been seeing the same woman for years. And she’s about ten years older than he is.”

  I laughed. “Well, at least now I understand the performance aspect of the evening,” I said. “The part of the young, full-service stud will be played by Roy Toner. At least the old broad did the rest of us a service and gave him a geography lesson.”

  She laughed with relief. “You’re not mad?” she said.

  “No,” I said truthfully. “I have to say, I really don’t care.”

  And I didn’t.

  Enough so that over the next several weeks I had three drinks dates, two lunch dates, and four dinners. I kissed two, slept with two, and the rest didn’t even get a handshake.

  About six weeks after the party at the Limelight (“Fabulous,” Coco had pronounced it, “you definitely should have stayed”), I got a call from Peter Darby.

  “I have a friend you might be interested in,” he told me.

  “God, do I have to?” I wailed. “My life has been a living hell.”

  “No, this one’s different,” he insisted, launching into a hard sell of Michael Victor, a financial whiz who was also on the board of the New York City Ballet. When I finally said okay, mostly to make Peter stop, he sounded relieved.

  “You shouldn’t be so angry, Sandy,” he said.

  “Are you going to give me a TM lecture now? Because I am truly not in the mood.”

  “Look,” he went on, unperturbed, “I know every breakup is hard, but this is a big city and there are opportunities everywhere. Like that night at the Limelight. I couldn’t believe that.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Remember that guy who asked us if it was the party for Claire, th
e one you totally blew off?”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “That was Mark Lewis.”

  “The art writer?”

  “The very one. Who, I might add, has been separated for more than a year now and dating like crazy.”

  “I’m not interested in anyone who dates like crazy,” I huffed. “Including me.”

  “Well, you certainly made an impression,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He wanted to know who that really cute woman was and why she was so incredibly pissed off.”

  “Did you tell him that someone had just mauled my shoe, not to mention my foot, and I couldn’t wait to go home?”

  “No,” he said. “I told him that you had just broken off an engagement and were a bitch in general. Nothing personal.”

  “Thanks for the support. Don’t you think then that you should wait before letting me meet your friend? Let me cool off a little?”

  “Nah. He’s lonely. And if the date doesn’t work out, you guys can always be friends.” Every matchmaker’s favorite line.

  “I have enough friends,” I growled.

  Peter laughed. “I know, I know, but if you keep behaving this way, you’re going to run out.”

  He told me that Michael Victor would call. I hung up and lit a cigarette. Okay, I was angry. Why shouldn’t I be? I’d been totally betrayed by the love of my life. And the only remedy seemed to be enduring this endless procession of bad meals and deadly men.

  I thought about Mark Lewis. He probably wasn’t deadly, I’d give him that. He was the art columnist for Art and Our Times, the prestigious art magazine, and a hot writer everyone wanted. He always seemed to be on PBS expounding on Pollock or Klee—which is why I hadn’t recognized him, since that was usually when I changed the channel. I let go a plume of smoke. Fuck it, I decided. I knew nothing about art and would have nothing in common with him, anyway. Let him date until his dick dropped off. What did I care?