She leans forward, smiling. “Pranny, bollocks, bugger, wanker, tosser, pillock, poxy.”
“Okay, now you’re just making sounds.”
“I’m actually not. But, whatever, sod swearing — let’s keep going. What?”
She’s asking me why I’m grinning at her the way I am right now, but I just shake my head, choosing not to tell her that I’m impressed at how she, a girl who got knocked down so mercilessly a couple weeks ago — and then totally stomped on within the last hour — is picking herself back up. She’s a fighter. I like that.
We both jump at the sound of a fist slamming on the bar, glasses rattling. The bartender — a tall, broad-shouldered gym rat who, I can tell, totally digs the standard plain black bartender’s tee, because it gives everyone a ballpark figure of how much he can bench — walks over to the Crying Man. His whiskey has to be thirty percent mucus by now.
“Come on, Doug,” says the bartender. “I know you’re hurting, but you’re bothering the other customers.”
I look at Charlotte, ready to suggest we take off, but she’s got Ten Easy Steps on her lap, and she’s flicking through it.
“Seriously?”
“Just a sec,” she says, still flicking. Then: “Ah! I knew I remembered seeing it — reminded me of what my mum said to me earlier …” She turns the book over so I can see the step that we skipped: “Do something for someone worse off than you.”
I look from Charlotte to Devastated Doug, who is staring into his whiskey glass as if he’s hoping to find something he might have dropped in there. “I don’t know,” I mumble. “He might be too drunk to listen to anybody.”
“Can’t hurt to try,” she mumbles back, returning the book to her tote bag.
Now she’s nudging me down the bar, toward the Crying Man — why am I going first? — and when I’m up close and see his face screwed up into a ball, teeth clenched as he takes quick, wet, rasping breaths, I know that the question I’m about to ask is pointless. Of course the answer will be “No” — but there’s no other way to open this conversation.
“You okay?”
Doug takes a big sniff and looks at me. Wipes his nose with his hand again. “Yeah, yeah.” He sits back on his stool, picking up the glass and toying with the whiskey. “Just trying and failing to drown my sorrows.” He knocks the drink back and puts the glass down gently — obviously so that the bartender will be more amenable to his thumbs-up signal for one more.
“The Doug is just in mourning,” he goes on. I avoid looking at Charlotte, in case she’s on the verge of laughing, too. It takes a certain something to pull off talking about yourself in the third person.
The bartender pours Doug another whiskey. “You’ve been trying to drown your sorrows for a week now, Doug.”
“Seven years, Craig,” says Doug, picking up the refilled glass then putting it right back down again. “Seven years The Doug gave that woman. That’s twenty percent of his life. Twenty percent of his time on this earth was spent devoted to her, and she leaves him so she can go ‘find herself’? What kind of crap is that?”
I shoot Charlotte a see-what-you’ve-gotten-us-into look, but she’s not looking at me. She’s taking the stool on the other side of Doug, who continues his rant:
“Lemme tell you, that ditz will find herself but forget to exchange email addresses. Know what I’m saying?” He sighs. “The Doug doesn’t mean that. He’s just letting off steam.”
“Hey,” says Charlotte, putting a hand on his shoulder, “you’re going to get over this.”
That’s basically just It’ll be okay with what feels like more substance, but I guess it’s not bad. Doug isn’t having it, though. He looks from Charlotte to me. “What do you two know? You look so perfect as a couple, I’ll bet you’ve never had a fight.”
“Actually, we’re —”
I talk over Charlotte. I don’t know why. “Oh, we fight, Doug. Believe that. But you know something? When we met, we’d both been through the worst breakups that we could imagine.” Charlotte and I have a brief discussion with our eyes, behind Doug’s back:
Her: What are you doing?
Me: Just go with it.
Her: You want to lie to The Doug?
Me: Trust me, this is what The Doug needs right now.
Her: If you say so …
I finish up. “I couldn’t imagine moving on. I thought that was it and then — boom! A cool English girl throws a book at my foot, and here we are.” I’m deliberately not looking at Charlotte. I maybe should have made up our meet-cute. “You never know what’s gonna happen.”
“That’s right.” Charlotte pats his shoulder. “You never know what’s around the corner.”
Doug’s eyes brighten with hope — just for a second, before he shakes his head. “Around every corner, The Doug finds a dead end. So many dead ends.”
Now I’m patting his shoulder. “So, look for a door. There’s always a way out. There’s always a new path. But you can’t find it if you stand still, you know what I mean?”
I look at Charlotte over Doug’s shoulders again. I expect her eyes to tell me she thinks I’m full of it, but she actually just gives me a single nod. She agrees.
For the first time tonight, I think that we both might actually be okay … eventually.
The Doug’s twirling his glass as he ponders what I said. He sets the glass down without taking a sip. “The Doug’s gotta take a whiz.”
He gets up, shuffles off toward the bathroom. Charlotte’s looking at me with a grimace. “I hate that word.”
“This from the girl whose favorite curse is ‘bollocks’?”
She grins as she slides off the stool. “I didn’t say that was my favorite. My favorite is — Mistake!”
Just as I’m wondering how that could be a bad word in British English, Charlotte’s barreling past me to where we were sitting before, crouching down to stop “our” dog from clambering out of her bag.
“Get back inside,” she whispers. “We’ll get in trouble.” But Mistake isn’t having it, and Charlotte takes a look at the empty bar and seems to conclude that it’s worth letting her loose. If we get thrown out, so what? We were planning to leave soon, anyway. She picks Mistake up and carries her over to me.
“Do you think we’re helping him?” Charlotte asks, as Mistake gets on with the business of making up for lost face licks. The gym rat bartender doesn’t seem to mind at all. But then, he does seem more focused on his cell phone, in a way that makes me think he’s FaceTiming with himself.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “He’s kinda lit, so I’m not sure how much of what we’ve said is sinking in. Maybe if we’d met him two or three whiskies ago.”
“Pretty funny how you let him think we were together.” She’s looking at me, unblinking, and I can’t tell if she’s mad or offended or something else. She’s definitely curious, maybe even a little confused.
“I just did it for The Doug,” I say, hoping the self-consciousness I’m feeling doesn’t translate to blushing. I try not to wonder if the tone of her voice means she thinks me unthinkable. Like, if what I told Doug was not only out of line but also totally unbelievable. “You’re a writer, you know how it is — add a layer to an already great story, make it mean even more. It’s one thing for him to know we’re getting over our breakups, but if he thought we found something better —”
“He’s coming back.”
Doug’s moving so fast, he almost skids to a stop. He’s got a new energy, and I almost want to give Charlotte an I-told-you-so look, because my lie totally worked. Either that or —
“You know, he’s been thinking about what you said, and The Doug thinks you’re right, man, he does need to give moving on a shot.” He’s talking rapid fire as he fumbles to take his phone out of his pocket. “The Doug does need to put himself back out there, and look what he found in his inbox!”
He turns the phone around and shows us an email he’s gotten, a garish poster of lots and lots of cartoon couples making out, under the words “KISS UNDER THE MISTLETOE — Find that special someone this Christmas!” A kiss fest with strangers? No thanks. “The Doug’s been getting this email for weeks, but he never really paid attention until tonight. And to think he was almost gonna set this email as junk.” Then he looks at us and asks the question I didn’t know I was dreading. “Wanna go?”
Thankfully, Charlotte’s on the ball. “But it’s a singles’ night, Doug.” As if to prove her point, she takes my hand. We take a second trying to get our fingers interlaced properly but don’t quite manage it. Charlotte’s index and middle fingers end up curled in my thumb.
Doug doesn’t seem to notice or care. “Come on. Please? I’m not sure I’ll have the nerve to go by myself. I’m kind of shy …”
Man, he’s talking in first person — now I know he’s being genuine. But still, I don’t want to go to a singles’ night. I’m about to tell him that ladies love shy guys, but Charlotte’s telling him that of course we’ll go. Apparently, we’d love to.
“Oh, that’s great, guys, that’s great. I owe you.”
Doug turns back to the bar to work on finishing his whiskey, while I turn to Charlotte and motion for her to shuffle back to where we were standing before. I keep my voice to a mumble.
“You sure about this?”
She nods to the book poking out of her tote bag. “Check out Step Seven.”
I crouch to retrieve the book, flick through it to the seventh chapter and discover that we’re now taking things up a notch: “Hook up with someone new.”
~ Chapter Seven ~
Charlotte
5. DO SOMETHING FOR SOMEONE WORSE OFF THAN YOU.
Taking care of someone who needs you teaches you how to maintain your positive energy, but what about when you need to do some emergency patchwork on your heart? Being there for someone else in a time of crisis is one of the best ways to show yourself how strong you really are.
10:10 p.m.
“Can you believe it?” says Doug, his voice worryingly wheezy. “I’ve never taken a single break-dancing class.”
I can easily believe that Doug has never taken a single break-dancing class. I don’t think he’s ever seen a break-dancing video. His pop and lock is more lurch and flop, and his attempt at the worm makes me fear for his face, his knees — every bone in his body! I could give him the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s hard to break-dance well on a moving 6 train (the carriage has been empty since we got on it at Grand Central, and I have been very grateful for that), but I’m fairly certain it’s more that The Doug is simply terrible at this.
For his big finish, he grabs a support pole with one hand, wrapping a leg around it and spinning. I think he’s going for a 360 — but at about 155 degrees, he loses his grip and goes slamming into the bench seat behind him. Anthony and I have been watching this for nearly three stops, and I can’t take it anymore, so I applaud Doug in a way that makes it clear I’ve assumed it’s the end of the performance. Doug half rises off the bench and gives us a little bow.
“Let’s see the single ladies of the Upper East Side resist those moves,” he says, crossing his arms and reclining. I hide my face behind Mistake’s head, trying not to snort into her fur.
Moments later, we get off the train at Eighty-Sixth Street station, Doug in the lead. He’s taking the stairs two at a time, and it’s a struggle to keep up. Once I’m on the street, I realize Anthony’s not with me. He’s dawdling up the stairs the way my sister Emma does when she disagrees that it’s bedtime.
“What’s the matter?” I ask him. “You hurt your leg or something?”
“Forgive me for not being super thrilled to set foot on the Upper East Side,” he says as he draws level with me.
“Weren’t we on the east side earlier?”
“That was Lower East Side.”
“Still east.”
He shakes his head at me. “Wait ’til you’ve lived here awhile. You’ll understand.”
He says that like my coming back is a foregone conclusion. I must admit, there have been long stretches of today where I’ve not hated on New York the same way I had been doing since …
Experiencing it with Anthony has made me see it differently.
By 10:25 p.m., Doug has led us to a club called Smooch (which Anthony said was a name “so East Side the place might as well be a barge on the East River”). My lack of ID isn’t a problem for the bouncer here, either, because he’s engrossed in a Sudoku puzzle. He has only one question: are we sure we want to go in? When Doug insists we do, the bouncer takes Doug’s money — he’s paying for all three of us, it seems — and mumbles something about it being our funeral.
The club certainly has a funereal atmosphere inside — it’s not quite as dead as Ice Bar, but it’s still pretty bleak: dimly lit, the beige walls decorated with the kind of tinsel and Christmas wreaths the Salvation Army wouldn’t even accept as donations. The whole scene is made even more absurd by the fact that the music (currently a-ha’s “Take On Me”) is blaring at eardrum-rattling volume. Mistake wriggles, and I have to shush her before she tries to harmonize with the high notes.
I count maybe a dozen singles, mostly over forty, standing around and staring into space. There are three “couples” in booths over by the far wall, making out like they’re on a plane that’s about to crash into a mountain. Cheese would be in Heaven here. I can’t tell if the people standing are nervous about approaching others, or if they’ve scouted the options and decided, simply, no. What I do know is that they are hugging the walls, keeping well away from the low-hanging mistletoe.
We follow Doug as he drifts over to the bar, scanning the room and nodding. “More ladies than dudes.” He sounds so approving, I half expect him to do a fist pump.
“There always are.” A woman — about ten years older than Doug, maybe — speaks from the bar, a pink drink in front of her.
I nudge Anthony, point to her glass, whisper: “Look at that brolly.” He just shakes his head at me — but he smiles. I’m trying to make him laugh, because, I don’t know why, it feels important to me. Maybe I’m trying to repay him for how he held me together after Katie’s party.
“We have a theme here, as you can see,” says Mrs. Pink Drink. I notice a badge with some company’s logo pinned to her lapel. Guess she’s one of the organizers for this thing. “To leave, you must earn yourself one of these.” She holds up a business card that has a bell attached to it. It jingles annoyingly with every move. “This is your Jingle Pass. This alone proves to the bouncer that you’re allowed to go.”
“How do we ‘earn’ a” — it seems to take effort for Anthony to say the words — “Jingle Pass?”
“Have one kiss under the mistletoe, while I’m watching. That’s all you’ve got to do.”
As Doug gets us drinks — nonalcoholic ciders — Anthony and I turn back to the “prospects.”
“Anybody take your fancy?” I ask him.
“Looks like a bookish crowd,” he mumbles. “Theoretically, we should fit right in, don’t you think?”
“I’m not being funny or anything, but … have you ever kissed an older person before? Like, years older?”
“Yeah, once.”
I can’t help it. I shift and sidestep so that he can see me gawp at him. “Oh my God, really? Who? And how old?”
He smiles again, looks to the floor. “Oh, no, this is a story I take to the grave.”
“At least confirm or deny whether she was in the same age bracket as the women here.”
“I’m not telling you.” He’s still grinning, but his face is reddening.
“You’re no fun.”
Doug’s back with the drinks. He’s bought another whiskey for himself.
“What are you two talking about?”
/>
“Just who we might approach,” I say, without thinking, because of course Doug asks:
“What do you guys need to approach anybody for? You’ve got each other.”
Thank God for Anthony, thinking quickly. “We figured we’d at least mingle a little,” he says, gesturing with the bottle at the near empty room. “Moral support.”
Doug peers at us for a long moment, and I fear he’s seen through our act. But then he starts grinning, almost bouncing on his toes. “This is just what I needed tonight, guys. Seriously, I can’t believe I made such good friends.”
Anthony claps Doug on the shoulder. “All right, then — let’s do this.”
7. HOOK UP WITH SOMEONE NEW.
Can’t imagine a future without your ex? How can you be sure about tomorrow when you haven’t explored all the possible todays?
*
Within a few minutes, I find myself standing flat against a wall — avoiding the mistletoe — being hit on by Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Okay, he’s actually a slightly nerdy guy in a burgundy sweater vest with a reindeer sock puppet, but still — he’s speaking through “Rudolph,” and I’m now so keen to get out of here, I’m wondering whether kissing the sock puppet will get me my Jingle Pass.
“Rudolph thinks your accent is very beguiling.” Finally, Sweater Vest speaks for himself, but there’s something about his tone, his choice of words, that makes my shoulders hunch — and makes Mistake lean up out of my tote bag and growl. Sweater Vest must not have noticed her before, because he takes a step back, but Rudolph is still kind of leaning in — close enough for Mistake to snap her teeth and whip him off the guy’s hand.
“No, Mistake!” I yelp, almost dropping my tote bag as I try to save Rudolph, but I only succeed in tearing him in half. I hand the remains back to Sweater Vest. “I’m so, so sorry.”
He takes the pieces of his puppet from me, cradling them in his hands and gasping, “Oh, no, Rudolph … Sweet, innocent Rudy …”
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