Perfection

by Julie Metz

  Friends in town were heartened to hear of my new relationship and responded with dinner invitations. But Daniel didn’t seem interested in becoming more engaged in my social world. He seemed interested only in being with me, writing to me, or calling me up in the evenings to have one of our long conversations—I lay on the red velvet couch in my darkened living room. I knew that he was lying on his bed in his beautiful bedroom.

  In December, we talked about going away together for a weekend. I found an inn in the Catskills and made reservations for us in early February. My brother kindly offered to take care of Liza. The prospect of the weekend away seemed like a positive step forward in our relationship of three months.

  My college friend Sara had invited Liza and me to join her family for the Christmas holidays in England. We left as soon as Liza’s school term ended. While I was away in England, Daniel sent me daily and loving e-mails, but although I enjoyed reading them, I saw that I did not miss him the way I had hoped. This just wasn’t right, though it had seemed like such a well-conceived idea.

  Unable to imagine a complete deviation from my married life, and in part to distract myself from the upcoming anniversary of Henry’s death, I decided to host a small gathering for New Year’s Eve after our return from England. Though Daniel seemed less than enthusiastic when I told him of my plans, he braved a snowstorm to attend. But as the evening wore on, I saw that my urge to bring him into my world of friends and family life was not likely to succeed.

  I had been busy in the kitchen preparing food. I noticed Daniel’s absence and heard childish laughter and squeals that suggested that he had been recruited for Attack. I found him in the hallway looking beleaguered and possibly miserable, with a bunch of kids, including mine, hanging off him. He was, I concluded, done raising small children. He had parented with love and care, had made his sacrifices. My adorable seven-year-old would not be inducement enough for another go-round. I did not blame him—he was entitled. Eliot had been right. I’d have discovered this in time if I had been more patient. Now, unfortunately, Liza actually liked Daniel. I could tell from the way she was hugging his leg.

  Shortly after this evening, he sent me an e-mail that would have been devastating had I been in love with him. He said that he anticipated a busy work period and that he would have less time to see me, though he was looking forward to our February weekend. I was too distracted to see what he was after—a gracious exit. If I had, I might have canceled the trip right then and still recouped my hotel deposit.

  The January 8 anniversary of Henry’s death was peaceful, though the lead-up was tense and sleepless. I invited Tomas and a few friends over to dinner. We raised a somber glass to Henry’s memory. Tomas didn’t stay long after the meal, but I was happy he’d come.

  After the guests left, I e-mailed my brother to tell him that I thought I might, after all, consider a move back to Brooklyn. I felt guilty about all the money I’d spent on the attic renovation, but he didn’t seem troubled by that. He reminded me that my house would now sell for a better price. Take your time, David wrote, no need to rush, just let things work themselves out. Some part of me was getting ready to move on.

  Maybe both of us were ready. One evening Liza looked up from her dinner and announced, “I’m sad that Daddy died, but I think I can have a happy life.”

  I had allowed the flirtation with Tim, my other online correspondent, to continue intermittently. He had shown me discomfiting moments of drama that would have pleased, even thrilled me, as a younger woman but now felt oddly invasive. The most alarming was the winter afternoon when I found a note and bouquet tucked under the wiper on the windshield of my car as I prepared to pick Liza up from her bus stop. I had not been alone in my house that day when he drove up to leave me this gift. Daniel’s car had been parked near mine.

  But after I received Daniel’s cryptic letter, I felt cooped up and ornery. Perhaps it was that hemmed-in feeling that explained why I visited Tim one January afternoon, and why I let him stay over another night when I knew full well that doing so was unkind and wrong. Daniel wasn’t for me, but he was a good person and did not deserve my childishness. In retrospect, I wish he had just dumped me cold. Then only I would have been hurt, and just a bit.

  I told Daniel about Tim. I canceled our weekend trip, forfeiting the deposit. Daniel and I officially broke up. He wrote that he had concluded weeks earlier that things were not meant to last, and of course, he was correct. His letters, as we unraveled, became surprisingly mean-spirited, but I figured he was fully justified. I had screwed up.

  In an effort to salvage something from my latest bungle, I broke Eliot’s three-month rule once more and invited Tim over for a meal. The following weekend I dragged Liza off to meet Tim at local skating rink. He took her hand to make a turn around the rink, but Liza did not seem pleased. In fact, Tim told me that Liza had kicked him in the shin, which alarmed me—she was not an aggressive child. I apologized to him and spoke sharply to her as we drove home. Perhaps, I reasoned, she would come to like him better as time went on.

  I invited Tim for another dinner. He arrived eagerly, perhaps too eagerly. After dawdling with him for some months, I had now abruptly offered him a chance to win me over. He brought Liza a present. She mumbled thanks, continued to survey him silently, and remained curiously withdrawn. Observing her, I knew that I had screwed up yet again. It had been too soon to present her with someone new. As Eliot had predicted, I was running out of chances.

  After Tim left, Liza said, “Mama, I don’t really like him.”

  “What don’t you like about him?”

  “It’s like”—she looked upward in her characteristic way, plucking the kindest phrase from the ceiling light fixture, then returning my gaze—“he’s trying too hard.”

  “Okay,” I said. I felt tears come and quickly wiped them away before she could see me fall apart. I had been reckless with two entirely decent men who had liked me. I felt like a spoiled brat who needed a time-out, or maybe a good old-fashioned spanking. A few weeks later, when I had gathered up the energy, I ended things with Tim.

  After the activity of the fall and winter, I finally took a longer look through the paintings I had made in Maine. Tomas had been enthusiastic about them. Sara had always encouraged me to pursue my artwork, long relegated to the few summer weeks I spent in Maine. “They will be appreciated,” she said of my paintings in an e-mail. I took a few pictures to the local frame shop, so that they would feel more official and presentable.

  Meanwhile, Henry’s book notes and research lived on, now unwanted relatives overstaying their welcome. Occasionally I’d go into his office and open the file drawers, rifling through the impenetrable documents. I struggled to read his longhand notes, kept in several small Moleskine notebooks, the ones Bruce Chatwin supposedly used. After the events of the summer, I had no interest in finishing Henry’s book for him. In fact, it required great discipline to resist hurling the contents of his file drawers into a large black plastic trash bag.

  Irena had been right. I had been drawn to self-absorbed, creative men, and they had sucked all the air out of the room. I felt ready to try a life that wouldn’t be the death of me but would still involve some adventure and risk taking. Nothing as physically bold as climbing Mount Everest, or crossing the Sahara, but for me, who had played by the rules to a fault, a bit of daring nonetheless. Henry had wasted the gift of time I had given him. Eliana reminded me in all her e-mails that I had been given a gift of time and that it was important not to waste that opportunity.

  I read the man’s profile. Here is Derek, and he is a bad boy. Let me imagine the contents of his closet. Black jeans. Black T-shirts. A few pairs of black boots. A motorcycle, probably black, unless it’s red. A black leather jacket to go with the motorcycle. He lived in the city. It seemed like a good idea to start dating men there, to get used to the idea of urban living. I figured that this man would usefully determine the outer edge of what I could tolerate; he’d be a research project.


  One photo showed him with a naked, wiry torso. And was that a tattoo on his upper arm? It was, he replied, in his first e-mail to me, and there were more elsewhere on his body. I wondered where they were. I had one tattoo (a hummingbird on my right calf, a birthday present to myself when I turned forty), but I wasn’t a tough motorcycle girl, just a girl who had wanted a tattoo. This guy was definitely a bad boy, who rode his black or red motorcycle above the speed limit and could drink Boris Yeltsin under the table. I was counting on it.

  I arrived on time at the restaurant he’d picked, a Mexican place in the East Twenties. Despite the festive atmosphere, I was feeling prim and guarded that evening. Don’t drink too much, just observe. I sat at the bar to wait, looking up nervously as unattached men entered. Derek, unmistakable, strolled in a few minutes later in black jeans, black T-shirt, black boots, and a well-worn black leather motorcycle jacket slung over his shoulder.

  Derek ordered both of us tequila, fancy stuff. Then he ordered a second round for himself. Derek was an effusive man, and I was happy to let him do most of the talking. The waiter arrived with our food. I was suddenly very hungry and ate the unmemorable meal with gusto, grateful to have something purposeful to do with my hands. He told me a bit about his work, then moved on to the topic of his marriage, which had ended several years earlier. Talking about one’s checkered past was First Date No-No Number 1 (I’d read that recently in a women’s magazine at the hair salon), but I didn’t mind, since I’d asked, and since this was a research project. His tale seemed somewhat rehearsed.

  “My wife calls me on my cell phone, while I’m out of town on a work trip, to tell me she wants a divorce.”

  He continued to speak about the dissolution of his married life with sorrow. He had lost a house and custody of a beloved dog. I wouldn’t have picked him for a homeowner somehow. I tried to imagine him mowing a lawn in black leather boots and black jeans. Then I imagined, as I had frequently, how bitterly Henry and I would have fought over our house and Liza’s custody.

  Derek, now looking a bit woozy after a couple more tequilas, seemed intelligent, capable of love, but still genuinely brokenhearted. And not someone I would ever present to Liza. Not someone I’d have sex with even once. Just a quick kiss would feel dangerous.

  The waiter brought the check. I promptly pulled out my wallet and asked Derek if we could split the bill. He blew off my offer with a mumbled comment: “Chicks don’t pay.”

  Whoaa, there. The last time I’d been called a “chick” (sometime in the seventies?), whoever it was had gotten a mouthful from me. Tonight, it didn’t seem worth the effort to complain. With some guilt I gazed across the table toward the bill. It wasn’t cheap, especially for a first date, a one-off at that. But then, I consoled myself, a good part of the bill was the liquor.

  We left. He held the door. Outside, he put his arm around my shoulder. Is this affection or lust, or does he need some propping up?

  “I’s early,” he slurred. “How ’bout I buy us a bottle of champagne? Would ya come back to my place? We could have a drink?”

  Anna, Chloe, and any other friend who loved me would have told me to hail a cab right there and get on home. But I really wanted to see how he lived. Looking at his glassy eyes, I didn’t feel in any danger. He was sloppy drunk. I was stone sober. Given his present state, I was pretty sure that I could take care of myself. I felt a great clearheaded pleasure in allowing my curiosity to run wild. I wanted to open my eyes wide, see everything I could see, and then I wanted to hail a taxi and go home.

  We walked down Third Avenue to the nearest liquor store. Derek removed his arm from around my shoulder and strolled, a bit wobbly, to the refrigerated case. He took out a bottle of Veuve-Cliquot. I didn’t even offer to pay. I waited quietly by the register while he fumbled with his credit card and clumsily signed the receipt.

  I followed him up the wooden stairs in his drab lobby, which were sinking in places and rickety where they were not sinking. I can still turn around, and take a forever rain check.

  As he stumbled across the second-floor landing, he wheeled around, as if caught in a strong gust of wind, and pointed to the door of a neighbor’s apartment.

  “Cuckoo,” he mouthed, twirling his pointer finger around his ear. He whirled around again, and smashed his head into the support beam along the landing. He staggered, looking dazed, then stopped and staggered again, his hand reaching up to his forehead. He was bleeding profusely, blood dripping onto the floor.

  “I’ve cut. Cut myself. Badly,” he said.

  The laceration was at least an inch long and literally gushing blood. The blood made me queasy and frightened. Shit. Only in New York.

  “Maybe we should go to an emergency room,” I said. “You might need stitches. You might have a concussion.”

  “No, no, I don’t wanna to do that. I feel stupid. I was, I was showing off for you and it was all…going so well.”

  I felt sorry for him, really and truly. He had wanted me to like him. He didn’t know me at all. He didn’t know that this evening had been just a research project.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s get this cleaned up.”

  He managed the last flight up to his apartment, fumbled with the key, opened the door, and flopped down onto a futon couch—black—just inside the door.

  While he slumped on the couch, I walked quickly through the apartment. The tiny kitchen area was an unabashed bachelor’s mess. After some cautious rummaging, I discovered what appeared to be a clean enough dishcloth, acceptable in the absence of a roll of paper towels. I brought the cloth over to Derek, whose gaze had followed me dizzily around the room. He seemed more focused now, and began mopping up the blood on his forehead.

  On the back of his apartment door, still ajar, I noticed a collage of pictures of his family and one of a very cool-looking woman, standing in a windswept landscape. She looked like just the sort of woman he ought to go out with next. She looked like she would be very comfortable on the back of a motorcycle.

  The bleeding subsided and he let me look at the cut.

  “Derek, you really need to go to an emergency room. It’s a deep cut. I think you need stitches.”

  “But I really don’t wanna do this. What a pain. I’m leaving town day after tomorrow, and then I’ll have to get the stitches taken out somewhere.”

  “We have to go to a hospital and get stitches. It’ll be okay, I’ll go with you.”

  On the street, I realized that I had not been to a hospital since Henry died. I thought about that and felt afraid. I started to cry. Derek stopped in the street.

  “Wha’s wrong? S’okay. Just a cut.”

  I couldn’t really explain, not then. He took my hand. It felt good to connect on some level, any level. So many private feelings we would never share: my own pain that he could not understand, his shame and disappointment about whatever he had anticipated from this evening.

  We sat in the ER waiting room on the brightly colored plastic chairs. I asked him about his work, and he seemed to relax a bit.

  He sat forward, looking at me. It made me uncomfortable—he was looking at me so directly and he was still unsteady from the tequila.

  “Sit back, relax,” I said, “we’re going to be here a while.”

  “Don’t you want me to look at you?”

  “You can look at me.” I sensed his regret that he had lost an opportunity to try to win me over that evening. I understood that he was as lonely as I was. And he didn’t have a lovely child to return to as I did. In that moment, I couldn’t wait to get back to my brother’s house in Brooklyn, where Liza would be sweetly sleeping. I couldn’t wait to kiss her cheek. Derek admired the hummingbird tattoo on my lower calf. I felt he might have liked to touch it, but he did not.

  Finally a nurse called Derek’s name, and he went off to get patched up. I arranged my coat across a chair and lay against it. Some time later I felt his hand touching my shoulder—I had dozed off. He seemed surprised that I hadn’t already disapp
eared into the night. The cut had been patched up with a new kind of skin glue—no stitches.

  “I’m tired,” I said with the peacefulness that follows the happy resolution of a medical crisis. “I’d like to go home now.”

  Back outside, a welcome streak of yellow flashed by, and Derek charged chivalrously down the street after the taxi. I was winded by the time I caught up, looking forward to the warmth and quiet of the trip home. As I tugged the door handle, Derek grabbed me and kissed me on the mouth firmly and with some passion. I turned away and got into my taxi, relieved and exhausted.

  But I thought, as the cab pulled away from the curb, this was not a bad person, not at all, just a muddled person, still trying to understand how his marriage had ended and what to do about the rest of his life. That felt a lot like me.

  Eliot said maybe we should have dinner after all. And I was curious to meet him after so much entertaining dialogue. The level of stupid flirting, a delightful distraction from my considerable failures in Boyland, required some action one way or the other. I only hoped that I was suitably chastened after my encounters with Daniel and Tim. A date with Eliot, who I was quite sure actually liked me, in spite of my obvious unreliability, seemed like a safe adventure.

  “Okay, Eliot, let’s do it. I’ll be visiting my parents this weekend. I think they’ll watch Lizzie for a night.”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow morning. I am just going to have dinner with a friend.” I said this with a quick glance at road directions, trying to act casual. My parents looked at me curiously as I laid out my evening plans while preparing dinner for Liza. We were in the kitchen of their Connecticut weekend home, which was about forty-five minutes from Eliot’s house.

  “It’s late already,” my father said, checking the time. “Are you all right driving back late tonight?” Since Henry’s death, my parents had become quite protective, which I mostly appreciated.