The rest of the day passed in a fog of sleep deprivation and jet lag. I wasn’t just tired—every last inch of my body was demanding sleep, and it took all of my effort to keep my legs moving forward. I was achy and bleary-eyed and so disoriented I felt like I was wandering around inside a Stanley Kubrick film. Stopping at every Starbucks I passed for a venti latte didn’t seem to help, either. The influx of caffeine just made me jittery.
Also, I kept forgetting that the traffic in London flows in the wrong direction, which meant that I had to look right instead of left while crossing the street, and I was nearly mowed down by unsympathetic motorists on three separate occasions. It was the third incident—a close call with an enormous black taxicab that I swear was gunning for me—that prompted me to call it quits. It was already six o’clock, and after grabbing an early lunch at a cheap but good café, I’d seen three of the four hotels on my list (two of which I could recommend without reservation; the third was in a sketchy area of the city, and probably not a great place for seniors, anyway). I’d have to squeeze in seeing the fourth hotel at some point on Friday, but with most of my work completed I was now basically free.
On my way back to my hotel, I stopped at a sandwich shop and picked up an inedible-looking egg sandwich to have for dinner (despite their many contributions throughout history to the arts, sciences, and literature, the Brits have yet to master the simple sandwich), and wolfed it down as soon as I got to my room. I shucked off my grimy clothing, pulled on a comfy pair of cotton plaid flannel pajamas (noting for my column that even with the heater set on high, the room still had a draft), and was happily ensconced in bed by seven. I’ve struggled with insomnia before, and have spent many a night lying tensely in bed, my body exhausted but my brain wired and wide awake, but this was one night I didn’t have to worry. A heavy, dreamless sleep claimed me almost immediately, and it seemed like only a minute after I’d drifted off that the insistent ringing of the hotel telephone was jarring me awake.
I fumbled for my glasses, and peered at my travel clock: it read ten-thirty, but thanks to the very effective blackout drapes, I had no idea if it was morning or night.
“Hello,” I said, my voice thick with sleep.
“Did I wake you?” I didn’t recognize the voice. It was male, but too deep to be Max, too young to be my editor.
“Who is this?”
“Please tell me you remember me . . . I’m the devilishly handsome, witty, brilliant man you sat next to on the plane this morning?” a teasing voice said.
I sat up in bed, suddenly wide awake. “Oh . . . hi. I didn’t . . .” I was going to say “expect you to call,” but that would sound churlish. “. . . recognize your voice on the phone . . . not, you know, in person,” I finished, trying without success not to mumble incoherently.
“What are you doing? Were you sleeping?” Jack asked.
“Mmmm . . . I’m exhausted. I was up all night talking to you, remember?” I practically purred into the phone, before cringing with embarrassment at how eager I sounded. What was wrong with me? Why was it that whenever I talked to this guy, I ended up flirting shamelessly? I was thirty-two years old—hardly at an age where I should be acting like a giggly teenager with a crush on the cute boy in homeroom. Although from what I could remember, Jack was pretty cute. I was still so exhausted from the jet lag and from staying up all night, my memory of him was a little fuzzy around the edges.
“Yeah, I’m pretty ragged today, too. I’m going to hit the sack in a minute, but I wanted to find out if you had plans for tomorrow,” Jack said.
“What did you have in mind?” I asked. What I really wanted to say—but didn’t—was, “What about your girlfriend?” Could I really go out with someone who’d already admitted he was attached, even if the girlfriend at issue might be on her way out? After all of the years spent carefully honing my dating criteria, of which practically the first bullet point after “Don’t date serial killers” was “Don’t get involved with unavailable men”?
“I thought maybe I could take tomorrow off, show you the city. That is, if you don’t have other plans,” Jack said.
My heart somersaulted and did a few handstands. “You can take the time off?”
Jack laughed easily. “I’m the boss. I can take as much time as I want. Besides, I was working around the clock the entire time I was in New York. I think I have some free time coming to me,” he said. “I’ll pick you up at your hotel tomorrow morning, and we’ll get some breakfast before we start. How does ten sound?”
I hesitated again. I didn’t want to say it, but my conscience was prodding me. “What about, you know, what we talked about on the plane?” I said.
Jack sighed, and the playful note disappeared from his voice. “I told her. It was pretty awful. She cried. A lot. And, well . . . it had to be done, let’s just leave it at that,” he said. He sounded weary.
“Are you sure you want to get together? Is it too early?” I asked, praying that he would say no.
“No,” Jack said. “It may not be the best timing, but I’d like to see you again. So tomorrow, then? Ten o’clock?”
“That sounds great,” I said.
After we hung up, it took me a while to fall back asleep. I realized that for the first time in a long time, I was actually looking forward to a date. And the idea that I was letting my guard down worried me.
Despite having slept for twelve solid hours, I was still conked out when my wake-up call jostled me out of sleep the next morning. I stumbled into the bathroom, and then shrieked when I saw my reflection in the mirror. In my half-awake stupor the night before, I’d forgotten to wash off my makeup. I recently read a magazine article that advised applying eyeliner before you go to bed as a fail-safe way to wake up the next morning with a cool, gothic-rocker-chick look. I looked like a rock star all right—Alice Cooper after a week of wild partying. Black eyeliner and mascara bled outward from my eyes, and—oh God—an enormous pimple was sprouting on my chin.
“No, no, no!” I said, scrubbing the makeup off with a rough, hotel-issue facecloth.
I hustled into the shower, making sure to wash my hair and shave my legs (I had no intention of letting Jack find out whether my legs were smooth or as a prickly as a cactus, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry in these situations). Luckily, the zit on my chin felt worse than it looked—it was still mainly under the skin—and I managed to cover it with some concealer, while praying that it didn’t erupt in the middle of the day. After blowing out my shoulder-length dark blonde hair, which cooperated for once by flipping out at the ends a little (just like Sarah Jessica Parker’s had in the picture I showed my stylist the last time I went in for a trim), I then turned my attention to fretting over what to wear. My chunky high-heeled boots were by far the best choice to go with my black trousers, but I wouldn’t last through a day of sightseeing in them. I finally settled on a navy V-neck sweater, dark stretch jeans that flattered my behind, and my super-hip black laceless Nikes, which Maddy had sent me a month earlier with a note saying they were the newest, hottest thing and sold out of every store the minute they hit the shelves. True to her word, Maddy had been shamelessly pilfering company merchandise for me since practically her first day of work.
The sneakers reminded me that I hadn’t heard back from Maddy. I was dying to fill her in on my new romantic prospect, and also to make sure that someone knew I was going off with Jack in case he did turn out to be a serial killer. I tried calling her again, at both home and work, but she wasn’t answering either phone. Maddy had said work was insanely busy lately, but I still thought it was strange I hadn’t heard from her. She’d been so excited when I told her I was going to be in London, and couldn’t wait to introduce me to her new boyfriend, Harrison, a Brit whom she assured me was The One. I hated to remind her she’d been convinced she was meant to marry three out of her last four boyfriends. But Maddy was Maddy, and part of her charm was the ease with which she routinely fell in and out of love, although she was so softhear
ted—sometimes annoyingly so—that she couldn’t bear to break up with anyone. As a result, her relationships tended to drag on forever while she mustered up the nerve to end them. Men never left her; at least, I couldn’t think of a single time she’d been jilted.
“Just tell him the truth—you like him as a person, but don’t have romantic feelings for him,” I’d advise her whenever her current romance had soured, and yet the man in question was happily ensconced in the Saturday night routine of dinner-and-a-video-rental, with no apparent intent of pushing off on his own.
“I don’t want to hurt his feelings,” Maddy would wail in response.
And even after she would pluck up the nerve to confront him, she’d feel guilty about it for days. More than once, when we were still in college and too young, stupid, and usually tipsy to know better, I’d done the deed for her. I’d call up the unsuspecting guy, disguise my voice in a fairly good imitation of Maddy’s, and briskly tell him that the relationship was over. But when I did the heart–squashing for her, Maddy felt even worse.
“He’s such a great guy, he deserves better,” she’d insist.
“Maddy. Look, whenever he gets drunk—which, I shouldn’t have to remind you, is nearly every day—he strips naked and runs around his fraternity house, snapping towels at other drunken, naked men. I’m not even sure he’s heterosexual. Clearly, you can do better,” I’d reply. “You deserve better.”
“I think he may have hidden depths,” she’d say, a sentiment at which I’d just snort derisively.
Maddy and I couldn’t be more different in our love philosophies—she’s an incurable romantic, while I am an incurable realist. A lot of my dating psyche was forever traumatized by the abrupt exit from my life of my ex-boyfriend, Sawyer Clarke. Sawyer was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, and although on the bony side, he was sort of sexy, like a good-looking version of Ichabod Crane. I always had this secret terror that when people looked at us they thought, “Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean,” but at least he was taller than me. We went out for about a year when I was twenty-seven, and I thought it was true love. But, as it turned out, I was an idiot.
We saw each other frequently, went out to dinner, had the occasional weekend out of town, and what I’d consider better-than-average sex, despite Sawyer’s preference for oral over regular (receiving, not giving, of course). But all relationships have their quirks, I reasoned, and I was willing to overlook the fact that every time we were in bed, he’d start pushing my head down while simultaneously arching his hips upward, since he was otherwise the ideal boyfriend. He was smart, had a decent sense of humor, and whenever we did sleep together, he would always spend the night, wrapping his long arms around me and holding me tight, which made me feel precious to him.
After we’d been together for just over a year, Sawyer told me that he had some important news to celebrate and that he’d made reservations for us at Tavern on the Green. I was half expecting an engagement ring. Okay, I was convinced of it—in fact, I’d played the whole scene out in my head. As soon as the dinner plates were cleared, Sawyer would pull out a robin’s-egg-blue box from Tiffany’s wrapped with a white ribbon, and with a sly smile would push it across the table toward me. He wouldn’t get down on one knee—not his style—but he might murmur, “Marry me,” in a sexy growl. Then a waiter would appear with a prearranged bottle of champagne, while I admired the ring on my hand and maybe even cried a little.
Needless to say, when Sawyer instead cleared his throat and announced over the endive salads that he had requested, and received, a transfer to his company’s Tokyo office, I was more than a little taken aback.
“You requested the transfer?” I repeated dumbly.
“Yes, of course. This is a big promotion for me. And I’ve always wanted to live abroad, you know that,” Sawyer said, spearing some lettuce on his fork. Unlike me, this change in plans did not seem to be affecting his appetite.
The sugarplum visions of a wedding on Nantucket and the china department at Saks had not yet dissipated from my mind, and I asked, with real confusion, “But what about me? Do you want me to come with you, or did you think we’d try and make the long-distance thing work? I mean . . . how long are you going for? A few months? A year?”
But as the words were spilling from my mouth, completely beyond my ability to stop them, I saw that Sawyer wouldn’t meet my eyes. Nor was he producing a beribboned blue box . . . or even asking me to visit him.
“Come on, Claire. You knew this wasn’t that serious,” Sawyer said, keeping his voice low so that the middle-aged couple sitting only inches away at the next table wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop.
And then it hit me: not only was Sawyer not proposing, he was breaking up with me in the most clichéd way possible—in a crowded restaurant to ensure there wouldn’t be a scene. And not only was he breaking up with me, he was planning to then leave the country in order to get as far away from me as possible.
Why is it that in moments like these, I can never pull myself together? If I were not me, but instead Sandra Bullock playing me in the movie of my life, she’d throw down her napkin and have a snappy comeback, like “Oh yeah? Well, I’m glad you’re leaving. Because you don’t deserve me,” before flouncing out of the restaurant with her head held high, and generally coming across as adorable and spunky in the face of adversity—and not like the pathetic and unwanted loser I was at that moment. The real crowning moment of my humiliation came when I dissolved into incoherent tearful babbling and fled the restaurant, knocking over a pitcher of water in the process.
Sawyer was really the last time I’d let myself seriously fall for someone, and a large part of the reason that I always expected the worst when it came to men. My abrupt breakup with him wasn’t the first time my heart had been broken, but rather the last in a long line of disappointments—and I was determined not to let it happen again. I would no longer allow myself to be lulled into thinking I had a special connection with another man until I was positive he felt the same way. If this made me overly cautious, so be it. At least I’d never be humiliated that way again.
So, considering my track record, it was understandable that as I closed the door to my hotel room and headed for the elevator, I was a little nervous. I knew it was entirely possible that when I got down to the lobby, the only people waiting there would be a few bellhops and tourists milling about. It’s not as though I go through life getting stood up all the time; it’s just that I’m not all that confident in my ability to close the deal. Maybe, I thought, that’s how we should approach dating in our thirties, like it’s a business deal. Mercenary? Perhaps. But it would probably be a lot less emotionally messy. And all of those cheesy motivational sales books could be put to new use by eager singles.
I was so busy contemplating the ramifications of this brilliant idea that when the elevator doors opened with a ding, and Jack was standing directly across from the elevator bank, looking a little uncomfortable as he perched on the edge of a modern purple upholstered chair, it took me a minute to register that not only was he there . . . he was there waiting for me. I was dismayed to discover just how glad I was to see him.
Chapter 3
Jack hopped up when he saw me approaching, and looked as nervous as I felt. He was wearing a cream fisherman’s sweater, brown corduroys, and brown suede hiking boots—not at all the image of the successful young lawyer (although perhaps I was overly influenced by the ascot-wearing model in the magazine ads for Chivas Regal), and—oh my God—he was actually more attractive than I remembered, all broad-shouldered and long-limbed. He looked like he’d climbed out of an L.L. Bean catalogue. For a horrible moment I was seized with panic that Jack hadn’t gotten a good look at me on the airplane, and now that he saw me on the ground and in daylight, he would have buyer’s remorse.
“Hi,” I said, not sure whether to hold my hand out or hug him, so I just stood there awkwardly, my arms hanging down by my side, and then, at the last minute, took a step
toward him. Jack leaned in to hug me at the same time that I was moving in, and we ended up bumping into each other, his nose hitting my cheek.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I began, at the same time that Jack said, “Sorry about that.”
And then we each took a step back and grinned at each other.
“You want to try that again?” I asked.
“Couldn’t do a worse job,” Jack said, and this time he stepped forward, pulled me into his arms, and kissed me lightly on the lips. It was a nice kiss, a perfect first kiss. Warm and sweet, and it lingered just long enough to make it clear that it meant more than just hello. I hadn’t expected such a greeting, and was stunned into momentary speechlessness.
“So, what are we doing? I haven’t been to London in years, and I want to see as much as I can,” I gabbled nervously to fill the silence as I stepped away. I liked the kiss—okay, I loved the kiss—but I didn’t want to just stand there swooning like a lovesick groupie, even if I was starting to feel like one.
“We’ll do it all. But first, breakfast,” Jack said. “What’s your breakfast speed—a big spread, or are you more of a coffee-and-pastry kind of a woman?”
Yeah, right, like I was going to pig out in front of him, especially first thing in the morning. It’s not as though I have an eating disorder, and I’ve more or less resigned myself to my size, but still—it’s considered charming when women the size of toothpicks wolf down copious amounts of greasy, fried food, but somewhat less appealing when done by women with Rubenesque proportions.
“Oh, just a bagel or something would be fine,” I said, and we went across the street to the same Starbucks I’d hit on my way out the day before. I’d always thought of England as a kingdom of tea drinkers, but Starbucks seemed as popular here as it was back home, which was fine by me. Even though I’d slept forever, I still felt a little worn at the edges from the jet lag, as though I had a nonalcoholic hangover, and I needed a good strong shot of caffeine. We ordered two cappuccinos and lemon scones, and then sat at one of the tiny tables in the back to consume them.
True Love (and Other Lies) Page 3