The NJ Transit bus ad also helped me to find Lois, who owned a family-run real estate business in Hoboken. She pulled my name off the tab on her way back from the new Guggenheim exhibit. Lois was super-connected and enjoyed recommending people she liked to others who needed help, like her son, who needed assistance at the real estate office. My superior office skills and genius filing helped those realtors keep all the house keys and clients straight. I would run down Washington Street from the bar to the real estate office on Tuesday and Thursday while I juggled calls from Emily. As soon as I got back to the bar, I put on my fundraising and PR hats before hopping across the Hudson to the clientele that I had built in New York. My day planner looked like an intricate puzzle of double-booked calls and appointments. With all the recommendations from Lois, my client list grew and grew. This was good for business, but bad for Emily, who sensed that I was not as devoted to her wedding and became even harder to manage. On a personal level, I was out of touch with my family entirely, and I feared another day of reckoning would be in my near future. I couldn’t hide from their scrutiny much longer.
I thought about Grace and her never-ending litany of questions: “What would Jesus do?” “What would Krishna do?” “What would Buddha do?” I was not sure how any of those people would be able answer my current questions. The only thing I knew for sure was that no amount of backyard tea and agave nectar sweets were going to get me through this career nightmare. I was going to need something a lot stronger.
I had no idea what to wear. I stood in my hallway in a pair of shorts and a ski sweater utterly and completely confused about what to do. I was so freaked that I called Maggie to help me out of my self-imposed inertia. Maggie had proven herself to be good at a lot of things, rounding up unruly drunk people, putting aggressive line cutters in place and, my personal favorite, becoming an advocate for those she called friends, but a fashion consultation was not the obvious role that sprang to mind. I needed just the right outfit, nothing too dressy, nothing too casual, the perfect combination of clothes that suggested I was ready to be asked out, spur of the moment. The outfit should outwardly say cool, calm, and casual, which was, of course, the exact opposite of how I felt, which was stressed out, scared and insecure. I was not getting dressed for an ordinary night out; I was getting dressed for a night out with my boss, well, with Dave. When Maggie got to my apartment, she immediately sized me up and remarked, “You look like a slutty coed. You clearly have never done this before.”
“I’m a mess, help me,” I whined and dragged her into to the apartment.
Maggie asked a few basic questions that confused me even further.
“It’s just the two of you, right?”
“As far as I know. He was really vague, almost like he didn’t know all the details himself. I think his exact words were, ‘Are you free tomorrow night?’”
“So, it could actually be a work thing, but on a Friday night, no chance. He’s definitely asking you out.”
“Well, it could be a work thing. We’re going to meet at work and then walk over, so it’s not like he’s picking me up or anything.”
“But a babe like Dave Germain isn’t going to work on a Friday night, no offense, but he’s probably pretty booked up with girls. I mean, they must just line up down the block for him.”
“Are you trying to make me feel better here? Because you kind of suck at it.” And now the image of scantily-clad groupies who looked like they just appeared in a White Snake video was seared into my mind’s eye, which made me feel even more inadequate. I had nothing in my wardrobe to compete with that.
I picked my first three outfits, outcasted separates from my work days that even paired cleverly with good jeans still looked more Junior League than effortless date night cool. It takes a lot of effort to look effortless. I was determined to find the perfect outfit, even though I had no idea where we were going, why we were going there, and what we were going to do when we got there. This made getting dressed very nearly impossible. The only thing I knew for sure was that Dave would be there. Since I was a little out of practice—I had not had a date in almost a year—Maggie was my Sherpa to navigate the tricky terrain of being invited to dinner under cloudy terms by a guy she deemed as “hot tuna.”
“You need something like an Abercrombie ad, but with some clothes,” Maggie bellowed as she leafed through an old InStyle magazine she had found on my couch.
“Oh, boy,” I said as I looked down at my outfit and realized that I was nowhere near the look that reproached me from the magazine page. I marched out slowly and braced for her reaction.
Maggie termed the first of the three outfits as “too old lady.” The second choice was “too retirement village.” And the third was “too middle-aged,” which she explained was getting warmer. After those disastrous choices, she took matters into her own hands and joined me in my closet, where she finally approved a pair of dark washed denim jeans and a fitted, black v-neck top that I usually wore under a suit, because it was a bit flimsy. Maggie insisted that it was fine, as it was. As I was ready to leave, I grabbed my trench coat, at which point, Maggie put her foot down once again.
“Hold up, Columbo, you are not heading out to solve a mystery. Don’t you have a regular jacket?” she said as she hunted through my coat closet and eventually dug out a leather jacket that I had had since college.
“Here, this is cool. Wear this,” she said as she tossed the jacket to me. My new, unassuming cool look could go just about anywhere, she assured me.
“What if he takes me somewhere really nice?” I asked.
“A babe like Dave Germain is not going to take you somewhere fancies schmancy.”
“Um, do you think you can dial back the ‘babe’ talk a few notches? And it’s fancy schmancy, one fancy, not plural.”
“Take it ‘EAZ,’ looks like someone is testy about their new boyfriend.”
“He is not my boyfriend,” I insisted, even though I really wanted him to be my boyfriend. It was going to take more than Maggie’s belief to convince me that he could think of me as more than just a girl he worked with. The more people asked me about our relationship, the more awkward I became. If he were my boyfriend, no one would ask, it would be clear. But, as in so many other things in my life at that point, this one, too, seemed up for debate. The only silver lining might have been that I had something else to feel insecure about besides work.
If someone were going to ask you out, you should know that you were being asked out. I had no idea what Dave asked me out for, his “ask” was so vague. He had simply leaned over my desk and wanted to know if I was available Friday night. That was it. He didn’t tell me why or what we were doing. Since Bertram was in the room, I said, “I was,” casually without looking up. And although he pretended not to notice, I saw Bertram look over his horn-rimmed glasses at me, with a worried look on his face. But this was expected since after meeting Dave, I had become the “yes” girl. Pretty much anything he asked me to do, I did. He just had that sway over me.
“Okay, then, meet me here at seven,” Dave said and then he left, creating an awkward void, which I attempted to fill by overtalking.
“He probably just wants to go over fundraising stuff. You know, so much to do, so much to do. We really should get some more hours in on this. Some more hours in…on this…” I repeated.
But Bertram had already formed his opinion and, of course, let the wisdom of Jerry Garcia speak for him.
“The wheel is turning and you can’t slow down, You can’t let go and you can’t hold on, You can’t go back and you can’t stand still, If the thunder don’t get you then the lightning will.”
“Jerry, right?”
“You got it, sister,” Bertram said.
Bertram’s advice via the Grateful Dead was no more helpful than Dave’s Mission: Impossible-like instructions for the date. Like Tom Cruise in those movies, I was on a need-to-know basis.
At the appointed time, I waited for Dave, under The Garage sign, feeling conspicuously alone. The feeling of being in the wrong place at the wrong time always crept in during those moments of being the first to arrive. There is no comforting reward for the punctuality, just a gnawing feeling of getting something wrong, which you fill by double-checking your watch, your address, your hair—a nonverbal checklist that you run through over and over again to reassure yourself that you are in the right place at the right time. None of these moments of doubt is part of the late person’s routine. There is probably more comfort in the hurriedness of being late; at least you know someone is waiting on you. Waiting on others is angst-producing.
He was late, 15 minutes late. As I stood there, a car pulled over to the corner and waited. I looked and then looked again, and it was not until the window of the teal green Honda Civic rolled down to reveal Dave as the driver that I knew it was him. But there he was, cool Dave, in one of the most uncool cars I could imagine. He should have been on a motorcycle or in a Jeep Sahara. He leaned across the front seat and cranked open the manual window. “Hop in,” he said. And then he put on his blinker and entered traffic. It was not exactly the dream pickup for a first date, more like a parental pickup from school or practice. I took a moment to acclimate myself in Dave’s car and picked up on the small details. Your car says a lot about who you are, and Dave’s screamed suburban dad: AM radio and cassette deck, the evergreen vanilla-scented car freshener, a used travel coffee mug. And to make matters more confusing, he was dressed differently; he had swapped his rock and roll look to match his car. He wore khakis and a polo shirt of, all things, looking like a Dockers ad. I was officially thrown off.
“I wanted to take you somewhere special,” he said with a smile, his arm slung cavalierly over the steering wheel, as if he were driving a fancy sports car rather than a fuel-efficient carpool sedan.
We drove out of Hoboken and he told me he had to make one stop at the mall. The mall, I thought to myself, I couldn’t imagine this guy at the mall. But he seemed to know exactly where he was going, into the heart of mall country—Bergen County, New Jersey, where, along Route 17, there are malls on either side of the highway, and not strip malls, but big malls with big anchor stores, the big New Jersey malls synonymous with the state. He chose the swankiest of the bunch, the Riverside Square Mall, where the anchor store is Bloomingdales, and the retailers include high-rollers like Hermès and Salvatore Ferragamo. Our final destination, of all places, was Brooks Brothers, where he needed to pick up something “different” to wear. Different may have been an understatement.
“Well, I got an interview in the city for a job with my brother-in-law,” he explained. “And I was hoping you could help me pick something out to wear.” I pondered what kind of interview he would be going on for which he needed a suit.
For someone who was constantly scrutinized for what she wore, I seemed to be consulted constantly about what other people should wear. Even though I was thrilled that he had asked for my help, I was saddened by the fact that he had given up on the bar; it was as if he were on to the next thing.
“What about the bar?” I asked. “You don’t think it’s going to make it?”
“Let’s just consider this a backup plan, if things don’t work out for us.”
Work out for us, I thought. What does that mean, exactly? Was our fate linked to the fate of the bar, and if he thinks the bar is sinking fast, then why did he chose me to help him with his future, a future I would have no part of if the bar closed? Maybe I was reading too much into this, but given the sketchy clues I needed to investigate further. Maybe I should have left the Columbo jacket on after all.
Clearly, he could have taken someone else to get this task done based on what I knew about his appeal. We entered Brooks Brothers and were immediately greeted by the quintessential men’s suit salesman. They are bred in a special place and then kept in a time capsule, where pocket squares and inseams are always essential. All the Brooks Brother men are dapper gentlemen who clearly never work in an office, but are attired as if they did.
He sized up Dave easily as a 42 long and directed him to a dressing room, where he had placed a navy blue pinstriped classic with a white shirt and red tie. This was the exact outfit the salesman was wearing. In fact, this was the same outfit that most of the salespeople in the store had on, whether they were male or female. I had a hard time telling which side of the store was for men and which was for women, the looks were so similar, the only giveaway being a slightly more pronounced cinch in the waist of the woman’s suits and of, course, that some of the women’s suits were pinstriped skirt suits. I searched the mannequins for something different for Dave to wear, disappointed to see him join the ranks of this uniform-wearing sales force. The thought of him giving up on his dream to become a corporate clone was almost too much to bear, so when he came out of the dressing room with that outfit on that looked more Halloween costume than business executive, I was moved to action. My anxiety escalated as I viewed him in the three-way mirror. I snapped to action.
“Please, God, no. Take it off, I can’t deal.” I had three different thoughts running through my head, so I wasn’t sure which one I had actually said out loud. I shepherded him back into the dressing room and ordered him to change back and quickly. I could not bear the idea of him getting a real job, getting into the shark tank that I had just escaped from, especially since he, in some way, had helped me escape from that boring pinstriped fate. He changed and headed for the door without another word. The dapper salesman followed him, confused. But I intercepted him with my hand up like a traffic cop.
“Don’t go, no thanks,” I muttered.
Dave continued to walk ahead of me directly to the guardrail and then finally turned dramatically and said, “Okay, now I know that you’re serious about our commitment.”
This was another confusing comment. Our commitment might have been our fledgling attraction or our intertwined fates of the club’s success. In any case, I felt like I had passed a test there at Brooks Brothers, that perhaps he was trying to see how deeply I was committed to our union, personal as well as professional. And then, as if the ghost of Christmas Future had been completely exorcised, he turned and said,” Are you up for something to eat? They have an awesome Cheesecake Factory here.”
“Really? Awesome? Cheesecake Factory? Well, those are some words I never thought I would hear from your lips,” I said.
“Lighten up, Jess, it’s just a meal, you have three a day.”
I laughed. He was pretty funny.
“You know I grew up in Ridgewood, right?”
And then it started making sense to me; he was from New Jersey, not Williamsburg or even an obscure upstate New York town that sounded cool, like Rochester. He was a Jersey kid, just like me. I should have known by the way he took the back exit to the mall. Not many people know that entryway.
Happily we strolled through the mall, past the Sunglass Hut, Brookstone, and L’Occitane, all the familiar places that had served as a backdrop to my afternoons of hanging out in the malls of New Jersey. It was like coming home again. That familiar walk comforted me. And I sensed that Dave was familiar with this terrain, as well.
We made our way to the Cheesecake Factory, a chain restaurant designed around a dessert I never ate. How they even come up with that as the driving force behind a restaurant remained a mystery to me. But that mystery was secondary to round two of our evening. At the front of the restaurant, the hostess, a perky high school student, welcomed us with a peppy smile and a quick once-over. Here we go again, I thought. She looked at Dave and then at me and then at Dave again, as if to say, how did you get with this guy? Dave, garbed in his traditional outfit, still had a touch of the bad boy tattoo that peeked out of his polo shirt sleeve enough to let people know that something darker lurked beneath his Dockers preppy exterior.
“How about a nice booth for you
guys?” she asked.
“A booth would be nice, wouldn’t it, dear?” Dave waited for my reaction.
“Yes. Booth. Nice.” I had once again regressed to monosyllabic speech. I usually fell victim to this cavewoman speech pattern whenever I was overwhelmed with circumstances beyond my control, like people calling me “dear” in public.
“We have some ‘business’ to discuss,” he said with a wink to the giddy hostess, who led us to the table and let out a little giggle as she told us to have an “awesome dinner.” They seemed to share a moment of understanding, like they were in on a secret that I had yet to discover. What exactly was going on here? How did we suddenly turn into a couple that eats at a cozy booth on a Friday night in a mall in Hackensack, New Jersey?
The waitress who served us made no mystery of her attraction to Dave and directed all of her questions to him as if I were not there. I think she was so smitten with him that she reverted to some old school, let-the-man-order thing, but I couldn’t be sure. The only thing I was not sure of was how out of place I felt at that moment. And in true patriarchal fashion, Dave took control.
“Hi, uh, what’s your name again?”
“Helen,” the portly waitress answered.
“Helen, Helen,” he repeated, as if to make sure he would remember her name. “Um, okay Helen, let’s start with a drink, something frozen, like a Piña Colada? Make it two Piña Coladas and a starter and we will have the roadside sliders, the lettuce wraps, and the crab and artichoke dip to start,” he shared.
I was speechless with this order as well as impressed by his menu knowledge. I was even more confused when the extraordinarily large drinks and our potpourri of “starters,” appeared. Everything was super-sized here. I questioned how people actually saved enough room for the actual cheesecake. Dave sipped his drink, which came accessorized with a large piece of pineapple, a cherry and an umbrella.
Best Friend for Hire Page 17