by Andrea Meyer
We make our way back to the living room, and I sit on the couch. He plops down next to me and absentmindedly turns on the TV and we stare at scantily clad women taking turns scaling a building. When the doorbell rings, he buzzes without asking who’s there.
A couple of minutes later, a girl saunters into the room and kisses him on the mouth. His sister? She’s Asian. And skinny. And striking, with poofy, red lips and skin like vanilla Häagen-Dazs. Could she be one of those girls who kisses male friends ambiguously on the lips whether or not she’s sleeping with them? I hold my breath.
“Jacquie, this is my girlfriend, Stacy. Jacquie’s looking at the room.”
I smile weakly up at her from the couch, which suddenly feels very low to the floor. “Nice to meet you,” I croak, feeling like a dwarf all alone on a planet populated by tall, pretty people.
We make polite conversation for ten minutes and watch TV, while I groan inwardly and display an expression that says, Chipper! Relaxed! Enthusiastic would-be roommate! After all, this enchanting, good-looking guy—and his equally enchanting, good-looking girlfriend—thinks I want to move into this apartment. I gnaw my left thumbnail and snap my rubber band. Ouch.
“Guess you’ll miss Peter when he’s in Turkey,” I say lamely.
“I’m going with him,” Stacy says perkily. “I’m psyched!”
“Yeah, cool, lucky.”
That clinches it. I stand up, drop my empty beer bottle onto the coffee table with a clink, and announce that I have to leave. What’s the point? I’m completely depressed and feel an urgent need to get out of the joint and call Jeremy to meet me for a stiff drink in the East Village, my turf, where I feel confident and protected.
“Well, Peter, I don’t think I’m interested in the room after all,” I announce.
He looks up at me, perfectly baffled, while Stacy continues to smile beatifically. Of course Peter is perplexed. If there’s anything I have learned in my thirty-two years on the planet, it’s that people generally believe what you tell them. If they own a liquor store and you tell them you’re organizing a fund-raiser for the American Cancer Society next week—like my best friend in high school once did—and you’re going to be ordering fourteen cases of wine and sixteen of beer and would like to check prices, they believe you. And when you add, incidentally, “I think I’ll take a bottle of that cheap white wine-in-a-box on the shelf behind you right now,” they hand it over, even if you’re seventeen and wearing a private-girls’-school uniform.
And if you tell a guy you want to rent a room in his apartment and actually go over to look at it, it never occurs to him that you might have ulterior motives. Why would it?
I stop by my apartment, which Alicia has miraculously straightened and momentarily evacuated, and check my messages.
“Hey, Jacquie, John here, remember me? Room for rent, Avenue B. I know you’re not looking for a place to live anymore, but I wondered if you wanted to come by—”
I erase it midmessage.
“Hi, my name’s Herbert. You left me a message about my room for rent. You wanted to know more about me. I am fifty-six, never married. I live with my six cats (Greg, Peter, Bobby, Marsha, Jan, and Cindy) two parakeets (Mike and Carol), iguana named Alice, and tarantula called Sam the Butcher—”
Delete.
“Hi, Jacquie. It’s Matt with the apartment in SoHo. Hey, can you come by Tuesday instead of Wednesday? That would be sweet. Let me know.”
“Hi, this is Denise. My boyfriend, Rufus, told me you called about our extra room?”
Delete.
“Hey, Franz here.” Sexy accent. “You called about the apartment. Me and my girlfriend would love you—”
I punch the Delete button with my fist, causing my answering machine to topple off its perch. “Sorry!” I tell it before placing it nicely back in its spot.
“Every guy in New York has a girlfriend,” I bitch to Jeremy over drinks at a onetime dive on Avenue A that now charges eleven dollars for a Cosmopolitan but Jeremy likes anyway because they let Napoleon sit on his bar stool with him. “I’m getting totally pessimistic about this whole endeavor.”
“What did that one guy say?” he asks, while Napoleon, decked out in a leopard-skin hoodie, compulsively licks his wrist. “The investment banker in Tribeca who raved about skinny-dipping in Ibiza.”
“‘She’s over sometimes, but I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.’”
“That guy doesn’t have a girlfriend,” he says, ripping Napoleon off his arm and feeding him from the bowl of pretzels on the bar. “He wants you to know he won’t jump on you when you walk through the door. Here’s what I think: If they don’t live together, he’s fair game.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right,” he says, leaning over to check his phone, which is sitting silently on the bar, and scooting back in his stool, disappointed. “Any mildly attached guy who’s still living alone sees you, he’s dumping her. Or at least having an affair.”
“You say the sweetest things. You know, if you’d fall in love with me, I wouldn’t have to go through this insanity.”
“Are you kidding? This is the best thing that’s ever happened to you. You’ll meet a guy so hot, next year every hipster in New York will be”—he makes quotation marks in the air with his fingers—“‘looking for a roommate.’ It’ll be the new trend in dating. You’ll be famous and go on Oprah, as if having a hot new boyfriend and an article in the women’s rag du jour weren’t enough.”
“I like that.”
“What’s rule number five again?”
“Rule number five: The date’s the prize. Do what it takes, whatever it takes, to nab the date.”
“You’re such a vixen. You’ll definitely get a date soon.”
I wonder silently why no one has asked me out yet, but wipe the thought from my mind.
“Whatever happened to that guy you went out with on my birthday?” I ask.
“Never called.”
We bow our heads. Napoleon gets nervous and barks twice. “It’s all right, Nappie, Daddy’s got it all under control.” Addressing me again, Jeremy says, “I called him and left a really cute message and then when he didn’t call back, I left another totally nonchalant one, and then yesterday, I left one saying, ‘Look, if you want to go out for a drink sometime, let’s do it. If not, please call and let me know. I had a really good time the other night and I think you did, too. I just want to know one way or the other.’” As I shudder, he goes on, “I am so sick of these people being dishonest with me. I don’t really care what happens. He was way too built for me anyway—I don’t like a guy with too many muscles—but just be straight up, you know?”
“My sister would kick your ass for leaving three messages. She says you should never, ever leave a message. If you absolutely have to call him or you’ll die, use *67 so your number comes up ‘unknown,’ and hang up if you get voice mail.”
“Oh yeah, I’m sure that’s what you do,” he says, checking his phone again.
“Yeah, every time. I’m a disaster, I call so incessantly someone should lock me up, but I never leave a trace.”
By the time we leave the bar, Jeremy has decided what I’ll wear when I go on Oprah and how I’ll slyly plug him as the hottest new fashion designer in New York. “I think what first made my perfect new boyfriend fall in love with me was the stunning dress I was wearing, designed by my sickeningly talented friend, Jeremy Frye. I have a picture of it right here. Isn’t it gorgeous?” (He makes me rehearse it fourteen times.) The bartender has bought us a round and given Napoleon a ratty old shoelace to chew on, making lifelong devotees of all three of us. And I have decided to change the rules slightly. For one, I decide that it is essential to find out if a guy has a girlfriend before I set foot in his pad.
“Is there anything else I should know about you? Like do you maybe have a girlfriend who sleeps over all the time?” I ask Jörg, a Norwegian designer with a “snazzy” loft in the West Thirties, whom I
call the next day.
“Not all the time,” he answers enigmatically. Screw him, I think. I’m not about to drag myself to the West Thirties for a guy who won’t tell a strange woman if he has a girlfriend or not.
“My sweetheart lives in Virginia,” says a thirty-six-year-old vet named Jeffrey. “She comes up on weekends and plans to move here next fall. That’s why I’m only advertising the place as a six-month sublet. It could be longer, depending on her plans.”
“Gloria lives here, too,” says Thierry, a Belgian massage therapist with a duplex near Gramercy Park. “It will be wonderful if you ladies will like each other.”
Getting the dirt up front saves me a lot of time and dashed hopes.
I also decide to start calling older guys. Some men in their late thirties and early to mid-forties are very attractive: George Clooney, Viggo Mortensen, and Brad Pitt, for example. And I relax the location rules. Okay, so I don’t particularly want to live on the Upper East Side, but I could conceivably date a guy who lives there, provided that I can persuade him to move downtown once he falls in love with me. Then again, maybe I’ll meet a guy with an old-school, vine-covered manse with four bathrooms, three fireplaces, original Schieles and Chagalls, a panoramic view of the park, a doorman named Sid who will become my new confidant, a car (or two), and so much cash that I could take cabs everywhere and never even notice I live in New York’s stuffiest neighborhood. What that guy would be doing looking for a roommate I can’t fathom, but that’s not important. Maybe he’s lonely. Maybe his cushy upbringing left him chronically craving attention, or his cat just died and he needs company but isn’t quite ready for another furry friend. Whatever. Point is, I decide to expand my parameters and therefore call Stanley, a recently divorced forty-year-old who lives on the Upper East Side.
Stanley and I have a nice conversation. It isn’t witty or flirtatious or deep, just nice. He tells me about his house in New Jersey, which his wife, Kelly, got in the divorce. He gushes about his two daughters, Kelsey and Kai, with whom he goes to amusement parks and baseball games on alternate weekends. He tells me about his Central Park soccer team and his real estate law practice that he hopes will really thrive now that he’s living in the city full-time. Stanley is a genuinely nice guy, so I give him a chance. Just in case, I ask Alicia to accompany me.
“The Upper East Side? Are you smoking crack?” she asks. But she comes along anyway.
Stanley’s apartment is located above an Irish pub on what must be the noisiest block of Lexington Avenue. This clearly isn’t my guy with the race car, the bulging bank account, and the dead kitty. There isn’t a vine or a doorman in sight. I’m ready to blow off the whole meeting but know I’d feel terrible later and plod on. He just moved to the city, I tell myself, he can’t be blamed for a questionable first location. Alicia’s face registers disdain. But I haven’t gotten asked out on any dates yet, so, knowing that I need to inject some juice into my article, I buzz.
We have to walk up four flights of stairs to get to the apartment—Alicia groaning all the way—and the guy standing at the door when we finally get there looks exactly like a recently divorced forty-year-old should. He’s sporting a graying version of Adam Sandler’s haircut in The Wedding Singer and a faded, baby-blue Lacoste shirt and acid-wash jeans. He asks us if we want “a soda.” His nondescript bachelor pad looks like it belongs to a nice, forty-year-old guy who just lost his shirt—and most of his other possessions—in a grueling divorce: cramped, almost empty (besides the mess of cardboard boxes clogging the hallway), in desperate need of a woman’s touch. We sit down on his exhausted, checkered futon, which probably used to live in his suburban basement. When my sister excuses herself to go to the bathroom, he looks so nervous about having to carry on a one-on-one conversation with me, I feel sorry for him. I smile dumbly as he babbles on about his partner at the law firm.
“It’s a weird partnership,” he says. “Sometimes we don’t get along. He yells and slams doors, but when we’re making money and things are smooth sailing, we click literally like hand in glove.”
“Gee, I know how that goes,” says Alicia, appearing suddenly at my side. “My gloves make such a huge racket when I put my hands in them, it literally breaks my eardrums.”
I give her a look that says, Lay off this poor guy, cupcake.
“I guess you and your partner click just like a couple of LEGOs most of the time,” she says to Stanley. “Just like ice falling into a glass. So, what you’re saying, Stanley, is you used to get along swell, but lately you’re just like cats and dogs. Literally.”
Stanley stares at her with his lips slack and lightly parted, his tongue protruding just a smidgen. Then he starts to laugh, a light chuckle, and shakes his head from side to side. Stanley isn’t a bad guy. I tell him I’ll call him as soon as I know more about my living situation. His face droops, the ends of his eyebrows turning down. He looks so sad, for a minute I consider moving in with him.
“Really, I’ll call you this week.”
Leaving Stanley’s place, I tell Alicia I’ll never look at another apartment above Twenty-third Street again and vow to myself to always trust my gut. It is infallible. It knew Philippe was not the guy I was going to end up with, even as my heart went pitter-pat and my head shouted Marriage material! It sent me to bed with Jake, which is where we were destined to spend a season even if it did eventually lead to turmoil. And it knew that Stanley was a Nice Guy but. That’s what we used to call guys like Stanley. Stepping out into the warm day, I say out loud, “Go with your gut. God!” No sparks means no sparks. Compromise is forbidden. If it feels like a bowl of cream of wheat and it smells like a bowl of cream of wheat, it’s going to taste like a bowl of cream of wheat.
My sister leaves me at Fifty-ninth and Lexington to meet a good-looking cameraman, whom she met apartment hunting, for a walk in Central Park. He wants to take pictures of the blossoming trees.
“How come you meet cool guys and I meet Stanley?” I ask.
“Because I don’t give a shit,” she says, disappearing into the subway station.
Then I do the logical thing and call Jake. Just to check in, see how he’s doing, and wish him a belated happy birthday. I missed it since I wasn’t speaking to him. I have a hunch it was selfish of me to cut off all contact with him just because he bruised my ego. He doesn’t have many true friends in New York (he only moved here eight months ago), and he’s grown to value my friendship, and I’ve decided I’m willing to overlook my hurt feelings to maintain contact with him. He says he’s grateful and sounds like he means it.
An hour later, we’re having sex in my bathtub. Afterward, while eating Chinese takeout in bed in the middle of the afternoon, I tell him about my scheme. He thinks it’s “awesome.” I’m pleased.
“Well, we’re not going out anymore, right?” he asks. “I mean, we did break up, right?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Of course. I mean, don’t you want to?”
“Yeah, yeah, I do,” he says. He doesn’t speak for a minute. “It wasn’t working out. Shit, Jacquie, you can be such a pain in the ass, but I was happy you called.” Pregnant pause. “I missed you.”
“It’s only been a week.”
I’m touched by his confession and even wonder if there might be hope for us. Then he gets up, quite suddenly announcing that he has to go, and leaves, only after advising me to “have fun bonking those apartment dudes.” I get out of bed and scribble “Trust Your Gut” on the Post-it barely clinging to my fridge. Then I call Courtney.
“Hey, I just saw Jake. He was really sweet, then he was a jerk. I don’t know, why do I stay hung up on these guys?”
“Jacq,” she interrupts, “you used to stay in going-nowhere relationships for three, four years. Now you’re starting to get out in three, four months. That is an improvement. It’s progress. Don’t regress now. Jake isn’t the one.”
“Right,” I say, scribbling, “No More Jake!” on my Post-it. “Hey, Court? How come no one’s asking me out?”
“Hmm, I don’t know.”
“Me neither. I’m wearing tight clothes, flirting like a sorority girl on Quaaludes.”
“Well, you tell them you’re not moving in, right?”
“Um.”
“I don’t think they’re going to ask you out on a date if they think you’re moving in. That would be inappropriate.”
On Monday, before I even go to work, I call Clarence and tell him I’m not interested in his apartment.
“Well, maybe we can have a beer in the neighborhood sometime.” I’m literally jumping up and down as I tell him I’ll check in as soon as I have some free time. Then I call Stanley and say I don’t actually have to leave my apartment. He asks me out to lunch, and I tell him I have a boyfriend. Dishonesty is coming a lot more easily these days.
I’m smiling so hard that my lips feel like they might leap off my face as I hop on my bike to go to work. I curse myself like I do every time I ride for being too vain to wear a helmet and concentrate on dodging traffic and trying not to die. I ride hard and fast for a few blocks of Ninth Street, taking in the New York City tapestry of serious-looking suits brushing up against deli delivery guys rushing past anxious young nannies chasing toddlers. Holding my breath as I zip down Seventh Avenue in a speedy bike messenger’s wake, which requires the focus and faith of a zealot, I laugh out loud.
It’s working, it’s working!
Now, if I could only meet someone I like.
The next few weeks yield more meetings with strange men than the rest of my life put together. It’s a relatively dead period at work between issues, Alicia’s in an apartment-hunting frenzy, Courtney’s in Boston playing groupie, and T-shirt weather has finally arrived, so I just go for it. Here’s what I come up with:
Bachelor #1: Matt the model lives in a loft in SoHo. It’s sparsely, but smartly, decorated. Couch is expensive, fire-engine red, facing a nice flat-screen TV. Bookshelves are blue milk cartons stacked sideways on top of one another, shoved up against a brick wall, mostly filled with Matt’s portfolios, fashion magazines, and framed photographs of his Midwestern family and childhood pets. The enormous coffee table was probably from Ikea once, but Matt has pasted hundreds of fashion shots (many featuring his flawless mug) all over it (presumably when stoned). Lamps—he likes lamps—are a funky assortment of designer and flea market. One wall of the living room has floor-to-ceiling windows facing west that display a string of roof gardens rosy against the sunset sky. Matt’s model roommate took off on a world tour beginning in Japan, which Matt tells me is standard practice. Matt also did a stint in Asia—they loved him for his handsome six feet two inches and shoulder-length, butter-blond hair—where he bunked with four other male models in a Tokyo dump, spent his days flashing his pretty teeth for casting agents and climbing the StairMaster, and killed brain cells all night at clubs where house music pounded and giggling teenage girls flocked. After Japan, he hit Paris, Munich, and, finally, London, where he landed a major contract with a major designer and moved to New York to pour way too much rent into two thousand square feet on Spring Street. As far as I can tell, there are only three books in Matt’s apartment: a coffee table book full of famous people and their pets, Giving Good Orgasm: The Man’s Guide to Tantric Pleasure (I’m completely serious), and Flowers for Algernon, which I find adorable. It’s a book I haven’t read since elementary school, and imagining cute Matt poring over it makes me want to run my hands through his silky sheath of hair. Matt is handsome as a god and dumb as meatloaf, and we make tentative plans to have drinks next week. I assume we’ll both blow off the date and wish I knew someone ditzy and pretty enough to set up with him.