Match Made in Manhattan

by Amanda Stauffer

  “I don’t know what else I’d do,” he breathes out, slightly winded from the multifloor climb to the rooftop. “You probably gleaned some of this from my profile, but I always thought I’d be a musician.”

  “Right . . .” I say thoughtfully. “I kind of remember something about that.” He shoots me a glare and an eye roll.

  “What?” I ask defensively. “I haven’t looked at your profile in . . . a really long time. At least a month!” The waiter escorts us to a banquette overlooking the Hudson River, and we sit down. “If you don’t believe me . . . you can check. You know they let you see a list of, like, the hundred most recent people who have viewed you.”

  “A-ny-way,” he spaces out the word, feigning aggravation, “I moved to New York to pursue . . . ‘my dreams,’” he says in a falsetto, clutching his hands over his heart, “and I got quickly sucked into the music scene. I had a stage name, and a tiny backup band and—”

  “Ooh!” I perk up. “What was your stage name? Should I guess?”

  “Nah, you’ll never guess. It was Nat Rivers. Nathaniel’s my middle name, Rivers is my mom’s maiden name.” He picks up a menu and hands me one.

  “Why did you want a stage name? Why not just be Luke Watts?”

  He pauses in thought, then shakes his head. “I don’t know. I never really thought about it. It just seemed like,” he pauses again, “a cool thing to do,” and shrugs.

  “So you were a starving-artist folk singer type? Or a bad-boy rocker type? Or . . .”

  “The former. A sexy starving-artist folk singer.”

  “I didn’t say sexy.” I shake my head. He elbows me in the rib. “Ow!”

  “Yeah, I played at The Bitter End and some other cool places you’ve probably heard of or been to. I played a lot of Dylan covers . . . but also wrote a bunch of my own songs.”

  “Cool.”

  “Yeah, it was cool. For a while . . . but you can’t make money, so I had to also work as a bike messenger, and after a few years, I was tired of . . . well, starving. So I applied to business school, went—”

  “—business school and journalism school.”

  “—Right. Went straight into finance, and that’s . . . what I’ve been doing ever since.”

  “That was how long ago?”

  “Seven or eight years.”

  “And you’ve been at Bank of Tokyo ever since you graduated?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “It’s fine. I mean, I don’t like it the way you seem to like your job, but it’s steady and it pays. . . . I don’t see why I’d leave it. Unless they fired me.”

  “How did we get on this?” I squint, trying to remember. “Oh right! Did you always want to work in finance? . . . So I guess the answer’s n—”

  “No,” he says. I nod quickly. He smiles. “When I was little, I wanted to be a spy. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a spy. Every year for Halloween, I insisted on having the same costume.”

  “Saves time and money for your parents.” I nod, sipping my ginger mojito. “How’d you dress up?”

  “I wore big dark sunglasses and my dad’s trench coat. And I carried a plastic gun, maybe a water gun?”

  “You’d get kicked out of school for carrying such an accessory these days. . . .”

  “I know, right. But what about you?”

  “What was I for Halloween? Oh, all kinds of things: a Viking, Harpo Marx . . .” I smile.

  “No, did you always want to work in conservation?”

  I have to pause to reflect on this before speaking. “As a kid, I wanted to be a glassblower. Really badly. I went to Venice with my family when I was maybe ten or eleven, and this glassblower at a factory in Murano brought me a small deer. I’m sure it was imperfect or flawed and they were gonna trash it anyway, but it was this . . . amazing gesture to a ten-year-old. My family didn’t speak Italian, so he tried to communicate by putting his hands up,” I mime being a deer, “and saying ‘Bambi! Bambi!’”

  “—Wait, that was really adorable. Do it again,” Luke interrupts.

  “Do what again? My impression of a glassblower’s impression of a deer?”

  “Yeah,” he nods vigorously, “do it again. It was really cute.”

  I shrug and do it again. “A-ny-way,” I continue, mimicking his aggravated tone from earlier, “I was hooked. I spent some summers glassblowing, and there was a point in time when I really thought I might up and move to Venice to apprentice there after college.”

  “So what happened? Why didn’t you go?”

  I shrug. “Life gets in the way, I guess. . . . I don’t have a good answer for that. I guess I’m not as brave as you, striking out on my own without an income to pursue my craft, or passion. . . . I do love what I do now. But I’m never going to meet a glassblower and not have pangs of envy.”

  “You could change it up, be a glassblower now?” he suggests.

  “I know. I still rent studio time every now and then, but . . . I guess I don’t have any regrets about it? I think there are myriad paths that can make you happy, it all just revolves around where you are when.” I pause, then add, “It’s like my Pachinko theory.”

  “Your what?”

  “Pachinko, those Japanese pinball games?” He shakes his head, indicating he has no idea what I am talking about. “Okay.” I hold my left hand up, spread my fingers out, and explain, “With American pinball machines, there’s a goal, right?”

  He nods.

  “You’re trying to get the ball to certain places for bonus points and away from others for penalties, but you always wind up at the same final destination, the bottom pocket of the machine.”

  “Okay.”

  “But with Pachinko, you have all these tiny pins, and the same sized ball will bounce around them,” I jump my right index finger between the open slots in my left hand, “and almost never take the same trajectory twice, and it can end up in a variety of different slots at the bottom. Like, ten, or twenty.” Though I could be making that up. I haven’t seen a Pachinko machine since high school in my friend’s basement. “And, I think life is like a Pachinko machine.” I shrug, dropping my hands.

  “Ahh, Forrest Gump.” He nods, teasingly.

  “No! But, one day, you could bounce off a pin to the right, the next day to the left, and it will affect where you land. But no matter where you land, you’re always on the same level as all the other pinballs, just . . . in a different slot. So . . . it’s like you can be happy—i.e., at the same level—with a plethora of outcomes. It’s not predetermined, you just need to make the most of whatever trajectory you take, so that it’s a good ride.”

  “Huh. I’ve never heard that.”

  “That’s because I made it up.” I smile proudly. “It’s not like it’s an official theorem or philosophy.”

  “Cult of Alison.”

  “Eek, I hope not.”

  “So do you think dating or love is that way, too? That there are dozens of different outcomes that can make us happy?”

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  “I like that.” He nods. “I might steal that theory and pretend it’s mine.”

  One round of ginger mojitos and two rounds of jalapeño margaritas later, the sun has set, leaving us with a twinkling view of the New Jersey waterfront.

  “God, I love this view,” Luke says as he pushes back my hair and kisses my neck.

  “Yeah, not too shabby.”

  “Not that view, this one.” He kisses my neck again.

  “What a line,” I mock, and he raises his eyes to meet mine, then kisses me deeply on the lips. We embrace for a while, for long enough that we’ve probably grossed out the poor waitstaff. His hand wanders up my legging-covered thigh and his fingers toy with the elastic waistband under my shirtdress. He slides his hand under the waistband and down my lower back. Wordlessly, I shift my weight off of my left arm and flick at his hand. Twice.

  He smiles through his kiss and moves his hand back to my—c
overed—thigh.

  “Do you want to run away to Vegas and elope? C’mon, let’s make it a forever,” he whispers into my ear.

  Yes, please!! But maybe once I’ve gotten to know you a tiny bit better? Can we sit down and talk about your values first, please? I turn, look into his eyes, and say, “I mean, I don’t know if you learned anything from The Hangover movies . . .”

  “Well, I was hoping you didn’t need so much convincing, but I hear they give you a free case of beer when you get married at one of those Elvis-y wedding chapels.” He half-sings the word “chapels” as if dangling a carrot or temptation before me.

  “Why didn’t you lead off with that information? In that case, heck yeah, let’s hop on the next flight!”

  As we walk to the subway, in a slightly bizarre effort at small talk, Younger Luke asks what I’m doing for the rest of the night. I glance at my watch.

  “Crud! It’s after midnight! Well, I gotta get to my next date. Sorry! But . . . thanks for everything. Hope you have a good week!”

  “Okay, fine.” He pokes my clavicle teasingly. “Dumb question. A-ny-way, I had fun. And I needed that after two days crammed behind a tiny desk inside the Javits Center. So, thanks.”

  June 12 at 12:32 a.m.

  ALISON: THANKS FOR THE DRINKS & THE ROOFTOP ROMANCE. A GOOD CHOICE. I’M ON TO DATE #2 FOR THE EVENING, BUT WE’LL BE IN TOUCH SOON.

  YOUNGER LUKE: I HEARD HE’S KIND OF A DOUCHE, BUT HAVE FUN. COULD HAVE STAYED ON THAT ROOFTOP ALL NIGHT

  After brushing my teeth and changing, I climb into bed and see my cell phone light up and vibrate on the windowsill. YOUNGER LUKE flashes on the screen. I swipe at the screen.

  YOUNGER LUKE: SO I’M THINKIN’ OF CATCHIN’ THE NEXT FLIGHT TO VEGAS. YOU WANNA COME WITH?

  YOUNGER LUKE: OR ARE YOU GOING TO LET THE WEREWOLVES GET THE BEST OF YOU?

  What on earth is he talking about? Was there a full moon tonight? Did we even talk about this? I ignore the second text and respond to the first:

  ALISON: A FRIEND ONCE TOLD ME THEY GIVE YOU A FREE CASE OF BEER IF YOU TIE THE KNOT IN VEGAS. . . . ER, OR AM I GETTING TOO FAR AHEAD OF MYSELF?

  Except, four (strong) cocktails and no dinner have gotten the best of me, and when I hit SEND and return my cell phone to the windowsill, I knock it off the sill and behind my bed. “Crud!” I exclaim aloud. I hop out of bed and try to push my bed frame away from the wall. It moves about an inch and gets snagged on the carpet, and I decide I’m not in great shape to do this right now. So I climb back in bed and go to sleep, hearing my phone vibrating somewhere beneath me.

  The next morning I recover my phone.

  June 12 at 1:06 a.m.

  YOUNGER LUKE: YOU JUST CAN’T PASS UP THAT FREE CASE OF BEER - I LIKE YOUR STYLE. BREAK A LEG TONIGHT, DON’T FORGET THE BANANAS.

  What happened to me last night? Bananas? Werewolves? So although I don’t remember these conversations at all, apparently I informed Younger Luke that I am giving a talk at the Armory tonight . . . but what bananas?

  The following week, I am sitting by the microscope at work when I receive the following text:

  June 20 at 2:43 p.m.

  YOUNGER LUKE: MEET ME BY THE TWO TAILED ELEPHANT WHEN THE RED CROW SINGS IN THE RAIN

  ALISON: AWW NUTS - YOU’RE JUST AS CRYPTIC AS YOUR HALLOWEEN COSTUME WOULD LEAD ONE TO BELIEVE. BUT I THINK I CRACKED YOUR CODE, SO, COOL, I’LL SEE YOU THEN.

  YOUNGER LUKE: JUST TO BE CLEAR, WERE YOU HEADED TO THE ANGELIKA ON HOUSTON FOR THE 8 PM SCREENING? CAUSE THAT’S WHERE ILL BE.

  ALISON: OH. WELL, THE MYSTERIOUS LINGO HAD ME HEADED FOR A MIDNIGHT SCREENING OUT IN QUEENS. GOOD THING YOU CLARIFIED. NOTE TO SELF: HONE SLEUTHING SKILLS.

  YOUNGER LUKE: YEAH, I MEAN, THAT WAS PRETTY FAR OFF. WHOA - WAY OFF. AND THAT WAS AN EASY ONE. . . ITS OK, YOU’VE HAD A ROUGH WEEK.

  Work was rough this week, and I told him so—albeit in an abridged, far sunnier edition of what actually transpired: in advance of my annual review meeting, I received a written performance evaluation, authored of course by Joanne, which was both inaccurate and scathing. Thankfully, the meeting itself isn’t scheduled for another eight weeks, leaving me fifty-six days to mentally prepare. Read: panic.

  After irrationally crying first to my mom, then to Nicole, I tried to broach it with Younger Luke over the phone in what Nicole and I now refer to as “our first feelings talk”—or, rather, my first feelings talk, since Younger Luke seemed pretty nonplussed by the whole thing. Although I omitted the most depressing and pathetic details, I wanted to see how he’d handle a display of any emotion other than sarcasm, passion, or bliss. It wasn’t the heart-to-heart Nicole and I had hoped for, but there was a lot of laughter, which was a positive by-product.

  Happily, the prospect of an easy-breezy movie date makes the work headaches slightly easier to endure.

  A Saturday night out in his neighborhood, Williamsburg, has begun to resemble a veritable pub crawl. An evening that started off classy with oysters and champagne gave way to two rounds of cocktails at a speakeasy-style bar, which devolved into multiple rounds of drinks and Skee-Ball at Barcade, and now we’re walking home in the rain after the last bar closed at 4:00 a.m.

  “Luke!” I scold, pointing at him. “We’ve been drinking for eight and a half hours. Why do our dates always end in your administering me . . . a giant dose of mind-erasers??”

  “What?” He laughs.

  “Sooooo. Remember your texts from last week? Or the week before?” We finally reach his front door, he turns the key, and we escape the rain, drenched though we may be.

  “Yeah?” He starts climbing the stairs to his apartment.

  “Werewolves? Bananas? . . . I don’t remember any of these things. None.”

  “So you’re saying that you don’t listen to a word I say,” he teases as we reach his apartment door.

  “No, what I’m saying is that you are using Jedi mind-erasing tricks on me!” I add quietly, “And, I’d like you to stop.”

  “Awww,” he says sympathetically, and he turns and wipes the rain off my forehead with his fingertips. “Someone can’t hold their liquor.”

  “Someone needs to . . .” I search for my words, “stop making me drink so much.”

  He laughs. “It’s a free country, you know. You don’t have to try and keep up with me. You are, you know, a wee bit littler than me.” He turns the key in his door, and we walk into his apartment.

  “Oh my God!” I exclaim. “You actually do have checkered linoleum flooring!”

  “Yeah, you put it in my Room for Sweet Fruit Beverages. Or did you forget that, too?”

  “Yeah, but . . . but I thought you were kidding, and I was just making a joke about it.”

  “Nope. It’s all here. Complete with the nineteen-sixties red kitchen cabinets.”

  “Your apartment is . . . so strange,” I say, not meaning to offend, but not sure how else to complete that sentence.

  “Thanks. I kinda like it. I think of it as a nice outdated man cave. Lacks any element of the female touch.”

  “Yes I see that,” I say, noting his music posters and the strange mismatched furnishings and décor.

  “Where can I hang this?” I hold out my coat, and he takes it to the closet by the door. I kick off my shoes, and Luke has me up over his shoulder—my torso upside-down against his back, my legs dangling close to his face.

  “Where are you taking me?” I ask. He carries me across the threshold of the apartment, through the living room, and into his bedroom.

  “Aww, look at you, my knight in shining armor,” I say, the blood rushing to my head.

  “Yeppppp. Yep yep yep yep yep yep yep,” he replies in a quick monotone.

  “Drunk speak?” I ask. “So who can’t hold their liquor now?”

  “No! I’m the Martian from Sesame Street.”

  “Soooo, yes, drunk speak.”

  He shakes his head from side to side, still carrying me.

  “Is this the only way you’re going to talk
to me?”

  “Yepppp. Yep yep yep yep yep yep yep yep.”

  “Cool. Okay. So from this point forward, I would like you to only communicate via binary speak. Don’t worry! It will never get old.”

  “Yeeeeeppp. Yep yep yep yep yep yep yep yep.”

  “Okay, but Luke?” I struggle to push myself up off his back so I am oriented at least semivertically.

  “Yeppp? Yep yep yep?”

  “I forgot to tell you that you’re not getting in my pants tonight.” We’ve reached the bed, and with this, he maneuvers me off his shoulder and into a sitting position on the bed. He stands facing me and cocks his head sideways.

  “Nope nope?”

  I smile. “Nope nope. I hope that’s okay. I probably should have told you sooner, like before I’m sitting on your bed at 4:30 a.m. . . . but I just got, I don’t know, carried away by the fun of the night. . . . Ha ha, get it?” I say, reaching out and poking his stomach with my finger.

  He nods twice.

  “So. Is that okay? Do you want me to . . . leave?”

  He shakes his head from side to side.

  “So. We’re good,” I say, looking at him askance.

  “Yeeppp. Yep yep yep yep yep.” He goes into his closet and takes off his shoes.

  June 25 at 12:16 p.m.

  YOUNGER LUKE: JUST TOOK MY SECOND COLD SHOWER SINCE YOU LEFT. HOPE YOU EVADED THE MARSUPIALS ON THE SUBWAY THIS MORNING.

  ALISON: HMMM. JEDI MIND-ERASING TRICKS AGAIN! . . . OR ARE YOU MAKING FUN OF ME?

  YOUNGER LUKE: NOOOOOPE. NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE.

  In stark contrast with Older Luke, all Younger Luke and I can seem to do is drink, laugh, drink, laugh some more, and make out. I have probably consumed more alcohol with Younger Luke in the past two months than in the prior two years. My poor liver. So when we’re playing Trivial Pursuit on the floor of his living room the following Friday night, a bottle of red wine in front of us and takeout Thai on the table, I sip from my wineglass and ask, as casually as possible, “How was your day?”