“Thank you,” I said. “End of interview.”
“Have you been studying Nora’s movies?” Kristine asked. “And I don’t mean Silkwood; that one’s depressing. The romantic ones.”
“Yes, and I’ve read her neck book and bought her remembering-nothing book, but I can’t write like her.”
“This is the suckiest assignment in history,” Kristine said. “When Jennifer Love Hewitt made The Audrey Hepburn Story, the press crucified her for not looking like Audrey Hepburn.”
“What about that old senator who told that vice-president guy, ‘And you, young man, are no John F. Kennedy.’ I have nightmares about that.”
“Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle,” Kristine said.
“Of course you’d know that.”
Kristine shrugged. “I know stuff.”
She does know stuff. She’s a walking encyclopedia of trivia. She was on It’s Academic as a kid.
Our waitress returned, plates lining her arm. “Enough appetizers for you?” she asked, after depositing our first round. We nodded our heads yes and she left.
I tasted the quinoa varnishkes and wrote a surreptitious rating in the notebook hidden on my lap. I must have looked like I was masturbating throughout the meal. “How would you rate the free-range-chicken salad?” I asked Kristine.
She wiggled her hand side to side like so-so. “I hate thinking about all the happy little chickens,” she said, “free, running around the range, and the next thing you know—bam! They’re salad.”
“Pulled pork gets me. I picture little piggy tug-of-wars.”
We shared a moment of silence. Then we shared nova mousse with cream cheese.
Over wild-halibut gefilte fish Kristine told me she was exhausted from dating. “What’s the difference between a first date and an interview?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Two glasses of wine.”
I said, “That’s why I’m grateful I found Russell.”
Kristine groaned. “What’s the difference between Russell and a heart attack?”
“What?”
“One’s exciting.”
Kristine is not a Russell fan. She is tolerant of Russell, not enthused. I maintain she just needs to know him better. “Russell’s exciting,” I said.
“Give me an example.”
I thought a bit. “Russell and I have a very comfortable relationship.”
Kristine shook her head. “Aren’t you about thirty years too early for comfortable?”
“I tried excitement once. Comfortable has more long-term potential.”
“You can have both, you know.” Kristine peered closer at her plate. “Something’s funny about this horseradish aioli.”
“Clean your eyeglasses. It’s fine.”
Over Kobe-beef brisket she informed me that she was not giving up on love, her subtle implication not all that subtle. She scrunched her face at the brisket, gave it a thumbs-down. “I have four dates lined up this week. A musician, a writer, a stand-up comic, and a pharmacist. I hope one of them’s decent enough to sleep with.”
“My money’s on the pharmacist,” I said, scribbling bad brisket in my lap. “If the date’s depressing, at least you can ask for drugs.”
“Maybe I’ll buy a dog. People meet people at dog parks all the time.”
“Dog lovers meet other dog lovers at dog parks. You hate dogs.”
Kristine sampled the organic-egg salad. I sampled the organic-egg salad. And added salt.
“Hot guys frequent rock-climbing clubs,” she said. “That could be a place to meet someone.”
I grinned at my optimistic friend. “Yes, sweetie. Right before you meet a paramedic.” I flipped my notebook to another page and read off my lap. “How’s this work as an opening for my piece? ‘If you’re looking for true love, don’t forget to ask for an ID. Otherwise, who knows what you’ll get. Heartache? Deceit? Maybe embarrassed to death on a Kiss Cam.’ ”
“That’s meant to be funny?” Kristine said.
“It’ll get funny.”
“How soon?”
“Soon.”
“Better be soon because so far it’s not funny.”
“It’s honest. Honest is good.”
“You want Nora Ephron. Not Charles Dickens. That sounds like an article about love written by someone who doesn’t believe in love.”
“So?”
“Jesus, Molly, how can you listen to those When Harry Met Sally couples and not believe in love?”
“Those are actors,” I said. “And what’s more unknowable than the happiness of couples? My parents seem happy, and Pammie and her rich husband seem happy, but if you knew Evan and me, you’d have thought we were happy, too. Unless, maybe, you’d run into him in a bar, in which case he probably would have offered to buy you a drink, then hit on you. Under those circumstances you might have wondered.”
Kristine adjusted her eyeglasses. “What if we’ve already met our soul mates, only we just haven’t realized it? The husbands we’ll be sitting next to on a love seat someday, talking about our lifelong romances.” I looked around in search of these mystery men. Kristine cupped her right hand in front of her left and held them to her eye like a camera lens focused on me. “When Molly Met Whomever. Maybe you already know whomever.”
“Maybe Russell’s whomever.”
Kristine snorted. “Yeah, sure.”
* * *
Kristine lives in the Village in an illegal sublet. She took a cab west to get home. I took the F train and transferred to the 6. My fellow travelers included people sleeping, people reading, people staring into space. I sat across from a young couple. A tattoo on the guy’s forearm said WHALE BELLY. I assumed it was the name of a band and not his favorite side dish. The girl had a safety pin pierced through one eyebrow. I couldn’t see her other eyebrow; her face was mashed against Mr. Whale Belly’s shoulder.
“Excuse me,” I said, competing against the noise of the subway. “I write for EyeSpy, the online magazine that’s not Gawker but like it, and I’m doing an article about love.”
“Love?” the guy said.
“Will our names be used?” the girl said.
“I can see you two look connected.”
“We do?” the guy said.
“He’s my boyfriend. Not my relative,” the girl said.
“How’d you two meet?”
“At a concert,” the guy said.
“How sweet! What’s the first thing you said to one another?”
“I don’t know. I was high,” the girl said.
“Me, too,” the guy said.
“This sounds like a terrible article,” the girl said.
5
INTERVIEW NOTES. TIFFANY’S, 5TH AVENUE. 2ND FLOOR. THURSDAY, JUNE 9
1:45 p.m.
ME: Can I ask you a question?
YOUNG MAN: I don’t work here.
ME: I see you’re eyeing engagement rings.
YOUNG MAN: Do you work here?
ME: No. EyeSpy.
YOUNG MAN: On customers? That is really rude.
1:52 p.m.
ME: Looks like you two are getting engaged.
WOMAN WITH BANGS: We’re ring shopping.
ME: How do you know it will last, that two years from now you won’t be trying to resell your ring on eBay?
MAN WITH SIDEBURNS: Who sent you here?
WOMAN WITH BANGS: His mother?
ME: I’m a reporter.
WOMAN WITH BANGS: (teary-eyed) She’s right! What if it doesn’t last?
1:58 p.m.
ME: So where did you two soul mates meet?
GIRL IN PONYTAIL: At a barn dance.
ME: Excuse me?
FRESH-FACED GUY: We’re from Nebraska.
GIRL IN PONYTAIL: We’re visiting New York because what’s more romantic than buying your engagement ring at Tiffany’s?
ME: Buying the same ring for half price on 47th St.
2:03 p.m
SECURITY GUARD: I’m sorry, ma’am. But we must ask you to leave.<
br />
* * *
On Friday, Deirdre dropped a press kit and plastic baggie on my desk. “A new assignment,” she said. “See if they work.” She jingled and wafted off.
“If what work?” Emily called out from the other side of my cubicle.
“Gift certificates for Bergdorf’s,” I called back.
I opened the baggie and pulled out panties with some kind of rubber plug, about the size of a nipple on a baby bottle, sewn into the crotch. Now I knew why Deirdre had made a Road Runner exit. According to the instructions, if I inserted the one-inch silicone extension vaginally, I’d have a focus point for performing Kegel exercises. Several bullet points on the press sheet explained why tighter is better, one of which claimed I could release stress throughout the day. A good thing, since these panties were already stressing me out.
Saturday morning I was meeting Angela and Kristine at the Met. Angela’s idea. Something to do with a client of hers, a Greek restaurant. Kristine and I were waiting at the top of the stairs when Angela came bounding up, out of breath. “Sorry!” she said. She’d been with Mr. Iannuzzeli, discussing lamb-chop promotions.
“No problem,” I said. “I kept busy.”
“Are you wearing them?” she asked.
“Tighter is better!” I said.
Two German tourists were ahead of us in the ticket line. I apologize for any racial profiling, but you can always tell from their socks and sandals; that, plus they were speaking German. Kristine was digging out her wallet while Angela was tweeting and asking how to spell slowpoke in German.
On our way past the uniformed security man, Angela told us her big plan to use Greek history for her client. “How often can you tweet about moussaka?” she said.
The museum was packed. People swarming about, peering into glass cases of museum-quality dishes, bowls, and figurines, shrugging and walking away. The whole thing made me depressed, seeing the visitors zipping past artifacts that were some ancient craftsman’s life’s work. But nothing depresses me more than the museum guards standing off to the side no doubt hoping, praying, for anyone to touch something, breath on something, or, too much to wish for, attempt a heist, thus alleviating the tedium of what must be the most boring job on earth. I know. I once spent a summer as a lifeguard waiting for someone to drown.
“Aren’t you glad you don’t have to dust this place?” Kristine said, as we headed to our gallery.
The Met’s Greek and Roman galleries are considered a big deal, a multimillion-dollar-renovation big deal with an overhead skylight, a penny-filled fountain, and Greek pillars. Or maybe Roman; I can never tell the difference. And a tile floor designed to look like rugs are spread all over it, except the rugs are made of tiles, too. The main attractions are the white marble figures scattered around the room on gray pedestals. Some of the gray pedestals just have heads, and others have headless bodies. The Met could save a lot of space if they stuck some of those heads onto some of those bodies. There are also a few urns, vases, and a marble coffin or two.
We stood in front of a statue of a fella who looked like, well, a Greek god. I squeezed out a couple of Kegels.
Angela asked, “Why are there never any penises on the men statues? Do you think there’s a big drawer in back holding all the broken penises?”
“Yes,” Kristine said. “Right next to the drawer with all the women’s arms.”
“Good one!” Angela said, her thumbs flying into action.
“No penis is a definite deal killer,” I said.
So while the other art devotees were conversing about Hellenistic this and BCE that and Greco-Roman whatever, we got into a spirited debate on the biggest deal killers with men, although it’s hard to top a missing penis.
“Dirty fingernails,” Kristine said.
“Excessive sweating,” Angela said.
“Gross Adam’s apples,” Kristine said.
“Refers to breasts as melons or bazooms!” I blurted out.
“Shhh!” the guard said.
“Nicolas Cage movies,” I mumbled, and immediately felt guilty. I thought of Cameron Duncan saying he loved Sleepless in Seattle. “Insincere men. A guy who uses romance like a hit-and-run artist.”
We checked out a frieze, or a fresco; I get those confused, too.
“How’s your Nora piece coming?” Angela asked.
I said, “It’s due in a week and hard to squeeze in with my other assignments.” The three of us guffawed. The guard shushed us. I contracted my pelvic floor muscle. “I feel like I’ve questioned half the city. I’ll interview a fire hydrant if I can get a good quote out of it. I even talked to the carriage drivers across from the Plaza. One of them told me about some guy making a marriage proposal.”
“That’s romantic,” Angela said.
“Proposing while riding around behind a horse’s diaper is romantic?” I said.
“Tell me again why they asked you to write this article,” Kristine said.
We walked to the American-furniture wing, which was far less crowded than the wing with the Greek gods. Maybe because it’s a room filled with chairs but no place to sit. We stopped to ponder something called a tête-á-tête, which looked like two chairs fused together at one arm in opposite directions. Apparently that was considered a good idea in 1850.
“Designed for soul mates,” Angela said, studying the chair-amabob.
“Okay, so how will you know someone’s the one?” I asked her.
“Give me three martinis,” she said. “Two on an empty stomach.”
Kristine sighed. “I should try that.”
“How was your date with the pharmacist?” I asked her.
“Dull.”
“The stand-up comic?”
“Tortured. But maybe I should give him a second chance. It took Meg Ryan twelve years to realize she loved Billy Crystal,” adding for all we non–It’s Academic members of humanity, “in When Harry Met Sally.” Angela and I nodded yes-we-knew-that.
“Didn’t Nora write that with her sister?” Angela said.
“Which sister?” I said. “There’s more than one sister.”
“She wrote You’ve Got Mail with Delia,” Kristine said. We were walking through a re-creation of a seventeenth-century living room. “I like the stuff we sell at Bloomingdale’s much better than this crap.”
“I can’t imagine writing with my sister,” I said.
“Your sister’s an upholsterer. None of us can imagine that,” Kristine said.
We paused in front of a Samuel McIntire chair in dire need of some Hallberg reupholstering; the silk fabric on the seat was in shreds.
“You know, Russell reminds me of the boyfriend in You’ve Got Mail,” Angela said.
“Greg Kinnear,” Kristine said. “But I think he’s more like Bill Pullman in Sleepless in Seattle. Although they’re both interchangeably bland.”
“Russell’s not bland,” I said. “And I like Bill Pullman; I like Greg Kinnear.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kristine said. “We all want Tom Hanks.”
* * *
After Kristine left for her Internet-musician date, and Angela decided to hang out in the museum store, I walked down Fifth Avenue, squeezing my way though the other pedestrians. I needed a new cord for my laptop.
The Apple store on Fifth is a major tourist attraction in town. Even PC users visit. A three-story glass cube lures you below sidewalk level. A spiral glass stairway wraps around a glass elevator. I found the cord I needed. An apple-cheeked employee swiped my credit card. I was walking up the stairs, feeling pleased with myself, my day, my efficiency, when riding down in the glass elevator, laughing with a curly-haired redhead in a swirly red dress, was the one and only Mr. Cameron Duncan. I didn’t turn away fast enough and he spotted me, his smile smug and charming. He waved, kept waving. I could feel my innards tighten. I forced myself to smile back. Wave. Squeeze. Wave. What an ass.
* * *
That night I made burgers and salad for Russell and me. He helped clear the di
shes. He rinsed while I loaded. He scrubbed the broiler. By now you’re probably thinking, Marry this guy. I was holding a drinking glass up to the light, looking for spots like a lady in a television commercial, and asked, “How about watching Sleepless in Seattle? I’m halfway through my notes.”
He looked as if I’d suggested, Now please scrub my floor. “Can’t you do that some other time?” he said. “I hate the way you pause the DVD to write stuff down. It takes twice as long.”
The spotty glass went into the dishwasher.
“And I’m kind of sleepy,” he said.
“Did you take your hay-fever pills?”
“Right before I got here.” Russell sponged the sink while I sponged the counter. “Do you mind if we go to bed early?” He was bending over, sliding the broiler pan back into the oven.
“Not at all.” I smiled, patted him on the butt.
“And read,” he said.
“And read?” I stopped patting.
On our sixth date Russell gave me a special foam pillow that curves at the base to support my neck. By our tenth date he brought over a second foam pillow for himself along with pajama bottoms, an electric toothbrush, two sets of fresh underwear, and the sleep mask he keeps in the nightstand. Russell prefers the side of the bed with the clock radio. I prefer the side closest to the bathroom. We’re compatible in so many ways.
In bed, on the clock-radio side, he asked me what I was reading. Stretched out on the bathroom side, I held up Gone with the Wind. “Research?”
I nodded yes and asked what he was reading. He held up Felonies among Friends.
“Why that?”
“It’s good. I like it,” Russell said. Five minutes later his eyes were closing, his head lilting forward.
“That must be some swell book,” I said.
“It’s the hay-fever medicine,” he said. Down and out.
On paper, Russell was the perfect boyfriend. Pleasant. Reliable. But in real life, sometimes, not always, he was just Russell. I tucked him in. Didn’t bother with his mask. I set his book on my nightstand, Cameron Duncan’s smile grinning at me from the back cover. I turned the book faceup and opened my novel to the bookmarked page, Scarlett about to be swept up the red-velvet staircase in Rhett’s strong arms. “Stop—please, I’m faint!” she whispered, while my boyfriend snored beside me.
What Nora Knew Page 6