Oh, how he charmed that audience! I found myself wondering how a guy who’s not attractive could be so attractive to so many women. But I also realized—much to my horror—that he was kind of attractive to me, too.
Cameron turned in his chair to face me. “Molly Hallberg writes my favorite pieces in EyeSpy. In between reading Joe and Frank Hardy, I read Molly Hallberg.” He smiled at me.
I sat back in my chair out of sight of his gaze.
Another woman asked a question at the mic, this one young with blond curls pulled into a topknot. “Do you need any more volunteers for Mike Bing to date?”
“If only he’d met you sooner,” Cameron said, smiling, “but Mike’s already solved the crime.” Laughter and applause.
Gordon Fenton thanked the panelists, said there’d be books for sale in the lobby and an opportunity to meet the authors for book signings. Theresa Flynn stepped out onstage clapping, calling out thank-you and saying good-night from the podium mic, like a hostess making a not-too-subtle hint that it was time for the guests to vamoose. The panelists rose to leave; Gordon shook hands with the men.
“Come help me, you naughty man,” Julia said to Joseph. She wrapped her fingers around his arm and made him aid her down the stairs. Gordon walked offstage with Theresa. Cameron and I followed.
“Thank you for what you said,” I told him. “About liking my pieces. Without you, I’d have felt totally invisible up there.”
“Feisty Molly Hallberg,” he said. Here came the smile again. “We might have to continue our parley.”
“Cameron!” Theresa said. “We need you at the signing table.”
“Continue it where?” I asked Cameron.
Russell came hurrying up and kissed me congratulations. “Good job,” he said. “You got through it!”
Cameron had already walked away with Gordon and Theresa.
12
People who write about their dreams are totally self-indulgent, expecting the reader to (1) give a damn and (2) waste precious time analyzing someone else’s dream as if they (#1 again) give a damn. But here goes:
I’ve just walked out of Saks Fifth Avenue having bought a pair of new socks when Nora Ephron and Nancy Drew drive up in Nancy’s blue convertible. Nancy’s behind the wheel and Nora’s carrying a pot roast and homemade cookies. “Get in!” Nora says. We drive to a bar on Second Avenue, past a mysterious old clock and a crumbling wall, and go inside. I don’t know what happened to Nancy’s convertible; maybe she valet parked it when I wasn’t looking. Anyway, once we’re inside the bar I’m eating Nora’s cookies and she’s giving me the recipe. The bar’s really hopping. Backslapping, high-fiving, boisterous energy. Harry Connick Jr. playing in the background. But what’s really weird are the two televisions hanging over the bar—that in itself, of course, is normal—but instead of a Yankees game or the Mets, one’s playing When Harry Met Sally and the other’s showing You’ve Got Mail. Nancy Drew orders a gin and tonic and uses her flashlight to point out two men. The bar’s smoky so I can never see their faces, but one man’s in a shirt and tie sitting by himself, staring at his cell phone. Women, laughing and having fun, surround the second man. Except—even though his face is a blur—he looks straight at me and holds out a rose. Nancy Drew asks, “Which man do you want?” I start to head over to the nice, quiet man with the tie just as Nicolas Cage walks in and sits down with him, and Nora Ephron says, “Don’t be an imbecile!” and snatches my cookie away.
I have no idea what this means.
* * *
I was meeting Kristine on the seventh floor of Bloomingdale’s half an hour before meeting Russell on the fifth floor of Bloomingdale’s. Russell needed a new mattress. Kristine and I needed frozen yogurt. And not just any yogurt, but the frozen yogurt at the Bloomingdale’s Forty Carrots restaurant. Just thinking about it makes me want to lick this page. Their yogurt’s dense, thick, creamy, obscenely smooth, intensely flavored, and—here’s the kicker—fat free.
I don’t actually believe it’s fat free. But I also can’t believe Bloomingdale’s would lie about such a thing.
The Forty Carrots menu has other items on it. Salads. Soups. Chicken sandwiches. But nobody orders those. There’s always a thirty-minute wait for a table and standing room only at the take-out counter, and, yes, the clientele is female. Nowhere in all of Manhattan can you get a better sense of sisterhood than sitting at a banquette in Forty Carrots savoring and inhaling frozen yogurt alongside dozens of other savoring, inhaling women. Fortunately Kristine works at Bloomingdale’s and she’s friendly with the Forty Carrots hostess. With a little surreptitious maneuvering, a secret head nod, and a certain back table, we didn’t have to wait the thirty minutes. Which is a good thing. As a Bloomingdale’s employee, Kristine only gets thirty minutes for lunch.
She ordered a medium peanut-butter yogurt. I ordered a medium half-chocolate half-coffee. The mediums are huge. Anywhere else they’d be extra larges.
“Exchange tastes?” she said.
We dipped into each other’s bowls.
Kristine sat back, closed her eyes, luxuriated in the chocolate, basked in the coffee, sat up, opened her eyes, and adjusted her eyeglasses. “Perfect,” she said.
“Perfect,” I said.
Kristine and I are purists. We never order toppings for our yogurt.
“Do you think they’ll invite you back to the Ninety-Second Street Y?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “If I buy a ticket and promise to sit in the last row.” I said. “I didn’t stick to the topic, nobody in the audience asked me questions, and I was warring over elbow room with a Pulitzer Prize–winning dick. We were some panel. Mr. Charm. Mr. Ego. Miss Dirty Old Lady. And Miss Nobody.”
“Anyone ask for a refund?”
“I tried but they pointed out that my seat was free.”
“I hope they videotaped it.”
“Oh, dear God, I hope they didn’t.”
We paused for new bites, mmmed in unison. All around us women were drooling and moaning.
“How insane you ended up on a panel with one of my dates,” Kristine said.
“Say that again?” I set down my yogurt spoon. That’s how taken aback I was.
“Your Cameron Duncan. My Frank Hardy. My writer date! I should have known it was a fake name.”
“You dated Cameron?” When I said Cameron’s name, my voice came out all high-pitched like a cartoon character’s.
“No.” Kristine smiled. “I dated Frank.”
“When’d you find out who he really was?”
“On my way home. When I saw his picture on the subway. How weird was that?” Kristine took a bite of her peanut-butter yogurt. I had to wait for her to finish savoring. “The whole date was strange,” she said. “More like an interview than a date. He kept asking about my online dating adventures. Like he was researching a book.”
A woman at the next table was served a yogurt larger than her face.
“Where’d he take you?” I asked Kristine. Why do I care? I asked myself.
“I suggested meeting for drinks at the top of the Times Square Marriott, but we went to Flute, that underground champagne bar on Fifty-Fourth. I think he goes there a lot. They seem to know him. It’s like a speakeasy.”
“He has a height-phobia thing.”
“Oh? Acrophobia? I once dated a guy with coulrophobia.”
“And that is?”
“Fear of clowns. Sometimes I’m afraid I have anuptaphobia.”
“I’m waiting.”
“Fear of staying single.”
“Thank you, Miss World Book Encyclopedia.”
Kristine looked down at her yogurt. “I’m never going to finish this,” she said.
I looked down at my yogurt, said, “I’m never going to finish this.”
“But let’s try,” she said. We scooped up two more bites. Kristine wiped her mouth with a napkin. “I suppose Cameron’s cute, if you like that type where none of the features are good-looking, but somehow they add up wel
l together.”
“You must have liked his photo online.”
“Not particularly.”
“So why’d you go out with him?”
“Oh, you know me,” she said. “I’ll date anyone. We only stayed for one drink. When I left, he gave me a cheek peck. I hate the cheek peck. It’s like your grandmother is kissing you.” The waitress refilled our water glasses and deposited the check. “That’s the biggest flaw with online dating. You can’t judge chemistry until you meet the guy, and when you do meet him, you can judge it in three minutes.” Kristine removed her eyeglasses and wiped them with her dirty napkin. “Fake Frank Hardy seemed sincere, smart, funny. Just not my type.”
“Good thinking. Hold out for the asshole bad boy.”
She put her glasses back on. They were still smudged. “Maybe Hunkster500 will be the one. He’s next on my list.”
“Do you think that’s a fake name?”
“I’m holding out for big-time chemistry,” she said. “I wish you would.”
“I tried chemistry once. I married chemistry. I’m good with comfortable.”
Kristine shook two fists the way someone does when they want to shake you, only they don’t really want to shake you, they just want to imply it. “Jesus, Molly. Slippers are comfortable! Cocoa is comfortable! Bing Crosby singing Christmas songs—that’s comfortable. You shouldn’t be sleeping with Bing Crosby!”
“Sex with Russell is fine,” I said.
“What about interesting?”
I had to think about that. “Well, sometimes he likes to pretend he’s Irwin and I’m Joyce during sex.”
“I said interesting sex, not kinky. What do turtles say during sex?”
“Nothing unusual.”
“So that’s it? You’re cool with the occasional turtle talk? You don’t want to feel that crazy flutter of invisible connection? That thing that makes your insides buzz?”
“That thing’s fleeting.”
“It’s a foundation. It’s your entire everything saying, Pay attention! You need to watch Sleepless in Seattle again.”
“I’ve watched it more than anyone. I’ve seen it more than Meg Ryan has. When she gets on that plane to Seattle, I know I’d have never done that.”
“And that’s why you wouldn’t have ended up with Tom Hanks.”
“How do we know they ended up happy? We never saw a sequel.”
“You got the message, right? What the movie’s talking about?”
“Let’s not talk about it.”
Kristine picked up the check. “My treat,” she said. “I can use my discount.”
She started unloading her purse onto the table. A wad of used Kleenex. Crumpled receipts. A brush with enough hair in it to weave a wig. Two condom packets. A rolled-up, open potato-chip bag. The bottom half, but not the cover, of a lip gloss.
“That is not an attractive sight,” I said.
“Just give me a minute. You know Nora Ephron’s essay about hating her purse? In her hating-her-neck book? She was writing about me.”
“How about I buy? I’m willing to pay full retail if I can stop you before you whip out an old tampon.”
“Oh, here!” Kristine held up her wallet. “My treat!”
* * *
The only thing worse than shopping for a mattress is shopping for a bra, which explains the sorry condition of most of my bras. But mattresses are preposterous. What once was a question of soft, firm, or hard is now a voyage into a world of pillow top, tight top, latex, innerspring, cushioned upholstery, motion transfer, antimicrobial, visco-elastic foam. I must be the most oblivious sleeper ever. My criteria for a new mattress is: will it fit through my bedroom door?
Russell was waiting by the escalators in front of the mattress department. Pardon me. Bloomingdale’s calls it their mattress gallery. They must be getting it confused with the MoMA, six blocks south. Russell was checking his watch, checking his BlackBerry, looking very Russell-esque in gray slacks, a white shirt, and striped tie; his hair neatly combed back. “You’re late,” he said.
“Five minutes,” I said.
“I have patients in an hour.”
“Fine. Let’s go bounce on mattresses.”
He pecked me on the cheek. Grandmother-style.
The mattress gallery at Bloomingdale’s is dimly lit in this kind of bluish, kind of grayish light. I guess so the customers can simulate bedtime. Only the mattresses are well lit; spotlights are aimed at each one so the entire room looks like a landing dock for large, white space pods. I’m sure the salespeople are on commission because as soon as you step within spitting distance of a mattress, they all converge, asking to help, asking if you have questions, suggesting you stretch out and see how the mattress feels. A woman who introduced herself as Mina got to us first. We were standing by the first mattress in the gallery. Mina was tall, attractive, her sleeveless, navy dress clean, simple; something about her manner was reminiscent of a college professor. A lot like Russell, only in the guise of a Bloomingdale’s saleslady. “Any questions?” she said. The other customers were all couples. Maybe that’s why Russell wanted me along; he’d have felt naked without a date. “Stretch out and see how it feels,” Mina said.
I turned over the price tag. “Holy shit!” I said.
Mina smiled. She was wise, patient. “That’s our top-of-the-line Kluft. Joma wool. Talalay latex. Calico-encased spring unit.”
I showed the price tag to Russell. “Holy shit!” he said.
“Seriously. I have to try this,” I told Russell. “I need to know what a thirty-six-thousand-dollar mattress feels like.”
“Is it for both of you?” Mina asked.
“For him,” I said.
“For me,” he said.
Russell and I lay down alongside one another, bouncing our shoulders a little, staring at the ceiling.
“Excellent,” Russell said.
“Excellent,” I said.
“Anything for anything less?” Russell said.
“Hi!” Kristine said as we sat up from the excellent Joma-wool, Talalay-latex Kluft. “Things are slow. I took a break. How’s this one?”
“Great,” I said. “The price includes a three-bedroom condominium.”
Russell stood and whispered something to Kristine.
“Sorry,” she said. “Not for mattresses. But maybe a discount on a tie someday.”
“What about the kind you can bounce on with a glass of red wine?” I asked Mina. “Can we try that?”
“No,” Russell said. “It’s impossible to flip a Tempur-Pedic.” Russell’s a big believer in mattress flipping. Something about dead skin and dust. “Half my patients are people who tried to flip Tempur-Pedics.”
I said, “Maybe they were drunk from red wine.”
Russell and Mina walked on ahead. Kristine and I followed.
“A chiropractor!” we heard Mina chirp. “So you appreciate the importance of a good mattress.”
“Not thirty-six thousand dollars’ worth,” I said to Kristine.
“Wait. I’ve got to try that.” She headed back to the Kluft. I joined Russell and Mina next to a king-size Shifman Handmade Luxury Plush Pillowtop. You can fall asleep by the time you finish saying the names of these mattresses. “How much is this one?” I asked.
“Hand-tufted,” Mina said.
“Seven thousand,” Russell said.
“Exciting. You’ve already saved twenty-nine thousand dollars,” I said.
We tried the Shifman.
“Not bad,” Russell said.
“Feels just like the other one,” I said.
“I liked the first one,” Russell said.
“You two talk,” Mina said, walking away to give us a moment of privacy in a bed-filled room filled with other couples sharing private moments.
“Please tell me you aren’t going to spend thirty-six grand on a mattress,” I said.
“If you amortize it out over the course of fifteen years it’s only—” He stopped.
“You j
ust did the math, right?”
“Right.” He said, “My ex-girlfriend had a Stearns and Foster that felt fine. And the girlfriend before her had a Sealy that couldn’t have been expensive, and that felt fine, too.”
“Thanks for sharing. How was the sex?”
“You two just had sex?” Kristine said, looming over us. Russell got up, waved down Mina, and walked over to her in the Sealy section. Kristine spread out on the Shifman with me, the two of us side by side, gazing upward like we were lounging on a beach.
“Why do mattress names always begin with an s?” I asked.
“Why are mattresses always on sale?” she asked.
“Russell was just telling me about his ex-girlfriends’ mattress brands.”
“Congratulations on dating Mr. Insensitive.”
“He’s not insensitive. He’s honest.”
Kristine and I looked at each other. She looked exasperated. “There’s honest. And there’s rude. Honestly, Molly, sometimes I wonder about you.”
“Stop wondering.”
“I once read this thing that said if a person’s snoring and keeping you awake, you should clap your hands over their face. That the noise will make them change positions and stop snoring without waking them.”
“You won It’s Academic, right? Your team won?”
“So I’m staying over at this guy’s and he’s sound asleep going at it full throttle like a beluga whale, and I clap my hands over his head.”
“What happened?”
“He opened his eyes and told me I was insensitive.” Kristine sat up. I sat up. I saw Russell in animated conversation with Mina. Good Lord. Was he flirting with the mattress lady? Maybe hoping for her Bloomingdale’s discount? Kristine must have also noticed. She gave Russell a look. “I’m sorry, Molly, but no woman wants to hear about the previous girlfriend’s taste in mattresses.” She slid off the bed, said she had to go back to her department to sell sofas. “Maybe your boyfriend should buy a Bill Pullman sleeper sofa.”
Kristine left. I interrupted Russell’s exchange with Mina, the two of them going on and on about spines and support and how she loved that he’s a chiropractor and really understands.
What Nora Knew Page 12