Wreathed

by Curtis Edmonds

  I should have walked out on him right then, just to see if he would chase me, but I didn’t want to go back in the cold and I was hungry anyway. “Do we have a table?” I asked.

  “Right this way.”

  I followed him upstairs to the dining room. I didn’t think I was turning many heads, and if anyone was looking, they were wondering how the schlub in the orange hoodie had ever gotten any woman to go out with him, much less someone in an amazing dress and stunning heels and perfect makeup.

  It took me about twelve seconds after we sat down to order a glass of chardonnay. One drink wouldn’t impair my driving, and I needed the moral support if I was going to get through the evening. Adam got another Coors Light, which was mildly distressing but ultimately not that important. I would have been much more annoyed if he was drinking chocolate martinis or herbal tea or something awful like that. Coors Light was plebeian and tasteless and horrible, but it wasn’t evidence of anything other than terrible taste in alcohol. As long as he had decent taste in women, I could work around that.

  “Did you have any trouble finding the place?” he asked. “I thought I sent you decent directions.”

  “No trouble,” I said.

  “You probably have GPS, though. I use it all the time myself. Couldn’t find anything without it.”

  “No, I don’t,” I told him. “I don’t have to drive all that much, living in Morristown. Just occasionally, on the weekends, and I use my phone if I ever get lost.”

  “Apple Maps or Google Maps?” he asked.

  “I don’t pay a lot of attention to it,” I said. “I have whatever map is on there, and maybe two games, and e-mail and text.” I have a little more on there than that, of course, but I desperately did not want to be drawn into a long conversation about smartphone apps. The waiter brought over our drinks just then, and I took a big yummy gulp of chardonnay. Careful, girl, I told myself.

  “Well, you do the social media stuff,” he said.

  “I do Facebook, a little. Maybe too much, or at least that’s what I’m thinking after this last week.”

  “I mention this,” he said, “because I had a long talk with your friend Vanessa.”

  I know how my mother would have handled this tidbit of information. She would have gone all icy outside, with a core of burning hot hate kept packed down inside. I can do the second part but have trouble with the first. “What did you say?” I asked Adam.

  “Your friend Vanessa,” he repeated, and there was a mischievous smirk on his face. “She had a few things to say about you. Most of it was stuff she got from your Facebook timeline, as far as I could tell.”

  “She is not my friend. She’s not your friend, either. She’s a leech on the backside of society.”

  “Was she the one taking those pictures at the funeral? The ones that showed up on that blog?”

  “That was her, hiding in the bushes like a coward. Like a rat. Like a cowardly rat.”

  Adam took a sip of his beer. “She said you assaulted her.”

  “Apparently not hard enough. What did she tell you?”

  “She said you were stuck up because you have relatives who have lots of money, but you don’t have any to speak of.”

  Lying bitch, I thought. “You didn’t believe that, did you?” I asked.

  “Well, no. But she was right about one thing.”

  “What was that?” I very much wanted this conversation to not be about Vanessa at this point.

  “She also said you had posted some amazing swimsuit pictures from your vacation in the Caribbean.” There was that smirk again, and this time it was more devilish. “She was right about that. That aqua-looking one was spectacular. The purple one was nice, too, but that’s not your color.”

  “Thank you. I think.” I decided not to say anything about the shirtless one of him I had seen online.

  “Are you thinking appetizer?” he asked.

  “I’m thinking not.” I had been hungry, but I was going to have heartburn for the next three days thinking of ways to get back at Vanessa.

  “I don’t know if you looked me up on any of this social media stuff,” he said. “It’s OK if you did, I mean. It’s weird that these days, you know a lot about a person before you ever go out with them, and it takes away a lot of the mystery of getting to know someone. It’s not that romantic, I guess.”

  I took another long fortifying gulp of chardonnay. “Some people say romance is dead,” I said. It was an easy conversational setup, a chance for him to recover his dating fortunes.

  “I mean, you might have seen some of the stuff about me and Marie in my timeline.”

  I did not want to hear one word in that sentence. “No. I didn’t,” I lied. “And it isn’t productive for either of us to talk about other people. We’re here, and it’s a nice restaurant, and a nice evening, and maybe we should just relax and find something else interesting to talk about.”

  “I wasn’t trying to talk about me and Marie, honest I wasn’t. I am not bringing her up to talk about her, necessarily. But there’s something about me that you probably want to know, and that you definitely deserve to know.”

  “Whatever it is, you don’t have to tell me anything.” I devoutly hoped that he’d change the subject, fast. There are things more depressing than being on a date and hearing someone else talk about their last toxic relationship, and those things involve pain and suffering and complex medical treatment and insurance companies and hospital food.

  “I want to tell you, because I think you might have an expectation about me that I may have a hard time meeting. Unless you’d rather order dinner now, so I can leave you in suspense.”

  “You might as well go ahead and tell me. If it’s something terrible, I can leave now, without ordering anything. That way you’re not out thirty bucks for a grilled pork chop and a glass of wine.”

  “All right. Here goes. I dated Marie for three years. She wanted to get married. I knew that. She had a Brides magazine subscription, OK? All I had to do was ask her.”

  “Did you?”

  “I was going to. I had the ring. I wanted to get married. But I couldn’t just take her out to a nice restaurant and ask her. She wanted her own special engagement moment. I’d go on her Facebook page, and there were all these links to all these YouTube videos of people getting engaged, and doing all these impossible stunts. I am not an imaginative person. I am not going to skydive and land on the boardwalk in Point Pleasant and kneel in front of somebody and give them an engagement ring. Other people can think up stuff like that, and that’s fine for them, but it’s not something I can do. So I asked for help.”

  “That seems like the sensible thing to do,” I said. “Except, wait. You didn’t go on social media and ask for help, did you?”

  “Oh. That would have been a worse idea than what I actually did, so I guess that’s something. Anyway, no. I asked my cousin Grace. She’s a wedding planner out in Toms River. She said I should propose at the New York Botanical Garden—she’d had a few clients do that, and it always worked.”

  “That sounds romantic enough.”

  “I thought about it. I went around and looked at different options. But it seemed like a really obvious thing to do, and I didn’t know how to set it up so she wouldn’t be suspicious. So I decided to improve on the idea—take the basic concept and do something memorable. Something she wouldn’t forget.”

  “Please tell me you didn’t make her climb a tree,” I said.

  “That would have been cheaper, and maybe more effective. What I actually did was hire a string quartet. The idea was that I would lead her into this woodland area, and then when we walked by, they would start playing this Beethoven song, and I would get down on my knees and ask her to marry me.”

  “That sounds romantic,” I said, trying hard to underreact. If a man half as cute as Adam had whisked me away to the Botanical Garden and proposed to me with a freaking string quartet in the background, I would have blown a circuit right on the spot. “So what w
ent wrong?”

  “Somebody else had done the same thing, the week before, on The Bachelorette. It was out in California, but it was the same idea, with the beautiful garden and the string quartet. She thought I had stolen the idea from the TV show. I tried telling her that I didn’t watch The Bachelorette, which, I mean, was totally the case, but she didn’t believe me. She thought I had gotten the idea from my secretary or something.”

  “Well, that’s just ridiculous,” I said. “You proposed. It was romantic. Why be persnickety about the details?”

  “If she had just been persnickety about it, as you say, I could have dealt with that. She was not persnickety. She was furious. She wouldn’t even look at the ring. Then she took off running for the exit. I tried everything. I tried to explain. I tried to get her to drink something cold to calm her down. I drove her back to New Jersey and tried to get her to go out to dinner with me. She wouldn’t talk to me the wh0le evening. First thing the next morning, she piles all her stuff in her car and takes off for Connecticut. I never saw her again.”

  “Bitch,” I said, and I meant it. If that was how his last relationship had gone, no wonder he wasn’t trying to be romantic. He was probably subconsciously sabotaging himself with his clothing selection and wasn’t even aware of it. “That was a crummy thing to do, Adam. I’m so sorry she treated you that way. You didn’t deserve it.”

  “I did, though.”

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  “She sent me a note, later. She explained why she acted that way. She told me that when I proposed, I wasn’t authentic. I wasn’t being my true self. I was just pretending to be romantic and borrowing somebody else’s ideas. If I truly had romantic feelings towards her, I would have been able to come up with something beautiful and unique and special. And since I didn’t, she felt she had to dump me on the spot.”

  I let my mouth fall open in shock. “Oh, my God. You didn’t believe that line of bullshit, did you?” I wanted to drive up to Connecticut and throw rocks at this woman’s car, and at her head if she wasn’t too scared to come outside and face me like a woman.

  “Of course I did. After all, she was right. I’m not romantic. It doesn’t come naturally to me. And I’m no good at pretending otherwise.”

  I gave him a sad little smile. “Oh, Adam,” I said. “You poor thing.”

  The good news, from where I sat, was that if he was willing to tell me all this depressing backstory, that meant he was being honest with me. It sounded like this Marie person had him all twisted up in knots in the relationship department, which wasn’t ideal, but it was something I could work on rather than something that was hopelessly wrong with him. All you have to do, I thought, is not be as much of a conniving bitch as his last girlfriend, and everything will work itself out.

  “I just figured you needed to know, that’s all,” he said.

  “So, when she left you, what did you do?”

  “I drank,” he said. “A lot.”

  “A man after my own heart, then.” I tilted my empty wineglass in his direction.

  “You want another glass of Chardonnay?” he asked.

  “God, yes.”

  Chapter 19

  The date got much better after the second glass of chardonnay. Of course, lots of things get better after two glasses of chardonnay, which is why they sell it in those big bottles. Anyway, the wine took the edge off, which was all to the good. Then our dinner came, which meant that we didn’t have to talk quite so much. Adam didn’t say anything else about his ex, and he didn’t ask about my checkered romantic history, and neither of us said anything about our jobs. It was delightful.

  The problem was that the date didn’t seem to be going anywhere. We liked each other, we had a mutual attraction, and we both thought that Adam’s bronzed salmon was dry. It wasn’t clear that we had any shared interests, though. I didn’t get anywhere talking about movies with him, and he didn’t get anywhere talking about sports with me. He liked skiing in Vermont and I liked snorkeling in the Caribbean. He liked Springsteen and I liked Bon Jovi and that was about the limit of our combined musical knowledge.

  But it wasn’t a bad first date, at least not by my standards. I was seriously thinking about a second date, if he was willing. But I wasn’t that sure he would go for it. We did live a long ways apart, so it wouldn’t be convenient for either of us to keep on dating. I couldn’t blame him if he didn’t want to ask me out again. I was hopeful that the power of the low-cut garnet-red dress would inspire him, but I was uneasy about my chances.

  Adam wanted the peach cobbler, so I ordered a slice of pecan pie that I didn’t want and nibbled at it. He attacked the cobbler, leaving tiny drops of ice cream on his worn orange hoodie. He wiped them off with his napkin, looking vaguely sheepish at his inability to eat neatly. “It’s really good,” he said. “How’s yours?”

  “It’s fine. I’m just not hungry enough to finish it, that’s all.”

  “You mind?” he asked. I slid him the plate, and he made the pie disappear. I envied him his appetite, and wondered if it crossed over to other spheres of activity.

  The waiter handed Adam the bill, and he fished a credit card out of his wallet to pay for dinner. “You want some coffee?” he asked.

  “I should be good, thanks.” I was maybe a tiny bit tipsy, but I thought I would be safe enough to drive home. There was a McDonald’s on the way where I could grab a cup of coffee if I needed the stimulant.

  “Where did you end up parking?” he asked.

  “I’m a block or two away, in a parking garage.”

  “Well, why don’t I drive you over there? It’s cold outside, and slippery. I want to make sure you get there safely.”

  I thought about making the long, cold walk uphill on the icy sidewalk, by myself, after a blah first date. “I would appreciate that, thanks.”

  I retrieved my coat, and we waited inside in the bar until the valet brought Adam’s Jaguar around. The temperature had dropped another ten degrees, and a chilly wind was blowing off the river. Adam cranked up the heater and drove around the block to the garage where I had parked my Audi.

  “OK, then,” he said. “Safe travels.”

  “Thanks. I had a good time,” I said.

  “I did, too.” He had a slight smile on his face, and he looked absolutely fetching in the dim light. But he wasn’t leaning over to kiss me, or even hold my hand. Maybe he was afraid to. Maybe he was bored. Maybe he’d had a terrible time and couldn’t wait to get rid of me. Maybe he would go home and drunk-dial his ex. Maybe I’m never going to see him again. I felt my body go tense, like before taking a deep dive into black water.

  “So do you want to go out again next weekend?” he asked.

  “Please tell me you didn’t say yes,” Pacey said.

  “I wanted to,” I said. “I almost did, like a reflex. But I stopped myself in time.”

  I was in my car, driving north towards Morristown, and talking to Pacey so she wouldn’t call me first thing in the morning and wake me up when all I wanted to do was sleep late.

  “Good work,” she said.

  “He’s attractive. And he’s smart. And I like him. And he’s attractive, if I hadn’t said that already. But I decided that if he wanted a second date, that he needed to work for it, and not just show up.”

  “That’s a hundred percent right,” Pacey said. “Remember, confidence is sexy. You just have to keep telling yourself that you are a desirable modern woman, not some lonely, desperate loser who can’t find a man.”

  “Hey!” I said.

  “Not trying to be insulting, dear sister, but if you project that kind of attitude, you’ll never get anywhere. So where did you leave it?”

  “He is supposed to make reservations somewhere,” I said. “He’s going to e-mail it to me, and if I approve, I’ll meet him there. If he chooses the Roy Rogers at the Cheesequake rest stop, I’ll know to dump him. If he chooses someplace suitably romantic and interesting, then we’ll see.”

 
“That should work. This is what you do in the meantime. Clear your mind. Don’t think about him. Don’t try to think about him. It’ll only cause you problems. Work if you have work to do. Go see a movie if you don’t. But don’t spend the weekend obsessing about him. Understand?”

  “Sounds reasonable,” I said.

  “If you’re really desperate, you can come over and watch my kids and let me do some laundry in peace, and even take a nap.”

  “Didn’t hear that,” I lied. “The cell reception is breaking up.”

  “Fine,” Pacey said. “Don’t help your sister who loves you and wants you to be happy. Go relax. Enjoy being single and free and irresponsible.”

  “Thanks! I will.”

  I couldn’t come up with anything really irresponsible to do, though, so I stayed home on Saturday and spent the day in my pajamas. I watched a couple of soppy romantic comedies on cable, lying on my couch with a glass of chardonnay in my hand. It was a relaxing way to spend the day, and it didn’t require me to think, but it wasn’t productive, and it didn’t help me deal with the low-grade anxiety I was feeling. So on Sunday, I drove down to the Bridgewater Commons Mall for a good dose of retail therapy.

  I didn’t need anything, but that was hardly the point. I made a quick run through Macy’s to see if they had updated their shoe selection, and as always, I was disappointed. I poked around Pottery Barn looking for a new entertainment center for my apartment, and I found one that I liked, but buying it would mean that I would have to get a bigger television, and that meant I would have to research a lot of technical stuff to figure out the right size and type of TV to get, and the thought of doing that gave me a headache. I got lunch at California Pizza Kitchen and planned my assault on Bloomingdale’s and Lord & Taylor.

  I ended up not getting anything at either store. I couldn’t find anything I liked, and I couldn’t justify spending the money on stuff that didn’t quite fit or that wasn’t right in some other way. Just about everything I wear to work is a variation on the basic theme of a navy jacket worn over a white silk blouse, which is the default Woman Lawyer Uniform, as set forth by either the fashion gods or the American Bar Association, I forget which. I must have looked at fifteen different dark-colored jackets at Bloomingdale’s, but every one of them had some minor flaw—too expensive, some of them, and the cheaper ones were either too short or too long or had cheaper fabric than what I wanted. I did find a lovely gray striped skirt that I spent a long time thinking about buying. It was a Kate Spade number that fit me perfectly, and it would have gone nicely with half the jackets in my closet, but it was expensive and I couldn’t decide whether it actually looked good on me or not. I spent five minutes going over the pros and cons of buying it before I put it back on the rack.