Wreathed

  I am not a perfectionist, and I don’t aspire to be one. I don’t think that every single thing about a piece of clothing, or a relationship, has to be perfect. All I want is to not expend any unnecessary energy on worrying about things, or forcing things to fit that aren’t ever going to fit. I want to be sure of myself and not be weighted down by uncertainty all the time. I hated the feeling of standing in a store, holding a perfectly fine skirt that I thought would improve my wardrobe, and not being able to decide one way or another whether it was worth it.

  I would ten times rather order takeout and eat and be done with it than spend an hour in the kitchen wondering if I had the oven on high enough and if the sauce I was making was going to come together or not. I would rather spend hours finding the perfect case on Westlaw to cinch a legal argument than dashing off a memo that said that the arguments on both sides were equally good. I don’t like not knowing where I stand. It makes me uncomfortable and out of place.

  I left Bloomingdale’s and walked past the Victoria’s Secret store on the top level, and there I felt even more uncomfortable and out of place. I didn’t need any underwear, but I had a sudden impulse to walk in and pick out some sexy, stunning lingerie for my second date with Adam. Except I didn’t know if there was going to be a second date. I hoped so, but if he wasn’t going to make even a minimal effort to be more romantic, I wasn’t going to make the effort to pursue him. And even if there was a romantic second date, he hadn’t so much as kissed me yet. Was I being presumptuous by even thinking about lingerie? Would he even care?

  I walked past Victoria’s Secret and out through Macy’s to my car. I pulled on to 287 and merged into the fast lane. Driving therapy was a lot simpler than retail therapy, and a lot cheaper so long as I didn’t get a ticket.

  Monday was easier, because I had work to distract me from thinking too hard about Adam. I told myself that Pacey was right, and that all I had to do was wait for him to do something, and that I would be able to figure out what to do based on whatever it was that he did. All I had to do was bide my time, and not think about his expressive brown eyes, or his strong, warm hands, or the well-defined muscles of his chest. Stop that, woman, I told myself. Calm down. Be patient. You’ll hear from him soon enough.

  I was deep in the middle of reviewing the credentials of an expert witness when our receptionist stuck her head in my office.

  “Are you the girl in the red dress?” she asked.

  “Not today,” I said.

  “I have a package up front addressed to the girl in the red dress. It must be for you.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Because I am the only other female person on this floor, and I don’t have a red dress, and nobody knows to send me anything here except my husband, and it’s not my birthday or anniversary, and Valentine’s Day was last month, and if he sent me anything else at any other time, the world would implode in on itself and all life on Earth would come to an abrupt end.”

  “That’s convincing.”

  “You, on the other hand, being young, single, and available, must have a closet full of red dresses, and suitors lined up around the block.”

  “Would that it was so,” I sighed.

  “It doesn’t look like flowers,” she said. “Might be fragile. You should come pick it up.”

  I trooped over to the front desk. Whatever it was, it was in a large box.

  “Is there a card?” I asked.

  “Maybe it’s in the box,” she said. “Hard to say.”

  “I can’t imagine what it is,” I said. It wasn’t flowers, or I thought not. If it was chocolates, there was enough sugar in there to give diabetes to the entire building. “Maybe we should have it scanned for high explosives.”

  “I am incredibly curious as to what is in that box,” the receptionist said. “I am even more curious as to when you will get it off my desk.”

  I lifted the box. It wasn’t that heavy, which was good. It didn’t rattle, which didn’t mean anything. “I’ll take it back to my office.”

  “If it’s popcorn, I want some,” she said.

  “If it’s anything edible, everybody’s getting some.” The box was big enough to hold a side of beef.

  I walked the box back to my office, and then looked inside my desk to find an X-Acto knife. I cut away the tape and opened the top of the box. I found a card inside, right on top of a large quantity of Styrofoam packaging peanuts. It was a generic card that said “Thinking of You” in flowing blue script. It didn’t say who it was from, although there wasn’t anyone else other than Adam who would have sent me anything.

  I knelt down on the floor and tilted the box over so that the Styrofoam peanuts spilled out into my trash can. I stopped when I saw a dark hank of hair inside. I recoiled, pulling my hand back. I banged my elbow against my desk.

  It’s a head, I thought. It’s a goddamned human head. Bastard sent me a human head.

  One of my fellow associates, a thick, pasty fellow named Warren Briggs, heard me struggling and came over from across the hall to check on me. “You OK there?”

  Warren was a nice enough person, and I thought he probably had a giant crush on me, but he was one of the most boring people on the face of the earth, and married to boot. I thought about telling him to go away, but I needed a witness in case there was criminal evidence in the box. “Can you just check and see what’s in there? I’m having a little trouble.”

  “Sure thing,” he said. He grabbed whatever-it-was by the hair and gave it a yank. “Oh. Cute,” he said.

  “Cute?”

  He lifted something large and brownish out of the box, spraying Styrofoam peanuts everywhere. “Looks like a giraffe,” he said. “Cute. Did you order it?”

  I got up from the floor to take a closer look. It was a stuffed giraffe. It was very high quality, almost lifelike. It was maybe two and a half feet tall, and had packaging material clinging to its tail.

  “It was a surprise,” I said.

  “I seem to have made a mess,” Warren said. “Let me help pick up the peanuts.”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll get them later. I need to think for a minute, if you can leave me alone for a little bit.”

  “Happy to help,” he said, and stepped back across the hall. He had a couple of Styrofoam peanuts clinging to the back of his pants, but I figured he would find them soon enough. I reached over and closed the door and sat back down on the floor, trying to process what was going on.

  I decided to ignore the fact that Adam hadn’t sent me flowers or chocolates or chardonnay or, you know, anything that you would normally send to a female person in whom you had a romantic interest. If Adam hadn’t sent me anything, I would have been fine with that. If he was going to send me something, it was best that he’d sent me something romantically ambiguous. But a giant stuffed giraffe wasn’t romantically ambiguous. It wasn’t romantic at all. It was the complete polar opposite of romantic. A stuffed giraffe was a thing that you sent somebody when you had no idea what else to send them. If he had sent me a Hickory Farms summer sausage, well, I would be able to figure out what that meant in short order. But what could a stuffed giraffe mean other than hey, I got you a stuffed giraffe!

  I wanted to understand Adam. It was fairly clear that I didn’t. More than that, I wanted to understand myself and how I felt about him, and whether my attraction to him was just based on a surface appraisal of his good looks and energy, or whether it was based on something deeper, something substantial. The stuffed giraffe didn’t help with that. It was just a large plush thing that would take up space in my apartment, and that had already shed a large quantity of Styrofoam peanuts across my office. If it were a clue, I didn’t know what it meant. If it was a symbol, I didn’t have the codebook. All I knew for certain was that I didn’t have any better idea of what Adam felt about me, or what I felt about him, than I had before.

  Chapter 20

  Adam, to his credit, had picked a decent restaurant. It was a seafood place overlook
ing the Manasquan River in Point Pleasant Beach, just a few blocks from the boardwalk. It would have been packed in the summer, but it was still late March, and winter was still hanging around like somebody owed it money. We watched the boats move up and down the channel as a cold rain pelted against the window. There was candlelight, calamari, and chardonnay. Adam was wearing a sport jacket and a clean shirt and it looked like he had gotten a haircut. I had put on a nice floral dress, with a white cardigan over it. Everything was in place for a wonderful romantic evening, and I would have been perfectly happy and content if I hadn’t been bored out of my skull.

  I didn’t want to talk about gadgets or sports. He didn’t want to talk about reality television or politics. Neither of us wanted to talk about our jobs or our families, and we didn’t know anyone in common that we could gossip about. We finished our appetizers and sat there and stared at each other, both of us hoping that the other person could find something for us to talk about.

  “We should have gone to see a movie first,” Adam said. “That way, we could talk about the movie.”

  “They have a movie theater at the mall in Bridgewater where they serve dinner during the movie,” I said. “You go and watch the movie and eat at the same time. My sister and her husband do that when they can get a babysitter. It’s more efficient that way.”

  “There’s something to be said for efficiency, I guess.”

  “The problem is that sometimes the food isn’t good, and sometimes the movie isn’t good, and then when that happens you’re kind of stuck.”

  “That’s not good,” he said. “But at least we won’t have to worry about that here. The food’s good. I used to eat here every weekend for a couple of months.”

  “Seems like a long way to drive,” I said. “Unless you’re really into fresh seafood.”

  “A friend of mine from college inherited a couple of rental properties down here. This whole area got hit pretty hard during Sandy, and the houses he owned had some water damage, so he decided to do a full renovation. He knew I had a lot of experience, so he called me to check and see if I’d be interested in helping him get the houses fixed so he could rent them again over the summer. I would drive up on Saturday mornings, and we’d spend the day working, and then we’d come here for dinner.”

  “So what all did you do?” I asked. I have only an academic interest in house renovation, but I watch the occasional real estate reality TV show and it was something to talk about.

  “We had to remove the flooring,” he said. “That was the first step. Everything was soaked. We ripped out the carpet, which was a huge job, mostly because it stank. We put in new hardwood and kept it that way, because it would be easier to deal with if there was ever another storm. The deck was a total loss, although we kind of lucked out on it because we were able to reutilize a lot of the scrap lumber once it had all dried out. I sanded it down and used it for wainscoting on the staircase. It was a really cool effect, too.”

  “That’s a good idea.” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Uncle Sheldon actually came up with it.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Yeah. It’s funny, because I’ve been forced into doing all this nonsense with the estate. You’d think all of that would remind me of him, but it hasn’t. I hadn’t thought about him at all until just now, thinking about us working together on that house.”

  “I’m sorry about your uncle,” I said.

  He smiled. “It’s all right.”

  He told me about the work that he and his friend and Uncle Sheldon had done with the kitchen, and the bathrooms, and the perils attendant to installing window air conditioning units on upstairs floors. That reminded me of the time my father had tried to install a new hot water heater by himself, and that reminded him of a cast-iron bathtub he had tried to install in a house up in Syracuse, and then our entrees arrived and we didn’t have to talk much after that. The restaurant was right about the seafood being fresh, and Adam was right about it being good.

  “Are you sure you don’t want coffee?” Adam asked.

  “Very sure,” I said.

  “The desserts are not really that great. Either that, or I’m not hungry.”

  “Me neither.”

  “If the weather was just a little nicer, we could go out on the boardwalk and stroll for a little while. Maybe get some ice cream or something.”

  “I would like that,” I said. “If it wasn’t for the weather. It’s supposed to be nice next weekend, though.”

  We had a nice recovery on what had been shaping up to be an unproductive second date. I didn’t have the desperate feeling I had last time, where I thought Adam was slipping away from me and that I’d never see him again. Being with him was starting to feel comfortable and right, the way it had been when we first met. I was looking forward to our next date, whatever that turned out to be.

  “I was thinking more about this weekend,” Adam said.

  “What did you have in mind?” I asked.

  “I think we should have sex.”

  I heard him say the words, but it took me a moment to process the fact that he had said them. He had a bland look on his face, as though he’d said that he thought we should have some coffee after all. I finally decided that he was either joking, or pretending to be joking to see how I would respond.

  “You mean right here? On the table?” I asked.

  “That wasn’t quite what I had in mind. I’m not an exhibitionist. Unless you’re an exhibitionist, in which case maybe we could start small and work our way up.”

  “So you were kidding me, then,” I said.

  “I wasn’t kidding. I think we should have sex.”

  “Why? Because it’s our second date?”

  “That’s not why,” he said.

  “Why, then?”

  “Because it would be fun. Because it would be good for us. Because we can.”

  This was not romantic. This was not seductive. This was preposterous, and presumptive, and worst of all, it was working. I was starting to feel a little lightheaded, and it wasn’t because of the chardonnay. I needed to slow this down a bit before I was swept away.

  “Let’s just suppose,” I said. “Let’s just suppose for one second that this was something we should be doing, which it isn’t. Do you have some place in mind for us to go?”

  “You remember me telling you that my friend had a beach house he rented out?” he said. “I still have the key. It’s not that far from here, and I know nobody’s using it. We could take your car and be there in five minutes.”

  That dealt with that objection, and a cozy little beach house certainly had romantic possibilities. I was now fairly certain that Adam had planned all this ahead of time, but if I confronted him about it, he’d just grin and deny doing any such thing.

  “I just want to hear one good reason why you think this is a good idea,” I said. “Convince me.”

  Adam didn’t say anything. He looked at me, and there was a light in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. It was almost as though he was seeing me for the first time. I felt for a moment like he was a wolf and I was a raw bloody steak.

  “Because you want to,” he said at last. “Don’t you?”

  I could think of any number of good reasons to say no, and only one good reason to say yes. It was late. I did have to drive home at some point. The weather wasn’t great. I thought he was rushing things. I wasn’t sure how I felt. All I had to do was sit calmly and explain very gently to Adam that tonight wasn’t the best time.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I was surprised to hear myself say it, but I had said it, and I couldn’t take it back. I didn’t want to take it back. I wanted to have sex with Adam. If that was a deranged, desperate thing to want right then, it didn’t matter to me, not right then. I wanted to feel his touch, his warmness, his skin soft against mine. Compared to that desire, all the other reasons felt small and unimportant.

  We left the restaurant and got in my car. I drove down the beach
road until Adam told me where to turn and where I could park. He got out of the car first, and came around to the driver’s side to take my hand. The houses were all packed together, and I didn’t know which house belonged to his friend.

  “It’s the one on the right,” he said. It was a tiny house, and not quite on the beachfront, but I wasn’t in any mood to pay any attention to trifles.

  Adam found the right key on the third try. We went inside and I followed him up the stairs. I gave an appreciative glance to the rough wood on the wainscoting, in case he asked me about it later. He opened the door to the master bedroom and we went inside together.

  It was freezing in there. It wasn’t just cold. It was penguin-exhibit cold. It was subarctic, with global warming a distant rumor.

  “Well, this is not good,” he said. “I mean, it could be a little warmer in here.”

  “It is ridiculously cold,” I said. “We can’t stay here.”

  It was a beautiful room, decorated in blue pastels with a nautical motif. You could see a corner of the Atlantic out of the window. The bed looked inviting and had a thick, warm down comforter. But it didn’t have a fireplace, and therefore was uninhabitable for anyone this side of polar bears.

  Adam walked over to the window air conditioning unit. “Here’s the problem,” he said. “This thing has probably been running all winter. Let me just turn it off. It’ll be fine.”