O n their second date, Mark brought Lauren a goldfish, which made her nervous. Lauren knew that the normal life span of a goldfish was about five days, but growing up she’d had one that lived for five years. And so, it seemed a big commitment when Mark gave her the plastic bag with the fish in it.
“Here,” he said, “I got you this.” He held out the baggie like he had just found it in the hal way before he came into her apartment, like it was a normal thing to do to hand a goldfish to a girl you barely knew.
“Oh,” Lauren said. “Thank you. I guess I should put these in some water.” Mark didn’t laugh. Either he didn’t get the joke or he didn’t think she was funny. She couldn’t decide which was worse.
Mark stood by the door while Lauren looked in her cabinets for an appropriate fish bowl. She final y settled on a glass mixing bowl she never used. Was the water supposed to be lukewarm or cold? She didn’t know. She settled on lukewarm so that the fish wouldn’t be chil ed, and dumped him into the water. It smel ed.
Lauren had won her other fish at the Pumpkin Festival when she was seven, and named her Rudy, after Rudy Huxtable from The Cosby Show.
Her parents were annoyed. “You won a fish?” they asked when she came home. They rol ed their eyes and warned her that it would probably die soon. They dug up an old fishbowl from the basement and bought fish food. “Don’t get too attached,” they told her. But little Rudy raged on. She swam fiercely year after year. When they final y found Rudy floating bel y-up at the top of the bowl, the whole family was shocked. It was as though they’d expected her to live forever; as though they’d forgotten that her dying was even a possibility.
Lauren watched the new fish swim around. He looked weak. Not like Rudy at al . “I guess I’l need to stop and get fish food,” she said.
“Just give it some bread crumbs,” Mark said. He sounded like he wasn’t the one who’d brought her the fish in the first place.
“I’m not sure that fish can eat bread,” Lauren said. Mark just shrugged.
“What are you going to name him?” he asked.
Lauren considered this. Should she name the fish Rudy as a good-luck gesture? Maybe it would help strengthen the little guy.
“Wil ard,” she final y said. “After Wil ard from Footloose. ”
“Where?”
“Footloose. The movie?”
“Never heard of it,” Mark said. He looked at his watch and then back at Lauren.
“Wel then, we’l have to watch it,” Lauren said. “It’s amazing.”
“You ready?” Mark asked. Lauren nodded and put her coat on.
“Good night, Wil ard,” she said to the bowl. She left the light on in the kitchen so that he wouldn’t be disoriented.
Mark was odd. Lauren knew that. She knew from the time that he approached her in the deli that he was not normal. He interrupted her while she was putting Equal in her coffee. “Hel o,” he said, and she jumped in mid-stir.
“Hi,” she said. She was running late to meet a client and didn’t have time for pleasantries with a stranger.
“I’ve seen you here before,” he said. “Every morning around this time, I see you here getting your coffee and sometimes a bagel.”
Lauren stared at him. She had never noticed him before. “Real y?” she asked. It didn’t occur to her until later that she should be nervous.
“Here’s my card,” he said. “Cal me. I’d like to take you out.”
Lauren took the card, but didn’t look down at it. “Okay.”
“I look forward to hearing from you,” he said. Then he turned and walked out.
Lauren thought that was sort of cocky. He was very handsome. She could give him that. But stil , people didn’t just approach other people in the middle of their morning coffee to ask them out. Did they? No, they did not.
Lauren thought about him al during her appointments that day. She was escorting a young Kansas City couple around. They were relocating to the city and wanted to find a place immediately. The wife had blond hair and wore a pastel minidress. She complained about every place they saw.
“I don’t know,” she kept saying. “It’s so smal . It’s just so smal .”
“This is pretty standard for a one-bedroom in New York,” Lauren said. The wife glared at her.
“We want to have children soon. Babies,” the wife said. Lauren nodded.
“Right. Wel , a lot of people in this building put up a wal for a second bedroom. It’s a pretty nice size, so you wouldn’t feel so tight for space.”
The wife looked at Lauren’s hand. “Are you married?” she asked.
Lauren shook her head. She reminded herself to be nice so that she wouldn’t lose a good commission. This couple had to move soon. They were against renting. They were a guarantee buy.
“I’m not married,” Lauren said. “But one of my best friends lives in a building very similar to this one, and they put up a wal to make a bedroom for their little boy. It might be hard to imagine what it would look like, but if you picture it over there you might get a better idea.”
“I think that would work nicely,” the husband said. “Don’t you?” He put his arm around his wife and squeezed her shoulder. He had been chipper al day. He felt guilty for making them move and was trying to make it up to his miserable pastel wife.
“If you want to see some bigger places, we could look in Brooklyn or maybe Hoboken,” Lauren offered.
The wife shook her head. “No,” she said. “We want to be in Manhattan. We told you that. Didn’t you listen?” She walked away and stood facing the wal with her arms crossed. Her husband gave Lauren a little smile and went to stand next to his wife. Lauren waited quietly while the couple stared at their imaginary baby’s imaginary room. Sometimes, she knew, people just needed a little time to be able to picture themselves in a new place, to see possibility in a blank space. And so she waited.
Lauren cal ed Mark that night. She didn’t even mean to. Not real y. She was eating take-out sushi and saw his card in her purse. She dialed before she could real y think about it.
“Hi,” she said when he answered. “Mark?”
“Yes,” he said.
“It’s … hi, it’s Lauren? From the deli?” She realized after she introduced herself that she had never told him her name.
“Hi, Lauren.” He sounded not one bit surprised. He sounded like he’d been waiting for her cal .
“So,” she said. “So, I decided to give you a cal .”
“So you did.” He was silent and Lauren waited. She decided not to say one more word and just when she was about to give in, he asked her to dinner.
“Sure,” she said. “That would be fun.”
“It’s nice,” Mark said on their third date, “that you eat.” Lauren had just ordered steak. His comment made Lauren sure that he had only dated anorexic girls in the past, thin, waify people who only ordered salad. The whole idea made her tired.
They went back to his apartment that night. It was clean. No, not clean. It was OCD. There was almost nothing on the shelves. No magazines lying around the coffee table. No pictures or knickknacks. Nothing. It looked like an apartment after she’d staged it to be sold, wiped clean of al traces that a human lived there.
“It’s nice,” she said.
“I know,” Mark said.
His bed was low to the ground, with a plain, dark blue cover. He stood in the bedroom and started taking off his shirt, unself-consciously, as though they had been together for years. He hung it up in his closet and then took off his pants. Lauren stood there, trying not to watch but also trying not to have it be obvious that she wasn’t watching.
“Do you need a shirt to sleep in, or are you okay in your underwear?”
“A shirt would be nice,” Lauren said. Who the hel was this guy? He went over to his drawer and took out a perfectly folded T-shirt that said
“Colgate” on it.
“Did you go to Colgate?” she asked.
“No, I went to Princeton.”
Lauren went into the bathroom to change, and for the first time that night got very nervous. She didn’t know this guy at al . She had never met any of his friends, had no idea if he was tel ing the truth about where he worked, or even what his name was. Lauren had just watched American Psycho on TV the other night, which was a mistake. She was short of breath. Had she even agreed to stay over? Al he’d said was “Do you want to come back to my place?” This was pretty presumptuous of him, wasn’t it?
She took her phone out of her purse and sent Isabel a a text message that she was at Mark’s apartment, and then she sent the address. At least someone would know where she was. Although, if she was dead, it wouldn’t help much, would it?
When she got out of the bathroom, Mark was sitting up in bed reading a thick book. “You are crazy,” Lauren told herself. “You are nuts. You have just been single for too long.” Lauren imagined that with each year she lived alone, she would get crazier and crazier. She would be stuck in her weird way of living and would never be able to meld together with someone.
Mark smiled at her when she came out of the bathroom, and waited for her to climb into bed before he turned off the light. She felt his lips on her neck, and then he positioned himself over her while he softly sucked on her clavicle. No, she decided. He is not a kil er.
Lauren waited for Mark to get less weird, but it didn’t happen. He changed his pil owcases every other night and left porn magazines in plain view in his bathroom. He had certain ties that he wore only to meetings, and he wouldn’t let Lauren sit on his bed when she was wearing clothes she had worn outside. But hands down, the weirdest thing about Mark was this: His favorite food was macaroni and cheese.
He didn’t like the fancy kind of macaroni and cheese that was retro-trendy and served in pricey restaurants, with Gruyère and lobster. He didn’t even like the homemade kind that was gooey and comforting. No, Mark favored the fluorescent noodles that were created from powder, milk, and butter—the kind that came in a box for $1.79.
At least once a week, Mark made a box of macaroni and sat down in front of the TV to shovel it into his mouth. He didn’t share. He ate straight from the pot. He ate the whole thing.
If he were a different person, maybe this wouldn’t have been so shocking. But he wasn’t. He was Mark. He wore suits that Lauren was pretty sure cost more than the rent for her apartment. He sent back bottles of wine at restaurants after he’d tasted them and declared them “off.” She’d never met his family, but she was sure that they would be horrified to learn what Mark did with his macaroni. Could she date someone who attacked pasta like this? She watched him closely each time he did it, sure that she was witnessing something deeply personal and tel ing. It was like watching him masturbate, but Lauren couldn’t turn away. It was fascinating, disgusting, and delightful al at once.
“Do you like him?” her friend Mary asked after their seventh date. Lauren shrugged. She didn’t feel like talking about whether or not she liked a boy with her friends. It made her feel like a child they were al entertaining.
When they were younger, Lauren and her friends talked about boys constantly. They told each other every detail and dissected each sentence.
But as the years went by and they moved into separate apartments, it changed. These weren’t just random boys they were going to date and then break up with. These were boys they might end up marrying. And so, they stopped sharing so many details without even realizing it. Wel , most of them did. Their friend Annie was slow to catch on, got drunk on red wine, and told al of them that her boyfriend Mitchel had a tiny penis. At their wedding, it was al Lauren could think about.
Lauren wanted to tel Mary about the macaroni and cheese, and how when Mark had met her one-year-old niece, Lily, he had taken her hand without smiling and said, “Hel o. Hel o, Lily.” She wanted to ask Mary if it was bizarre to like a guy who’d brought you a fish. She wanted Mary to help her decide if Mark was a sociopath or just a little strange.
Mary looked at her expectantly, rubbing her stomach and groaning at fake contractions. Her little boy, Henry, bopped around the room, and Lauren knew she couldn’t do it. It was too odd to sit there and tel Mary these things, too strange to talk about Mark bringing her a fish, while Mary toddled after her toddler. So Lauren just said, “Yeah, I do. I do like him.” It was the truth, she thought. Just not al of it.
The day that Rudy died, Lauren went to feed her before school and found her bel y-up and completely white. She let out a little scream and her parents came running. Her dad looked shocked, and her mom looked as though she had opened a Tupperware ful of mold.
“We’l have to flush him,” her dad said.
“Rudy’s a she,” Lauren said.
“Of course she is.” Her dad put a hand on her shoulder.
Her mom had left them to it, let them carry the bowl to the upstairs bathroom and dump Rudy in the toilet. Her dad had started to carry the bowl to the downstairs bathroom, but her mom yel ed at him, “That’s the guest bathroom.” She said it like he was crazy, like everyone knew you weren’t supposed to flush fish in guest bathrooms. She shook her head and said, “Take him upstairs.”
“Do you want to do it?” her dad asked, and Lauren shook her head. He looked relieved and pressed the flusher. They stood next to each other and watched little Rudy go round and round.
Lauren didn’t cry during the flushing, and she was embarrassed when her dad hugged her good-bye. But that day in school, during a spel ing test, tears began to fal out of her eyes. She was mortified. You didn’t cry in sixth grade. Lauren especial y didn’t cry in sixth grade. She was tough. But as the teacher read the words “Submarine, crystal ized, immigrant,” Lauren’s tears dropped onto the page and made a mess of her test. She felt awful that Rudy had died. She couldn’t even remember if she had checked on her the night before or not. What if Rudy had been dying al night?
The tears came faster, sliding in one motion down her cheeks and fal ing with a plop on her paper. Final y she raised her hand and didn’t wait for her teacher to say anything before getting up and going to the bathroom, where she locked herself in a stal and cried until her friend Lizbeth was sent to check on her.
She told the whole class that she’d had an al ergic reaction to the kind of cereal she’d eaten for breakfast that morning. It was a reaction, she said, that gave her a sudden pain so bad that she cried. When Tina Bloom suggested that Lauren’s story was a lie, because her dad was an al ergist and she’d never heard of such a thing, Lauren told her she was stupid and, above al , mean for not having more sympathy, and none of the girls in the class talked to Tina for a week.
On their tenth date, Mark told Lauren he never wanted to live with someone else.
“Never?” Lauren asked.
“Never,” he said. He didn’t sound sorry about it. Lauren wasn’t sure that she ever wanted to live with anyone else either, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you said aloud. It was something that you kept to yourself, knowing that if you ever found yourself seriously dating someone or getting married, that you would just do it. Because that’s what people did.
“So, what’s your plan?” Lauren asked.
“My plan for what?”
“I mean, let’s say you meet someone one day and get married. Separate residences?”
“Maybe,” Mark said. “One uptown and one downtown? Or maybe just two separate apartments that join together somehow?” He was lost in thought and Lauren was horrified for him. It was like on their fifth date, when he’d tied a windbreaker around his waist and had no idea that he should be embarrassed as they walked around the Central Park Zoo.
“Maybe you’l change your mind someday,” Lauren said final y. She wanted him to stop thinking about it.
“Maybe,” Mark said. “But I doubt it. I don’t like other people touching my stuff.”
Lauren met the Kansas City couple on their closing day. The wife was wearing a plaid dress and a headband. “Congratulations!” Lau
ren said.
“You’re going to love New York.”
The couple walked around the empty apartment and Lauren recommended a cleaning service they could use if they wanted to get it scrubbed down before they moved their furniture in. She found the wife standing in front of the new wal that had been put up to make the second bedroom.
“Is everything okay?” Lauren asked.
The wife smiled at her. “I just never pictured myself here, you know?”
“Yes,” Lauren said. “I know how that goes.”
On their fourteenth date, Lauren brought Mark over to Mary’s apartment for dinner. Mary and Isabel a had been hounding her. “It’s real y weird that we haven’t met him yet,” they’d kept tel ing her. “Fine,” she’d said. “Fine, we’l come to dinner.”
Henry took an immediate liking to Mark. Henry always chose the person who paid him the least attention and then spent the night trying to win him over. This worried Mary. She was sure he was going to end up in some sort of abusive relationship. “It’s just so odd,” she always said. “It’s like he can sense who doesn’t like children and then he won’t leave them alone.”
This night was no different. Henry sat on the floor at Mark’s shoes and played with his shoelaces. Every once in a while, he patted Mark’s leg affectionately. Mary gave Lauren a look like she was sorry, and Isabel a laughed and tried to distract Henry. “No!” Henry yel ed at Isabel a. “Go away.” He grabbed tight fistfuls of Mark’s pants and held on to them for dear life.
“So, he hates babies,” Lauren thought. She had kind of suspected it, but now Henry confirmed it. She watched Henry climb onto Mark’s lap and rest his head on his chest. “Mark,” he said in a perfectly clear voice. He’d never been able to say Lauren’s name right. He cal ed her “Peg” for reasons that no one could figure out.
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