by Devan Sipher
“It was a gin and tonic, and my hair has never floated,” said Roxanne, who made it clear her frizzy locks were a source of lifelong frustration.
We were on a conference call. Not my preference, but I couldn’t blame Roxanne. I had canceled our previous interview, and now she was in Los Angeles and Ari was in Tel Aviv. His cell phone kept going in and out, as did my concentration while he rhapsodized about his first impression of her thick, dark, corkscrew curls.
“I thought she was Israeli,” he said.
“I thought he was twelve,” she bantered.
Though boyish and gymnast height (he claimed to be five-seven), Ari was twenty-four when they met and she was twenty-eight. They would be twenty-seven and thirty-one at their wedding in two weeks. Ari made a point of saying he was the oldest of his friends to get married. I wanted to punch him.
“In Israel, I’m considered an old maid,” Roxanne affirmed.
I’m going to die alone.
I pictured myself lying in a cavernous hospital room, emaciated and solitary, while an endless line of graying couples ambled slowly by the open doorway. They were all couples I had written about, and they whispered to each other as they passed, “Look, dear. That could be us if we hadn’t found each other.” Then they would shuffle on, hand in hand in IV stand.
I was never going to know someone so well that I could predict when they needed chocolate. I was never going to be woken by a child bouncing on my bed and squirming under the covers. I was never going to keep my job unless I stayed focused.
“I told him he had nice pecs for a twelve-year-old,” Roxanne was saying.
“I told her, ‘So do you,’” Ari said, snorting as he laughed.
“He still thinks that’s a good line. He’s so lucky he’s no long-er single.”
Fortunately, Roxanne and Ari’s story wasn’t very complicated. Glamorous party. Balmy evening. Two people with perky pectorals. Other than a couple layers of flimsy summer clothing, there didn’t seem much standing between them and the Olympic dream of international unity.
“I didn’t think I ever see her again,” Ari said.
I had missed something crucial. “What happened after the party?” I asked.
“I told you I left,” Roxanne said impatiently. “It was a work night for me.”
“You left?” I scrolled through my notes, trying to see where I had lost them.
“Without give me phone number,” Ari said. “She was playing—how you say?—hardball to get.”
However, she had told him she’d be watching the closing ceremony in the NBC box, so instead of joining the other athletes on the field, he parlayed his way through security with flowers and an Israeli team pin as a gift for her. “But she not give me the box number,” he said. “I run door-to-door, and I ask, ‘Is this NBC?’”
“How was I supposed to know he’d be crazy enough to do that?” she said. “I didn’t think he’d remember me five minutes after I left the party. There were a hundred thirty thousand condoms handed out to athletes in Athens. So let’s just say he wasn’t lacking for pleasant opportunities.”
“I didn’t want someone pleasant,” he said. “I wanted you.”
I’m going to die alone.
“Misery makes great copy,” Tucker proclaimed, pounding on his desk for emphasis. “Our readers don’t want touchy-feely crap. They want stories about people who’ve been raped, murdered or censured by a congressional ethics committee.”
It was the most he had spoken in my presence in months. Renée had just pitched our latest blog proposal about “Dream Weddings.” It was our third attempt in as many weeks, but this one had potential. Our plan was to post multimedia interviews with upscale wedding vendors, incorporating photos and videos from their recent events. Basically, wedding porn. Tucker was less than dazzled.
Renée persevered. “It’s an opportunity for us to provide readers with information about the latest trends in designer bridal dresses, celebrity florists and—”
“My eyes are glazing over,” Tucker said. “I mean, in this day and age, who really cares about weddings?”
Oh, the millions of people who read our pages each week, for a start.
“With the number of divorces, everyone knows weddings are a sham.” It should be noted that Tucker was on his third marriage. “I don’t want to read about some Wall Street bozo marrying a swimsuit model. Or what dress she wore. I want to hear about what happens when she runs off with her personal trainer.”
“That sounds a little tabloid,” Renée tut-tutted.
“Well, weddings aren’t anyone’s idea of hard news,” he said with what could be described as concealed contempt only if he had tried to hide it. “You can’t go to a wedding without thinking of a bad Hollywood movie. Speaking of which, there’s some flick coming out about a bridesmaid gone bonkers.” He grabbed a press release from a pile on his desk and tossed it toward Renée. “Even Hollywood knows that breakups make for better stories than people mooning over each other. I can’t tell you how many times friends ask me, ‘Why don’t you run a column about divorces?’ So now I ask you: Why don’t we?”
He pointed his finger directly at me. I had assumed I was there mostly to offer Renée moral support.
“Well, Tucker,” I stalled. “We rely on couples being willing to share intimate details about their lives, and I don’t know if people getting divorced would be willing to do that.”
“Real reporters make people talk about things they don’t want to.” Real reporters! This was from a man whose last byline was about martini trends in Miami. In Tucker’s mind, he was still a sharp-shooting, trash-talking foreign correspondent slumming it in Lifestyles until his inevitable rise up the managerial ladder.
Tucker decreed that we should take another stab at the blog proposal, combining our concept with his. The lack of a common denominator didn’t faze him. I was dismissed, but he asked Renée to stay behind. I tried not to dwell on any ominous implications and returned to my desk. Before I could even look at my e-mail, an instant message from Tony distracted me.
“Check out Gawker.”
I wasn’t in the mood for reading about other people’s misfortune, as I felt more than sated by my own. Gawker’s victim of the week was one of our fellow Lifestyles reporters. He was being raked across the coals of public ignominy for a mass e-mail he had sent out requesting an invitation to a sex party. The fact that it was for a story he was writing got lost in the tittering and Twittering.
My phone rang. It was Tony. Sheesh.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think you need a new hobby.”
“Did you read it?”
I clicked on the Gawker link he had sent.
The Paper Announces Buyouts.
“Shit.”
“Keep reading.”
There was a letter from our publisher, which looked suspiciously like an e-mail I had deleted earlier in the day after only a cursory glance. But after several paragraphs of hyperbole about our “hard-working staff” and “award-winning journalism” came this gem:
By this time next year, there will be significantly fewer people working in our newsroom than there are today. How many fewer, I don’t know yet.
Fear crept up my esophagus.
Through attrition and buyouts, we’re looking to collect the low-hanging fruit. If necessary, there will be layoffs.
There it was in black and white. No longer a rumor. Now the only question was, Who were the lowly plums and which of us were lofty coconuts?
“It’s a scare tactic,” thundered Renée, looming over my shoulder. She was standing in what Tony called her battle-ready pose, shoulders back and jaw defiant. “They won’t do layoffs. Even in ‘eighty-seven, after the stock market crash, there were no layoffs in the newsroom.”
“They already started,” Alison piped in. “Have you heard about Darius de Santis?” She was referring to an admired fashion writer. “He hasn’t been seen in two weeks.”
“I h
eard he pitched a pilot to ABC,” said Tony. There was a hush. Few things inspired greater awe than a reporter getting a Hollywood production deal. It was like going up to the Heaviside layer in the musical Cats, but with better residuals.
“Enough,” Renée declared. “Buyouts are not layoffs. Rumors are not facts.”
“So you think we’re safe?” I asked.
The word “safe” seemed to undo her. “There’s no such thing,” she sighed, deflating before our eyes. Her shoulders sloped. Her cheeks sagged. She was no longer a sergeant leading her troops. Just a woman approaching her eighth decade with a bad hip and a “rumored” heart condition who had dedicated her life to her career. No, to a newspaper, and everything it stood for.
“I would never bet against The Paper,” she said, lumbering back to her desk. “But I’d sure as hell fasten your seat belt.”
Chapter Seventeen
Flying Solo
For the second time in a month, I was flying. Looking out the plane’s window at the grid of snow-flecked ground below, I felt untethered. I wondered where I was going. Not literally. I was on my way to LA for Roxanne and Ari’s wedding, but to what end? I was a bean count away from unemployment. Even if I survived the gauntlet, there was a limit to how many weddings someone single could attend before imploding. The couples seemed to be getting younger and younger, reinforcing my fear that I was past my prime bachelor days and on my way to becoming a male spinster. A spinet. A freestanding male on an interconnected planet.
I was on a path I didn’t recall choosing. Gary was always the one who swore he’d never get married. Not me. Though it was embarrassing to admit, I was the kid who daydreamed about fantasy honeymoons (from watching too many episodes of The Love Boat). I even once made a clandestine list of potential baby names that went well with Greene. When I imagined myself as an adult, I envisioned marriage being central to my existence. And it was. Except it was other people’s marriages and not my own.
I feared I had made a wrong turn somewhere and diverged from my destiny. Perhaps one of the speck-sized houses I was passing over contained someone living the life I had intended. Someone with a ring on his fourth finger and a life companion who offered the affection and ballast that I yearned for—and that I briefly had with Laurel.
I still couldn’t go near the lake in Central Park without my stomach rebelling, and I couldn’t even look at green tea. Ironically, she had been the one to pursue me. She even made the first call. Gary said that was what doomed us. Of course, he also said she was a heartless shrew. But what he meant was that she could be painfully blunt, which was why I trusted her. Right up until the three a.m. newsflash that she had found someone else.
Here it was, more than three years later, and I still hadn’t. Not really. Not unless I counted Melinda. And how could I? I barely knew her. Yet I still caught myself thinking about her, and I needed to stop. I needed to set my sights lower. My new goal was improving my love life and finding someone to marry me before my chest hair turned gray.
Online dating had been a bust. ComeFlyWithMe had flown the coop, and most of the other profiles seemed to blur together. As did my belabored e-mail exchanges about what I liked to do with my free time. Hope said I needed a more positive attitude.
“It’s a good thing A.J. was more optimistic about online dating,” she had said. A.J. was the pediatrician with a penchant for late-night cabernet—more specifically, he turned out to be a Stanford-educated pediatric surgeon and volunteer fireman who had spent two years in the Congo with Doctors Without Borders. He had her at “Doctors Without Borders.”
“He cares about people,” she told me with the tone of voice one would usually reserve for Mother Teresa and Bono. I’d rarely seen Hope fall for someone so quickly. She was already seeing A.J. twice a week, and she talked about him ad nauseam (emphasis on the “nauseam”).
I was happy that she had found someone, but her success made me all the more aware of my failure. I knew that “failure” was not a politically correct or psychologically helpful word to use, but that’s what it felt like. I had failed in the most basic of life’s tasks. Oh, I know: In our evolved, multicultural world all lifestyles are equally valid, but for the billion or so people who don’t watch Oprah, being alone violates societal and biological norms. From a macroeconomic perspective, living by myself in a Manhattan apartment was a waste of limited housing and energy resources. Taking an even broader view, according to Darwin (and Richard Dawkins), I was on this planet solely for the purpose of procreating, and to the best of my knowledge, I hadn’t done so. It was no longer just a matter of losing out on two-for-one airline deals; I was letting down the species.
I usually tried not to think of living alone as being an anomaly. Or, more accurately, I tried not to think about it period. After so many years, solitude had become as familiar to me as the plaid wool blanket I wrapped around myself on winter nights. When I was in my twenties, I would pretend there was someone waiting for me in my apartment. On my way home, my pulse would quicken. As I turned the doorknob, I would have a momentary vision of her hair, her neck, her voice. I don’t remember when I stopped fantasizing about her presence, but it seemed a healthy choice at the time. It was disconcerting that Laurel was the only girlfriend who ever had a key to my place. Yet I habitually slept on only one-half of my full-size mattress, leaving room for a better or at least a different future.
There was something about arriving at LAX that invigorated me. It could have been the three hours gained. Or the VIP treatment I was getting from Brooke Brenner, Roxanne’s publicist. She texted me within moments of landing that she was waiting for me outside the baggage claim to chauffeur me to the wedding. Gary was picking me up afterward to ferry me to his place in Burbank for the night. I was hoping that saving The Paper money on a hotel and car rental would score me some brownie points.
Since I had never met Brooke before, she had e-mailed me a photo—of her car. A red convertible MINI Cooper. Sitting inside it, slurping a Starbucks iced latte, was a tan woman with silky blond hair and oversized Chanel sunglasses. Her smile was broad. Her teeth were white. I caught myself thinking of the iconic Farrah Fawcett poster. Not that Brooke was wearing a bathing suit, but her clingy, white sleeveless top was barely more concealing.
“Jump in,” she said with an inviting twirl of her hand. I tossed my shoulder bag into the backseat and was still buckling up when she zipped out from under the overhang into the glorious sunshine.
“What’s with the jacket?” she asked. I was dressed for the wedding in a light gray suit and tie. She was obviously not. The wind whipped through her hair as she wove between lanes. “Loosen up. You’re in California.”
I caught a glimpse of the ocean while standing on the narrow balcony of Brooke’s apartment in Santa Monica. She lived a few blocks from the beach, and I could see a small patch of azure waves between the neighboring buildings.
“You’re sure you don’t mind waiting while I change?” she asked for the third time, even though I had assured her I was fine. “When I was a kid, I hated it when my dad would make unannounced pit stops. Hated it. I hope I’m not turning into him.”
Clad in cut-off jeans and sparkly flip-flops, she didn’t look like anyone’s father. I said something to that effect.
“You’re a keeper,” she said with an ingratiating giggle. I was tempted to think she was flirting with me, but that’s what publicists do. They flirt. They charm. They do anything within their powers to persuade you to write nice things about their clients, and I knew better than to take it seriously.
“I’ll be back in a flash,” she said. “Make yourself at home.”
I closed my eyes and surrendered to the sun’s warmth. It felt good on my face. I wanted to take off my clothes and go running along the beach. Or swimming in the figure-eight-shaped pool below. It somehow felt wrong to be in California and not be lounging poolside. I was glad I had taken Brooke’s advice and removed my jacket.
I heard her voice from the bac
k of the apartment somewhere. “I forgot to ask you if you’d like to freshen up.”
“Is that your polite way of saying I have convertible-car hair?” I asked, eyes still closed and staying in my Zen zone.
“I think of it as organic volumizing.” Her voice sounded closer. “People pay hairstylists a lot of money for that.”
I opened my eyes and she was standing beside me—in a white towel. And not a particularly large white towel.
“I think it’s working for you,” she said. “See for yourself.” She held up a hand mirror she was carrying, but it was hard for me to take my eyes off her tan lines.
“Not too much damage,” she said, teasing my hair. She was more than a half foot shorter than me, so to do that, she had to stand very close. Her towel brushed against me, and she smelled like fresh taffy.
I held the mirror. Or rather I held my hand around hers. I wanted to caress her shoulders. I wanted to kiss her lips, her chin. I wanted to nuzzle in the crook of her neck.
“I decided to take a shower,” she said. I hoped she was going to say, “Do you want to join me?” I had an irresistible urge to remove her towel. All it would take was one finger.
I had an hour before I had to be at the wedding. I had condoms in my wallet.
I had to stop.
She was the publicist for my article. It was hard to conceive a worse ethical breach than sex with a source. This was not the time to be taking chances with my job. Not to mention I was one false move from a serious charge of sexual harassment. True, she was undressed, but this was LA. Being half naked was a way of life.
Brooke wasn’t the slightest bit self-conscious. She didn’t seem to notice I was attracted to her. Or she didn’t care. Or she was pretending she didn’t care. I wanted to know which.
She absentmindedly picked up a stack of mail before putting it back down and heading back to her bedroom.
“I gotta get cleaned up,” she said.
I didn’t want her to go. I needed to say something smart and sexy.