Maggie began maneuvering us forward toward the bar, craning her neck to survey the room as we wound our way through all the people.
“Who do you want?” she said.
“Want?”
I must have looked even more alarmed than I felt, because Maggie burst out laughing. “To kiss!” she cried. “Do you see anybody you want to kiss at midnight?”
I’d been married so long that I couldn’t remember ever considering this question. Last New Year’s Eve, I had still been with Gary, at our friends Marty and Kathy’s annual New Year’s dinner party, and as always it had been Gary I’d turned to first. I’d had no idea that in twelve hours he’d tell me he wanted a divorce; never in a trillion years would have guessed that the next New Year’s Eve, I’d be surveying the throng at a downtown Manhattan restaurant in search of a stranger to kiss.
And then I saw him. He was standing at the bar, half listening to a skinny redheaded guy talking on the stool beside him, but focusing more on looking around the room, a little half smile on his lips. His hair was long and dark, his skin pale. He looked to be medium height and medium build, but with extraordinarily broad shoulders, shoulders wide enough to ride on. His eyes seemed to be dancing, as if he’d just remembered a really good joke and couldn’t wait to tell someone.
It was at that moment that he turned, as if I’d shouted that he could tell the joke to me, and looked directly into my eyes. His face broke into a grin, leaving me no choice but to smile back. It was like we were old friends, ex-lovers who’d parted on the friendliest of terms, recognizing each other in the crowd.
Then the redheaded man said something more insistent, and my man looked away.
“I’d kiss him,” I said to Maggie.
“Who?”
“At the bar,” I said. “Next to the redheaded guy. The one with the artsy hair.”
He looked at me again then, and Maggie started nudging me forward. Then, all at once, a shout went up and two televisions mounted above the bar flickered on. It was the Times Square ball, with an onscreen clock showing the minutes left until the new year: just under five.
“Perfect!” Maggie shouted in my ear as she propelled me along. “He’s a baby!”
I stopped. “What do you mean?” Now I was trying to look at him without him seeing me. I hadn’t exactly pegged him as middle-aged, but neither did he look like a college kid.
“He’s definitely in his twenties,” Maggie said, poking me in the back.
I frowned. “I’d say thirties.”
“No way. Come on. We have to see if you pass.”
Move forward? Or run shrieking into the night? Maggie made the decision for me by giving me a major shove, practically right into Mr. Dancing Eyes’ arms.
“Oh,” I said, my breasts jammed against the starched cotton of his shirt, the soapy smell of his neck filling my nose. “Sorry. My friend—”
“It’s all right,” he said. “I was wondering whether I was going to be able to get close enough to talk to you. You look so familiar. Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
Not unless you’ve been loitering at the Lady Fitness near my house in New Jersey, I wanted to say. Or attending meetings of the Homewood Garden Club.
Then again, he couldn’t possibly know me from anywhere, because I’d never been anywhere—not the me that was standing in front of him, anyway.
“Ten,” the crowd started to chant. “Nine. Eight—”
“Oh, no,” I said.
“No?” He looked surprised.
“It’s just—”
It was just that I could feel Maggie mere inches behind me, awaiting our kiss like some pimp with an overdue car payment. And I wanted to kiss him, but I was scared.
“Five. Four—”
Scared of kissing someone new, I mean really kissing someone really new, for the first time in twenty-three years. Scared I wouldn’t remember how. Scared because it was clear, now that I was so close, that this guy had probably been a toddler the last time I’d done this. Scared that I didn’t care.
There was shouting. There was cheering. I stared at him, feeling like a rabbit who’d come face-to-face with the fox. And also, a little bit like the fox. He looked back, his eyes sparkling with that joke again.
And then I realized something that, in my terror about going into the city and in my focus on making the right wish and throughout my overhaul by Maggie, had eluded me. The year was over. This moment marked the end of the worst year of my entire life—the year my husband left me and my mother died and my only child moved half the world away. It was done now, and it seemed as irrefutable as a law of the universe that the year that had just started could only be better.
I was filled with such a sense of joy and relief that I let out an enormous sigh and smiled at him, which was all the encouragement he needed to lean in and touch his lips to mine. The thing was, they fit so perfectly, his curved upper lip notching exactly into the space between my two, his lower lip landing neatly below my own. He tasted of sugar; I could feel the actual little grains.
When we finally pulled apart, I said the first thing that came to my mind: “Thank you.”
He burst out laughing. “You’re very welcome, but let me tell you, that took a lot of effort.”
I felt my face begin to burn. “It’s only—,” I said. “It’s just that I mean—”
“That’s okay,” he said softly, bringing his finger to my lips.
And then he moved as if to kiss me again.
“No!” I cried, springing backward.
He looked confused. “No?”
“I’m not interested in a relationship.”
He laughed again. “I’m not interested in a relationship either,” he said.
“You’re not?”
“No,” he said. “I just broke off my engagement.”
“Just…,” I said, “…now?”
He smiled. He was big on eye contact, which was very nice but, in my experience, unusual in a man.
“Well, last June,” he said. “I realized I didn’t want to get married, not yet, anyway. I’m not in any hurry to step onto that whole fast-track-career, mortgage, babies thing.”
“That’s great,” I said.
All around us, people were cheering and throwing their arms around each other.
The dark-haired man leaned in closer to me, boring into me with those brown eyes. “You’re serious? Because most girls I meet, I tell them that and they walk away. They’re totally turned off.”
“No, I think that’s really smart,” I said. “This is the one time in your life when you can be free, experiment, do whatever you want to do, and you should take advantage of that. Don’t be in any rush to settle down.”
It was the same thing I’d told my daughter Diana, who’d taken my advice so seriously she’d moved five thousand miles away from me. Now he was talking to me again, but I’d become so lost in my thoughts of Diana that I seemed to have missed what he was saying. The only word I heard was “Williamsburg,” but he was obviously waiting for a response.
“All those weird costumes,” I said, remembering Diana’s eighth-grade trip.
He looked at me strangely. “I know a great club there that should be quieter than this. I wondered whether you’d like to go.”
I couldn’t believe it. “Go all the way to Virginia?” I said. “Tonight?”
A smile came over his face, and he shook his head. “I mean Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I live there.”
“Ohhhh,” I said, suddenly feeling as out of it as if I’d been wearing a flax apron and a mobcap.
“So what about it? Want to go?”
Did I want to go? Well, of course I’d want to go, if I was really the person that it apparently looked like I was. But in fact, I might as well have been this guy’s mom. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that, though, and ruin his year when it was only a few minutes old.
Where was Maggie when I needed her? I’d felt her hovering at my shoulder until the midnight kiss. Now, though, she was nowhere
to be seen. Finally, I spotted her way over near the door, whispering in the ear of the lovely female bouncer. She was clearly going to be no help.
“I thought you didn’t want to get into a relationship,” I said.
“This isn’t a relationship,” he said. “It’s just a…just a…”
“One-night stand?” I said. “Because I’m not interested in that either.”
I wasn’t, was I?
“No,” he said. “I mean, if we wanted to hook up…”
His shoulders sagged, and he stared at the floor. Then he beamed in on me again.
“Listen,” he said. “I like you. That’s all. I’d like to know you better.”
I hesitated. “I don’t think you’d be happy with what you discovered.”
He moved a tiny bit closer, just enough to make me uncomfortable. “Why don’t you let me decide that?”
I could feel something fluttering in my chest again, dangerously close to my heart. When I broke his gaze, I looked at his lips, and when I averted my eyes from his lips, they fixed on his shoulders, which were all too easy to envision naked. A year without any kind of sex, a year during which I’d finally made very good friends with the vibrator Maggie had long ago foisted upon me, had sent my fantasy life into high gear. Now that I’d become an expert at having an electronically fueled orgasm whenever I wanted—something I’d never accomplished with a real live human being—I thought I might have one right there on the spot.
I felt his hand on my hip. His hip pressed gently against mine.
But then the big steel clock above the bar gonged once—12:15—bringing me back to my senses.
I remembered something a few guys had said to me, something I’d always wanted to say to someone, except no one would ever have believed it. Now, though, I felt as if it might even be true. “Believe me,” I said, suddenly feeling cooler than I’d ever felt in my life. “I’m trouble.”
Rather than making him back off, however, my warning only seemed to pique his interest. Come to think of it, it had always had the same effect on me.
“Let me see your cell phone,” he said.
“I’m not going to give you my number.”
“Just let me see the phone.”
He held out his hand. I’d slipped the phone into the front pocket of the tight jeans Maggie had dressed me in, and I could feel it pressing against my thigh. Reluctantly, I took it out of my pocket and handed it to him.
“Wow,” he said, when he had flipped it open. “You have Tetris.”
That sounded like a disease. A disease of the cell phone.
He must have noticed the puzzled look on my face, because he explained, “It’s one of the oldest video games. That’s what I do. I’m a game designer. Or at least I’m learning to be.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling even more alarmed than I already had been. “You’re still in…college?”
“I’m heading to Tokyo this spring for game design school,” he said. “But actually, I already have my MBA. Along with not getting married, I decided I didn’t want to get a job in the corporate world. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“What do you do?”
“Uhhhh,” I said, wondering if laundry, dusting, or unloading the dishwasher were worth mentioning. “Not much of anything, at the moment.”
“So you’re in school?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I’ve been out of school for a long time.”
I kept telling myself that as long as I didn’t tell him a direct lie, I wasn’t doing anything wrong.
“So you’ve been…traveling?”
That was, if not exactly true, true-ish. I nodded. “I’ve been away.”
“In, like, France?”
“Somewhere like that.” Well, I told myself, there must be someone out there who thinks New Jersey is like France.
He began pressing the keys on my phone.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m putting my number into your phone book,” he said. “My name’s Josh, by the way.”
“Alice,” I said.
“Ali?”
“No. Alice.”
“Okay, Alice, pick a number between one and thirty-one.”
The number that popped into my head was what I guessed his age to be. “Twenty-five,” I said.
He sighed. “Couldn’t you pick a lower number?”
Oh, God, I hoped not. “No,” I told him.
“All right.” More punching of buttons. “We have a date on January twenty-fifth.”
“We do?”
“Yes. I set your phone alarm to remind you. We’re going to have a drink at…name a bar.”
“What if I don’t want to have a drink with you?”
“You have twenty-five days to think about it. If you decide you don’t want to do it, you can always cancel. Now pick a bar.”
The only bar I could think of was the famous place, Gilberto’s, around the corner from the office of my one and only long-ago employer, Gentility Press. That was the last time I had any real occasion to go out for a drink in the city. I had a moment of panic wondering whether Gilberto’s was even still there, but Josh told me he knew exactly where it was, and noted the name and address in my phone before handing it back to me.
“I don’t know how to use that phone alarm,” I warned him.
“You don’t have to do anything,” he said. “At four o’clock on the twenty-fifth you’ll hear the alarm go off, and the phone will tell you everything you need to know. I’ll see you then.”
Chapter 3
The ringing of my cell phone jarred me out of a deep sleep. The first thing I thought, still in a fog after the late night, and in the unfamiliar light of Maggie’s loft, was that it was the alarm going off for my date with Josh. I’d been dreaming about him, something vaguely erotic that was hurtling out of my reach as the phone kept up its insistent trilling.
I finally managed to wake up—my neck was stiff from sleeping on the purple chaise—and find the phone still lodged in the pocket of the jeans I’d worn, crumpled on the floor. After I said hello, there was only crackling on the line, crackling and silence, and I was about to hang up except finally, tinny and far away, I heard my daughter Diana’s voice.
“Mom?” she said. “Mommy? Is that you?”
“It’s me, sweetheart,” I said, at once fully awake. Diana wasn’t able to call often. The nearest phone was a ten-mile hike from the village where she was working as a Peace Corps volunteer. Contrary to popular belief, there still were some places—make that many places—where cell phones and the Internet didn’t reach.
“It doesn’t sound like you,” Diana said.
I ran my hand over my hair, remembering as I did everything that had happened last night, my transformation at Maggie’s hand, the encounter in the bar. Getting up off the chaise, I walked over to the oval mirror and looked at myself. With the makeup washed off, I looked more like the old Alice. But my newly pale hair and the choppy cut Maggie had given me had done wonders. Even in this early-morning raw state, I looked like a young woman.
But not a young woman that my daughter was ever going to encounter. Like my pot-smoking days and a few drunken and semi-anonymous sexual adventures, this was not something I was ever going to tell Diana. “It’s me,” I assured her. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Mom,” she said, with that edge to her voice that let me know she thought I shouldn’t be questioning her fineness. Of course she was fine. She was a grown-up and didn’t need me to take care of her.
“Good,” I said. “Are you in town just for the day?”
There was a silence so long I thought we may have lost our connection, but then Diana said, “No, I actually went to Morocco for a few days with a couple of the other volunteers. I thought I told you.”
It was as if she had slapped me. She definitely had not told me, and I knew she knew it. I had wanted Diana to come home for Christmas, and she had raged at me that since her tour of duty was almost ove
r, there was no way she could possibly leave her village, that just because it was a holiday in the United States didn’t mean anything where she was, that poverty and need didn’t take any holidays, and so on until I was apologizing for being so selfish as to have offered to buy her a ticket home.
Don’t start a fight with her, I told myself. It’s not worth it, she’ll be home soon, none of this will matter.
“I didn’t remember that,” I said. “How was it?”
“You never remember anything I tell you,” she said. “I don’t know why I even call.”
Oh, Lord. It had been like this for the past year, ever since her father and I had broken up. Even though he’d been the one who’d left, it was me Diana had been furious with, maybe because I was safer, maybe for the very reason that I was the one she was closest to, who wouldn’t abandon her. Last January, two weeks after Gary left, Diana announced that instead of returning to NYU to finish her senior year, she had joined the Peace Corps and was leaving for a year’s posting to Africa. Now, after a lifetime of affection and closeness—Diana had not even gone through an adolescent period of testiness—she called me from five thousand miles away to pick a fight.
“I’m glad you called,” I reassured her. “I can’t wait until I see you again.”
More silence. I guess she needed a few minutes to find something wrong with my having said that.
“Well, you’re going to have to wait a little longer,” Diana said finally. “I’ve decided to extend my stay here another couple of months.”
My breath caught in my throat. I’d managed to suspend everything—my fear; my anxiety; my overwhelming desire to be close to her, physically and emotionally, again—by telling myself she’d be back in January. And now all those feelings I’d kept dammed up came flooding through me, and I let out a cry that was much louder than I’d intended. Across the room in the red iron bed, Maggie’s eyes popped open, and on the other end of the phone line, Diana was squawking.
“How dare you give me a hard time about this?” she said. “I have my own life to live. Just because all you want to do is sit in that house in New Jersey doesn’t mean it’s enough for me.”
I felt myself go very still. Maggie was sitting up in bed now, staring across the room at me with a look of concern on her face. She raised her hands and her shoulders as if to ask, What’s going on? and I had to turn my back to her to keep from bursting into tears.
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