•••
I went to Brenda’s bathroom, splashed water on my face, went back to the office, then took the subway home. I made myself behave like I was a normal, functioning person. I set my alarm, savoring the handful of seconds after I woke up and before I remembered what Andy had done, where I was, and that I was alone. I forced myself out of bed and into clothes. I saw my clients, kept my appointments, attended my review session for the licensing exam. At the end of the day, I stopped at the corner grocery, bought a frozen Marie Callender’s chicken potpie, put it in the toaster oven, and took a shower while it cooked. By the time the hot water ran out, my dinner was done. I put on a robe, ate my pie with a glass of wine, climbed into bed, took one of the Ambien I’d talked my doctor into prescribing, and fell asleep like I’d been concussed. I wouldn’t let myself call him or go near the Internet to look up his race results or see if there were pictures of him, of her, of them together. I tried to remember the bad stuff, how it felt to be the only person in Andy’s little enclave who had any visible body fat, the way the female runners looked at me when I’d gone to use the gym; the way I was always the last thing on Andy’s mind, behind his workouts, his diet, his training schedule, the race he’d be running the next month or the one he’d run the month before, and how every time I suggested going out to dinner or to a movie or a play or a museum, he was either too busy or too tired. What kind of a life was that? I’d asked myself . . . and then I would remember something—having sex in the shower, or how it felt when he’d laugh, and I couldn’t lie—despite all the annoyance and embarrassment, it had been the life I’d wanted.
By June, the weather was brutally humid, but Amy insisted that I walk with her to SoHo, then join her for a drink. “Here’s to love,” she said, lifting her Champagne cocktail. “I signed you up for JDate.”
“Oh, no. No. Please no.”
“It’s not up for discussion,” she said, handing me her phone so I could see my profile. At least she’d used a good picture, I thought bleakly, a shot from when I’d been a bridesmaid at Pamela Boudreaux’s wedding, my hair drawn back in a chignon, with a single white camellia behind my ear.
“Just go on ten dates,” Amy said.
“Five,” I bargained.
“Eight,” she countered. “Look, if you don’t get out there you’re just going to spend every Saturday watching Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally on your couch.”
“And that’s wrong because . . . ? ”
“There’s a guy out there for you,” Amy said. “You have to open yourself up to the universe’s possibilities.”
“Did your yoga teacher say that?”
“No. I think I read it on a napkin at the new salad place.”
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “What if I already met the guy out there for me? Only he dumped me for a swimsuit model?” As far as I knew, Maisie did not solely model swimwear. Still, whenever I described her, I called her a swimsuit model. It sounded so much worse than just “model.”
“Honey,” she said, “Andy was not the guy for you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if he was,” she said, “he’d be here. Or you’d still be there. You’d be together, and you’d probably be engaged.”
It was hard to argue, and easy to log on to the website, sort through the hundreds of guys, like they were entrees on a Love menu. Lots of them looked good and sounded funny and interesting. Then again, I thought, how hard was it to look presentable and sound acceptable online? On the Internet, every guy was a catch.
“It’s a numbers game,” Amy told me. She counseled me not to get too attached too soon, to develop a thick skin and keep it moving, setting up dates with other guys even while I was waiting to hear from a promising prospect. “Prepare for the worst,” she’d said . . . but the worst turned out to be so much worse than I had ever imagined.
My first encounter was with a charmer named Nate, an off-line fix-up and a fraternity brother of Pam’s cousin Martin. I arrived at the agreed-upon bar, a place in Midtown near his office, ten minutes early, and was sitting with a glass of chardonnay when Nate showed up, wearing fashionable eyeglasses and carrying a cool canvas bag. He was a little more jowly than he’d appeared in his picture. In repose, his face had a kind of smugness, an expression that said I have sampled many of life’s finer things and expect to enjoy many more. “Hi there!” he said, his hand extended. The smile on his mouth didn’t reach his eyes, which were cool and assessing, moving around the room, possibly scoping for better prospects. “You’re Rachel?”
“I’m Rachel.” Greek life at our respective campuses would give us a solid ten minutes of conversation, I thought; his job as a speechwriter for the mayor and mine with the Family Aid Society would be good for another ten, at which point we should have finished our beverages and gotten some sense about whether we wanted to see each other again.
The hostess led us to a table. A waiter approached. Nate asked for Scotch as I swallowed a yawn. “You feel like getting food?” he asked.
“I had a late lunch,” I lied. I hadn’t had lunch at all, had gobbled a granola bar on the subway uptown so my stomach wouldn’t grumble during our date. I didn’t want food. I wanted to be home, with my boots off and my bra unhooked, a bowl of Cream of Wheat on the table and Friends on TV.
“Okay if I order something?”
No. “Sure, that’s fine.”
“Lunchtime just got away from me. I completely forgot to eat.”
I didn’t trust people who forgot to eat. Andy, I remembered, didn’t trust short men. “They’ve all got something to prove,” he’d said. I pushed Andy out of my mind, wondering how long it would take to permanently evict his voice from my head, and tried to focus on Nate, who was not short, and was Jewish, and reasonably handsome, and perfectly acceptable.
Nate ordered a burger, well-done, with fries. “You sure you don’t want anything?” he asked, so I got some soup. Eight dollars for a bowl of watery chicken broth with mealy, limp noodles. I could have made an entire pot of the stuff for eight dollars, and it would have tasted better than what I’d been served. Soup had been one of my go-tos when I’d lived with Andy, healthy enough for him, indulgent enough for me. I’d learned to make three different kinds of lentil soup, split pea, minestrone, Italian wedding soup with tiny meatballs, pungent with garlic and cheese . . .
“So!” Nate had a strand of something green between his two front teeth. Nice hair, I told myself. Nice, thick hair, not a sign of thinning or receding. Focus on the good stuff. Maybe this could work. “Tell me about yourself!”
I’d gotten as far as “born in Florida” when Nate interrupted, launching into the story of his grandparents, who’d retired in Sarasota, continuing on to the highlights of the spring break he’d spent in St. Pete in 1999 and how, in general, he preferred ski vacations to beaches. “Too much sand in too many places, you know?” Pausing for a bite of burger, he chewed, swallowed, and said, “Do you ski?”
“Never learned. I had a heart condition when I was little, so my parents were really cautious about what they’d let me do.”
“Ah.” He returned to his burger. Usually, dropping heart condition into a conversation would prompt at least a few questions, a bit of back-and-forth about exactly what was wrong and whether it was better, but Nate seemed more interested in his meal than my health. I stifled another yawn and sneaked a glance at my watch, an inexpensive Timex. Nana had gotten me a Cartier Tank watch, but it caused too much trouble when I wore it to work. Brenda, I remembered, had asked to try it on, had turned her wrist from side to side, then had gotten teary and said, “I’ll never have anything this pretty.” Andy’s watch had monitored his heart rate. Sometimes I’d make him wear it when we were in bed, to see if his heart rate jumped when I kissed him and did other things.
“So tell me about speechwriting,” I said.
For five minu
tes, Nate talked and ate, describing how he’d landed his job (his father had been the mayor’s urologist), and how the mayor consistently ruined his best efforts with his high-pitched, nasal voice. Then, somehow, we were back to skiing again. “I learned to ski in Vermont. Didn’t ski on powder until I got to college. It was, like, a totally different thing.”
Possibly my desperation was starting to create its own gravitational pull, because not one but two waiters came to our table. “We’re all set here,” said Nate, pushing his last two french fries into his mouth without asking if I wanted anything else. I made the expected gesture toward my purse; he did the obligatory wave-away, saying, “No, no, I got this.” In less than two minutes the bill was paid, and we’d collected our coats and bags and were out on the street. “That’s me,” I said, gesturing toward the subway, trying to decide what I’d do if he went in for the kiss or put me on the spot by asking for another date.
No such luck . . . or no such problem. “Listen, it was great meeting you, but I’ll be honest. I’m not sure I’m seeing a future.”
“Mmm.” I wasn’t interested in feedback any more than I was interested in seeing him again, but Nate took my noncommittal noise as a request for explanation.
“You’re a great gal, and I’m sure there’s a lot of guys who’d be into you, but I mostly date eights and nines.”
I’d been slinging my work bag over my shoulder. When he said eights and nines, I paused, midsling, positive that I’d heard him wrong. “I beg your pardon?”
“Eights and nines,” he repeated, as if it was a normal and inoffensive thing to be rating women like coins in a collection or steaks in the butcher’s case—choice, select, prime.
“And I’m a . . .”
He had the nerve to put his glasses on for a closer look. “Did you ever think about straightening your hair?”
I looked past him. The sidewalks were full of people carrying takeout containers and briefcases and shopping bags, people on cell phones, people on bikes, people just walking around like the world was a normal place where everyone obeyed the social contracts and men understood they couldn’t go around casually assigning women numbers outside of the privacy of their own heads.
“You’re a jerk,” I said in a pleasant voice.
“Hey, hey!” He held up his hands, the universal male gesture of I didn’t do it. “There’s plenty of fish in the sea.”
“You have bad breath,” I said in that same polite voice. I didn’t know whether it was true—luckily, I hadn’t gotten close enough to smell—but there’d been raw onion on his burger, so it felt like a safe bet. “And you have small, womanish hands.” Nate looked at his hands. Then looked at me. “Girlie fingers,” I said, and lifted my head, curly hair and all, and walked away.
I didn’t cry until I’d made it home, until the door was locked, my work clothes were off, and I was wrapped in my cozy chenille robe, with my unlikable hair in a ponytail. You’re beautiful, I heard . . . in Andy’s voice. No, you are. You’re beautiful.
Nate, thankfully, was the low point . . . but it didn’t get much better. A copywriter for an ad agency spent the whole date complaining about his ex (“I think she was bipolar,” he said). A rabbi, funny and charming, spat tiny chunks of food when he talked. A banker rhapsodized about the amazing vacation he’d just taken with his mom. When he showed me pictures of the two of them together, with Mom in a bikini, her arm around his waist, I feigned an appointment and told him that I had to go.
It wasn’t always awful. I had a few second and third dates that fizzled out painlessly. I met nice guys to whom I was not attracted; attractive guys who weren’t especially nice. No one made me feel passionate, no one even had me wanting to know him better, to hear about his childhood pets and his first girlfriend and what he wanted his life to be like.
Finally, at Amy’s insistence, I agreed to meet one of her friends. “He’s a little bit older,” Amy cautioned.
I raised an eyebrow. “How old?”
“My age.”
“Ancient.”
Amy threw a packet of paper clips at my head. “You’ll like him. He’s a do-gooder. Did Teach for America, then the Peace Corps, then AmeriCorps.”
“So, lots of America, lots of corps. What’s he do now?”
“He went to law school, but he’s been working as an editor.”
“What’s he edit?”
Amy paused. I crossed my arms over my chest. “What is it?”
“The last time we talked, he was editing a magazine for urban farmers.”
“Oh, no. Come on. Do I look like someone who wants to be around goats?”
“I don’t think he actually has goats, he’s just running a magazine for people who do.”
“That’s not any better! He’s probably got a chicken coop in his living room,” I said.
“He can’t be worse than the Spitting Rabbi.”
“If he uses the word artisanal, I’m leaving.”
“That sounds fair.”
“Also ‘curated.’ None of that. No curation.”
“Fine.”
“And he’s never been married? What’s the story there?”
Amy shrugged. “Sometimes there’s not a story except ‘he just didn’t meet the right girl.’ ”
“Fine,” I grumbled. “But I’m oh for eight. If this is a bust, you owe me dinner at Shun Lee.”
On Friday night, I did my hair, wriggled into my date dress, and arrived early at my favorite wine bar so I could watch him come through the door. The place served a “grown-up grilled cheese” that I’d decided was the sandwich of the gods, made with homemade sourdough bread and three different cheeses. Twelve bucks for a sandwich? I’d heard Andy complaining in my head the first time I’d ordered it. Nobody’s making you pay for it, I told him. Now go away.
The door opened and, maybe because I’d been thinking about him, for one desperate half second I imagined it would be Andy; Andy, come to his senses, Andy, come to rescue me from men who spat or obsessed about their exes or took their mothers to couples’ resorts. But of course it wasn’t Andy, it was Jay Kravitz, who had shiny brown hair and a generous nose and a nice smile. He held out his hand, saying, “It’s Rachel, right?”
“Rachel. Right.” He wasn’t especially handsome, but his smile improved his looks, and he had a nice firm handshake, and smelled good, like he used just the right amount of some delicious cologne. He pulled out the chair at our table for two, sat down across from me, and looked at me more closely, his expression warm and thoughtful. Hmm, I thought to myself as I felt something inside me shifting. At the very least, he’d gotten my attention.
“What would you like? Just drinks, or can I talk you into splitting a sandwich?”
I wanted a grilled cheese so badly I was fighting the urge to snatch one off the plate that had just been set in front of the man at the next table, but I said, “How about we just do drinks? I’m actually meeting someone at seven.” A few years ago a book called The Rules had become the single girl’s bible, and rule number one was never to be too available. If you wanted a man to think of you as a potential wife, you should never okay a last-minute assignation. You had to make him wait, make him chase, let him think that you had suitors lined up and vying for your time. Having no actual plans, I thought that I’d call Amy, who’d be finishing work, to see if she could meet me for a debrief; or I could just have a latte at the Starbucks down the street.
“Is it another guy? It’s another guy, isn’t it?” Jay pretended to sulk. When I didn’t answer, he said, “Tell you what. You meet him, and I’ll read my paper, and if it’s a no-go you come back here and we’ll have dinner.”
“What if he’s it?” I teased. “What if he’s the one?”
“Then I’ll let him have you,” Jay said, assuming an expression of noble resignation as he spread out his New York Times. “Far be it from me
to thwart true love’s course.”
“Did you say ‘thwart’?”
“I did,” he said, nodding. “I thwarted.”
I smiled, ordered a glass of wine from the waitress, and said, “Amy tells me you’re an editor.”
He shook his head. “An editor no more.”
“You gave up on urban farming?”
“There’s only so much you can say about how to get around the zoning laws so that you can keep rabbits in Red Hook. So I’ve gone slinking back to the law.”
I fake-applauded. He mock-bowed. “I’m actually an adjunct criminal law professor at NYU. I thought you should know, in case Amy told you all about how I dug latrines in Sierra Leone and you were looking for some kind of Mellors-the-gamekeeper thing.”
I smiled and looked away, wondering how he’d known that was exactly what I’d been imagining, and how he knew I’d read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I’d discovered in my parents’ bookcase, between What Color Is Your Parachute? and a Passover cookbook titled Let My People Eat. It would be nice to date a reader. Andy’s shelves had featured guides to running, biographies of runners, memoirs by runners, and not one but two copies of Once a Runner.
Two white wines and several literary references later, it was time for me to go. Jay stood, walked me out, then said, “Hope to see you soon.” I went to a newsstand, bought a tabloid, read half of it in a Starbucks, and then, trying to manage my expectations and prepare for the worst, I went back to the bar.
Jay was reading the Metro section. “No good?” he asked. He looked like he was glad to see me. I found that I was glad to see him.
“I’m starving,” I said, and he stood and took my hand, then gave my cheek a kiss.
“Then let’s eat.”
Over grilled cheese, I learned that Jay was thirty-four, the oldest of three, with a brother in banking and a sister in grad school. His mother had died of breast cancer when he was twenty-nine. His father did trust and estates law in Greenwich, and expected Jay to join the practice someday.
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