Three outfit changes, two ice cream goblets of pinot grigio, and one sing-along to the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” later, Caroline and I are ready to head out. I’m in my black slip dress with a long silver pendant and a pair of Caroline’s heeled sandals. She’s wearing a dangerously low-cut white leather top and half a roll of boob tape.
We indulge in the sweetest of luxuries, a cab. Caroline is texting Wesley, the guy she’s been on two Tinder dates with this week, although I don’t see why. From the photos I’ve seen, he’s way too Brooklyn for her. His beard swallows up half his face and his arms crawl with colorful tattoos that any self-respecting person would instantly regret (Pikachu, the eggplant emoji, a jumping dolphin).
When the cab pulls up to the curb, Caroline swipes her card without negotiating with me first.
“I’ll Venmo you back,” I say, watching her tap at the screen to leave a 20 percent tip.
“Or whatever.” She shrugs.
Maybe I’ll pick up the next cab or the next bottle of wine, but she won’t notice or care if I forget. I do want to pay her back, just to lessen my guilt: I told her I’d pay her back, so I should. I already mooch off her enough. We don’t really talk about how I pay slightly less than my fair share of the rent and she pays slightly more. When she runs to Duane Reade to pick up shampoo, she always offers to pick some up for me, too. I think she feels guilty that she gets money from her parents and I don’t, because she’s never once brought it up and I’ve never stopped her.
The party spills out of a walk-up on Rivington Street onto the sidewalk. A hundred years ago, this neighborhood was full of Jewish tenements bursting with immigrants, but now it’s all glitzy clubs and vintage boutiques that sell ripped Tupac tees for $300 and brick lofts where independently wealthy models/DJs live. There’s a group of girls in tight dresses, clunky platform heels, and chokers. They look like out-of-state girls here for summer internships.
“Should we go up?” one asks nervously.
“I don’t know if they’ll let us in,” says another.
“I thought you said you knew someone who knew the host?” says the third. “What was her name?”
“No, I sort of know someone who knows someone who knows the girl having the party. Do you think that’s okay?”
“You here for Victoria’s party upstairs?” Caroline asks, cutting in.
They swivel to look at her, wide-eyed.
“Yeah, how’d you know?”
“Come on up. It’s fine.”
Caroline climbs the three steps up the stoop and finds the buzzer for 4B. Someone buzzes her in and she pushes open the creaky front door with its chipping brown paint. Inside, the hallway is lit in harsh fluorescent lights. Caroline leads the way up the steep, warehouse-style staircase, followed by the three girls. They all have spindly legs and blisters that poke out from the straps of their shoes. A few people walk past us down the stairs, carrying open PBRs and that chain-strap vegan leather Stella McCartney bag that literally everyone in this neighborhood owns. The stairs wind up and up and up and my thighs burn. I can hear the hum of the music upstairs. We pass 4B on the fourth floor and finally reach a heavy, industrial-looking door clearly marked DO NOT OPEN above the sixth floor. Caroline pushes it open and the full force of the party’s sound hits me.
There must be a hundred—two hundred?—people crowded onto the rooftop. They’re splintered off into groups of three and four and the conversations blur together so all I hear are a few staccato shrieks of “Hiiiii!” as girls approach one another. Drake is on. The rooftop is made of concrete and splattered with red and purple graffiti on one wall. There’s a glorious view of One World Trade Center, illuminated in glowing shades of silver and blue against the night sky. Below us, I can see bar patrons crowding around dives and girls in crop tops lining up outside clubs with velvet ropes. Cabs idle in the streets. The air is smoky. This is why people flock to New York every year and never, ever leave.
Caroline removes a pack of American Spirits from her purse and brings a cigarette to her lips. She fumbles through her bag to find a lighter, and a guy in an ironic Hawaiian shirt standing by himself jumps at the opportunity.
“Need a light?”
She smiles and leans in. A little orange flame flickers and the guy cups his hand around the light protectively, waiting for the cigarette to catch. He looks like he’s waiting for her to say something to him, but instead, she turns to me, offering the pack of cigarettes.
“Want one?”
I do, but Jonathan hates when I smoke, and I bet he’ll be here soon. I’ve told Jonathan I only smoke when I get really drunk with Caroline, which is true, but what I haven’t exactly spelled out for him is that we drink together almost every night. Caroline’s cigarette looks so appealing, but I decline. I wish I didn’t have to. She switches sides with me so her smoke doesn’t blow back into my face and lets Hawaiian Shirt Guy try to impress her for a few minutes before she touches him gently on the arm and tells him she needs to go say hello to a friend. She says she’ll be right back. We will, of course, never come back.
We make our way across the party for the requisite rounds of saying hi to people from college. Victoria, the birthday girl, is wearing a red jumpsuit with a plunging neckline that matches the two Solo cups she’s double-fisting and a glittery tiara that spells out DIVA. We went to the same parties most weekends in college, but we’ve never actually had a conversation sober or during the day. She’s bugging a skinny guy with a laptop hooked up to the speakers to play Taylor Swift’s “22.”
“I don’t care if you don’t think the song matches the party vibes,” Victoria insists, stomping one stilettoed foot. “It’s my party and I want to hear it!”
I tap her on the shoulder and she spins around, anger dissipating into an exhilarated smile. Her eyes don’t focus. She’s wasted. She sets her cups down on the table beside her and throws her arms around us in a hug. Her floral perfume is overpowering. Caroline and I wish her a happy birthday.
“Sasha, I saw the craziest thing on Facebook,” Victoria says, picking up her cups and guzzling from one. “Something about you being a matchmaker?”
I can’t help but smile. “Yeah, I just started working for a dating service.”
Victoria’s friends descend on our conversation. We weren’t ever that close. They had never paid attention to me quite like this before.
The girls pepper me with questions and ask to be set up. I start to explain how Bliss works, but Caroline cuts me off mid-sentence.
“You can’t afford her,” she announces smugly.
This is what Penelope was talking about when she said that matchmaking was the most powerful job in the world. Suddenly, they’re all clamoring to talk to me, just because I do something a little cooler than working as an underpaid blogger or production assistant. I know they just care about the job, not about me—they don’t really want to be friends—but this is almost better than having friends. It’s social currency, and it makes me important tonight. Caroline squeezes my arm and tells me that her Tinder guy Wesley is here. She slips away into the crowd.
“What, did you set her up, too?” Victoria demands.
Before I can answer, my phone lights up with a call from Jonathan.
“I’m here, where are you?” he asks.
I’m relieved. I rise up on my toes to get a better view. I catch his eye, and he nods, wading through the crowd to reach me.
“You have a cool job and a boyfriend?” Victoria says, jaw hanging open. “Ugh. I’m getting another drink.”
Jonathan is still dressed in his suit and has his Goldman Sachs duffel bag slung over one shoulder. I feel a thrill when I realize that he’s probably the most successful guy at this party. Not necessarily the richest (Ruby “Daddy Bought Me a Company” Hoffman is here, and so is at least one rumored Saudi prince), but the person with the most impressive career, for sure. He looks obnoxiously good right now; every other guy at the party is wearing some graphic tee they found at the back of a vin
tage store, or worse, a pseudo-hipster chambray button-down they paid full price for at Urban Outfitters.
“You’re overdressed,” I say, giving him a quick kiss.
“You love it,” he replies, smirking.
His hand lingers on the small of my back, fingers grazing the top of my ass. Victoria’s roommates watch us hungrily.
We head over to the drinks table to scope out what’s left of the booze. There are sticky, empty handles of rum, crushed cartons of beer with the bottles gone, and an overturned bottle of cranberry juice leaking sad puddles onto the concrete. I swat a fly away from an open bottle of vodka and pour us drinks. There’s only a pinch of lemonade left and no other mixers. Jonathan winces when he takes his first sip.
“Don’t make that face,” I say. “It’s bad for my Russian street cred.”
“I think Putin will let you be.”
“Tell that to my mom. She’ll swoop in and replace you with some guy named Dmitri or Ilya like that.” I snap my fingers for emphasis.
“Come on. She wouldn’t.”
While Jonathan won over my stepdad, Steve, he never quite got on my mom’s good side. She doesn’t understand why I want a boyfriend at all—she would’ve killed for the freedom to be single or play the field at my age. (“Look at all the options you have!” she crowed once, forgetting the fact that I am not actually drowning in men who want to be my boyfriend.) I warned Jonathan about this before they met for the first time, and so he amped up his usual charm. It backfired—she found him a little too smooth, like he was a player.
He launches into an explanation of the financial concepts behind his latest deal at work, which spins out into a history of the Greek economy over the past century, which reminds him to tell me the story about why his cousin Harrison will be arrested on public indecency charges if he ever returns to Mykonos, which prompts him to recite what he learned about nudity laws in New York City, since he looked those up one time. It’s one of the things I love best about him. He’s a sponge for detailed, obscure information, and can get lost in tangents like that forever. Sometimes, I have to force him back on track, but I wouldn’t want him any other way. He’s like my personal library, Wikipedia, and Google all rolled into one.
When I first met Jonathan, I had a constant fear that he’d pull the rug out from under me when I least expected it. I used to wake up furious with him, convinced that he had betrayed me somehow—lied or cheated or humiliated me—only to realize that whatever nightmare I had conjured up was purely a dream. I had to learn to relax, to enjoy him.
Caroline bounds over to us, trailing the bearded, tattooed Wesley behind her. They’re a vision in leather: her on the verge of spilling out of her white top, him in a black motorcycle jacket. His dark hair is shaved close at the sides and gelled on top to flop over toward his left ear. He has a slightly chipped front tooth and scrawny collarbones that peek out from his loose V-neck T-shirt.
“It’s just that I’m such a nineties kid,” Wesley tells Caroline. “Like, it’s insane. Those years were the best. I mean, Blink-182 is the shit, man, you know?”
I recall Caroline telling me that he’s only going to be a junior in college. He was maybe a toddler when Blink-182 was big. Tops.
“I know, you told me.” She sounds bored. “Guys, this is Wesley; Wesley, this is my roommate, Sasha, and her boyfriend, Jonathan.”
“Hiya, guys.”
He keeps talking loudly about being a ’90s kid. When no one responds, he looks around uneasily, then launches into another story.
“I was a little hungover this morning so I didn’t want to get up, but my roommate’s stupid cat threw up in the hallway, and my roommate was making so much noise trying to clean it up,” he says, swaying too close to me. I inch a polite step back. He inches closer, rambling on. “And that made me want to hurl, but I didn’t because I was running late to meet with a mom on the Upper West Side. She wants me to photograph her kid’s fifth birthday party. She’s one of those moms who wears yoga pants and sneakers all day, even when she’s not exercising, you know? I don’t get it. But I was coming from Brooklyn and the L train had huge delays, so—”
I cock my head slightly and give Caroline a wide-eyed, close-lipped stare intended to communicate one simple concept: Who the fuck is this guy?
“Wesley? Why don’t you tell Sasha and Jonathan about your art?” Caroline asks gently. Then, to me, “He’s a really talented artist. I’ve seen his work.”
“Oh, yeah, right. I do a lot of photographs of handmade sculptures. I just sold a triptych to this independent gallery—I was smoking one day and got the idea to light squares of American cheese on fire. When it melts, you can drape it over shit and it looks really cool. So I melted it over a toy NASCAR car, a Barbie doll, and a dollhouse sofa. It’s about how society just indoctrinates children with capitalist values straight out of the womb, you know?”
The silence that follows is just a beat too long. I look down at my feet.
“He’s very talented,” Caroline says, turning to him and pressing her hand to his chest. I think she tries to beam at him, but the smile doesn’t fully reach her eyes.
“Isn’t that fascinating,” I say.
“So, man, what do you do?” Wesley asks, clapping Jonathan on the arm.
“Nothing quite as creative as what you do,” he says. Diplomatic as always.
Wesley takes in Jonathan’s suit, frowning. “You’re, like, what, a Realtor or something?”
“No.” He stifles a laugh.
“Then what?”
“I work in finance.”
“Oh, yeah? So, like, what does that mean?”
“I work for one of the bulge bracket investment banks.”
“Which one?”
“One of the ones downtown,” Jonathan says quietly, sipping his drink.
“Dude, do you work for the CIA or something? What’s it called?” Wesley is annoyed.
“Goldman Sachs,” he says, like he’s embarrassed or something.
He’s not, of course. It’s a total game. It’s like how Harvard grads will tell you they went to school “in Boston” or millionaires will tell you they’re “comfortable.” Jonathan likes to stretch out the process of telling people where he works. I know he secretly gets a rush from that wide-eyed, impressed look in people’s eyes when he finally reveals what he does. If he were actually embarrassed, he wouldn’t trot out this little song and dance every time he meets someone new.
Wesley narrows his eyes and nods. “I mean, whatever works for you, man. . . . But don’t you have a problem with the way large banks threw millions of hardworking people under the bus with the subprime mortgage crisis?”
Jonathan starts to answer, but Caroline jumps in to smooth things over. “And Sasha just started a new job as a matchmaker! Isn’t that cool?” There’s a note of panic in her voice.
Wesley ignores her, choosing instead to duke it out with Jonathan. He’s losing the argument—hard—when he suddenly checks the time on his phone.
“Do you ever listen to Righteous Mold?” he asks us.
“I’m sorry?” I ask.
“The band.”
“Oh. No, I haven’t heard of them.”
“I got tickets to see them tonight, so I’ve gotta bounce. There’s a one a.m. show around the corner. Sasha, Jonathan, it’s been real. Caroline, you’re a goddamn daydream.” He downs his drink in one long gulp, then suddenly grabs her by the shoulders, kisses her, and disappears into the crowd.
Everyone is silent for several long seconds, absorbing Wesley’s absence. The DJ has finally given in and is playing Taylor Swift. Victoria and her friends are screaming the lyrics to “22” in front of the circle congregating by the graffiti wall. Someone’s iPhone camera flashes repeatedly. The photos will be on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat within five minutes.
Caroline breaks the silence first. “You didn’t like him.”
I try to tread cautiously when it comes to the losers she dates. I know she�
��s embarrassed by how they reflect on her. “I think you can do better,” I say.
“Way better,” Jonathan says.
“Ugh, don’t you think I know that? He’s awful. They’re all awful. Every single one.”
“There has to be someone out there who doesn’t suck. You’ll meet him, I promise.” This would sound fresher—more convincing—if I hadn’t already said it a million times before.
“Oh, fuck off, both of you,” she snaps. “You don’t know what it’s like to be single and alone forever.” She snatches up a lighter resting on the ledge of the roof, lights another cigarette, and sulks into it. Jonathan waves away the smoke.
“How did I become some soulless Tinder cyborg?” she whines. “I meet so many guys and can’t make myself like any of them. I feel like there’s something wrong with me.”
“No, you’re just going for guys who don’t deserve you.”
“I know it’s like that line in The Perks of Being a Wallflower—we accept the love we think we deserve. And I know I’m fucking great, so why do I keep going for these idiots?”
I listen and nod and soothe her for a few more minutes until Jonathan gives me The Look that says it’s time to go. We’re heading downtown together and Caroline’s heading uptown, so it doesn’t make sense for the three of us to split a cab. I apologize to Caroline again for leaving.
“Yeah, whatever,” she says. Her cheekbones file into sharp edges as she takes a drag. She blows her smoke up in a long stream toward the sky.
Jonathan reaches for my hand, but I can’t help but teeter toward Caroline.
“Do you want me to stay here with you?” I ask.
I know she does. Back when we were freshmen or sophomores, we would stay out until the parties dwindled down to nothing, then collapse at the nearest diner and scarf down omelets. But that was a long time ago. Tonight, I just want to shut out the noise of the party and crawl into bed with Jonathan. It’s an unspoken rule that when you get a boyfriend, the boyfriend becomes your go-to person, and your best friend is . . . well, not less important, but just important in a different way. They fill separate roles in your life. Caroline’s never had a real boyfriend, so she doesn’t get that.
Playing with Matches Page 4