Will You Won't You Want Me?: A Novel

by Nora Zelevansky

  “Just don’t tell anyone!” she blurted out. It was a mistake born of panic. She’d confirmed Mac’s suspicions. He would be on the phone spreading the dirt before that night’s episode of Dawson’s Creek began. She waited for his joyous exclamation of “I knew it!” Nothing came. They had stopped next to an old stone fountain on Riverside Drive and 76th Street, so much a part of her everyday landscape that she barely knew it existed.

  “Why do you care anyway?”

  “I don’t care.” It sure looked like he did. He tugged at his earlobe like he was signaling to some half-blind pitcher.

  “Then why are you asking?”

  “I heard he likes Sarah Kaplan anyway.”

  “Please. Everyone knows Sarah Kaplan is hooking up with Eric Martinez.”

  He stared at her hard, sighed, and then looked up at the blue sky and across the street at a bicyclist pedaling hard toward his next Chinese food delivery.

  “Fine! I like you. Okay? I do. And that Bryce guy is a loser.”

  Marjorie was shocked. She had written Mac off long before and assumed that he’d done the same with her.

  “Oh.”

  His opponent knocked off balance, Mac grew suddenly confident. “I think you would like me too if you gave the idea a chance. We’d be unstoppable.”

  “It’s not a competition.”

  “Sure it’s not.” He rolled his eyes. “Here’s the deal: I’m going to kiss you now. And you’re not going to say anything afterward, until you give this some thought. But you have to give me this chance. It’s only fair.”

  No one had ever told Mac O’Shea that life wasn’t fair.

  Marjorie had set her sights on Bryce, and Mac was hardly boyfriend material. But she found herself wanting to say yes on a gut level she’d not experienced with boys before but would later with men. She felt an uneasy flutter reverberating through her, a warmth, a pull.

  “I’m not sure about this,” she admitted.

  “Why?”

  “I think you might be…”

  “What?”

  “A bad idea.”

  Mac laughed. “That’s for sure.” And before she could gather her wits, he’d stepped so close that she got distracted by the light tips of his dark eyelashes. “So, can I kiss you?”

  She nodded a quick assent, though her brain screamed no. He leaned in, his lips finding hers, at first a bit awkwardly, as she panicked. But then the kiss intensified and she was surprised by her shudders as his hands found her waist. And when he let go, because it was he who ended it, she wasn’t sure how she felt. Embarrassed, sure. Dizzy, yes. Like maybe she wanted him to do it again?

  Before she could do anything, he tipped an invisible hat in her direction, grinned, and stalked away in the direction of home.

  That night, Marjorie couldn’t focus on the latest episode of Felicity, ate only half a steamed artichoke (her favorite), and couldn’t comprehend her Algebra 2 homework, even after consulting notes. She wasted an hour doodling squiggles in lively conversation with geometric boxes. The next morning, she spotted both Mac and Bryce in the locker area, caught first one guy’s eye, then the other’s, and ran.

  By seventh period, she was queasy and still unsure but was finding it difficult not to think about that after-school kiss, when Vera reported the first rumors: “I’m telling you this because I would want to know.” Despite her complicit audience, she couldn’t disguise her gossipy glee. “Mac is telling everyone that you made out with him yesterday. He says you practically raped him into kissing you, and he isn’t even into you.”

  Knowing what she did about Mac, Marjorie shouldn’t have been surprised that he had fabricated a half lie that would both humiliate her and sabotage any relationship with Bryce, or that he never approached to apologize or acknowledge her silent treatment when she ignored him for the next three weeks before slipping back into their former—if not as close—acquaintance. Nor should she have been alarmed when he befriended Bryce as his closest pal, even into adulthood, and adopted for him the nickname “Brass.” Still, she’d felt hurt and confused.

  In the end, she’d dated Bryce anyway for the next two years, until she started twelfth grade and he left for Tufts. Then they played and inevitably lost the long-distance game.

  Between Marjorie and Mac there had been just one more incident, an innocent dare during a party game with friends in his childhood bedroom—that kiss on the Spider-Man sheets.

  Now Mac closed the file cabinet and arched his back to stretch a crick. “Guess I’m gonna have to live with you thinking I’m a liar. The card is MIA.”

  “I would have thought you were a liar either way, if it’s any consolation.”

  “You know? It is.”

  He walked in a slow, wide circle around the disproportionate couch and leaned against the wall beside her. “So, what now, Her Drunkenness? Wanna rejoin the hordes for another drink?”

  “I dunno.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  “About another drink.”

  “Got somewhere to be?” He turned toward her, his head cocked sideways. The unanswered question hovered in the air between them.

  “I just think it’s probably a bad idea.”

  He smiled. “Oh, yeah? I remember you once thought I was a bad idea.”

  “I still do.”

  This time, he didn’t ask. Mac kissed Marjorie hard, pressed her expertly against the wall. He tasted, she thought with amusement, of that Hamptons Julep. For a moment, he broke away and peered into her face, as if confirming her existence, probably memorizing her expression to better tease her later. And Marjorie thought then that life is inevitable. That this had been fated since she first walked into the dumb gastropub earlier that evening. She and Mac were arrested peas in a pod. She had one last thought of fleeing to her bedroom, next door to Vera and Brian. Nothing had ever sounded so lonely.

  Mac ran his palms down the sides of her hips, then thighs, and she trembled a little at the strangeness of it all. Then, a bit tentatively for him, he slid his hand up under her skirt and between her legs. He traced his name against the lace of her neon yellow Hanky Panky underwear, and then she was toast.

  3

  Even as a preteen, Marjorie had never been a fan of sleepovers.

  First, a cry fest was inevitable. After activities like watermelon Bonne Bell Lip Smacker application and Slam Book making (which involved girls anonymously scribbling each other’s flaws on pink stationery with bubble hearts above the i’s), some underdog would feel “left out” having had her nose called “big” (knowing full well who wrote that!). An argument would ensue; girls took sides. Enter angry parent at 3:00 A.M. with electrified hair and robe knotted off-center, issuing a stern warning about how it’s “bedtime!” and the kids better “be quiet!” That reprimand would rebond the group. Only then would the girls—tucked inside worn Strawberry Shortcake sleeping bags—drift off into sound REM cycles, a couple even having remembered to wear their retainers.

  Most of all, Marjorie hated waking up surrounded by someone else’s stuff, eating strange pancake breakfasts governed by that household’s rules, waiting for her parents to appear and chaperone her home. It was a feeling that persisted even as she grew up.

  The next morning was no exception: She collapsed onto the cold tile floor of Mac’s bathroom, having sprinted from his bed, her clothing in hand. Anything to avoid confronting him naked in daylight. She’d already entrusted him with way more than was wise. In a surge of adolescent paranoia, she imagined him at DIRT, talking trash to those boys about what she’d said and done the night before. Shit. Shit. Shit.

  The throbbing bass in her head was accompanied by a falsetto of C-sharp sinus pains and a tenor of nausea. Not long ago, she would have erased the drunken night with a large Diet Coke, BLT, and steak fries. But grease was no longer a miracle cure. She would pay in exhaustion and mild blues for the entire day, at least.

  That’s when she remembered it wasn’t Saturday.

  “Fuck!” M
arjorie smacked a hand over her mouth. She cracked the door and peeked out.

  Mac was still sprawled on his stomach, cheek pressed into a cockeyed pillow, lips parted. She could see the rise and fall of his back, bare but for a trio of healing mosquito bites. A tangled sheet covered any risqué bits, thankfully; they hadn’t closed the shades when they stumbled in, giddy and half stripped of clothes. She fought down images from the night before: clawing kisses on the pavement outside DIRT and in the taxi as they sped up 10th Avenue. For now, her memory was mercifully fractured into blurry shards.

  He had kicked the cream-colored comforter off the king-size platform bed so that it lay in a heap on the otherwise immaculate bamboo floor. Summer had just arrived, but, ever meticulous, he had already switched to his lightweight duvet.

  This room—like the rest of Mac’s too-slick loft—had an unused, boutique hotel quality, with more empty square footage than any city dweller might rightfully expect. A bearskin rug at the foot of the bed was one kitschy nod among “tasteful” interior-designer-approved pieces. Above modernist leather library chairs, white built-in shelves held first-edition Hemingway tomes and coffee table books from Annie Leibovitz at Work to a Beastie Boys Anthology, stacked both horizontally and vertically by color (as was the current trend). Marjorie doubted that Mac had read any besides the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Portfolio and a hardcover volume of Batman comics.

  Marjorie shut the door softly and set to work fastening her bra. Her shoulder felt stiff; she hated to think why. If only she had gone to yoga instead of meeting Vera. She stood and grabbed her skirt, shimmying it up to her waist, and slipped on her shirt, then realized with disgust that her underwear was missing.

  What stared back from the Art Deco mirror was not pretty: Her eye makeup had bled into raccoon circles; a near dreadlock had formed at the back of her head from pillow friction. She sighed and opened the medicine cabinet, revealing a stash of packaged guest toothbrushes; she opted not to dwell on why they existed. The rest of Mac’s face products were as high-end as her own but scented like Gillette deodorant, branded with names like “Black Ice” and packaged in silver and blue to signify to male consumers that no raw masculinity was lost by instituting a skincare regimen.

  Cold water on her face was a revelation. Once finished with her ablutions, she tucked any evidence into the bottom of the garbage pail, eschewed peeing for fear of a loud flush, and sat on the closed toilet seat to pull on her socks and boots.

  Perhaps she would survive, after all. She pulled her phone from inside her tote; it was dead.

  Marjorie slipped out the bathroom door and spotted her underwear tucked beneath Mac’s left thigh, standing out against the white sheets like a cheerful announcement of her bad choices. Fuck. They were unextractable without waking him. She sorted through her bag, for once thankful that she toted around everything she owned, and pulled out an old cotton “period” pair of extras—not cute. She crept close to the clock on Mac’s bedside table: 12:23 P.M.

  “Late” didn’t express it.

  Fuck.

  Seized with panic, Marjorie tripped to the doorway while pulling on her spare underwear, catching a boot in one leg hole. Falling toward the floor like a felled tree, she caught herself on the doorframe, untangled her foot, yanked the stubborn garment up, and started out. Behind her, an insufficiently groggy voice said, “Later, Madgesty.”

  She turned to see Mac smirking back at her, bed head rendering him no less self-satisfied.

  Fantastic. He could now cap off his madcap Madge story with a description of her tripping over grandma panties.

  With as much dignity as she could muster, Marjorie retorted, “Later.” At least it felt like a retort. And she marched—once out of sight, scurried—from his apartment into the freight elevator and onto the street.

  At least the humiliation is over, Marjorie thought, as she hurried east, her skirt tucked into her faded underwear.

  4

  It was a glorious blue-skied, sunny June day, against which Marjorie stood in stark contrast.

  It is an unwritten rule that the more disgusting one feels, and even perhaps looks, the more fat, pockmarked men on the streets of New York City whistle and shout lewd remarks. Maybe this is the universe’s way of making up for a bad night with recognition of resilient beauty. Or perhaps these men find a pretty woman, disheveled and vulnerable, suddenly more in their league. In Marjorie’s case, her exposed butt may have been to blame.

  Either way, Miss Plum jogged the first blocks of her walk of shame to work amid mostly good-natured jeers and invitations, appraisals of her “jugs,” and relentless reminders to “Smile!” (As if any woman wants to be instructed to grin when the morning merits nothing of the sort.) Then, as there was no simple subway route from the far West Side to Midtown, she flagged down a cab.

  The driver, Adolfo Moris Díaz, was born in Astoria, Queens, to a Dominican family and named for nineteenth-century Spanish poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, not the murderous founder of Nazism. Still, he went by “Mo.” As in “Mo Money, Mo Problems” his fellow drivers at the taxi dispatch liked to joke. And Mo was hard luck, often catching fares to remote areas of Staten Island and Long Island City, where there was little to no chance of picking up a return fare. And, of course, there was the poor luck of being named Adolf in a city full of Jews.

  Mo was in a particularly bad mood today, having been kept awake all night by his newborn son (safely named Joe), then starting his shift at 4:00 A.M. First thing at dispatch, mind clouded by exhaustion, he’d tripped over an orange safety cone and spilled coffee down his slacks, inspiring taunts from fellow cabbies about having pissed his pants. He’d also stained his lucky Jorge Posada Yankees jersey, a prized possession since the catcher (whom Mo considered similarly underappreciated) retired.

  Marjorie slid onto his scarred leather backseat, thinking it cold through her nonexistent skirt. She prayed that she wouldn’t throw up. If Mo had known the extent of her queasiness, he would have prayed too.

  “Thank goodness you stopped!” She glanced at his license. “Today … Adolfo, you saved a woman’s life.”

  Normally, Mo might have managed a smile, but he was in no mood to placate some spoiled slut who wreaked of booze. And he didn’t appreciate the use of his full first name. He opted for stony silence.

  “Okaaay, I’m going to 11 West 42nd Street.”

  “Eleven?”

  “Yes, 11. 11, 11.”

  “Wait, what? 111111?”

  “No. Sorry. Just ignore that last bit.”

  “So, just 1111?”

  “No. Just 11.”

  “Lady, where you going?”

  “Sorry. Just 11 West 42nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues … and make it snappy! That was a joke. That last part. Not the address.”

  Mo pulled violently from the curb as Marjorie gazed out the window, racking her brain for an excuse for showing up to the office at one o’clock in the afternoon in yesterday’s clothing: an emergency doctor’s appointment? A plumbing problem so dire that she’d had to plug the toilet with her foot and couldn’t get to a phone?

  On the upside, work could hardly get worse. Long before, Brianne had begun saddling her protégé with demeaning tasks: coffee fetching, copy making, collating, and lunch ordering—even once, during the annual boozy Christmas party, “bathroom upkeep.” Occasionally, Brianne rolled Marjorie out in a short dress to work the door at boutique openings or swag-filled parties, where she would shout about some invented mistake (The VIP list is in the wrong font, you idiot!) before an audience of waiting guests.

  At first, Marjorie had been seduced by Brianne’s horsy smile and hard sell, by an infamous tyrant’s deference, and by money because, unlike many of her peers, she didn’t come from a lot. But she couldn’t say why she continued to take the abuse. The truth, tucked between deep layers of gray matter, was that—after her post-high-school plummet from grace—she felt like too much of a failure.

  Marjorie was more defeated eac
h day, less capable of picking her purse up off the concrete floor of their lofted office and marching out the door. And, in self-fulfilling prophecy, she grew worse at her job: She jammed the copy machine, stapled paper stacks on the wrong corners, delivered them upside down on Brianne’s desk, and awaited her next reaming.

  When Mo finally pulled up to her office building, Marjorie sank lower into the taxi’s palm, awash in both relief and despair. The driver felt the former: the way she stuck her head out the window was a classic hangover move. And this girl looked like a puker.

  She excavated the insides of her bag, digging past empty packs of mint chocolate chip Extra Sugarfree Gum and wadded-up receipts, before uncovering her wallet. The bills inside were covered in sticky leaked lip gloss. She handed them to a thoroughly disgusted Mo, who looked to his taped-up photo of Shakira for support.

  In the lobby, Bill, the building’s long-enduring daytime security guard, looked meaningfully up at the antique wall clock, then winked a little sadly at Marjorie.

  “I know,” she murmured. “I know, I know.”

  “Miss Plum! Miss—” She disappeared into a waiting elevator car before he could clue her in to her exposed bottom.

  Marjorie shot upward, her stomach left floors behind. Fellow passengers carried salads with dressing on the side from the downstairs commissary; the naked lettuce depressed her. They studiously ignored each other, arranging themselves at an optimal distance.

  What felt like an eternity later, the doors opened with a bing! and she disembarked into the reception area at Bacht-Chit PR (that was “Bat-Shit” to those who knew Brianne). From behind an enormous spaceship of a desk, adorned with a single cruel orchid, Tina the receptionist looked Marjorie up and down, taking in the day-old, rumpled attire. “Oh, no.” Her pudgy cheeks sank inward. “Madge! What happened?” she stage-whispered, gesturing her friend closer.

  From one of the waiting area’s white Eames chairs, a man—in the same Brioni tie as Mac’s, his hair side parted and slicked back like Rhett Butler—followed Tina’s gaze. He crinkled his nose in offense and returned to his New York Magazine.