by Kyle Smith
The sidewalk talent. Has there ever been a greater moment in history to watch girls? We have all come to an agreement on the hair: keep it straight, clean, neat, shiny, somewhere between chin and shoulder length. The hair. You can see your reflection in it, and the chemicals make it so natural looking. But if the hair is small, the tops are smaller. Some sort of T-shirt and tank-top manifesto has been signed out there in girl-land. Now every top comes in the same size: not quite large enough. Combine that with the low-riding pants and every time they bend over it’s showtime. It’s the summer of ass cleavage, and any girl who elects full body coverage quickly starts to wonder if she looks like a first lady.
Then there’s upstairs. So much on display, so little on offer. Check out the top floor on that girl, the pair of them harnessed, pulled up, pushed together, tightly sheathed—she has a shelf, in a scoop-neck—make that two-scoops-neck—T-shirt. Julia’s weren’t that big. Yeah. Who needs her?
Time to pull myself together. I’ve got a date tonight. With Liesl Lang, that slender blonde I met at a party in Park Slope. She’s sexy, but when I took her to lunch a couple of times she wasn’t exactly encouraging. She made me fight her for the check, and she didn’t reach for it in super-slo-mo the way most girls do; she really wanted to pay her share. It could be that she has an overripe sense of fairness, though. This girl is so honest, she would never make use of the pictures, descriptions, and accounts of a game without the express written permission of Major League Baseball. I have decided to warm her up by taking her for a nice mid-priced dinner. My plan, of course, is to fill her with alcohol. This is partly for her, partly for me. Because I also need warming up, because basically without booze I have no personality.
Liesl and I have these conversations. I try to make her laugh and she doesn’t. She just waits. So I try again. Then she doesn’t laugh again. She has a serious life, a serious job. She works as the head paralegal for one of those wild-haired downtown public defenders who sign up for any cause, as long as it’s lost. They defend guys who try to blow up buildings, guys who decide God wants them to clean out a passenger car of the 5:33 to Garden City, guys who burn down entire nightclubs because it seems easier than waiting around to kill the ex-girlfriend inside. I have a slight problem with public defenders: why do these people think they’re so noble? The night I met her I asked, “Uh, aren’t most of the people you defend guilty?” She said, “They all are.” Then of course she gave me the standard everyone-has-a-right-to-a-lawyer line. Sure. I understand. But shitty people have a right to shitty lawyers. What attracts good people to saying, “Oh, you’ve got some glassy-eyed murderers who need help evading justice? I’m there!” The KKK has a right to hold their spring cotillion, but you don’t see any bright-eyed young Bryn Mawr grads applying for jobs on their decorating committee.
And anyway, she’s not Julia.
“So why don’t you just move on?” Julia’s sitting by the window, smoking. I even miss her smoking. How can I miss her smoking? It fouls the air. It makes my eyes water. If she farted, would I be hiking through the Rockies and go, “Ah, the mountain breeze is nice, but not half as sweet as Julia’s farts”? If she jabbed me with a steak knife every night as I slept, would I caress the scars?
Yes and yes.
“You’re smart,” she says. “You have a good job.”
“Yes,” I say, “but who wants to date a pasty-faced leprechaun shaped like a bowling pin?”
“I think you’re quite handsome,” she says.
“See, that’s why I can’t get over you. Who talks like that? ‘Quite handsome.’ Everything you say sounds innocently endearing.”
“Oh, come on. You’ve gone out with a lot of girls. You even went out with other girls while you and I were, um, hanging out.”
I never told her that last part, but Imaginary Julia knows everything about me. That way she can hurt me even more.
“That’s true,” I admit. Why not be honest when you’re talking to yourself? “But it was only because I needed an air bag in case I crashed and burned with you.”
See, then, I’ve scared her away again. Now I look at the window and all I see is the pane. Well, and the dirt on it.
I dial my friend Mike Vega, a guy who crossed over to the Other Side four years ago. Mike and I are friends because we once had a lot in common. We had lunch together every day at our Potomac high school, played soccer together, contributed shaky fiction to the school newspaper (my stories were about vampires, his about Euro-spies who seduced beautiful women). The intervening years, for him, have been the story of decreasing embarrassment about having money. Too late, I figured out that the rich are very, very different from you and me: they have more sex. The new Camaro that suddenly appeared in his driveway one senior day hosted more deflowerings than the bridal suite at beautiful Mount Airy Lodge. In those days he said he never thought of himself as rich—his parents had the money, you see, not him, all he had was the right to spend it—but money knowledge is in the genes and by the time we were twenty-six he had himself a law degree and a position at a top M and A firm. Now that he’s happily ensconced with a wife, every day his little household corporation boasts a new acquistion—here a teak dining table or a digital TV, there a Tag Heuer, a Steinway, a Lexus. I keep wondering when he’ll tell me I clash with his lifestyle and order me to get an MBA. Or at least take up golf.
He’s not there. “Hi,” he says on the machine. “We’re at the hospital having a baby, so we’ll get back to you later.”
Not that I have some sort of aching primal-chick need to have a baby or anything, but I do get the sense that Mike is accomplishing more than I am today. Do something!
So I flick on the TV. Bugs is in a wrestling match with this huge villain called the Crusher. The Crusher tries various ways to subdue Bugs (shooting himself out of a cannon—cannons are easily had in cartoons, there’s always one in your hip pocket—or building a brick-and-mortar cube around his hand to slug Bugs with) and then decides to run him over with a train. So the Crusher ties up Bugs on some train tracks that have suddenly appeared in the wrestling ring and then goes off to conduct a train that apparently he keeps parked in the upper deck of the arena. The choo-choo starts up. The Bunnyis scared. The Crusher is smiling maliciously. The choo-choo gathers steam. Bugs is really sweating bullets now. The Crusher can hardly contain his sadistic glee…then suddenly the film goes all wobbly and stops, as if it has come off the projector. Bugs walks onscreen, which is now merely a white background. He apologizes but says the film broke. He says he has no idea how it happened. Then, grinning rakishly, he brings out from behind his back a pair of scissors. Snip, snip.
Bugs is always doing pomo things like that. Not only does he have access to a limitless array of props, makeup, and costumes, but he also has this surreal godlike ability to simply step out of the situation and overrule everything that’s happened. I’m kind of like Bugs. Bad things keep happening to me, mostly of my own doing, but I show no scars. I show up for work every day and go to parties most nights and I make conversation and trade remarks about characters in the popular culture. And, like Bugs, I am a permanent resident of the Valley of the Bachelors.
Can I just cut the film and start over please? This is not my life. It’s just a rough draft. I’ll get it right next time around.
The phone. It’s Liesl. To cancel, no doubt. Girls can smell failure, even over the phone.
“I’m going uptown to see the Dance Theater of Harlem,” she says in a cancellation tone.
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“What time should we meet up, or?” she says hesitantly.
Betray no weakness. Cover up the stench. Rub on some broken-heart deodorant.
“Why don’t you just stop by after the dance?”
Slick. Get her in the apartment.
I hold my breath as she makes pondering noises.
“Um,” she says. “Okay.”
Now relax. I practice the piano badly—really, it’s a $99 electric Yamaha; Schroeder
had a better piano—and then read without interest. I pick up the New York Observer. Throw away the articles. They’re just the bread in the desperation sandwich. The meat is in the back pages. The small ads.
“Single white female, facial deformity, seeks man 29–40. 5’11" and above, in good shape.”
This woman has a facial deformity, and I don’t meet her height requirement. Us, afraid of commitment? Women can’t commit to one drink with the greatest guy on earth if he’s one inch shorter than they are. I read somewhere that Manhattan does not have the highest proportion of single people in America. We came in second. First place went to a county in Hawaii. Party town, USA? The place where moist young college grads come to celebrate panting youth? No: a former leper colony. Does Facial Deformity Woman place an ad, in, say, Canker Sore Illustrated? No. She picks the most upscale, Gucci-and-Harvard paper in the country for her personal ad, then she sits back thinking: George Clooney will be calling any minute.
Liesl buzzes me around five. I don’t jump her, although she is sexy in a beige tank top with matching bra straps peeking out on the sides. And light makeup. This matters: it’s a Sunday, and she’s a feminist. Not a default feminist as in, “Well, I’m a woman so I guess I have to be one, don’t I?” but a real one who writes angry letters to the Times to call attention to their insidious sexist language. This is the New York Times we’re talking about, the paper that made “white male” a surprisingly effective insult.
I love the way she looks, all blue eyes, fair skin, medium-blond hair. She looks like the führer’s wet dream, and why not? She’s German. Half German, anyway. She was born here; her mother fled East Berlin in the fifties. I picture my friends—the Cohens and Rabinowitzes, the Meyers, the Shapiros, the Fleisch-, Good-, and Kuntzmans—freaking when they meet her.
“I like your place,” she says, looking around as though she’s thinking of renting it. “Oh, my. Those, flow ers,” she says. “Time to change them.”
I look at the windowsill: oh yeah. The flowers. From The Dinner. They look like I feel.
I’m in the middle of watching a Brian Wilson special on TV. I start to tell her about it. Maybe she’s a fan.
“And who is Brian Wilson?” she says.
Who is Brian Wilson? He only wrote “Good Vibrations,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” and “Don’t Worry, Baby.” I can see not knowing who Brian Wilson is if you also don’t know who Mozart was. But this girl definitely knows who Mozart was. And she grew up in the time of Brian, not in eighteenth-century Austria.
It gets better: she hasn’t even heard of “Caroline, No.”
“ ‘Caroline Knows’?” she says. “I thought it was ‘God Only Knows.’ ”
At times like this, I look to a higher power for guidance. Luckily I have His image on the wall: Bogart. The poster shows him sitting at a typewriter. Next to him stand two guys pointing guns at him. He ignores them and keeps typing. That picture says it all. The film was called In a Lonely Place. He plays a jaded writer, a guy so hard-boiled that he cracks jokes when he finds out a girl he knew slightly has been murdered. My favorite line is when his detective buddy tells him he has recently gotten married. Bogey just says, “Why?”
Not only was Bogart great for the part, but the girl who makes him fall in love and confront his emotions for the first time is played by this withering blonde, Gloria Grahame. She was clever and hard, a girl who could say it all with a cocked eyebrow or a flared nostril. Bergman in Casablanca? Please. A clinging bore who fawns over that twinkle-toes do-gooder Laszlo. Where’s the mystery in her? Give me Gloria any day. In every movie you get the feeling that she could be capable of anything. And in real life she was: she married the guy who directed In a Lonely Place, that weirdo Nicholas Ray. Then dumped him. Then she married his son from an earlier marriage. Now that’s a woman who knows how to hurt a guy. And make him beg for more. Because he knows it’ll take him a lifetime to figure her out. You don’t hang on to the crossword puzzle after you’ve finished it, do you?
What would Bogart do with Liesl? He’d take her out to a cool dive. A mildly pretentious Frenchy cafe, the kind that makes girls want to drink because it’s such a European thing to do. Luckily there’s one right in my neighborhood. It’s one of the main reasons I picked this apartment: I’ve closed many a deal at Cafe Frog.
We get a table in the sunshine. I give her the old, “Do you want to get a bottle of wine?”
“No,” she says.
I get a half bottle for me. She orders one beer, makes it last. That scotches my evening right there. Never hit on a woman who could pass a Breathalyzer.
Mmmm. Scotch.
She agrees to come back to the apartment afterward. My arsenal is prepared.
Weapon number one: my baby pictures. This a) humanizes me; b) makes me look sensitive; c) makes her think we would make beautiful babies (I was one, after all); and d) shows me at my best, since frankly I looked stellar at five, but rarely since. Who doesn’t look good in baby pictures? Clear skin, matched outfits, induced jollity. Plus your unbroken heart is in mint condition. Your hairline hasn’t begun its retreat and your gut has not yet made the acquaintance of Messrs. Anheuser and Busch. Baby pictures are the Doomsday Machine of getting play. Press the button, it’s all over.
There are pictures of my parents at Niagara Falls for their honeymoon, pictures of me abusing the seams of various Little League outfits (Why were they always too small, year after year? Couldn’t they have just given me the next year’s uniform ahead of time?), pictures of me in a Bugs Bunny costume, pictures of me arm in arm with my best friend, Bucky, both of us in white T-shirts and navy camp shorts. It is always summer in these pictures, or a holiday. I spot a pattern. There were the Gosh-Darned Adorable Years (0–6) and the Really Quite Acceptably Kid-Looking Kid Years (6–11). Then there were the Wonder Years (11–32), as in, I wonder how two such foxy parents managed to produce such a chimp?
As I hand each picture to Liesl for adoration, I realize she is meticulously putting them in chronological order. She is not even issuing the requisite “Awww’s.” Come on: me in a Donald Duck hat, age six? Who could resist?
“Wait, wait,” she says as I give her a picture of my dad and me at Disney World circa 1979. I’ve got on huge plastic glasses and an Electric Light Orchestra T-shirt.
Liesl looks at this one, flips it over, peers at the date, finds the exact right place for it in the stack. I’m tempted to shuffle the deck on her to see if it will make her cry.
I take the Beach Boys’ Greatest Hits off the CD player (I played it with manboy sarcasm; it contains both “Caroline, No” and “God Only Knows,” but Liesl didn’t seem to notice my point) and unsheath weapon number two: Cowboy Junkies, The Trinity Session. In times like these I always choose The Trinity Session. This is guaranteed stuff. Over the years it’s fifteen for fifteen in delivering at least a gropefest. Don’t think I don’t keep charts for these things.
“What’s this?” Liesl asks.
“Cowboy Junkies,” I say.
“Is that a joke?” she says.
“No,” I say. “It’s actually their name.”
“Is there anything on TV?” she asks.
After we watch a sitcom about (hint, hint) horny girls in New York (“I didn’t think it was very funny,” she informs me), I fetch her a glass of water (isn’t that supposed to come after the sex?).
But we talk and chat and then we chat and talk and ponder and talk serious stuff about the future when all I want to do is taste the inside of her mouth. I can’t, because she’s still holding the glass of water. She takes a sip, and then keeps it in her hand. Who does this? The coffee table is right there! She takes another sip, continues to clutch the glass. She does this until she drains the entire glass. Then, finally, anxiously (the half bottle of wine has worn off so I’m all antsy again), I lean in and give her—well, not much, because I pull back at the last second and give her what turns out to be a peck. A mom kiss. Short and not particularly sweet.
“
Umm,” she says.
Here it comes. The let’s-be-friends speech. Or worse: the I-don’t-feel-that-way-about-you speech.
“Yeah?” I say, trying to hit the mute button on my ringing desperation. God, I need to prove I can get over on someone.
“Nothing,” she says. Girls are always saying, “Nothing,” but it’s always something.
“Come on,” I coax. Why do they always make you beg for bad news?
“It’s just…”
“Yeah?”
“Could you…”
Rub your back? Kiss your ear? Remove your bra?
“Yeah?”
“Could you walk me to the subway?”
It’s ten o’clock. It’s ten fucking o’clock.
Off to the subway. A couple more pecks, but then she gives me a nice, long, warm hug. What does that mean? Maybe she wants to get busy. Maybe she wants me to be her brother.
Five minutes later I’m watching Bugs again, but after a while I decide I’ve had enough of this nonproductive behavior for one weekend. I stand up straight. I turn out the lights and program the CD carousel to play Murmur, Up, “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea,” “A Letter to Elise,” and “Yellow.” I sit back down. It takes me five glasses of Scotch to get through them all and then I stumble into the kitchen to drink five glasses of water to cheat the hangover gods and then the couch seems so warm and friendly and inviting and…
Monday, July 9
And when I walk in the lobby this morning, whose is the first face I see? Hers. Not dream her; for-real her. We still work together, after all. Did I not mention that? I rarely bump into her, though, since her desk is on the far wing of the building.
Today it’s her first day in a new job. She’s been promoted from sub-blue-collar-wage-tryout-level deputy assistant flunky to, like, Officially Sanctioned Big-Time Media Factotum.
I kid around with her. Badly.