by Kyle Smith
The first time I ever took her out: the premiere of the hot HBO show of the year, on a January night in John’s Pizza in Times Square. We saw one of the tough guys from Goodfellas there and hung around him quoting lines from the movie while his eyes swept the room desperately for Security. Then I tried to heist a kiss off Bran as I was putting her in a cab. She turned her cheek: frostier than the January air.
The time we got dinner in the West Village in the summer a year ago and I bought a pot pipe. I had secured a little wacky weed a couple of weeks before, so I invited her to come over and partake. First we got drunk on red wine. We smoked a little, listened to eighties tunes, cuddled. When Spandau Ballet’s “True” came on, I got her locked in a slow dance. Then I tried to kiss her. It was like trying to catch a butterfly. I gave up and we sat back down on the sofa and she lay down with her head in my lap listening to the eighties. I stroked her long black hair for a while until she went home.
The time her parents took us to see a Broadway play. Her father’s first words to me were? “Tom? You’re a genius.” Apparently Bran had been saving my e-mails to her and forwarding them to her dad. Her parents brought their own food to the show: a quart Ziploc of trail mix. It was pretty tasty stuff. Afterward I walked her home and tried to kiss her again as a freezing wind blew off the Hudson. “Don’t,” she said.
That time she came to my birthday party. She and her best friend, Sharon, were the last ones left, and we all sat on the couch talking until four. When Sharon was in the bathroom, I whispered in Bran’s ear, “Why don’t you stay?” She laughed. And left.
I rub Bran’s back a little as we walk. “You’re tense.”
“See those yellow cars going by, Tom?” she says. “Can’t we get one?”
All of the cabs are occupied. We wait on a corner. My arm is around her. This would be an ideal moment for her to put her head on my shoulder, but she can’t, as that would require contortions. She is one inch taller than me.
“Maybe we’re not such a bad fit,” I say.
“Tom,” she says. “Men are like a black dress. Any woman could go shopping with a guy and try on a hundred black dresses, and he may say, ‘They’re all alike.’ But to her there’s just something missing from each one.”
Ouch. But I think of those lines in “You’re a Big Girl Now”: Oh I can change I swear. See what you can do. I can make it through. You can make it too.
In the cab I go for it anyway. She breaks off after about thirty seconds.
“Tom,” she says. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“I am trying,” I say evenly, “to sex you up.”
This earns me a) a laugh and b) another kiss. But there is a buzzing in the backseat.
“Is that my heart?” I say.
“Shut up, you idiot,” she says, and pushes me off. She digs her phone out of her backpack. She’s thinking: News! Sources!
I’m going for my phone thinking, Obviously Julia sensed me making out with someone other than her and she’s mighty peeved. Heh, heh.
But it’s Bran’s phone. She hits the talk button with Serious Young Journalist urgency.
“Yeah, Stuart,” she says, then covers the mouthpiece. “If you’re going to have the same phone as me you have to at least change your ring tone,” she orders.
“So that means you want to see me again,” I say.
But by this point she’s so annoyed that we don’t touch for the rest of the cab ride. I don’t change my ring tone.
Wednesday, August 15
I’m at work editing gossip, crafting headlines, throwing away press releases. But mainly I’m avoiding Julia. Not calling Julia. Ignoring Julia. She filled in for Hyman Katz at the noon features meeting, which I spent courageously not looking at her. She was not looking at me. But I was trying very hard not to look at her, whereas she did not seem to be trying very hard not to look at me. I know this because I was looking at her the whole time. Has she forgotten me? This ignoring game, it isn’t much fun.
The phone. It’s Bran. Do I want to come out for margaritas and bingo tonight?
“No,” I say. I want to go home and stew in my own fetid bachelorhood. Seems like a nice night for it.
“Come on,” Bran is telling me. “I’m bringing Katie.”
Katie. That cute blonde who told my fortune at my birthday party.
“My schedule,” I say, “just cleared itself.”
So we head to the West Village in the rain. Bran looks pretty good in a tight blue tank top and a clingy black skirt. I let her get the cab for once.
“I always pay for everything,” she whines. Girl arithmetic. Like when the check comes and it’s $41 plus tax and tip and the girl, saying, “I want to pay my share,” lays out a ten and three singles.
“I read your New Yorker piece,” I say.
“Thank you so much,” she says. “I couldn’t have done it if you had been stamping your feet and saying, ‘Let’s go, blow this off.’ But you were so patient with me, you helped me sift through everything, and then you were supportive of what I wrote even though I’d never written anything before.”
You get girl points for the strangest things. Basically, I a) stood there like a potted plant on the KK-Killuh night; b) read her first draft of the story. It was good. I told her so.
“It was all you,” I say.
“And thanks for giving me the name of your friend at The New Yorker,” she says.
“It was nothing,” I say.
“I really gained a lot of respect for you that night,” she says.
“I lost all respect for you when you didn’t recognize ‘Tangled up in Blue,’ ” I say. This is not meant to be taken seriously. But. Here. It. Comes.
“Why would you say that? That’s such a mean thing to say. I had nothing but nice things to say to you, and then you go and attack me again. You’re a prick.”
“What’d I say?” I say, incredulous. I spend a lot of my time with Bran in a state of incredulity. Nobody, with the possible exception of the collections department of the Columbia House Music Service, is so hostile to me.
“Why do you always have to be so mean?” she says.
“I wasn’t mean!” I say. Was I? Come on, guys, you be the jury. Mean: Hitler, Nixon, Martha Stewart. Not mean: Fred Rogers, Oprah, me.
Katie is waiting in a cocoon of cuteness at the bar. She waves us over. She seems glad to see me.
“I didn’t know you were coming!” she says.
So I get the exclamation point.
We’re eyeing the pitchers, and I’m thinking expensive tequila.
“Patrón?” I say.
“I’m a student,” she pleads. “I’m about to go to law school, I don’t have that much money. Let’s get the cheap tequila.”
“You’re a law student,” I tell her. “It’s not like you’re going to study Renaissance Poetry. You can pay.”
Katie and Bran both look utterly shocked.
“See,” Bran says. “He’s always being mean.”
Gaffe! Delayed arrival.
“You think I’m mean?” I ask Katie.
“You’re very, direct,” she says.
We get a table, and I slide into the booth first. Katie slides in next to me. Bran is across. Well now. Wouldn’t it be nice if this were really happening? Wait, it is happening. Pay attention. Make it keep happening.
We’re playing bingo and working on our fourth margaritas. Katie drinks. And Katie is small. This is good news. Both of us are losing when some tool yells, “Bingo!” and skips to the front of the room.
I look at Katie. She looks pretty good to me.
Bran is talking to some chick she seems to know at the next table.
“You have big cheeks,” I say to Katie.
She is mortified. “Why would you say such a hateful thing?” she says. “I know I have big cheeks. They used to call me Dizzy Gillespie in school.”
“Is he being mean?” Bran says, turning around.
“He’s mean,” Katie agrees. But she�
�s smiling. She leans over to me while Bran goes back to talking to the girl at the next table. “Tequila shots at the bar?” she says.
I wonder if I have gone so far into the Gaffe! zone that I have gone through a warp in the cosmic fabric and come out the other side: instead of being a doofus who can’t make his mouth say socially acceptable words, I am, to Katie, the galactic opposite: The Total Bastard. The Guy Who Doesn’t Give a Rat’s Ass. The Man Who Calls ’Em as He Sees ’Em. Have I stumbled through a trapdoor and found myself in Shooterville?
We do a shot at the bar.
“I heard you called her Ellen DeGeneres,” Katie says.
“Not in the lesbian sense,” I say. “Merely the looking-like-a-lesbian sense.”
“She’s a little touchy about that.”
“She asked what I thought,” I say. Why do girls do this—Are my thighs getting fat? Do you find that underwear model pretty?—when they know that they will either get an honest answer or a lie that proves they have turned us into cringing castrati?
“There’s this woman who keeps hitting on her,” Katie says. “That’s why. But after you told her she looked like Ellen, she went out and bought some skirts.”
Suddenly Bran is behind us.
“Okay, you guys,” she says. “Time to jet.”
We go to the Art Bar to hook up with a friend of Katie. The Art Bar sounds like some kind of Eurosnob hangout but it’s actually cool: if you go in the back room, you can find some old couches built before the primary functions of a couch were to be sleek and stylish and uncomfortable. These are plain old regular couches with all the styling touches of the ones I remember from Rockville: shabby cushions and threadbare arms.
My meanness trial is continuing.
“Why do you have to be so mean all the time?” Bran says, and begins itemizing my faults. What is she saying? I have no idea. I have to admit, I don’t really listen well at times like these.
“Uh-huh,” I say, picking up her right hand absently and rubbing it with both of mine. I’m watching Katie chat with her friend Ginny across the table. Ginny is tagged. A sparkly look-at-me-I-got-a-rich-guy ring. She is married, and has taken the corresponding 50 percent IQ cut. Everything she says is about “Josh.” Where Josh just took her on vacation. Why Josh and she are moving to Japan. What Josh thinks of her piano playing. Where Josh is, right now, at this very second. It turns out this woman is fluent in Japanese, is a concert-level pianist, and is training for the marathon. Yet she can spend ten minutes discussing the curtains she bought—today! this very day!—at Bloomingdale’s.
“Are you listening to me or are you watching Katie?” Bran says.
“Whose hand am I holding?” I say.
Katie shoots me a ferrety glance.
Ginny and Katie talk about how Katie, when she first came to New York from Iowa, stayed with Ginny, who also grew up in Iowa.
“Why’d you come to New York?” I say.
“It seemed so exciting,” Katie says.
“It can’t compete with Des Moines, can it?”
“You,” says Katie, “are such a bastard.”
But her eyes are flashing. Not with boredom.
I sink back into my seat and drift out of the conversation, wondering if I can get away with it: Can I be a Total Bastard? Will anyone buy it? From a guy who has reached only the Minimum Acceptable Height for an Adult Male?
Bran goes to the bathroom and I get up and sit next to Katie. She takes out her cell phone. She’s a little sloshed.
“Give me your phone number,” she says, and she adds it to her database. She wants my home number and my work number too. I enter hers into my phone. Now I’ve got her on call. Didn’t even have to be the first one to ask. Total Bastard mode: you should try it some time. It’s 99 percent humiliation free, since you never give any hint you care about anyone.
“Bang me on my cell,” I say, as Bran comes back. “Anytime.”
Now Bran is giving me a glance. “I’m gonna go,” I say. Be the first to leave. Cool.
“I’m going too,” Bran says, and all the girls do their hugging-and-kissing-good-bye routine.
But I don’t. I hang back. When I kiss Katie, I don’t want it to be a cheek job. And Total Bastards don’t do hugs. All of those troublesome greeting-and-departure rituals are eliminated! I just lead Bran out the door and into a cab.
“You like her,” Bran says in the cab. We’re approaching her block.
“She’s likable,” I say.
“You’re going to ask her out,” she says.
“You never know,” I say.
“It’s all fun and games until someone loses a guy,” she says miserably. And before she gets out, she grabs me and kisses me viciously on the mouth.
Friday, August 24
Julia took the day off. She and her whole family are driving the little brother to the University of Wisconsin for freshman year. They volunteered to help Al unpack, no doubt to his undying horror.
And Rick, a young man who just happens to be at Wisconsin vet school? He was merely Julia’s boyfriend from ages sixteen to twenty-two.
“Are you going to see him?” I say to her on the phone.
“Yeah, I called him,” she says. “He gave me that voice he used to use on other people who called him when we were dating. That ‘It’s so good to hear from you!’ voice. With exclamation points.”
Rick broke up with someone last spring. He was in New York. But he never called her the whole weekend he was in New York. Possibly he has tired of her.
“Broke your heart?”
“No,” she says. “He just dented it.”
“Does he have a girlfriend?” I say.
“Prob ably,” she says, disgustedly. He’s the kind of guy who snaps his fingers, and girls waft gently out of the trees to land at his feet.
“You’re going to hook up with him,” I say.
“No,” she says.
When she hangs up I immediately start dialing another number.
“Help,” I tell the phone. “I need a lawyer.”
“Any lawyer in particular?” Katie says.
“I’m thinking of someone I know with an intuitive sense of jurisprudence and a nice butt,” I say.
Her laugh is low and naughty. “I’ll let you know if I meet anyone like that,” she says.
“How’s the paper chase?” I say.
“We just had orientation,” she said. “Mandatory fun, happy hour. They actually made us wear name tags.”
“How were the boys? L.A. Law types?”
“I don’t know, did they have a spinoff called L.A. Khaki-Wearing Money-Grubbing Dorks?”
Exactly what I need to hear right now.
“It doesn’t even start until next week,” she says. “And already I’ve got homework. And I’m behind on it. I’ll never pass the bar.”
“I never pass any bars without stopping in. Care to join me at one of them tonight?”
“I really shouldn’t,” she says. “And I really need a drink.”
“And some dinner to wash it down with,” I say. “If you’re going to uphold the cause of justice, you’ll need to eat your broccoli rabe.”
“I know this new place on Columbus,” she says.
So we meet at seven at one of those joints where waitresses with pulled-back hair wear tight black ass pants with white shirts and a skinny black tie tucked insouciantly into their shirts. Katie is thirty but at the bar, in a cranberry pleated skirt and a white twin set, she looks like a cute undergraduate. She’s halfway through a legal tome and three-quarters of the way through a glass of red.
I sidle up next to her and take a seat. “I’ve come to examine your briefs,” I say.
“Huh-huh,” she says in that low way that makes me tingle.
When we sit down, our waitstaffer grandly opens our menus for us before handing them over: that’s class. Then Katie issues a preliminary injunction.
“I’m not that hungry. And do not,” she says, “get me drunk. I have to get thro
ugh forty pages tonight.”
Menu girl is waiting with a local-TV-newscaster smile that says: Sure, I don’t care if you guys walk out of here with a $23 tab. I do this job because it is my calling to serve.
“We’ll have a bottle of the Burgundy,” I say. I love this place already: the most expensive bottle on the menu is only $40.
“Be right back,” says the girl.
Katie narrows her eyes. “You total bastard,” she says. But she can’t help smiling.
“Who said you could have any of it?” I say. “A man’s got a thirst.”
The girl comes back and stages her little bottle theater. Presents the label (I peer, squint, mouth the words, finally nod solemnly), wrenches out the cork and pours me half a sip. Now it’s my turn to star. I swirl, hold the glass up to the light frownily and swirl some more. Then I get into that whole sniffing business.
“Oh, just drink it, nancy boy,” Katie says.
“Please. I’m checking to see if it has legs.”
She tries to kick me under the table but she has little legs. I grab her ankle and hold it, running my hand up her calf.
I sip. Give the girl a nod.
“You don’t need to check out my legs,” Katie says. But she relaxes her leg and I hold her calf for a minute. Her sandal falls off.
“Ticklish?” I say.
“Don’t you dare,” she says, and her leg is gone.
“D’you ever get tired of dating?” she says.
“Yes. No.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“It’s like a job interview,” I say.
“Okay, interview me,” she says, and sits up, all straight and perky. She starts to drink her Burgundy.
“Can you describe your last, um, position for me?”
“Huh-huh,” she laughs, in that low, growly way of hers. “I won’t tell you the position, but I’ll tell you the guy. His name was Fred. The second time I went to his apartment? He had weird food. And that was it.”
“Weird food?”
“Goose fat. Smoked turkey necks. Endless cans of clam juice. Weird food.”