Hal dropped his eyes. “I’ll always be here for you.”
“I’ll always be here for you,” Diana jeered back at him. “The official motto of Dumpsville. Population: me.” Hal winced—watching The Simpsons together had been one of their routines, and usually a reference like that would make him smile. Now he just looked sad.
Diana slid out of the booth and walked out the door with her head held high. She managed to keep it together through the subway ride and the walk to her parents’ apartment building. Then, in her bedroom, the tears came, and with them her resolve. Hal had been her first real boyfriend, her first true love, and while she’d never been the kind of girl to daydream over a white dress and a wedding, still she’d imagined herself as a young bride and young mother, imagined living with Hal, raising a family with him, growing old in Hal’s company.
Back in Philadelphia, Diana purged her apartment of every sign of her ex-boyfriend. The books he’d given her, the sweatshirts and boxers he’d left beneath her dorm-room bed, the Valentine’s card she kept tucked into her mirror, all of these went into a contractor-size trash bag, which she tied in a double knot and left beside the door.
She couldn’t go through it again. No more romance, no more breakups that left her gutted and heartsick. No more boys like Hal who would kiss her as if they were drowning and her mouth held the world’s last breath of air. Certainly no men like her father, handsome and charismatic, who’d want their women to traipse after them like camp followers, fitting their lives to his wishes. No more.
Breathing hard, she went into the bedroom, did her hair and makeup, and wiggled into a tight black dress. I am going to get drunk, she thought, shoving her feet into high heels and stalking out the door.
There was a bar at the corner, and there was a guy at the bar, a tall guy, her father’s height, who stopped talking to the bartender and turned to stare as Diana gulped down her first glass of white wine. “Hey,” he said as she finished her second glass. “You okay there?”
“I’m fine.”
“I’m Gary.” When she’d first glimpsed him she’d thought, uncharitably, that he had a face like an elbow, all unpleasant angles, tiny, muddy eyes and a sharp, jutting nose. His body, underneath his shirt, looked just as bony and unwelcoming. But then she considered more generously. He had a nice smile. Straight white teeth, a kind face. He slid a twenty-dollar bill across the bar, and already that was better than Hal, who’d insisted on splitting the cost of everything right down the middle. She drank more wine, smiled at him, and thought, Screw Hal, who wasn’t good enough or strong enough for her anyhow; Hal, whom she’d once heard remarking, Diana’s got a bigger set than I do … and, the hell of it was, he’d said it knowing that she might have overheard, and in a tone suggesting that she wouldn’t be offended if she had.
Gary, she learned through her thickening haze, worked in communications for a Philadelphia-based pharmaceutical manufacturer. He had funny stories about approving TV spots for the latest drug for erectile dysfunction without saying either erection or dysfunction, because it turned out that both words made men uncomfortable. He’d had the same job since finishing business school, and when she asked if he liked it, he shrugged and said, “They call it work for a reason.” Not too ambitious, she’d thought, letting him buy her another drink. Then again, she was ambitious enough for two people. Maybe even more. Hal had made that clear.
Eventually, they were the only people left at the bar, and just before last call, Gary pulled her against him and started kissing her, his thin lips pursed and aiming for her mouth but making contact primarily with her nose. Stumbling out into the darkness, giggling in an almost Lizzie-like fashion, Diana thought that this was what regular girls felt like: her college roommates, who’d hooked up with guys as casually as trying on sweaters at the Gap. This was normal, this was fun, this was a harmless way to get over Hal, to feel like she was desirable and womanly instead of a bitch with a bigger set of balls than her boyfriend.
Gary lived in Society Hill, in an apartment on Pine Street, where he slept in a bare-walled room on a mattress on the floor. He held her hand tightly in his own sweaty one as he led her up the stairs, and gazed at her with an awed look on his face as she wriggled out of her black dress and tossed it at him. “Oh, God,” he groaned. “You’re so hot!” He sounded, she thought fuzzily, like a fourteen-year-old gawping at his first centerfold. Quickly she found herself on the mattress and there, less than two hours after meeting, they consummated their love, in a ten-minute episode that ended with Gary panting, red-faced, his sunken chest drenched in sweat, and Diana flat on her back, feeling as if she’d undergone a minor dental procedure—a little violated, slightly sore, stretched in places she wasn’t used to stretching, but nothing that a few Advil wouldn’t help.
So the sex wasn’t great, she thought as they kissed, bumping noses and teeth as sweat dribbled from his forehead onto her breasts. (“Sorry!” he’d cried, wiping her off with a pillowcase.) True, Gary had jammed his fingers up inside her like he was trying to extract the last olive from the jar, and his kisses were the dry pecks of a maiden aunt. But the night had served its purpose. When it was over, and she lay in the crook of his arm, Gary looked down at her, light-brown eyes warm, with just the tiniest spit bubble in the corner of his mouth. “That was incredible,” he said. Diana couldn’t detect anything but sincerity in his voice or in his eyes. So maybe that was great sex for him. Maybe this was great sex for everybody, and there was something wrong with her. Either way she should stop thinking so much—another trait Hal had faulted her for.
Gary slid his hand over her belly, and tugged at her pubic hair in a not entirely pleasant fashion. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
Can you turn into someone else? Diana couldn’t stop herself from thinking. Can you turn into Hal? She pushed the thought away and then, using her own fingers to guide Gary’s, she showed him what to do, eventually succeeding in producing a ticklish spasm that she supposed was, at least technically, an orgasm.
So much for my one-night stand, she thought, pulling on her dress as Gary snored.
Walking the street at three in the morning, panties in her pocket, looking for a cab, she thought she would never see him again. Never seeing the guy again seemed to be how most of her friends’ hookups ended, with neither party brokenhearted, or even much worse for the wear. He’d wanted her, and that was what mattered.
When Gary called her the next day, when he found her address and sent pink tulips to her apartment the day after that, she’d been surprised and charmed. He was pursuing her. In all of her previous relationships, the more loving one had always been her. Maybe she’d give Gary a try and see what it felt like to be on the other side, the one who was desired, who was pursued. True, Gary, with his rattling chest and runny nose, didn’t make her heart flutter, but Diana figured she’d see plenty of fluttering hearts in her professional life. If she found his kisses less than enthralling—if, in fact, the first time she’d felt his tongue brush against her own she’d felt briefly revolted—well, there was more to life than kissing. Besides, she’d slept with him. Diana had slept with a grand total of only three other guys—Hal, her love, and Craig, in summer camp, and Paolo, the exchange student she’d dated for six months her sophomore year at Columbia who’d had a disconcerting tendency to fall asleep immediately after and, in a few humiliating instances, during the act. To Diana, sex meant something; it meant she couldn’t put him aside or discard him like a book she’d started and decided she didn’t want to finish.
She dated Gary through the fall and winter, then brought him home that spring, for Passover, to meet the family. She remembered how, over her mother’s dining room table, she’d looked into his eyes and thought, He will never leave me. This thought was a comfort to her. It was also a helpful counterpoint to the thought she’d had just seconds before it, which was, He’s maybe a little bit dumb.
Of course that wasn’t true. Stupid people didn’t go to Penn, then Rutgers, whe
re Gary had earned a master’s degree in business. If he occasionally looked doltish at certain angles—his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide and glassy, as if he’d just been given a really hard word at the spelling bee—well, that was simply an accident of bone structure and genetics. He was dependable, and he loved her, and he would never leave her … and she wasn’t so desperately, blindly in love with him that she’d let go of her goals and dreams and give herself up, the way her own mother had.
Sylvie had the entire meal catered, and Gary, who’d never tasted gefilte fish before, ate an entire piece and even asked for seconds. When it was time to clear the table he’d practically leapt to his feet and started clearing and scraping and packing the leftovers in Tupperware. “He seems like a fine young man,” Diana’s father had said, before slipping into his office to take a phone call from the head of the Rules Committee. Diana’s mother, typically, had watched Richard go and said nothing to her oldest daughter except “If you’re happy, I’m happy.”
The next afternoon, a gorgeous, soft April day, Gary had walked with her to the Columbia campus, where she’d been invited to a young alumni luncheon during the school’s spring break. She was just about to kiss him goodbye and go through the gates on Broadway when she caught sight of a familiar figure across the street—Hal, holding hands with a leggy blonde. Diana felt her heart speed up. She knew Hal so well, his every gesture and expression, and she could tell, from his body language, that he was trying to decide whether to greet her or just keep walking. Her first impulse was to grab Gary’s arm and hustle him onto campus, to pretend she hadn’t seen her old boyfriend who’d dumped her so cruelly, but by the time she’d reached for Gary, Hal had crossed the street, calling, “Hey, Diana!”
Awkward introductions were exchanged while the two couples stood on the sidewalk between a hot dog cart and the ivied brick wall separating the campus from the street. “This is Maeve,” Hal said. Diana took her in—the boot-cut jeans, the tight button-down shirt, the expensive eyeglasses and ironic sneakers. Undergrad, she guessed, a theory confirmed when Maeve told them she was waiting to hear from grad schools for next fall. Diana looked at Hal, in his khaki shorts and alt-rock-band T-shirt and running shoes, and thought, He probably can’t get a woman with an actual job to go out with him. Then her bravado faded and her heart crumpled as she wondered whether he’d courted this Maeve with the same lines that had worked on her, whether he’d lain in wait on the library steps and said the words Ironic juxtaposition.
Maeve laced her fingers with Hal’s. Diana took Gary’s arm, knowing how good, how solid and grown-up he looked in his khakis and button-down; how, unlike Hal, he had put away childish things. He was a man, she thought; a man, not a boy … and on the heels of this happy realization came another one: I can make this work. True, maybe the chemistry between them wasn’t great, but what was chemistry compared to compatibility and maturity and two grown-ups who wanted the same things? She could marry him, she thought, and stick to her timetable: a wedding by twenty-three, a baby the year after that.
“You look good,” Hal said to Diana, his voice low.
“You, too.” With her mind made up and the matter settled, she could afford to be generous. “How’s stand-up?”
Stand-up, it emerged, wasn’t good. Hal tried to sound optimistic, speaking vaguely of some opportunities on the horizon, a regular gig at an open mike night and a spec script he was writing, but Diana quickly forced him to admit that he was still earning a living as a paralegal, still living with five roommates in a two-bedroom apartment in a sketchy neighborhood in Harlem … and, of course, still dating college girls.
“Nice to see you,” she said, offering Hal her hand, explaining that her attendance was expected at the young alumni luncheon. Then she slipped her fingers through Gary’s and, beaming, kissed him. His lips were still too thin, his mouth entirely too wet … but none of that mattered. Her mind was made up. Diana would bring all of her will to bear on the subject of Gary and their marriage (that Gary might not want to marry her had never even crossed her mind) … and her will had never failed her, not in the classes she took or the races she’d run. It would not fail her now.
“So do you think you guys will get married?” Lizzie asked. This was in August, right before Diana was starting classes again, and Lizzie had come down to Philadelphia to spend the weekend. Diana and Gary had taken her to their favorite brunch spot, then to the Museum of Art, where Lizzie was visibly bored, and on to the Mütter Museum of medical oddities, where Lizzie had spent hours photographing the collection of syphilitic skulls and taking close-ups of some of the two thousand objects that had been removed from people’s throats.
“Maybe,” Diana had answered, turning her back to her sister, unhooking her bra, and slipping it through the sleeves of her shirt.
“And you like him?” Lizzie’s disbelief was as palpable as the scent of sandalwood and pot that clung to her clothes.
“Yes,” Diana said, twisting her hair into a knot on top of her head. “I do.”
Lizzie peered into the screen of her digital camera, training the lens on the ceiling, with her blond hair fanning out over the bedspread. “Why?” she asked.
Diana sighed. “Because he’s a good guy.”
“He’s boring,” Lizzie said, punctuating her assessment with the shutter’s click.
“Because he’s not passing out at the table or stealing Grandma’s silver?”
Lizzie fiddled with the lens, then snapped a picture of the crown molding. “Boring,” she repeated, swinging the camera toward Diana and punctuating her assessment with another click.
Diana turned her back again. She hated having her picture taken, hated the way she looked so massive and overpowering through Lizzie’s eyes and Lizzie’s lens. She thought of telling her sister that, unlike her, she couldn’t afford to be picky, because she was never going to have a dozen guys to choose from. With hard work at the gym and at the mirror, where there was always something to pluck or wax or exfoliate, Diana rated herself acceptable: a six-and-a-half on the one-to-ten scale. Lizzie, with no work at all, looked like a woodland sprite, a busty little thing meant to wear a toga and a crown of laurel leaves and strum a lyre on a mountaintop. Diana looked, her exchange-student boyfriend had once told her, like the goddess Diana, Diana the huntress, born to sling a bow and a quiver full of arrows over her broad shoulders and go out and kill something for dinner.
Lizzie set down the camera, rolled onto her side, and swept her hair back over her shoulder. “You know that he spits when he talks.”
Diana sighed. She knew. You couldn’t spend five minutes with Gary and not know. “He can’t help it,” she said, stepping into her pajama bottoms. “And by the way, you could have been a little more subtle.” At brunch, over banana-and-ricotta-stuffed French toast and a spinach-and-blue-cheese frittata, Gary had asked Lizzie where she’d be applying to college, and Lizzie had lifted her napkin and ostentatiously wiped off her cheeks before answering.
Her sister snorted. Lizzie was a great snorter. She could get away with it. On Lizzie, it was cute. “Subtle?” she said. “I thought I was going to drown. How can you like him? He’s a …” She lifted the forefinger and thumb of each hand into the shape of an L and a 7, then touched them together, forming a square.
“He’s nice,” Diana said, feeling her face heat up, hoping that Lizzie’s critique would not extend to Gary’s looks. He did have those gentle brown eyes and good teeth and thick dark hair, and he was tall, but his face was all unpleasant, aggressive angles, and his body was bony and unwelcoming.
“Bor-ing,” Lizzie repeated, lifting her camera again. “I liked Hal.”
Diana turned away from the lens. “Hal,” she said tightly, “has moved on.” She got into bed beside her sister, rolled on her side, and shut her eyes.
Maybe love was a myth anyhow, a brew of hormones and fantasy, evolution’s way of getting men and women together long enough for them to procreate, back in the day when girls got pregnant
at twelve, were pregnant or nursing for the next twenty years, and were dead of the plague by forty. She was trying for something infinitely more obtainable than true love: a man with whom she could build the partnership she craved after all those years of listening to her father’s stealthy early-morning departures and late-night returns, her mother’s whispering and cosseting, and the way she had eyes only for her husband. She would find a man who would respect her as an equal and a partner; a man who would love her and never leave her, a man, unlike her father, who wouldn’t give her a ring and then spend the next ten, twenty, thirty years taking things from her, chipping off little pieces, eroding her confidence and independence until there was nothing left but a shell in a St. John suit.
She’d have one child, a girl, she hoped. They’d take a week’s vacation at the beach each summer, with the daughter holding her hand, stopping to consider driftwood and shells and sea glass. A cozy house with a fireplace and a little garden or a yard in the back. A husband, of course: someone to share popcorn at the movies, to carve the turkey on Thanksgiving, to hang Christmas ornaments, to kiss on New Year’s Eve, to help her (it was morbid, but inevitable) handle her parents’ old age and eventual death, because God knew that Lizzie would be useless. When Gary had proposed, pulling a box out of his pocket and saying, “Will you be my girl forever?,” Diana let him slip the ring on her finger, let him kiss her lips, and whispered, “Yes,” in his ear. She had told herself that she would have exactly the life she wanted, even if he wasn’t exactly the man she’d dreamed of having it with.
By the time she arrived at their redbrick row house, still fuming from the afternoon’s revelation about her dad, she’d sweated through her shirt, and her face was flushed. The living room was cool and quiet, the television off, Milo’s Legos were stacked neatly in the corner, and the leather couch Gary had brought into the marriage was wiped clean. The room still looked unfinished, with its walls bare and its built-in bookcases mostly empty. Diana had big plans—there was a blue-and-white Chinese export vase she’d had her eye on in an antiques shop on Pine Street; an alpaca blanket, like a soft gray cloud, that would look perfect on top of the couch; the blown-up black-and-white photographs of Milo as a baby and a toddler that she’d meant to have framed and hung. So far, she was having a hard time putting together the time and the money to keep the room and, indeed, the whole house from looking as though the three of them had moved in the week before. Can’t we just buy a couple of chairs? Gary would ask. Do we really have to eat on a folding table? Diana had patiently explained that if they were going to spend the money, the things they bought had to be right. It wouldn’t do to just buy the first table that fit in the space, to hang just anything (or, worse yet, Gary’s poster of the Phillies celebrating their World Series win) on the walls.
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