Now what? The blind-date concept is completely foreign to me. Probably I should handle this like market research: Hayes Heeley has asked me to study ways to make male customers feel more comfortable in pretentious watering holes. Okay. I search the crowd for Elliot, who has told Sexy Lexy he’s six feet tall, with brown hair, blue eyes, and an athletic build, but, Linda tells me, is really five ten on a good day, with thinning hair and the beginnings of a pinot grigio belly.
A man standing to my left, holding not an electric-orange technodrink but a plain glass of red wine, returns my gaze with an almost imperceptible nod.
Bingo. Now for introductions and rapport building. I uncross my arms over my artificially boosted breasts and walk over to stand next to him, smiling my warmest moderator smile. “Hello, there!” I switch my Wallflower to my left hand, surreptitiously try to dry the right one on Val’s dress as I tug it down over my thighs, and execute a perfect moderator handshake: neither too brief nor too lingering, firm without being overbearing. “You’ve been waiting awhile!”
He appraises me quizzically. “What makes you say so?”
I motion toward his glass. “Half empty.”
His grin reveals an unexpected dimple in his left cheek. Linda gave Icarus short shrift. He may not be Hotel Royal perfect, but he’s real-life attractive, with a slightly rumpled suit, a touch of gray at the temples, and glasses like my favorite sociocultural anthropology professor at Pomona. “Don’t you mean half full?”
“Definitely not! That’s something my mother—” Iris, stop! Your mother would, but Sexy Lexy’s might not. Let’s do the introductions. And whatever you do, don’t call him Elliot. “Hi, Icarus, I’m Sexy Lexy.” Saying the name makes my cheeks burn. “But you can call me, um, Lexy.” I pull at Val’s dress, which is creeping up my legs again. My right breast slides back a fraction of an inch into my armpit.
“Pleased to meet you, Lexy. But who’s Icarus?”
Oh, great. “You mean you’re not Icarus?”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
I dissolve into giddy laughter. “I thought you were my date!”
He laughs, too. “I’m Frank Hudson and try never to fly too close to the sun.”
I cover my face with my hands. He pats me on the right shoulder. As I’m plotting an escape into the crowd, someone else taps my left shoulder.
The tapper—five feet ten, brown hair—clears his throat. “Did you just call him Icarus? Because Icarus, th-that’s me.” Icarus shakes my hand damply. His eyes dart around the room. Compared to him, I am the picture of composure.
“That’s my cue,” says Frank. “I enjoyed meeting you, Lexy.” He flashes his dimple again and walks off with one last, bemused over-the-shoulder glance.
My real date stands stiffly. Other than homing in for a nanosecond on my cleavage, he doesn’t seem much of a Casanova. His shoulders are hunched, an ink stain dots the bottom corner of his shirt pocket, and his tie is askew. I want to straighten it and tell him to mind his posture. He stammers something about the subway being slow, and then we both look at each other. I should say something, but what? When you’ve read a man’s e-mail description of his recurring nightmare about falling from the Empire State Building in his boxer shorts, it’s hard to discuss the weather. And while that was probably as risqué as Icarus’s revelations went, I can’t say the same for his wife. Last week Linda, as Sexy Lexy, e-mailed him a disturbingly insipid erotic fantasy involving a bathtub full of chocolate sauce.
This man thinks I wrote it.
“Hey!” His face brightens. “Looks like you’ve finished your drink. How about something else from the bar? A ginseng martini? That’s your favorite, right?”
“Shot of tequila.”
Elliot looks nonplussed but goes off to fetch it. When he returns I drink the shot down with a triumphant shiver and ask something innocuous about his day. Soon the ice is broken and Elliot is talking about a recalcitrant client who won’t pay her bills, and the new restaurant where he had lunch last week, and the Vermont summer camp he attended as a boy, and his feelings about the mayor. I lean against a mirror, debating another shot. Haven’t had tequila for years, come to think of it, and why not? My college friend Jadey used to claim the stuff made her hallucinate, and my other one, Audrey, once drank nine margaritas and passed out for eighteen hours, but right now it’s providing me with a surprising streak of empathy for Linda’s husband. The poor man must be desperate for a woman to listen to him. I ask a waitress for a second shot—¡más tequila, por favor!—and drink it; the wisdom of the ages courses through my veins. I pull Val’s dress back down over my thighs.
“. . . and sure enough, the stock tanked, as I’d been warning all along.” Elliot nods his head in satisfaction at a story well told. He’s absolutely harmless. Dull, yes, but harmless.
“It always happens that way, doesn’t it?” I’m beginning to have a hard time concentrating. My head feels funny, and I’m finding it a challenge to stand in heels. I should go. I don’t think Linda has any cheating to worry about. I look forward to telling her she’s got one of the good guys.
“That’s right.” Elliot moves closer to me. “It always happens that way.”
I move away. My brain sloshes from side to side.
Elliot takes a second step forward, puts both hands on my shoulders, and puckers up. Before I have a chance to react, he crushes me to him and plants a big, sloppy kiss on me.
“Mmmmmm!” I try to struggle free. My left cutlet wedges itself under the band of my bra top. The right one moves farther back under my arm. Elliot tries to work his tongue between my clamped lips. “MMMM!” I shove him away and wipe my mouth. “What do you think you’re doing?” I yell.
“L-Lexy!” Elliot stammers. “I’m sorry!”
“You should be!”
“I am! I’ve never done anything like this before, and I thought . . .”
“You thought wrong!” I’m sincerely angry. My evening has just gone from an easy fifty dollars an hour to a hard fifty dollars an hour. I’ll have to call Linda, wait until she arrives, and be exhibit A in a noisy scene in front of all these self-impressed neon-drink drinkers. “Ooooh! Why’d you have to do that?” I stomp my foot.
With that, my left cutlet breaks free of my bra top and oozes down, down, down under my dress. Under a looser garment it might not have stopped until it hit the floor. But restrained by Val’s slip-girdle, the cutlet succeeds only in scoring itself a few inches of freedom. I sneak a look into a mirror at my lopsided chest and prod the new bulge over my lower left ribs.
Elliot doesn’t notice. He just looks miserable. “You’ve been coming on so strong these last few weeks. I thought it’s what you wanted. My wife is going to kill me!”
It is then, as I resist the temptation to reach down the front of my outfit and reposition my wayward cutlet, that I realize I can’t watch this marriage, ridiculous as it is, crumble over a stupid kiss that’s as much Linda’s fault as Elliot’s. What is she doing, trying to entrap the man into cheating on her? Who does he think he is, pulling a stunt like this?
I pull myself up to my full five-feet-four-with-three-inch-heels, as morally outraged as a woman wearing lingerie in public can be. “You’re married?”
Elliot raises his arms and drops them against his sides in a gesture of defeat.
“Shame on you, Icarus! I am not that kind of girl! I’ve never been with a married man and am not about to start now!” Another tequila has found its way into my possession. I toss it back ferociously. A term from my college days floats into my head: the death shot. That’s what Jadey and Audrey used to call the shot that put you over the edge from pleasantly tipsy to staggering, slobbering drunk. With zero inhibitions left, I stick my hand into my top and reposition my wayward cutlet. Elliot’s eyes look about to pop out right into his drink. “And how would your wife feel,” I go on, “knowing you were here with me? And you, spending all those nights on the computer, telling me your innermost secrets? For shame! You should be
sharing those secrets with your wife! That’s what you do when you’re married! You share your hopes and dreams with the person you’re married to! Not with a complete stranger! Hey, you, mind your own business!” I direct that last bit to a woman in hot pants and gladiator sandals gawking at me over her cocktail.
Elliot’s hands are actually shaking. He puts them in his pockets and drops his head and promises never to do anything like this again.
“You’d better not. Cheating is wrong! You go home to your wife, cancel that e-mail account, and start honoring your marriage vows!”
I wouldn’t say Elliot runs screaming for the exit, but I can say he’s gone before I can sort out what has just happened. All I know is, my heart is pounding and the room is whirling and I need to sit down without delay. There—there’s a stool up at the bar. I totter up to it. “Can I sit? I mean, is that open? I mean empty?” I inquire of the person nearest the stool, a man in khakis holding a business book. I put one hand over each breast to check that they’re still positioned correctly and push them both closer together. Whoopsie. Hands off the cutlets. “I’m Sexy,” I inform the man. “I mean Lexy.”
He straightens the collar of his polo shirt and lays The Wall Street Journal Complete Real Estate Investing Guidebook facedown on the bar. The letters swim before my eyes. “I’m Joe. By all means, sit.”
Accepting his offer may be harder than it looks. The stool seems to have reproduced itself while I wasn’t watching. There are now two overlapping stools. I’m no fool. Clearly one is real and one is a mirage, but which is which? I swipe out my hand and strike it on the stool closest to me. Got it, that’s the real one. But when I go to sit, it does a sly feint to the left. I miss it by an inch and have to catch myself on the edge of the bar, barely avoiding ending up sprawled on the floor with Val’s dress bunched up around my neck. I should probably go home, but then I wouldn’t get to share my triumph.
“Joe!” I scramble, finally, onto the stool and slam my hands down on the bar. “You, like, wouldn’t believe what just happened. I just saved someone’s marriage! Hey, you aren’t married, are ya? ’Cause if y’are, whatcha doin’ in a hotel?”
Joe hooks his thumbs into his pants pockets. He’s the male version of me—the usual me, not the current me—unremarkably dressed, average-looking, though he does have exceptionally white teeth. “I’m not married. What are you doing in a hotel? You from around here?”
“I’m new in town from Losh Angelesh.” Is that me slurring?
“New in town, huh? Well, I live in Connecticut but work here in the city. I just bought a new Land Rover. I’ve got a summer place right on the beach. Maybe you’d like to go with me sometime. I’m an endodontist. Harvard Dental School.”
It’s funny how New Yorkers from Ivy League schools always want you to hear all about their educational credentials within five minutes of meeting you. Why did I start talking to this person? What was it I wanted to tell him? Something about marriage, if memory serves.
“Well.” I slip back down off the stool and grip the bar for support. “I got married on the beach. It was shupposhed to be the two of us barefoot at shunshet, reciting poetry, all romantic. Ha! Guessh what, Joe? It was freezing. The guests were all shivered up together, and the wind blew off my veil. Whoosh! Right into the ocean. Teddy shaid we’d laugh about it on our twenty-fifth annivershary, and now we’ll never have a twenty-fifth annivershary, sho I’ll never laugh about it!”
Joe blinks his two sets of eyes.
“I’m shtill married, Joe. Why do I like tell everybody I’m divorshed when I’m shtill married? Know what, Joe? Maybe I should call Teddy! Maybe I should call him right now!”
Joe is dumbstruck. He’s holding a glass with a paper cocktail napkin stuck to the bottom. Something momentous is about to happen. Joe knows it, and I know it, and the napkin knows it. Teddy is going to send for me to come back to Studio City. Maybe Joe will hail a cab to take me to the airport. He’ll give the driver the fare and say, “Take this woman back where she belongs.” Before the cab drives off he’ll press the napkin into my hand as a memento. Years from now Teddy and I will show our grandchildren the napkin, which I will have carefully preserved between the acid-free pages of an archival-quality scrapbook, and we’ll raise a glass to the compassionate stranger who helped us find each other again all those years ago.
Joe removes the napkin from the bottom of his glass and scrawls something on it. He gives it to me. “If you ever feel like going out.”
The napkin has no name, only a phone number. I tuck it into the recesses of my bag, knowing full well it will never again see the light of day, and grope slowly toward the door. I stumble out into the warm May evening, and the door closes, leaving behind a fleeting puff of cool air. I lean against the front wall of the Hotel Royal and manage to dial my old home number on my cell phone.
“Hah!” hollers a happy male voice. A happy male voice with a Texas-sounding accent, so that I must assume he means “hi.”
“I’m like looking for Teddy.” Thanks to all that tequila, it takes some work to get the words out.
The happy Texan drawls, “Ah-ris?”
“Ish Teddy there?” It’s hard to be sure over the din of the city, but . . . have I called in the middle of a party? At my house?
“Ah-ris, what tahm is it out there?”
“Dunno. Can I just shpeak to Teddy?”
“This is Teddy, Ah-ris.”
“Oh, Teddy . . .” I trail off. Groups of New Yorkers walk past me in twos and threes. A man and a woman, arms around each other’s waists, look me over and continue down the sidewalk. I try to identify the distinctly festive sounds on Teddy’s end of the line: the thud-thud of music on the stereo, shouts of laughter, a whir that could be a blender. “You’re having a party?”
“A barbecue, here at the ranch, yes ma’am.” Teddy remains stubbornly in character.
“Teddy, can I, like, ashk you a quesshion?”
“Sure thing, ma’am.”
“I was wondering . . .” But what? What do I want to ask, and what am I hoping to hear? The rush of Teddy’s blender whirls with the clatter of the city until it’s impossible to separate one from the other. “What is there to celebrate?” I shout into the whirling.
But the last word comes out “shellebrate,” and I hang up without waiting for Teddy’s answer.
Someone, somewhere, won’t stop playing that song.
Over and over, the same few maddening chords: “La-la-la la-LA! La-la-la la-LA! Yaah-dah yah-dah yah-dah YAH.” It won’t stop. It’ll play for a while, cut off abruptly, and then, after an all-too-brief period of quiet, start up again from the beginning: “La-la-la la-LA! La-la-la la-LA!”
Moaning, I maneuver myself from my back onto my stomach and pull the bedcovers over my head. After a spell, the music stops. I lie with my face buried in a pillow that is mysteriously, repulsively, cold and damp, and savor the silence. Perhaps this time the music has stopped for good.
“La-la-la la-LA! La-la-la la-LA!”
“Teddy, please.” I believe I am talking. It doesn’t sound much like me, but I’m thinking, Teddy, please turn it down, and hearing somebody croak those words as I think them, so I believe the croak must be mine.
But wait; Teddy isn’t here; he’s in California. And “La-la-la la-LA!”—could that possibly be “La cu-ca-ra-CHA!”? I force open one eye and pull back a corner of sheet. My cell phone is tweeting away on the nightstand/mail table. Oh, no—could I possibly have forgotten to call Linda? No, I vaguely remember telephoning her a few minutes ago. Or a few hours ago. What time is it?
“La cu-ca-ra-CHA! La cu-ca-ra-CHA!”
The act of reaching for the phone, grasping it, snapping it open, and speaking into it seems slightly less taxing than listening to it make that unholy racket for one more instant.
Vickie is on the other end, brimming with excitement. “Iris! Iris! Where are you? This is it! You need to get over to Eighty-second and Columbus right away!”
I do not. I need to sleep. I hang up the phone.
It starts to cucaracha again. This time I hit the answer button and don’t even bother to say hello. Why won’t this woman leave me alone?
“Steve just left the apartment,” Vickie continues, as if there has been no pause in the conversation. “He says he’s got a meeting at one of the buildings his company manages. It’s right in your neighborhood! But you’ve got to go now!”
“Go away. I’m asleep.” I’m still wearing my watch. I concentrate on its face until the hands swim into focus. “It’s three a.m.”
“What are you talking about? It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. What are you doing asleep? I need you, Iris! Don’t do this to me! You’ve got to follow him!”
I pull the covers back over my head. “No more spying. Go away.” There. That should do the trick. I wait for Vickie’s good-bye.
Vickie’s first sniffle is only a decibel or two above the threshold of human hearing. The second, third, fourth, and fifth get progressively louder. Then the weeping commences, quietly at first but escalating rapidly into a symphonic crescendo of boo-hoos. “I should have known,” she sobs. “You’ve never taken me seriously. You’re just like Val!”
I consider a weak joke about how, at the moment, I am more like Val than Vickie can possibly imagine: in bed with a debilitating hangover. Under the safety of the covers I open both eyes for the first time. That’s what the cold, wet thing is: a hand towel. I put it across my forehead last night just before passing out.
Vickie allows her weeping a moment’s pause. “Do you know what Val said last time I tried to talk about Steve’s cheating? She said, ‘Isn’t it a little late in the season for this? All the good spring handbags are already sold out.’”
I slide from the bed onto the floor, slipping out from under the covers inch by inch, a snake reluctantly shedding its most beloved skin, and crawl to the bathroom, stopping every foot or two to hold the phone back up to my ear from where I’m scraping it along the floor. “You probably heard Steve wrong.” I sound slightly less croaky. “He can’t be having a meeting. It’s the weekend.”
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