by Zack Love
“No. You must be thinking of someone else,” Heeb said, even redder, and worried that Angelina believed her.
“I swear it’s you.”
“No, I’ve never done anything like that.”
“Yes you have. It’s you! I know it’s you! It’s just so funny to see you here, of all places!”
“Look, I don’t what you’re talking about…I know you’re just trying to be friendly, but I’m here with someone and there are lots of other people to meet here, so why don’t you make like a newspaper and circulate a bit, OK?”
And with that, Heeb grabbed Angelina’s hand, and led her away into the crowd. He was mortified.
Once they joined their group upstairs, back in Heeb’s comfort zone, he took a shot of vodka and was able to relax enough to start joking about what just happened. Angelina was undecided as to whether Heeb was embarrassed because the Indian woman’s recollection was accurate or because he had just found it awkward to reject someone vying for his attention.
“Can you imagine?” he said, with affected disbelief. “Me as a model? That’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It is pretty funny,” Angelina agreed.
“And the other forty-six Jews running the world would never allow it. It’s just not a part of the job description, when you apply for a position with the conspiratorial cabal.”
“Maybe she just thought you were cute,” Angelina suggested playfully.
“Yeah, it must have been my dancing.”
Angelina burst into laughs.
At 1:30 a.m., Angelina asked Jess if she wanted to share a cab back to their place. Jess frowned, thinking this meant that Angelina wasn’t going to show any further interest in Heeb.
“I’ve got a photo shoot in eight hours,” she explained.
“So? I have one in ten. What’s the big deal?”
“You can stay. But I’m wiped. And I’ve had too much to drink. I need to rest.”
“OK…We’ll go,” Jess agreed reluctantly.
Angelina gave Heeb a smooch on the lips, and he delighted in the fact that it was longer than a peck. She wrote down her email for him. “Use it. I’ll be waiting for your email.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll use it. But in case I lose it before I can use it, here’s my info.” Heeb wrote out his work, home, fax, pager and cell phone numbers, as well as all three of his email accounts. She chuckled in amusement at the two napkins of information.
“That’s just in case you weren’t sure whether I want you to stalk me,” Heeb said.
She laughed and gave him another kiss on the lips.
Jess gave Evan her cell phone and email address, even though he was marrying Delilah Nakova in six months. Evan, of course, had no intention of ever calling Jess, unless it could somehow help Heeb out with Angelina. As stunning as Jess looked, she was – next to Delilah Nakova – a mere mortal without a fraction of Delilah’s brains, charm, or gracious humility.
As the two beauties turned around and left, Heeb dreamily watched Angelina walk down the stairs. He meditated on the fact that he had never before had such a gorgeous woman kiss him or hang out with him for so long. Evan and Heeb talked excitedly for a few minutes, exchanging notes on the night.
Twenty minutes later, the two women were in a cab heading home.
Besides Trevor, who would remain by the bar until closing, Narc and Jade were the only ones left from the initial group. Carlos had left around midnight, to ensure that he was home in time for Carolina. As Raquel walked him out of the club, she realized from Carlos’s unexpectedly early goodbye that the wedding ring actually meant something. Her heart sank a little. “All the good ones are taken,” she thought. If Carlos could rebuff the sexual advances of a twenty-two-year-old runway model in order to stay faithful to his thirty-year-old wife, she wanted to have him that much more. But he wouldn’t even take her number much less give her his. He just squeezed her hand good night and kissed her cheek.
At 2 a.m., Narc and Jade went back to Narc’s place. They made out for the whole cab ride (between stoned laughs) and were half-naked by the time they stumbled out of the elevator of Narc’s building. Outside Narc’s apartment door, they kept kissing and giggling as he fumbled with his keys. He finally got the door open, and they slipped inside. They resumed their action once the door closed, and removed the rest of their clothing.
The marijuana made everything seem slow and light, even as they handled each other with raw and carnal impatience.
“Show me the real thing,” she said, with an adventurous smile. “I’ve never been with a real pro.”
During the two hours of sex that followed, Narc – true to his reputation – gave Jade an orgasm in each of the four rooms of his apartment. Employing virtually every position and every technique in his arsenal, Narc also climaxed several times. The grand finale – as measured by the loudness of Jade’s moans – occurred on the large marble bathroom sink, on which she sat with her legs open to receive Narc’s talented tongue, which lapped away with verve while warm water from the faucet behind her trickled down her lower back.
The next morning, however, when Jade kept asking whether Narc really “fucked for a living,” Narc finally had to confirm the ugly truth.
“Yup. I do.”
“Stop lying.”
“I’m not lying. I’m a porn star.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’m being serious.”
“No, you’re trying to be funny.”
“All right,” Narc said, walking over to his big screen TV and pushing some buttons. “I wasn’t planning on doing this, but since you don’t believe me, I’ve got some videos to prove it.”
A giant image of Narc fornicating with some silicone-breasted blonde appeared on the screen.
Jade’s hand involuntarily rose to cover her mouth as she stood there, speechlessly appalled.
She was disappointed in herself for not extracting such a basic fact about Narc before getting stoned with him. And she was furious at Narc for so smoothly skirting the issue until it was effectively too late. On her silent storm out, she pushed Narc’s TV and VCR so that they came crashing down onto his apartment floor in a shattering thud.
There was nothing Narc could do to save his beloved big screen TV, on which he had watched so many basketball games and pornos. He could only stand there and watch it fall, as if it were some slow motion sports replay. The large video image of himself and the busty blonde gradually collapsed into an ever-acuter angle that then became hundreds of pieces of glass.
The thud of his smashed TV was followed by the slam of his front door.
Chapter 29
Obsessed and Depressed
Prior to the mid-1800s, the most one could hope for from a love interest was the relatively rare occurrence of a letter or an unannounced, in-person visit. In the mid-1800s the telegraph arrived, followed soon thereafter by the telephone. In the 1980s, the fax came about, and the 1990s ushered in pagers, cell phones, and emails.
By the year 2001, with so many people communicating so many times per day with so many devices, every cell phone call, voicemail, email, and pager represented a potential sign from one’s budding infatuation. This greatly expanded universe of communication made any silent treatment from one’s crush all the more unbearable: it increased the number of disappointments per day exponentially from the horse and buggy days. Yet the emotional mechanism for handling letdowns had not evolved with the technologies that caused them.
Heeb’s coping techniques were particularly unprepared to handle the week of psychological torture that followed his night with Angelina. Evan felt partly to blame for this because he had encouraged Heeb to email Angelina the next day.
“But what about the rule from Swingers? The Vince Vaughn character said that you’re not ‘money’ if you don’t wait at least six days,” Heeb replied, in response to Evan’s recommendation.
“Yes, but don’t forget what happens in that movie. The Jon Favreau character ends up with th
e girl who called him the day after they met. She calls him. Without waiting.”
“That’s Hollywood, Evan. Stuff like that never happens to me in real life.”
“Heeb, the bottom line is: you’re always better off calling sooner. If you’re both interested, you can get started that much sooner. And if you’re not both interested, then you can move on that much sooner.”
Evan felt especially confident about this advice because he was sure that Jess would lobby Angelina to respond to Heeb promptly. He didn’t think that she would get on the Internet and thoroughly research all of the latest gossip on Delilah’s love life, and discover that she has been single for several months with no mention of any fiancé or upcoming wedding – to Evan or anyone else.
Throughout each of the six days following Heeb’s first email to Angelina, he obsessed over why she wasn’t getting in touch. “Why doesn’t she call?” he would ask.
“Heeb, you’re sounding like a girl! Just chill out,” Evan would say. “She’ll call.”
After three days of fruitless waiting, Evan decided it was time to remind Jess about the big Delilah Nakova opportunity. But Jess always let his call go to voicemail, even when Evan blocked his caller ID. So Evan began to obsess about Jess almost as much as Sammy did about Angelina. But after five days, Evan wrote her off, noting that he couldn’t have dated her anyway, given his solemn commitment to Delilah Nakova.
“Sammy, you really should learn to juggle more,” Evan advised him, as if he didn’t need to follow the same advice. “You’ve gotta have at least three or four prospects that you’re talking to at the same time, or you could get too hung up over one female. And if she ever does call you’ll sound way too desperate.”
“But I really hit it off with her,” Heeb protested.
“Heeb, she’s not nearly smart enough for you, and she’s not even Jewish when you’re just a few months from starting your Jewish dating phase…Why are you so obsessed with her now?”
But Heeb couldn’t imagine meeting or starting with anyone else because he was now gripped with self-doubt. Not only did he doubt his charms, he doubted his very ability to interpret female behavior accurately. He repeated in his mind, over and over, how Angelina had laughed so hard and so often at his jokes, how she seemed to think he was more of a gentleman than some of her other dates, how she invited him to go dancing downstairs, how she kissed him twice on the lips, and how she wrote down her email for him and said “Use it. I’ll be waiting for your email.”
Six days after his first email to her, the cumulative pain of phone calls and emails and voicemails from everyone but Angelina felt like a slow but ever-worsening chest ache. Every new incoming call and every new email in his inbox produced a gnawing moment of unbearable suspense and fear that it was not Angelina. Heeb would hesitate nervously each time he had to answer the phone or check his email; yet the ever-present possibility that it might finally be Angelina compelled him to accept the risk of deepening the slow psychological sore that was festering within him. He was also painfully aware that if she ever did call, he couldn’t let on that she had won the game of brinkmanship. He couldn’t reveal that – while she had played it cool – he had come ever closer to “caving in” and calling her roommate’s number (which he had taken from Evan, on the seventh day after his email to Angelina, when he thought he was losing his mind).
On the eighth day, just as Heeb was about to call Jess and ask to speak with her roommate, he got an email back from Angelina. As he opened it, he was overcome by a mixture of relief and dread.
“Hey Sammy. Sorry it took a while to email you back. Thursday was fun. Maybe I’ll see you around some time. Angelina.”
That was Angelina’s tactful way of telling him that she wasn’t interested, but Heeb was too obsessed by this point to read between the lines. So he had to email her back and ask her when they could see each other again. After four days passed with no reply, Heeb sent her another email asking what the story was and what her honest thoughts about him were.
Two days later, he received the following reply: “There is no story between us. I think you’re pretty funny, but you’re just not my type…I like a guy with hair, and I like guys who are five to six inches taller than me. I’m sorry there isn’t a nicer way to say it, but if I said something like ‘I just don’t think it’ll work between us’ or ‘there really isn’t any chemistry there’ you’d probably want more details. So I figured I’d just give you the details now. Sorry. Good luck to you.”
Heeb was devastated.
He forwarded the email to Evan with a simple “Need I say more?” and descended into a deep depression. At the office, where he was normally a star performer, he became apathetic. After work, Heeb didn’t want to see or talk to anyone. He lost all interest in going out with a posse that he thought was exponentially out of his league. His appetite for food shrank significantly, and he began to lose weight.
During the first three weeks following Angelina’s last email, each member of the posse had left Heeb several unreturned voicemails, each trying to cheer him up and get him to come out. On the two nights when they went out in his absence, they spent most of their time together worrying about how to help Heeb, until Carlos realized that it was time to get Titus involved.
Sammy hadn’t spoken to his old blind friend from Boston since a few weeks before his injury, and a call from him turned out to be a good idea. Speaking to Titus, who had lived a rich and varied life despite countless obstacles, always gave Heeb a dose of perspective on things. Titus, who was now seventy-two, embodied optimism itself. He emanated an indomitably positive spirit that refused to let anything – whether it was racism or blindness or life’s hard knocks – diminish his joi de vivre. There was also something compellingly simple about his approach: “It’s just hair, son!” he would stress, whenever Heeb complained about balding.
“Now look out your window and describe for me the Manhattan skyline. It’s been a long time since you gave this old geezer a treat like that.” Titus had the wisdom to know that such a request would comfort and restore some of Sammy’s self-esteem. Returning Sammy to the familiar and intimate routine that marked their friendship over the years would remind Sammy of how much he could brighten the lives of others.
“Go on now. Don’t make me wait…Give me my favorite nighttime view…”
During the day, Titus liked the view from Heeb’s bedroom, and at night, he preferred the living room view.
“All right, hold on…I’m going there now,” Sammy said, already feeling better.
Heeb walked over to his living room.
“All right. I’m here.”
“What do you see?” Titus asked impatiently.
“On the left side of the window you can see all of the cubicle lives of New Yorkers, lit up in the dark, like a bunch of yellow boxes stacked up on top of each other from the ground up to towering heights.”
“And what are they doing?”
“One guy’s watching TV. The woman above him is talking on the phone. To the right is a couple having dinner together. Above them are two people kissing. To their left is a woman running on her treadmill.”
“Now what about on the right side of your living room window?”
“If you move your eye away from all of those miniature people you get the perspective of the entire city, so that it’s not just a few hundred lives stacked on top of each other, but millions and millions of lives sharing this same night with us under the same sky. And you wonder how all of those individuals actually fit into this tiny city – this city that’s a whole little world unto itself, made up of populated needles standing atop a slender island.”
“Keep goin’ Sammy. That’s beautiful…Now as you move your eye across that Manhattan skyline, tell me about the building that your eye wants to cling to the most tonight – among all those populated needles, competin’ for your attention.”
“Tonight it’s the Chrysler Building.”
“All right. Tell me about the
Chrysler Building.”
“It stands there so simply and majestically. Its small lit triangles each pointing upwards in a triangular formation towards its sharp spire, like the angelic sparkles of a tiny flame in a bright shining candle.”
“Ah…The Chrysler Building…I remember those small lit triangles well…From my many trips to New York City…Ain’t that somethin’, Sammy…New York City! Ain’t nothing like it in the whole world.”
“It is a sight to see, Titus.”
Chapter 30
The Posse Prevails
From late February until mid-March 2001, with a few more calls from Titus, Heeb gradually became interested in his professional life again. The complex and monumental work project he had completed just before his funk, involving the estimation and management of risk variables for the airline insurance industry, received kudos from several prestigious industry groups and publications. But his social confidence was still far too damaged for him to consider meeting any women or rejoining the posse for anything more than a meal in Narc’s favorite Chinatown restaurant (where there was an infinitesimal chance of meeting any English-speaking women of interest).
Meanwhile, Evan’s confidence was also beginning to suffer. Nearly six weeks had passed since Mike Yuvalov confirmed that he had sent Evan’s manuscript to Delilah Nakova. Just as it took everything in Heeb’s willpower to avoid emailing Angelina more frequently than he had, Evan virtually exhausted his self-restraint by calling Mike only once every two weeks to see if there were any promising developments. Evan’s entire self-esteem was riding on the assumption that Delilah would fall in love with his novel, and soon thereafter with him, and that the two would end up living together happily ever after.
Evan badly needed something to distract him from his anxiety about Delilah and whether he had any hope of making his living as a writer. He began actively looking for a job as a computer programmer, and became even more determined to save Heeb from his lingering social doldrums.
On Saturday, March 31, 2001, there was a loud knock on Heeb’s door.