скачать книгу бесплатно
“Either that or she’s taking enough Prozac for it to not matter.” Ever since she lost Warren, my mother was a firm believer in the kind of happiness that was available in easy-to-swallow caplets.
“What’s gotten into you? You seem more cynical than usual. Did you fight with Derrick this weekend?”
Her question caused a minor panic inside me, as if my sudden state of stressful singledom had somehow become glaringly apparent. I stumbled around for a moment or two as I studied her careful blond bob and perfectly plucked brows, the neat way she had lined up her pencils on her desktop. Suddenly I was filled with distrust. Even the shiny eight-by-ten framed photo of Nash she kept in her cubicle seemed to glint evilly at me. There was no way I could tell her the truth.
“No, no. Nothing happened with Derrick. Everything is fine. Great, in fact.”
“Terrific,” Rebecca said, turning back to the layout before her. “Then that will give you a clear head to help your mom out with this wedding. Gosh, you could practically plan this thing yourself, if you had to.”
“Sure, if I had to.” If I didn’t die of heartbreak first.
Confession: Marriage suddenly seems like a social disease.
Back at my desk, I was faced with my greatest challenge since The Breakup: attempting to muster enough perkiness to write a short to-do list for the bride-to-be that I had secretly titled, “How to Make Your Wedding Day Happen Without All Hell Breaking Loose.” As I struggled to come up with an opening paragraph, I started to feel some of that anger Alyssa had encouraged in me. What about us non-bride-to-be’s? I wondered. Even my own mother had put me to work in the service of her wedding day by asking me to start looking up cruise ships and “getaway” weddings on my handy little database. Worse, she had gleefully offered to take one of the many vacation days she’d accumulated during her twenty-year career at Bilbo to meet me for lunch the following week to see what I had come up with.
Why was my job so convenient for everyone else? Why was it that everyone else had a burning need to pick my brain for suggestions on everything from romantic-honeymoons-that-don’t-require-a-tan to effortless-and-elegant hor d’oeuvres? Working in the warped little world of wedding planning had led me to one conclusion: If you don’t get married in this world, you get nothing. Once, in an editorial meeting, I jokingly suggested that a woman should get a bridal shower when she turns thirty, wedding or not. Everyone looked at me as if I were some kind of nut. I am thirty-one years old, am I not entitled to free Calphalon yet?
The phone rang, saving me from starting the dreaded article.
“Hey, Em,” came Jade’s voice over the line.
“Jade. Thank God.”
“Were you expecting someone else?”
“I was hoping for anyone who is not getting married.”
“No fear here. What’s going on?”
“Nothing, nothing. You know, the usual. Deadline pressure high, motivation factor low. How did the date with Ted Terrific go?”
“Terrific, of course. We did drinks, went to shoot some pool. Did I mention that he has the most beautiful forearms I’ve ever seen? Nice and thick and just the way I like ’em. He’s even got a couple of tattoos. And you know how I feel about a man with tattoos.”
“Uh-oh. You’re finished.”
“If I don’t sleep with him, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Marry him?”
“What’s gotten into you this morning?”
“It’s my mother. She’s getting married again.”
I held the phone away from my ear as Jade shrieked with joy. “That is so wonderful! She and Clark are too cute together. Oh, I have to call and congratulate her. I should probably pick up a card at lunch….”
I should have figured Jade would be my mother’s biggest champion. After all, she’d known my mom since husband 1. “Jade, am I the only person in the world who’s not excited about this?”
“Well, you should be,” she said, censure in her tone. “She’s your mother! Don’t you want her to be happy?”
“Happy, yes. I’m just not too clear on the fact that marriage is the way to get happy. You do realize that this would be Husband 3, almost 4?”
“Em, I think you need to get over that. Not everybody lives a cookie-cutter life. So what if your mother has spent a lot of her life searching? As long as she finds what she wants in the end.”
“I suppose you’re right.” I let out a sigh. “Maybe I’m not looking forward to the Big Day, especially since she’s got the whole family cruising to the Caribbean together for the ceremony. And guess who will be the only guest in the single cabin? Of course, my mother doesn’t know that yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about Derrick. I don’t know why…I just…couldn’t.”
“You’re going to have to tell her eventually. When’s the wedding?”
“She’s hoping to get something together by the end of September.”
There was a silence, as if Jade was pondering. “That’s not much time, but who knows what could happen before then. You might be in love with someone else. Or you might find yourself a cute waiter on the cruise ship to share that single room with.”
“Somehow I doubt it. But maybe I can dig up someone to take with me.”
“Ah, yes. The old Boy Under the Bed.” This was our term for the ever-present male friend who was suitable to take to such events as weddings or office picnics, though for one reason or another not someone you had any sort of desire to truly date. Mine used to be Cal, who’d been a fellow waiter at Good Grub, the restaurant I waitressed at during grad school. Cal was a perfect Boy Under the Bed—a great dancer, tall enough so you didn’t tower over him in heels, and just unattractive enough not to cause any instances of drunken groping on the dance floor that might later prove embarrassing. The problem was, Cal had up and gotten married during the Derrick Years. Men were such bastards.
“I just realized my Boy Under the Bed went AWOL. Cal got married last year, remember?”
“Oh, yeah.” She paused, and I heard her inhaling on a cigarette. “What about Sebastian?”
Sebastian was always a possibility, of course. But he was more a Boy Out of the Closet than a Boy Under the Bed, which made choosing him as a wedding date a bit of a problem. “I don’t want to be the fat older sister turned fag hag at this affair.”
“You’re not fat.”
“Well, you never know what could happen by September. I ate an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough over the weekend. And not even the frozen yogurt version. I went for the gusto—twenty-four grams of fat per serving, four servings per pint.”
“Big deal. Don’t worry, Em, we’ll find you someone. There’s always that model I told you about.”
“You know how I feel about models.”
“Well, you don’t have to marry him. And consider how good you’ll look together in the wedding pictures.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, reluctantly.
“Now there’s the Emma I know and love. Don’t worry. Everything will be just fine.”
Confession: I would marry for a below-market one bedroom.
I somehow managed to muddle through the rest of the week without any major emotional disasters. And after making it through a second weekend alone without completely falling apart, I felt almost proud of myself. In fact, as I walked down my tree-lined street on my way home from work on the verge of week three of the Post-Derrick Period, it suddenly occurred to me that being single in the greatest city in the world wouldn’t be all that bad. I even lived on the nicest street, I thought, as I passed the pretty brownstones on West Thirteenth Street.
Then I reached my building, with its faded facade of peeling paint and row of dented garbage cans and I couldn’t help but sigh with dismay. Why, oh, why, couldn’t Derrick and I have made it as far as shared real estate? He would never have left me if we had landed a below-market one bedroom downtown. No man in his right mind would walk away from that kind of find.
And no woman, I realized now, hating Derrick more for denying me my real estate dreams. With another sigh, I started up the steps.
Derrick was fond of calling my twenty-four unit apartment house The Building of the Incurables, because it was filled with tiny studios that housed—other than students struggling through until graduation—old people with ailments either mental or physical, which kept them from moving on to apartments with a living space large enough for an area rug that didn’t say Welcome on it. There was Beatrice on the first floor, for example, who had been hit by a piece of scaffolding on West Thirty-ninth Street sixteen years ago and whose injury required a metal plate in the head that had put her on the permanently disabled list. Now in her fifties, she was collecting social security and painting watercolors, which decorated the walls of her tiny cube on the first floor. Then there was Abe, who could have been anywhere from sixty-five to eighty-five and who, every morning, emptied the entire contents of his apartment (except for the furniture, which wasn’t much) into two trash bags, loaded them into a shopping cart, and went off to God knows where for the day.
Then there was me. Neither student nor psychotic, yet stubbornly holding on to my rent-stabilized studio as if my very life depended on it. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a great address—just a few short blocks from the subway, the Film Forum, the downtown bar scene, the Peacock, NYU and just about anyplace anyone wanted to be in the downtown area. And it was easy enough for me to bear up to my lack of closet and living space for the kind of location that drew looks of envy whenever I spouted my address at parties. Besides, with Derrick in my life, there was always that lingering hope of the one bedroom we would one day share, once Derrick realized the two-bedroom dive on the Lower East Side he shared with a foul-mouthed bartender just wasn’t cutting it. I used to fantasize about our dream apartment, complete with wall shelves displaying our combined, heady collection of film and literature titles. It was that hope that kept me sane, and safely apart from my in curably psychotic and old, or annoyingly young and transient, neighbors.
But once Derrick was gone from my life, I fell out of my Safely Coupled category and into…Something Else. And that something else was yet to be determined, I realized, as I entered the building.
“Emma!” came Beatrice’s shrill cry as I stepped into the foyer and found her at the mailboxes, arms laden with every mail-order catalog you could imagine, and an assortment of envelopes.
“Hi, Beatrice, how are you?” I said in the usual singsong voice I reserved for small children and adults like Beatrice, who weren’t, as they say, all there.
“Oh, I’m all right—”
“Good,” I replied quickly, starting for the stairs.
“—except for this crazy sinus condition. Every morning I wake up, stuffed nose, clogged ears. And my molars. Oh—” Her gray eyes opened wide behind her thick glasses. “It’s unbearable.”
“I hear what you’re saying, Bea,” I replied, bracing one foot on the steps, preparing for flight at the first opportunity. Beatrice did like to get into a thorough discussion of her ailments, and I still hadn’t managed to figure out how to effectively avoid listening to her litanies. She’s lonely and it means a lot to her that I listen, I often rationalized after a good ten minutes hearing about everything from nasal congestion to hot flashes.
But instead of carrying on with the details of sinus drainage, which I thought was sure to come next, she abruptly stopped talking, her eyes roaming over me from head to foot in a way that made me feel faintly ill. Beatrice, with her thick, squat body shoved, more often than not, into flannel shirts and stretchy pants, always looked to me like the butch half of a lesbian couple—except she was permanently sans her other half—and so her inspection, especially during this vague Post-Derrick Period of my life, was anxiety-producing. “You do understand, don’t you?” she said, her mouth dropping open as it did whenever she was captured by some thought.
As I started to proceed up the stairs with a hurried wish that she feel better soon, she called out, “Wait!” and turned her attention to the mail in her hands. Shuffling through the catalogs, she pulled out a thick, glossy volume and held it out to me. “I thought you might be able to use this,” she said as I reluctantly took the catalog from her.
I stared dully at the cover, which featured a tall, large-framed woman dressed in a flannel shirt similar to the ones Beatrice favored, and dark jeans.
“It’s got great deals on styles for women like us,” she continued, staring up at me, a pleased expression on her face.
Women like us? I started to get defensive, but thought better of it and made my escape. “Thanks, Beatrice. I’ll return it when I’m done.”
“Oh, no need,” she replied, beaming a mouthful of brown teeth at me as I fled up the stairs.
Confession: I’m not convinced a fish wouldn’t be happier with a bicycle.
“Why aren’t we married yet?” I asked Jade later that night on the phone.
“Because we’re strong women,” she replied.
This answer was beginning to bother me. “What does that mean, exactly? That I’ve got metal in my head and can withstand numerous blows?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Maybe we aren’t looking hard enough.”
“Oh, I’ve been looking all right.”
“Oh, yeah. So how are things going with Ted Terrific?”
Big sigh. “Turns out he’s more likely to be Ted Bundy.”
“What?”
She sighed. “He didn’t call.”
Needless to say, I was shocked…and slightly horrified. Of every woman I knew, Jade was the only one who never got snubbed by a guy. Men always called Jade. She was my one last hope that women didn’t have to forevermore be left waiting by the phone. Good grief. What did this mean for the rest of us if Jade, the Über-Single Girl, was having trouble getting to date number two?
Understanding all too well the frustration that followed such blow-offs, I offered the one thing every woman who has been left hanging by a man always needs: anger. “Clearly he’s an asshole.”
“Hmm.”
“Or gay. Or mentally deficient. I mean, what kind of moron goes out with a beautiful, intelligent girl like you and then neglects to pick up the phone, even just to tell her he’s happy she’s alive and he had the opportunity to spend a few hours in her presence?”
“He probably couldn’t handle the fact that I beat him in two out of three games of pool.”
“Wimp.”
There were a few moments of silence, while we ruminated over the question of how Ted Terrific had taken a turn for the worse.
“Maybe I was too aggressive,” Jade offered.
“You’re kidding, right? Jade, I’m sure you did nothing—”
“I did invite him up. I mean, not to sleep with him or anything. But I’d just gotten the new Jamiroquai CD, and I knew he was into the same kind of music, so…”
“Did he come up?”
“No. He said he had to get up early. Gave me this killer kiss in front of my building, then took off. It just doesn’t make sense. The whole night, right down to that kiss, was amazing. We had drinks, shot pool and talked like we’d known each other all our lives. We liked the same music, hated the same clubs. I couldn’t believe how well we clicked. How much we had in common. And the chemistry…forget about it! I wish he had come up, so at least we could have had sex before he disappeared. I’m sure it would have been nothing less than incredible.”
In truth, I was stumped, but concluded that maybe we had just assumed things all wrong. “Maybe he’ll still call. What night did you guys go out?”
“Last Saturday. As in the weekend before last. Granted, I did leave town on Thursday to go on a shoot for the weekend, but he didn’t know that. I came home on Sunday morning to no message.”
It didn’t look good. One week, okay. But to go to week two without even a quick hello-had-a-great-time-wish-I-could-see-you-again-when-I’m-less-busy call, was not a good sign. He was history. “Maybe he got hit by the Second Avenue bus. Doesn’t it run right past your gym? He could have been coming out late, after a workout, and wham-o.”
“Yeah. If he’s lucky.”
I knew we would never truly find an answer. Why He Didn’t Call was one of the great mysteries of single life. A life, I realized, I was now reluctantly a part of.
Confession: Marriage—any marriage—is beginning to look good.
As if the idea of newly tackling single life wasn’t exhausting enough, the next day at work I was forced to take on the facade of one of the Happily Coupled-Off when Rebecca dropped by my cubicle to regale me with tales of her romance-filled evening with her boyfriend, Nash. “He just seems different lately,” she said with a glimmer of excitement in her eyes. “More committed.” Then she went on to tell me about the great little French restaurant on the Upper East Side where they’d had dinner the night before. “Maybe if you and Derrick ever venture uptown,” she added, “we could all go to dinner there together sometime.” To which I responded, with what I hoped was a convincing smile, that maybe we would, all the while knowing that it would be a miracle if Derrick ever ventured to the East Coast again, never mind the Upper East Side.
By the time I dragged myself home that evening, I was convinced that the key to life was finding someone—anyone—who would stick around long enough for you to lure him to the altar. Someone stable and reliable like Nash. Or better still, Richard.
As if to punctuate this realization, my father called. Though he had managed to drown a good portion of his life in Johnnie Walker Black, there was no denying that my father had been a good catch in his day. By age thirty, he had worked his way to the top of a financial investment firm. Even when he’d asked my mother to marry him at the tender age of twenty-five, he was making a respectable salary and had “upwardly mobile” stamped all over him. Life had been pretty cozy growing up in our sprawling Garden City home. It was no wonder it took my mother twenty years to realize her husband loved no one and nothing more than the bottom of a bottle.
“Hi, Dad,” I said, “how are you?” This question was still asked with some trepidation, despite the fact that it had been over a year ago that my father’s second wife, Deirdre, had dragged him off to the rehab center for the third time in their twelve-year marriage. It amazed me that Deirdre, who hadn’t realized what she was getting into when she’d married him, didn’t leave him at that point, despite his big house and fancy landscaping. But maybe she had made the right choice. After all, he had managed to stay sober since that last incident, and passing the one-year mark constituted a new record for him. Still, none of us quite trusted that he wouldn’t fall off the wagon again.
“I’m fine, fine. Finally got that settlement on that toaster oven that exploded on us,” he said, satisfaction in his voice.
The end of my father’s drinking career did have one side effect: He had become extremely litigious. Ever since he’d made his first attempt to go off the bottle a few years back, he’d begun suing anyone he believed had slighted him—whether it was his firm, which forced him into early retirement three years ago without (according to my father) sufficient compensation, or this most recent episode, in which his toaster oven allegedly burst into flames unbidden. It only took a little research for my father to find out the model had been recalled six months earlier.
“How’s my little girl?” he asked now. “Make your first million yet?”
