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Erika said, “I gave up Ben at twenty-four, and someone else got him.”
“And how long did that take? Five months?”
“Not even,” Erika said, looking down at her boots. “Three.”
Gert had heard many times about how Erika had met and lost her college boyfriend. Erika and Ben had started dating around the same time as Gert had started dating Marc—sophomore year. But Erika broke up with Ben five years later. She was pretty, a lot of guys liked her, and her friends and family kept telling her not to settle down so quickly. She wasn’t sure she was ready to make a lifelong commitment, and she didn’t feel hopelessly, madly in love with Ben, the way she’d always dreamed she would be.
So she told Ben she needed a few months off. Better to figure out what she wanted now, she said, than when it was too late. She dated a few guys, realized Ben was much better than everyone she’d met, and called him up one night.
It was too late.
They passed a guy with a huge backpack who was slumped against a building, drunk. A policeman was kneeling down to talk to him. The thick smell of beer-soaked sidewalks and vomit invaded Gert’s nostrils. She remembered it from frat parties in college. It was a sad smell—the smell of being among two hundred happy people but just wanting to be with the one who made you happy. It was a memory she could do without.
“At least you got to be Ben’s first love,” Hallie said to Erika. “I’ll never get to be anyone’s.”
“I hate her,” Erika said.
“Don’t start.”
“I’m going to read her Web log tonight and put crap on her message board.”
“Again?”
Gert had heard all about Ben’s wife, Challa, and her Web log. Challa wrote every few days in her “blog” about her life, for all the world to see. It told of romantic trips, of art classes the couple took together, of how wonderful Ben was with the baby, and of Ben’s dream to renovate an old farmhouse in New England where they could raise their family. Erika told Gert and Hallie about the night Ben had sat on her dormroom bed in college and first told her of this dream.
“That should be me,” Erika always said to them. “She’s an imposter, living my life. And here I am, sitting in my pajamas in front of the computer, reading about it.”
Hallie, Erika and Gert had problems with the first three bars they passed. Blastoff was playing eighties music. (“Eighties music was never good the first time,” Erika sniped. “Just because today’s music is so bad, suddenly we think ‘Der Kommissar’ is good?”) Gert passed on the biker bar—too intimidating. Hallie thought there were too many women in Atlantis.
“They should open a really hip bar that refuses to admit women if they’re underdressed,” Hallie said.
“Aren’t you part of the problem?” Gert asked.
“I can’t take a stand on it alone,” Hallie said. “The stakes are too high. If everyone would just say no to overexposure to the elements, I’d put on a sweater, by gum!”
Gert laughed. Hallie sometimes used funny expressions like “by gum.” It did lighten the mood a bit. But these days, it seemed like practically the only time her old roommate said things like that was when she was drinking or drunk.
Gert remembered meeting Hallie on move-in day at college. She’d liked her new roommate instantly. Hallie was a short, chubby-cheeked girl who laughed at everything and constantly poured her heart out about all her unrequited crushes. And just as Hallie was willing to share her problems, she was nosy and would ferret out all of her friends’ concerns. If something was bothering Gert, Hallie would be unrelenting in drawing it out of her and making her feel better. The two of them often left a night of studying on their respective beds to head to the corner coffee shop to hash out their problems over espresso. They would leave after two hours with a clear course of action: Call their crushes. Study harder. Hang around over break. Hallie was a psychology major, so she liked helping people deal with their dilemmas.
But toward the end of freshman year, Gert had stopped being able to match Hallie’s tales of unrequited longing. Gert was beginning to get male attention, even if she wasn’t used to it. A childhood friend of hers told her that she was “college popular” rather than “high school popular”—in her high school, only the beautiful, outgoing girls had had boyfriends, but in college, if you were pretty and funny and easygoing enough, you could do all right. One thing Gert had always had going for her was a calm rationality, a willingness to live and let live. She rarely got bent out of shape over the little things, and it seemed to her that most girls were high-strung. Especially about men. Gert thought that a lot of things guys did were funny, whereas most women found their jokes offensive or just plain gross.
It was like Hallie and Erika—especially these days. They got crazy over every aspect of the dating process, worrying it to death. Hallie was still as good a listener as she had been back in school—but only when Erika wasn’t around. When Erika was there, Hallie seemed more concerned with trying to impress her glamorous friend. Gert suspected it went back to high school, when beautiful Erika was exceedingly popular and Hallie was grateful to tag along.
Gert thought that maybe, just as Hallie wanted to help Gert get back into society, she could help Hallie not be so focused on winning everyone else’s approval—that of Erika and every man she met. Hallie used to be a lot of fun. But more and more, she acted desperate. Strained.
The three women finally agreed on a bar called Art’s. It had a dual meaning that Gert liked. She didn’t see a guy named Art, though; just a female bartender with overalls and cropped blond hair. A female Eminem.
There were four stools open at the mahogany counter. Hallie and Erika jockeyed to be at either end, rather than in the middle. If you were in the middle there was no chance of someone sitting next to you. Hallie had done that in lecture halls throughout college, too—always sat just one seat in, so a guy could sit on the end without effort. Nowadays, Hallie also chose the middle seat on airplanes, meaning that seats would be left on either side of her, guaranteed to be taken by people traveling alone. It was Hallie’s Law of Maximum Exposure, almost as airtight as the Great Male Statistic: Leave as much surface area as possible so you will come into contact with an exponentially greater number of single people.
Of course, 99.9 percent of the time, the plan failed. On airplanes, Hallie often ended up flanked by someone’s grandpa and a woman who looked like Pamela Anderson.
At Art’s, a David Bowie song was playing, which made Gert think immediately of Marc, because he’d been a big Bowie fan. There she was, thinking about him again. Whenever she did that, everything else lost focus. She sometimes lingered in such a netherworld for four to five minutes and then popped back into reality and wondered what had just happened. People would be staring at her, wondering why she looked so spacey. But there was comfort in the netherworld.
She tried to figure out which Bowie song it was. Marc would have known. He was a rock ’n’ roll encyclopedia. She could count on him for that. It was just one of the many small things she could count on. Whenever they were in the car together, she would test him just to tease him, asking which singer was on, and if he didn’t know, he would get all frustrated, and the moment they got home he’d dash up the stairs to look up the song in the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits.
Strains of Bowie were soon replaced by “5:15” by The Who, which also had a memory attached. They’d gone to see the movie Quadrophenia together. Gert was unimpressed with the movie, but loved the music. Marc was constantly trying to get Gert, and everyone else, into his favorite bands. It was adorable.
Gert hadn’t realized until he was gone just how many different things she had liked about him, nor how much his very existence had become part of her constitution. She wasn’t the type to constantly blather on about her boyfriend or husband, but she had always had Marc in the back of her mind, no matter where she was. Now, whenever something reminded her of him, she’d remember what happened and her stomach would drop. She wondered if people who were part of a couple had any idea what a privilege it was to get to spend their lives with the person they loved. Of course, they knew on one level, but did they really know?
Erika whined about wanting to sit on an end stool, so Hallie reluctantly offered her one. But instantly, the seat on the other side got taken—by a girl who’d just come in with her boyfriend. What nerve. At least the girl wouldn’t be competing with them for the guys hanging out by the dartboard.
Gert picked up the drink menu and looked at it. Wine was eight dollars a glass. It seemed ridiculous for her to spend that much money. Especially now that she was living on a single income.
She looked around the bar and felt sick. Was this the world she’d been left to—squandering money on booze, dressing half-naked, shouting over music, strategizing about where to sit?
Gert felt angry. Angry about everything that had happened. Angry at herself.
Gert knew that thinking about this at the bar didn’t make her look very approachable. But she couldn’t help it. Obviously she wasn’t ready to go out yet. Her initial instincts had been right: a year and a half wasn’t long enough. She was too tired, too angry, too sad. Maybe next year.
Then she thought of something.
She could pretend she was back in college, hanging out with friends just like freshman year. She didn’t have to be worrying about who was by the dartboard. She could sing along with Roger Daltrey. She could make fun of Erika’s ponytail. She didn’t have to be looking for a man like her friends were. She didn’t want one, anyway.
No worrying, plotting or planning.
Gert craned her neck over the bar and forced a smile. “So,” she said to Hallie, “did you fire that girl at work?”
“No.” Hallie shook her head. “I will, though.”
Hallie was the office manager at a management consulting firm, and her twenty-three-year-old assistant spent half the day calling guys, Instant Messaging guys, checking to see if she had e-mail from guys, and scribbling ratings on the posters of guys she kept on her cubicle wall. On Brad Pitt’s arm, the girl had written, “HOT.” On Ben Affleck, she’d written, “yumie” (and yes, spelled it wrong). On Josh Hartnett, she’d written, “Cute!!!” Then, on Robert Downey, Jr., she’d written a simple “OK.”
“You can’t fire her,” Erika said. “She makes you feel better about your own life.”
“I know,” Hallie said. “I may be twenty-nine and single, but at least I’ve never put Tiger Beat posters on my walls. And now she keeps disappearing every day between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m., and she thinks we don’t notice. I don’t know where she goes.”
“Do you have any idea?” Gert asked.
“No,” Hallie said. “My boss is going to have me follow her.”
Gert sensed someone sitting next to her. She felt the brush against her shoulder before she even looked. Two men were sitting down. They weren’t looking her way, though. They were talking to each other. She snuck a peek. They were both wearing leather bomber jackets. They were average-looking and clean-cut.
“Fresh meat at three o’clock,” Erika said.
Hallie took a quick look at the guys, then went back to Erika. “They’re short, though,” she reported.
“Did I ever tell you that Ben’s bitch wife is an inch taller than he is?” Erika said. “I can’t imagine what happens when she wears heels. The two of them must look like a circus act.”
“Maybe she doesn’t wear heels,” Gert said.
“Don’t be funny,” Erika said.
Gert heard the guy to her right say to the bartender, “Just a cranberry juice.” The bartender looked at him strangely before going to get the juice.
The guy noticed Gert looking at him. “I’m all for girly drinks,” he said, smiling.
“Oh,” Gert said. “This may shock you, but so am I.”
“What kind?”
“All kinds, as long as there’s citrus fruit involved.”
“It prevents scurvy,” the guy’s friend said.
“Health is always important when ordering alcoholic beverages,” Gert said.
“So I should order one for you, then,” the first guy said.
Gert said, “You could.”
Erika whispered to Hallie, “Hook-up at stage right.” Gert ignored her. The guys both seemed nice.
“Cranberry juice is…” Gert started, but then she stopped. What she’d thought of was that it was good for urinary tract infections. But that was not appropriate dating conversation. Damn—she was going to have to start thinking like that now. With Marc, of course, she could have said anything. She could have gone to the bathroom in front of him, although she preferred not to.
It was back to square one on everything. Well, at least she was older now. Square two, then.
“Cranberry juice is…good for you,” Gert finished.
“It’s good for urinary infections,” the first guy said.
Erika leaned over Gert’s seat and said to him, “Are you a doctor?”
The guy looked at her for a second.
“No,” he said, laughing. Erika shrugged and went back to her drink.
“Anyway, there’s a reason I can’t drink,” the guy added.
“What is it?” Gert asked.
“He’s on the extra board,” his friend said.
Gert looked at them blankly.
“That means I’m on call for work,” the first guy said. “But even when I’m not on call, I’m never allowed to drink.”
“Are you a cop?”
“Nope.”
“Guess what he does,” the guy’s friend said. “Guess. No one can ever guess it.”
“Gert,” Hallie called from two stools down. “Do you want a drink?”
Hallie had drained two cosmos in ten minutes. She was giving Gert a look like she wanted to know if Gert needed to be rescued. Gert didn’t know why. All they were doing was talking. “No, thanks,” Gert said. “I’m okay.”
“Gert!” Erika said. “Hallie and I are going to the girls’ room!”
“Fine,” Gert said. “See you.”
“Gert!” Erika called. “Let us know if you want a drink.”
Gert nodded.
“Your friends are loud,” the guy’s friend said in a low voice.
“They’re really nice people,” Gert said.
“You must be nice to defend them,” the first guy said.
“It’s the least you should expect someone to do,” Gert said, “defend their friends.”
“Anyone who has a rule like that,” the first guy said, “I’m all for.” He smiled. He had a small scar on the bridge of his nose. It looked cute.
“Todd defends me, right, Todd?” the second guy asked.
“Yeah, I do,” Todd said in an authoritative voice. “Two more guesses.”
“You’re a treasury officer,” Gert said.
“Hey, is that an Untouchables reference?”
“Yes,” Gert said.
“That’s like my favorite movie. How’d you know?”
Gert said, “I just knew.”
“Brian, isn’t that like my favorite movie?”
“It’s like his favorite movie,” Brian said.
Erika and Hallie hadn’t gone to the bathroom as promised. They were staring at Gert.
Hallie elbowed her.
“Why don’t you introduce us?” she asked.
“Oh,” Gert said. “Todd and Brian, this is Hallie and Erika.”
