Sarah awoke the next morning with a vague sense of dislocation—something was different, but in the initial haze of semiconsciousness, she could not quite remember what. It dawned on her first as a sense memory—her skin alive as it hadn’t been for months, a porous sexual hangover lingering, pleasant but disturbing. The previous night came back in disjointed words, touches, his lips, his face so close to hers. She felt her arms, the curve of her hips, testing, probing, remembering, her nerve endings reawakened in a way that just weeks ago she hadn’t believed would ever be possible again.
Suddenly she did care, cared deeply, what he thought, if he’d call. She climbed out of bed and dug her BlackBerry out of her bag. Her heart jumped when she saw that she had two new messages. Neither turned out to be from him and she felt a pang of rejection, despite telling herself that the fact that he did not text her in the middle of the night was meaningless. There were so many more ways to feel rejected, so many more ways for men not to contact you than there had been when she had first started dating.
By the time Sarah dropped Eliza at school and got to work, it seemed as if hours had passed, hours with no word, though it was only 9:00 a.m. She opened her office door hoping to see the red message light of her phone blinking but it was a matte gray. She checked her e-mail (maybe her BlackBerry wasn’t working for some reason; it could happen) but there was nothing. What was the acceptable time frame for a morning-after call, 10:00 a.m., 2:00 p.m., had it changed? At what point did the absence of communication imply an absence of interest?
Paige had a breakfast with the PR people for a new organic beauty line at a vegan restaurant near Gramercy Park that served only locally grown produce cooked below a certain temperature and wouldn’t be in for another hour. Lucy was at a PTA meeting planning the spring benefit, which she swore every year she would never do again, and yet always ended up running. There was no one for Sarah to call, nothing for her to do but try to work. She read the same first paragraph of a proposal for a story about the rise in type 2 diabetes in young women at least four times before giving up and moving on to the second paragraph.
At ten-fifteen, Sarah’s e-mail pinged.
“Well????????” It was from Paige.
Sarah walked over to her office, sat down in the pink director’s chair, and rested her elbows on Paige’s desk.
“What does that look mean?” Paige asked, studying Sarah. “It was bad? How bad?”
Sarah remained silent.
“How bad could it be? I mean, really.”
Sarah waited another moment. “I slept with him,” she said, a mixture of giddiness and resignation in her voice.
“You what?” Paige got up instantly and shut her office door. “I don’t believe it.”
“What don’t you believe?” Sarah asked. “That anyone would want to sleep with me? That mothers of young children have the same desires as everyone else?”
“Oh please, that has nothing to do with it. Who wouldn’t want to sleep with you? Who wouldn’t want to sleep with him, for that matter? It’s just not what I expected, that’s all.”
“It’s not what I expected, either.”
“So? How was it?”
Sarah smiled. “Great.”
“Okay, how did you leave it, what did he say, has he called yet?”
“It wasn’t one of the most graceful exits of all time. I was two hours late for Dora and I freaked.”
“Sounds romantic,” Paige remarked.
Sarah frowned. “Look, I’ve never done this with a kid, okay? The last time I slept with anyone other than my husband was fifteen years ago. The last time I slept with a guy on a first date I was in college and there were one-dollar whiskey sours involved.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t know, we kissed good-bye at the door, he said he’d call.”
“And?”
“It’s early still,” Sarah replied defensively.
Paige nodded ruefully.
“What? I don’t like that look on your face.”
“Okay, you made a rookie error,” she said. Sarah detected a note of condescension in her voice.
“I’m sure there are plenty of couples who slept together on their first date.”
Paige raised one eyebrow.
“Well some, anyway.”
“Sarah, I’m not being judgmental. We’ve all made the same mistake.”
“Why is it a mistake?” Sarah was in the unfortunate role of defending a position she was not thoroughly convinced of.
Paige shrugged. “I’m not talking good girl/bad girl here. Men like the hunt, you know that. You made it too easy. But aside from that, the real problem is that you know each other really well in one way and not at all in another. It’s hard to back up. The progression gets all screwed up. Literally. There’s nothing wrong with it. It just makes things more awkward.”
“Good Lord, hasn’t anything changed?”
“Not a whole lot,” Paige remarked cynically.
“I don’t care. It was worth it.”
“I guess the concept of delayed gratification didn’t quite occur to you?”
“At that particular moment? No.”
“Right.”
“Look,” Sarah said, seriously, “it wasn’t just wanting Tim, which I did. I mean, I was wildly attracted to him.” She paused. “It was the first time since August that I’ve forgotten about what happened, about my life. Maybe that’s wrong, but—”
“It’s not wrong.” Paige softened, leaned forward, gently moved a strand of hair from Sarah’s face.
As the hours passed, Sarah began to suspect Paige was right, though she hated the old-fashioned code it implied. She called Lucy, relayed the details of her night, and asked if she knew of any couples who had begun their relationship in bed.
Lucy managed to offer up one, no wait, two. “If it was meant to be, it won’t make any difference how it started,” she reassured Sarah.
The afternoon was winding down slowly, depressingly, silently, when, at close to 5:00 p.m., Maude buzzed Sarah to tell her that Tim Wakefield was on the line.
Sarah picked up nervously. “Hi.”
“Hi. Did you get home okay? I hope your babysitter wasn’t too pissed off.”
“She was fine. I apologized profusely, overpaid exorbitantly, and sent her home in a car service.”
Tim laughed. “I use the same technique with my designers.”
“I’ll remember that when I get your final bill.”
He ignored this. “So,” he said, “I had a good time last night.”
“Yes. Me, too.”
She could hear numerous voices in the background and someone calling Tim’s name.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m on a shoot. Listen, I have Chris again this weekend. I had thought his mother, never mind, anyway, he has a birthday party Sunday afternoon. I know this is short notice, but do you want to meet for a glass of wine? I only have a couple of hours, but…”
Sarah flashed immediately to the logistics—who would watch Eliza, what would she tell her, how on earth did people with young children do this? Nevertheless, she wanted to appear as if spontaneity was at least a possibility in her life. “That would be great,” she said. And what kind of second date was that anyway, a couple of hours in the middle of the day? Was he downgrading her?
“Great,” he replied.
As soon as Sarah hung up, she e-mailed Paige, “He called, Smarty Pants!” There was vast relief and not a small amount of vindication in the words. She hit Send and called Lucy to ask if she could leave Eliza at her house for a few hours on Sunday.
The wardrobe choices for a Sunday afternoon, kids-at-birthday-party glass of wine were far from clear to Sarah, and she spent much of that morning trying on various incarnations of casual-but-sexy, trying-but-not-trying-too-hard. She finally settled on tight, low-slung jeans and a white scoop-neck sweater that showed off her newly prominent collarbone (this had required taking on and off six tops and three different bras).
“Why aren’t you staying?” Eliza asked suspiciously as they headed into Lucy’s building.
“I have some errands to do,” Sarah replied, not looking her daughter in the eye.
Upstairs, Jane and Eliza hovered about the living room with the sixth sense children have for moments when grown-ups want to talk out of their hearing range.
“Why don’t you show Eliza that new beading kit?” Lucy suggested.
Jane made no move.
“Go on,” Lucy prompted.
The children turned around and headed down the hallway, registering their protest with every step.
“I’ve outlawed beading kits,” Sarah remarked as they sat down on the couch. “I can’t stand stepping on those things all the time.”
Lucy shrugged. “I outlaw a lot of things until I need some time alone and then somehow they magically reappear. It’s the no-backbone approach to motherhood.” She smiled. “You look beautiful.”
“Really? When I look in the mirror all I can see is how much my face has changed in the past few months.”
Lucy studied her for a moment. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. A little nervous, but yes. I like him. I think I like him. I don’t know.” Sarah looked away. “I feel guilty,” she said quietly.
“To be seeing someone?”
“Yes. It’s just so… soon. I think about Todd every day. Every time the phone rings, I… I still think there were will be some news,” she admitted.
“Sarah, you’ll always miss Todd. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get on with your life. Only you can know if it’s too soon. And you may not know that right away. But you have nothing to feel guilty about. Todd is dead. And you were separated even before that.”
Sarah looked at Lucy, so absolute, so certain, and knew that as much as she might pretend otherwise, it would never be that clear-cut to her. She was waiting still, perhaps she always would be. “It’s just not… clean,” she said. “The way it would be with a real death. Not real, but you know what I mean. I still see the ocean every time I close my eyes. Maybe it will always be that night for me and everything else is just living around it.”
“Maybe. But it is still living, you’re still living. You don’t need permission to start dating again. It’s okay.”
“I know. I guess I just needed to hear it from someone else.” Sarah looked at her watch. “On that cheerful note, I’ve got to go,” she said, standing up and getting ready to leave.
“Have a good time,” Lucy told her as she walked her to the door.
Sarah nodded and kissed her good-bye.
The small bistro in the meatpacking district was one block from the rattle and squalor of the West Side Highway, just beyond the ever-encroaching borders of gentrification. Run by a French couple known for their friendliness to those they liked and their distinct frostiness to those they didn’t, it was dark, brick-walled, intimate, and virtually empty in this off-hour between late lunch and early Sunday dinners. Sarah was the first to arrive, and she took a table by the far wall. The sole waiter had just managed to pull himself away from his seat at the bar to bring her a glass of water and the wine list when Tim walked in.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. He leaned over to kiss her hello and she offered up her cheek, realizing too late that he was aiming for her lips. “The party was over at Chelsea Piers,” he explained as he took off his jacket and sat down. “Fifteen eight-year-old boys hopped up on sugar and bad rock ’n’ roll. I can’t stand that place. I need a sensory deprivation tank after three minutes there.”
Sarah agreed. “I always get stuck pouring more and more money into those damn game machines in the back. Eliza gets this crazed look in her eyes the minute the paper tickets start spitting out. I’m sure she’ll be in Gamblers Anonymous by the time she’s ten.”
Tim laughed. “Did you tell her where you were going today?” he asked, motioning to the waiter, who miraculously came instantly, greeted Tim by name, and took their order.
“No,” she admitted. “You?”
“Nope.”
They both smiled.
“You know how I said I felt like I was in college the other night?” Sarah asked. “Well, I’m regressing. This afternoon I felt like a teenager lying to my parents, only this time I was lying to a six-year-old.”
“Which is actually far worse. No one on earth is as judgmental as your own children.”
Sarah nodded. When they had spoken about Eliza the other night, she had given Tim a sketchy sugarcoated version; she had not mentioned her refusal to be kissed, her slamming of doors, her anger, in part because it felt disloyal, but also because she did not want it to appear that she had a troubled child—surely a mark against her in this new world of dating.
“Actually, I’ve found it’s easier to date women with kids,” Tim said.
“Have you dated a lot since your divorce?” Sarah asked carefully.
He smiled. “That’s a trick question, right up there with ‘Do I look fat in these jeans?’”
“And that’s not an answer.”
“I’ve dated some. You?”
Sarah began ripping up her paper napkin again. “I haven’t been out with anyone since Todd died,” she said.
“What about when you were separated?”
She took a large sip of her kir. Drinking in the middle of the day, even the smallest amount, had always made her warm, woozy. She looked over at Tim, a stranger really, and yet not, and felt a stirring deep within. “No.”
He reached over and put his hands on hers. “You’ve got to stop that,” he said, taking the shredded napkin from her. But he was smiling, they were in on this together.
“I guess you make me nervous,” she admitted.
“Well, you make me nervous, too.”
“I do?”
“Why are you so surprised?”
“Because you’ve dated ‘some,’” she teased him. “Because you spend half your time with models. Because you just don’t seem the nervous type.”
“Well, in that case it must be something about you.” He looked at her seriously. “Sarah, I’ve never dated a client before.”
“I’m not a client anymore, remember?”
“Yes, that’s why I waited to call you.”
She smiled, pleased that he had been thinking of her, waiting for her. “So what was the shoot you were on the other day?”
“Two gallery owners are renovating a condo building on lower Madison Avenue, extremely high end. They’re going to market it to the same clientele and in the same way they sell paintings. They want us to design the advertising campaign.”
“Art justifying overpriced Manhattan real estate—it’s a brilliant strategy.”
Tim studied her for a moment. “The other night, I told you I know the difference between façade and substance. The thing that makes me good at my job, that makes Wakefield successful, is that I know in the end I’m an interpreter, a designer. I’m okay with that.”
There was a slightly defensive tone in his voice and Sarah realized that he was, in his own oblique way, referring to Todd, feeling competitive with him, the craftsman versus the artist.
“I didn’t mean to be sarcastic,” she said. “It actually sounds like an interesting project.”
“Well, you do have a point. Art dealers and real estate agents both appeal to aesthetics and snobbery. But every now and then they actually believe in what they’re selling. Besides, we balance the big lucrative projects with a few smaller ones we really care about.”
“Like Splash?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, that didn’t get you very far. I hope you have better luck with those condos.”
“I don’t know, I think some good things came out of Splash.” He smiled. “What about you? Do you want to stay at Flair now that Rena’s gone?”
“I’m not sure I have a choice.”
“You always have a choice. I’ve given this a lot of thought, particularly toward the end of my marriage when I was trying to decide whether to stay or go. You choose every day how you want your future to look, with even the smallest decision you make. Choice is ongoing. I think you can choose happiness.”
“Rena wanted to do a whole issue on that.”
“Don’t write her off. A lot of people have made that mistake. But I’m not talking magazine-speak. Look, you may not achieve it, you may get totally slammed, but I honestly believe that you can choose to at least aim for it.”
Sarah looked at Tim without answering. It sounded ridiculously, annoyingly simplistic to her. But she realized, too, that it took a certain bravery to be so nakedly uncynical, particularly in the strata of the city he lived in where cool was so often mistaken for intelligence, irony for insight. She was drawn to him more than ever—after the past few months, nothing could be more attractive than a man who envisioned a future and was confident of his own ability to shape it.
“Okay if I get back to you on that one?” she asked.
“I’m counting on it.” He reached over to touch her face and she rested her cheek against the palm of his hand, a catlike sigh of contentedness escaping from her throat.
They ordered another round of drinks and as people began to wander in from the nearby galleries and shops, they felt cocooned in their corner, their legs touching now beneath the table, the wine, the closeness distracting them both, their desire enhanced by their inability to do anything about it.
Tim looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go pick up Chris.”
He paid the check and they walked out, standing on the street corner in the deep glow of dusk. The wind from the Hudson River whipped around them and he pulled her into his embrace. She wrapped her arms about his neck as they kissed, unwilling to separate, the intensity magnified by the fact that it felt mildly illicit, children, obligations waiting for them. Their hands were wandering down each other’s backs, their legs pressed against each other. “I used to wonder why people like this didn’t just go home,” Tim said, pulling back an inch, smiling at her. “Maybe they just didn’t have a place to go to. We are homeless romantics.”
She laughed, buried her face in the crook of his neck.
“I really do have to leave,” he said, convincing himself, convincing her.
“Okay.”
They kissed once more and he hailed a passing cab.
Sarah walked a block and then caught a cab of her own. She leaned back against the black vinyl seat and stared out of the filmy window, slightly drunk, disjointed, desirous, confused, as the streets grew more crowded with people, restaurants, Korean delis with their brilliantly dyed flowers behind sheets of plastic protecting them from the cold. She grew almost dizzy, flooded with the colors, the afternoon, the beginning with Tim overlapping with a past still nibbling at its edges.
She went over their conversation in her mind, searching for clues to him, but it was filtered through a film of insecurity. She realized that he had not said anything about calling her, about getting together again, and she felt a wave of uncertainty—it was all just empty space ahead. She remembered her early days with Todd; there were no fits and starts, no strategies, no doubts that they were from the very start, a couple. Perhaps it was Todd, his nature—the very idea of dating was anathema to him—but perhaps, too, that can only happen at an earlier stage of life, before the barnacles of past lives, current responsibilities, young children, ex-spouses, ghosts. She and Tim were not, would never be, just the two of them; it would never be simple in the way it had been when they were each starting out.
Or perhaps that is only how Sarah remembered it now—it had never really been that simple, after all.