THE FIRST THING I SEE when I get off the train is Wendy frantically waving.
“Hi, stranger.” I throw my arms around her, then step back. “You look fabulous!” I say and mean it. Her brown hair is tied back in a bun, and she’s wearing a sophisticated pinstripe pantsuit with fancy black leather loafers. Very chic. And very skinny. Why is she so skinny? “Have you raided Ally McBeal’s closet?”
“Hi!” she squeals. “Since I have no life, the only thing I have to spend my money on is ridiculously expensive clothes. Just one bag?”
“I’m here for only five days. How many bags do you want?” Maybe more than five days. Cupid closes down for the whole holiday, so I’m off work until the third. If Jer and I are getting along, maybe I can be convinced to stay over New Year’s…
“Okay, here’s the plan. It’s three o’clock now. I’ll take your bag with me to work, and you’ll wander around the city for a few hours. Then you’ll meet me back at my office at around nine. After that, it’s up to you. Do you want to go out tonight? What about tomorrow? Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. Do you want to do something special? I may have to work in the morning, even though I’m pretty sure the office will close down later.”
“Not really.”
Hmm. I wonder where Jeremy is? How am I going to find him? Why didn’t I call him before I came? What if he’s not even in the city for the holidays? If he just got back, he wouldn’t leave again so soon. But what if he did?
I’m a complete idiot. Who comes all the way to New York City to see a guy she doesn’t even know will be in town? Should I call him now to ask what his plans are for tonight? But then he’ll know I’m here specifically to see him. I have to accidentally-on-purpose run into him. How difficult can that be? The characters from Friends run into each other all the time.
I won’t call him. I’m not going to call him. I think I’ll do some window-shopping this afternoon. I love New York. I should move to New York. It’s a little scary, though. I don’t want to have to worry about getting mugged or murdered every time I step outside. They’d probably leave my body in Central Park, with no identification and no clothes—I can’t even think about moving here until I lose a few pounds—and it would take the N. Y.P.D. weeks to figure out who I was.
I definitely watch too much Law and Order.
Speaking of losing weight, why is Wendy so thin? Is it all the walking? The hectic lifestyle? No time to eat? The city would go well with my new low-carb diet. I read about it in City Girls. No bread, no noodles, no fruit. The problem is that as soon as you start eating the stuff again, the diet is all over and back comes the weight. But that’s fine, because it’s only an I-haven’t-seen-Jer-in-many-months-so-I-have-to-look-really-hot temporary diet. And it’s working so far. I think. It’s hard to tell. It’s only been one day. Since breakfast, actually. After breakfast. And I had a salad for lunch. But no croutons.
My hands are cold. Why don’t I have gloves? What happened to the pair I had last year? I think I lost them. The next time I buy gloves I should sew them to the sleeves of my jacket. But then I’d probably just lose the jacket.
By the time I meet Wendy at her office, my feet hurt, I’m starving, and my fingers are bloated and red. I change into a more appropriate going-out outfit—my high black boots and a little black dress—and we go to a trendy new Japanese restaurant for dinner. I order teriyaki salmon (low in carbs). Afterward, we go to a bar in Chelsea for a drink. Wendy sees some investment banker people she knows, but no Jeremy. “I told you we weren’t going to run into him,” she says in her annoying I-told-you-so voice.
After an hour of me almost falling asleep at our table, we’re on our way home. The good thing is that since I don’t know anyone here, I can wear the same outfit tomorrow night.
We take a cab to Wendy’s place in the Bronx. We’re quiet when we open the door because her grandmother is already sleeping. I’ve pretty much known Bubbe Hannah as long as I’ve known Wendy, since she used to come to Danbury from New York to visit at least one weekend a month. She doesn’t like me to call her Mrs. Teitelbaum. “It’s Bubbe,” she says in her thick Yiddish accent. So I call her Bubbe Hannah. Normally she’d be in Florida this time of year, but Wendy’s cousin is having his bar mitzvah in the middle of January, so Bubbe Hannah had to postpone her trip. Supposedly the timing of the bar mitzvah caused quite an uproar among the geriatric crowd, regarding the necessary changes in their yearly migration schedules.
I’m sleeping with Wendy in her room, since the couch in the living room is covered in protective plastic, kind of like the sticky plastic stuff we had to cover all our textbooks with in grade school. It’s not comfortable to sit on, never mind sleep on.
“You’re not going to hog the entire blanket?” Wendy asks, throwing an extra pillow on her double bed.
“I don’t hog blankets.” Uh-oh. “I forgot to pack pajamas. Can I borrow?”
“Why am I not surprised?” She throws me long johns and a T-shirt. “And you do hog blankets. You roll yourself around in them like a roly-poly. Speaking of which, I’m going to get us some.”
She goes to the kitchen and returns with slices of a dough roll filled with jam, raisins, and nuts. Oh, well. I guess my diet officially starts tomorrow. We finish our snack, get washed and changed, close the blinds and the light, and crawl into bed.
“How many times do you think I stayed over at your house in Danbury?” I ask, rolling myself in the flower-patterned duvet. Just a little.
“At least once a week. How come you slept over at my place more than I stayed at yours?”
“You had brothers who would play with us. And better food.”
“True.” Wendy sighs. “I wish we still lived in the same city.”
“Maybe one day we will.”
“Maybe I’ll quit my job and move to Boston.”
“Don’t you like your job?”
“Not really. I mean, I guess the job’s okay, sometimes, but I hate the hours. I really hate the hours. I’m usually there ’til eleven every night, sometimes past one. Is this a life?”
“But think of the money you’re making! And you live rent-free! You’re going to be filthy rich by the time you’re thirty.”
“BythetimeI’ mthirty! Areyoucrazy? I can’t dot his for another six years! I’ll go insane! I’ll lose so much weight I’ll disappear!”
“So what do you want to do? Go to business school?”
“Maybe. But I don’t have time to write all the essays. Maybe I’ll do something fun like copyedit.”
“Yeah, real fun—I’m bored to tears. Inserting commas is not my ideal job. And you couldn’t afford your fancy suits on my salary.”
“Maybe I’ll just quit and take off some time to figure out what I want to do.”
“But you’ve always wanted to be in business.”
“Have I? Maybe I should have been a doctor. At least then I’d feel as if I’m contributing something to society.”
“So go to medical school.”
“Maybe I will.”
“You know what your problem is, Wen? You’ve been focused for so long, you don’t know how to be unfocused. You don’t know how to just ease off and have a little fun. You know what I would do if I were you? I’d bum around the world for a while. Go to Italy, France, Greece. Just take off. No one to answer to. Just you and the unknown.”
“That’s your style, Jack. Not mine. You’re the one who just packed up and went to Boston. But you never know, maybe one day I’ll do just that. Maybe one day I’ll wake up and say, ‘Enough! Goodbye nine to five, or nine to eleven, or nine to one, I’m off to join the circus!’”
We have a moment of silence while Wendy, I assume, is contemplating how she would fit in with acrobats and clowns, what kind of wardrobe she would need, et cetera, et cetera…while my mind drifts to more immediate concerns.
“Should I call him?” I ask.
“Now?”
“Not now. Tomorrow.”
“Why bother discussing it? You know you’re going to call him.”
“No I don’t.” We both know this is not true, and laugh.
“Why do you miss him?” she asks.
“Why?” What kind of question is that? “I don’t know. I just do.”
“So then call him.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“So don’t.”
I’ll worry about this tomorrow. Right now I’m too tired to exert the kind of energy this decision requires. “Can we go to sleep now?”
“Yup. Good night.”
When the alarm goes off the next morning, I am quite pleased it’s not for me. I fall back asleep and wake up at eleven to Bubbe Hannah knocking on the door.
“Vake up! Vake up, sleepyhead!”
“Hi, Bubbe Hannah,” I mumble, sitting up. She kisses me on the cheek.
“Are you hungry? I made lunch.” All her U’s sound like O’s, all her W’s like V’s.
“You really didn’t have to,” I tell her.
“Vat you talking about? I made chicken soup and lokshin, broiled chicken, raisin kugel, and my roly-poly, of course.”
What are the chances these are all carb-free?
I sit down at the table as five dishes are brought to me at once. Hmm. The chicken looks fine. The soup smells great, but it has lokshin noodles in it. I guess I can eat around them. The raisin kugel and roly-poly are definite no-nos.
“Thank you so much for lunch,” I say.
“It’s my pleasure. My Vendy doesn’t eat. No time, she says. No time to eat? Vat kind of life is that? Maybe you vant something else? Bread? Let me get you some bread.”
“No, thank you.”
“No bread?”
“I’m on a special no-bread diet.”
“Vy are you on a diet? You’re too skinny. You girls today are all too skinny. Eat, bubelah, eat.”
Too skinny? Me? I love this woman. Maybe I’ll move in. Why can’t I have a bubbe? “It’s just a short-term diet. It’s the new trend in diets these days. No bread or pasta.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Bubbe Hannah says, nodding. “It’s called Passover.”
I eat in silence for a few minutes.
“So tell me about Boston,” she says.
“I like it.”
“Vat do you like?”
“I like my job.”
“Good. That’s good. And your boyfriend? He’s good, too? I’m happy you have a boyfriend. Vendy has no boyfriend. It’s not good. It’s not good for a girl so old to not have a boyfriend.”
“Ah, come on, Bubbe Hannah. Wendy’s still young. There’s plenty of time for her to meet someone and get married.”
“Time for her, maybe. But I’m not getting any younger. She vorks too hard. She comes home very late. She’s not going to get married. Not like you. You I don’t have to vorry about. So ven’s the vedding?”
“Uh, we haven’t decided, Bubbe Hannah. But soon. Real soon.”
“Good. Just leave the plates on the table ven you finish. Don’t you like the lokshin? Vy did you leave the lokshin? Eat the lokshin, bubelah.” She leaves the kitchen to watch Veel of Fortune.
I eat the lokshin. I don’t want to be rude. The diet starts right after lunch.
After lunch I take the subway to Thirty-fourth Street to look at the Macy’s window display and to do some last-minute holiday shopping. I stop in front of the store window and look at my reflection. Why do I go on letting Bubbe Hannah think I’m with someone? What if I never meet anyone I want to marry?
Every Cupid book is based on the premise that the heroine and hero were meant for each other right from the start. My dad always says, “There’s a lid for every pot.” But this doesn’t make sense. What if two people are perfectly matched but live in different countries? This would imply that luck plays a greater role in life than fate. I mean, what if the stars schedule you to meet your one true love at exactly three o’clock, but at one minute to three you sneeze and have to search through your handbag for a tissue? By the time you find one and are done with blowing your nose, the love of your life has rounded a corner and is out of your life forever. Is this what it all comes down to? A sneeze? No wonder we end up marrying whomever we happen to be dating in our mid-to-late twenties. We get desperate because we haven’t met our soul mates. No wonder there are so many divorces.
My hands are cold. I need a new winter jacket, too. If I had gone to Danbury to visit my dad, I would have raided his company’s coat inventory.
Should I call Jer? No, I’m not going to call him.
I could always call and hang up, just to see if he’s home. He might not even be in town. He’s probably not in town. I should check. Just to see if I’m wasting my time.
Where’s a pay phone? I need to find a pay phone. I find a pay phone and dial his number before I change my mind.
Why am I doing this? It’s ringing. What if his parents answer? I can’t talk to his parents. What if he’s not there?
“Hello?” It’s his voice. He’s home. He’s on the phone. I’m on the phone with him.
“Hi,” I say. “It’s me.”
“Hey!” His voice feels both strange and familiar. “How are you?”
“Good. How are you? Happy to be back?”
“A little. Happy to be clean. Miss the life. You know.”
“Of course.” Not really. What does a little happy mean?
“How’s Boston?”
“Good,” I lie. My job sucks, I have no friends except for Nat and Sam, and I miss you. “How are your mom and dad?”
“Good. They’re away. Hawaii.”
“You didn’t want to go with them?”
“I just got back. I’m trying to settle in.”
Pause. I can’t hold in my whereabouts any longer. “I’m here.”
“Here? In New York?”
“In New York.”
“Where in New York?”
“Outside Macy’s.”
“Come over,” he says without hesitation.
Do I want to go over there? Of course I want to go over there. “Okay.” I need to find a place to change. Good thing I brought along Wendy’s knapsack with my knee-high boots, black tights, a cute skirt, and my first-date shirt. Just in case.
I step out of the cab in front of his parents’ apartment building on the Upper East Side. I smile at the doorman, and he calls up to the eighteenth floor to tell Jeremy he has a visitor. Two, three, four…you’d think such a fancy building would have a faster elevator. What am I doing what am I doing what am I doing? Don’t think don’t think don’t think. About twelve hours later, the elevator opens. Why am I here? Why do I always react based on primal instincts rather than on rational thought?
He’s leaning against his door, his arms crossed in front. Our eyes lock and I’m moderately concerned my knees may do the same.
The first time you see an ex after a substantial time, you kind of hope he looks a little worse. Not ugly—you don’t want to wonder what you were doing with him in the first place. You want him to be just slightly less attractive to prove to yourself that he’s not doing quite as well without you around.
He looks at home in dark jeans, a navy sweatshirt that make his eyes look even bluer, and an incredibly sexy twelve-o’clock shadow.
And he’s tanned. So much for him looking a little less attractive.
“Hi, there,” he says.
“Hi.”
Why does he have to be wearing that cologne? The one he knows I love?
I lean over to kiss him on the cheek, kind of, and he pulls me into him. Before I realize it, his lips are on my lips, my neck, and then back on my lips. We’re still in the hallway and I’m touching his shirt, his arms, his face, and his hands are in my hair, on my back, on my skirt…
And so it goes.
“Do you want to see pictures?” he asks, wrapping the covers over my shoulders with one hand, fingering my belly ring with the other.
“Sure,” I reply sleepily. “Only if it involves us not getting out of bed.”
“No problem, they’re right here.” He kisses my forehead and pulls out two packages of photos from the drawer in his nightstand. “I haven’t had a chance to put them in an album yet.”
Only two rolls? I’m surprised. On one of our weekend ski trips he took four rolls. I guess he was too busy this time to be camera happy.
I wade through a stack of photos of him standing next to native Thai people. When he pulls out the second batch, I’m sure I’ll have a heart attack. “This is the group I traveled with for about a month,” he explains. “We moved through the country together.” The first picture is of him, some French guy named François, and four girls. Two of the girls are tall blondes, one is a skinny redhead, and one is a short brunette. How do I know which one is the bimbo? I can’t ask. Why is he showing me this picture? He shows me about five more pictures of the same group. Is he trying to kill me? I’m going into cardiac arrest.
Wonderful. A bikini shot. Which one is she? Which one? Could he have slept with all of them? Maybe he was sleeping with all of them. For some sick reason that makes me happier. If he was sleeping with them all, he couldn’t be in love with only one, right? Maybe when he wrote me that he’d met someone, he actually meant he’d met more than one someone.
There are no pictures of him and some girl posing in front of a sunset on the beach. No cover shots. Hmm. He usually buys rolls of thirty-six. Have I seen seventy-two pictures? I don’t think I have. I think I’ve only seen sixty-six, maybe sixty-seven. Gasp. He must have taken some out! He’s hiding them! Or maybe some of the pictures were overexposed. It happens.
He places the photos back in their envelopes. “I’m going to take a shower. Wanna join me?”
“No, thanks. I’m too comfy.” I want to have a better look at these photos, without him surveying over my shoulder.
I wait to hear him turn on the water. I remove the pictures from the envelopes and look through them again. I’m guessing one of the blondes. But that would be the obvious choice, wouldn’t it? He expects me to think that, but it’s really the brunette.
I’m unclear as to what happens now. Are we back together? Do I just forget the last few months? Can I do that? Can I trust him again? Earlier when he reached into the drawer of the nightstand to get a condom, I noticed the box was open. Did he take home an opened box from Thailand? It couldn’t have been here before he went over there, because for the last two years I was with him, I was on the pill.
It would be really wrong if I searched through his drawer to investigate the matter further. Really wrong. Morally wrong. Legally wrong.
Hmm. I can still hear the pounding of the water against the tiles.
I open the drawer and take out the box. Let’s see. It says on the package there should be twelve condoms inside. And the box is in perfect shape—meaning that there’s no way it was anywhere near a backpack. So he didn’t take it back with him from Thailand. It could have been a new box, mind you, and he could have opened it just after I called. In expectation. In eagerness. I’ll buy that. But there had better be eleven in there, since we used one. Let’s see. Four. There are four condoms left. Four? Only four? Is there a secret compartment? Like the spare tank in your car when your gauge says empty? Why are there only four? Where are the missing seven?
More importantly, where were they?
The water stops and I frantically return the box and the pictures to their original homes.
Seven. He’s had sex seven times in the last two weeks. His vacation sex I’m prepared to forget about. But New York sex?
I am having difficulty processing this information.
When he walks back into the room, I’m sitting cross-legged on his bed. The lower half of his body is wrapped in a black towel. The wet tips of his hair fall in front of his eyes. He is so cute wet. Very distracting.
“I’m starving,” he says.
I pull him back to bed. “What do you want to do for dinner?” I decide to give him the benefit of the doubt—for now. He could have bought the box months ago, intending to bring it to Thailand, but at the last moment decided to take only seven condoms.
“Actually…”
Yes? Order in? Dine out? He rests the back of his head against my knee. “I have this Christmas Eve dinner thing tonight,” he says.
“Oh.” That sucks. I guess I’m going to make Wendy take the whole day off from work, after all. “You can’t get out of it?”
“Unfortunately, no. You didn’t tell me you were coming in.” I watch as his eyes change from blue to gray. They do that sometimes, depending on the light. “If you had given me some sort of notice, I would have been able to take you.”
Excuse me? A look of death must be clouding across my face because I sense him tensing up. Or maybe he’s tensing up because he realizes what he’s just said and knows he’s busted.
“You’re taking someone else.” This is not a question.
“I…”
I just slept with him and now he has a date. I just slept with him and now he has a date. Tonight. After I slept with him. I shove his head off my knee. “Who? Who’s your date?”
He pauses. Again. “Jackie, I don’t think you want to know.”
Omigod. I know. I know who it is. “Are you dating Crystal Werner?”
Another pause. This man sure takes a lot of pauses when he’s being busted.
“You’re dating Crystal.” I’m going to kill myself. Did he always like her? Did he like her while he was dating me? Was he just waiting for her to break up with her boyfriend? Was I just the bed warmer? “Good for you, guys. I hope you two have a long and happy life together.”
He laughs. I can’t believe he laughs. I’m contemplating suicide and he’s laughing. “It’s not serious. It’s really casual. We don’t want to get too attached to each other. I’m moving to Boston in a week, remember?”
No, I do not remember. He never did give me a date as to when he was coming. And what does he mean by “we”? Is he saying that he would have considered getting serious with her if he weren’t moving to Boston? Which makes me now wonder about our whole relationship. Did he sleep with other girls when we were together and tell them that we weren’t serious, that we were only casual, because he was going to Thailand?
If he cared about me, even a little, he would not have done this. He would not have started up with Crystal. He would not have started up with anyone, in Thailand or elsewhere. He would not have made me an afterthought, an if-nothing-else-works-out-there’s-always-Jackie kind of girl.
I have to get out of this apartment immediately. If I stay here a moment longer, I might explode—and I mean into actual physical pieces, not verbally. Where are my clothes? Where are my damn clothes? I hate him. I really hate him. I hope he dies. I hope he dies an excruciatingly painful death. Like getting eaten by a shark. While still conscious. Or being burned to death, but not passing out from the smoke. I wish I had one of those sock puppet voodoo dolls. I know exactly where I’d prick him.
As I step back into my skirt and boots (I would put on the comfy clothes that are in the knapsack, but I don’t want him to know I dressed up for him), I feel him watching me. I ignore his gaze. “Have a merry Crystal Christmas,” I say and slam the apartment door behind me. I am not going to cry. I will not let him matter that much to me. I will not cry. He is not worth it. Raindrops on roses? Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes?
I walk into the closest grocery store and ask the woman behind the counter where the nearest phone is. She points me to a phone booth near the fridge at the back of her store. I need to speak to Wendy.
“Hi,” she says. “So are you staying at Jeremy’s?”
“No. I want to go back to Bubbe Hannah’s.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” I answer, my voice shaking. I won’t cry. I can’t cry. I cannot start sobbing while the grocery woman is watching me while she stocks the fridge with milk cartons.
“What happened?”
“He’s dating Crystal Werner.” I am not going to cry in a grocery store. I am crying in a grocery store. The grocery woman passes me a tissue.
“It’s okay,” she says soothingly (Wendy, not the grocery woman). “He’s an ass. Nothing new.”
“I know.” The tears are now running freely down the sides of my face. “So why am I surprised? It’s not as if he’s inconsistent.”
She tells me to stay where I am. She’s coming to pick me up in a cab in half an hour.
I wander around the store for five minutes, buy a chocolate bar, and then decide to try Sam’s cell.
“Jack! How’s New York?”
“Horrible. I hate this place. When will you be home?”
“Day after tomorrow. The twenty-sixth. What happened with Jer?”
I don’t feel like revisiting the experience just yet. “Me, too. I’m coming home.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be coming back on the twenty-eighth?”
“I’m coming home early. I don’t want to talk about it. Tell me about Florida.”
“I met the cutest lifeguard at the pool!” she exclaims excitedly, and goes on to describe all the men she’s met.
Twenty minutes later (good thing I memorized my dad’s calling card number way back when), I see a yellow cab pull up outside the store. I hang up in the middle of some story about mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and, sobbing, join Wendy in the backseat.
We order kosher Chinese food for dinner (Bubbe Hannah wants to join us) and rent Love Story, Titanic, The Other Side of the Mountain and Madame X. I’m in the mood for a good cry.
“Jim called,” Bubbe Hannah says.
“Jim?” I ask.
“Who’s Jim?” Wendy asks.
“Not for you. It was a boy for Jackie. A boy didn’t call for you. Unfortunately.”
Wendy rolls her eyes. “Do you mean Tim?”
“Yes, Tim. I thought your boyfriend had another name. But I’m old. I forget.”
“You’re not old, Bubbe. You’re chronologically challenged.” Wendy pecks her grandmother on the cheek. “What did he say?”
“To call him.”
So not happening.
“I have a Hanukkah present for you,” I tell Wendy the next day. It’s Christmas morning. I pull the present I purchased for her yesterday out of my bag. It’s not wrapped or anything, and there’s no card, but still, it’s a present.
“You didn’t have to buy me a Hanukkah present. Friends don’t exchange presents on Hanukkah. Anyway, I’ve known you for over fifteen years, and you never bought me a Hanukkah present before.”
“I know, but I wanted to.” I hand her a copy of Let’s Go Guide to Europe. “To inspire you.”
“This is fantastic,” she says flipping through it. “Oooh…Italy. One day for sure, I’m going to Italy.”
“I wouldn’t care where I went,” I tell her, “as long as I don’t ever have to come to New York again.” I hate New York. Maybe I’ll create a new line of hats and T-shirts with that logo.
“I have a present for you, too,” Wendy says.
“You do?” Yay! A present! She hands me a box wrapped in shiny, green paper, tied with a swirled pink ribbon. She’s included a card, one of those text-free ones with a pretty scenic picture of a couple holding hands next to a large Christmas tree—obviously purchased before the calamity. Inside, she wrote, “Happy holidays to a wonderful best friend. You are strong, brilliant, and beautiful. Anyone who doesn’t realize this immediately does not deserve to be in your presence.” I assume this was written after. I sniffle.
Under the wrapping paper is a Bloomingdale’s box with two pairs of identical fuzzy gray gloves.
“They’re gorgeous!” I tell her. They really are. “But why two pairs?”
“You are to immediately place the second pair in a safekeeping drawer. They are for when you lose the first pair.”
So clever, that Wendy. How could I ask for a better friend? Someone who gives me a backup plan.
Instead of someone who makes me the backup plan.