Carrie Pilby (22 page)

 

When I get home, there's a message on my answering machine. It's Matt, saying he had a good time and that he wants to see me as soon as he can.

Part of me can't wait to see Matt again. And part of me feels bad. I know this is wrong, at least partially wrong, no matter what rationalization I put on it. Rationalizations are for other people. I'm supposed to be a person who doesn't allow herself to dupe herself. Isn't that what I've prided myself on? I can't just talk myself out of things, push them to the back of my consciousness. I should instead work through them.

Am I really hurting other people by seeing Matt? That should be my standard. Hurting myself—that may be stupid, but at least the odds are that it only affects me. Health issues, like smoking or drinking, are things people do mostly to themselves, so maybe they're not quite as bad as the moral issues. At least, not until people start pressuring others to do them, which they often do, or until they start hurting others because of them. But what I'm doing with Matt, fooling around, could directly hurt others.

Matt and Shauna are engaged. By my seeing him whenever he decides we can, I may be letting him believe in some uncommitted, unrealistic fantasy. It may hurt his relationship with Shauna. It may take his attention off appreciating her and doing things for her as much as he should. They spent all these years together.

I don't know what's right anymore.

I have no one to talk to about my confusion. Kara hates adulterers. I don't have any other female friends. I have my date with Michael from the personals soon, but I don't think we'll become best buds. I also can't tell my father about it, nor Ronald the Rice-Haired Milquetoast, who acts as if he wants to know me but sometimes seems a little slow on the uptake.

There's Petrov.

He is confidential, right? He is there to listen, right?

I don't have to tell him about Matt, exactly, but I do want to bounce off him all the moral quandaries that are clanging around in my head. He's really supposed to be there to listen to problems, not to help me analyze the world, but so what? For what we're paying him, he should do whatever I want. He should take a course in reflexology and spend each session kneading my wounded tootsies.

 

The next afternoon, Kara calls.

She invites me to a holiday party at her friend's on Saturday. I want to see her, but I have to figure out how to properly relate to her. I worry that I might say the wrong thing and then she'll realize that I'm not cool enough to fit in with her and her friends. I quickly tell her I have a date.

I don't know why I lied. It was a split-second decision, and one I instantly regret.

“Who's the date with?” Kara asks. “That guy from last time? Did you sleep with him?”

“Not him,” I lie. “Someone new.”

“You are on a roll! How'd you meet this one?”

“Uh…through friends.”

Her phone clicks. “Oh, I have to take this call!” she says. “I'll call you back and maybe we can get together a different time.”

“Okay—bye.”

I hang up. I wonder why I was so incredibly stupid. I do want to hang out with her again.

What if she doesn't really call? What's wrong with me?

 

I climb onto my window loft. I decide to hold off on calling Kara back. I'll do it if I don't hear from her soon.

I sit there, watching the cars roll past. Cars look more appealing when it's raining. Especially black ones with square headlights and tiny beads collecting on their hoods. So
film noir.
I wonder if I should save up for a car. But having a car in New York is like having a baby. They start crying in the middle of the night. You constantly have to worry about where they are. You have to mop up their leaks.

This would be the perfect afternoon for an old movie. But that means I'd have to go out to get the movie. That's the problem with rain—by the time you realize how nice it would be to stay in and watch a movie, you have to temporarily
not
stay in in order to get the movie.

I put on my raincoat and pull a hat over my head. I grab my umbrella and trot down the stairs.

The sidewalk is full of puddles. I splash in some as I walk. I do that all the way up the street. If puddles are inevitable, might as well enjoy them.

When I get around the corner of my block, I see someone familiar walking across the street.

I duck behind a parked car so he can't see me.

The person is wearing an overcoat and a scarf, but I'm pretty sure I know who he is. He pulls his umbrella lower and his head disappears.

I slip into an alleyway to watch. Dr. Petrov climbs some steps to the stoop of a building on the corner. He stands there in order to fold his umbrella and shake it off.

The front door opens and a tall, ponytailed young woman
steps out. The two of them kiss romantically. Petrov hugs her tightly. Then they disappear inside.

I stand there, dumbfounded. Last time I bumped into Petrov around here, he said he had a friend in the area. Is this his girlfriend?

I look up. The light comes on in a second-floor window. For a second, I see the two of them together in the window, but then they disappear.

This girl seems rather young.

I wait for a car to pass, then run across the street and step into the vestibule. I pull my usual technique of looking on the mailboxes.

There's only one apartment listed for the second floor: S. Rubin/D. Leshko. I think I may have seen this girl around the neighborhood before. But I think I've seen her with a guy. I can't be sure. A lot of the girls in my neighborhood look alike.

When I come back out, I head back across the street and look up at the window. I see them in there again for a second.

Only one thing to do.

I run home and thumb through the Manhattan white pages for a number. There are lots of Rubins, but none at that address. There is, however, a Leshko at the address, a Daniel Leshko.

I punch in *67 to stop my number from being traced, and then I dial.

It rings a few times. Gee, I hope I'm not interrupting anything.

A woman answers. “Hello?”

“Is Daniel Leshko there?” I ask.

“He's away on business,” the woman says. “This is Sheryl. Can I take a message?”

“Actually, I'm doing a quick two-second phone survey for
Women's Week
magazine,” I say, “and I know you're busy, but I
just want to ask you two questions, and it would really help me out a lot in completing my quota.”

The woman sighs. “I don't want my name used.”

“No problem.”

“Okay.”

“We're calling 500 people in preparation for our next issue,” I say. “All I want to know is, do you live alone, with a roommate, with your significant other, with your spouse, or none of the above?”

“Uh, with a husband,” she says. “With a spouse.”

“Okay,” I say. “Well, thank you.”

“What about the second question?” she asks.

I hadn't even thought of one. “Uh…to win a free ten-year subscription to
Women's Week,
please answer the following. What is the most commonly used phrase in the English language?”

“Uh…I don't know…”

“I'm sorry, that's the second most common. Have a nice day.” I hang up.

This woman is fooling around with Petrov while her husband's away! I can ask him leading questions at my next appointment to be sure. He's divorced, so he's not cheating on anyone, but
she
sure is.

Perhaps she was the one who was at his place during the blizzard. Maybe she's the one who's always buying him new socks. Maybe she's whom Petrov thinks of when he wakes up in the morning.

That's why I saw Petrov on my block that day.

Now I can come up with a goals list for Petrov: Don't fool around with a woman in her twenties who's married. Don't do it in the same neighborhood as one of your patients.

I seem to know a lot of cheaters lately. Matt. Sheryl. Maybe I'm just paying too much attention. But that doesn't mean everyone's like that. Kara, for instance, says she'd never cheat.
Maybe I should have faith. Just because a lot of people are doing something doesn't mean everyone is doing it. Why am I forgetting that? I remembered it well enough at Harvard, when people were beer-guzzling and having one-night stands. I want to stay true to the old me. The old me knew where she stood.

The new me is watching the rules get fuzzy. I don't like that. How can you make decisions without guidelines? How can you have guidelines if you keep changing them?

I do have one guide: Petrov's list. And I'm going to do everything on it no matter what, and after that, I'll have the experience to decide how to live. Yes, that's a good format to follow. For now, stick to the list.

The thing about the list is that it's stuff most people do without thinking. Dating. Joining clubs. But I don't do these things. And maybe the reason I don't do them is that the people who do them
aren't
thinking. And maybe my problem is I think too much. So Petrov's list is things that normal people, less-smart people, do without thinking, and I have to do them so that they become part of
my
thinking, because the only way I'll do them is if they
are
part of a thought-out list.

From what I glimpsed of the girl, she's pretty—tall, with long hair. Poor Petrov. A gray, bespectacled professional, having gotten divorced and raised two kids, trying to keep the attention of this black-haired, dark-eyed Barbie. He's like that anchorman in
Network
who's so impressed when the young vixen actually wants him.

Why am I listening to Petrov's advice, anyway? Is he really happy? Maybe he's only happy when this girl's husband's away and he can get some of her attention.

 

In the morning, the sun is out, but the puddles remain to prove that the day before was brutal. I wonder what's happen
ing in the Rubin/Leshko/Petrov household. Probably, they're all at work.

I hope Sheryl isn't one of his patients. That would be disturbing.

Maybe she has it all. She gets a doting father figure at noon and a dutiful young husband at night. Should I want what she has?

Around nine, I get a call to do legal proofreading at a firm I haven't ever been to. It's in the daytime, for a change. I fill a backpack with magazines, playing cards, my journal and
A Brief History of Time.
That should cover at least half the shift.

It feels strange to be sitting in an office while the sun's out. Everyone is in suits. I do get a few assignments, but mostly, I'm bored. During the course of the day, I manage to: read four months' worth of the
Atlantic Monthly;
play solitaire; make a graph of the last ten movies I've watched and how they rated on a scale of one to ten; fantasize about beating up the woman two desks over who records her voice mail message fifteen times before she's satisfied (and it's just, “Hi, this is Trudy”); create a flip cartoon on the pages of the firm's directory; create a flip cartoon on the pages of
Black's Law Dictionary;
create a flip cartoon in the pages of the regular dictionary; and check my answering machine six times.

To kill more time, I decide to dial David Harrison's number in Boston. I've wanted to do that for a while.

I make sure no one is looking, then slide the phone slightly off its black base and tap the push buttons. I still remember his number, but I'm great at remembering numbers, always. Each one has some relation to some other important number. I can't ever play the lottery because I would think of too many combinations to pick.

The phone rings, and I hear a woman's voice on an answering machine. “Hi,” she says. “We're not home. Please leave a
message.” It beeps. It didn't say who “we” is. I don't know if it's still David's number. I have to accept that it might be. I guess I always had sort of hoped, or perhaps assumed, that he'd never find anyone he cared about more than he cared about me. I know that's unrealistic. But I suppose when you stop having contact with someone, they're frozen in time in your mind. Well, he wasn't right for me, anyway. Only for the first few weeks. And anyone can seem right for the first few weeks.

 

Since I'm thinking about checking people's answering machines, I have another flash of brilliance. I call the phone number for Petrov's girlfriend, Sheryl. I want to see who's on her answering machine.

The machine picks up and says, “Hi, you've reached Dan and Sheryl. Please leave a message and we'll get back to you soon.”

More confirmation of the cuckolded couplehood.

 

I think for a while about people in normal relationships, who don't have to play games with phones, who don't have to worry who's on the answering machine. What is it like to feel that confident and fulfilled? Or are there other problems? I think there are people in the world who would have us believe that there is no such thing as a problem-free relationship, that people simply cannot fall into a mutual, compatible love that is infinite and wonderful and rational and true. It's a bleak view. I hope the naysayers are wrong, but maybe that's the way it really is, just like how men are from another planet.

 

I still have time to find out.

The day comes for my date with Michael from the personals. I head to Barnes & Noble early to grab a table at the café. Someone has left a little stack of magazines on top, and I pick up one called
Rope
and begin thumbing through it. It's actually
all about rope. That's just bizarre. I see that two tables away, there's an old man reading
Puppies.
I don't even want to ask.

Every time someone new comes through the front doors, I hope it's not Michael, because each person looks stranger than the last. First there's a guy with a beard down to his waist. Then a guy with sunglasses and a cigar. Then a crew-cutted ten-year-old. I realize that since I didn't say anything about looks in my ad, I really
could
get a guy with a beard down to his waist, or green hair, or fluorescent spandex pants. There are a million things that could be odd about someone you meet through the personals, especially if you try not to be superficial and you don't mention looks. Okay, I guess we all care about looks, it's just that different things bother each of us. We can't help it. Someone might specify that she wants someone blond and blue-eyed. I might specify that I don't want anyone with a Mohawk haircut. Does that make me any less superficial?