Five Things I Can't Live Without (22 page)

T
he cabbie pulled up in front of the address I’d given him, a five-story brick building in Brooklyn Heights. I looked around admiringly. It was almost dusk, and there was a park down the street with children engrossed in their last game of the day. It was a scene out of a neighborhood association brochure: the happy, multiethnic children playing, oblivious to the spectacular view of the Brooklyn Bridge and downtown Manhattan.

I’d braced myself for the cab ride to cost a fortune, and it had. I counted out the money, Derek’s money, glad to purge myself, bit by bit.

I pressed the buzzer, and Kathy’s voice rang out. “Nora?”

“Yes!!!!” The dampening effect of a day of travel yielded to the excitement of arriving. I couldn’t wait to see Kathy. She had the most impressive effect on my meta-life. It tended to cower in her presence.

“I’ll be right down.”

As I waited, I read the names next to the various buzzers. Rodriguez, Stanton, Williams, Aurelia. And Pecoe. Even when she’d been married, she’d stayed Kathy Pecoe.

Kathy burst through the stairwell door. “I didn’t want to wait for the elevator!” she said, grabbing me in a hug. “I can’t believe you’re actually here!”

“I can’t believe it, either,” I said.

“Are you tired?”

“I was, but now I’m feeling pretty energized.”

“Do you want to meet Matt?” she asked, her voice full of anticipatory delight.

I was surprised that she would suggest meeting Matt the first night I was in town, but I figured that I had four more. “Sure.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Famished. I always forget that they don’t feed you on the plane anymore. Well, they do, but you have to pay twelve dollars for reheated ham. It’s disgusting.”

“We could meet Matt for dinner, then.” She pushed the button for the elevator.

I thought of saying that I’d rather have dinner with just her and then meet Matt for a drink later, but I reminded myself that there was plenty of time for us to catch up. As hungry as I was for dinner, I felt hungrier for Kathy’s company. Now that I was standing beside her, I realized how profoundly I had missed her. I put my arm around her and squeezed.

“This was the best idea,” she said, beaming. “I mean, I know it was my idea, so maybe I’m not supposed to say that, but I’ve been beside myself all day waiting for you.”

“I’m really happy, too.”

We rode up in the elevator. Kathy’s apartment was on the third floor, and it was perfect. The rugs, the furniture, the art, the view. I rushed to her window to take in the Manhattan skyline.

“Yep, it’s the Chrysler Building,” she said, with evident satisfaction.

“My God, Kathy. This is incredible.”

“I know. I’ve never loved a place this much. I’m hoping it’ll go condo so I can buy it. Otherwise, to buy something, I might have to move.”

“Wow. You’re actually thinking of buying real estate?”

She nodded. “I don’t know anything about the market, though. I don’t even know what people mean when they say it’s ‘soft,’ but I just feel like for me, it’s getting to be time. Matt and I were just talking about this the other day.” She flopped on her couch. It was an orange sectional, which sounds frightening but looked great. Kathy had always had an eye. I loved the abstract painting above it, and the skylights in the kitchen, and the hardwood floors. I missed hardwood floors. “He was saying that he’s getting ready to buy, and he doesn’t know if he’ll do it in the city or here in Brooklyn. Who knows, maybe we’ll be doing it together.”

My ears pricked up. A week together and talking about buying real estate. Well, even thirty-year-olds could fantasize in the throes of a new infatuation, I told myself. It didn’t sound like she was actually making plans. Given Kathy’s history, though, the situation merited watching.

“I’m going to call him.” Kathy crossed the room to the phone. She had put on a little weight, but it seemed to have mostly gone to her chest. She looked wonderful, her trademark hair just as wild and curly and black as ever. As she dialed, I salivated over her kitchen. Gleaming granite countertops, exposed brick in the eating area. “Hey, babe … yes, Nora’s here. How did your meeting go?” She waited for his response, then let out a peal of laughter. “I know, right? Well, she’s up for dinner. What time can you get out here? … Are you serious? … Come on over then … You too. See you soon.”

I sincerely hoped that the “You too” was not a truncated “I love you, too.”

She returned to the couch, her face aglow. “He’s actually on the train right now. He knew you’d be hungry after your flight and he didn’t want us to have to wait too long, so he figured he’d head out this way. If we weren’t up for dinner, he’d just turn around and go home. Isn’t that so thoughtful?”

I thought it was most likely manipulative and definitely intrusive. I mean, if he’d called when he got to Brooklyn, would we really send him home? No, obviously we’d let him join us for dinner, even if we’d wanted to be on our own. Just as obviously, I couldn’t say anything. I just nodded and tried not to let my concern show. “So you met him online?”

She nodded. “He wrote to me. I loved his e-mail, I loved his profile, I just felt this real kinship with him even before we met. And you know me. I don’t go wild for many people. It’s pretty hard to get through to me.”

That was true. Kathy does an incredible amount of nitpicky rejection. The problem was, once she “went wild” for a guy, he basically got a free pass. There could be a million clues to his unfitness, but she saw none of them. She ignored every unpleasant attribute, rationalized every awful moment that passed between them. There had only been two such men in her thirty years, but each relationship had ended in utter devastation. I’ve theorized that something primal and/or chemical must pass between Kathy and these men for them to fixate on one another so intensely and at such personal cost. It always reminded me of something I’d read about birds. Apparently, birds form this deep connection to their mother the moment they first see her by a process called imprinting. It’s like Kathy and this particular species of man imprinted on each other, and released only when threatened with true extinction.

“What does Matt do for a living?” I figured I’d try to ground Kathy in specifics.

“He makes wedding cakes.”

“What kind of meetings does he have then?”

“With suppliers. With his backers. I don’t know.” Kathy’s apathy for this line of questioning was obvious. It was not impossible that this man was lying to her, and my brilliant Kathy would not pick it up because she’d already stopped thinking. Now was not the time to lose her meta-life. It occurred to me that nearly the only time a meta-life could be a true asset was in the first month of a relationship. “He just designs the cakes. Someone else makes them. Maybe he had to meet with the bakers.”

A cake architect. Who knew? “So he’s successful.”

“He seems to be. We don’t really talk about money. We talk about … other things.” She smiled to herself.

I wondered how much talking they actually did. “Is the sex really great?”

Her smile widened. “Phenomenal. There ought to be a new word for it, it’s so celestial. It’s like, hours pass in minutes.”

I beat back the twinge of envy. I knew that I didn’t really want what she and Matt had; that is, I wouldn’t want all the suffering that was certain to come. But what if the pain never came? What if Kathy had found herself a successful wedding cake architect and she spent the rest of her life humping him on a cloud?
Then you’d be happy for her. This isn’t about you and Dan
. “Time always has a different quality in the beginning.”

Kathy shook her head. “I’m telling you, there’s something—mystical about it.” Her voice resumed its normal tone as she said, “I’m not going to get into all that ‘he’s the one’ crap. But I will say that he’s blowing my mind. But tell me about you. What’s been happening?”

That was a tough act to follow. “I’ve been doing pretty well.”

“Well, what happened after we talked?” She was looking at me, her eyes bright and encouraging.

“After we talked, I put all decisions on hold. I’m not making a move until after this trip. And knowing that made the days a lot easier. I did one more profile, but I haven’t scheduled anything else. A couple of people e-mailed, but I wrote them to say I’d be in touch soon. I took my ad down.” I resettled myself on the couch with my feet tucked under me. “I think a little hiatus will be good for me.”

“It can’t hurt,” Kathy agreed. We talked until we were interrupted by the buzzer, at which point Kathy practically ran to the intercom. “Matt?” At his affirmative reply, she pushed the button to let him in, then waited by the door for his knock. She was awash in pleasure.

I wanted to be happy for her, but as you’ve gathered, my reaction was mixed. The good-friend part of me was concerned because of her past, but also wanted to remain open to the possibility that this time around, she was falling for a good person and would have a better outcome. The bad friend in me was jealous of her sex life, and didn’t want to believe that it could continue to exist within the confines of a healthy relationship. I wanted to think that the road Dan and I were currently traveling was the one where all other roads converged. The synthesis of the good/bad friend was a hope that Kathy and Matt were a great match and that they would remain happy, coupled with a belief that their sex life would become just like everyone else’s, i.e., like mine.

That’s where I was as I stood watching Matt and Kathy embracing. He was tall with dark hair and blue eyes, and he would have been a little too handsome if not for a somewhat pronounced overbite. He was stylish without looking effete. When he realized how long he had been holding on to Kathy before greeting me, he had the decency to look a tad embarrassed. And when he reached out to shake my hand, he seemed sweetly nervous and a little overenthusiastic. So far, so good.

“Kathy’s told me a lot about you,” he said.

“She’s been telling me about you, too,” I answered.

He looked at her. “All good,” she assured him, and we all laughed in that way you have to for a first meeting.

“What are you in the mood for?” he asked, looking from Kathy to me and back again.

“We haven’t even talked restaurants. I’m thinking someplace without too much of a wait?” Kathy looked over at me.

“That would be good. I am pretty starved,” I said.

“And Kathy’s told me how you get when you’re starved.” Matt was smiling as he said it, but at Kathy, not at me. I didn’t appreciate the idea that my blood sugar crises had become an in-joke between them, but I told myself to stop being so sensitive.

“There’s that Italian place, the one with the checkered tablecloths. It’s big, and you can always get a table.” Kathy was trained on Matt as she spoke.

“It’s nothing fancy,” he explained to me.

“Quick seating and not too fancy. That sounds perfect,” I said.

Kathy and Matt headed for the door, arm in arm. I grabbed my jacket and trailed behind.

Dinner isn’t worth recounting. We split a carafe of wine, Kathy and Matt seemed to be groping each other under the table, and we talked about nothing. I mean, words were exchanged, but they were all frothy and meaningless. Everything was just an opportunity for Kathy and Matt to feign detailed knowledge of one another, or to express amazement at some new facet that had just been revealed. It was depressingly like tagging along with your friend and her high-school boyfriend. A few times Matt looked ever so slightly askance at something Kathy said, and she didn’t seem to notice. But I noticed, and it was always when she’d just said something that showed she had a life outside of him, and that she liked that life. Maybe I was just being hypersensitive, but those moments gave me an eerie sense of dejr vu.

I never really got to know the first man Kathy was in love with, but what I saw between her and Stephen terrified me. Kathy met Stephen when we both lived in Boston. He was a struggling musician who supported himself as the super of Kathy’s building. She was twenty-two, and he said he was twenty-seven, though it later turned out he was much older than that. He lied about all matter of things—large and small—but Kathy was addicted to him from the first. He was tall and semiemaciated, but he had a beautiful face and Kathy certainly wasn’t alone in finding him sexy. He’d been working his way through the women in Kathy’s building, but when he got to Kathy, he said he never wanted to be anywhere else. His flip-flop between bad boy and over-the-top romantic seemed designed to keep Kathy completely wrapped up in him. When things were good, she had never felt so extravagantly and perfectly loved; when they were bad, she was destroyed. He didn’t think she should need anyone else but him, that he should be everything to her. And while he never told her outright what she should and shouldn’t do, he made his disapproval felt. She broke up with him every time he cheated or lied or shouted about how worthless she was, but she also took him back every time he made another grand gesture of love.

Family and friends tried repeatedly to help her break free of him, but it would have taken nothing short of deprogramming or rehab. I saw how she distanced herself from all of them in the face of their criticism, so I tried to be circumspect. That was why, when she married him, I was their only witness. I was sobbing in the bathroom twenty minutes before, wondering if I could even go through with that. But I cleaned myself up, picked up my bouquet, and suffered. Kathy looked so happy; she was convinced that marriage would change him. It was nearly inconceivable to me that Kathy would believe something so retrograde, but she believed it totally.