Heart of the City (12 page)

“Or couldn’t care less.”

“Grow a pair, bro. Honestly, what do you have to lose?”

Matt agonized all week. Did she like him or not? Did he have her and lose her or did he never have her? He sifted and resifted her every word and gesture. He decided late in the week that he needed to know. Sure, he could have just let the memory be, but of what use was that? Memories were for people in nursing homes. In his last relationship, he had told his therapist, his passivity had been part of the problem. He had felt something was wrong for a long time but failed to act. Now he felt something was right. Had he learned anything?

At the end of a long day at the office, when the janitors began wheeling in their pails, he called her.

“Hi, it’s Matt, from the other night, from outside Carnegie Hall.”

There was a moment of silence. Had he lost the connection? He peeled the phone from his ear and looked at its display: the signal was still strong.

“Hi, hello? Is Sofia there?”

Another pause. “Who else did you think would answer my cellphone?”

Matt didn’t understand the hostility. But he took a deep breath. He chose to ignore it, to blot out both this comment and the one by the subway about forgetting his name.

“Did you make it home okay the other night?”

“I survived,” she said.

“I probably sounded like somebody’s parent. ‘It’s late, you’re a single woman.’ But it really was late, and you told me you’d never been above Twenty-third. I didn’t mean to be parental.”

“I’m independent, that’s all. But it was sweet of you.”

“What are you doing next week? There’s this cool restaurant. I wondered if you’d want to grab dinner there.”

He had been thinking about HanGawi, a vegetarian Korean restaurant on Thirty-second Street near Madison Avenue. He was a red-blooded carnivore, but he remembered the place as romantic and was willing to forgo meat for the night: it was like some Buddhist temple, with its dark wood, antiques, and cubbies for shoes. Plus, Matt thought, the location was perfect, a midpoint between her place and his.

But before he could tell her any of this, she cut in. “It’s a mouse bloodbath at the lab next week, so my schedule is a little crazy. But if you want, you can call me over the weekend. It’s doubtful, but there’s a chance things will change.”

“Okay,” Matt said, trying to mask his deflation.

He was about to hang up when she said, “Oh, wait.”

“Yeah?”

“Since I’ve got your number in my cellphone now, I just need your full name. It’s Matt what?”

“Fitzgerald,” he said, suddenly smiling. “Matt Fitzgerald.”

TWO HOURS before the Greenwich Village Orchestra was to play at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Sofia sent Matt a text message. “Chk us out if u want,” she wrote. “Shudbagud show.”

Matt looked at his cellphone, pleased at this small triumph. Then he decided not to go. He didn’t want to sit through a concert, then have to hang around conspicuously for however long while the band packed up. For what? Only to say “Sounded great!” before she made some excuse about having to meet some other friends?

He ignored the text message.

“Are you running? Where are you?” Sofia asked the next afternoon, when he finally called.

“Playing a few rounds of golf with friends in Jersey. It’s a beautiful day to be outside.”

“I’m stuck on an overcrowded Metro-North and so wish I weren’t.”

“I was actually on par the last hole, if you don’t count the three mulligans my friends let me take. Do you know anything about golf?”

She burst out laughing. “Sorry, no.”

“City girl.”

“Hey, about dinner, remember you asked?” Sofia said.

“I remember.” Matt, feeling his throat muscles tense, hoped she would let him down easy.

“The mice have won a reprieve,” she said. “How’s Tuesday?”

SOFIA WAS a half block from the restaurant and could see Matt standing in the middle of the sidewalk. His hands were on his hips, and he was pitched forward, wagging his head from side to side. He looked like a tourist puzzling over which direction was downtown and which up. Sofia looked at her watch. She was fifteen minutes late. She always was. To everything. But did he have to be so obvious? Oh, my God, she thought. What a dork.

When she got close enough and waved, she could practically see his face muscles unclench.

“Here,” he said, handing her a small box of what she could see were gourmet chocolates.

She wrested them from his hand like a policeman disarming a suspect.

“What is
this
?” she said, with an incredulous smile.

“What do you mean, ‘What is this’? It’s chocolate.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a thing people give other people.” He looked at her as if she were half crazy. “You might even like them.”

When Sofia opened the menu and saw it was entirely vegetarian, she felt her typically hypercharged nerves calm a little.
She’d never told Matt she didn’t eat meat, and yet somehow this guy, who had a burger at the bar the other night, invites her to a vegetarian restaurant. She felt a tinge of guilt. Why was she giving him such a hard time? She let her guard down a little over dinner and just tried to talk normally, as she might to a friend.

She told jokes about her upbringing in Peter Cooper Village, the cluster of middle-class high-rises in Gramercy. Her parents—her dad was a solo architect, her mom a math teacher—grew up in the Bronx but were strivers.

“They gave me everything,” she told Matt. Visits as a kid to museums and concerts, trips to Brazil as part of a peace-promoting summer exchange program, placement in two elite public city schools run by Hunter College. In return, she lived up to all her parents’ expectations: straight A’s, captainship of the high school soccer and volleyball teams, nice friends, admission to Harvard. She couldn’t even cast her global trek after college as rebellion. The hallway of her childhood apartment was decorated with photos of her parents’ journeys as newlyweds. Eager to leave the Bronx and see the world, they had spent months visiting places as far away as Turkey and Nepal.

“I graduate from college and am like, ‘That’s it, I’m going to the Himalayas, see ya in a year,’ and they’re like, ‘Of course, Sweetheart.’”

“They sound nice,” Matt said.

“Oh, please,” she said.

They drank soju and laughed, and then walked more than twenty blocks to a downtown jazz bar where Sofia’s cousin, a bassist, sometimes played.

“Do you want to come up?” she asked around midnight. Her walk-up studio apartment was a couple of blocks away. “I’ve got a few albums that I think you might like.”

Matt sat down on her love seat—it was the one real piece of furniture besides her bed—and Sofia squeezed in beside him.
She spent the next four hours playing CDs and talking and, eventually, wondering when he would kiss her.

She had never been this close to him. He had full lips, she could see now, and liquid blue eyes, and fine light-brown hair.

But 4 a.m. flashed on her digital clock, and she was still kiss-less. Soon she started to get annoyed. How many clues does this guy need? After a moment’s thought, she threw her leg over his, expecting him to respond as had other boys—like a jackal at the scent of meat. But all Matt did was smile, pat her knee, and stand up to leave.

“I have to be at work tomorrow,” he said. “I should probably get home, change, shower, and try to get some rest.”

This is ridiculous, Sofia thought. “Yeah, okay,” she said. “Go home. You look exhausted.”

Matt looked at her uncertainly, then left. She was already under the covers a moment later when she heard a knock. She opened the door to find Matt with his brow wrinkled and the fingers of his right hand at his temple, as if trying to puzzle out some heretofore unsolved computer programming problem.

“I just want to let you know,” he said, “that I, um, wanted to kiss you. But I haven’t brushed my teeth and I probably have bad breath, so. ...”

“You came back to tell me that?”

He leaned across the threshold and pecked her on the cheek.

“Good night,” he said.

On their next date, a few nights later, Sofia didn’t wait for the night to grow stale. As soon as they got barstools, she leaned in, pulled his head toward hers, and kissed him.

COLD SETTLED over New York, with dead leaves falling off branches and snow draping the city in lace. Sofia and Matt ate falafel in the East Village; they went to parties in SoHo and jazz shows in the Village. On Halloween, they dressed as Fred and
Daphne from Scooby-Doo. In early November, they celebrated Matt’s thirtieth birthday.

Sofia was seeing Matt a few times a week but tried to hide her deepening attachment by grousing to friends about him.

“He’s such a loser,” she’d say. “Why are we still going out?”

“The guy bought you tacos,” her friend Jessica said. “You
have
to go out with him.”

It was true. He did buy her tacos. And noodles. And bagels. He paid for everything. And he brought her flowers, chocolates, and little gifts.

No boyfriend had ever done that before. The guys she’d met online had rarely even bought her a beer on their way to propositioning her.

So why did she keep fighting him? Their relationship had reached a point where she could stop worrying about self-preservation. Matt called her all the time. He showed no signs of bolting. If anything, he seemed more committed than ever. Maybe it was just that his small-town ways felt old-fashioned in a city as forward as New York.

“It’s a little embarrassing,” she told her friend.

“Why, because he’s so nice?” Jessica said.

“Or something.”

“What don’t you get?” Jessica asked, exasperated. “He’s courting you. That’s what they call it in that itsy-bitsy part of America between Manhattan and L.A. ‘Courting.’ Alien concept, I know.”

Weeks passed before Sofia came to understand the reason for her unease with Matt’s open fondness: she didn’t feel worthy.