Instant Love (9 page)

“They were doing it?” I said.

“My aunt Esther got plastered at my parents’ thirtieth anniversary party and told me that when Mrs. Wolfowitz walked in my mom was on her knees,” he said.

“Oy,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said.

So Walter snuck in there, telling Naomi how she was a princess, a goddess, that if he were her man he would never let her go, not for a stupid fight, not for anything. And then one day in April, after a fresh rain, he walked her home from school. As they leaped over puddles and brushed their heads against the rain-soaked leaves dangling from the trees above, she let him hold her hand proudly.

“For all the world to see,” I said.

“She was a prize, my mother,” mused Alan. “She still is.”

I rolled over and put my head on his chest, turned and faced the ceiling.

“They got married right after high-school graduation. She had me that November.”

I started counting backward, November, October…

“Wait, I’m doing the math,” I said.

“I’ve been doing it all my life,” he said.

TWO WEEKS LATER,
Alan gave me a diamond tennis bracelet. I laughed when I saw the Wolfowitz label on the inside of the box. And then I got down on my knees and pretended we were on vacation with his family.

I don’t wear the bracelet much now or really at all, because where am I going to wear it. To work? On the subway? I would say I would pass it on to a daughter someday, only I’m not sure I want to have kids.

That was the problem with me and Alan. Well, that was the first problem with me and Alan. Had we fixed it, there would have been a whole series of problems to solve after that, so we just stuck with the one. He fed me ice cream and fattened me up, then pointed out how my breasts and hips would be perfect for childbearing and nurturing. He turned parts of me into the woman he wanted, but he could never turn all of me into something I wasn’t.

And then I got the job offer in New York, and decisions needed to be made.

What he said was: “You go, I’ll follow.”

What he did was: meet a flight attendant on one of those goddamn golf trips with his family. I saw the wedding announcement, and let’s just say she’s twice the shiksa I’ll ever be.

For a year all I did was eat and eat and listen to him talk. And at the end, I was single again, only this time around, fat.

“
WHAT HAPPENED
with Wolfowitz?” I said. “Who did he end up with?”

“Who didn’t he end up with?” Alan said. “Turns out my dad was right, Wolfowitz liked to play the field. He’s on his third wife now. They get younger every year.”

“While we just get older,” I said. “It doesn’t seem fair.”

“You have nothing to worry about,” he said, and at that moment, I couldn’t figure out how to disagree. Now I have plenty to say, but then? Nothing.

I
agreed to go out on the first date with Gareth not because I was attracted to him, but because it had been a while. You know. A
while
. Also he asked properly, not by e-mail or instant message, but with an old-fashioned phone call. I had been spending too much time on Internet dating sites, which I often fell back on as a stopgap measure. A stopgap between
what
I can’t exactly tell you, because it certainly wasn’t relationships. Perhaps between winter and spring. Between my thirties and forties. Between birth and death. But to meet someone in person, names exchanged, eyes contacted, and then to receive a formal, nerve-wracking phone call made me feel like I was in high school again. Maybe we would make out, too. Maybe I would give him a hickey. Maybe I would let him get to second base.

He called me on a Tuesday evening, after dinner but before bedtime, asked about my day (long), my job (same as always, which is to say, less complicated than people think and mainly fine), and what I thought about the latest political scandal (I am never surprised). Then he popped the question: Would I join him for dinner on Friday? It could be an early meal if I had other plans, he didn’t mind. He just wanted the opportunity to spend a little time with me, just an hour or two, a fraction of my day to bestow upon his unworthy self.

This charmed me, I must admit.

Instead of dinner we met for drinks postwork at an Irish pub near his place on the East Side, as I did indeed have other plans—tickets to dinner theater with my sister, Maggie, and her husband, Robert. They’d purchased them months in advance, so I couldn’t say no. They liked to come to the city on a weekend at least once a month. “Because I’m down,” said Robert.

“Down where?” I said.

“You know what he means,” said Maggie.

The play was a historical parody—the ads for it had the word “historical” crossed out in yellow and the word “hysterical” scrawled over it in block letters—about the Last Supper. Whenever Judas tried to kiss Jesus, the audience was ordered to “drink from thine chalice.” Delightful. Robert found the play “freaking hilarious” and thought it would be a good idea to recommend it to his boss. Better yet, he would get him tickets as a birthday present. Maggie agreed with him. She was a big supporter of any sort of gift-giving or, at the very least, shopping. I kept my head down in the program, contributing an occasional tidbit of information from the cast biographies.

“Did you see that Mary Magdalene was on
Law and Order
? I thought I recognized her.”

“No way,” said Robert.

“Way,” I said.

“Honey, did you hear that?” said Robert. “
Law and Order
. I wonder if she was a criminal.”

Sometimes I roll my eyes in such a fierce way that they actually hurt. I should really stop doing that.

“Maybe she was a corpse,” I said.

WHEN GARETH ARRIVED,
I was nursing a chardonnay at the bar and staring at the smoke-stained wood paneling behind the bartender’s head. I noticed first his cowlick, combed and pressed. I parsed the syllables, envisioned the sweaty tongue of a cow feeding on a trough of water. I opened up my vision to take in the rest: Gareth was wearing a three-piece suit. I had assumed this was a low-pressure date. He had just jacked it through the roof. I suppose I did appreciate the effort, though it made me regret not going home after work to change first, as the inequality of our intentions were now rendered so painfully obvious, which is to say he had some and I did not.

Though to be fair—to me? to him?—lately I’ve been lazy about my appearance, slipping on clothes that require the least work, shirts without buttons, pants that I can wash and dry and wear. When I picture myself with an iron going at my clothes, it’s on an old-fashioned board, and I am suddenly wearing a frilly gingham apron, perhaps with a cross-stitched homily on the front of it, and my feet are clad in simultaneously high yet sensible heels and my hair is in pin curls. Somehow I am naked under all of this, ironing, humming, steam rising from what are soon to be perfectly pressed pants. And then I reach for an old college sweatshirt and a pair of Levi’s, which is what I ended up wearing when I saw Gareth.

“Don’t you look fresh in that suit,” I said. Gareth is an enormous man, well over six feet and probably pushing 250. The weight is in a solid block, though it’s not muscle. The suit did him a favor, though. It made him look impressive rather than merely overweight. I pictured him as a king, raising a jeweled goblet to the sky, toasting some bloodthirsty victory or a peace accord between nations.

He thanked me, and sat down slowly next to me. “I like to dress up for a first date,” he said. “It’s just me. I’m old-fashioned.” And then he quickly added, “But you, Holly, you look lovely as is. You would look perfect whether in a formal gown or, oh I don’t know, hiking gear. Your beauty is transcendent.”

I considered this. I didn’t see myself as a transcendent beauty, though I did think my looks were from another time, all my curly hair, the curves of my hips and belly. I’ve recognized myself in ancient paintings in museums, but never on the pages of a fashion magazine.

“Trust me, it takes a lot of work to look like I’m not trying,” I said.

I spent the next hour listening to Gareth tell me how spectacular he found me. How when he interviewed me two weeks ago he was instantly smitten, how he knew I was special right away.

“In this city it is easy to find candor in a woman,” he said. “But it is usually mean-spirited. Not so with you.” He looked concerned for a moment, but then his face changed to a delighted disbelief, as if he had found a hundred-dollar bill on the ground. “It’s just refreshing, that’s all.”

Clearly he had mistaken me for someone else.

Gareth was a writer (children’s books, mainly, though I did notice he’d also authored a book of satire when I searched him on Amazon) and occasional commentator for the local NPR station, and had contacted me as a source for a piece on women in modern science. (I’m a scientist. I won’t go into the details of my work except to tell you that if you’re a male between the ages of eighteen and thirty and you’ve ever peed in a cup, well, let’s just say I’m
involved
.) He e-mailed me daily after the interview, ostensibly for follow-up questions, but soon enough he was sending me links of interest, followed by queries about my life, until finally he asked me out.

And now here he was, continuing his quest, a seemingly unstoppable force in the game of Getting to Know You, hurling questions about my childhood (no pets, one divorce), reading interests (Science fiction, mainly. Yes, I know, why
am
I single?), and taste in music (A former indie rocker, now retired. I still get that ringing in my ears every so often, which triggers memories of cool Budweiser drafts in plastic cups and irresistible curly haired men who wear faded T-shirts that always have back stories and who never call when they say they will, and I almost miss it. Then my chest heaves with the poison of a hundred imaginary cigarettes smoked in quick succession over the course of the night, and I smell something sour and urine-soaked, mixed with bleach, and I remember squatting above toilet seats; and then I don’t miss it at all).

At the end of the hour, I apologized for having to leave, but Jesus and my choice of Veal or Chicken Marsala awaited me. I apologized also for not learning anything about him. He had focused the entire conversation on me. Sly. He asked me out again, and I agreed. He rose when I did and, pint in hand (I noticed he had two and was well into his third in an hour, but he didn’t act any different, probably because of his size), escorted me to the door.

“M’lady,” he said, and bowed slightly, then laughed.

I laughed, too. He made me nervous. “Sir,” I responded.

If I hadn’t, he would have been miserable.

IN BETWEEN
the first and the second date I thought about Gareth a lot, even though I didn’t know very much about him at all. I bought two of his Camilla books at lunch one day and read them in the small park in front of the lab. There was a seal from a national children’s advocacy group on the cover of each colorful, oversized volume, declaring it an award-winning series, ideal for ages five to seven.

The books depicted the adventures of Camilla, a spunky young giraffe who had a longer neck than anyone else in her family. This got her into trouble sometimes: while she could see what the birds were doing in the highest trees, she often missed what was going on right below her nose. The first book involved Camilla feeling ostracized because of her height, while the second book was a morality tale about sticking your nose—or your neck, in this case—where it didn’t belong.

While none of it was groundbreaking material (And how could it be? There are no new lessons left to teach children), I found endearing the heartwarming exchange between Camilla and her love interest, Otto, the roly-poly zebra who has had a crush on her since the day they met. (“No matter that you are taller than I, we both will always see the same blue skies,” he declares at the end of the first book.)

I closed the book, then laid it next to me on the bench, running my hands along the smooth cover. I imagined Gareth and Maggie and Robert and me all out to dinner somewhere. He would laugh at all my jokes, especially the ones at Robert’s expense, the ones Robert never gets and Maggie chooses to ignore. I wondered if he would put his arm around me when I shivered.