Jo Piazza (7 page)

When Cameron told him maybe he was sharing too much for a first date, he replied, “Wouldn’t you rather have everything out on the table at the very start of things?” Since this seemed entirely rational, Cameron agreed and kept drinking dirty martinis, maybe a little faster than before. He invited her back to his place to see his fish. He wouldn’t shut up about his damn fish, and against her better judgment she went. She blamed the gin and the fact that he promised some of his fish glowed in the dark. They did indeed glow in the dark and before Cameron knew it they were making out by the light of the glow-in-the-dark fish in the bedroom of his junior one-bedroom in Chelsea. That’s when he started biting. The first one was right above her left hip and it was a sizable bite. Cameron bruised easily and yelped, “Hey, cut it out.” And he did for about ten minutes until he got his teeth close to the fleshy part of her thigh and then, CHOMP! That was the last straw, and Cameron called it a night. She couldn’t wear a bikini for weeks while the welts healed.

Annie got a good laugh at that one.

“He was hungry. He hadn’t had protein in nine years!!!!”

The other online outcasts Cameron picked up included a banker who brought his mom along on their first date, a television producer who she caught wearing her black La Perla panties after he spent the night at her apartment, and the dog walker who left a Chihuahua at her house and never returned her calls. She calls him Paco. He was in her purse. Still Cameron kept at it. And the worst part was that she was never the one to call a spade a spade. She usually stuck around until they stopped calling or texting or erupted in an admission of hatred.

Melissa: Five months ago her husband, a doctor in Manhattan, cheated on her with one of the nurses in his hospital. She found out because another nurse, in a fit of altruism or maybe smuggery, e-mailed her about it. When she confronted him, he didn’t deny it, and since it was the second time she had caught him cheating, she was finally ready to kick him to the curb and she told him she wanted to file for divorce. She may have been ready to end her marriage, but she certainly wasn’t finished talking about it. She began nearly every conversation with everyone she met, “I don’t know if you’ve heard but I’m going through a tough time. I found out my husband was cheating on me,” and from there she would launch into the entire torrid story, sometimes varying the details. Occasionally she would mention how she left the other woman a birthday card on her windshield that said “Happy Birthday” on the front and “You Dirty Whore!” on the inside. Other times she would talk about how her two boys, Chase and Brandon, were holding up, or the latest thing that Dr. Mike had told her in therapy. She finally realized she might need to seek some kind of help when she pulled up to the gas station last week and, when Fred the attendant asked her if she wanted unleaded or regular, she said, “Fred, I don’t know if you’ve heard,” and he cut her off screaming, “Of course we’ve heard and I don’t think that birthday card you left on that poor woman’s car was the right thing to do!”

Lila: Pretended she was Jewish for a whole year because the guy she believed would be the perfect husband told her on their second date that he would only marry a Jew. She was and to this day remains a lapsed Southern Baptist. But Lila eagerly attended services and spent the high holidays with Ben Greenberg’s mother and father. She was so desperate to get a ring that she created a backstory that included her taking a trip with Birthright Israel, something she learned about when she put “dating a Jew” into Google. She was in so deep she didn’t know how she would ever get herself out of it. She figured they were so in love she could tell him and they would have a good laugh, she’d convert, and they could still live happily ever after. They moved in together, they put a mezuzah over their door, and then, unexpectedly, her not-at-all-lapsed Southern Baptist parents dropped in for a visit, arriving on her doorstep asking what that little doll was hanging from her door frame, thus outing her as a shiksa. She and Ben Greenberg did not have a good laugh, and she was now couch surfing among her work colleagues.

Olivia: Had a habit of blacking out during her dates. Dating made her so nervous that she drank to excess, which she realized was a problem when she went home with one guy last week and in the middle of the night got up to take a pee and ended up in his roommate’s bed—naked. She didn’t notice a thing until she spooned him and he screamed. Her date came running down the hall. When she finally came to, she realized she didn’t recognize either man.

Annie whispered something in her ear and Olivia nodded. I saw her slip her Joe’s number and the address of the AA meeting. I was proud of her for wanting to take Olivia to an AA meeting and also a little proud of me (back pat) for doing something that was actually helping other people.

Allison: Was also desperate to get married. (This felt like a recurring theme, and I wasn’t sure what to do about it.) She had been dating Alex for six years, since they graduated from college. They moved in together a year ago and Allison couldn’t understand why he hadn’t just popped the question yet. She tried giving him an ultimatum last April. Nothing. She tried withholding sex. He took longer showers. She tried talking to his mother. He just stopped taking his mom’s calls.

“I was so frantic I thought about pulling the goalie. I was just about to stop taking the pill when I heard about this meeting.” Allison laughed. “I guess that would have made me pretty desperate.”

At that the girthy Indian girl with the waddle pulled back her long cardigan to reveal a very pregnant belly.

“I’m Prithi, and I’m desperate,” she said, holding one hand in the air, the other on her massively pregnant belly. I made a mental note not to assume people are just fat. Of course it is better than assuming someone is pregnant, since calling someone pregnant when they are not in fact pregnant is tantamount to calling them fat anyway.

Prithi was born in the United States, but her parents were strict Brahmans from Calcutta. Since the time Prithi was a toddler her mom and dad had arranged for her to marry the six-months-younger son of their former neighbor in Calcutta, also a Brahman. He was an engineer who came over to the States when he was eighteen and attended MIT. When Prithi and Sasank finally met at age twenty, they hit it off. The problem was that they hit it off as wonderful pals. Sasank was the most intuitive man Prithi had ever met, and gorgeous. He dressed like a celebrity and his skin was as smooth as mahogany-colored butter. But he never made a move on Prithi. One night while he painted her toenails in her dorm room at Brown (his idea), he revealed that he thought he might be gay and that he was in love with a physics major named Michael. He told Prithi he would go through with the marriage because he really did love her as a friend, but he couldn’t bring himself to consummate his relationship with her. Prithi also loved this man as her best friend, but she had to admit she had never been sexually attracted to him, either. They didn’t have the hearts to break it to their parents yet, especially Sasank, so Prithi went out determined to find another suitable Indian man to marry who would please her parents and soften the blow. She met Dr. Amir Mehti the next summer when she was visiting NYU med school to decide whether she wanted to apply to go there. He was perfect—thirty-five, a cardiac surgeon, parents who still lived in Calcutta, his own apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a summerhouse in Montauk. Prithi fell head over heels and knew this was the guy she had to marry. He would make her parents so happy, and if they were happy, they might be able to help soothe Sasank’s parents when he finally told them he was gay.

Prithi and Dr. Mehti dated through the summer and then he grew distant. She was desperate.

“If you think a good man is hard to find, a good Indian man is impossible,” she said with a sigh at this point in the story.

As her desperation grew so did a plan, hatched by a joke Sasank had made in passing during their hours of chatting on the phone late at night.

“Just get pregnant. No honorable Indian man will leave a pregnant woman,” he said, laughing. Prithi laughed too, but the next week she stopped taking birth control. At this point the good doctor was only returning one of every three of her calls. She got demanding about setting a date for them to go out and when it finally came around, she pulled out all the stops. She bought something called the water bra from Victoria’s Secret that gave her cleavage nature had never intended. She packaged her newfound assets in a slinky bandage dress from Max Azria and shoved her feet into six-inch heels. Her seduction measures worked, and the doctor could barely keep his hands to himself through the appetizer. By the time he choked down his roast chicken, he had his hand halfway up her tiny skirt and was practically licking her neck as he breathed into her ear that he needed to have her right then and there. They got up from their table and slipped cautiously into the single-stall bathroom of the swanky downtown restaurant and Prithi had what she attests was the greatest orgasm of her life.

It was a hearty orgasm on all fronts, and four weeks later Prithi missed her period. She had also maintained her meticulous grooming regimen and now had the doctor eating out of her hand. Then she dropped the bomb. She was pregnant! He was shocked and a little terrified. He wasn’t ready to settle down. He asked if she was keeping it. She nodded. There was nothing he could do. Sasank was right; good Indian men married the women who were having their children. Dr. Mehti proposed, albeit reluctantly.

“Will you?” he asked, as he handed over the requisite ruby ring his grandmother had given him to give his bride, a month after she told him she was expecting. Prithi screamed with delight. “I will!” She knew the doctor was just scared and he would come around once they were settled into their life together. She called her parents, and though they were upset about Sasank, they saw the doctor as a major upgrade. Doctor definitely trumped engineer. They also weren’t pleased about the little blessing coming their way, now seven months down the road, but since a wedding was in the works they couldn’t complain too much. Besides, her mother said, “We are a modern family.”

By Prithi’s second trimester in June she barely saw the doctor, even though she had moved into his Upper West Side bachelor pad. But she contented herself by finishing her applications to med school and looking for a new family-friendly town house in Brooklyn.

Then, last week, the doctor told her he couldn’t do it. He was in love with someone else, a brain surgeon at Columbia whom he had been seeing before Prithi and had apparently taken up with again after she stopped wearing that water bra (it had burst when her real breasts started swelling, causing quite a scene at the home of one of Dr. Mehti’s hospital’s major donors).

He told Prithi he was calling off the wedding.

“Holy Mary Louise Parker,” Allison whistled.

“Tell me about it,” Prithi agreed. “And that surgeon isn’t even as cute as Claire Danes, but she does have that evil pointy chin.”

The entire group agreed, Claire Danes’s pointy chin foreshadowed a certain man-stealing temptress who could convince a man to leave his eight-months-pregnant fiancée.

Prithi moved downtown with Sasank, who was now living with Michael in a loft in Soho. And then she heard about the meeting and she got on the train to New Jersey.

“I can’t face my family,” she said through tears. “I can’t go home. I have no job. I got accepted to Einstein for next fall, but how can I go as a single mother? And I can’t keep staying on Sasank’s bed. He and Michael need their space and a proper place to sleep and have sex since they would never kick a giant pregnant beast out of their bed.”

Annie, typically not one to be a shoulder to cry on, had put her arm around Prithi. “You can stay here.” She looked at me and I nodded, not sure why I knew we had to take in this pregnant stranger, but knowing it was the right thing to do.

“I can’t pay you rent,” Prithi said. “But I can cook for you.”

“That’s enough,” I said. And the case was settled. We had a third roommate.

The meeting went on like that for another twenty minutes, although no one could top Prithi’s tale of woe.

Then I brought up the thing that had been nagging at me as I listened to each of the women’s stories.

“Why do you guys think we want to get married so bad? I was listening to all of you and I keep hearing the same thing: ‘I go crazy because I want to get married.’ What’s that about?”

The room got eerily quiet because it was true, and when you bring up something that’s true, people need to stop and think about it for a minute.

“I genuinely want someone to love me and spend the rest of my life with me,” Lila said, twisting her pearls in between her fingers.

“My parents want me to get married. I want to make them happy,” Prithi added.

“I’m afraid of being alone,” Olivia said almost under her breath.

The room grew even quieter on that beat. Being alone was something we all feared.

Cameron broke the silence.

“I’ve watched too many seasons of
The Husband
,” she offered, getting a few laughs.

The Husband
was a television show that had become widely popular with women (and more than a few men; Dave, for one, was a fan) over the past decade. The show found a single guy, typically in his thirties, with a good job—like a pilot, a doctor, or the brother of someone famous—and brought in twenty-seven women, on average ten years younger and abundantly less successful than him, to catfight their way into his heart over the span of eight weeks before the Husband finally narrows it down to two ladies. They add alcohol and hilarity really ensues. Everyone awkwardly professes their love, even though in real life they’ve only known each other for maybe three weeks. He then whisks them both away on a terribly romantic tropical vacation where they have to pretend to get all angsty about spending the night with him, even though they know if they don’t do it they’re donesky. Then he dumps one and proposes marriage to the other. All in all, it has raised and lowered the bar for what we should expect from a man in the first two months of dating.