Love Monkey (12 page)

“Any minute now,” I say, putting down a credit card that disappears in seconds, “they're going to turn the house lights up.”

“I have to go anyway,” she says. “The last train's in twenty minutes.”

They've already brought the bill. It's about a week's rent. I overtip. Then I walk her to Grand Central. It's beautiful and quiet inside at this hour, now that it has spit its throngs back to Connecticut and Westchester.

“Want to see my favorite spot?” I say.

“Sure,” she says. “By the way, I've had a lovely evening,
monsieur.
”

“
Mamselle.
”

“I think I should have been born in France,” she says as we walk downstairs. Well. I walk. She sort of dances all the way down. And at the bottom she twirls around on one leg with the other pointed straight out behind her. She looks at me with pursed lips and her tongue poking her cheek like an insolent child. “I like the way the language works. It's a very foggy tongue.”

“Foggy?”

“Imprecise. French has a lot less words than English, so words do double duty all the time. You always have to read into it, figure out the context.”

“Example.”

“Depending on the context,” she says, twirling, “ ‘like' and ‘love' are the same word. ‘Kiss' and ‘fuck' are the same word. ‘Malicious' and ‘clever' are the same word.”

“Sounds like an ideal medium for miscommunication,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “In the musical-comedy, mistaken-intentions sense.”

In front of the Oyster Bar there's this stone archway with a vaulted ceiling.

“Here,” I say. I put my hands on her shoulders and put her in the corner next to one side of the arch. “You stand here. Face the wall.”

“Why?”

“Trust me,” I say. And I retreat to the opposite corner, fifty feet away. I turn around to see if she is cheating. She is. She's sort of facing the corner like an unruly infant, but she's mostly peeking over her shoulder.

“Ready?” I say. “Turn around and face the wall.”

She does, tentatively.

I face my corner and start whispering to the wall. “Juuuulia,” I say.

Her laugh ricochets up her corner, across the ceiling and down to my corner, clear as fiber optics. “That was awesome,” she says. “Do it again.”

“Try whispering,” I say in the lowest voice imaginable. “It's a whispering corner. It picks up everything. Especially secrets.”

“Thanks for dinner,” she whispers. “Thanks for…” Her voice trails off.

“What?” I whisper. “I didn't get that last part.”

“Maybe you weren't meant to,” she whispers.

There's puzzling, there's cryptic, and then there's French.

“Julia,” I whisper. “I would like to kiss you because you're clever.”

She laughs again.

“Do you know what they call a love affair in France?” she whispers.

“What?”

“
Une aventure
.”

“An adventure?” I say.

“Oh yes,” she says, so softly.

I guess that makes me Indiana fucking Jones.

“Don't move,” I say. “Keep facing the corner.”

She does. But by the time I sneak up behind her and put my hands on her waist, I'm pretty sure she knows what I'm up to.

I take her to a movie. Afterward we get loaded on gin at McHale's. I take her to a play. Afterward we get smashed on flavored vodka shots at Russian Samovar. A week later I take her to a premiere at Radio City. Afterward we get blitzed at the giant dinner reception at the Hilton. I take her to a Knicks game: some friends of mine had an extra pair of luxury box tickets. A parade of waiters brings an unending supply of G and Ts to our seats. I am not actually this wonderful, but I'm willing to pretend for as long as necessary. Afterward we build on our drunk at Swift's.

A grinding guitar line on the speaker system. A guitar like things falling and breaking. It's Coldplay. “Yellow.”

“What do you see in me?” I say over my Bass. It's been more than a month, and the unanswered sex question hovers between us like a fly you want to squash, just to stop the distraction. Every night ends with an increasingly naughty grab session in the back of a cab as it pulls up to my apartment. “Come up,” I say to her ear, every time. “I can't,” she says, every time.

The thing I like about the Coldplay song: the aching tiredness of it. As the guy is singing about how much he likes the girl, and how great she looks, about how she reminds him of the stars, you can hear the exhaustion dripping off him, like sweat off a boxer. A boxer who has gone about nineteen rounds.

“What do you mean?” she says.

“I mean, why do you hang out with me?”

We listen to the guitars rumble and claw.

“You're smart,” she says. “You're kind. You're funny. I like you,” she says.

“I'm the man of your dreams, then.”

That one merits half a laugh. No comment. Julia would have made a good White House spokesperson.

“I've been meaning to tell you something,” she says.

I nod. Uh-oh.

“The night we met,” she says. “I told you I had a boyfriend.”

“The one who works in Bridgeport,” I say.

A nod. “When I was living in Connecticut, it was, different. But since I've been in the city…”

The unfinished sentence hangs in space for a while, and then it just falls on the floor with the spilled beer.

“It's gotten more serious,” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “So. About us? I'd like to keep things—”

You know the word is coming before it arrives. You can hear it screaming down the tunnel like a 2 train at rush hour, showering sparks over the rails, busting into the station with a hundred tons of lethal momentum.

“—platonic,” she says.

Keep it platonic. I've kissed about 40 percent of her body. Who was Plato anyway? A guy who didn't need to get laid? This makes him a hero? Or was “platonic” the word he invented so he could beg off taking girls up to his apartment and go back to fooling around with little boys? And who says he was so great in the first place? Three thousand years later and his country is known for, what? The gyro and the design on disposable coffee cups.

I don't say anything. I just nod. Play Understanding Guy. Try to cover up Cardiac Arrest Guy underneath.

“Whatever you want,” I say.

Coldplay say:
“For you I bleed myself dry.”

She takes my hand. Drops her shoulders with relief. She knits her eyebrows. This all makes her even more beautiful, which seems unfair.

“
Thank
you,” she says.

“So,” I say. “What's his name?”

She doesn't say anything for a long time. She tries to half-laugh her way out of it. My eyes don't leave hers.

“Duane,” she says.

I don't say anything. Because I'm unflappable. Insouciant. Nonchalant.

“How do people stay interested?” she says, looking down. “Don't people get bored with each other?”

“You're bored,” I say.

She nods.

It strikes me for the first time that “Yellow” is both a warning and a conversation. The warning is: Guys, do you really have the stamina for this? The conversation is: The singer pleads, then the guitar, playing the part of the girl, answers. But it doesn't say much, that guitar. It just saws and gnaws away.

And I can't ask the next question. Because I'm flappable. Souciant. Chalant.

We go outside and hug. I punch the air until a cab stops. And I don't ask the question: are you bored with him or me?

Back at my place I climb four flights alone. I have had much to drink tonight, but not nearly enough. I pour myself a large glass. I want to crawl inside it and marinate in my longing. Things shouldn't be this complicated. Things weren't always. Were they? I still have the same worries I did when I was thirteen. Except now I'm slightly better dressed, I have a lot more money, and I'm a lot closer to the point where it is severely abnormal to be single.

My top ten favorite things when I was thirteen:

1. whacking off in the bathtub with a dirty magazine;
   
2. The Empire Strikes Back
   ;
   
3. beating Bucky in tennis;
   
4. Steve Martin;
   
5. throwing things at each other in Bucky's pool while quoting
   Caddyshack
   ;
   
6. three-on-three football games at the high school with Bucky and Clint and John and Jim and Ralph on misty days in the fall, when you could smell the fresh decay in the air and the leaves made cool crunchy sounds underfoot in addition to being fun to get tackled on;
   
7. the guitar solo in Boston's “More Than a Feeling;”
   
8. a come-from-behind victory by the Baltimore Orioles;
   
9. playing Intellivision with Bucky;
   
10. feeling like I had a bright future.
    

My top ten favorite things now:

1. real, actual, official sex, the kind that counts in all scorebooks;
   
2. getting a blow job (used to be number one, but let's face it, girls these days are giving them away like sticks of Dentyne. Or Big Red. There's a potential new product: “Give your breath long-lasting freshness with Big Head!”);
   
3. meeting a girl for the first time at a party and flirting with her and making her laugh;
   
4. getting pleasingly drunk (as opposed to desperately, you've-got-a-problem drunk), preferably on the same night as 1), 2), or 3);
   
5. whacking off with a Victoria's Secret catalog (if I keep waxing the cuke, will it get all shiny and worn like a
   baseball glove? When will they come up with schlong transplants anway?);
   
6. somebody cute coming up to me at a party and quoting one of the witty remarks I've made in some article I wrote (never happens, but would be cool if it did);
   
7. Hanging out at Shooter's pool in Amagansett, not throwing things but still quoting
   Caddyshack
   ;
   
8. getting comped to a Dylan concert or a cool movie premiere;
   
9. thirty minutes of extreme sweating in a cedar sauna;
   
10. the joke section in
    Randy.
    

Let's see. What hasn't changed? I still like a joke and an orgasm. Still like a movie, and, hmm, seem to like being damp. What happened to hope for the future?

At work I read the papers and script a conversation. I plan my spontaneity down to the last detail. I make
notes
. Then I call her “just to say hi.” I don't want anything. Who me? I'm just a great guy, saying amusing things about topics of the day. I do not ask her out.

I call her the next day, same thing. Aren't I the best? I'm a pal. We talk about her brothers. We talk about her mom. We talk about various books we're reading. Well. Books she's reading. I do not ask her out.

Then we're on the phone on a drippy Friday in April. There's always a hint of dreamy farewell about these Friday-afternoon chats: she goes home for the weekend on the 8:52, and I know I'm not going to see her again until Monday. I don't ask about the details. It's understood that we don't see each other on weekends.

“What are you doing this weekend?” she says.

“Not much,” I say. “And you?”

“Same old,” she says.

“Wanna get some air?” I say.

The rain looks like it's stopped (the only way I can tell from this floor is to gaze down at the street five hundred feet below: if you can't see any umbrellas, it's clear), so I put on my blue blazer, the one some people Julia's age think is dorky, but which she thinks is kind of retro-prepster-cute. (I don't tell her I bought the jacket in an entirely unironic state, because I thought it looked grown-up and needed something to wear to all of my married friends' increasingly frequent semi-stuffy Sunday brunches.) We stroll down Seventh, all the way down to Penn Station, talking about Audrey Hepburn.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
is her favorite film, of course.

“
Charade
is much better,” I say.

“
Lovvved
that,” she says.

“Did you see
Sabrina
?”

“You mean she played the Julia Ormond part?”

“Funnee,” I say. “What about
Two for the Road
?” My favorite obscure Audrey movie: but she's seen that one too. And loved it. It's all about a love affair between Audrey and Albert Finney, and they're wisecracking newlyweds kicking pennilessly around Europe in the sixties, and Audrey always wears dresses by (another thing I've learned from hanging around women) Givenchy, which (as a girlfriend once taught me), is a name that may only be pronounced with maximum pretension: “Zhih-von-shee.” The movie is all mixed up in time, skipping back and forth between good and bad moments in their relationship.

“It's cool how it keeps you off guard,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “It preserves the mystery of it all.”

“The mystery,” I say, chewing it over. “Good word. Speaking of.”

I nod at the Kmart across the street.

“Nooooo!” she says, doing her best take on the girlfriend of the action-movie hero as he races toward the ambush.

“Come on,” I say. “Daddy needs some lightbulbs.”

Today I'm dressed just okay for a New Yorker but here I look like the king of Monaco or something. Plus, here among the Kmart shoppers, I feel well above the Minimum Acceptable Height for an Adult Male. Poor people aren't just short of
cash
. Maybe I should look into a Kmart Kareer.

“Excuse me?” An enormous Latina woman of about fifty, wearing her makeup in thick layers. In her shopping cart is economy-sized, cheap-branded everything. She looks exhausted by life.

Julia and I ignore her but the woman is tugging my sleeve.

“Excuse me, do you work here?” she says in hesitant English.