Pug Hill (17 page)

My initial thought is that I’m surprised, and yes, a little disappointed, that Alec is the type of guy to address people as “dude.” Though I don’t want to have a crush on Alec (clearly) I hope in spite of myself, that his addressing Lindsay as “dude” was a one-time slip. Then, as Lindsay hunches inward a little bit more and mutters, “No,” I think,
Oh my God, I remember that story!

Six, maybe seven years ago, a woman at some big accounting firm forwarded to her friend an e-mail, one from a guy asking her if she’d like to go out with him. She included in the forward some fairly X-rated, and actually now that I think about it, pretty awful commentary about how the guy who’d just e-mailed would buy her and all of her friends drinks because she hadn’t slept with him yet. She then went into
way
too much detail about someone she
had
slept with the night before (she used a far less G-rated term for it) and how he’d fallen asleep during the, uh, act. Her big, or rather
biggest
mistake, one she must regret really a whole lot, is that rather than hitting the forward button, she somehow hit
reply.
The guy then forwarded her e-mail to his entire address book, and it traveled around from there. I must have received it ten times, once from a college friend who lived in London.

I looked up at her, and even though she’d said no, I guessed it was she.
Wow,
I think, remembering even more of the e-mail,
Her
Grapes of Wrath
is so much worse than mine.
We all stop in front of Cedar Tavern. Lindsay looks up. I remember after that e-mail scandal, I read how she had to work from home, how her company’s e-mail servers had crashed. I’d wondered a few times what it must be like to be her. And here we are: so completely different, but in exactly the same place.

“You know, I have a conference call at eight. If you guys go out after the next class, I’ll try to make it then,” she says to the group.

“Aw, come on, I didn’t mean anything by it,” Alec protests. “Come on, one drink. I mean, you kind of brought it up last time, right?”

“Next time, really. Have fun, you guys,” she says quickly and rushes away. I can’t help thinking that unless he pulls a complete one-eighty, all the cuteness and fashion sense is wasted on Alec, because Alec just might be a bit of an idiot. I imagine that’s probably for the best, reminding myself that I just don’t have it in me to love anyone else from afar, or come to think of it, even from up close right at this juncture in time.

“What was that all about?” Amy asks heavily as she clomps just as heavily behind me as we climb the stairs and head to the back of the second floor of the Cedar Tavern.

“I’m not sure,” I say, because as intriguing as the tale of the slutty accountant whose e-mail was read around the world is, I want to do something nice for Lindsay, and that’s the only thing I can think of.

“Dude,” Alec calls from in front of us, “she’s the girl who sent some e-mail about nailing this guy who fell asleep and not nailing someone else so he’d buy all her friends drinks but she sent it by mistake to the guy who wasn’t, uh, getting nailed, and then it got forwarded, I mean
everywhere.
A celebrity in our midst.” He flashes a grin over his shoulder. Such a boyish, handsome grin, I think, and wish he’d stop using the word
dude.

“Wow,” Amy says, “I absolutely remember that. That’s intense.”

There’s a round table in the back, we circle around it, take our seats as a waitress appears to take our drink orders. A bourbon for Amy, just ice water for Martine, a Manhattan for Lawrence, and whatever you’ve got on tap for Alec. And then it’s my turn, and I want it to be a friendly night, a nice night, I want people to like me and I wonder if it’s really true what Evan always said about white wine spritzers.

“I’ll have an Amstel Light,” I say, and as soon as I say it, I wonder if maybe that’s the next worse thing to a spritzer.

“So,” Lawrence says brightly, “where does everyone live?” No one answers, I take a sip of my beer, gather any reserve that is left after all that has been spent in class, and say, “Upper West Side.”

“I hate ze Upper West Side,” says Martine.

“Why do you hate the Upper West Side?” Lawrence asks. “I live there, too.”

“Zare are so many mothers on ze Upper West Side, so many of zem bottle-feed. I think ze people on ze Upper West Side, zey think zey are so great with zare proximity to ze park and zare decorative fireplaces but so few of zem breast-feed.”

Lawrence purses his lips. Amy curls a lip at her, I imagine more over the breast-feeding, than over any defense of the Upper West Side. I decide that, as in many situations, it might just be better not to say anything.

“I live in Brooklyn,” Amy says and I’m happy we’re moving on, and I wonder if she lives near Elliot.

“My coworker lives in Carroll Gardens,” I offer and she nods. Alec tells us he lives in Tribeca. I’ve long had a theory that all the cutest guys in New York live in Tribeca; everything looks good about this guy, except it seems for his personality.

“So, why does it make you so angry when people don’t breast-feed?” Lawrence asks, really rather provocatively if you ask me. Martine takes a deep breath, it seems she is preparing to launch into a tremendous tirade. Lawrence leans into her, stage whispering so that everyone can hear, “My wife didn’t breast-feed.”

Wife?
I think, and Martine’s tirade begins. Luckily, she and Lawrence are at one side of the table, and the group seamlessly, naturally separates at this point: Lawrence hunkers down to listen to what I’m sure will be a long speech, and Alec and I turn in our chairs toward Amy. Alec leans in to Amy. “So, you’re a novelist, that’s totally cool. What have you written?”

She exhales and says, “My first novel came out about two years ago,
Black.”

“Oh, I think I’ve heard of it,” Alec says in a way that reveals he hasn’t heard of it. I can’t really fault him too much on that though, because I haven’t heard of it either.

“It’s very
literary,”
Amy offers. “You may not have.” And I think,
Well, okay, Amy,
but feel also that I should contribute to the conversation in some way.

“Are you working on another novel now?” I ask. “Yes”—big exhale—“I
was
about half way through my second novel, No
Yellow,
and it was really fucking brilliant, but ...” She trails off and stares into her bourbon.

“But, what, it didn’t sell or whatever?” Alec pipes in. “No, uh, it sold. It sold on a proposal,” she answers back quickly, haughtily. “It’s just, I, uh ... I lost it. It got erased.”

“Dude,” Alec says. Amy looks at her hands. “Yeah, so I have to write it again. I mean I have parts of it that I e-mailed to myself for safe keeping, it’s just, the majority of it was on my laptop and I spilled, uh, a glass of water on my laptop.” Her eyes tear up. “Accidentally, of course.”

Alec says, “Dude, that’s fucked up.”

“Yeah,” she says, nodding her head slowly.

“Didn’t you have it backed up anywhere?” I ask, and the way she looks at me says, really succinctly, “No,” and also, “Do you have any idea how many people have asked me that?”

“Do you have any idea how many people have asked me that?” she says, just in case I missed the point.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “that was a dumb thing to say,” and Amy looks like she might start yelling.

“Dude, it was a dumb thing to do. Uh, no offense, Amy.” She looks at me with squinty eyes, turns in her chair a bit to look at Alec, she takes another deep breath, lets it out.

“It was really fucking brilliant, and now it’s just really fucking depressing,” she explains again, and though everything about her seems so utterly pessimistic in tone and in feel, I can’t help thinking that somewhere at least, she must be really optimistic in spirit, to come to a public speaking class to prepare for reading a book out loud that hasn’t yet been written.

“So are you just working on the second book now?” I ask.

“Yeah, mostly, it’s just, you know, it’s hard. I write for magazines, too.”

“Dude, no way, I love magazines, what sort of things do you write about?

“Trends,
mostly. In New York,” Amy says, haughty again, and again I think I don’t really like her. I contemplate angling my chair the other way, joining into the other conversation, happy the chair I am in has left me with some options. I look across the table: Martine is speaking quickly, making quick circles in the air in front of her breasts; Lawrence is smiling brightly, looking not so much at her as off into the distance. Amy, I think, is better than the alternative.

“Did you ever want to be anything other than a novelist?” Alec asks her. It seems it has yet to occur to Amy that she could, and probably should, ask us some questions, too.

“What?” She hisses.

“Did you ever want to be anything other than a novelist?” Alec repeats.

“Yeah,” she says wistfully, “thin.” I think that I may have more in common with Amy than I’d care to acknowledge, and that is most definitely a bad thing. I also think that maybe I should jump in here, that maybe we need to change the subject, before any further similarities reveal themselves to me.

“Well, what are you guys going to read next week?” I ask.

Amy answers first, “I’m going to read a haiku I wrote, it’s about despair.”

Right, right,
I think.

“I don’t know, maybe I’ll just read a paragraph or two from The
Da Vinci Code,
that’s my favorite book of all time. How great was that book?” Alec asks us, bursting with enthusiasm.

“They never went to the bathroom,” I say. “Every minute was accounted for, every second, and they never went to the bathroom.”

Amy puts her face in her hands, rubs vigorously for a moment up and down. She tilts her head back, leaving her hands on her throat and says, loudly, to the ceiling, “I cannot believe it has come to this. I cannot believe I am part of a conversation that is debating the merits of that commercial piece of crap,
The Da Vinci Code.”
Amy spits a little as she says this, and then reaches quickly for her bourbon, taking a big sip and turning away from Alec, to me, “That’s not your favorite book also, is it?”

“No,” I say, and really, it wasn’t. I liked it and all, it was just, I spent a lot of the book waiting for someone to go to the bathroom. You’d think that if every single second of time was accounted for, and the course of the book was at least three days long, then someone would have to go to the bathroom, or at least at some point say they’d be right back. That bothered me, and a favorite book, in my mind at least, should be one that doesn’t bother you at all.

“What is your favorite book?” she asks. Questions one and two for Amy: why do they have to be hostile ones, directed at me?

“My favorite book,” I say in all honesty, “is
The Encyclopedia of Dogs.”

“The Encyclopedia of Dogs?”
she says, very much in the manner of someone whose favorite book is probably by Proust. I am inclined to explain, as much as I am inclined to never ask her what her favorite book is.

“Let me explain,” I say, because this is important, I think, so much more so than the deleting of novels or the search for the Holy Grail, at least to me. “See, I’ve always really loved dogs, and
The Encyclopedia of Dogs
has every single one of them in there. It was the first book I ever loved. I can remember how big it was, I can remember pulling it down from the bookcase and looking at it for hours.” I notice they are both paying complete attention to me, but still, I continue.

“I had this game I played with myself, where I would turn to a page and slap my hand down, and whichever dog my fingers landed on, would be my imaginary dog for the day. I used to love playing it, I called it, ‘That’s My Dog.”’

I leave out the part about how Darcy wanted to be involved in my game of “That’s My Dog,” how she then changed the name to “That’s Me,” and how the dog your fingers landed on would be the dog that you
were
for the day.

I leave out the part about how Darcy, more coordinated and quicker at slapping her hand down onto the page, and not averse to resorting to hair pulling to get her way, always got first choice of the dog she wanted. I leave out that Darcy was always the collie, just like Lassie; the elegant French poodle; the mysterious and sleek weimaraner; the beautiful Doberman; the all-American golden retriever. I leave out that I was always the bulldog; the squat longhaired dachshund; the sad-looking, peculiar Clumber spaniel; the pug. I think the story is better without those facts, and then I think,
Oh my God, I was the pug.

“You can’t really read from a book like that,” Amy says, and, just like that, I’m back in the present.

“I know, Amy. I’m going to read a poem.”

“Dude,” Alec says, turning to me and grinning, “you’re cute.”

I look down at the floor, at Alec’s square-toe loafers.
Prada,
I think. And once I’m done with this class, once I’ve made my speech, and finished the Rothko, and somehow gotten free of the crush on Elliot, once I’ve done all the things I need so desperately to do, I think I might need to rethink the amount of importance I place on footwear.

“It is an outrage! An absolute outrage!” Martine yells from across the table, slamming her palm down for emphasis.

“Okay, then,” Lawrence says, remarkably still in good cheer, “well I think I’m gonna call it a night. Go home and work on my poem.” He winks.

We survey the empty glasses in front of us. No one jumps in to suggest another round.

“Maybe next time we’ll all go to dinner,” Alec suggests as we head down the stairs. He taps the breast pocket of his jacket as he says this, as if something important is in there. “I’ve got the private number to Balthy.”

“Balthy, what’s that?” I ask, assuming, the moment the words are out of my mouth, that Balthy is some new, trendy, hip place that just about everyone knows about and I have once again revealed my complete and utter dorkiness by speaking at all.