Pug Hill (25 page)

“I will go first,” Rachel says at last. As she gets out of her chair, she looks over her left shoulder again, and swats at the air behind her.

“Wonderful, whom would you like to be your partner?”

“I would rather not work with a partner,” she says, looking over her shoulder again, this time nodding. “I would rather go out into the hall and practice the relaxation exercises on my own, please.”

“Okaaay,” Beth Anne says, “if that’s what will make you more comfortable.”

“It is.” Rachel walks to the door and through it, pulls it closed behind her. Right before it shuts completely, we hear, sharply, “Scratch that!”

A moment later, Rachel comes back in, walks right up to Beth Anne, literally inches from her, and announces, “I cannot go now. I cannot go tonight. I would like to go next time.”

“Oh, Rachel, are you sure you don’t want to try?”

“I do not.” Rachel walks back to her seat, sits down, and bows her head. She doesn’t look over her shoulder again. Lawrence has shot his hand in the air and is waving it around frantically. Beth Anne ignores him and continues to do so even after he has stomped his foot.

“Okay,” says Beth Anne, seeming slightly flustered. “Amy, why don’t you go next?” Apparently she’s forgotten about wanting to provoke as little anxiety as possible. That, or maybe she’s getting back at Amy for all the annoying questions, though something like that doesn’t seem very Beth Anne.

Amy exhales heavily and stands up. “I pick Alec as my partner,” she announces, which surprises me because she doesn’t seem to like Alec very much and then I remember they were partners once before. I wonder if maybe they’re having some mad, passionate, albeit secret, affair where they seem like they hate each other, but behind closed doors they just can’t keep their hands off each other. I wonder if maybe I’m a little jealous.

“Uh, dude?” Alec says to Amy. She sneers in revulsion as she looks over at him.

“Yeah,” she says with a curled lip.

“Would you mind if I went first? I’m kinda feeling like I’d like to get it over with.” Amy somehow manages to sigh, snort, and exhale, all at once. This is something, I’m sure of it, that can’t come naturally to anyone, even someone like Amy. It’s something I think you’d have to practice a lot to get quite right.

“Yeah, fine, whatever,” she says and sits back down heavily. Alec stands up, straightens his tie. “Thanks, dude, I appreciate it. Do you still want to be partners?”

“Uh, not really,” she says and rolls her eyes. I think maybe I’m wrong about the passionate affair.

“Uh, Hope? Do you want to be my partner?” he says, startling me. I haven’t been asked to be anyone’s partner yet. I’d kind of thought no one wanted to partner up with me, with me on the coaching side, because I pretty much suck. I’m kind of happy to have been asked.

“Oh, sure,” I say, and I tell myself I’m happy right now just because someone has asked me to be their partner-coach, not because I’m attracted to someone who seems so much like an overgrown frat boy in a really nice suit. I get up and follow Alec out into the hall. Beth Anne lingers by the door, and once we are outside it, she shuts it behind us.

“Um, are you feeling ready?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says, “ready to get it over with.” It occurs to me I’m not really sure what a partner-coach is supposed to do. I try to remember.

“Do you want to do One Nostril Breathing?” I ask.

“If you do it with me,” he says, a little charmingly, and I’m glad I suggested One Nostril and not Kalabati. One Nostril Breathing is slightly less embarrassing. He looks into my eyes. As he does, my stomach flips over even though I don’t want it to. I can’t like anyone right now, I remind myself. Not until I get through my speech, not until I get over Elliot, not until I’ve dealt with all the things I already need to deal with. I don’t think my heart can handle much more safely.

“Dude,” he says, once we’ve finished a few rounds of One Nostril Breathing. “I forgot to tell you last time. I was up in your neck of the woods a few weeks ago.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I went up to see that dude in the park with the orange flags.”

Christo, I think,
The Gates.
And my stomach is still; my heart, for the moment, is safe.

“Uh, cool,” I say. “Do you want to pick a Deity?”

“Trojan,” he says and winks.

I don’t think Trojan was actually a Deity. But then, I also don’t think that was so much the point.
Yikes,
I think, as I look down quickly at the floor, and then lead the way back into the room.

I head quickly back to my chair-desk, hoping everyone doesn’t notice how red my face now is. Alec walks suavely up to the front of the room.

He puts his hands on his hips. He looks around slowly, Taking the Room. Or at least he takes most of it, because when he gets to me I have to look away.

“Katie,” he begins, “her name was Katie. I met her a long time ago in New York. Katie,” he says again, “she was fantastic.”

As he describes quite calmly, rather eloquently, how Katie was into politics, how she was out to save the world, he hardly stutters at all, hardly falters. He’s so eloquent as he describes her.

“She was brash,” he says, “loudmouthed, opinionated, but she had a terrific pair of legs.” I think to myself what I’m sure everyone must be thinking:
Alec is very good at this.

“We broke up for a while, and it was hard, but then she called me one night. She said she needed to talk to someone. She said when you’re upset you talk to your best friend, and I was her best friend.” He talks about how they got back together, how he so
very badly
wanted it to work.

Lawrence’s hand shoots up in the air like a rocket. He starts waving it around. Beth Anne ignores him. Alec looks over at him quickly, but then keeps talking.

“Uh, Katie and I, we moved out to L.A.” Lawrence is still waving his hand in the air, with even more zeal. His face is bright red and he has just started stamping his foot, quickly, rhythmically. I wish he would stop doing that, because Alec is such a good speaker, and his story of mismatched love is so heartfelt, so
true.
I’m feeling like all the “dudes” might not matter so much, I’m feeling like maybe I might be a little bit in love with Alec.

“Thing’s got rough out in L.A. See, Katie didn’t have a lot to do, and then, there was this girl, this girl I knew from Beekman Place, and—”

“No! No! No!” Lawrence is up and out of his chair, flailing his arms in the air above him, jerking his head from left to right. “Stop it! Stop it! STOP IT!” It’s impossible not to notice the preponderance of spit that flies from Lawrence’s mouth, after every “stop it!”

Alec stares at Lawrence, shocked. We
all
stare at Lawrence, shocked.

“You can NOT rip off Barbra for your One That Got Away!” he shouts and turns on his heel to face Beth Anne. “Beth Anne! Beth Anne! BETH ANNE!” He puts a hand on a hip, turns toward her, points a long arm in the direction of Alec.
“THIS
man is ripping off BARBRA!
THIS
man is just telling us the plot from
THE WAY WE WERE!”

Oh, God, I think, he’s right, and then I think
Oh, God, I’m such a gullible idiot.
Beth Anne stands up and actually starts laughing, and then, there just isn’t anything else for me to do. I start laughing, too, because the truth that I am such a gullible idiot has gone quite beyond sad, all the way to funny. Sad things, I’m beginning to see, they have a way of doing that, of just eventually becoming funny.

“Dude, if it gets me out of the moment, if it’s the way I interpreted the assignment, what’s your damage?”

“How could you?”
Lawrence hisses. He turns and storms back to his seat.

“Yes, Lawrence, class, I think Alec is right. I think if this is how he interpreted the assignment, then it’s okay. What’s important is that Alec is delivering a wonderful speech. Let’s let him finish.” She smiles at Alec and returns to her seat.

Lawrence lays his head down on his desk and covers his ears with his hands. The rest of us listen to Alec’s speech, all the way to the end where he runs into Katie, years later in front of the Plaza Hotel, and she says to him, “Your girl is lovely, Alec.”

“Great job, Alec,” Beth Anne tells him. “What was your anxiety level?”

“About a four,” he tells her. “I’d say, really not so bad.” “Marvelous, just marvelous! Now, Rachel, would you like to try again?”

“No! I cannot!” she blurts out, stealing a glimpse over her shoulder as she does.

“Okay, Amy,” Beth Anne says instead. Amy stands up, smirks, and replies, “Hey, Hubble, want to be my partner?” and cracks herself up, all the way out the door.

Amy stands up very straight in front of the room. She takes a deep breath in and lets it out. It is the first time I have ever heard an exhale from her that is not solely for the purpose of hostile emphasis. She crosses her arms in front of her, which probably isn’t the best thing in terms of proper public speaking posture.

She uncrosses her arms and begins speaking, “There was some guy. Some guy named Matt. We went on one date. We had some things in common.” She pauses and looks down at the floor. I wonder if she is going to the bad place. She regroups, looks back up. I study her for further signs of failure. I’m awful like that, I know. She takes another breath.

“Among them: we both grew up in a suburb of Chicago, we both used Macs, we both liked the Book Review and the Travel section of the Sunday
New York Times
best. We met for a drink.” She uncrosses her arms, she continues. “We sat at the bar, me with a bourbon, he with a Tom Collins. He quoted a line for me from the very book I was reading at the time. He thought it was the best book he’d read recently, too. I forgave him the Tom Collins. He thought I was pretty. He thought I was smart.

Or at least he made the effort to say he did. He was polite; he was well-read. He said during dinner how much he wanted to see me again. We made plans for that Friday, even before the first date was done. When I offered to split the check with him he told me he made egregious amounts of money.” Amy pauses for a moment, looks over at Beth Anne, who smiles at her encouragingly, and continues.

“Egregious.
He said it a second time just to make sure I had heard him. And he might as well have walked me out into the street right then and hailed a taxi. He might as well have just put me right in the back by myself and walked on over to the driver’s side window. He might as well have leaned in, given the driver some of that
egregious
fortune and said to him, ” ‘Take her, will you, to that place she has gone so many, many,
many
times before.’ ” But really he didn’t have to bother, he had already taken me there himself. There I was with my big, big suitcase in hand at the Place Where I’m Sure There Won’t Be Any More Dates.”

Amy, I think, is
very good at this.
She is speaking so well, so smoothly, so confidently. She’s very theatrical, very animated. So much more animated than I have ever seen her before, and though she seems a bit hostile to her subject matter she seems so much less hostile to all of us in the room. And more than that, as she stands up there straighter and straighter, intermittently, she takes deep breaths, and pauses to make eye contact around the room. I’m able to stop looking at her as just someone who’s practicing a speech, I’m able to stop looking for where she’s falling short. I’m able to stop looking for nervous ticks to reveal themselves, stop waiting for telltale signs of a big breakdown: the gasping for air, the dry heaving, the running for the door. And her subject matter on top of everything else, it is so captivating to me. I sit back in my chair and give her my complete, undivided attention.

“I had something leaning towards a panic attack the next day,” she says, “thinking about how he had quoted the rather high price tag of the apartment he was looking to buy; how he said that
his
Mac was the new titanium version; how he
always
bought dinner for his friends who didn’t make the
insane
amounts of money that he did; how, that said, he bought dinner for his friends
a
lot. I got a little feverish thinking how he told me he would take me to Bond Street next, how he looked forward to showing me the wonders of fine dining.

“I called his home number during work hours and left a message and said I wasn’t feeling well and got into bed with a book for the rest of the rainy weekend, thinking maybe being alone for the rest of my life might not be so bad. I’d get to see a lot of movies. I’d get a lot of reading done.

“What if he was the one?” She pauses, looks around the room, and
continues.

“There was some guy named Kevin. When I met him at a bar on the Upper East Side, he was sipping club soda and told me he had just gone to his first AA meeting. Ten minutes later he said he was thinking that the better version of AA for him would be a ‘modified version.’ Ten minutes after that he ordered a Makers Mark and soda and in no time flat had drunk it and ordered two more. There was David, who picked me up at the end of our.first date and twirled me. Jim sent me a stuffed bear holding a heart that said ‘I Wuv You.’ Justin wore a vest; Ron looked to me so much like Sam the Eagle. There was Gary, too emotional Gary, who cried more than I did, and I cry a lot. Josh, so promising, until he licked my armpit. Scott was unkind to waiters; Craig didn’t know what amicable meant; Alan, old Alan, had his own house in the Hamptons but pronounced Nietzche,
Nitzky.
Alex was a Republican.”