Pug Hill (8 page)

In with hysteria
, I think, taking a deep breath,
out with love.
Or, wait, is that supposed to be the other way around?

“Good,” she says, instead of “fraidy cat,” or “liar,” and then she says, “we’re looking forward to it, too.” We make small talk for a while; everything, I say, is just fine with me and everything, she says, is just fine with her. And then the topic turns to Evan.

“How’s Evan?” she asks, and the very tone of her voice reminds me that even though I have my moments when I am so convinced they are in this together, determined to chip away happily at my self-esteem, they are, in fact, not. The tone of her voice reminds me that Mom is no longer a fan of Evan, hasn’t been since I told her recently about how he criticized my hair and said I brushed it too much. I’m sure that when I told her this, there had to have been a part of her that had to hold herself back from jumping in and saying that with everything colorists are doing these days, there is no reason at all that I have to walk around with it red. But I think what won out in the end was the part of her that felt critiquing me was her domain and her domain alone, and that Evan was not invited to join the club.

“He’s fine,” I say and listen to the silence on the end of the phone. I’ve been dating for a while now, for quite a long while come to think of it. You’d think somewhere along the way I would have wrapped my head around the concept of not telling my mother bad things about my boyfriends. I haven’t. In case you have some trouble with this concept, too, let me try to help you, since clearly, I am beyond help. If you’re going to listen to anything I say, listen to this: Do not tell your mother bad things about your boyfriend. Repeat this to yourself a few times; maybe it will help:
Do not tell your mother bad things about your boyfriend. Do not tell your mother bad things about your boyfriend.

Sure, getting it off your chest and all, it might make you feel better
momentarily.
But what happens inevitably is that you will forget all about whatever it is that upset you in the first place, and continue on in your relationship happy as a lark (or some approximation thereof, adjust as necessary). Your mother, however, if she is anything like my mother, will never forget. Once the bad information is out there, your mother will forever change her once-happy tune about your boyfriend. She will go quite quickly from commenting loudly, whenever his name comes up, on how much he looks like Jean-Paul Belmondo (that you have no idea who Jean-Paul Belmondo is, let alone what he looks like, is clearly beside the point) to commenting repeatedly on the fact that he is a schmuck.

“Has he told you he loves you yet?” she asks. Mom isn’t one to beat around the bush. I, on the other hand, have been known to beat around the bush and have even been known to take some solace in that bush. Solace, it seems, is nothing if not fragile.

So, yeah, there’s that. Evan has never told me that he loves me. It’s one of the problems with the Evan thing. I told him I loved him once. The fact that I was drunk when I said it, that it was midnight on New Year’s Eve at that, and the fact that I most likely didn’t mean it at all outside of the context of that “Old Lang Syne” moment, when you just want someone to love and want that someone to love you back, has become severely overshadowed by the fact that Evan didn’t say anything back.

If you go by what my mother says is acceptable and not acceptable, six months of dating with nary an
I love you
to bandy about, is six months too long. I consider my answer, consider lying and think how much easier that would be. But I also consider how things would be different for me right now if I hadn’t lied by omission so many times about how afraid I am of public speaking.

“No,” I say, resigned.

“Schmuck,” she says, and to hear her say it, it all seems so simple. I wonder if it really is, even as I simultaneously try to push the thought from my mind.

“No, Mom, he’s not a schmuck,” I say, my mind kaliedescoping onto the very first hours of this year.

“No, um, honey, I think that maybe he is.”

“He’s not,” I say, again, letting every tense cadence in my voice loose, free to scurry down the phone line, all the while thinking that maybe he is. Mom doesn’t say anything else; it’s not a talent you can teach, knowing how to usher a pause into a conversation so that even
silence
sounds disapproving.

“Mom,” I tell her, this time more firmly, “Evan isn’t a schmuck.” What does it say, I wonder, that with all the time I have spent thinking lately that Evan is indeed a schmuck that right now I’m so motivated to jump to his defense? A little voice, one of the dramatic ones, pops into my head. “Oh, what does it mean?” it exclaims, arms theatrically outstretched. I refuse to indulge it. Really, I have too many other things to think about.

“Okay, Mom,” I say again, once the screaming silence has become far too much to bear, approximately two and a half seconds later. “I’m going to be late.”

“What are you going to be late for?”

I look over at my cell phone, lying forlorn on the table, The New School catalog lying next to it in a way that I want so very badly to believe is hopeful.

“I’m going to meet Evan,” I say. I’m going across town, I think, back over to the Upper East Side to have a drink with my boyfriend, even though his drink of choice is Scotch, and I hate the smell of Scotch, even though if
anyone
shuns their Judaism, it’s Evan, and even though all his friends are so Biffy, all their girlfriends so Buffy.

An hour later, and I am sitting next to Evan on a banquette in the library bar at the Regency Hotel. The squash-playing friends are in a different area of the bar with a group of Junior League-type women, only the occasional
caw-caw
sounds, the intermittent, “Oh, Brandon, really, stop,” belie their existence. Evan is crunching on his Scotch-soaked ice cubes, there is such a determination in the way he crunches them so. I am eating M&M’s. The Regency has these big glass urns everywhere, filled with M&M’s; their very presence makes everything else about the place infinitely more enjoyable. I grab another handful and turn to face Evan.
He is my boyfriend,
I think,
my supporter, my confidante.
I can tell him this. I take a breath.

“I think I’m going to sign up for a public speaking class,” I blurt out.

“Yeah?” he says sort of distantly, looking across the room. I wonder if he’s thinking about his squash game, or about the next time everyone at The Union Club decides to dress in Lilly Pulitzer just for fun, or about something else entirely. I follow his gaze to the Junior Leaguey women, and I wonder if he wishes one of them were his girlfriend instead of me.

“Yes,” I continue. “There’s a class starting next week at The New School.”

“Uh-huh,” he says nonchalantly and I have to remind myself that it isn’t his fault; he doesn’t realize what a big deal all of this is. Because I haven’t told him.

“What night?” he asks absently.

“Thursdays.”

“Thursday nights?” he asks, turning his attention to me. “Why that night?”
Why that night,
I repeat to myself. This is what he asks. He asks, “Why that night?” instead of the clearly so much more appropriate, “Why are you taking the class?” I mean generally people don’t take a public speaking class just for fun, do they? Generally, there’s something there, some sort of back story, some sort of reason why someone would want to take that class. Shouldn’t the question here really be, “Why are you taking the class?” Shouldn’t that be the question? Wouldn’t it
all
be so much better if he cared about the
why,
more than he cared about the
why that night?

“Because that’s the night the class is offered,” I say, simultaneously wishing I’d never said anything, and also wondering if this could be one of the instances in which I’m maybe too hard on Evan, if asking, “Why that night?” isn’t really as big a deal as I am making it out to be.

“Thursday night is a big going-out night; it’d just be better if the class was a different night.”
This
is what he says, and any thoughts, any thoughts at all that I am being unfair, unkind, too hard, they just evaporate, vaporize. I look back at him and say nothing.

“There’s not another night?” he asks and I shake my head no, to which he feels compelled to say, “Everything is replaceable, Hope.”

Evan likes one-liners, he especially likes this one-liner, “Everything is replaceable.” He sprinkles it into conversation as often as possible. Once it had been around awhile, bandied about enough to clue me in to the fact that it was a favorite saying, it had struck me as a really sad outlook, and I hoped I’d never be the type of person to say things like “everything is replaceable.” Later I began to wonder if it, this saying, was maybe some kind of threat. Right now I only wonder if Evan simply spews one-liners all the time, one-liners that mean absolutely nothing just because he likes to hear himself speak.

“That makes no sense,” I snap, and snapping, if you think about it, is better than the alternatives, better than, let’s say, standing up and screaming at the top of your lungs, or running, arms flailing, out into the street.

“Everything is replaceable,” I mimic, and while mimicking is as ungracious as snapping, it too is better than other options. “It’s not in the right context,” I try to explain. “It’s just a dumb thing to say.”

“No,
Hope,
it’s not,” he snaps back, leaning forward in his seat toward me. “I’m just saying that if you wanted to, you could do it another night.” I slide back an inch or two on the banquette, away from him.

“And I’m just saying I can‘t, that is the only night.” I try to gather my thoughts, as much as they can, at present, possibly be gathered. “And, I’m not just saying that, I’m also saying that ‘everything is replaceable’ doesn’t fit. I’m saying that, too.”

“What do you want me to say?” he says, tilting his glass back, another ice cube sliding to its unhappy end. I just wanted him to say, “Why?” That is what I wanted. Want
ed
, past tense, because I don’t want it anymore.

“I just want you to say you think it will help,” I tell him, and lean back against a cushion.

“I think it will help,” he says, and the fact that he says it, somehow only makes me feel worse.

“Thanks,” I say. “Do you want to go home?”

“I want to have another drink.” He signals a waitress and first orders a Scotch for himself, and then turns to look at me in a way that I am sure says, “Order something other than a white wine spritzer.”

“A white wine spritzer,” I say and glare at him and we sit. There would be something to be said for letting this conversation end; this I know. But also, there might be something to be said for explaining how hard this is to Evan. I take another bracing breath and try to explain it to him.

“It’s just,” I begin, “I’ve been so scared of it, of public speaking, so scared of it my whole life and now I have to do it, soon. See, my parents want me to make a speech at their anniversary party and I can’t say no, but I don’t know if for a thing like this, this big, if I can say yes and mean it, and I’m just really freaked out, and really scared.” I say it all at once, so quickly. He looks back at me, he cocks his head slightly, in a way that I think could be thoughtful. There is a small, tiny part of me that thinks,
this is it,
this is where Evan actually
gets it,
where everything that I thought was wrong about us turns out not to be such a big deal at all, because the most important thing is that he gets it.

“I love public speaking,” he says. “I really excel at it.” And that small tiny part of me: it dies. I urge the parts of me that are still living to take a deep breath.

“Really?” I say, telling myself that completely freaking out in the middle of the bar at the Regency Hotel might be something I’d look back on later with regret.

“Yeah,” he says, “If you Google me, an article from the the
Pennsylvania Gazette
comes up. It’s from when I went back to Wharton to speak on a panel. I spoke about hedge funds,” he explains.

Who Googles themselves? Do people really do this?
I stare at him blankly. Evan doesn’t care that I’m staring blankly. Evan just keeps talking.

“They say, ‘Evan Russell, consummate public speaker.”’

“Consummate, huh?” I say.

“Yeah, consummate,” he says and then, “Thanks,” to the waitress as she sets down his new Scotch. He leans forward and takes a first sip and then turns back to look at me. His eyes sparkle; they always do. I wonder if confidence, if appearing to be so sure of yourself, even when there is quite a lot of evidence to suggest that you are not, if that is what makes a person’s eyes sparkle. Or if it’s something else.

I look over at Evan and take a sip of my spritzer. It’s times like this, when I notice the way his eyes sparkle, that I can understand why I ever thought I loved him. Just as it makes it all so clear why I don’t think I love him anymore and makes me wonder, actually, if I ever did. He drinks his Scotch and I drink my spritzer. I eat some more M&M’s, and we sit in silence for a while.

“Do you want to have another drink?” he asks me, hopeful, once his Scotch glass is once again empty, the ice-cube pillage but moments away.

“I don’t care,” I say. And I don’t, because right this second I know that no matter how hard I try, I won’t be able to hang on to that phone call when he said, “All I want in the world is to have another drink with you,” and I melted. That was just a phone call. No matter how much I want it to be, it’s not going to be more than that. And it’s certainly not going to be enough.

“Don’t be scared, Hope,” he says, and I feel for a moment like he’s saying things out of context again. But then, maybe it’s not as out of context as I think. It occurs to me, and I’m sure it can’t be for the first time, that maybe there are things in this world other than public speaking that scare the hell out of me.