The Book of Jonah (6 page)

He glanced at his phone again. Another two minutes had gone by since he'd last checked. He couldn't wait much longer: He'd been gone from his office for nearly an hour now, and even if he and Zoey didn't actually sit down to lunch, it would be difficult to get back in time for the 1:30 meeting he had on his calendar. He would need time before this meeting, as well—not so much to review the materials that would be discussed, but rather to sit unmoving in his air-conditioned office for the ten or so minutes it would take him to stop sweating.

He considered calling Zoey again, texting her again, but she hadn't answered the first four rounds of calls and texts; he doubted she would respond to the fifth. Besides, he felt he could in good conscience hurry her only so much, given what he had come to do.

At some point, the heat had reawakened the doubts he still held about this conversation: exacerbated them, merged with them, become indistinguishable from them. The temptation was growing simply to abandon ship. He could text Zoey that he hadn't been able to wait any longer, could go back to his office—not mention anything about a breakup to her. After all, if he'd known he was going to have a BBEC case to celebrate, he might have waited until after the weekend to end things, anyway.

He reminded himself, however, that there were not merely moral arguments (the force of which seemed to have faded considerably over the course of the morning) in support of the breakup. There was also what might called the weight of precedent. To wit, he and Zoey had been breaking up and getting back together for going on ten years now: ending things by mutual accord, or not; not talking for weeks or months; and then emailing each other out of the blue, or texting from a bar or a party; hooking up again, dating again, and then—seemingly by force of the same gravity that had brought them back together in the first place—breaking up again, vowing never to speak again, and starting the whole process over—over and over and over. In all their incarnations over the last ten years—hooking up, or dating casually, or dating exclusively, or cheating with each other, or cheating on each other—they'd never managed to achieve anything sustainable, never managed to recover the jarring and perspectiveless love of their first few months. That love had given way to reality, Jonah told himself, and reality turned out to be an environment to which their relationship was ill-suited, regardless of form. There certainly wasn't any reason to think their latest iteration would be any different, given that he was moving in with Sylvia and she was seeing Evan, the intermittently employed actor she'd been intermittently dating for close to a year now. If he didn't end it today, it would just end some other day.

He found this case he'd made to himself fairly convincing—but felt it contradicted almost instantly when he saw a young woman of medium height, brunette and narrow-shouldered, with a distinctive gait of short, choppy steps that were at once both hurried and measured—as if she were resisting an urge to run—and recognized her immediately as Zoey.

She had a phone pressed against her ear. When he approached, she smiled—momentarily, apologetically—then returned her attention to whomever she was talking to. “Then we want to link to it on their site?” she said into her cell, her toe tapping agitatedly, her thumb at her mouth, her expression one of brow-furrowed concentration as she stared off into the middle distance. She was dressed in a black-and-white Rorschach-patterned dress and black high heels, and Jonah could see in silhouette created by the sunlight pouring onto the plaza the shape of her slender figure under her dress, the darker outlines of her bra and panties. He found he couldn't stop staring at this sight, despite his intentions here—and despite having seen her entirely naked maybe a thousand times before. Finally he feigned interest in his own phone, reminded himself that Sylvia had a pretty great body, too, though in an entirely different mode.

“Then we can just post the whole thing, right?” Zoey was saying. “And I could definitely get a quote from his publicist.…” She was, to use a term she had coined herself, a B-girl: a writer for the blog
Glossified,
a culture-cum-gossip website popular among young urban women. It was a job many envied her for—many young urban women, at least—but, characteristically, Zoey managed to hate it. Her career was a source of deep, persistent anxiety for her—as were her vast credit-card debt, her recurring ulcer, her smallish cup size, her nose: long and tall from her face, with a slight bump at the center that she referred to as “the mogul.” Despite Zoey's loathing of it, though, Jonah considered this nose her sexiest feature—the one that gave her face the distinctive character that, for whatever reason, he always associated with the letter Z.

Indeed, nothing that bothered her so much about herself bothered him at all; he even found the persistence of all the (to him baseless) anxieties charming. And as he watched her frowning at whatever she was hearing on the phone, still chewing her thumbnail (a habit she had been trying to break for as long as he'd known her), it became difficult for him to distinguish between his reluctance over the breakup and his affection for her, because there really was so much about her that he found charming: the inchoate worries; her candor, her wit; her idiosyncratic habit of swearing only in languages other than English; the drama of her facial expressions—she being a woman whose brow furrowed, whose laughter was loud and openmouthed, whose nervousness brought tautness from her forehead to her chin, whose almond-shaped brown eyes narrowed and darted, and whose head tilted just so when she was flirting.

“Five hundred words? Two fifty?” she continued. “Sure … And then you saw the emails? Okay. Call me on my cell when you hear from Anika, all right? Okay, thanks,
ciao.
” She hung up, dropped her phone into her voluminous purse, and, with the same hand, immediately began digging around in it. “You have no idea, Yonsi”—this being her nickname for him—“I have been on the phone nonstop since I walked in this morning. I haven't even had the chance to do something terrible for my body.” She pulled out a lighter and a pack of cigarettes, by smooth rote motions put one in her mouth and lit it. As she took a deep drag, she looked at him from feet to moist forehead. “Remember, it's good for your pores,” she said consolingly. “Do you want a tissue?”

“No, it's okay…” he said, wiping his face again, guilt now taking a place among the doubts. She was so complicated and contradictory in so many ways that he was often caught off guard by how plainly nice she was to him. She was the closest thing to a Jewish mother he had ever had.

She took another tug on her cigarette. “The star of one show you never watch is writing a memoir about his gay escapades with the star of another show you never watch. And Darla's old roommate is an assistant to some agent in L.A., and she sent us the proposal. It's mass hysteria up there, Yonsi, really, B-girls gone wild. I had zero time to answer your calls. The details are absolute pornography, and guess who has to write about it? That's what I get for graduating magna from NYU. Tell me I have the most soulless job of anyone you know.”

He glanced at his phone—he had only about five minutes left. Again he pondered reversing course. But he knew himself, knew that if he failed to do it now, it would be weeks before he put himself in a position to do it again. It was still the right thing to do, he reminded himself. So he took a decidedly calm breath and said, “Look, Zoey…”

Her eyes immediately narrowed, she scrutinized his face suspiciously. Then she let out a disgusted sigh. “
Scheisse,
Yonsi…”

“Zoey…”

“Please stop saying my name like you heard my cat died.”

“I just think that we—”

“You're doing this to me again?”

“How often has it been you doing it to me?”

“Yeah, but I always had good reasons.”

“Sylvia and I…”

She rolled her eyes preemptively. “She does not qualify as a good reason.”

“We're moving in together.”

He had meant to deliver this piece of news more gently, but had found himself feeling immediately on the defensive, and so the most compelling rationale had come tumbling out. There had, of course, been many such revelations over the last ten years: new significant others, new seriousness with those others, new intentions of exclusivity. Only three months previously, Zoey had mentioned—with a certain grimness—that Evan had started making veiled references to possibly getting engaged at some point. But actually living with another person was something new to them—and maybe because it was new, Zoey looked puzzled when she first heard it, and her first response was, “But you said she didn't even vote for Obama.”

“I said I didn't think she voted for Obama,” he answered, though the only reason he wasn't certain was that he hadn't wanted to ask and know for sure.

She asked skeptically, “You really want to live with
Schlampe
?”—this her nickname for Sylvia.

“I don't know,” he answered—more honestly, he realized, than he probably should have. “I can really see a future with her,” he added quickly. “And with us,” he went on, “it just isn't meant to be.”

This point seemed fairly obvious to him—self-evident, really. But as he watched, tiny tremors began in her lips and her forehead, a reliable harbinger of tears. Though her cigarette was only half smoked, she dropped it to the pavement, stamped it out with her toe as her hands began digging into her vast purse for another. “You have such a talent for saying the most hurtful things.”

“Zoey…” he began.

“There's that word again,” she said into her purse.

“You know I never wanted to hurt you,” he mumbled.

“That must make you feel much better about all of this.” She didn't look up until she had another cigarette between her lips. As she clicked her lighter before it, she said, “Would it never work out because of my A cups? Or because I didn't go Hah-vahd like
Schlampe
?”

“C'mon, Zoey, we aren't even dating,” he said, guilt giving way a little to irritation.

“Therefore I shouldn't mind that you're dumping me to live with another woman?”

“I'm not dumping you—we aren't dating!”

“I guess I'm not aware of the legal definition of getting dumped. But then again, we didn't all go to Columbia Law School—”

“You have a boyfriend! You're talking about getting married!”

She lifted the hand holding the cigarette, flapped her bare ring finger. “You were the one who said it didn't mean anything until he got me a ring.”

“I never said that,” though he knew he had.

“No really, it's fine,” she said, with mock breeziness. “I was looking forward to a joyless marriage with a man who can't support me. Maybe I'll see
Schlampe
pushing one of your blond babies around Prospect Park someday.”

She turned away, stared off toward the traffic on Seventh Avenue, her forehead still trembling a little, but her mouth now set in a hard, tight frown. Jonah glanced at his phone—a bead of sweat dropped from his forehead onto its face. If he didn't get in a cab in the next three minutes, he would be late. And there was, he told himself, no point to this conversation anymore. He'd learned from his past breakups—with her, with anyone—that everything beyond the delivery of the hard, essential message was only a sort of ritualistic airing of grievances: kabuki theater in which the aggrieved party tried to elicit as much guilt as possible, while the person doing the aggrieving made parrying attempts to end the conversation without giving any new cause for being thought an asshole, or at minimum, to escape before the crying started.

“Zoey, you were late, I've got to go.…”

“My therapist says I have a problem with patterns,” she responded, taking another drag on her cigarette and exhaling smoke from the corner of her mouth. “Dr. Popper explains that my anxiety makes me do what's familiar, even when it's bad for me. Your name came up. Shocking, I know. Thanks for making her look so smart.” She punched him—hard—on the arm.

“Jesus,” he said. But he knew the punch was, if not exactly affectionate, then at least not entirely hostile, either. If nothing else, it was an acknowledgment of something. “Look, I feel really shitty about this,” he told her.

“That's nice of you to say.” She was standing perpendicular to him now, and this lessened the translucence of her dress—which was a relief—but allowed him the full profile of her nose—which was not. It was not that Zoey was prettier than Sylvia; by conventional reckoning she wasn't. There was simply a lot more going on in Zoey's face than in Sylvia's neat, all-American-by-way-of-Ireland features. Zoey glanced over at him, her brown iris filling the corner of her right eye. “Tell me the truth. Does it mean anything if there's no ring?”

Jonah rubbed some sweat from the back of his neck. “I was being a dick. Of course it means something.”

Whether she was comforted by this or further distressed, he couldn't tell. She couldn't tell, either, was his guess. Profound ambivalence had always been a hallmark of her feelings toward Evan. “But she'll see a ring from you, is that the idea?” Zoey asked. “It'll be you and
Schlampe
?”

He didn't answer. He didn't know the answer—and he wouldn't have known how to phrase any answer, given who was asking. But his best guess was yes—him and
Schlampe.
Wasn't that the whole point of doing this?

“I got a BBEC case,” he told her. “I'll be working with Doug Chen—y'know, the one with the strippers. It puts me in good shape for partner.” He realized it was unfair to tell her—to dump her and in the same breath mention how great his life was going. But it was important to him that she know, for some reason.