What She Saw... (27 page)

14. Neil Schmertz

OR “The Great Date”

SHE FELT LIKE a better version of herself that night, the night of her and Neil Schmertz's first date, her hair swinging, her skin clear, her lips red, her legs long and sheathed in black, her conscience clear, her future, if not bright, then at least unknown. And the way she felt about herself affected the way she looked at Neil Schmertz, who, in all honesty, she'd found only vaguely attractive when she first met him—through a friend of a friend, at a mutual friend's party—but who, it now seemed to her, cut a comely figure in his black three-button suit, his rust-colored open-collared button-down, and his black buckle booties. And he was trim and taller than her. And his sideburns were fashionably long, his fingernails clean, his dark hair, if slightly on the natty side, then neatly cropped, at least.

He smiled when he saw her. And there were dimples in his cheeks. He looked comfortable in his own skin—at thirty, less like a boy than a grown man. Just as there was an ease in the way he kissed her hello on the cheek, helped her with her coat. He smelled clean. He looked competent, too. As if he'd know what to do in a crisis—in a fire, or a robbery, or an elevator that got stuck. Even more impressive, he seemed to know the maître d', who shook his hand before he showed them to their table, pushed it aside so Phoebe could maneuver her way into the banquette, which was upholstered in puckered black vinyl and made squishy noises when she sat down. Neil sat facing her, his back to the room. And the light was soft and flattering. And the buzz of conversation eased the pressures of their own.

“It's nice to see you.” That was the first thing out of Neil Schmertz's mouth. And while it wasn't, maybe, the most inspired line ever uttered, the way he uttered it—leaning forward slightly in his chair, his eyes focused, the corners of his mouth lifted in a half smile—made her think he meant it.

“It's nice to see you, too,” said Phoebe. At which point a chiseled waiter with a weak chin appeared to take their drink order. “I'll have a glass of white wine,” she told the guy.

“By the glass, we have a California Chardonnay, a Pinot Grigio, a Riesling, and a Gewürztraminer from Alsace,” the guy told her.

“I'll have the Gewürztraminer,” Phoebe giggled at her garbled pronunciation.

“And a glass of Merlot for me,” said Neil.

That's how it started.

It continued with a mixed-field-greens salad for her and a Cobb salad for him and thirty-five minutes of benign chitchat regarding the irritations of their respective workdays, the beleaguered state of Phoebe's cuticles, and the intricate web of people and places that had led to their meeting one balmy evening in early July. Then the main course arrived—the Chilean sea bass for her, the filet mignon for him.

Between bites, Neil told Phoebe a little about himself.

About how he'd grown up in a wealthy suburb of Chicago. His schoolteacher mother still lived there. His labor-lawyer father had moved out to Los Angeles after his parents divorced. He had a younger brother who'd graduated from U.C. Santa Cruz—still lived out there and spent most of his time surfing. Growing up, he was “your basic nerd”—spent most of the time getting high and watching
Saturday Night Live
reruns. He went to Brandeis undergraduate. He moved to San Francisco shortly after graduation. He moved to New York a few years after that. He currently made his home in a rent-stabilized one-bedroom in Chelsea. He currently made his living developing CD-ROMs for a start-up called Atlas Digital (offices on Lafayette and Spring). He had a little black pug named Siegfried and an old Saab he parked near the Holland Tunnel. He was currently unattached. He'd lived with a graphic designer named Diane for almost five years. They'd broken up two years ago. He'd dated a few people since then but no one seriously.

His favorite novelist was Graham Greene. His favorite painter was Edward Hopper, but the abstract expressionists were cool, too. He mostly listened to jazz—Billie Holiday, in particular—but he liked some contemporary stuff, too. Also classical. But he didn't know that much about it. He had a secret-but-not-that-secret thing for Manfred Mann's Earth Band. His two favorite film directors were Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick. He celebrated Chanukah, but he wasn't religious. He used to roll his own cigarettes. Then he quit smoking. On the weekends he played squash, watched movies, and rode his bike. He was on the neat side of the neat-to-messy continuum. Okay, so he was kind of a neat freak. He hated himself for crying at the end of
Forrest Gump.
He preferred foreign to domestic beers. He went to therapy once a week. He was closer to his mother than he was to his father. In fact, his ex-girlfriend, Diane, used to tease him about how often he spoke to his mother on the phone—
just about every day
.

Then their plates were cleared, their drinks replenished. At which point, Neil turned to Phoebe and said, “What about you?”

So she told him her life story, the five-minute version she'd rattled off so many times before it had taken on a life of its own—had begun to sound more like a stand-up routine at a third-rate comedy club than the life she remembered having lived, a life spent semiparalyzed before an unsympathetic mirror. In the five-minute version, on the other hand, she was a happy-go-lucky sexpot/eccentric/drama queen/professional neurotic with a charming fragile streak. She told Neil, “My Marxist phase gave way to my
Barbarella
phase. I thought I was really postmodern and I wore really short skirts made out of fake fur and I was in outer space all the time thanks to this antianxiety medication I was taking so that I wouldn't freak out if my chicken was touching my rice. Plus, I was going out with this married man, and worried his wife would find out . . .” Lies and half-truths, all of it.

What did Neil Schmertz know?

He seemed to find everything that came out of her mouth fascinating, provocative, worrisome, surprising—just this side of insane. And he shook his head at the right moments, expressed concern where concern needed to be expressed. Then dessert arrived—a flourless chocolate-mousse cake to split. Whereupon Phoebe took a final drag on her cigarette and raised her mostly empty glass. She felt suddenly, exuberantly, blitzed. “Bon appétit,” she mouthed in the pinched, Anglican clip of Julia Child.

“To our date,” smiled Neil, clinking his glass against her own.

“And to our dinner,” added Phoebe.

“And to our plates.”

“And to our silverware.”

“And to our napkins.”

It went on like that, with each toast progressively more absurd, until they were toasting the tablecloth, the Dalai Lama, Manfred Mann's Earth Band, the rabbit who had been denied the lettuce that had wound up in Phoebe's field greens. And just then, just as a splash of her drink leapt up and out of its glass and onto the linen tablecloth, where it bled imperceptibly but irrevocably outward, like a dying star consuming its planets, it was, for Phoebe, such joy to be alive. It was the Gewürztraminer. It was also Neil Schmertz, who made her feel special but also normal—wonderfully, tantalizingly normal insofar as she'd always imagined herself sitting across from a guy like him in a place like this.

But her mirth proved fleeting, interrupted as it was by the sight of a famous actress seated just two tables away from their own. She was a woman of Phoebe's approximate age who'd achieved stardom while she was still a teenager. And she was beautiful, but she was also respected, having appeared in several carefully crafted film adapations of nineteenth-century British literary classics, in both cases as a haughty aristocrat in a high-neck dress. It was less jealousy Phoebe felt than a sort of canceling out of her own experience—her own right to find herself glamorous, lovable, poignant. “Isn't that Paige Smithers?” she murmured from inside her glass, unable to halt the forward momentum of her jealousy.

Neil's head cocked left then center. “Yeah, that's her. She comes in here all the time.”

“She's really beautiful.”

“She's not as beautiful as you.”

Phoebe raised a single, dubious eyebrow.

It was all for show; it was exactly what she'd needed to hear.

“You don't have to say that,” she told him.

“I know I don't have to say that,” he told her.

“Well, thank you for saying it.”

“Thank you for having dinner with me.”

“Anytime.”

“Phoebe.”

“What?”

“You're amazing.”

It was pretty corny. It was nice to hear. So much so that when Neil Schmertz reached for her hand, Phoebe gave it to him gladly. And while he stroked the back of it, his eyes dissolving inside her own, she wondered if she might spend the rest of her life with this man—not so much because she'd fallen instantly in love but because she was tired of
not
being in love. And he was such a gentleman. He was even Jewish. He was so obviously crazy about her.

He paid the check.

And then he walked her to Canal Street, where he put her in a cab (he didn't want her walking, not at this hour—it wasn't safe), but not before he'd kissed her on the lips in front of a discount electronics emporium all boarded up for the night, Mack trucks roaring by them, mud-flap girls swinging perilously beneath their sixteen wheels. And while it wasn't, maybe, the most inspired kiss Phoebe had ever experienced, it was a good kiss, a solid kiss, a solicitous kiss. And that meant something to her.

It meant he'd want to see her again.

She wanted to see him, too.

In fact, they saw each other the next night—and the next night after that. By then, they were a couple, catching up on each other's days, dropping already familiar names, trading private jokes born of earlier incidents in their short dating career. For Phoebe, the transition was as natural-seeming as it was sudden. Indeed, Neil Schmertz seemed to her like the logical next step—a step in the direction of maturity. It wasn't merely that he always had a chilled bottle of Pinot Grigio waiting in the refrigerator, and showed up at the hour he said he was going to show up, and put to rest any questions in her family regarding her ability to grow up and lead a “normal life.” He showed an interest in her future, where others had been oblivious.

Two weeks into their relationship, he bought her a gift that couldn't be equaled by the most expensive perfume—the gift of inspiration: a music stand and sheet music, a turn-of-the-century double-stop extravaganza called “Adoration,” by a guy named Felix Borowski, from whom no one ever heard much again. Because she'd told Neil she couldn't think of anything she liked to do better than play yesteryear show tunes on the electric violin. The vibrato! The spiccato! The slides! The schmaltz! What was life without melodies? And what musical genre could claim richer ones? And was there ever a relationship that didn't cry out for its own song—a soundtrack by which love's fleeting impulses might be captured for all time, if only for five minutes, or maybe even three?

Not long after “Adoration” became theirs, Phoebe and Neil began to discuss moving in together. It seemed like the sensible thing to do. They spent all their time at each other's apartments anyway. And it meant a larger apartment for both of them— two rooms instead of one, and possibly even three. And her lease was running out in March, and Crystal was moving back to Florida to work with dolphins. And the idea of merging record collections—it offered up a vision of harmony the likes of which Phoebe hadn't known since she was a child seeking refuge in Leonard and Roberta's bed when the thunder was so loud she feared the house would split in two. But it wasn't just Neil's records she dreamed of appropriating. Almost unconsciously, she began eyeing his Eames chairs—fantasizing about if and how they'd work with her steamer trunk, her standing lamp, her zebra-print rug.

It turned out they worked fine. That April, Phoebe and Neil moved into the second floor of a Victorian brownstone in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn. There was hammered tin on the ceiling, wainscoting on the walls. One set of windows looked out onto an overgrown garden, the other onto a historic, tree-lined street. It was pleasant like the suburbs, but it was urban by virtue of the sprawl that surrounded it—the fried-chicken joints and public-housing projects and Islamic education centers. Never mind the Brooklyn House of Detention. It was for this reason that Phoebe could imagine that she and Neil, far from being mimickers of the bourgeois tropisms of their parents' generation, were one of those haute Bohemian couples who lounged around their retro modern flats in androgynous Calvin Klein underwear, snacking on seaweed while debating the relative merits of the latest Don DeLillo novel— when they weren't uninstalling software on their his-and-hers laptops, deconstructing Japanimation, or preparing late-night dinner for their ten best friends, all of them similarly attractive, ironic, and technologically adroit, with a fondness both for “rare groove” and for toasted pine nuts in their warm goat-cheese salads.

Oh, but the reality was something different; the reality was that there were no dinner parties—only dinner, typically taken out from You Bet You Want Szechwan, only to be taken in on Neil's pilled futon couch, the two of them in matching terrycloth bathrobes, a romantic comedy starring Meg Ryan playing on the tube. Moreover, the less effort they made to connect with the outside world, the more inseparable they became. One pissed while the other one brushed teeth. One opened his mouth to speak and the other one spoke. They confided in each other all their ugliest secrets. Endearing nicknames changed from week to week. (“Coolio” became “Carlos,” which became “Julio,” which became “Wubble,” which became “Booboo,” which became “Looboo,” which eventually became “Wooboo,” for reasons that were never entirely clear.)

During work hours they spoke on the phone up to ten times a day. Phoebe would call Neil to tell him she licked an envelope. Neil would call Phoebe to tell her he moved a paper clip—and that he couldn't live without her; and that he'd never felt this way about anybody before; and that he loved her more than life itself—even while sex was always, somehow, beside the point: the point of Neil's adoration. He acted as if it were a privilege to lie next to her. He acted as if he'd never seen a naked woman before. Or, at least, not one who looked like Phoebe. And the way he held her afterward—no one had ever held her like that before. He held her like he'd never let go.