Who Do You Love (28 page)

“Ah.” He returned to his burger. Usually, dropping
heart condition
into a conversation would prompt at least a few questions, a bit of back-and-forth about exactly what was wrong and whether it was better, but Nate seemed more interested in his meal than my health. I stifled another yawn and sneaked a glance at my watch, an inexpensive Timex. Nana had gotten me a Cartier Tank watch, but it caused too much trouble when I wore it to work. Brenda, I remembered, had asked to try it on, had turned her wrist from side to side, then had gotten teary and said, “I'll never have anything this pretty.”
Andy's
watch had monitored his heart rate. Sometimes I'd make him wear it when we were in bed, to see if his heart rate jumped when I kissed him and did other things.

“So tell me about speechwriting,” I said.

For five minutes, Nate talked and ate, describing how he'd landed his job (his father had been the mayor's urologist), and how the mayor consistently ruined his best efforts with his high-pitched, nasal voice. Then, somehow, we were back to skiing again. “I learned to ski in Vermont. Didn't ski on powder until I got to college. It was, like, a totally different thing.”

Possibly my desperation was starting to create its own gravitational pull, because not one but two waiters came to our table. “We're all set here,” said Nate, pushing his last two french fries into his mouth without asking if I wanted anything else. I made the expected gesture toward my purse; he did the obligatory
wave-away, saying, “No, no, I got this.” In less than two minutes the bill was paid, and we'd collected our coats and bags and were out on the street. “That's me,” I said, gesturing toward the subway, trying to decide what I'd do if he went in for the kiss or put me on the spot by asking for another date.

No such luck . . . or no such problem. “Listen, it was great meeting you, but I'll be honest. I'm not sure I'm seeing a future.”

“Mmm.” I wasn't interested in feedback any more than I was interested in seeing him again, but Nate took my noncommittal noise as a request for explanation.

“You're a great gal, and I'm sure there's a lot of guys who'd be into you, but I mostly date eights and nines.”

I'd been slinging my work bag over my shoulder. When he said
eights and nines,
I paused, midsling, positive that I'd heard him wrong. “I beg your pardon?”

“Eights and nines,” he repeated, as if it was a normal and inoffensive thing to be rating women like coins in a collection or steaks in the butcher's case—choice, select, prime.

“And I'm a . . .”

He had the nerve to put his glasses on for a closer look. “Did you ever think about straightening your hair?”

I looked past him. The sidewalks were full of people carrying takeout containers and briefcases and shopping bags, people on cell phones, people on bikes, people just walking around like the world was a normal place where everyone obeyed the social contracts and men understood they couldn't go around casually assigning women numbers outside of the privacy of their own heads.

“You're a jerk,” I said in a pleasant voice.

“Hey, hey!” He held up his hands, the universal male gesture of
I didn't do it.
“There's plenty of fish in the sea.”

“You have bad breath,” I said in that same polite voice. I didn't know whether it was true—luckily, I hadn't gotten close enough to smell—but there'd been raw onion on his burger, so it felt like a safe bet. “And you have small, womanish hands.” Nate looked at his hands. Then looked at me. “Girlie fingers,” I said, and lifted my head, curly hair and all, and walked away.

I didn't cry until I'd made it home, until the door was locked, my work clothes were off, and I was wrapped in my cozy
chenille
robe, with my unlikable hair in a ponytail.
You're beautiful,
I heard . . . in
Andy's
voice.
No, you are. You're beautiful.

Nate, thankfully, was the low point . . . but it didn't get much better. A copywriter for an ad agency spent the whole date complaining about his ex (“I think she was bipolar,” he said). A rabbi, funny and charming, spat tiny chunks of food when he talked. A banker rhapsodized about the amazing vacation he'd just taken with his mom. When he showed me pictures of the two of them together, with Mom in a bikini, her arm around his waist, I feigned an appointment and told him that I had to go.

It wasn't always awful. I had a few second and third dates that fizzled out painlessly. I met nice guys to whom I was not attracted; attractive guys who weren't especially nice. No one made me feel passionate, no one even had me wanting to know him better, to hear about his childhood pets and his first girlfriend and what he wanted his life to be like.

Finally, at Amy's insistence, I agreed to meet one of her friends. “He's a little bit older,” Amy cautioned.

I raised an eyebrow. “How old?”

“My age.”

“Ancient.”

Amy threw a packet of paper clips at my head. “You'll like him. He's a do-gooder. Did Teach for America, then the Peace Corps, then AmeriCorps.”

“So, lots of America, lots of corps. What's he do now?”

“He went to law school, but he's been working as an editor.”

“What's he edit?”

Amy paused. I crossed my arms over my chest. “What is it?”

“The last time we talked, he was editing a magazine for urban farmers.”

“Oh, no. Come on. Do I look like someone who wants to be around goats?”

“I don't think he actually has goats, he's just running a magazine for people who do.”

“That's not any better! He's probably got a chicken coop in his living room,” I said.

“He can't be worse than the Spitting Rabbi.”

“If he uses the word
artisanal,
I'm leaving.”

“That sounds fair.”

“Also ‘curated.' None of that. No curation.”

“Fine.”

“And he's never been married? What's the story there?”

Amy shrugged. “Sometimes there's not a story except ‘he just didn't meet the right girl.' ”

“Fine,” I grumbled. “But I'm oh for eight. If this is a bust, you owe me dinner at Shun Lee.”

On Friday night, I did my hair, wriggled into my date dress, and arrived early at my favorite wine bar so I could watch him come through the door. The place served a “grown-up grilled cheese” that I'd decided was the sandwich of the gods, made with homemade sourdough bread and three different cheeses.
Twelve bucks for a sandwich?
I'd heard Andy complaining in my head the first time I'd ordered it.
Nobody's making you pay for it,
I told him.
Now go away.

The door opened and, maybe because I'd been thinking about him, for one desperate half second I imagined it would be Andy; Andy, come to his senses, Andy, come to rescue me from men who spat or obsessed about their exes or took their mothers to couples' resorts. But of course it wasn't Andy, it was Jay Kravitz, who had shiny brown hair and a generous nose and a nice smile. He held out his hand, saying, “It's Rachel, right?”

“Rachel. Right.” He wasn't especially handsome, but his smile improved his looks, and he had a nice firm handshake, and smelled good, like he used just the right amount of some delicious cologne. He pulled out the chair at our table for two, sat down across from me, and looked at me more closely, his expression warm and thoughtful.
Hmm,
I thought to myself as I felt something inside me shifting. At the very least, he'd gotten my attention.

“What would you like? Just drinks, or can I talk you into splitting a sandwich?”

I wanted a grilled cheese so badly I was fighting the urge to snatch one off the plate that had just been set in front of the man at the next table, but I said, “How about we just do drinks? I'm actually meeting someone at seven.” A few years ago a book called
The Rules
had become the single girl's bible, and rule number one was never to be too available. If you wanted a man to think of you as a potential wife, you should never okay a last-minute assignation. You had to make him wait, make him chase, let him think that you had suitors lined up and vying for your time. Having no actual plans, I thought that I'd call Amy, who'd be finishing work, to see if she could meet me for a debrief; or I could just have a latte at the Starbucks down the street.

“Is it another guy? It's another guy, isn't it?” Jay pretended to sulk. When I didn't answer, he said, “Tell you what. You meet him, and I'll read my paper, and if it's a no-go you come back here and we'll have dinner.”

“What if he's it?” I teased. “What if he's the one?”

“Then I'll let him have you,” Jay said, assuming an expression of noble resignation as he spread out his
New York Times.
“Far be it from me to thwart true love's course.”

“Did you say ‘thwart'?”

“I did,” he said, nodding. “I thwarted.”

I smiled, ordered a glass of wine from the waitress, and said, “Amy tells me you're an editor.”

He shook his head. “An editor no more.”

“You gave up on urban farming?”

“There's only so much you can say about how to get around the zoning laws so that you can keep rabbits in Red Hook. So I've gone slinking back to the law.”

I fake-applauded. He mock-bowed. “I'm actually an adjunct criminal law professor at NYU. I thought you should know, in case Amy told you all about how I dug latrines in Sierra Leone and you were looking for some kind of Mellors-the
-ga
mekeeper thing.”

I smiled and looked away, wondering how he'd known that was exactly what I'd been imagining, and how he knew I'd read
Lady Chatterley's Lover,
which I'd discovered in my parents' bookcase, between
What Color Is Your Parachute?
and a Passover cookbook titled
Let My People Eat.
It would be nice to date a reader. Andy's shelves had featured guides to running, biographies of runners, memoirs by runners, and not one but two copies of
Once a Runner.

Two white wines and several literary references later, it was time for me to go. Jay stood, walked me out, then said, “Hope to see you soon.” I went to a newsstand, bought a tabloid, read half of it in a Starbucks, and then, trying to manage my expectations and prepare for the worst, I went back to the bar.

Jay was reading the Metro section. “No good?” he asked. He looked like he was glad to see me. I found that I was glad to see him.

“I'm starving,” I said, and he stood and took my hand, then gave my cheek a kiss.

“Then let's eat.”

Over grilled cheese, I learned that Jay was thirty-four, the oldest of three, with a brother in banking and a sister in grad school. His mother had died of breast cancer when he was twenty-nine. His father did trust and estates law in Greenwich, and expected Jay to join the practice someday.

“Will you?”

“Probably,” he said cheerfully. “It's not the most exciting work in the world, but the hours are usually pretty reasonable, and you're hardly ever in court. And it's steady. People are always going to need wills, and rich people are always going to need help figuring out how to keep their greedy kids from snatching their money.”

I answered his questions about my job, and the families I was working with, imagining what it would be like to spend time with a guy who was content and comfortable, who wasn't constantly pushing himself, endlessly striving for something that was impossibly hard to attain.

Jay was exactly what my parents would want for me; as perfect as if they'd put him together in some kind of build-a-guy workshop. He'd gone to George Washington and spent his twenties volunteering before law school at Columbia. He'd been in two serious long-term relationships but had been single for the past year. He came from the same kind of background that I did—Jewish, but not super observant, with parents who were comfortably upper-middle-class, but not rich. His passion, he said, was Scrabble, which he played in tournaments. “You shouldn't be too impressed,” he told me. “It's not about being a genius. It's more about knowing every two-letter word in the world.”

Modest, I thought. A reasonable hobby. A dry, self-­deprecating sense of humor, a nice, lived-in face. I could get used to this.

On our second date—
Lost in Translation
at Lincoln Center and noodle soup at a new ramen place afterward—I'd told him stories of how my brother, Jonah, had been so jealous of the attention I'd gotten in the hospital that he'd once tried to feign a brain tumor so he'd get special treats, and Jay told me about his sister's eating disorder, and how weird it had been to visit her in the hospital. “I just kept thinking, ‘Eat something! How hard can it be? Have a cheeseburger and you can come home!' ” He rode the subway with me, even though he lived uptown, and walked me to my door. “I think you have a beautiful heart,” he said, and kissed me. His words didn't move me as much as
Andy's
once had . . . but I wasn't sixteen anymore, and Andy was gone. I'd spent too many mornings learning that over and over again, waking up hopeful and then feeling the sadness settle into me like a sickness, as soon as I remembered what was starting to feel like the central fact of my existence:
Andy is gone.

On our third date, Jay and I went out for sushi. In an enormous, dimly lit room, behind big white plates decorated with curls of white or pinkish flesh, tiny mounds of rice and wasabi, and shreds and flecks of vegetable, we swapped bar and bat mitzvah stories, and Jay told me about the first time he'd had sex, how he and his high school girlfriend had shared a bottle of wine in the room at the Days Inn that they'd gotten, and he'd ejaculated on her thigh and spent five minutes apologizing before he realized that she'd passed out. After the check for a hundred and twenty dollars came we admitted to each other that we were both still starving, and hurried out into the frigid November night, holding hands, mitten to mitten. We race-walked to the Burger Bar, hidden behind heavy velvet curtains in the lobby of Le Parker Meridien, and ordered two cheeseburgers, plus an order of fries and a brownie. Jay had a beer; I had a chocolate malted and licked ketchup off my fingers, saying, “I know it's cool to love sushi, but I just don't.”