An Ex to Grind (22 page)

"Fine. I won't go to a lot of trouble. Is a little trouble okay?"

I laughed. "It is."

The week sped by—my time with Buster always seemed to go faster than my time without him—and before I knew it, I was confronting Saturday night and my "date" with Evan. I'd considered canceling, but ultimately it was just easier to show up, keep things light and chummy, and then leave. Also, the fact that the site of the date was just down the hall provided me with an easy escape route, should I start to feel trapped. Yes, he was a great guy. We've established that. And, yes, I hankered for companionship. We've established that too.

But my emotions were directed elsewhere, as you know.

Still, I dressed up a little bit Saturday night. Or, should I say, I dressed down a little bit. My uniform—business suit—remained in the closet in favor of navy wool slacks and a white silk blouse. Much too formal for a casual dinner at a neighbor's apartment, but I had lost touch with "casual." I was just in my thirties, and yet I wore the clothes of a middle-aged matron. Only my long wavy hair, full lips, and a bust size other women go under the knife for suggested that there was a babe in there somewhere. I had long since covered her up.

Having said all that, I was in a festive mood as Buster and I trotted down to 3F that night. Desiree, Ricardo, Isa, and Antoinette had all checked in, confirming that Dan and Leah were still going strong. Amazing, right? I had managed to cut the three-month cohabitation hurdle down to nearly two months. A mere sixty days—the amount of time the DMV gives you for paying a parking ticket! Ninety days had seemed like forever, but a sixty-day deadline seemed within reach, totally doable. I practically salivated as I imagined calling Robin and declaring, "We're done! Dan's on his own! I don't owe him another cent for the rest of my life!" God, what a glorious moment that would be. And it was so close now I could almost smell it.

Actually, what I could smell was garlic, and it was coming from 3R I looked down at Buster as we stood by Evan's door. "What could he be cooking, sweetie boy? He doesn't have much money."

He rubbed his body up against my leg in what I took to be a manifestation of his ambivalence—about Evan, not the dinner. "It's not a real date, and Evan's not trying to replace Daddy," I assured him. "He's just giving Mommy a chance to relax a little."

Buster perked up, so I rang the bell.

"Here you are," said Evan, looking mighty fine. He was in jeans and a body-hugging black sweater, and while he had kept his promise and not donned a tuxedo and tails for our evening together, he had definitely taken extra care with his grooming. His unruly hair was sort of slicked back off his face, like a choirboy's, save for the cowlick that wouldn't lay down, and he had a couple of cuts on his face where the razor had nicked his skin. All of which I found rather endearing. "Come on in. Both of you."

Buster hung back in a rare display of reticence until Evan produced a squeakie toy and tossed it at him.

"Did you buy that for him?" I asked as my dog started playing with the toy and wandered off with it.

"No. I bought it for you. So you wouldn't have to worry about him."

"Very thoughtful. Really." I handed him a bottle of dry rose champagne, my favorite. "I didn't know which went better with kibble, red or white, so I split the difference."

"Good choice. The kibble special tonight is lamb shanks with mashed potatoes and string beans almondine."

"It smells fabulous," I said, grateful that we weren't having ketchup sandwiches or Spam. I felt guilty that he'd spent so much on dinner when he obviously couldn't afford to. On the other hand, maybe his wife had started coming through with the checks by then. My eyes crossed as I thought about the likelihood of her paying for my meal. At that very moment, Leah was probably at Dan's, eating off
his
ex, and there I was at Evan's, eating off
his
ex. Talk about a circle jerk.

I followed him into the tiny kitchen, which was identical to mine except that his miniature appliances were hopping with activity. There were pots on the stove and pans in the oven, and it all felt homey and warm.

"Can I help with anything?" I asked as he stirred the potatoes with a big wooden spoon. I was just being polite. I hoped he'd say no, obviously, given my ineptitude in the culinary arts.

"You bet. I told you I would teach you to cook." He let go of the spoon and nodded at it. "Keep stirring until they get thick and creamy."

I panicked. "How about the lumps? Are they supposed to disappear?"

"Not completely. I'd leave a few in, just to keep it real."

He patted me on the back and left me to my stirring. I must tell you, I got a vague thrill from working those potatoes and watching them thicken and smooth. A satisfaction. A sense of having control over something. Yeah, the Leah/Dan thing was very promising, but I didn't know for certain if it would go my way in the end. The potatoes, on the other hand, were easily manipulated and much more predictable. Perhaps I had underestimated the joy of cooking.

Since Evan had moved out a lot of the apartment's furniture to make room for his canvases, there was no dining room table. So we ate on our laps as we sat on the sofa, Buster eating nearby. (Evan had bought him a food bowl too—a big, sturdy steel one—and filled it with lamb morsels.)

"This is so good," I said, licking my lips. "As professional as any of the restaurants on Ninth Avenue. Who taught you how to cook?"

"My wife," he said. "Kaitlin grew up in a large family, and she and all her sisters are naturals in the kitchen."

"How long were you two together?" I asked, since, unlike me, he never flinched when he mentioned his marriage.

"Five years," he said. "Funny how you expect these things to last a lifetime, in spite of the depressing statistics."

"Were you very traumatized when she told you she wanted a divorce?"

He shook his head in puzzlement. "You and all these assumptions of yours. What makes you think she was the one who wanted the divorce?"

"I think Patty said something. Or maybe I just figured that when you lost your job and took up painting instead of finding another… Well, I thought your wife—"

"Dumped me?"

I nodded sheepishly.

"Is that what happened with you and Traffic Dan? He lost his job with the Giants, so you dumped him?"

"No, of course not. I'm not that callous. There were other factors."

"Such as?"

"Such as: Dan didn't just stop working; he stopped trying to work." I was about to do my usual number on my ex, but I thought it might be awkward for my host, since he too was a bumbo, albeit not as flamboyantly.

"It's an interesting phenomenon," I said instead, hoping that if I spoke in general terms, I could avoid bashing Dan. "Men like to have it both ways. They want women to do well financially—or, at least, they say they do—but only if they're doing well too. The minute the balance of power shifts away from them, they can't handle it."

He looked skeptical. "What about you? Can women handle it when their man goes down? You act very enlightened and say it doesn't matter who's earning the money, but I think it does matter. I think you women don't respect a man if he's got less in the bank than you do."

"No, what I don't respect is a man who takes advantage of a woman he claims to love. Dan went on and on about how much he loved me and didn't want the divorce and wouldn't I reconsider, and now here he is hoarding what's mine, what
I
worked hard for."

"And you're hoarding a grudge."

"Wouldn't you?"

"Maybe in the beginning, but grudges use up a lot of space in here," he said, pointing to his heart. "I'm not pretending that life is fair, but sometimes things are what they are and you have to let them go."

Easy for him to say. He was about to be on the receiving end of the monthly checks. "Getting back to you, Evan, be honest: did Kaitlin give up on the marriage when you flew off to the Bahamas to paint? Was it the lifestyle change that prompted her decision to leave?"

"Assumptions again." He sighed, exasperated. "I was the one who left her, Melanie."

"Really? Why?"

"She had an affair."

"Oh." I put down my knife and fork.

"I told you she's a real estate agent. What I didn't tell you is that she sold this guy a loft in SoHo, then slept with him the day he closed on it. Some people celebrate closings with a bang, huh?"

"You're making a joke about it? You must have been devastated."

"Sure I was. But it happened during the third year we were married. We spent the next two trying to get past it, and we couldn't, so we broke up. Now I'm at the stage where I'm making jokes about it. It's called moving on. You should give it a shot."

"Okay, okay. I get it that you think I haven't moved on from Dan."

He set his plate on the side table and inched closer to me. "It's obvious that part of you is still in that relationship. You should hear yourself. If you didn't care about him, you wouldn't foam at the mouth every time his name comes up."

"I don't foam at the mouth." I wiped away the spittle that had formed in the corners.

"Right," he said. "Just like you don't have that vein popping out."

I reached up to feel my temple. There it was. The Dan vein. "Okay, so I get a little riled up, but it's not Dan I care about," I said. "It's the idea of giving him half of my income and then having to watch him piss it away. But I'm about to put a stop to his nights out on the town and all the rest."

Evan laughed. "He's probably too old to be grounded."

"I'm serious. I shouldn't be saying this to you, but the legal system has its loopholes."

"Why not to me?"

"Because you're about to battle it out with Kaitlin for alimony and whatever assets you have."

He leaned over and cupped my chin in his hand. "I like you," he said in his soft, raspy voice. "And I hope you like me too. I hope you like me regardless of the terms of my divorce settlement. I hope you like me in spite of your preconceptions about men who lose their jobs and become full-time artists. I hope you like me because you find me fun to be with or easy to be with or challenging to be with or a combination of all three. I know money's a huge issue for you, but it's irrelevant to me, so I really don't want to hear any more about it. Are you following?" Like a puppeteer, he moved my chin up and down so I would nod yes, then took his hand away and resumed eating. "Good. Now let's talk about something else. Tell me about your job, your friends, your position on global warming, anything but Dan."

Anything but Dan. Suddenly, I remembered my first conversation with Desiree. She said that a divorcee who goes on a first date and talks about her ex is a big turnoff to the new guy. Obviously, she was right.

Fine. It wouldn't do me any harm to stop obsessing about Dan and Leah for the rest of the evening, to forget the plotting and planning and strategizing just for a couple of hours. Things were going well in that department, so I deserved a night off, I told myself.

For the rest of the meal Evan and I talked and joked and scraped our plates clean. And when he brought out the dessert he'd made—fudgy brownies with pecans—we gobbled them up too. We even made faces at each other with the chocolate smeared across our front teeth and giggled like a couple of kids. It certainly wasn't the kind of evening I was used to, and I enjoyed myself more than I expected to.