Been There, Done That (27 page)

I was in big trouble.

 
 
I had planned to accomplish many important tasks during my day in the office, all of which I immediately forgot upon being humiliated in the meeting. Instead, I gave in to my impulse to run and hide.

“We’ve got to talk,” Tim mumbled as I shoved my papers into my bag. “About the investigation, I mean,” he added hurriedly.

“The investigation?” I spat. “Isn’t there something else we need to talk about?”

“No,” he said evenly. “There’s nothing left to say.”

“How about, I’m sorry for misleading you? I’m sorry for making you look like a fool?”

He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them slowly. “Let’s try to be professional. To just focus on the investigation. We need to sit down and review the facts. We need to see if we missed any angle, any lead.”

“It’ll have to wait,” I snapped. “I’ve got a full day of interviews scheduled.”

“Don’t back out now, Kathy,” he said. “This isn’t about you and me.”

“You’ve made that perfectly clear.” Backing out seemed like a wonderful idea.

“I talked to Gerry,” Tim said.

“Who’s Gerry?”

“The bartender, you know, at that pub.”

“The Snake Pit.”

“Right. Anyway, he said there’s this kid. Troy. He didn’t know his last name. But he said to watch him.”

“I already have been.”

He took a deep breath as if to gather strength and spoke again. “I’ll finish this story without you if I have to, but I’d rather have you on my side.”

“I’ve got the inside track,” I said as if I believed it. “You couldn’t possibly do it without me.”

“Just see what you can find out,” he said.

My “full day of interviews” was utter crap, of course, but it sounded feasible—especially since I’d promised Sheila three nonexistent articles by Friday.

I fled to my apartment. It looked unusually large and luxurious. Framed pictures! Built-in bookshelves! Curtains! On the coffee table there was a plate of fossilized toast crusts and a rotting apple core, which kind of took away from the overall effect and made the room smell a bit. The carpet was littered with lint and crumbs. Once I moved back home, I vowed, I would keep fresh flowers on my coffee table. I would vacuum more often and stop eating my frozen dinners on the couch.

I carried my plate to the kitchen sink and dropped the apple core into the trash. So it wasn’t just the apple that smelled: I’d take the trash out later. Then I went into my bedroom (Look at the size of the bed! And the bedding: no synthetic fibers!) to fetch the vacuum, which wasn’t in my closet. I lay down on my bed to try to remember where I’d stashed it and promptly fell asleep.

I awoke disoriented. The shadows in my room told me that it was almost evening. So much for getting anything done. It all came back to me in a rush: Tim and Jennifer, my precarious job situation, the need for three quick articles. I only knew one person who could throw that many topics my way. I checked the glowing numbers on my digital clock: 5:20 P.M. With any luck, he’d still be in the office.

“Kathy!” He sounded far too pleased to hear from me. “I’ve called your office a couple of times, but they keep saying you’re out on assignment.”

I cringed. Not that I really wanted to know that Dennis had been calling me—but it would be nice if Jennifer would pass on my messages every now and again.

I asked him if he was free for a “professional dinner,” which sounded entirely dopey, as if we would be paid to eat, but which I figured would at least let him know that I wasn’t asking him out. We agreed to meet at seven-thirty at a trendy place in the South End.

Next, on impulse, I called Marcy and asked if she could join us. I needed to tell her about my night with Jeremy, needed her assurances that I wasn’t a bad person. I didn’t want to go into details over the phone, but maybe we could catch some time alone before or after dinner.

“I’m having dinner with Dennis, and I’d rather make it a group thing,” I told her. “Besides, I need to talk to you about Jeremy.” I’d told Marcy about Dennis, whom she’d just missed meeting that long-ago day in Filene’s Basement, but I wasn’t sure if she remembered much. She called Dan, and he, miraculously, said he’d shoot to be home at six-thirty. “So he’s working shorter hours?” I ventured.

“No. But the bigger I get, the more frightened of me he becomes.”

Dennis and Marcy were engrossed in conversation when I arrived at the restaurant. “You found each other,” I said.

They beamed up like old friends—of each other, not me. “Marcy said you were rescuing her from another night of chicken nuggets and Nickelodeon.”

“Dennis likes
SpongeBob,
” Marcy announced, rolling her eyes dramatically.

Dennis squeezed her arm. “She’s a snob, this one,” he laughed. He turned to Marcy. “Give it one more chance.”

Marcy shook her head. “That’s just asking too much.”

When Dennis went outside to use his cell phone, Marcy, without even looking up from her menu, remarked, “When you told me we were meeting Dennis, I thought you meant the Dennis who had a thing for you.”

I squinted, trying to get her drift. Her stomach was so enormous, she could hardly pull up her chair. Yes, Dennis was being awfully nice to her, but did she really think he was hitting on her? What I really wanted to talk to her about was Jeremy, and she didn’t even care enough to ask.

I was trying to come up with a suitable response to Marcy’s inquiry when Dennis reappeared. He looked nice tonight, I had to admit, in a white tab-collar shirt, black jeans and black oxford shoes. He smelled good, too, like a freshly sliced pear.

“What do you think of this place?” he asked, pulling back his chair and smiling at me. I glanced at Marcy to see if she’d noticed the shift in his attention. Didn’t she see he was just being polite to her, that he was hoping to win me over by sucking up to my friends?

I looked around lazily. “The whole exposed-pipe thing has been overdone,” I proclaimed. “Although I like that they’ve painted the pipes different colors. Makes me think of the, you know, that museum in Paris.”

“The Pompidou,” Marcy offered.

I ignored her. “But the black walls . . .” I wrinkled my nose and shook my head.

“What would you do?” Dennis asked. “Royal blue? Red?”

I considered. “Parchment. With colorful prints on the walls. That way, the ceiling would be the focus.”

“But I thought you didn’t like the ceiling,” Marcy said. She wasn’t being especially contrary; she was always like this. Tonight, though, I just wasn’t in the mood.

“If you’re going to have exposed pipes, it’s striking to paint them different colors,” I reiterated carefully. “Hey! There’s an article idea—exposed pipes and vents and stuff as art! Taking the industrial look a step further . . .” I pulled my notebook out of my bag and wrote it down. Dennis gave me the name and number of a designer who specialized in industrial chic. “Any other ideas?” I asked Dennis.

“Black walls?”

“Yes . . . yes! Black: bold or bleak?” And we were off.

After dinner, Dennis, who lived around the block, asked us back to his place for coffee, and I finally felt grateful for Marcy’s presence (she still hadn’t asked about Jeremy, even in a whisper). Dennis seemed almost appealing tonight, I had to admit, but I still wasn’t ready for any kind of physical contact. But who knew? Maybe Marcy had allowed me to see him with new eyes. Really, he was just the kind of sensitive, artistic guy I should be hooking up with.

Dennis lived on the second floor of a lovely brownstone. The South End was still dangerous in places, but over the past twenty-five years or so, it had been reclaimed and restored to much of its original glory. The apartment itself was anything but traditional: plum, mustard and ochre walls, leather arm chairs, blond wood intermingled with cherry. Black and white photographs mounted on broad white mats lined the walls. The overall look was part contemporary, part retro: striking and stylish, certainly, but not quite original. I’d seen the look before, I was certain. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

“Cappuccino? Latté?” Dennis asked, heading for a massive espresso maker that took up most of a black granite countertop. Then it hit me: Dennis’s apartment looked just like a Starbucks.

“Latté,” I said. “Decaf if you have it.” It was really, really hard not to add, “venti, nonfat, with a shot of vanilla syrup.”

Marcy asked for a glass of milk as she gazed around in wonder. “Snazzy place, Dennis. You really have a knack for decorating.”

He shrugged. “Not me—my ex.”

Marcy made sympathetic noises, while I peered at Dennis anew. He had been loved and desired. Maybe I had missed something. Maybe I should open my mind and my eyes.

“At least he had nice taste,” Marcy said. “Your ex, I mean.” I spun around, tried not to gasp. She often spoke without thinking, but with this, she’d hit a new low. Why would she assume Dennis was gay, just because he had style? The evening had been going so well. Dennis was a sensitive sort. His self-esteem might never recover.

I smiled at Dennis, tried to find words to make the whole thing into a joke. He looked remarkably unperturbed. He pushed a button on the espresso machine, which made a loud whooshing noise. When it was quiet again, he sighed. “I don’t know. The place is a little too in-your-face for me. I was pushing for a tweedy, masculine look, but he had to have his way. As always.”

thirty-two

So you can’t really blame me for going to bed with Jeremy again.

It’s not like I went to his room intending to rip his clothes off. I just tapped on his open-just-a-crack door, smiled shyly and sat down on his unmade bed. Sloppy though I am in my own home, I felt a whiff of superiority. It’s one thing to be slovenly behind the locked doors of an apartment no one ever visits, quite another to leave your bed unmade with your door open. The beige sheets looked familiar. Surely he had washed them since our romp. Right? Anyway, the bed was really the only place to sit; it was that or the floor. Jeremy was at his desk, his bendy aluminum desk lamp illuminating an over-highlighted textbook. The thing is, though, he got up and closed his door and came back to sit next to me on the bed. He cupped my face in his hands and gazed at me with those green-gold eyes with such pure heterosexual lust that I thought, “This may be the last straight man on the planet—and he likes me!”

That’s another thing. After we left Dennis’s place, Marcy gushed about what a nice guy he was. She illuminated this niceness by saying, “Dennis told me how you said all your old friends had gotten married or moved away. So he thought you needed a shoulder to lean on.” There you have it, from the mouth of Marcy: Dennis had been calling me nonstop because he felt sorry for me. I had reached the very lowest rung on the Ladder of Loserdom. I was so mad, I never told her about Jeremy, even when we were finally alone, and she never bothered to ask.

Still, I contained myself and forged ahead on my quest to set things right with Jeremy. “About the other night—” I looked down at my lap. I fiddled with the braided silver ring on my right hand. After Tim moved out, I’d bought it to replace the turquoise non-engagement ring he had given me for our five-year anniversary. “It wasn’t supposed to happen. It just wasn’t . . . right.”

“I know,” Jeremy said softly. I looked up in surprise. Was he about to express his undying apathy? I wasn’t sure I could take it. He dropped his hands from my face and stroked my fingers. “When you told me about that music teacher in high school, I just assumed . . .” He looked up at me and smiled gently.

“What?” I asked, honestly perplexed.

“Well, that it was more than, you know, emotional.” Oh, God. Not another retread of my romantic past. I didn’t mind the sobbing and lying, really; I just wasn’t sure I could remember all the details. “What do you mean?” I asked carefully.

“I thought, you know.” I looked at him expectantly. “That you had slept with him.”

Okay, now I was truly confused. “What does it matter whether or not I did?” I asked, hedging my bets and sounding a bit defensive.

“It’s okay,” he said, squeezing my hand. “I just wish I had known. I would have made it more, I don’t know, special or something. But I’m really honored to be your first.”

So there you have it:
I was so bad in bed that Jeremy thought I was a virgin.
What choice did I have, really?

 
Afterwards, I crept out of the bed and tried not to feel smug. (In the heat of passion, Jeremy had murmured that I was “a quick study.” Ha!)

The hall was mercifully empty. As I turned the key in my door, I said a silent prayer that Ethan wouldn’t be there. And he wasn’t. Some pimply kid with greasy black hair was there instead. “Huh?” he grunted, the hall light waking him as it hit his face. His exposed shoulders were white and bony and sprinkled with yet more acne. He lifted his head slightly and then let it fall back onto Tiffany’s pillow. She never woke up. More likely, she was faking sleep. She usually snored when she was really out.