Love Monkey (20 page)

The idea of shooting the other man has a certain desperado flair, no?

“Tom,” she says, “I don't know what you're talking about.”

We wind up on University looking for a cab. We've had only one drink but I notice Bran seems to be walking awfully close to me. Leaning on me a little. I send a tentative arm slithering out on a reconnaissance mission to her waist. Normally when I do this I'm in for a nasty remark or two, like,
Tom, how many times do I have to tell you I'm not interested?
After three years of failure, one tends to scale back on operations a little.

But at the moment Bran seems to like having my arm around her. For the first time ever.

A few notable rejections by Bran:

1. The first time I met her. We were at a birthday party for some guy I'd never met at a grim little Bowery apartment filled with people I didn't know. Bran and I made each other laugh. I asked for her phone number. She gave it to me. Then she started dropping hints: hints that she wasn't interested. I called her anyway. We talked for forty-five minutes. I made her laugh some more and then I asked her out.
   
2. The first time I ever took her out: the premiere of the hot HBO show of the year, on a January night in John's Pizza in Times Square. We saw one of the tough guys from
   Goodfellas
   there and hung around him quoting lines from the movie while his eyes swept the room desperately for Security. Then I tried to heist a kiss off Bran as I was putting her in a cab. She turned her cheek: frostier than the January air.
   
3. The time we got dinner in the West Village in the summer a year ago and I bought a pot pipe. I had secured a little wacky weed a couple of weeks before, so I invited her to come over and partake. First we got drunk on red wine. We smoked a little, listened to eighties tunes, cuddled. When Spandau Ballet's “True” came on, I got her locked in a slow dance. Then I tried to kiss her. It was like trying to catch a butterfly. I gave up and we sat back down on the sofa and she lay down with her head in my lap listening to the eighties. I stroked her long black hair for a while until she went home.
   
4. The time her parents took us to see a Broadway play. Her father's first words to me were? “Tom? You're a genius.” Apparently Bran had been saving my e-mails to her and forwarding them to her dad. Her parents brought their own food to the show: a quart Ziploc of trail mix. It was pretty tasty stuff. Afterward I walked her home and tried to kiss her again as a freezing wind blew off the Hudson. “Don't,” she said.
   
5. That time she came to my birthday party. She and her best friend, Sharon, were the last ones left, and we all sat on the
   couch talking until four. When Sharon was in the bathroom, I whispered in Bran's ear, “Why don't you stay?” She laughed. And left.
   

I rub Bran's back a little as we walk. “You're tense.”

“See those yellow cars going by, Tom?” she says. “Can't we get one?”

All of the cabs are occupied. We wait on a corner. My arm is around her. This would be an ideal moment for her to put her head on my shoulder, but she can't, as that would require contortions. She is one inch taller than me.

“Maybe we're not such a bad fit,” I say.

“Tom,” she says. “Men are like a black dress. Any woman could go shopping with a guy and try on a hundred black dresses, and he may say, ‘They're all alike.' But to her there's just something missing from each one.”

Ouch. But I think of those lines in “You're a Big Girl Now”:
Oh I can change I swear. See what you can do. I can make it through. You can make it too.

In the cab I go for it anyway. She breaks off after about thirty seconds.

“Tom,” she says. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“I am trying,” I say evenly, “to sex you up.”

This earns me a) a laugh and b) another kiss. But there is a buzzing in the backseat.

“Is that my heart?” I say.

“Shut up, you idiot,” she says, and pushes me off. She digs her phone out of her backpack. She's thinking: News! Sources!

I'm going for my phone thinking, Obviously Julia sensed me making out with someone other than her and she's mighty peeved. Heh, heh.

But it's Bran's phone. She hits the talk button with Serious Young Journalist urgency.

“Yeah, Stuart,” she says, then covers the mouthpiece. “If you're going to have the same phone as me you have to at least change your ring tone,” she orders.

“So that means you want to see me again,” I say.

But by this point she's so annoyed that we don't touch for the rest of the cab ride. I don't change my ring tone.

I
'm at work editing gossip, crafting headlines, throwing away press releases. But mainly I'm avoiding Julia. Not calling Julia. Ignoring Julia. She filled in for Hyman Katz at the noon features meeting, which I spent courageously not looking at her. She was not looking at me. But I was trying very hard not to look at her, whereas she did not seem to be trying very hard not to look at me. I know this because I was looking at her the whole time. Has she forgotten me? This ignoring game, it isn't much fun.

The phone. It's Bran. Do I want to come out for margaritas and bingo tonight?

“No,” I say. I want to go home and stew in my own fetid bachelorhood. Seems like a nice night for it.

“Come on,” Bran is telling me. “I'm bringing Katie.”

Katie.
That cute blonde who told my fortune at my birthday party.

“My schedule,” I say, “just cleared itself.”

So we head to the West Village in the rain. Bran looks pretty good in a tight blue tank top and a clingy black skirt. I let her get the cab for once.

“I always pay for everything,” she whines. Girl arithmetic. Like when the check comes and it's $41 plus tax and tip and the girl, saying, “I want to pay my share,” lays out a ten and three singles.

“I read your
New Yorker
piece,” I say.

“Thank you
so much,
” she says. “I couldn't have done it if you had been stamping your feet and saying, ‘Let's go, blow this off.' But you were so patient with me, you helped me sift through everything, and then you were supportive of what I wrote even though I'd never written anything before.”

You get girl points for the strangest things. Basically, I a) stood there like a potted plant on the KK-Killuh night; b) read her first draft of the story. It was good. I told her so.

“It was all you,” I say.

“And thanks for giving me the name of your friend at
The New Yorker
,” she says.

“It was nothing,” I say.

“I really gained a lot of respect for you that night,” she says.

“I lost all respect for you when you didn't recognize ‘Tangled up in Blue,' ” I say. This is not meant to be taken seriously. But. Here. It. Comes.

“Why would you say that? That's such a mean thing to say. I had nothing but nice things to say to you, and then you go and attack me again. You're a prick.”

“What'd I say?” I say, incredulous. I spend a lot of my time with Bran in a state of incredulity. Nobody, with the possible exception of the collections department of the Columbia House Music Service, is so hostile to me.

“Why do you always have to be so mean?” she says.

“I wasn't mean!” I say. Was I? Come on, guys, you be the jury. Mean: Hitler, Nixon, Martha Stewart. Not mean: Fred Rogers, Oprah, me.

Katie is waiting in a cocoon of cuteness at the bar. She waves us over. She seems glad to see me.

“I didn't know you were coming!” she says.

So I get the exclamation point.

We're eyeing the pitchers, and I'm thinking expensive tequila.

“Patrón?” I say.

“I'm a student,” she pleads. “I'm about to go to law school, I don't have that much money. Let's get the cheap tequila.”

“You're a
law
student,” I tell her. “It's not like you're going to study Renaissance Poetry. You can pay.”

Katie and Bran both look utterly shocked.

“See,” Bran says. “He's always being mean.”

Gaffe!
Delayed arrival.

“You think I'm mean?” I ask Katie.

“You're very, direct,” she says.

We get a table, and I slide into the booth first. Katie slides in next to me. Bran is across. Well now. Wouldn't it be nice if this were really happening? Wait, it is happening. Pay attention. Make it keep happening.

We're playing bingo and working on our fourth margaritas. Katie
drinks
. And Katie is small. This is good news. Both of us are losing when some tool yells, “Bingo!” and skips to the front of the room.

I look at Katie. She looks pretty good to me.

Bran is talking to some chick she seems to know at the next table.

“You have big cheeks,” I say to Katie.

She is mortified. “Why would you say such a
hateful
thing?” she says. “I
know
I have big cheeks. They used to call me Dizzy Gillespie in school.”

“Is he being mean?” Bran says, turning around.

“He's mean,” Katie agrees. But she's smiling. She leans over to me while Bran goes back to talking to the girl at the next table. “Tequila shots at the bar?” she says.

I wonder if I have gone so far into the
Gaffe!
zone that I have gone through a warp in the cosmic fabric and come out the other side: instead of being a doofus who can't make his mouth say socially acceptable words, I am, to Katie, the galactic opposite: The Total Bastard. The Guy Who Doesn't Give a Rat's Ass. The Man Who Calls 'Em as He Sees 'Em. Have I stumbled through a trapdoor and found myself in Shooterville?

We do a shot at the bar.

“I heard you called her Ellen DeGeneres,” Katie says.

“Not in the lesbian sense,” I say. “Merely the looking-like-a-lesbian sense.”

“She's a little touchy about that.”

“She asked what I thought,” I say. Why do girls do this—Are my thighs getting fat? Do you find that underwear model pretty?—when they know that they will either get an honest answer or a lie that proves they have turned us into cringing castrati?

“There's this woman who keeps hitting on her,” Katie says. “That's why. But after you told her she looked like Ellen, she went out and bought some skirts.”

Suddenly Bran is behind us.

“Okay, you guys,” she says. “Time to jet.”

We go to the Art Bar to hook up with a friend of Katie. The Art Bar sounds like some kind of Eurosnob hangout but it's actually cool: if you go in the back room, you can find some old couches built before the primary functions of a couch were to be sleek and stylish and uncomfortable. These are plain old regular couches with all the styling touches of the ones I remember from Rockville: shabby cushions and threadbare arms.

My meanness trial is continuing.

“Why do you have to be so mean all the time?” Bran says, and begins itemizing my faults. What is she saying? I have no idea. I have to admit, I don't really listen well at times like these.

“Uh-huh,” I say, picking up her right hand absently and rubbing it with both of mine. I'm watching Katie chat with her friend Ginny across the table. Ginny is tagged. A sparkly look-at-me-I-got-a-rich-guy ring. She is married, and has taken the corresponding 50 percent IQ cut. Everything she says is about “Josh.” Where Josh just took her on vacation. Why Josh and she are moving to Japan. What Josh thinks of her piano playing. Where Josh is, right now, at this very second. It turns out this woman is fluent in Japanese, is a concert-level pianist, and is training for the marathon. Yet she can spend ten minutes discussing the curtains she bought—today! this very day!—at Bloomingdale's.

“Are you listening to me or are you watching Katie?” Bran says.

“Whose hand am I holding?” I say.

Katie shoots me a ferrety glance.

Ginny and Katie talk about how Katie, when she first came to New York from Iowa, stayed with Ginny, who also grew up in Iowa.

“Why'd you come to New York?” I say.

“It seemed so exciting,” Katie says.

“It can't compete with Des Moines, can it?”

“You,” says Katie, “are such a bastard.”

But her eyes are flashing. Not with boredom.

I sink back into my seat and drift out of the conversation, wondering if I can get away with it: Can I be a Total Bastard? Will anyone buy it? From a guy who has reached only the Minimum Acceptable Height for an Adult Male?

Bran goes to the bathroom and I get up and sit next to Katie. She takes out her cell phone. She's a little sloshed.

“Give me your phone number,” she says, and she adds it to her
database. She wants my home number and my work number too. I enter hers into my phone. Now I've got her on call. Didn't even have to be the first one to ask. Total Bastard mode: you should try it some time. It's 99 percent humiliation free, since you never give any hint you care about anyone.

“Bang me on my cell,” I say, as Bran comes back. “Anytime.”

Now Bran is giving me a glance. “I'm gonna go,” I say. Be the first to leave. Cool.

“I'm going too,” Bran says, and all the girls do their hugging-and-kissing-good-bye routine.

But I don't. I hang back. When I kiss Katie, I don't want it to be a cheek job. And Total Bastards don't do hugs. All of those troublesome greeting-and-departure rituals are eliminated! I just lead Bran out the door and into a cab.

“You
like
her,” Bran says in the cab. We're approaching her block.

“She's likable,” I say.

“You're going to ask her out,” she says.

“You never know,” I say.

“It's all fun and games until someone loses a guy,” she says miserably. And before she gets out, she grabs me and kisses me viciously on the mouth.