Pug Hill (4 page)

I jump out of bed, reach behind the dresser and turn the heat on. A girl has to think about the future, and my future, as unappealing as it seems, does entail getting out of bed. Just not right now. Back in bed, I resituate my sheet, prop myself up on two of the three remaining pillows and reach over to the night table for the remote.

I want to see my commercial. If I can’t see the pugs today, at the very least, I would like to see my commercial. It’s been on a lot lately. I wonder if it’s been on so much lately because of some cosmic coincidence; because some force somewhere knew the speech was coming and knew that it might help things if I started seeing the commercial more and more often. Or maybe they’d just increased their marketing budget.

I saw it the other night, I think, right in the middle of
Law &
Order. My DVR is set to record
Law & Order!
I click over to list and there it is, right at the top:
Law & Order.
I hit select and play, and think, as I often do, that DVR, the cable company’s much easier-to-install version of TiVo (mostly I guess because someone comes and does it for you) is just fantastic. I listen to the first
duh-duh
of
Law & Order.
It is so similar in tone to the music from
Jaws;
I’m surprised I’ve never noticed this before. I hit fast forward until I see the first frame of my commercial. I hit play and turn the volume up a bit. I sit up a little straighter on my pillow.

There is the little sad egg on the TV screen. There is a rain cloud over his head, just like there always is. I watch the sad egg sigh as he propels himself forward across the screen. A voice-over comes on and soothingly explains, “You may feel sad.” The sad egg: he hears this, he nods.

“You may feel panicky,” the voice-over tells him. “You may feel isolated, overwhelmed, embarrassed in groups.” And the sad egg, he sighs again.

Then the voice-over tells the sad egg all about Zoloft; he tells it that Zoloft can help. The rain cloud disappears. I lean back, a bit more relaxed into my pillow. I watch as sunshine spreads out over the egg, I notice that the one previously out-of-place hair on its head has been smoothed (confidence and the lessening of anxiety apparently works well as a styling balm, too). And the sad egg smiles.

I hit rewind. I watch it again. I watch it two more times. Whenever the sad egg sighs, I do, too.

As uplifting an activity as staying under the covers for the remainder of the evening, watching the Zoloft commercial again and again, would be, at a little after seven, I reluctantly accept the fact that my night holds other forms of fun in store for me.

Slowly, I emerge from under the covers. I sit on the edge of my bed, holding on to it, not quite ready to commit to getting out of it. Though commit, I know I must. I walk the one and a half steps to my dresser and pull a T-shirt from the middle drawer, the in-the-apartment / gym-T-shirt drawer as opposed to the nice T-shirt drawer. Pulling it over my head, I look down and contemplate my pile of clothing on the floor.

I wonder if I should pick out a different outfit to wear to dinner at The Union Club. I pick up my pants off the floor, smooth them, and lay them on the bed. I retrieve the sweater and fold it. Even though said sweater and pants are perfectly fine, more than acceptable, I figure I should pick out a different outfit. The thing about The Union Club is that it’s the type of place that always makes you wish you’d picked out a different outfit, no matter what it is you happen to be wearing. Well, there are lots of things about The Union Club, that’s just one of them. I look at the green numbers on my alarm clock: 7:14 glows back at me in a way that I would not describe as helpful. I turn toward my closet, focusing first on my shoes. “Clearly,” I say to myself in my best snooty voice, “one does not wear Ugg boots to
The Union Club,”
and that makes me hate everything a little bit more.

Just before eight, I turn off Sixty-ninth Street and into the dark wood and marble entrance of The Union Club. The same man who’s always there, a man with gray hair and sad-looking eyes, gets up from this stool he has to sit in, in this little marble nook right off the foyer, and walks a few steps toward me, slowly.

“May I take your coat, ma‘am?” he asks and, as I do whenever I’m here, I hate that he calls me
ma’am.
I hate it not in the way that women in their thirties usually hate to be called
ma‘am,
because it makes them feel old, but because I know it’s in this man’s job description to call people
sir
and
ma’am.

Some Biffy guy coming up from the downstairs locker room passes by and says, “Hey, Clarence,” to the guy waiting to take my coat. He says back, “Hi, Mr. Ward.” And really, I think I so often miss the mark. I will waste all this time and energy feeling sorry that this man’s job is taking the coats of squash-playing Republicans (I don’t play squash nor am I a Republican, but I think you’d be safe in assuming that pretty much everyone else here does, and is). What I should really feel bad about, if I’m inclined to feel bad about something, is the fact that I’ve been here fifteen, twenty times and this man has always taken my coat, and I’ve never asked his name. That’s another thing about The Union Club: it always makes me feel bad.

I take off my coat and hand it to him, to Clarence. I say, “Thanks, Clarence,” as he takes it. Clarence is now looking at me strangely. I smile back at him and it takes me a minute to realize he’s waiting.

“Oh, right,” I say quickly, “I’m here to meet Evan Russell.” I say this not only because I want him to know that I myself do not belong here, that I myself am not a squash-playing Republican, but because Clarence won’t let me in unless I’m meeting a member.

“Mr. Russell is in the library,” he tells me and then, making it all so much worse, he kind of shuffles away with my coat. I thank him again and wonder if Evan is the type of club member who gives good tips. He told me once after he’d gotten a massage that he hadn’t tipped the masseuse because she’d stopped after fifty minutes. He hadn’t seemed remorseful at all, not in the least, when I told him that I thought most hour-long massages only last for fifty minutes.

I start up the grand sweeping staircase, a
Gone with the Wind-type
staircase if ever there was one. I wonder, as I climb up one of two graceful, sweeping sides of the staircase, what it is that actually bothers me: The Union Club itself, or the fact that I have been willingly dating for the past six months (which, especially when you’re thirty-one, isn’t a nothing amount of time) someone who belongs to The Union Club. I know that in the end we all must take a certain, if not a complete, measure of responsibility for our actions, and for our circumstances. And I endeavor to do that, I do. For right now, though, I blame Pamela.

I should explain. I need a minute anyway before I head into the library to meet Evan and Brandon and his fiancée.

My friend Pamela told me about a year ago, right after my then-boyfriend Rick had broken up with me (Rick, by the way, was not a great boyfriend, but the man could wear a Barbour jacket like nobody else), that she felt I should get out more.

“You need to embrace being single,” Pamela told me one day. “You need to get out more. You need to date!” she pronounced, captain of the cheerleading squad for single Manhattanites everywhere. Pamela, professionally, is a party planner, and pretty much I’ve always thought of her as a professional dater, too.

“Maybe you should go on JDate,” she suggested. “I do not want to go on JDate,” I told her, and by JDate, just so you know, in the context of the conversation, I swear, I meant JDate,
Match.com
,
Nerve.com
, eHarmony, the whole lot of them. I feel it is important to clarify that I was expressing my lack of interest in Internet dating altogether, not a lack of interest in Internet-dating Jewish people.

“You shun your Judaism,” she told me. “This has always bothered me about you.” Shunning my Judaism? I thought that was taking it a bit far.

“I think,” I told her, “that’s taking it a bit far.” “I don’t,” she said, getting her back rather up, taking it, I thought, a little ridiculously personally. “I think most people don’t even know you’re Jewish.”

Pamela had a point with that, but I thought that was more of a factor of my name than of any overt shunning on my part. As my nana has told every single person she has ever introduced me to, I’m the only Jewish girl she’s ever heard of with the name Hope, and the only Jewish girl in the history of the world, she’s sure of it, with the name
Hope McNeill.
Nana’s also quite fond of explaining that along with my shiksa name, I got the red hair, the fair skin, and the lack of bust from my father’s side of the family.

“I think that’s a really judgmental thing to say,” I said to Pamela, who can at times be very judgmental.

“Well, that’s what I think.” And rather inflexible, too. “Well, Pam-e-la,” I said, exhaling, stretching out her name as a way to point out my displeasure at her condemnation, “As you know, I wasn’t raised Jewish so I don’t really think it’s something you can just come right out and say I
shun,”
I pointed out.

So right, in addition to being Jewish and Catholic, I’m also kind of neither. After all the grandparents freaked out over the interfaith marriage, or maybe even before, my parents decided they’d raise me and my sister, Darcy, without religion. And I’m sure they thought this was a good idea. I’m sure they thought that this was for the best. It’s just that sometimes, I’m not so sure. I’m not sure if they thought that through, if they realized that being no religion doesn’t erase the fact that you are two. And I’m not sure, since it wasn’t something either of them ever experienced, that they realized what an identity crisis being two religions,
and
being no religion, could be. Or at least could be for me.

“Well, I don’t think that has anything to do with it,” she said.

“Pamela, it does.”

“Well, I think you shun your Judaism,” Pamela said again and I think she sneered at me, a little bit like I’d failed her, like I’d failed
all
my people.

I did, I imagine, what anyone would have done. I stopped returning Pamela’s phone calls for a while, and about four months later I signed up on JDate. It wasn’t just Pamela, it was a tribute to Nana, too. She used to love to tell me that she was pretty sure I’d never be happy if I didn’t stop dating the goyim. She just didn’t understand how I could date non-Jew after non-Jew in good conscience. The fact my father wasn’t Jewish never seemed to play into her logic. But even so, it had gotten to the point where I’d had to wonder, where I’d begun to believe that if the last ten years of dating were any indication, maybe she was on to something.

Evan was the first and only JDate I ever went on. I used to think that it was all so easy for us: how we e-mailed, and met, and then he made that really nice phone call to me, and I melted, and then pretty soon we were dating exclusively. I used to think that maybe, except for the whole being half-Catholic thing, I could be the poster child for JDate, because it all worked out so well for me. I don’t think that anymore.

At the top of the stairs, I turn left and walk into the library. It’s impossible, even if you hate having dinner at The Union Club, not to be taken in, even if it is ever so briefly, by the breathtaking woodwork, the four-hundred-foot-high ceiling, and the grand leaded glass windows that look out onto Park Avenue. I see Evan at the far end of the room, sitting on a couch with a blond couple, one of those couples who look, from across a very large room at least, like they are brother and sister. As I approach, I notice that the sister/fiancée is wearing a headband. I can hear Evan caw-caw-ing all the way from here. Evan has a caw-caw-sounding laugh, and apparently someone has just said something funny. Everyone stands as I reach them. The brother and sister (and I should stop calling them that; I should start right now calling them the affianced) are both ten feet tall.

“Hope, hi, I’m Courteney. Evan has told us so much about you,” says the sister, I mean the fiancée, I mean Courteney, as she reaches out her hand to me. Evan has not reached out to kiss me, to say hello, yet. He hangs back; it is because he wants to observe the interaction between Courteney and me. Evan is judgmental, too.

“Hi, Courteney,” I say with a (slightly fake) smile, “it’s so nice to meet you, too.” We shake hands. She is so tall, and thin, and long-limbed, and blond, and I don’t want to feel threatened by that, but I am. I try to push any comparative thoughts from my mind as Evan reaches over, places his hand on the small of my back, leans in and pecks me on the cheek.

“You remember Brandon, right?” he asks.

“Yes, hi, Brandon.”

“Hope, great to see you.”

“Shall we?” Evan asks.
Shall we?
And we head together to the elevators, up to the fourth floor to the dining room.