Ten Girls to Watch (16 page)

What girl’s heart doesn’t just melt at a Roman historical reference? Answer, most girls’. But I swooned. The two of us, crossing over the proverbial point of no return? If we were in one of those subway ads for TheOne, it’d be the painting by Pierre-Auguste Cot,
The Storm,
in which the rococo lovers flee the coming storm, running down the Arcadian path, each holding a corner of the sail of cloth billowing above their heads to protect them from the rain.

“Done,” I said, setting my plate on the table. And with that, Elliot turned and led me through the crowd.

Back on the street, he said, “Which way?”

“Isn’t being some sort of nightlife guru part of your job description?” I asked.

“Oh, definitely not. I make the interns pick all my date spots.”

“For real?”

“No, but nightlife guru would be a vast exaggeration of my expertise. Though I’m decent at picking spots in Brooklyn.”

“You live in Brooklyn?” I said. “Me too!” Despite the fact that 4 million people lived in Brooklyn and that all on its own it would be the fourth-largest city in America, this little revelation seemed like undeniable evidence that Elliot and I were simpatico.

“Fort Greene,” he said.

“Carroll Gardens, which means you’ve got me beat in the coolness department, but I have you beat in mafia hangout Italian places.”

“So, let’s head back to our fair borough.”

“We could walk the bridge,” I said. “We’re not far.” And it was true. Just a few short blocks and we’d walked our way to City Hall plaza and the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge footpath. At which point I felt a serious twinge of dread. Why hadn’t I realized you don’t walk the Brooklyn Bridge with just anybody? It was romance incarnate. I’d practically asked him to go to the top of the Empire State Building with me. I might as well have just thrown in the suggestion that we bear children together. Everything had been going so well, and now I’d surely ruined it. But it was too late, we were already heading up the ramp, the beautiful lines of the bridge soaring above us, the silver lights of the buildings glimmering on the dark water. I glanced over, and he seemed unfazed, striding ahead as if the bridge were no big deal.

“So, Secret Agent Romance, what did you do before you were drafted into the service?” I asked, attempting to match his nonchalance.

“Well, there were the years of hard training, all the covert ops stuff . . . Actually, I started out after college doing management consulting. And then I decided I wanted to be a writer, which meant quitting the consulting job and doing a lot of odd projects. But then I realized the reality of abject poverty isn’t nearly as charming as the idea of it, and I went back to consulting, but freelance. You’re looking at the proud author of the Carbonated Beverages Report, the Vibrating Devices Report, and my favorite, the Cultured Milk Report. Did you know that the popularity of yogurt-based drinks is dramatically rising?”

“Wow. I had no idea. So, what other trends should I be looking out for?”

“Actually, I quit the consulting gig a while ago.” He put his hands casually into his pockets, like a shy guy who was about to start kicking a rock. “I kept writing while I was doing that stuff, and I got lucky and published a book, which freed me from the shackles of consumer marketing research at least insofar as it helped me land better freelance gigs.”

“You published a book?” I grabbed his arm. Genuinely impressed and excited, and also aware that it was an excuse to touch him. How had I failed to google this man?

We stopped and leaned against the bridge’s railing, gazing out toward the bay and Governors Island.

“You’re not familiar with my masterwork?” he said. “I assumed that with the literally
hundreds
of copies in circulation, surely you would have heard of me.”

“So tell me about the book.” I smiled. “I’ll get a copy tomorrow, I swear.”

“I don’t know. They’re selling for a steep $1.97 on Amazon these days.”

“So are you going to tell me about it or not?”

He paused for a second and looked farther out at the bay. “It’s all about divorce. More specifically, my divorce.” And then he flashed a big smile. “It’s a new genre I like to call the antiromantic comedy.”

It was all queued up for my easy response. I was supposed to gracefully and almost imperceptibly acknowledge the revelation, then proceed immediately with the banter. But I couldn’t do it. I’d never thought about dating someone divorced. At twenty-three, it just hadn’t come up yet. And after my parents, it was the thing I scared myself with late at night. In the yellow glow of the furnace in Helen’s glassblowing hut, during peak postgraduation Robert breakup season, I’d tossed around on my cot, thinking,
It could be worse. We could have gotten married. We could have had a whole bunch of kids, and then we could have ruined everyone’s lives by getting divorced. Breaking up now is a blessing!
All the while smudging tears into my pillow. Now, in my crooked apartment, there were nights when I’d stare at the line of light under the door that meant Sylvia and Rodney were still up and think,
Who needs to date? You’re better off alone. The highs aren’t worth the lows. You know what dating leads to? Marriage. And you know what marriage leads to? Divorce!
Like divorce was an STD, and abstinence was the only surefire protection.

Hearing the D word scared me on a fundamental level, but more immediately, it put Elliot in a clear category. And that category was: old. He’d had time for marriage and divorce already. Obviously, I knew Elliot was older than me, but the gap suddenly felt like a chasm. Were this to progress any further, I’d be playing the part of the girl who needs someone older and wiser, telling her what to do.

When I didn’t respond as expected, he seemed not to know how to proceed. He looked at me searchingly.

“Go on,” I finally said.

He took a breath. “Well, I grew up in a really religious family, married young. Me deciding I wanted to be a writer coincided with a lot of things, including my wife and I realizing we disagreed about some fundamentals. And to be fair, she hadn’t exactly signed up for life with an impoverished writer. So in the end, there I was, a twenty-six-year-old guy who went from working at a swanky firm and living in a beautiful apartment on the Upper West Side with his high school sweetheart–turned–wife to being a divorced guy living with strangers in a share in Bushwick and writing pharmaceutical copy and marketing reports. It was a lot, and a few years after the whole thing, I wrote a book about it.”

“I’m looking forward to reading it,” I said.

He leaned away from the railing, and I followed suit, the two of us continuing toward Brooklyn but now at no more than an amble.

“So, Dawn West, how did you become the Jane Smith googler for
Charm
?”

I laughed. “Go home and google Kelly Burns. You’ll find some masterworks to rival the Cultured Milk Report, I guarantee it.”

“And aside from these masterworks, you working on anything else?”

I wished I could say,
Yes, some great stories. Check them out in literary magazine X.
I wanted to impress Elliot. But the sad truth was I hadn’t really written any fiction in months. I thought about telling him about the profiles I’d been writing about past Ten Girls to Watch winners, but that didn’t feel like anything to talk about yet.

“Well, don’t you just love asking the hard questions,” I finally said. “Maybe I’m working on a few things here and there. Nothing too serious.”

He gave me an inquiring half smile that clearly said
go on,
but I didn’t. I felt suddenly, inexplicably, yet much too explicably, emotional. Like when you start crying for the smallest reason, like you open the fridge and see that you have no yogurt left, and your eyes suddenly puddle. Of course you know it’s not the yogurt, it’s hormones, or another breakup, or fatigue, or whatever. The rush of threatening teariness now felt similarly out of the blue, yet there was the obvious answer: Robert had been a great Dawn writing-career cheerleader—Robert had read and admired all my drafts. He’d cheered when I’d turned down law school and urged me to buckle down and write more. He’d known just what to say in a way my parents and other friends never had, how not to be pestering, and how to be positive without being pandering. And now Robert was gone.

Standing here on this bridge talking not with someone who knew and loved me, or who had once known and loved me, but with a stranger, more or less, and talking about writing, perhaps the area of my greatest need and want and aspiration, I couldn’t varnish over my vulnerability as easily as I could with other things. Besides which, everything I’d tried working on for the last year had sounded whiny or maudlin. Unemployed college graduates suffering from
utterly tragic
heartbreak kept creeping into every story I wrote—hardly golden material. The result was that I’d pretty much stopped writing. The tears pricking at my eyes made me want to cover myself back up. I wanted a shielding blanket. At the very least, I wanted to talk about something else.

Finally, I said, “I don’t know if you ever felt this way before you published your book, but I feel like there’s something terrible about being an aspiring writer. Like everyone smiles and says good for you but they’re secretly cringing and hoping you never ask them to read anything you write, since they’re assuming it’ll be awful dreck.”

“And are you worried they’re right?”

I wrapped myself safely again in smiling, protective chattiness. “Of course not,” I said. “My delusions of grandeur know no bounds. Every year when they announce the MacArthur ‘genius awards’ I read the press release very carefully to make sure that I don’t miss my name, just in case. I imagine the lectures tenth-grade English teachers across America will give when they assign my books to their students.”

“I see.” He smiled. “What if I admitted that I clipped all the positive reviews of my book and anonymously sent them to my tenth-grade English teacher, just to show him he was wrong, advertising wasn’t the best route for aspiring writers?”

It was official. I liked Elliot. Even if he was old and divorced. We both smiled and held each other’s eyes, long enough to make it clear that something was happening on this bridge.

We’d made it just past the high point, the lights of downtown Brooklyn and the clock atop the Jehovah’s Witnesses Watchtower twinkling before us (9:37 PM. 71°). And just then his phone rang, a ringtone that took me a second to place, but then, oh, place it I did.

“Is that ‘Sexual Healing’?” I asked as he rifled through his pocket.

“Noooo . . .” he said in exaggerated denial. “I can’t believe you’d even think that.” At last he found the phone, pulled it out, and silenced the ringing without looking at the caller ID. Clearly, this was a special ringtone that required no caller verification.

“That was so totally ‘When I get that feeling I need, uh, sexual healing.’ ”

He smiled, sheepishly but encouragingly.

“Was that a Boots booty call?” I said. “That had to be a Boots booty call.”

“You’ve been stalking me through my columns!” He clutched his hands to his chest in an impersonation of my flattered pose earlier in the evening.

I flicked his arm. “Absolutely not!”

And right then he leaned in and kissed me.

“Where are you from?” I said, a moment after our lips parted and he drew back to see my face.

“Like what planet?” he asked warily.

“No, like what state.”

“Nevada.”

“I knew it. You have rectilinear western state written all over you.” I leaned in and kissed him again.

Night lights have always made me feel dreamy. As a teenager I slept out on the trampoline and memorized the constellations using flash cards I got for Christmas. The first time I saw fireflies, which wasn’t till college, I made Robert pull the car over and sat by the side of the road, staring into the field where they glowed for what must have been a full thirty minutes. Standing there with Elliot, the lights of the bridge, the lights of the city, the lights of the cars streaming along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway—it was all so beautiful. I’d felt so exposed just a few minutes earlier, but now it was like the world was twinkling warmly at me. Elliot and I kissed and kissed and kissed until my chin was sore from his stubble, and then we finished the walk across the bridge—11:02, the Watchtower said. He walked me all the way to Carroll Gardens, slowly, stopping here and there, kissing me again and again, and when we finally got to my building he kissed me one more time on my doorstep.

I gave him my phone number. “Swear you won’t assign it ‘Sexual Healing.’ You swear?”

“Cross my heart, hope to die. You have any preferences?”

“I want that Cake song, the one about the girl with the short skirt and the long jacket who has fingernails that shine like justice and who’s touring the facility and picking up slack.”

“The na-na-na-na-na-na one?” He sang the tune.

“That’s the one.”

We kissed again and I climbed my crooked stairs and walked into my crooked apartment and didn’t notice the slant at all. I felt better than any TheOne ad. I was in a Chagall painting, and the yellow goat was playing the violin and I was floating, full of hope, with the village spread out behind me.

Patricia Collins,

Ohio State University, 1967

_________

THE FARMER’S DAUGHTER

Patricia’s good looks are as American as apple pie. The daughter of a dairy farmer, she won her town’s Harvest Queen title in high school. In college, she can’t shake her All-American smile but has added a new level of sophistication to her style with tailored coats and the latest above-the-knee looks. A history major, she’s considering the Peace Corps after graduation. “I know I want to make a difference.” We can’t think of a better ambassador.