The Way Life Should Be (3 page)

“Everything’s coming together just fine,” I say in my most competent voice.

The big secret of event planning is that hundreds of things always go wrong. The planner’s skill comes in knowing how to minimize the problems. After you’ve organized half a dozen events, you realize that you don’t have to invent the form each time; some things universally work, and some don’t. You must send invitations by mail. Important people must feel pampered. Nobody eats crudités unless the vegetables are fancy. Speeches should never last more than seven minutes.

What truly matters can be counted on one hand: the invitation, the food, the entertainment, the drinks, and the little details people have time to dwell on—gift bags, table centerpieces. Having a theme that’s carried out from the invitation through the party favors also impresses people. You learn to focus 90 percent of your attention on these things.

“You know, Angela, this event is
very
important to the identity of the museum. It’s imperative that we get it absolutely right.” Mary taps her pen against her teeth. “I’m thinking of sending you to Boston to meet with several of our key benefactors, the
Charles Byemores and the Langley Biddle-Smyths. I think it’s not a bad idea to explain our vision for the gala, get their input. We want to make them happy.”

Tapping her teeth again, she turns and heads for the door. Then she turns back and says, “When I say ‘send’ I mean we’ll do what we can—the train, at least. Do you have an old college roommate up there you can stay with?”

I do not, in fact, have an old college roommate up there I can stay with. But this is the first time Mary Quince has proposed that I travel for work, and I’m as thrilled as a monkey would be about escaping from the zoo. “I can rustle somebody up,” I say, and Mary says, “Good. Then let’s make this happen. I will call the Byemores and the Biddle-Smyths to set up a meeting.” She beams at me. “I am so pleased—
really,
Angela—at how this is working out. This event could be a career-maker for you, you know.”

To call or not to call?
While I’m ostensibly working—okay, I am working; my job is not so difficult that I can’t obsess about my personal life at the same time—I am weighing pros and cons in my head.

CONS

1. Calling looks overeager, even desperate.
   
2. He might be a dud, a freak, or worse.
   
3. The whole point of this Internet thing is to get to know someone slowly and safely.
   
4. I’ve been Internet dating for less than a day! Maybe somebody better is out there. Isn’t it too early to focus on one random connection when there are so many other possibilities?
   

PROS

1. What if this is The One? It would be a story to tell our grandchildren: “There I was, in New York City, and there your grandfather was, on the coast of Maine—and now here we are, happy as honeymooners forty years later, running an international sailing school from our cozy waterfront cottage….”
   
2. What do I have to lose?
   

I pick up the phone. Clear my throat. Take a breath. Put down the phone. Pick it up again and punch in the numbers.

“Hello?” a male voice answers.

“Hello?” I say idiotically, as if I’m not the one calling.

“New York City?” His voice, a little gravelly with a slight Boston accent, sounds far away, and he seems to be shouting. I realize that he’s probably outside somewhere, and the area code came up on his cell phone window.

“Yes. This is, um—Angela. New York—” I’m about to say “Girl,” but it feels too dumb to say, so I just leave it hanging.

After a moment he says, “How are ya, Angela.” It’s not a question, simply a greeting.

“I’m fine,” I answer anyway. I feel like I’m in a foreign country, trying out an unfamiliar language.

How are you?

Fine, thank you. And you?

Fine, thank you.

Can you tell me where I can find…a toilet?…a nice restaurant?…some cheap souvenirs?

I hear a flapping sound. Wind? “Are you on the water?” I ask.

“Just about,” he shouts. “I’m on the dock. It’s a beautiful day for sailing, Angela. Guess you can hear the sail.”

“Yep,” I say.

“So you called,” he says.

“Are you surprised?”

“Nah, not really,” he says. “But I wouldn’t have been surprised if you hadn’t, either.”

“That’s—philosophical of you.”

He laughs. “You can’t waste your time worrying about shit, right?
Que sera,
as they say.”

This is not, it must be said, a viewpoint I share. Which isn’t to say that I don’t find it immensely appealing. “Well,
I’m
surprised I called,” I say. “It’s very unlike me.”

“Oh, really. How’s that?”

“I’m not usually so—bold.”

“Well, I like it. It’s working for you.”

In the background I hear the caw-caw of a seagull. The sail is flapping and the wind is blowing and I’m sitting here in my basement office staring at an in-box filled with 114 e-mails, most of which are subject-headed things like “Mail Merge Lists” and “Head Count for Gala.”

“Look, I’m getting ready to head out,” he says. “Though I’d rather keep talking to you.” That husky voice. Those seagulls. “Can I call you later this afternoon?”

Oh, jeez, I don’t know. “Okay,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant.

“I’ve got your number,” he says, and I’m thinking, yes, indeed you do.

The rest of the day is a blur.
E-mail, e-mail, e-mail, phone call, phone call, down the hall (within earshot of my phone) to talk to Audrey Gruber, who is coordinating the lists. Lunch at my
desk. Finally, sometime around four o’clock, the phone rings and it’s him. The next thing I know it’s five fifteen and people are starting to leave and I’m still talking to MaineCatch—aka Richard Saunders—about everything and nothing. The members of my family have become characters in a sitcom—the old-country Italian grandmother, the accountant father and his cat-loving wife, the free-spirited mother, the estranged yuppie brother. In this TV-Land universe I’m a spunky career gal who had a revelation one day that she was working too darn hard and maybe it was time to wake up and smell the sea salt.

Of course, it turns out that Rich isn’t exactly a country boy. From our conversation I glean details, like silverfish caught in a net: He grew up in a wealthy Portland family and went to boarding school before attending a small, leafy New England college. After a couple of restless years, mostly spent sailing instead of studying, he dropped out and invested some family money in the sailing school he owns in Spruce Harbor. It’s been ten years now, and the business is doing fine, but something, he confides, is missing.

The more he talks, the more convinced I become that that something is me. I’m keeping my cool, keeping the conversation going, but my mind, as usual, is racing ahead. The wind is blowing, the air smells of pine and the sea, and Rich and I are living in that white cottage with the wood-shingled roof, apricot roses blooming on a trellis by the front door. A fire glows in the fireplace, a dog drinks water in the back hall. I stand in the kitchen baking bread, and the cottage is warm and yeasty.

Rationally I know that these tepid Hallmark images have nothing to do with reality. But it’s too late for reason. In my heart I’m halfway to Maine.

CHAPTER 3

I try to keep my mind on my job, but it’s a struggle. Mimes and jesters
are no match for a husky-voiced sailor who might just be the man of my dreams.

Dating—well, okay, online flirting—gives your life a whole new perspective. Describing myself and my habits, I’m struck by how cramped and rote my existence has become. I work underground and live in a box. My social life has dwindled as one friend after another has paired up, married, gotten pregnant, and moved out of town. I’ve been to so many wedding and baby showers in the past few years that I buy vases and crib quilts in bulk. I love to cook, but my airplane-galley kitchen has room for only one, so if I invite people over for dinner they have to huddle in the hall. Lately I’ve taken to storing sweaters in my oven.

Communication between us is as straightforward as a children’s book. We talk about sailing and the weather and what the weather was like out sailing. We talk about our favorite childhood memories (his—going to Disneyland; mine—wearing down my feminist mother enough to get a Malibu Barbie town house for Christmas when I was seven). It doesn’t matter what we talk about. I just like to hear him talk. And I like feeling wanted. I lie on my bed chatting on the phone as if I’m in high school. It’s
all
very high school—the love notes (now e-mail), the
heart-melting sound of his voice when I pick up the phone, the breathtaking high of a crush.

He doesn’t hide his feelings. “I’m lonely,” he says.

He is refreshingly direct. “You’re too far away. I want to see you.”

I want to see you.

He tells me about the slap of salty air on his face at six in the morning, the sharp waves and slick surface of the boat. He describes being out in deep water when the only boats in sight belong to hardy lobstermen, or when there aren’t any other boats. He talks about building a fire at home at night, collapsing in a big chair, exhausted and sunburned, watching the flames.

The stories he tells reinforce all my fantasies. Little cottage, rocky coast, solitude. I want to fall through the phone and into his arms.

He laughs about our long-distance romance. “What the hell are we doing?” he says. “I haven’t dated anybody south of Augusta in ten years.” Augusta, I find out through MapQuest, is way up there.

When he learns I was an English major in college, he starts sending me haikus:

She lives in New York

I’m on an island in Maine

Who? What? Where? When? Why?

Okay, not exactly lyrical, but who needs a tortured poet when you can have a man of the sea?

As it happens, the when and where present themselves sooner than I expect. Mary Quince sets a date for me to meet in Boston with the Byemores and the Biddle-Smyths, and even offers to put me up in a hotel—not a hotel I’ve ever heard of,
mind you, but surely a step above my nonexistent college roommate’s couch. When I happen to mention to Rich—that is, plant the idea—that I’m coming to Boston, he muses that maybe he’ll journey down the coast to meet me.

Sailing to Boston

Angela will check me out

I’ll check her out, too!

Early on a Thursday morning, I board the train from Penn Station to South Station. My stomach is fluttery; I’ve barely eaten for three days. Once again, in my head I am narrating my experience as if to grandchildren: “And then Grandma got on the train for the ride to meet your grandpa for the first time. She was nervous, but also excited. She went to the hotel and sat in the lobby reading
Metropolitan Home.
Then she looked up, and through the revolving door…”

There he is. He has an athlete’s confident movements, and he is—cute. Really cute. He’s wearing faded Levi’s, a white T-shirt, and a heather green wool V-neck sweater, with a small duffel bag slung over one shoulder. When he sees me he grins boyishly and saunters over, leaning down to kiss me on the cheek.

“How are ya, Angela.”

“I can’t believe you came,” I say.

“I can’t either,” he says. He swings the duffel off his shoulder and onto the floor. The sheer animal fact of him shocks me; he is a cartoon character come to life, Pinocchio transformed into a real boy. Part of me truly believed that he existed only in cyberspace, in the disembodied blink of a cursor.

Now that I have a chance to look at him, I try to put the pieces together. How to reconcile the gravelly voice, the goofy
haikus, the Buddha-like serenity of his screen persona with this lanky, slightly preppy guy in front of me?

“So, are you checking me out?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say.

He sits down beside me on the couch and smiles. His front-right tooth is slightly chipped, and he has fine lines around his eyes, the kind I imagine you get from squinting into the sun out on the open sea. “What do you think?”

He doesn’t need confirmation of his looks; he must be plenty aware. So I say, “What do
you
think?”

He looks me up and down—flirtatiously, easily, as if just by looking he’s telling me what he thinks. “You’re prettier than your picture. A lot.”

“Thanks.” I didn’t realize my picture was
that
bad, but good to know.

“I like your hair.” He reaches out and lifts a strand. “It’s so shiny and dark.”

What a strange thing to say! But kind of endearing. “Thanks,” I say. “I like yours, too.”

“Thanks.” He laughs. Chuckles, actually. “You don’t really like my hair.”

“No, I do. It’s all—blond and windswept.”

“That’s true. At least I have some, right?”

“Yeah.” Then I hasten to add, “Not that I have anything against bald guys.”

He laughs again. “Well, that’s good. Not that I care, really. Not being bald.”

“Well, how do you feel about bald women?”

“You’re telling me that’s a wig?”

“No. I just mean—in general.”

“Oh. Well, I guess when I see a bald woman, I think she’s probably sick.”

“Oh. Yeah,” I say.

Shaking his head, he says, “This is a weird conversation.”

“I know. How did we start talking about bald women?”

“I don’t know.”

“Should we start again?”

“Yeah. Let’s start again.”

Now it’s a little awkward. I’m not worried, though; I’m so high on adrenaline and nerves that I’m hovering on a cloud. We’re sitting side by side and in the silence I’m wondering if there’s anything stuck between my front teeth. It’s a warm fall day—warmer than I expected—and I wonder if he can tell that I’m sweating. I also wonder if he thinks he’s staying with me here, in this hotel, or what. Then I remember that he sailed here—sailed here!—and it occurs to me that a sailboat that’s big enough to make the trip from halfway up the state of Maine must have a sleeping cabin.