When the Messenger Is Hot (6 page)

¹⁵
In a dark railroad apartment (which the woman has never been especially fond of, she likes walls and doors [and does not very much like lofts for the same reason] and also it was on the Upper East Side,
way
Upper, a little scary, and probably at least subliminally confirming her earlier reservations) where he was by then living with the woman who would become his wife, who the woman met only that one time for about a minute and so therefore has no particular opinion about (although as a rule, she does have a habit of thinking the women who replace her are either genius supermodels [in which case it's easy for her to say, well of course, I can't compete with that] or genius scullery maids [in which case she can feel better about herself (and yet simultaneously worse, knowing that the man has chosen the genius scullery maid on the basis of something other than her appearance) although the truth is that this isn't an entirely relevant point, considering that the genius/supermodel/scullery maid quandary tends to pertain more to situations in which she's been rejected and in this case it
is
very relevant that she was not, and yet, her mind is inclined to go to the g/s/s.m. place anyway, just in case it enlightens her as to any possible means to self-improvement, some way to be more genius supermodel scullery maidlike, which anyone ought to know is probably the wrong way to go about self-improvement, not to mention that it's toward a questionable end anyway] which maybe gets into an issue she has that possibly has nothing to do with reality, or has to do with the choices she's making and not the supermodel-chooser, but if you think about it, either way she's lost). This visit falls into a period of some years before she quit drinking where she had stopped thinking about him as a romantic question mark, stopped thinking about him at all for a while, stopped thinking about much of anything.

¹⁶
Trying not to drink so much while also trying to forget that the English department at her school really sucked and that the guys she went to school with were a bunch of gold jewelry-wearing, nose-jobbed, perm-headed (seriously), Sergio Valente/whistle-around-their-neck, disco-dancing, coke-sniffing, put-their-dick-in-fucking-anything-that-paused fucking stupid greedy fucked-up motherfucking assholes

¹⁷
One card had a picture of a naked boy and girl and the girl is kind of innocently touching the boy, which at the time the woman thought was provocative and shocking and which is now pinned to her bulletin board.

¹⁸
There was that one time he called at her father's house in Iowa, only she hadn't given him the number there and it was kind of late, even though everyone in the house was still up (this was another reservation she maybe didn't so much forget but maybe she doesn't see it as so upsetting now as it seemed then, all she remembers thinking is,
It's ten-thirty! Ten-thirty!
but now that she's remembering it better it might have been more about him telling her he missed her and loved her loved every single hair on her head loved the way she laughed loved the way she looked at him
what are you talking about I don't look at you like anything
that freaked out her teenage self than it being ten-thirty, you know, when everyone was going to sit down and watch Carson anyway).

¹⁹
He called her the first few times after he moved to New Zealand (or, he returned her calls, the point is it was his dime, or maybe there are two points [the truth is it's entirely possible that the tables have totally turned, or that they've turned part of the way around, at least, given that after she rejected him in the first place, he eventually got over it, enough to marry and have kids and move out of the country anyway, and even though when they talk he says he loves her and it's like they're back in time except she's not totally freaked out and even though she thinks people don't/shouldn't say things like that if they're (supposedly) happily married, she would probably, if backed against a wall, admit that she's the one to keep in touch with him more than the other way around, even though he obviously likes it, and it may be that it is a lot easier for him, under the day-to-day circumstances of raising a family and all, in New Zealand, 8,187 miles from Chicago, to be aware of the severe unlikelihood of this particular tragic romance ever coming to fruition]) and then one time she called him and that one call cost $117, so now she either writes or actually what she does is she writes and then tears up the letters because even that seems really wrong, and then she writes letters that are just stiff and boring, like about the weather, and work or whatever, she just sewed curtains, which every time he calls he calls her on and says
why are you telling me about curtains
, and he's right, except when it gets onto paper what she's only been thinking or talking about seems more real and wrong than just saying things into the universe, to disperse, even if it's just him who ends up saying things like he always used to say when it wasn't against the Commandments, she feels like she's somehow more blameless if she lets him say the things, like she's some cerebral fucking female Bill Clinton, which is obviously a bunch of fucking bullshit, and so in the end, especially whenever it seems like there actually is a possibility of them ever seeing each other in person again, she freaks out and feels terrible and so just fantasizes about him but secretly though, she thinks about asking him, just to know, just to find out if he
would
, if he would ever just get on a plane and come to see her, and she thinks he would, if she really wanted him to, which is obviously bad, because either way, either way it goes, either she finds out that when they are finally face-to-face for a week or two or a day or whatever, finds out that he taps his fingers repeatedly like people do, or wears really bad shoes or Dockers or something, or that he listens to ‘NSync, or that she still, twenty years later, can't deal with a person who is sincerely, truly in love with her, or she can, she can deal, and she's an adulterer.

H
E IS TOO YOUNG.

You are Mrs. Robinson and Gloria Vanderbilt and Cher in the bagel-boy phase and that other singer who's about eighty and in a wheelchair and has a thirty-year-old “beau” is what she calls him. Martha Raye.

You are robbing the cradle.

You look young for your age, but so does he. He looks like he's in high school. You would look old in grad school.

You have many common interests.

You have several common interests.

You have at least one significant interest in common that provides many hours of conversation.

You have nothing in common.

Over dinner, he says smart things. He seems interested in your opinion about smart things. You think,
He's so smart. He's so smart and cute and nice. When he was born, you were a high school freshman. When he was born, you were a high school freshman
. You think this twice. You think,
When you were getting kissed for the first time, he was
crawling. You follow this thought process through a few more developmental stages. You wonder when his birthday is. If his birthday is soon, you might only be 13½ years older than him. If his birthday is not soon, you could be as much as 14¾ years older than him. You realize you have not measured age in quarter-years since you were eleven. You wonder if this thought means anything, if this thought possibly averages your mental age closer to his real age. You notice that he is still talking. You check back in to what he's saying about some philosopher you've never read and you think,
I don't even understand philosophy he's smarter than I am I am a terrible harsh judgmental ageist
.

He has roommates.

You have furniture. You put photos in frames. You have a TV schedule. You have seen
The Brady Bunch
in prime time.

He goes out. He is schedule-free. He is spontaneous. You take naps.

He talks to strangers.

You are from New York.

He has a tendency to be late.

You have a tendency to be there before it opens.

He thinks five hundred dollars is a lot of money.

You think five hundred dollars is a beaded handbag with a picture of a pug embroidered on it.

He says
Wow
a lot when you tell your stories. You wonder if this is because he doesn't have that many stories yet or because he's from the suburbs. You wonder why none of those stories seemed
Wow
to you at the time. You frankly wish for a little less
Wow
. He's likely to seek it out.

He worries about things.

You used to worry about things. You stopped worrying about things a few years ago when you finally figured out that both marvelous and tragic things happened whether or not you worried about them. When he tells you his worries you suppress an instinct to use phrases that begin with
When I was your age
or
Oh, honey
. When he tells you his parents are driving him crazy you suppress both those phrases as well as any information about how dealing with one's parents gets simultaneously better and worse as time goes by.

He kisses you sweetly, but you would believe it if you found out it was his first time.

You swear you will not sleep at his house.

You sleep at his house. With makeup on. You have not gone to bed with your makeup on since you quit drinking. You get up to leave early. You try not to be seen at that hour with your actual face, but he walks you to the door.

You have experience.

He has hope.

You have hope too.

But you hate a cheesy ending. So you amend that; You have hope too, but maybe not for the same things. You want the ending to be neither cheesy nor gloomy. You want the ending to be open. You want an open ending. You want an open, hopeful ending whether it involves you being with the young man, or not being with the young man. An ending where, at the very least, the young man walks away having discovered the
rejuvenating
revitalizing benefits of the afternoon nap. An ending where it's more likely that you and/or the young man learned something useful and/or possibly had a great love affair than an ending where no learning took place or that a learning of a bitter nature took place where one or both of you made note that there are no great love affairs and that even couples born on the same day of the same year who think they're in love are kidding themselves. You want an ending of hope tempered only in the slightest way by experience. You want an ending of cautious hope.

Better.

S
CHOOL IS TAKING a little longer than expected.

Most of her friends have graduated, so she spends a lot of weekends in New York. She doesn't want to be where she is. Her salary from the bank (she knows nothing about banking; she answers the phones) affords her a ticket on the Metroliner every other weekend. It doesn't occur to her to save it. Josie is not thinking that far ahead.

She has a
fucking buddy
(she doesn't much like that term but likes
lover
even less especially when there's not much love) from the senior class who sometimes comes over on weekends when she hangs around Philly, but although he's good at getting the job done well and quickly, lately he's gotten into a thing where he likes to watch her, and she doesn't much like putting on a show. She figures that she doesn't need anyone else in the room who isn't going to participate. She doesn't really care about watching him.

Josie has a friend in New York named Nadine. Josie and Nadine went to high school together. Nadine is an actress. Josie doesn't want to be an actress, but she wouldn't mind being Nadine. Nadine has excellent posture. Nadine's posture, Josie thinks, explains everything you need to know about Nadine. Her grammar is good and her diction is better. She does not leave syllables unpronounced. She does not use slang. Nadine has all kinds of men making her all kinds of offers at all times. On a New York weekend, Josie meets Nadine for a $6.98 all-you-can-drink champagne brunch at an East Side restaurant called the Racing Club. Nadine brings a pair of excess suitors with her, Hyman and Hayes. Those are their real names.

Hayes works for a bank, a Wall Street bank. Hayes knows something about banking. Hayes thinks he has something in common with Josie because of the bank thing, but he really doesn't. Hyman is a composer. Hyman lives in
Boston and New York
. Hyman and Josie probably do have a few things in common, but Hyman could kind of care less. Hyman thinks Josie is
beautiful
. It is apparent that Hayes thinks Josie is beautiful too, but Hayes has
nice guy
written all over his seersucker jacket. Hyman is
interesting
. Hyman wears horn-rimmed glasses.

Nadine's posture aside, the attention of Hyman and Hayes is mostly fixed on Josie. Hyman dominates the conversation some, asks Josie a lot of questions. Josie doesn't ask a lot of questions of anyone, but Hyman finds a way to mention that he went to Yale and got near-perfect SAT scores. It seems that in spite of an 800 on math, Hyman scored only a 780 on verbal, something he prides himself on, his verbal skills, and has, approximately nine years after having taken the SATs, never really gotten over it. Josie has been called an underachiever. Josie has never stopped to break down that word, or to look it up. She doesn't understand that it means she can do better. She accepts that it means she can't.

Hyman tells a story involving a menorah and begins to explain to Josie what a menorah is. Josie is not Jewish but takes this kind of personally.
For god's sake, Hyman
, Nadine says,
she's been to my house for Hanukkah. She's from New York
. Hayes, also from New York, says,
I'd like to know what a menorah is
, and everyone laughs except for Hayes. Hyman says,
Maybe you'd like to explain, Josie
, in a playfully challenging tone and Josie says to Hayes,
It's sort of a candelabra with nine candles that represent the creation. Sometimes seven
, Hyman says. Nadine says,
Oh Hyman stop it already
. Later in the conversation Hyman tries to explain a few more things Josie already knows. Hyman touches her arm and tries to feed her cake and makes double entendres about having a three-way with Nadine and Josie and throws a couple of blatant insults over to Hayes, mostly regarding his seersucker jacket and his full-size umbrella that keeps falling off the side of the table onto the floor. The umbrella insults have to do with it being sunny. Josie has six mimosas and hardly catches a buzz and Hayes politely asks for her number after lunch. Hyman pulls Josie over and whispers loudly,
Give him the wrong number
.