Читать книгу Starting From Square Two - Caren Lissner, Caren Lissner - Страница 6

“It can’t be that bad,” Gert said.

The D train was careening through the subway tunnel, passing through areas of light, then darkness. Gert was squeezed on one of the long gray seats next to her former college roommate, Hallie. Looming high above them was Hallie’s high school friend, Erika, who was tall and always wore huge black boots.

“It is that bad,” Hallie said to Gert. “You have no idea what it’s like out there.”

Gert looked up at Erika, who was strap-hanging. They weren’t really straps, though. They were metal triangular things. When was the last time they were straps, Gert wondered.

She’s triangle-hanging, Gert thought to herself.

She’d have said it aloud if Marc were there. He liked corny observations.

Then she felt bad. It was impossible not to think of him in relation to everything. She’d done it for eight years of her life.

“Let me ask you a question,” Hallie said to her.

“Fine,” Gert said. “Ask me a question.”

“You were married to Marc for five years, and you’d dated him for three before that. In those eight years, did you come across even one other man who, had you been single, you would have considered dating?”

Gert shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking like that,” she said, “because I was with Marc.”

“But,” Hallie said, “during that time, did you ever just happen to meet a man who was remotely attractive, normal, in his twenties and not taken?”

“No,” Gert persisted. “I wasn’t trying.”

“What about in the course of your regular business?”

“I wouldn’t have noticed.”

Gert wondered if, in some small way, Hallie and Erika occasionally felt a secret bit of satisfaction that the accident had happened, so they could finally prove to her that the dating scene was just as bad as they’d always said.

But true friends could never wish that on her, could they?

Gert knew they were only trying to help by dragging her out. Everyone was always trying to “help”—like the people who told her that eventually, it would hurt less, or that she was strong and she’d move on. But they had no idea how many times per day she heard expressions, songs or references that reminded her of him. Every time something bad happened to her, or she felt lonely, she thought of him on impulse, as she’d done for most of her adult life—and was reminded again that he was gone. They’d met sophomore year of college, so that was eight years or 2,920 days of memories she had to suppress in order to even feel remotely okay. Didn’t people understand that?

The only people who did understand were the women in her support group on Long Island, where she went every week. Among her circle of friends, there was not exactly a surfeit of twenty-nine-year-olds who had lost their husbands. Most of them had not even been married yet. And Gert, who had counted herself so lucky for so long, and who had been far outside the realm of her lonely single friends, was now—because of one horrible day—among their ranks.

It had only been a year and a half since the car accident. That was barely enough time to even accept what had happened. It was also barely enough time to stop having those brief moments when she felt as secure as she used to be, then, in a flash, remembered that everything was all wrong.

But Gert was finally giving in to one of Hallie and Erika’s many exhortations to go out. It certainly would be healthier than sitting home all night. Still, her heart wouldn’t be in it and her mind wouldn’t be on it. She’d just be going through the motions—like she did with so many things these days.

Gert looked at Hallie and Erika. Both of them had complained about dating since college graduation. They always made it sound like war, packed with battle plans and tricks and conspiracies. Gert had been skeptical in the past. Wasn’t dating supposed to be fun?

In college, it had been. It went like this: A guy in your class or dorm would strike up a conversation, he’d invite you for coffee or a movie, you’d flirt relentlessly in the study lounges, and eventually the conversations would turn into heated dormroom aerobics. Or in the case of Marc, the two of you were at the bookstore, and he saw you buying a used copy of Calculus for $44.99 instead of $60 new, and he said, “Where’d you get that?” and you talked about how you almost placed out of the class entirely and how you both thought that math was the worst and best subject in the world. It was the worst because it was boring, but it was the best because it always provided finite answers—no room for guesswork or interpretation. You came to realize you both liked things you could count on. You were in the same lecture, so you could study together. You got an A-minus and the first intense relationship of your life.

Gert’s other dates, before Marc, hadn’t been bad, either. There was cynical Andy, who was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee and PEZ dispensers. Paul, the head of the political union, called the profs and deans by their first names when he saw them on campus. He went to their office hours even if he wasn’t in their classes, because other students didn’t take advantage of them and he figured it was a good time to schmooze. But neither of them was as driven or interesting as Marc, a guitar-playing business student who had three red-haired Irish brothers, none of whom looked a thing like him.

Gert’s closeness with Marc was what made her realize that someday, she might need to be with someone again. The idea of going through the rest of her life without a person beside her to help her through it was torture. But she couldn’t imagine dating right now. No one could possibly have Marc’s ideas and expressions, those idiosyncrasies and small kindnesses that made her smile. There couldn’t possibly be anyone like him.

Gert looked at Hallie, dressed so scantily in the middle of February. Hallie’s dating troubles always had seemed self-imposed. When Hallie had told Gert about the guy who’d said, “I actually drive better after a few beers,” Gert couldn’t believe Hallie hadn’t walked out on him right then. But Hallie had told Gert she wanted to stick with him because he was “sensitive.” Next, Hallie met a guy who didn’t drive drunk, but had big ears. So Hallie stopped dating him. Gert worried that Hallie was focusing on all the wrong things.

One day Gert actually told Hallie that her priorities seemed skewed.

“You meet a nice guy and his forehead’s too high,” Gert said. “You meet a jerky guy and you date him anyway and end up bitter when he doesn’t morph into a poet. You hate bars but you go to the same ones five days a week. Why don’t you just relax a little and have fun?”

Hallie got angry. She said Gert had no idea at all what it was like out there.

That’s the phrase Hallie had used: Out There.

Like it was a jungle.

The subway bumped a bit, and everyone grabbed their belongings to prevent liftoff.

“Well?” Hallie said.

“Well, what?” Gert asked.

“Name one decent guy you’ve met since college who’s single.”

Gert sighed. “Marc’s brother Michael,” she said. “He’s normal. He’s nice. So there is one who exists.”

“And you’d date him?” asked tall, ponytailed Erika, from somewhere near the ceiling.

“I didn’t say I would date him,” Gert said. “He’s Marc’s brother. I’m just saying he exists.”

“Isn’t he the short one with the mutton chops?” Erika asked.

“No. Eddie’s married.”

“Is he the one who wears stained overalls and lives in Maine and breeds Sea Monkeys?”

“Patrick doesn’t breed Sea Monkeys; he’s a crabber. And he’s married too.”

“Oh. So you mean the third brother, the eighteen-year-old.”

“Michael’s twenty-two now,” Gert said.

Hallie and Erika looked at each other.

“So you would date a twenty-two-year-old?” Hallie asked.

“I didn’t say I would….”

“See!” Hallie said, her voice surging with victory. “That is exactly my point, and something you will learn soon enough. There are no single guys who don’t have at least one major flaw, and a flaw, I might add, that would stop you from dating them—even if everything else was great. Why? Simple math. Women are interesting and honest and sensitive. Most men are not. There is only one normal, decent single guy for every five women in this city. This is what’s known as the Great Male Statistic. Girls don’t want to face the GMS. They want to believe there’s someone for everyone. The truth hurts. You only start coming to terms with the GMS when you’re twenty-six or twenty-seven. It actually killed Sylvia Plath. She finally found this guy in grad school who she thought was so great, and she married him, and he cheated on her.”

“Didn’t Sylvia Plath have a history of mental illness since she was an undergrad?” Gert asked.

“Incidental. She didn’t kill herself until Ted Hughes cheated. The truth is, the really good men are snapped up quickly. You get into your mid-twenties and it’s five to one. Don’t give me that look. You don’t believe it because you don’t want to.”

Gert was ready to go home. “Then why are we doing this?”

“Because looking for the one in five,” Hallie said, “is still better than being alone.”

The bar was two blocks from the mouth of the subway. When the women emerged on Bleecker Street, a frigid wind swept through, grazing their bare arms. Hallie wrapped her hands around herself as she walked, but insisted to Gert that she wasn’t cold.

“The only way to get into a lasting relationship is to find one before you finish college,” said Erika, her dirty-blond ponytail bouncing behind her.

“Absolutely,” Hallie said. “Look when both of you met your boyfriends. Sophomore year. And—poof—you had taken them off the market forever. Denied to older women like us.”

Erika said, “I gave up Ben at twenty-four, and someone else got him.”

“And how long did that take? Five months?”

“Not even,” Erika said, looking down at her boots. “Three.”

Gert had heard many times about how Erika had met and lost her college boyfriend. Erika and Ben had started dating around the same time as Gert had started dating Marc—sophomore year. But Erika broke up with Ben five years later. She was pretty, a lot of guys liked her, and her friends and family kept telling her not to settle down so quickly. She wasn’t sure she was ready to make a lifelong commitment, and she didn’t feel hopelessly, madly in love with Ben, the way she’d always dreamed she would be.

So she told Ben she needed a few months off. Better to figure out what she wanted now, she said, than when it was too late. She dated a few guys, realized Ben was much better than everyone she’d met, and called him up one night.

It was too late.

They passed a guy with a huge backpack who was slumped against a building, drunk. A policeman was kneeling down to talk to him. The thick smell of beer-soaked sidewalks and vomit invaded Gert’s nostrils. She remembered it from frat parties in college. It was a sad smell—the smell of being among two hundred happy people but just wanting to be with the one who made you happy. It was a memory she could do without.

“At least you got to be Ben’s first love,” Hallie said to Erika. “I’ll never get to be anyone’s.”

“I hate her,” Erika said.

“Don’t start.”

“I’m going to read her Web log tonight and put crap on her message board.”

“Again?”

Gert had heard all about Ben’s wife, Challa, and her Web log. Challa wrote every few days in her “blog” about her life, for all the world to see. It told of romantic trips, of art classes the couple took together, of how wonderful Ben was with the baby, and of Ben’s dream to renovate an old farmhouse in New England where they could raise their family. Erika told Gert and Hallie about the night Ben had sat on her dormroom bed in college and first told her of this dream.

“That should be me,” Erika always said to them. “She’s an imposter, living my life. And here I am, sitting in my pajamas in front of the computer, reading about it.”

Hallie, Erika and Gert had problems with the first three bars they passed. Blastoff was playing eighties music. (“Eighties music was never good the first time,” Erika sniped. “Just because today’s music is so bad, suddenly we think ‘Der Kommissar’ is good?”) Gert passed on the biker bar—too intimidating. Hallie thought there were too many women in Atlantis.

“They should open a really hip bar that refuses to admit women if they’re underdressed,” Hallie said.

“Aren’t you part of the problem?” Gert asked.

“I can’t take a stand on it alone,” Hallie said. “The stakes are too high. If everyone would just say no to overexposure to the elements, I’d put on a sweater, by gum!”

Gert laughed. Hallie sometimes used funny expressions like “by gum.” It did lighten the mood a bit. But these days, it seemed like practically the only time her old roommate said things like that was when she was drinking or drunk.

Gert remembered meeting Hallie on move-in day at college. She’d liked her new roommate instantly. Hallie was a short, chubby-cheeked girl who laughed at everything and constantly poured her heart out about all her unrequited crushes. And just as Hallie was willing to share her problems, she was nosy and would ferret out all of her friends’ concerns. If something was bothering Gert, Hallie would be unrelenting in drawing it out of her and making her feel better. The two of them often left a night of studying on their respective beds to head to the corner coffee shop to hash out their problems over espresso. They would leave after two hours with a clear course of action: Call their crushes. Study harder. Hang around over break. Hallie was a psychology major, so she liked helping people deal with their dilemmas.

But toward the end of freshman year, Gert had stopped being able to match Hallie’s tales of unrequited longing. Gert was beginning to get male attention, even if she wasn’t used to it. A childhood friend of hers told her that she was “college popular” rather than “high school popular”—in her high school, only the beautiful, outgoing girls had had boyfriends, but in college, if you were pretty and funny and easygoing enough, you could do all right. One thing Gert had always had going for her was a calm rationality, a willingness to live and let live. She rarely got bent out of shape over the little things, and it seemed to her that most girls were high-strung. Especially about men. Gert thought that a lot of things guys did were funny, whereas most women found their jokes offensive or just plain gross.

It was like Hallie and Erika—especially these days. They got crazy over every aspect of the dating process, worrying it to death. Hallie was still as good a listener as she had been back in school—but only when Erika wasn’t around. When Erika was there, Hallie seemed more concerned with trying to impress her glamorous friend. Gert suspected it went back to high school, when beautiful Erika was exceedingly popular and Hallie was grateful to tag along.

Gert thought that maybe, just as Hallie wanted to help Gert get back into society, she could help Hallie not be so focused on winning everyone else’s approval—that of Erika and every man she met. Hallie used to be a lot of fun. But more and more, she acted desperate. Strained.

The three women finally agreed on a bar called Art’s. It had a dual meaning that Gert liked. She didn’t see a guy named Art, though; just a female bartender with overalls and cropped blond hair. A female Eminem.

There were four stools open at the mahogany counter. Hallie and Erika jockeyed to be at either end, rather than in the middle. If you were in the middle there was no chance of someone sitting next to you. Hallie had done that in lecture halls throughout college, too—always sat just one seat in, so a guy could sit on the end without effort. Nowadays, Hallie also chose the middle seat on airplanes, meaning that seats would be left on either side of her, guaranteed to be taken by people traveling alone. It was Hallie’s Law of Maximum Exposure, almost as airtight as the Great Male Statistic: Leave as much surface area as possible so you will come into contact with an exponentially greater number of single people.

Of course, 99.9 percent of the time, the plan failed. On airplanes, Hallie often ended up flanked by someone’s grandpa and a woman who looked like Pamela Anderson.

At Art’s, a David Bowie song was playing, which made Gert think immediately of Marc, because he’d been a big Bowie fan. There she was, thinking about him again. Whenever she did that, everything else lost focus. She sometimes lingered in such a netherworld for four to five minutes and then popped back into reality and wondered what had just happened. People would be staring at her, wondering why she looked so spacey. But there was comfort in the netherworld.

She tried to figure out which Bowie song it was. Marc would have known. He was a rock ’n’ roll encyclopedia. She could count on him for that. It was just one of the many small things she could count on. Whenever they were in the car together, she would test him just to tease him, asking which singer was on, and if he didn’t know, he would get all frustrated, and the moment they got home he’d dash up the stairs to look up the song in the Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits.

Strains of Bowie were soon replaced by “5:15” by The Who, which also had a memory attached. They’d gone to see the movie Quadrophenia together. Gert was unimpressed with the movie, but loved the music. Marc was constantly trying to get Gert, and everyone else, into his favorite bands. It was adorable.

Gert hadn’t realized until he was gone just how many different things she had liked about him, nor how much his very existence had become part of her constitution. She wasn’t the type to constantly blather on about her boyfriend or husband, but she had always had Marc in the back of her mind, no matter where she was. Now, whenever something reminded her of him, she’d remember what happened and her stomach would drop. She wondered if people who were part of a couple had any idea what a privilege it was to get to spend their lives with the person they loved. Of course, they knew on one level, but did they really know?

Erika whined about wanting to sit on an end stool, so Hallie reluctantly offered her one. But instantly, the seat on the other side got taken—by a girl who’d just come in with her boyfriend. What nerve. At least the girl wouldn’t be competing with them for the guys hanging out by the dartboard.

Gert picked up the drink menu and looked at it. Wine was eight dollars a glass. It seemed ridiculous for her to spend that much money. Especially now that she was living on a single income.

She looked around the bar and felt sick. Was this the world she’d been left to—squandering money on booze, dressing half-naked, shouting over music, strategizing about where to sit?

Gert felt angry. Angry about everything that had happened. Angry at herself.

Gert knew that thinking about this at the bar didn’t make her look very approachable. But she couldn’t help it. Obviously she wasn’t ready to go out yet. Her initial instincts had been right: a year and a half wasn’t long enough. She was too tired, too angry, too sad. Maybe next year.

Then she thought of something.

She could pretend she was back in college, hanging out with friends just like freshman year. She didn’t have to be worrying about who was by the dartboard. She could sing along with Roger Daltrey. She could make fun of Erika’s ponytail. She didn’t have to be looking for a man like her friends were. She didn’t want one, anyway.

No worrying, plotting or planning.

Gert craned her neck over the bar and forced a smile. “So,” she said to Hallie, “did you fire that girl at work?”

“No.” Hallie shook her head. “I will, though.”

Hallie was the office manager at a management consulting firm, and her twenty-three-year-old assistant spent half the day calling guys, Instant Messaging guys, checking to see if she had e-mail from guys, and scribbling ratings on the posters of guys she kept on her cubicle wall. On Brad Pitt’s arm, the girl had written, “HOT.” On Ben Affleck, she’d written, “yumie” (and yes, spelled it wrong). On Josh Hartnett, she’d written, “Cute!!!” Then, on Robert Downey, Jr., she’d written a simple “OK.”

“You can’t fire her,” Erika said. “She makes you feel better about your own life.”

“I know,” Hallie said. “I may be twenty-nine and single, but at least I’ve never put Tiger Beat posters on my walls. And now she keeps disappearing every day between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m., and she thinks we don’t notice. I don’t know where she goes.”

“Do you have any idea?” Gert asked.

“No,” Hallie said. “My boss is going to have me follow her.”

Gert sensed someone sitting next to her. She felt the brush against her shoulder before she even looked. Two men were sitting down. They weren’t looking her way, though. They were talking to each other. She snuck a peek. They were both wearing leather bomber jackets. They were average-looking and clean-cut.

“Fresh meat at three o’clock,” Erika said.

Hallie took a quick look at the guys, then went back to Erika. “They’re short, though,” she reported.

“Did I ever tell you that Ben’s bitch wife is an inch taller than he is?” Erika said. “I can’t imagine what happens when she wears heels. The two of them must look like a circus act.”

“Maybe she doesn’t wear heels,” Gert said.

“Don’t be funny,” Erika said.

Gert heard the guy to her right say to the bartender, “Just a cranberry juice.” The bartender looked at him strangely before going to get the juice.

The guy noticed Gert looking at him. “I’m all for girly drinks,” he said, smiling.

“Oh,” Gert said. “This may shock you, but so am I.”

“What kind?”

“All kinds, as long as there’s citrus fruit involved.”

“It prevents scurvy,” the guy’s friend said.

“Health is always important when ordering alcoholic beverages,” Gert said.

“So I should order one for you, then,” the first guy said.

Gert said, “You could.”

Erika whispered to Hallie, “Hook-up at stage right.” Gert ignored her. The guys both seemed nice.

“Cranberry juice is…” Gert started, but then she stopped. What she’d thought of was that it was good for urinary tract infections. But that was not appropriate dating conversation. Damn—she was going to have to start thinking like that now. With Marc, of course, she could have said anything. She could have gone to the bathroom in front of him, although she preferred not to.

It was back to square one on everything. Well, at least she was older now. Square two, then.

“Cranberry juice is…good for you,” Gert finished.

“It’s good for urinary infections,” the first guy said.

Erika leaned over Gert’s seat and said to him, “Are you a doctor?”

The guy looked at her for a second.

“No,” he said, laughing. Erika shrugged and went back to her drink.

“Anyway, there’s a reason I can’t drink,” the guy added.

“What is it?” Gert asked.

“He’s on the extra board,” his friend said.

Gert looked at them blankly.

“That means I’m on call for work,” the first guy said. “But even when I’m not on call, I’m never allowed to drink.”

“Are you a cop?”

“Nope.”

“Guess what he does,” the guy’s friend said. “Guess. No one can ever guess it.”

“Gert,” Hallie called from two stools down. “Do you want a drink?”

Hallie had drained two cosmos in ten minutes. She was giving Gert a look like she wanted to know if Gert needed to be rescued. Gert didn’t know why. All they were doing was talking. “No, thanks,” Gert said. “I’m okay.”

“Gert!” Erika said. “Hallie and I are going to the girls’ room!”

“Fine,” Gert said. “See you.”

“Gert!” Erika called. “Let us know if you want a drink.”

Gert nodded.

“Your friends are loud,” the guy’s friend said in a low voice.

“They’re really nice people,” Gert said.

“You must be nice to defend them,” the first guy said.

“It’s the least you should expect someone to do,” Gert said, “defend their friends.”

“Anyone who has a rule like that,” the first guy said, “I’m all for.” He smiled. He had a small scar on the bridge of his nose. It looked cute.

“Todd defends me, right, Todd?” the second guy asked.

“Yeah, I do,” Todd said in an authoritative voice. “Two more guesses.”

“You’re a treasury officer,” Gert said.

“Hey, is that an Untouchables reference?”

“Yes,” Gert said.

“That’s like my favorite movie. How’d you know?”

Gert said, “I just knew.”

“Brian, isn’t that like my favorite movie?”

“It’s like his favorite movie,” Brian said.

Erika and Hallie hadn’t gone to the bathroom as promised. They were staring at Gert.

Hallie elbowed her.

“Why don’t you introduce us?” she asked.

“Oh,” Gert said. “Todd and Brian, this is Hallie and Erika.”

“Hiiii!” Hallie said, pulling her stool around so that she could see them better. “What do both of you do?”

“I was just trying to guess that,” Gert said.

“I’m a stockbroker,” Brian said. “But Todd’s the one with the interesting job.”

“I think stockbrokers are very interesting,” Erika purred.

“Well, Todd’s job is more interesting,” Brian insisted.

“He can’t drink,” Gert added. “So I guessed that he’s an officer of the treasury.”

Hallie and Erika looked clueless.

“The Untouchables. They went after alcohol during Prohibition….”

“That movie rocks,” Brian said.

“Oh, right!” Erika said. “Wasn’t Kevin Bacon in that?”

“Costner,” Brian said.

“Yeah,” Erika said. “My ex-boyfriend was into that movie. He married a girl who keeps a Web log.”

“How many more guesses you want?” Brian asked Gert.

“One more,” Gert said.

Todd pursed his mouth. He had dark hair, a little curly behind his ears.

“Truck driver,” Gert guessed finally.

“Close,” Todd said.

“Oh…I give up.”

“I work for Norfolk Southern,” Todd said. “I’m a conductor on a train, and we get twelve hours on and twelve hours off….”

“Those are freight trains, right?”

“Yeah, and you have a couple of guys on each run, one driving and one making sure everything’s okay. It’s too dangerous to be drinking off-duty, because they could call you all of a sudden to come in. So they don’t let you drink at all, ever.”

“That’s too bad,” Gert said. “I mean, if you think it is.”

“Nah.” Todd shrugged. “I did enough of that in college. It’s okay.”

“So, Brian, how long have you been a stockbroker?” Erika asked.

“Since college,” Brian said. He looked at his watch and nudged Todd. “I think we’d better get going.”

“Yeah, we’re meeting friends,” Todd said. “It was nice to meet you, though.”

Gert didn’t know if he meant all of them.

“So…” Todd said “…if you have a number, I mean, would you mind if maybe I gave you a call sometime?”

Gert thought about it. There couldn’t be much harm. Besides, the practice would do her good. She searched in her purse for something to write on—it had been a while since she’d done this—and finally came up with an inky business card. She scribbled her home number on the back.

Hallie and Erika looked on, concerned.

Then, the men were gone.

“The only person to even talk to a normal guy was Gert,” Erika whined in the subway in the wee hours.

“Neither of you would have even talked to Todd,” Gert said. “You didn’t like that he’s a train conductor.”

“Well, I did like Brian,” Erika said.

“Based on what?”

“I don’t know. He was cute. So thanks for not helping. You were like, ‘I’m taking Todd and that’s it.’”

Gert sighed. “I wasn’t taking him. He just seemed like a nice guy, so I talked to him.”

“Why didn’t Brian like me?” Erika wailed.

“Maybe Todd only wanted my number so he could call me to get yours,” Gert said.

“Well, if he calls, don’t give it to him,” Erika said. “They were short.”

Now Gert knew the truth: Hallie and Erika were single because they were crazy.

“How did you know to mention his favorite movie?” Hallie asked.

“Oh,” Gert said. “There’s a canon where guys are concerned. Marc was always quoting lines from that movie. If you quote certain things, you can slide right into their conversation.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“We’ve got nothing to lose.”

The canon for guys in their twenties and thirties

1 The Simpsons

2 This is Spinal Tap

3 Star Wars

4 Monty Python

5 Star Trek

6 The Princess Bride

7 The Untouchables

8 The Hobbit

9 The Matrix

10 Office Space

“Excuse me,” Erika said. “Don’t you mean, ‘The canon for nerds’?”

“No. There are cool guys who like those things.”

“Hey,” Hallie said. “Maybe we should get together at my place this weekend and rent these flicks.”

So they put it on their schedule.

When Gert got home, she was exhausted. Her bed felt soft and wonderful.

She’d spent the last five hours trying to put something out of her mind that she hadn’t really wanted to put out of her mind. She’d been in an environment where everyone was supposed to appear carefree and happy, but her feelings had veered between torture and just getting a mild drubbing. Even if the bar scene hadn’t been as horrible as Hallie and Erika made it sound, there was a real harshness to it. It was unsettling. It wasn’t at all like what she would have done that night if Marc had been there.

If he had been there, they probably would have gone out to dinner, and then taken a walk through Manhattan. Or maybe they would have snuggled on the couch and watched a movie. Even cleaning the house with him would have been better than going to the bar. Playing a rousing round of that silly plastic foosball game he’d insisted on keeping in the living room would have been better. It was too hard to fall in love with someone, learn all of their quirks and passions, assume you’d spend the rest of your life with them, and then suddenly have them snatched away forever.

Slowly, in bed, Gert spread out her bare arms. Sleeping barearmed, feeling the sheets against her skin, was the closest she got to a caress these days.

She knew she had to stop thinking about what she could have done if Marc had been there. This was the new reality. He never would be.

But did she have it in her to start fighting her way through leather-jacketed and miniskirted crowds in search of a second miracle?

It didn’t seem worth it.

Erika brought two bowls overflowing with popcorn into Hallie’s living room. It was Friday night. The room had one wide window that was being pelted by the rain. Hallie popped the tops of three Diet Coke cans and a no-frills carbonated fruit punch and let them fizz on the coffee table.

Gert and Erika, sitting on the couch, reached for the diet sodas.

They left one for Hallie’s often-absentee roommate, Cat, who was rumored to be making a rare appearance within the hour. Although with meek Cat, who spent weekends with her family on Long Island, it was always hard to be sure.

Why, Gert thought, does it seem wrong for us to be having a slumber party for twenty-nine-year-olds?

Because this is not what you expected. You don’t have a sleepover party with your twenty-nine-year-old girlfriends. You and your husband have kids, and THEY have sleepovers, and the two of you stand in the doorway beaming, pleased to see the kids so excited, remembering what it was like back then—and thrilled to have your own best friend to sleep with.

“You know what would be great?” Hallie asked, lying on her stomach on the floor and painting her nails. “If the rain turned to snow, and it piled up, and we were stuck here for three days.”

Erika, on the couch, pulled a blanket around herself and shivered visibly. The rain snapped more loudly at the windows. “What would we do?”

“We’d hole up right in this room in our sweatpants and play truth-or-dare and confess our deepest secrets to each other,” Hallie said, “and order heaping bowls of pad Thai and drink cheap wine.”

“I want a guy to do those things with,” Erika whined.

“Well, you ain’t got one, so shut up.”

“I’m twenty-nine,” Erika said. “It isn’t even healthy to be boyfriendless this long. My body needs to be physically touched by a member of the opposite sex.”

“Get a root canal.”

Gert gazed over the blankets neatly laid out on the floor, and at the popcorn on the table, and really did feel like a kid at a sleepover. She wondered if later Erika would break out the Ouija board, hoping to channel Elvis, and after that the three of them would try to levitate themselves, chanting, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board….”

The door opened, and it was tiny Cat, lugging a doggie bag from whichever pricey restaurant she’d been to with her aunt. Gert had only met Cat a few times. Cat constantly complained, in her squeaky voice, that she wasn’t meeting anyone, but turned down every invitation Hallie and Erika made to go out, whether it was dancing at Polly Esther’s or rinsing trays at the University Community Soup Kitchen. She was “too tired,” or it was too cold out, or she was spending the weekend with her family. Hallie and Erika privately ragged on her, but at the same time, they loved it when she actually did come out with them, because her shrinking-violet existence made them feel good about their own lives. At least they’d had real relationships.

One more thing about Cat was that she wasn’t willing to accept any degree of obnoxiousness in boys. If a guy even made a joke about sex, Cat looked intimidated, and she retreated. Gert was glad that Cat stuck by what she believed in, but Hallie and Erika said that Cat would be alone until she was sixty-five. Then she could meet a nice guy who had prostate cancer and just wanted to be her very good friend.

Hallie got up and turned off the light so the women could watch the male canon movies they had rented: Monty Python’s Holy Grail, This Is Spinal Tap, and number eleven in the canon, Reservoir Dogs. Gert was hoping Hallie and Erika would like the movies, but the odds were against it. She’d never had a female friend who had the same sense of humor as she did, except for her high school friend Nancy, who lived in L.A. now.

Even before the movie started, Gert’s prediction was proven right. Instead of paying attention to the opening scenes of Holy Grail, Erika was fussing over her throw pillows. Hallie was finishing with her nails. Cat had already gone into her room.

Hallie got up and paused the DVD. “I forgot,” she said. “Before the movie starts, I have to tell you this. I thought of a great question for the two of you today.” She was wearing an orange long-sleeved T-shirt and gray sweatpants that Gert thought looked cute. Even though Erika was around making her nervous, Gert realized that at least this was just a no-pressure girls’ night. They didn’t have to worry about how they looked or how they dressed. Maybe it could be fun.

“Not another of your profound probing questions,” Erika said to Hallie, flicking a piece of popcorn across the coffee table.

“No, this is great,” Hallie said, prying and probing as usual. She crawled over to the table and waved her nails to dry them. “Let’s say a soothsayer told you that you would not meet the man of your dreams for eight more years.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Let’s say that the soothsayer said that without a doubt, when you turned thirty-seven, you would finally meet someone, fall madly, madly in love with him, and live happily ever after. Would you still date people in the interim?”

“No,” Gert said.

“No,” Cat said, coming back into the room.

“Probably not,” Erika said. “I wouldn’t bother.”

“Interesting,” Hallie said. “So dating is just a means to an end for all of you. It’s not about fun or socializing or sex.”

“I have enough fun,” Gert said.

“I do enough socializing,” Erika said.

“I…do enough socializing,” Cat said.

“Most people won’t admit that,” Hallie said. “They won’t admit that dating is work. Maybe we should all decide we’re going to meet the man of our dreams when we’re thirty-seven. Then we’ll stop squeezing into tight shirts and walking around half-naked and analyzing every encounter as future husband material. We’ll stop feeling the need to put on makeup to take out the trash just in case he’s walking by. Maybe we should just assume that we’ll meet our dream man at some future point, and stop driving ourselves crazy before then.”

“I already met the man of my dreams,” Erika said. “He’s married to a bitch.”

“I already met mine,” Gert said. “And then he was gone.”

The room was silent for a minute.

Cat said, “Anyone for Ouija?”

The movies ended up largely ignored for the night, as a half hour into the first one, something reminded Erika of Ben, and she said she just had to show Hallie and Gert what had happened on Challa’s Web site that day.

Gert had sighed. Erika had the attention span of a Chihuahua.

Standing in Hallie’s room by the big bed, they waited for the Web site to load. Hallie’s bedroom was mostly black, with a black comforter over the bed and black furniture. She still had the same purple telephone from college, Gert noticed, and she wondered if it still had the same sticky goo around the push-buttons.

Across the computer screen flashed a page with a rich blue background and the words “Challa’s Corner.” A gliding pastiche of photos swirled across the screen, most of them of Challa, Ben and their baby. On the left was a list of links to things like the Weather Channel and Elle magazine.

Gert had to admit to herself that it looked cheesy.

And at the bottom of the screen was the bane of Erika’s existence: The Web log.

Standing in front of Hallie’s computer, the three women read that day’s blog entry from Challa.

Last night was cold out, and we stayed in and put the baby to sleep and made dinner. I cooked linguine and mussels, and Ben tossed a salad. It was soooo romantic!;) We polished off an entire bottle of red wine LOL!!!

Gert suspected that deep inside, all of the women were thinking that mussels and wine sounded a lot better than soda and popcorn at 11:00 p.m. Gert almost felt her body ache, remembering the effort and passion that went into something as mundane as preparing dinner together.

Erika returned to the home page and clicked a link that said, “Message board.” That was where Challa’s friends could leave comments like: “Hi, Chall!” “Hey, girl, love the new pix!” “Thanks for helping me waste time at work.”

But recently Erika had started to leave messages, too.

She’d used all seven of her America Online screen names to create aliases to post things. Some were meant to annoy Challa, and some were just meant to confuse her. She told Hallie and Gert that Challa deserved it. Why did Challa have to shove everyone else’s face in her and Ben’s bliss all the time? Erika said that if she herself were married to someone as passionate and artistic as Ben, there was no way she would waste her free time writing blog entries about it.

The three of them read what Erika had posted on the message board that morning.

“You are banal,” Erika had written under the screen name Mr. HushPuppy. (She chose screen names completely at random, based on whatever she happened to see from the Internet café while she was typing. That day, someone had walked by in Hush Puppies.)

“Yes, she is, isn’t she?” Erika had responded to herself, this time using the name LadyAndTheTrump. “She started a whole Web site dedicated to herself. Sweetie, you don’t need TOO much attention, do you?”

“Challa’s a ho and a slut,” Mr. HushPuppy wrote.

“Ho, ho, ho, Merrrryyyyy Chall-mas,” wrote “JenDurr.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if Challa did name a holiday after herself,” Mr. HushPuppy wrote. “Too much attention isn’t enough for this girl. She should be lucky for what she has, not clog everyone else’s cyberspace with her binary spittle.”

“You’re a sick girl, Erika Dennison,” Hallie said, laughing.

What really got a rise out of Erika and Hallie that evening was that Challa, who previously had been ignoring the posts, was now getting into fights with the “writers.”

“Can’t you at least say something meaningful between your insults?” Challa had written back to Mr. HushPuppy. “If you hate me so much, then please don’t read this board. I didn’t invite you. At least LadyAndTheTrump sometimes has something meaningful to say.”

“Ah,” Erika said aloud, triumphantly. “She’s using me as an example for me to follow.”

Gert worried that someday, Erika would take this too far.