Читать книгу Starting From Square Two - Caren Lissner, Caren Lissner - Страница 8

“You can’t start dating the first person you meet,” Hallie said.

They were at a dingy coffee shop on the Upper West Side, near Hallie’s apartment.

“Did Brian say anything about me?” Erika asked Gert. “I don’t want to date him…I just want to know why he didn’t like me.”

“I’ll ask the Saturday after next,” Gert said, feeling suddenly tired of Erika. She elected to forget the “big hair” comment.

“But you were supposed to come to a party with us on that Saturday!” Hallie said. “You can’t go out with him that day. Can’t you see Todd on Sunday?”

“He’s working on Sunday,” Gert said. “He’s working for a week straight after that.”

“Now she knows his schedule,” Erika said.

“They’ll have to have their wedding when he’s not on call,” Hallie said.

“They won’t be able to have alcohol at the reception,” Erika said, “because Todd can’t drink.”

“Then I’m not coming,” Hallie said. “How can a single girl get through a friend’s wedding without alcohol?”

“Will you guys stop!” Gert said. “We’re not getting married.”

“You act like it.”

“You know, all the two of you do is complain,” Gert said. “It almost seems like you’re upset that I spent an evening with someone nice.”

There was silence.

“You know we just want you to be happy,” Hallie said.

“Yeah,” Erika said. “We know what guys are like. We don’t want you to get hurt.”

Gert didn’t want that either. But sometimes it hurt to get up in the morning. Whatever was coming couldn’t be much worse.

Every other Christmas, Gert and Marc had stayed with Marc’s parents in their huge warm house in Massachusetts, where all four brothers had grown up. Gert loved that house. It held oodles of guestrooms, a fireplace and long slurpy couches you could fall asleep in. It was in an upscale waterfront hamlet just north of Boston with gaslights on the main streets and shanties near the water. During holidays, relatives practically oozed from the walls: Cousins, nieces and nephews, all asking Gert when she was going to have a baby. She had always said, “Soon.”

Nowadays, she sometimes felt like she had a gaping hole inside of her, ready to be filled with something living. She used to look at Marc and think that she couldn’t wait to see what kind of person would come from them.

This past year, on both Thanksgiving and Christmas, the Healys hadn’t invited her to the house. She and Marc had routinely stayed on the East Coast for one holiday and then gone to her parents’ in L.A. for the other. But now, she hadn’t heard from Marc’s parents in almost five months. She still had their last name. She had been officially part of the family. Yet, suddenly, because of one day, half of her support network was gone.

Going home to L.A. for both holidays had been especially hard. Gert’s brother and his girlfriend were there. Gert was alone. After bluffing her way through dinner, she’d gone up to her childhood bedroom, lay on her mattress surrounded by purple walls and cried.

She remembered the times that Marc had stayed with her there on holidays, how they had both crammed onto her single bed in the room with the stuffed animals and purple walls, and how funny that was. He used to scrounge through her closet to find old diaries and report cards and use them to tease her. “‘Gert’s penmanship has improved slightly, but she needs help following directions,’” Marc read one time in an authoritative voice, linking it to the way she’d botched a bisque recipe the previous weekend. “Oh, look,” he said. “A poem: ‘I Love My Fish.’ Aw, how cute—you drew fins on the ‘O’ in love, to make it look like a fish! No wonder you flunked handwriting.” But as much as he teased, he was unrelenting in wanting to see every single thing in her closet. Gert sometimes felt as though she had actually kept all those things to show someone someday, if she was lucky enough to find someone who cared enough about her to want to know what she’d been like as a kid. And he had. He’d gone through everything, asking incessant questions. Marc was driven in everything he did.

Once, at Marc’s house, Gert had gone through his things, too. It was only fair. He had packed most of them away in the basement before heading off to college. She was delighted to find that he had listed the contents of each box very carefully. He was super-organized and super-particular. All his baseball cards were in order, all his die-cast cars were in order. She teased him constantly as she burrowed through the boxes. He’d even alphabetized his comic books.

She also found photos of him growing up. There was one of him at his high school graduation in wire-rimmed glasses, looking younger but just as serious. His short brown hair was neatly cut, and he was wearing a suit and tie. Very neat, very particular, very handsome.

Marc’s particularities had extended into adulthood. There was a certain steakhouse near their college in Pennsylvania that he had loved. So a couple of times a year, he would wake up in their New York apartment on a sunny Saturday and randomly decide it was time for a “steak break.” He’d drive the two of them three hours back there for dinner. After relaxing and enjoying their meal, they’d drive the three hours home. Marc was such an adventurer, Gert thought. And he took such good care of her, too. But she also knew how to support him when he needed it. She filled in all his blanks.

Another thing about Marc was that he was big on looking after his friends. He consistently went out of his way to help them move, to study, to work on projects. A year after graduation, his best friend, the baby-faced Craig, was in Illinois at graduate school teaching economics to freshmen. Marc and Gert took a road trip out there. Marc forced Craig to bring them to one of his classrooms to give them a mock lesson, so they could see exactly how Craig taught his students. Marc delighted in other people’s fancies. But at the end of the day, when he needed someone to rest his head against, it was Gert. Heading back in the car, she would look over at him, his Red Sox baseball cap hovering over his tired eyes, and she’d squeeze his right shoulder.

Now she would never go to the steakhouse in Pennsylvania. She’d never get to reach over and squeeze his shoulder while he was driving. And she had no reason to head up to Boston to visit the warm house with the fireplace and the huge slurpy couches.

“It’s like you don’t just lose him,” said Brenda, the nurse, at the support group that weekend. “You lose his whole family. You see them at services and memorials right after, but if you didn’t have a baby with him, your in-laws stop needing to see you. It ends up being an exchange of cards on holidays. It’s like, for years they cared about you, but it was only because you were part of him.”

“We never had kids,” Gert said. “I always think that if we’d had kids, I’d still hear from them all the time. They’d be inviting me up there or coming down to visit. Now they act like we were never even related in the first place.”

Arden looked angry. “We have this society that makes you feel like it’s okay to defer everything,” she said. “I have a friend who’d been living with her boyfriend for almost six years. They lost him in the Pentagon, and the two of them hadn’t even gotten engaged yet. Six years. Now the relationship counts for nothing in anyone’s eyes. She feels like she doesn’t even have a right to the memories.”

Gert thought again of Chase, who’d lost her fiancé in the towers. Chase hadn’t been there in six weeks now. Gert wanted to ask Brenda if she had her contact number, so she could make sure Chase was okay. But she knew she probably wouldn’t ask.

“You put things off, and poof, you wish you hadn’t waited so long,” Michele said. “But I have friends who got married and had their kids young, and they always tell me they think they gave up their youth too soon. You never know what’s going to happen. You just have to do what you feel is right and not sit around having regrets.”

Stephanie, who was a personal trainer, said, “What about my biological clock? I’m thirty-five, and I still can’t imagine when I’ll be psychologically ready to date again. If I start two years from now, and I meet someone, it will probably be at least a year or two before we get married. By then I’ll be thirty-eight. Too old to have kids. For the rest of my life.”

“Honey, you can have kids these days till you’re fifty,” Brenda said.

“No, you can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

“That’s a medical falsehood perpetuated by the media.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is. It’s…”

Gert wasn’t in the mood for this debate. Her gaze moved to the wall of the community center where the meetings were held. There were finger paintings all over it from the daycare program that was in the building. One of the paintings said in round, childish letters, “TODD.” Gert smiled, thinking Todd was actually a little innocent and childlike.

She thought of telling the women in the group about going out with him. But she was feeling guilty about it. The women always talked about how they couldn’t imagine dating someone again. What right did she have to have dinner with a man—and what right did she have to actually enjoy it?

“Having a baby alone just isn’t something I’m going to do,” Arden said.

Everyone else got quiet.

Gert found the silence uncomfortable.

“Well, let’s move on,” Brenda said. “What else happened this week?”

Gert saw no volunteers among the ten women there. She started reluctantly. “I had dinner with someone,” she said. “On Saturday.”

The other women leaned closer. “A man?” Brenda asked. Gert nodded. “Your first date since…?”

“Yes,” Gert said. “But it wasn’t really a date. Just a friendly dinner. I met him when I was out with friends, and he asked me to dinner, and I figured I might as well try, just to see what it was like.”

“And how was it?”

She shrugged. “His name’s Todd. He seemed nice….”

“But he’s not your husband,” Brenda said.

“No,” Gert said, shaking her head. “No one could be. And he’s very different from Marc. But in a way, I was glad. If he was anything like him I’d have felt like I was cheating.”

“Don’t ever feel like that,” Brenda said. “Don’t any of you feel like that.”

“There’s at least room in our hearts for new friends,” Michele said.

“Are you going to see him again?” Leslie asked.

“I think so,” Gert said. “It’s strange, but I feel like I want to learn more about him. But just last week we were all saying how we couldn’t possibly imagine dating again. What right do I have to go out with anyone when it’s only been a year and a half?”

They all got quiet.

“I have a confession,” Michele said. “I know I said I couldn’t date for years. But sometimes, when I’m in bed at night, I miss being held.”

“I do, too,” Leslie said.

“It’s odd,” Brenda said. “I think the better your relationship was with your husband, the more you probably will need to find that closeness again. It’s just that the idea of being with a stranger repulses us. What we really want is to be with our husbands. But it’s impossible. Right now, a fantasy seems better than a real person.”

“When are you going to see him again?” Arden asked.

“Next weekend,” Gert said.

“Those friends you mention,” Brenda said, “make sure you don’t let their notions of dating and five-nights-a-week partying push you. If you need four months to get to know this guy, to get to the point when you so much as want to kiss him, you take four months. Gert has to do what’s right for Gert.”

Gert smiled. Brenda often lapsed into social worker–speak.

“Are those girls younger than you?” Michele asked. “When you talk about them, they seem like it.”

“No,” Gert said. “But sometimes, I feel about five years older than them.”

“It’s not that you’re five years older,” Arden said. “It’s that they’re emotionally five years younger than you. If you’re between twenty-five and thirty-five and you’ve never been married, you get to subtract five years from your age. So your friends are twenty-three or twenty-four. And if you have children before you’re thirty-five, you add five years to your age.”

“What if you’re a widow?” Brenda asked.

“You add a hundred,” someone said, and all the women laughed.

At work, someone had left a card on Gert’s desk. It was a congratulations card for a guy who worked on a different floor. Gert was supposed to put ten dollars in it for a wedding gift.

Gert hated these cards. Hallie had told her once that in China, it was the opposite. In China, if something great happened to you, you took everyone else in the office out to dinner; they didn’t take you. That made sense—after all, you were the lucky one. You were the one who was getting married or promoted.

Marrying the person you loved was not a struggle. The struggle was being able to keep going after you’d lost yours, or not finding one at all. The people who needed cards were those who weren’t engaged, those who weren’t about to have a baby—those who were miserable, single, alone.

“Congratulations,” Gert wrote unenthusiastically in the card, and stuck in her ten dollars.

She got up, sauntered down the hall and pitched the card onto the desk of Leon, the long-haired fiftyish nihilist proof-reader. “No backs!” Gert said, and raced back down the hall.

“Awww, I hate these!” she heard him say.

As she ran, she looked at the tops of buildings: The GE building, the Paine Webber building, some brown towers she didn’t know the name of.

At work, the people were mostly older. She had always been glad that she’d been married and hadn’t counted on work as a social outlet. No one in her office went out after hours. The only person there whom she really had thought of as a friend was her boss, but even that had changed over the last few months. Missy was in her mid-forties and still dressed sexily, always in skirts and off-black panty hose. She had an evil sense of humor. But for the past few months, she’d had mood swings that could have registered on the Richter scale. Gert thought it had to do with relationship issues. The rumor was that Missy was having an affair with the chiseled young guy on the ninth floor who worked in the mailroom. There were elevators near the back of the building that could be stopped between floors without setting off alarms.

What else could she say about Missy? Missy had been saying for years that she was going to get separated from her husband, Dennis, but she never had. Gert had met Dennis at the office Christmas party. He was a sad sack. He hated dancing, so he always stood near the buffet table watching Missy dance up a storm with every guy in the company. Gert wondered why Dennis didn’t try a little harder to keep up with Missy, looks-wise. Not that he should have had to. But he could have at least tried.

After fobbing off the congratulations card, Gert sat back down and stared at her in-box. The accounts that her boss handled involved baldness remedies, skin creams and hemorrhoid preparations. Not really Gert’s preferences, but she had, from time to time, thought up some pretty funny campaigns for all of them. Watching British comedies with Marc often got her thinking creatively. Someday, Gert could take over those accounts if Missy moved to others. Or she could move to other accounts if she had a portfolio of creative work. But Missy was there to stay, and Gert had put off starting creative work for a long time. There were only so many things you could do at once. She’d been fulfilled enough in the past and had never really expected to get most of her satisfaction nine-to-five, anyway. She went out with Marc’s co-workers, took road trips to see friends, celebrated milestones with both of their families—siblings’ graduations, new babies—cooked together, bought a condo. She had felt feminine doing these things, even. Now she felt like she had to be the man and woman in dealing with every daily chore and struggle.

Before Marc died, she had been toying with some portfolio ideas that he’d encouraged. But after the accident she’d been uninspired to do anything that disturbed the stasis of other facets of her life, particularly work. Tragedy could certainly make you lose interest in the fast track.

“Oh my God!” Hallie sang into the phone to Gert that night. “You have to get over to Erika’s apartment. We’re reading Challa’s Web site!”

Gert was in bed, kicking her heels and watching a romantic movie that was making her feel more depressed than romantic. She had to be careful with forms of entertainment these days. Things that were romantic made her miss Marc. Things that were witty made her miss Marc. Things with action made her miss Marc. She was on a long main course of light and fluffy.

“I was watching a movie,” Gert told Hallie.

“What movie?”

“Before Sunrise,” Gert said.

“Oh my God, you never saw that?” Hallie asked. “That was ten years ago.”

Marc would never have seen an Ethan Hawke movie. Especially one about Ethan taking his brooding self on a train through Europe. Gert thought about all the movies she could catch up on now, and then hated herself for the thought. She often thought about the movies Marc would have wanted to see, the ones that were coming out that spring: Both the Matrix and X-Men sequels. Every single time she heard about them, she felt bad, thinking about how excited Marc would have been. If he were there, they’d be strategizing about how to get to see them both on their opening days.

“I guess I just never rented it,” Gert said of Before Sunrise.

“Well, I don’t want to take you away, but you have to see the Web site,” Hallie said. “We’re going to order dumplings for dinner and plot strategy.”

Gert was getting tired of the movie, anyway. Maybe watching other people’s evil machinations would take her mind off her pain. She was going to have to force herself to recover, even if it meant pushing herself into uncomfortable situations.

“That sounds good,” Gert said, pulling herself up.

On the N train, Gert remembered the corollary to Hallie’s Law of Maximum Exposure: If you’re single, being outside is always better than staying in, even if you have nowhere to go. You could meet someone getting on the bus, or standing in line buying your shriveled bagel.

Gert decided that Hallie should either forget these dating rules completely, or put them on a list and publish them. Even if they were myopic and pessimistic, at least someone would find them funny. Maybe Hallie could post them on a Web site for bitter wymyn.

Erika’s apartment was a studio in Harlem. It hadn’t always been hers alone. Erika had gotten it with a friend right after college. They had hung a blanket across the room to separate it. Eventually, the other girl got married and moved out, and Erika was earning enough money at the design firm to allow her to take the big step of living in the prewar hovel alone.

It was the coziest apartment Gert had seen in Manhattan. Two of the walls were exposed brick, and there was artwork everywhere. Some of it was stuff Erika had bought, and some was stuff she had designed. Gert knew that both Erika and Ben had been big fans of modern art. Ben had always wanted to be an architect, although from what Gert heard, he had never ended up going to graduate school.

Gert knocked on Erika’s front door. She heard cackling inside, then steps. When the door swung open, Erika was there, looking pretty and smiling at Gert. Her blond hair was streaked with a few dark lowlights, and it was back in a ribbon. Graphic designers always dressed well.

“Gertie!” Erika said, and she threw her arms around her and hugged her. Gert felt a surge of warmth. She realized why Hallie always wanted to please Erika. If Erika was in a happy mood, she could make you feel like the most accepted and wanted person in the world—like you were as glamorous as she was. “I’m so glad you’re here,” Erika said. “We need you.”

Maybe Erika wasn’t so bad.

Gert followed her to the far corner of the room. Hallie was already sitting in front of Erika’s enormous Macintosh. It had little color printouts taped to it. They were impressive designs.

“This is great!” Hallie said. “This is so great!”

“What?”

“Take a look.”

Gert peered closely at the screen.

TO WHOEVER KEEPS POSTING THE

OBNOXIOUS MESSAGES

I know your the same person because their all coming from the same server I checked it out. Even if you use diff. screen names you can’t fool me. Your unintelligent and unoriginal to. You obviously don’t like me and I’m not sure what I ever did to you, but tell me and maybe we can come to an understanding about it otherwise I’ll delete every one of your postis.—C.S.

“You have to help me,” Erika said to Gert. “We need to write some posts, but from different computers. You have a computer at home, right?”

“Yeah…” Gert said uneasily. She didn’t like where this was going.

“I need to create more screen names and send messages from different servers,” Erika said. “That way, it won’t be coming from just mine and the Internet café. It’ll really drive Challa nuts. I’m going to write that I’m some girl who had an affair with Ben on a business trip.”

Hallie’s mouth dropped open, and her gaze moved from the screen to Erika’s face. “You’ve mentioned that before,” she said. “But you said you’d never do it.”

Erika said, “This girl is living my life, and wasting Ben’s. She’s stupid and needs too much attention. She took my whole life. I should be having kids with him right now.”

Gert felt nervous. “What if you write that,” Gert said, “and she takes the site down?”

Erika was quiet for a second.

“Don’t you understand?” she said, her voice rising. “Don’t you get it? That would be the most wonderful thing in the world.”

Erika sounded ready to cry. Gert felt embarrassed for her, so she stared at the floor.

“If Challa took this stupid site down,” Erika said, “then I wouldn’t have to maniacally check it every day to see what Ben’s doing. I wouldn’t have to know everything that’s going on in his life. But I just have to. I have to figure out what he’s doing now, and whether I did the right thing. I just wish the site didn’t exist. But if it does, I have to check it.”

Gert considered suggesting that Erika pretend the site didn’t exist. But she knew people couldn’t trick themselves in matters of the heart. Hell, she’d certainly tried. She had dutifully repeated positive messages as her therapist had instructed. “If I get through today, I’ll have accomplished something.” “Marc would want me to be happy.” “There was nothing I could’ve done.” “Everything happens for a reason.” These were the lies she’d told herself.

“I know you guys think this is crazy,” Erika said. “But Ben and I honestly had something. I can’t just forget about it.”

As the three of them sat on the subway heading toward Gert’s condo, it occurred to Gert that she should have pretended her computer was broken. They would have believed her. There was a nasty computer virus going around called the “Kiss Virus.” It looked like an e-card that said, “KISS…” but when you clicked the link, it said, “…your hard drive goodbye!”

Gert told herself it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe Erika would just blow off steam for a few minutes and be done with it. At least Erika and Hallie were helping Gert get out of her apartment. She had to cut them more slack. This was Erika’s strange method of getting closure.

Gert knew about closure. It was a favorite topic in the support group—those women who wished they’d said more to their husbands before they’d died. Gert had her own fantasies, in fact, about that day, all the ways she should have stopped the chain of events that led to Marc’s death.

“Did you tell Gert about your date?” Erika said to Hallie, pushing a newspaper away on the subway seat.

“Oh, it’s barely worth telling,” Hallie said. She turned to Gert. “This guy from work set me up with his friend the other night. He’s into seafood, so we went to a seafood place.”

“Sounds good…” Gert said.

“Well, it started off that way,” Hallie said, “but…two things. One, he wore a Tweety Bird shirt. It had an emblem of Tweety on the shirt where an alligator would be.”

“At least he’s different,” Gert offered.

“Yeah, but,” Hallie said, “he’s totally obsessed with Bugs Bunny and Warner Brothers cartoons.”

“That’s like a secondary male canon thing,” Gert said. “A lot of guys are into Bugs Bunny cartoons. Remember Marc’s best friend, Craig? He had all the tapes.”

“I do remember Craig, and I know some guys are into Bugs Bunny,” Hallie said. “But would they wear Tweety Bird on a first date?”

“I guess not,” Gert admitted.

“I think the more I go out, the more easily I get irritated by guys who don’t make an effort,” Hallie said. “I spend so much energy worrying about impressing them, but they don’t even do the basics to look half-decent.”

“What was the second bad thing about him?” Gert asked.

“Oh. He kept saying things about us being on a first date, or pointing out that things were awkward, even when I didn’t feel that way,” Hallie said. “Like, our meals came, and the minute I put food in my mouth, he said, ‘So, have you ever gone camping?’ And I said, ‘No, I guess I was never really into that.’ And he was quiet for a second, and then he said, ‘Wow, this is awkward.’”

“There should be a rule,” Erika said, putting her finger in the air, “that if you actually point out that something is awkward on a date, you immediately get ejected from your chair.”

Gert was glad that she had felt comfortable with Marc, and then with Todd, right away.

“I guess I’ll go on one more date with him,” Hallie said. “Everyone deserves a second date.”

“Not everyone,” Erika said.

“I’m perfecting a top-secret innovative method to meet men, anyway,” Hallie said. “No more of these horrible blind dates. Both of you will think I’m a genius when you hear my idea.”

“You said something about this last week,” Erika said. “Tell me already.”

“I’ll tell you soon,” Hallie said. “I promise. I’m working on it. You’ll both love it.”

Gert didn’t know whether to look forward to it or dread it.

Erika was tapping away at the keys of the computer in Marc’s trophy room.

“My new screen name is Baltimora,” she announced. “It’s in honor of the group that sang that ‘Jungle Love’ song in the eighties, which was on the radio when the alarm went off this morning, so now it’s stuck in my head. And boy, this’ll drive Challa crazy.”

“I want to write some,” Hallie said. “You said I could write some.”

Gert walked over to her window and pulled down the shade.

“The two of us can argue with each other!” Erika said, cracking up. “We’ll both say that we’re flight attendants who gave oral sex to Ben on his business trip to Texas, and that he was the best customer we’ve ever had.”

“That’s mean,” Gert said, wondering why she was trying to give Erika the benefit of the doubt. “What if you were married to him and living your life, and some girl kept writing this stuff to you?”

Hallie and Erika got silent.

“Gertie,” Hallie said.

“Gert,” Erika said, “if I had married him and was as happy as this girl seems to be, I would not need so much freaking attention that I’d write a Web site about myself every day. She needs to appreciate what she has instead of rubbing our noses in her syrupy slop.”

Hallie and Erika switched off writing messages, and they laughed hysterically. At the end, the exchange said:

THIS SITE IS STUPID AND P.S. LEARN TO SPELL. BEN IS A LITTLE “TO” SMART FOR YOU.—Baltimora

Hey, leave them alone. The two of them are happy. Ben told me so when we did it in the bathroom on Continental flight 221 to Houston.—XSGIRRRL

WAS THAT TO “BUSH” INTERCONTINENTAL AIR PORT? GET IT—BaLT.

We’re lucky Ben has so many business trips. He showed me this site to tell me how annoying his wife is. Don’t get me mad, honey, or hack hack hack!—XSGIRRRL

“They could file a harassment complaint on you,” Gert said.

“It’s a public forum,” Erika said. “There’s no law against calling someone annoying on their Web site. Besides, the worst that can happen is that Challa feels as bad today as I do every day.”

Gert suddenly understood. Erika wanted to jar Challa a little, make her less smug. Deep inside, Gert couldn’t help but know what Challa’s life was like. When she’d had Marc she never thought about being alone, about how hard it could be. Now Gert saw women walking with their husbands or complaining about their boyfriends, and she wanted to shake them and say, “Do you realize what you have?”

“I’m going to go back to using the Internet cafés to send these next time, anyway,” Erika said. “They’re less traceable.”

Gert was still pretty concerned about what Erika might do next.