Super in the City Page 2

  I’d roll out of bed around nine the next morning, pad up the two flights to apartment 4A, knock as a punctilio while letting myself in, plop down at the lox- laden table, and ask, “Hey, Mom, St. Regis security didn’t call here last night, did they?” Or maybe, “Hey, Dad, it turns out the King of Spain wears the same cologne Uncle Hy used to wear.”

  And my father would fold up the Week in Review, slap the table, and lean forward, bellowing, “Do tell!” My mom would chuck the Book Review and bustle into the kitchen, saying, “Wait, wait, don’t start, I want a full cup of coffee for this.”

  First, though, I had to ensure that hotel security did not actually become acquainted with my parents or their telephone number.

  Tag and I race- walked across the lobby and emerged, panting, onto Fifth Avenue—surely the streets were safe, like international waters?—and into the magnolia- scented spring evening.

  “Oh my God!” Tag shrieked, her hand on her side, trying to catch her breath.

  I could only wheeze and push sweaty, renegade tendrils off my cheeks.

  “What is the point,” Tag gasped, “of having a party in another country if you can recognize everyone there? Did they just fly in everyone she usually hangs out with?”

  Leave it to Tag to find the princess at fault.

  “I mean, we could have been, you know…”

  “Senators’ daughters,” I ventured between breaths.

  “Or soap opera actresses!”

  “Or borough presidents.”

  “Yeah! Or venture capitalists looking to invest heavily in … in … what does Spain make?”

  “Yellow rice?”

  “Yellow rice!” Tag put her hands on her hips defiantly. She looked so convinced that she was a venture capitalist wanting to invest in Spanish rice that I started laughing, which left me so out of breath that I had to sit down on a planter. Tag seemed to remember that she was not a wealthy speculator and sat down beside me.

  “You have to pay more attention at these things, Zeph,” she said sternly. “Not get all googly- eyed over the first bag of tricks to give you visions of villas.”

  I glared at her. “Me? You were supposed to do due diligence! I would have been fine at home with my pizza.”

  “Of course you would’ve.” She licked her finger and rubbed at a sangria stain on her dress. “If it weren’t for me, you’d never go north of Fourteenth Street.”

  “This from the woman who’s allergic to the Upper East Side,” I announced to no one in particular. Tag had spent her childhood shuttling between a mother who boasted that she’d married Tag’s father for the alimony, and a father who was now on his third wife (second trophy). Tag had concluded that their behavior was the result of their neighborhood. Reminding her that people behaved badly on the West Side, and even downtown, did nothing to dissuade her from her theory.

  We were quiet for a moment.

  “Friends of OPEC?” I finally said. “FOOPEC?”

  Tag shrugged, but she started to smile.

  “So what now? It’s only nine- thirty.” Though we both knew we’d be in our beds within the hour, we went through the motions as a nod to our youth and to New York’s reputation for being the center of the universe.

  “Movie?” I said, glancing toward the marquee of the Paris Theatre two blocks away.

  “Kind of late to start a movie.”

  “Drink?”

  “I don’t wanna spend the money.”

  “Jazz at Smoke?”

  “Since when do you like jazz?” Tag asked suspiciously.

  Since spotting the buzz- cut bass player who’d moved into the apartment between my parents’ and mine two months earlier.

  I shrugged. “Just trying to think of something new.”

  But Tag was starting to squint in a way that meant she really wanted to go home and get up early and go into her lab to look at her beautiful tapeworms under a microscope. And I was thinking of the three Netflix DVDs waiting in their inviting red- and- white envelopes at home, an orgy of chick flicks, with Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, and Jennifer Aniston receiving equal representation. Plus a fresh bag of Newman’s Own Ginger- O’s. A yawn escaped me.

  Ten minutes later, we were waving to each other across the Columbus Circle subway tracks, as Tag waited for an uptown train and I headed downtown. I paced back and forth to the beat of the steel drum player, who was pinging out the grooviest version of “Hava Nagila” I’d ever heard. The guy was grinning and sweating while two Latino guys alternately danced and sucked face in front of him and a tourist family—towheaded, wide- eyed, clutching Lion King programs—took pictures of the whole scene, no doubt deriving better entertainment value from their MetroCards than they had from their orchestra seats.

  Plugging my ears as the express roared past, I grew giddy from a familiar first- world high, a euphoria that suffused my body like an electric current: I had been born into circumstances that allowed me clean running water, heat, and toilets that flushed, where no tanks rolled down Fifth Avenue and I could find tofu in a variety of configurations twenty- four hours a day. I adored my friends, I loved my parents, and I usually didn’t mind my brother. I lived in a city, if not a country, where two men could make out in public with impunity. There was no one to keep me from heading out of the subway station, going to the airport, and, if my bank account permitted, hopping a plane to China. Or Atlanta. Or Spain. I pushed aside guilt, figuring someone had to actually experience the freedom to which so much of this subjugated, avian- flu- fearing, war-stricken world aspired. If no one lived it, then what was the point of anyone having dreams?

  And I was living It.

  Right?

  I was pretty sure I was living It.

  I boarded my train and tried to hold on to my high.

  TWO

  I SQUEEZED INTO A SEAT ACROSS FROM A SLEEPING FAMILY with teenagers for parents—poof went my life- is- grand high— and reflexively scanned the subway car for Him. Just as quickly, I tried to convince myself that I was studying the bilingual ad exhorting HIV testing.

  Oh, the lust of my life, the thorn in my side. The light in my heart, the pain in my ass. Hayden Briggs, that son- of- a- bitch— no, that troubled, sexy psychopath—was the main reason I could not declare myself a well- balanced, completely healthy woman. (Almost, but not quite.) Hayden and I had been broken up for a year already—okay, two years—and I was over him, I really was, but I was still obsessed with him. There is a difference, which not enough books, psychiatric diagnoses manuals included, make a point of articulating.

  I had moved on, dated other guys, considered what each would look like at the far end of a petal- strewn aisle, but I still dreamed about Hayden at least once a week, and I looked everywhere for that distinctive thatch of red hair falling lazily over one mischievous eye. On the street, at the Food Em porium, in Hudson River Park, through the windows of cabs stopped at red lights. In elevators and cafés, at crashed parties, in the background of murder scenes on the evening news.

  I’d met Hayden at the Odeon, that Deco mainstay of West Broadway, where Tag and I had crashed the afterparty for the New York Press Club awards. Hayden was a reporter for the New York Post and his homicide beat was one of the main reasons I’d been attracted to him. He’d call me while I waited alone at Café Loup to tell me he was standing in the blood of three murdered men in the South Bronx. It was titillating enough to distract me from the fact that he was also standing me up.

  He’d show up three hours later at my apartment, sweaty, with a tired smile, holding a six- pack and flowers, and tell me all he wanted was to climb into bed with me.

  “On you, I mean,” he’d amend, pursing his lips. And I was so turned on by his lithe, freckled body and his grown- up career—all the other guys I’d dated were production assistants who bossily halted pedestrian traffic or grad students slogging through classes in pursuit of a lofty, low- paying degree—that I let him stand me up over and over again.

  When Tag was too busy describin
g new species to listen to the blow- by- blow accounts of my Hayden addiction, I turned to three other fellow survivors of the Sterling School, which had been a pit of institutionalized snobbery save for them, my angels of snarkiness and sensitivity. I didn’t want to bother Abigail, who was grading exams and packing for Stanford to pursue aforementioned low- paying, lofty career. Lucy, perki-ness incarnate, was a social worker who might be too easy on me. When I needed tough love, I interrupted Mercedes, who was merely boning up for the Philharmonic’s fall season.

  “You’re a booty call,” she bluntly concluded one night over the phone, plucking her viola impatiently.

  “Am not!” I growled at her. It was ten- thirty and I had just returned home from another evening of eating sushi in the company of National Geographic. Hayden had great taste in restaurants, even if I was rarely at them with him. The door buzzed.

  “Ooh, gotta go, he’s here!” I hung up on her and checked myself in the mirror. I had on a perfectly worn, soft, clingy gray T-shirt that made my stomach look flat and my boobs round, and boxer shorts that suggested a trail of past lovers. My hair was down and wild and the whole look was calculated to look sexy- sleepy- messy, not like I’d been eating tekka maki solo. It was calculated to get us into bed, the place where our putative relationship flourished. I rubbed my cheeks, licked my lips, and flung open the door.

  “Mmm,” he said, letting his eyes run over me. “God, it’s good to see you after a hard day.” Which prompted visions of firing up the camping stove in the middle of the Sudanese jungle, following a day covering guerrilla warfare. Hayden would report and I would take awe- inspiring photos for National Geographic. At night we’d make love in our moldy tent and, sometime after that, we’d hold hands at the Pulitzer awards ceremony before our joint acceptance speech. We were going to have a great life together.

  If I could just ignore the two beers he swigged while he was inside me. He placed an empty on the headboard and reached for another from under the bed. “Want one?” he asked.

  I shook my head in a way that I hoped wouldn’t be taken as judgmental, even though I was pretty sure this wasn’t normal.

  “You don’t drink?”

  My non- drinking was frequently an issue with boyfriends precisely because there was no issue. No ascetic streak, no hidden pieties, no alcoholism in the family, and none in me— though sometimes I was tempted to darkly hint that I was “recovering” because it seemed a lot more interesting than admitting I’d never developed a taste for spirits. Getting buzzed was fun, getting bombed was fun, and I had no problem with people who wanted to do both those things—I would have liked to join them more often, but I just couldn’t get enough liquor down before surrendering to Pepsi.

  “Eh,” I told Hayden, hoping to avoid the conversation.

  “Are you an alcoholic?” he asked eagerly.

  “I’d rather not discuss it,” I said quietly, trying to suggest that I was a founding member of AA.

  “Is it a problem for you to be around this?” He held up a Red Stripe nervously.

  “No,” I reassured him. “I’m pretty strong.” He looked relieved and popped open a third bottle.

  I made the mistake of running this behavior by the Sterling Girls.

  “You mean, he drinks after sex, like a cigarette?” Tag asked.

  “No … during,” I said, realizing I should never have brought it up.

  “That’s disgusting,” proclaimed Mercedes.

  “Now, wait, don’t judge her,” Lucy reprimanded, her social worker’s license burning a hole through every single interaction in her life.

  “I’m judging him,” Mercedes told her flatly.

  But then Hayden would surprise me and actually show up for a date on time and we would stare into each other’s eyes over candlelight. I’d ask him about his career and his past and I’d throb all over with the novelty of having a truly adult relationship.

  And he really was a grown- up: I was a fetus when he was going through puberty. I had hoped to hide our age span from my parents indefinitely Actually I had hoped to hide Hayden from them indefinitely His past may or may not have included a brief marriage, and he had a mysterious rift with a brother back in California that kept him at arm’s length from his whole family. I, on the other hand, lived downstairs from my parents and couldn’t have kept a hangnail a secret from them if my life depended on it.

  Only months after the relationship finally, finally ended for the final,/maZtime was I able to admit to myself that our dates had been elaborate products of my own imagination. I asked Hayden lots of questions and he murmured vague assents, never taking his hand off of mine, never looking away from me, and I had mistaken this performance for deep conversation. He was a writer, a reporter, maybe even a divorcé; ergo, he was a veteran communicator with a soul annealed by all those atrocities he’d witnessed, a still water that ran deep. In fact, he was probably the stupidest guy I’ve ever dated, and I had projected an entire relationship onto the blankest of blank slates.

  Finally, after he went AWOL for ten days—with nary a booty call—and I was furious, bonkers with rejection, and all the more horny for being so manifestly mistreated, I called it quits. I met him for margaritas (easy on the tequila) at Teddy’s one hot July night and told him exactly what an asshole he was, which unexpectedly thrilled me. I wasn’t in the habit of telling people off and I certainly never cursed at anyone. If people wronged me, I analyzed it with the Sterling Girls, stewed in silence, and waited for the sting to fade.

  “You treat me so badly,” I told him loudly, hoping my anger was irresistibly sexy. “You treat me the way people get treated on Maury Povich. Now I know what women everywhere are going through. Thank you for helping me understand my fellow sisters!” I pointed a finger at him. “I don’t intend to be treated like this ever again!” I was enamored with my own eloquence. “I thank you, I really do, for giving me an experience that helps me understand the stuff of self- help books, but I’m done with this shit.”

  He just watched me, chin in hand, smiling his lazy bedroom smile, and I knew I must look good going nuts. It was a huge turn- on, making a scene like that. He slid his tongue over the length of my accusing finger and later we slept together and that was it.

  Almost.

  I managed not to see or hear from Hayden for about five weeks. I Googled him every couple of hours and would start to tingle if I even saw anyone reading the Post, but I kept my sticky little fingers away from his phone number. And just as I was getting a grip, having invited Rick, a web designer, upstairs after a peaceful first date, Hayden called me. It was eleven at night.

  “Can you come over?” he asked in his gravelly voice, which sounded sad, though I may have just wanted it to. I might have resisted except for the fact that I had never, in our four and a half months of simu- dating, seen his apartment.

  “Your place is so much homier. I feel really good here,” he’d say when I tried to steer us toward his place.

  So I told Rick that my sister needed me right away.

  “I thought you said you only had a brother—in Colorado.” Rick squinted at me in confusion. It gave me hives to think I’d hurt someone’s feelings, which is why I went on so many bad second dates. But Hayden made me act in new ways. In mean ways.

  “It’s my cousin—sometimes I call her my sister. I’m sorry.” I pushed Rick out the door, grabbed a toothbrush and some condoms, and headed for the subway.

  It was late, but I detested cabs: they got stuck in traffic, were gut- wrenchingly expensive, and it seemed like pure folly to accept a ride from a stranger just because his car was yellow and had a medallion. But as I frantically paced the subway platform, waiting for a train that was moseying uptown on a late-night schedule, I feared my beef with the Taxi & Limousine Commission would cost me my last chance with Hayden.

  I arrived at his building nearly forty- five minutes later, terrified that he might have changed his mind. My fear should have spotlighted the worm- eaten foundations on whi
ch our affair was built, but my blinders were firmly back in place. I don’t know what I expected—a dark little walk- up filled with smoke and the smell of cabbage, a pudgy Russian landlady in a house-dress, eyeing my ascent disapprovingly? Was that how I thought a beat reporter should live? His neat white box of a high- rise apartment in a doorman building was a disappointment. It revealed no more of him than I already knew.

  “No photographs,” I observed pointedly, giving myself a tour after he opened the door. He had tried to kiss me hello, but I was going to make him beg for it—if I could just keep my shaky legs (purposely on display in last season’s floral Gap skirt and painfully high slingbacks on loan from Mercedes) from collapsing out of sheer desire.

  “It looks like a Crate and Barrel showroom,” I snorted.

  “It does,” he admitted with a hint of self- pity. “I didn’t have the time or know- how.” He grabbed my hand and held it tightly between both of his. “Zephyr?” he said plaintively.

  Four and a half months of whatever we’d been doing, and he had managed never to utter my name, not on the phone, not to my face. I’d tried not to think about it too much. At that moment, insanely, all the “Hey you”s seemed worth it just to finally hear him say my name. I let him pull me behind a rice- paper screen and onto his bed.

  Because there was no beer involved, because he had finally let me see his apartment, because he had said my name, I made myself believe Hayden had changed. We were at his place. He couldn’t slip out the door before sunrise and I sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere until morning, so for the first time we spent the entire night together.

  I surrendered to bliss. I lay on his khaki sheets listening to the garbage trucks make their pickups and studying his sleeping face, something I’d never had the chance to do before. I told his unconscious self that I loved him. I imagined a wedding in shorts and hiking boots atop a craggy Mayan ruin, exchanging vows in the mist on a quick break from a dangerous assignment. I imagined advising panicked women in volatile relationships, telling them how many great marriages had rocky beginnings. Just look at Hayden and me! But it took effort to tune out my mother’s frequently repeated axiom about relationships: the beginning, at least, should be heavy on the happy. Otherwise you don’t have a whole lot to work with when the going inevitably gets tough.