Audrey’s Door (3 page)

During her second year in school, with one aspect of her life in place, she decided to shoot for gold and shore up the other part, too. Her first effort was E-Harmony, but their standards against weird were too high, because after she filled out their hundred-item questionnaire, they told her she was unmatchable. Next she tried singleny.com, then smoked up with the last of Billy’s hash before her dates because she’d needed the courage. She let the first guy kiss her even though she didn’t like him, because a girl needs a first kiss. “Farmer’s daughters are my favorite! You’re as sweet as jelly!” he’d announced, and she hadn’t corrected him by letting him know that the closest she’d gotten to a farm was when Betty had worked as a secretary at the John Deere in Hinton.

She let the next guy get to second base. She liked him a little better, but not much. He’d lived with his parents in the Trump Towers, and kept talking about how
much money he would inherit when they died. From the broken veins across his nose and the half bottle of Bombay Gin he downed, she got the feeling that she’d hooked herself a boozer. “You’re forty-two years old, right?” she’d asked, thinking such a question would shame him, but instead he’d answered, “I lied on the application. I’m forty-nine.”

Compared to his predecessors, Saraub was Prince Charming. His name was pronounced Sore-rub but his friends called him Bobby, because, before political correctness, that was what kindergarten teachers at Manhattan private schools renamed all the Indian kids—they didn’t like having to pronounce foreign words. Worse, she later learned, his real name was Saurabh, but the hospital got it wrong on the birth certificate.

From his short, no-nonsense e-mails she’d learned that he was a documentary filmmaker, he liked Frank Miller comic books, especially Batman, and he was teaching himself to play the harmonica. Badly. He’d never once written that she was
hot,
that he’d like to poke her, or that he wanted to fill a room with oodles of crisp hundred-dollar bills and swim naked through them with her. “Yours, Saraub,” he always signed, and the first time she’d read that, she’d thought:
Okay, I’ll take you.

“Are you stoned?” Saraub had asked when she met him outside the Film Forum movie theatre, where they’d arranged to see Hitchcock’s
Strangers on a Train.
Her pupils must have been dilated to the size of black aggie marbles. So far, he was the only guy who’d noticed.

“Yeah. I hardly ever smoke anymore. But I got nervous,” she’d confessed.

He was about six-foot-six, and wide as a linebacker, but he stood kind of slumped, like he’d been putting people at ease about his girth for so long that he’d given himself bad posture. His online profile had framed only his face: clear skin and big, puppy-dog brown eyes. She
hadn’t noticed his twenty-inch neck. Probably, to get his blue pin-striped shirt to hang so nicely, he’d had it made special.

He bent down so that they were talking eye to eye. “Do I look that scary?”

She’d shrugged. This was her third date in a month, and already she was sick of the bullshit. “Yeah, you do look scary, but that’s not why I’m high. I don’t date normally, but ever since I moved to New York, I decided to try, you know? I don’t come from much, but I’m trying.”

He’d frowned. Maybe he’d expected the gleeful Audrey Lucas from the singleny.com profile, who ended all her sentences with exclamation points (looking forward to meeting you!!!) to be his soul mate, but the somber woman with crow’s-feet waiting for him at Film Forum had dashed his hopes. He looked up at the sky, like he was just a little pissed off at God. It occurred to her that getting high before a date is kind of rude.

“Hey, I’m sorry. What can I do?” she asked.

Cars trundled down West Houston Street and toward the Holland Tunnel. “I’m trying, too,” he said as a cab hit a pothole, so she wasn’t sure she’d heard him right.

“What?”

He shook his head. “Forget it. I should go. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Normally, she would have let him leave. Her tiny, four-walled dorm room whose bathroom she shared with three other girls needed vacuuming, and he was a fat Indian guy, so why chase him? She could call forty-nine-year-old contestant number two tonight instead. They’d go out and get sloshed, and in a way that would be easier because he wouldn’t look at her the way Saraub was looking at her right now, like he was actually trying to
see
her.

He started to walk away, and it slipped out before she had the chance to censor herself: “Don’t go. I like you.”
Suddenly, she was red-faced and sober. Her heart beat in her ears (squish-squish!), and she looked around for a hole to crawl inside of and hide.

Saraub turned back and smiled like he was amused. He
saw
her. Her whole life, she’d been a phantom. She and Betty had moved around so often that she’d never had time to make friends, and when they finally did put down roots, it had been too late to learn how. Sometimes she got so lonely, she caught herself talking to the damn cactus. But, looking at Saraub, she glimpsed the promise of something better. His arms looked firm. Like if he wrapped them around her, he’d weigh her down and make her real. In her mind, she hugged him back. She pressed her fingers along his spine and let him know that around her, it was okay to stand tall.

“Come on,” she pleaded, even though this was the first time she could remember ever chasing a man instead of running in the opposite direction. It felt scary. It felt alive. “It’ll be my treat.”

He narrowed his eyes like he was thinking hard on something. “The thing is,” he said, “my family has somebody picked out. An arranged marriage. I thought…I’d see what else was out there. I’ve only ever dated Indian girls, but I’m getting married next month. Twenty-four days, actually.”

“Oh,” she said. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat, but it stayed there. She looked down at the sidewalk. His shoes were shiny loafers. Hers were ballet flats. The smell of popcorn was in the air. She wondered if she cleaned more often than necessary because she was lonely.

“I shouldn’t complain. I’m no catch,” he’d said, patting his ample gut. In his profile he’d called himself fit. Then again, she’d called herself an optimist. “The girl—she’s not my type. She smiles all the time, but she never says anything. It’s annoying.”

“What’s your type?” Audrey asked. She ached so
much at the thought of losing this stranger that she thought she might cry, so she bit her lip and looked at the man in the ticket booth, who was counting quarters one by one.

Saraub ran his hands along his suit, straightening the fabric. It was a Saturday. She didn’t think he was going to work after this, which meant he’d worn it for her. “Complicated. My type is complicated. Would you mind seeing the movie, just as friends?”

She nodded. By the time the tennis star’s wife got murdered in the reflection in Patricia Hitchcock’s glasses, they were holding hands. By the third “just friends” date, he’d postponed the wedding.

She was afraid to tell him that she was a thirty-three-year-old virgin, so they didn’t sleep together until their tenth date. To avoid the humiliation of such a confession, she’d considered breaking up with him. But she liked him too much, so instead she braved the adult section of Kim’s Video on 112
^th
and Broadway, and rented three pornos.
Dr. Cocksalot,
with his fingers made of penises, provoked the most giggles, though it had lacked the desired erotic effect. She studied it until she thought she could put on a decent show and make him believe she wasn’t new to the world of love.

Her plan had one flaw. Sex is terrifying. As soon as he unzipped his jeans, and his little friend poked its way out of his blue silk briefs, she started crying. What was she supposed to do with that thing? Hold it? Compliment it? Give it a cute name? She’d never seen one before in real life!

Then she’d laughed, loud and braying, because this was absurd. After all the bad shit with Betty she’d faced with the kind of poker face that even a stoic would envy, she’d picked now to cry, when she was happy for the first time in her life, and a nice man finally wanted to touch her.

Saraub hiked his trousers. Shirtless and blushing so
hard his brown face turned red, he’d looked down at his stomach like it had done something wrong, hunched his shoulders, and tried to make himself small.

She stopped laughing, and leaped off his queen-sized bed. Melted Mallomar crumbs from one of his late-night snack sprees were stuck to her back like freckles. “It’s not you. I—I love you,” she’d blurted, so intent on keeping the immediate secret that she hemorrhaged the more important one. “But I’m…. I never dated, you know? I used to be kind of a shut-in. I was too scared. I never…”

He’d smiled then, a lazy, cat-that-ate-the-canary grin, and dropped his trousers again. “It’s okay,” he told her. “You don’t have to say.” She cried through the whole thing, but not because she was sad. She’d gone and done something stupid. After all the ways she’d let crazy Betty Lucas break her heart, she’d finally opened up and trusted somebody again.

“I’m glad it was me,” he told her when they were done, and lying in each other’s arms. “Because I really love you.”

At those words, she’d felt something inside her crack apart. Her whole body got warm. Sometimes you can feel your walls as they break. “Me, too,” she said.

Six months later, she and her cactus moved into Saraub’s apartment on the Upper East Side. With his wedding officially canceled, his family, who lived twenty blocks away on Park Avenue, cut him off. No more ski trips. No more health insurance. All they had to live on was his freelance income and her tips from waiting tables on weekends at La Rosita. “I’m so sorry,” she’d told him.

He’d rubbed the back of her neck in that way that made her purr. “I’m not. I’m relieved. I wish I’d done it sooner.”

She tried to hide it for the first few months, but after a while, she couldn’t help it; she rearranged his kitchen
cabinets, moved the framed poster of dogs playing poker to the space behind the door so she wouldn’t have to look at it, and scrubbed all the floors with a toothbrush. He was understanding because he had a few quirks of his own. He was a documentarian, which provided him the excuse of filming people with his camera phone when they weren’t paying attention. At least once a week she caught him holding up his phone while she sipped her morning coffee. She shooed him with a wave of her hands like he was a fly: “Are you kidding? I haven’t even brushed my hair!” But after a while she learned to ignore it. Some men buy flowers, others carry around footage of what their girlfriends look like at 6:30 A.M.

After their first year of domestic bliss, Saraub started talking about finding a bigger place. With his I
NY tourism commercial editing gigs, and the job at Vesuvius, she was about to start, they could afford a house in Yonkers, maybe even start a family. She’d nodded and changed the subject, because she’d figured he wasn’t serious. Besides, it wasn’t
that
outlandish: she’d kept a cactus alive for five years; a baby couldn’t be that much harder, could it?…Right? And the truth was, this happy family bullshit, with its white picket fence and healthy Campbell’s-Soup-looking kids he kept dreaming about; it sounded pretty good.

One morning, he woke her up with a cup of coffee and the real-estate section of the
New York Times,
in which he’d circled about five house listings. “Let’s take the train to Yonkers and have a look,” he’d nudged. She’d rolled over and told him she had too much homework, which was true. She’d been working ninety hour weeks to get her thesis finished on time.

When the project was done and she’d been at the new job a few months, she couldn’t put him off anymore. They went to Yonkers. Saw a classic Victorian over
looking the Hudson River. “It’s run-down,” he’d told her. “But the taxes are low, and I know you’ll work wonders.” As soon as the broker left to take a phone call, he got down on one knee.

“I’ve got a surprise,” he told her as he reached into his pocket. A lock of black hair fell into his eyes, and she thought he was the most handsome and terrifying man in the world. The air got thin, and the walls felt closer. She pressed her hands against them to keep from getting crushed.

“I saved up the money for the deposit,” he said. He was so proud that he’d done it without his family’s help that she had to smile, and be proud of him, too. “It’s our house if we want.”

“Wow,” she mumbled, while pushing hard against plaster and trying to remember to breathe.

He opened a velvet box. Something sparkled. “My grandmother’s,” he explained. “Do you like it?”

The ring was small and classy. Antique platinum. Perfect. She loved it. The house was perfect, too. She took a deep breath and held herself steady. Then again, it wasn’t perfect at all. This was a man who burst into the bathroom while she was showering, just to announce he was leaving for work. This was a man who, no kidding, really did eat crackers in bed. His grandparents had survived famine, and as a result he thought that food equaled love. When she came home from school at night, he scampered out of the bedroom like a puppy dog: “How was your day? Did you have a good day?…I baked you this pie! Eat my delicious rhubarb pie!”