We all closed our eyes.
“Anita?” asked the doctor.
“I’m tired,” she said immediately.
“Bonnie?”
“Oh, maybe tired. Maybe a little hungry, too,” she said.
“And emotionally?” he prodded.
Bonnie sighed. “I’m sick of my school,” she finally muttered. “The kids say rotten things to me.” I snuck a peek at her. Her eyes were still tightly screwed shut, and her hands were clenched into fists on top of her oversized jeans. High school, evidently, had not gotten any kinder or gentler since my own attendance ten years prior. I wished I could put my hand on her shoulder. Tell her that things would get better… except, given recent events in my own life, I wasn’t sure it was the truth.
“Lily?”
“Starving,” Lily said promptly.
“And emotionally?”
“Umm… okay,” she said.
“Just okay?” asked the doctor.
“There’s a new episode of ER on tonight,” she said. “I can’t be anything less than okay.”
“Esther?”
“I’m ashamed,” said Esther, and burst into tears. I opened my eyes. The doctor pulled a small packet of Kleenex out of his pocket and handed it over.
“Why ashamed?” he asked gently.
Esther smiled weakly. “ ‘Cause before we started I was looking at the plastic pork chop, and I was thinking that it didn’t look half bad.”
That broke the tension. We all started laughing, even the doctor. Esther sniffled, wiping her eyes.
“Don’t worry,” Lily said. “I was thinking the exact same thing about the pat of butter on the food pyramid.”
The doctor cleared his throat. “And Candace?” he asked.
“Cannie,” I said.
“How are you?”
I closed my eyes, but only for a second and what I saw was Bruce’s face, Bruce’s brown eyes close to mine. Bruce saying that he loved me. Then I opened them and looked right at him. “Fine,” I said, even though it wasn’t true. “I’m fine.”
“So how’d it go?” asked Samantha. We were panting on side-by-side StairMasters that night at the gym.
“So far, not bad,” I said. “No drugs yet. The doctor who’s leading the class seems okay.”
We climbed in silence for a few minutes, the belts grinding and squeaking beneath our feet as a Funky Fitness class blared away beside us. Our gym seemed determined to attract new members by offering every flavor-of-the-week fitness class, so we had Pilates, gospel aerobics, interval spinning, and something called the Fireman’s Full-Body Workout, complete with hoses, ladders, and a one-hundred-pound mannequin to be hauled up and down the stairs. Meanwhile, the roof leaked, the air conditioners were iffy, and the Jacuzzi always seemed to be under repair.
“And how was the rest of your day, dear?” asked Sam, wiping her face with her sleeve. I told her about Mr. Deiffenger’s angry defense of Celine Dion.
“I hate readers,” I gasped, as my StairMaster kicked into a higher gear. “Why do they have to get so personal?”
“I guess he probably figures that you were messing with Celine, so you deserve it.”
“Yeah, but she’s public property. I’m just me.”
“But not to him, you’re not. Your name’s in the paper. That makes you public property, just like Celine.”
“Only bigger.”
“And with better taste. And not,” said Samantha sternly, “with any plans to marry your seventy-year-old manager who’s known you since you were twelve.”
“Oh, now who’s being critical?” I asked.
“Damn Canadians,” said Samantha. She’d spent a few years working in Montreal, had endured a disastrous love affair with a man there, and never had anything nice to say about our neighbors to the North, including Peter Jennings, whom she steadfastly refused to watch, arguing that he’d taken a job that should have rightfully gone to an American— “someone who knows how to say the word about.”
After forty miserable minutes, we adjourned to the steam room, wrapped ourselves in towels, and assumed prone positions on the benches.
“How’s the Yoga King?” I inquired. Sam gave a satisfied-looking smile and raised her arms above her head, reaching toward the ceiling.
“I’m feeling very flexible,” she said smugly. I threw my towel at her head.
“Don’t torture me,” I said. “I’m probably never going to have sex again.”
#147;Oh, cut it out, Cannie,” said Samantha. “And you know this won’t last. Mine never do.” Which was true. Sam’s love life, of late, had been uniquely cursed. She’d meet a guy and go out with him once, and everything would be wonderful. They’d meet again, and things would be clicking along. And then, on the third date, there’d be some horrible awkward moment, some unbelievable revelation, something that would basically make it impossible for Sam to see the guy again. Her last guy, a Jewish doctor with a fabulous résumé and enviable physique, had looked like a contender until Date #3, when he’d taken Sam home for dinner and she’d been disturbed to find a picture of his sister prominently displayed in the entryway hall.
“What’s wrong with that?” I’d asked.
“She was topless,” Samantha’d replied. Exit Dr. Right, enter the Yoga King.
“Look at it this way,” said Samantha. “It was a lousy day, but now it’s over.”
“I just wish I could talk to him.”
Samantha brushed her hair back over her shoulders, propped her head on an elbow, and stared down at me from her perch on one of the upper tiers of wooden benches. “To Mr. Deiffledorf?”
“Deiffinger. No, not him.” I ladled more water on the hot rocks so the steam billowed around us. “To Bruce.”
Samantha squinted at me through the haze. “Bruce? I don’t get it.”
“What if…,” I said slowly. “What if I made a mistake?”
She sighed. “Cannie, I listened to you for months talk about how things weren’t right, how things weren’t getting better, how you knew that taking a break would be the right thing to do in the long run. And even though you were upset right after it happened, I never heard you say that you’d made the wrong decision.”
“What if I think something different now?”
“Well, what changed your mind?”
I thought about my answer. The article was part of it. Bruce and I had never talked about my whole weight thing. Maybe if we had… if he had some sense of how I felt, if I had some inkling of how much he understood… maybe things could have been different.
But more than that, I missed talking to him, telling him how my day went, blowing off steam about Gabby’s latest salvos, reading him potential leads for my stories, scenes from my screenplays.
“I just miss him,” I said lamely.
“Even after what he wrote about you?” asked Sam.
“Maybe it wasn’t so bad,” I muttered. “I mean, he didn’t say that he didn’t find me… you know… desirable.”
“Of course he found you desirable,” Sam said. “You didn’t find him desirable. You found him lazy, and immature, and a slob, and you told me not three months ago lying on this very bench that if he left one more used piece of Kleenex in your bed you were going to kill him and leave his body on a New Jersey Transit bus.”
I winced. I couldn’t remember the line exactly, but it sure sounded like something I’d say.
“And if you called him,” Samantha continued, “what would you say?”
“Hi, how are you, planning on humiliating me in print again anytime soon?” I’d actually had a monthlong reprieve. Bruce’s October “Good in Bed” had been called “Love and the Glove.” Someone— Gabby, I was practically sure— had left a copy on my desk at work the day before, and I’d read it as fast as I could, with my heart in my throat, until I’d determined that there wasn’t a word about C. Not this month, at least.
Real men wear condoms, was his first line. Which was a hoot, considering that during our three years together Bruce had been almost completely spared the indignities of latex. We’d both tested clean, and I went on the pill after a handful of dismaying times when his erection would wilt the instant I produced the Trojans. That minor detail was, of course, notably absent from the story, along with the fact that I’d wound up putting the thing on him— an act that left me feeling like an overprotective mother tying her little boy’s shoes. Donning the glove is more than a mere duty, he’d lectured Moxie’s readers. It’s a sign of devotion, of maturity, a sign of respect for all womankind— and a sign of his love for you.
Now, the memory of the way he’d really been regarding condoms seemed too tender to even consider. And the thought of Bruce and I in bed together made me cringe, because of the thought that came dashing in on its heels: We’ll never be like that again.
“Don’t call him,” said Sam. “I know it feels awful right now, but you’ll get through it. You’ll survive.”
“Thank you, Gloria Gaynor,” I grumbled, and went to take a shower.
When I got home, my answering machine was blinking. I hit “play” and heard Steve. “Remember me? The guy in the park? Listen, I was just wondering if you’d like to get that beer this week or maybe dinner. Give me a call.”
I smiled as I walked Nifkin, grinned when I cooked myself a chicken breast and a sweet potato and spinach for dinner, beamed all through my twenty-minute consultation with Sam on the question of Steve, Cute Guy from the Park. At nine o’clock precisely I dialed his number. He sounded glad to hear from me. He sounded… great, in fact. Funny. Considerate. Interested in what I did. We quickly covered the basics of each other’s lives: ages, colleges, oh-did-you-know-Janie-from-my-high-school, a little bit about parents and family (I left out the whole lesbian mother thing, in order to have something to talk about in the event of a second date), and a little bit about why-we’re-single-right-now (I gave the two-sentence synopsis of the Bruce denouement. He told me he’d had a girlfriend back in Atlanta, but she’d gone to nursing school and he’d moved here). I told him about covering the Pillsbury bake-off. He told me that he’d taken up kayaking. We decided to meet for dinner on Saturday night at the Latest Dish and maybe catch a movie after that.
“So maybe this will be okay,” I told Nifkin, who didn’t seem to care much, one way or the other. He turned three times and settled himself on a pillow. I put on my nightgown, trying to avoid glimpses of my body in the bathroom mirror, and went to sleep feeling cautiously optimistic that there was at least a chance that I wouldn’t die alone.
Samantha and I had long since identified Azafran as our designated first date restaurant. It had all the advantages: It was right around the corner from her house and my apartment. The food was good, it wasn’t too expensive, it was BYOB, which gave us the chance to a) impress the guy by bringing a good bottle of wine, and b) eliminate the possibility of the guy getting blotto, because there’d be nothing more than the single bottle. And, best of all, Azafran had floor-to-ceiling windows, and waitresses who worked out at our gym, who knew us, and who would obligingly seat us at the window tables— our backs to the street, with the guy facing forward— so that whichever one of us didn’t have the date could stroll by with Nifkin and scope out the prospect.
I was congratulating myself, because Steve looked eminently scop-able. Short-sleeved polo shirt, neat khakis that looked as though he might actually have ironed them, and a pleasant whiff of cologne. A nice change from Bruce, who was given to stained T-shirts and droopy shorts and who could, absent frequent reminders on my part, be somewhat haphazard in his deodorant use.
I smiled at Steve. He smiled back. Our fingers brushed over the calamari. The wine was delicious, perfectly chilled, and it was a perfect night, with a clear, starry sky and just a hint of fall in the wind.
“So what did you do today?” he asked me.
“Went for a bike ride, up to Chestnut Hill,” I said. “Thought about you…”
Something flickered across his face then. Something bad.
“Look,” he said quietly. “I ought to tell you something. When I asked if you wanted to have a beer with me… well, I told you I was new to the neighborhood… I mean, I was really just looking for… you know. For friends. For people to hang out with.”
The calamari turned into a lead ball in my stomach. “Oh.”
“And I guess I didn’t make that clear enough… that, I mean that this isn’t a date or anything… oh, God,” he said. “Don’t look at me like that.”
Don’t cry, I told myself. Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry. How had I misread this so badly? I was pathetic. A walking joke. I wanted Bruce back. Hell, I wanted my mother. Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry.
“Your eyes,” he said softly. “Your eyes are killing me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said dumbly. Apologizing as always. This cannot get any worse, I thought. Steve stared over my head, out the window.
“Hey,” he said, “isn’t that your dog?”
I turned, and, sure enough, there was Samantha, and Nifkin, both peering through the window. Sam looked impressed. As I stared, she flashed me a quick thumbs-up.
“Will you excuse me?” I murmured. I stood up, forcing my feet to move. In the ladies’ room I splashed cold water on my face, concentrating on not breathing, feeling the tears I couldn’t cry mass behind my forehead and instantly transform themselves into a headache. I considered the night ahead: dinner, then we were supposed to go see the latest world-ending disaster flick at the multiplex. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t spend the whole night sitting next to a guy who’d just declared himself an un-date. And maybe that made me too sensitive, or ridiculous, but the truth was, I couldn’t do it.
I went to the kitchen and found our waitress.
“Almost ready,” she said, then looked at my face. “Oh, God… what? He’s gay. He’s an escaped convict. He used to date your mother.”
“Along those lines,” I said.
“Want me to tell him you’re sick?”
“Yeah,” I said, then thought again. “No. Tell you what… pack up the food, and don’t tell him anything. Let’s see how long he sits there.”
She rolled her eyes. “That bad?”
“There’s another way out of here, right?”
She pointed to the fire exit, which was propped open by a chair containing a busboy on a break. “Go for it,” she said, and a minute later, clutching two to-go containers and what remained of my pride, I slunk past the busboy and out into the night. My head was pounding. Fool, I thought fiercely. Idiot. Stupid, stupid idiot to think that somebody who looks like that would be interested in someone who looks like you.