Perfection (27 page)

I arrived on time at the restaurant he’d picked, a Mexican place in the East Twenties. Despite the festive atmosphere, I was feeling prim and guarded that evening.
Don’t drink too much, just observe.
I sat at the bar to wait, looking up nervously as unattached men entered. Derek, unmistakable, strolled in a few minutes later in black jeans, black T-shirt, black boots, and a well-worn black leather motorcycle jacket slung over his shoulder.

Derek ordered both of us tequila, fancy stuff. Then he ordered a second round for himself. Derek was an effusive man, and I was happy to let him do most of the talking. The waiter arrived with our food. I was suddenly very hungry and ate the unmemorable meal with gusto, grateful to have something purposeful to do with my hands. He told me a bit about his work, then moved on to the topic of his marriage, which had ended several years earlier. Talking about one’s checkered past was First Date No-No Number 1 (I’d read that recently in a women’s magazine at the hair salon), but I didn’t mind, since I’d asked, and since this was a research project. His tale seemed somewhat rehearsed.

“My wife calls me on my cell phone, while I’m out of town on a work trip, to tell me she wants a divorce.”

He continued to speak about the dissolution of his married life with sorrow. He had lost a house and custody of a beloved dog. I wouldn’t have picked him for a homeowner somehow. I tried to imagine him mowing a lawn in black leather boots and black jeans. Then I imagined, as I had frequently, how bitterly Henry and I would have fought over our house and Liza’s custody.

Derek, now looking a bit woozy after a couple more tequilas, seemed intelligent, capable of love, but still genuinely brokenhearted. And not someone I would ever present to Liza. Not someone I’d have sex with even once. Just a quick kiss would feel dangerous.

The waiter brought the check. I promptly pulled out my wallet and asked Derek if we could split the bill. He blew off my offer with a mumbled comment: “Chicks don’t pay.”

Whoaa, there.
The last time I’d been called a “chick” (sometime in the seventies?), whoever it was had gotten a mouthful from me. Tonight, it didn’t seem worth the effort to complain. With some guilt I gazed across the table toward the bill. It wasn’t cheap, especially for a first date, a one-off at that. But then, I consoled myself, a good part of the bill was the liquor.

We left. He held the door. Outside, he put his arm around my shoulder.
Is this affection or lust, or does he need some propping up?

“I’s early,” he slurred. “How ’bout I buy us a bottle of champagne? Would ya come back to my place? We could have a drink?”

Anna, Chloe, and any other friend who loved me would have told me to hail a cab right there and get on home. But I really wanted to see how he lived. Looking at his glassy eyes, I didn’t feel in any danger. He was sloppy drunk. I was stone sober. Given his present state, I was pretty sure that I could take care of myself.
I felt a great clearheaded pleasure in allowing my curiosity to run wild. I wanted to open my eyes wide, see everything I could see, and then I wanted to hail a taxi and go home.

We walked down Third Avenue to the nearest liquor store. Derek removed his arm from around my shoulder and strolled, a bit wobbly, to the refrigerated case. He took out a bottle of Veuve-Cliquot. I didn’t even offer to pay. I waited quietly by the register while he fumbled with his credit card and clumsily signed the receipt.

I followed him up the wooden stairs in his drab lobby, which were sinking in places and rickety where they were not sinking.
I can still turn around, and take a forever rain check.

As he stumbled across the second-floor landing, he wheeled around, as if caught in a strong gust of wind, and pointed to the door of a neighbor’s apartment.

“Cuckoo,” he mouthed, twirling his pointer finger around his ear. He whirled around again, and smashed his head into the support beam along the landing. He staggered, looking dazed, then stopped and staggered again, his hand reaching up to his forehead. He was bleeding profusely, blood dripping onto the floor.

“I’ve cut. Cut myself. Badly,” he said.

The laceration was at least an inch long and literally gushing blood. The blood made me queasy and frightened.
Shit. Only in New York.

“Maybe we should go to an emergency room,” I said. “You might need stitches. You might have a concussion.”

“No, no, I don’t wanna to do that. I feel stupid. I was, I was showing off for you and it was all…going so well.”

I felt sorry for him, really and truly. He had wanted me to like him. He didn’t know me at all. He didn’t know that this evening had been just a research project.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get this cleaned up.”

He managed the last flight up to his apartment, fumbled with the key, opened the door, and flopped down onto a futon couch—black—just inside the door.

While he slumped on the couch, I walked quickly through the apartment. The tiny kitchen area was an unabashed bachelor’s mess. After some cautious rummaging, I discovered what appeared to be a clean enough dishcloth, acceptable in the absence of a roll of paper towels. I brought the cloth over to Derek, whose gaze had followed me dizzily around the room. He seemed more focused now, and began mopping up the blood on his forehead.

On the back of his apartment door, still ajar, I noticed a collage of pictures of his family and one of a very cool-looking woman, standing in a windswept landscape. She looked like just the sort of woman he ought to go out with next. She looked like she would be very comfortable on the back of a motorcycle.

The bleeding subsided and he let me look at the cut.

“Derek, you really need to go to an emergency room. It’s a deep cut. I think you need stitches.”

“But I really don’t wanna do this. What a pain. I’m leaving town day after tomorrow, and then I’ll have to get the stitches taken out somewhere.”

“We have to go to a hospital and get stitches. It’ll be okay, I’ll go with you.”

On the street, I realized that I had not been to a hospital since Henry died. I thought about that and felt afraid. I started to cry. Derek stopped in the street.

“Wha’s wrong? S’okay. Just a cut.”

I couldn’t really explain, not then. He took my hand. It felt
good to connect on some level, any level. So many private feelings we would never share: my own pain that he could not understand, his shame and disappointment about whatever he had anticipated from this evening.

We sat in the ER waiting room on the brightly colored plastic chairs. I asked him about his work, and he seemed to relax a bit.

He sat forward, looking at me. It made me uncomfortable—he was looking at me so directly and he was still unsteady from the tequila.

“Sit back, relax,” I said, “we’re going to be here a while.”

“Don’t you want me to look at you?”

“You can look at me.” I sensed his regret that he had lost an opportunity to try to win me over that evening. I understood that he was as lonely as I was. And he didn’t have a lovely child to return to as I did. In that moment, I couldn’t wait to get back to my brother’s house in Brooklyn, where Liza would be sweetly sleeping. I couldn’t wait to kiss her cheek. Derek admired the hummingbird tattoo on my lower calf. I felt he might have liked to touch it, but he did not.

Finally a nurse called Derek’s name, and he went off to get patched up. I arranged my coat across a chair and lay against it. Some time later I felt his hand touching my shoulder—I had dozed off. He seemed surprised that I hadn’t already disappeared into the night. The cut had been patched up with a new kind of skin glue—no stitches.

“I’m tired,” I said with the peacefulness that follows the happy resolution of a medical crisis. “I’d like to go home now.”

Back outside, a welcome streak of yellow flashed by, and Derek charged chivalrously down the street after the taxi. I was winded by the time I caught up, looking forward to the warmth
and quiet of the trip home. As I tugged the door handle, Derek grabbed me and kissed me on the mouth firmly and with some passion. I turned away and got into my taxi, relieved and exhausted.

But I thought, as the cab pulled away from the curb, this was not a bad person, not at all, just a muddled person, still trying to understand how his marriage had ended and what to do about the rest of his life. That felt a lot like me.

Eliot said maybe we should have dinner
after all. And I was curious to meet him after so much entertaining dialogue. The level of stupid flirting, a delightful distraction from my considerable failures in Boyland, required some action one way or the other. I only hoped that I was suitably chastened after my encounters with Daniel and Tim. A date with Eliot, who I was quite sure actually liked me, in spite of my obvious unreliability, seemed like a safe adventure.

“Okay, Eliot, let’s do it. I’ll be visiting my parents this weekend. I think they’ll watch Lizzie for a night.”

“I’ll be back tomorrow morning. I am just going to have dinner with a friend.” I said this with a quick glance at road directions, trying to act casual. My parents looked at me curiously as I laid out my evening plans while preparing dinner for Liza. We were in the kitchen of their Connecticut weekend home, which was about forty-five minutes from Eliot’s house.

“It’s late already,” my father said, checking the time. “Are you all right driving back late tonight?” Since Henry’s death, my parents had become quite protective, which I mostly appreciated.

“Oh, he has a guest room. He’s got a big house.” I felt like a conniving teenager, my regression depressingly complete. No wonder Daniel had grown fed up with me.

My father shrugged as I continued to arrange Liza’s meal. I was grateful for his concern and the way he knew me well enough to just let some things go, without asking too many questions. As I set Liza’s plate before her, I figured this might be a good skill to cultivate in time for her adolescence.

Eliot’s house was larger than I had expected. He took care of the garden himself, he told me with pride. Even in late winter the borders were carefully tended, the perennials clipped and mulched. I had entirely abandoned my own garden. But seeing his effort sparked an urge to take advantage of the coming spring’s spirit of renewal. I would make an attempt to reclaim my flowers, if they hadn’t already been overwhelmed by my neglect and winter’s frosts.

While Eliot prepared an elegant first course of grilled shrimp, I hopped up onto his counter so as not to feel completely dwarfed by his height. After dinner and several glasses of wine, consumed while lounging and snogging on his couch (on a couch, everyone is the same size), he persuaded me—it wasn’t that hard—not to stay in the guest room.

Eliot was an affectionate lover, showering me with attention and compliments that felt genuine. But after he fell asleep, with his arm around me, I lay awake in the unfamiliar setting, listening to the dripping of the bathroom faucet, fretting about Liza and my fate.

In the morning, however, I woke exhilarated, as if purged and absolved. I twirled a few pirouettes in his expansive living room, while Eliot made me coffee and chuckled. I didn’t care if he
thought I was a loon. He fed me an ample breakfast, and I warmed under a delicious shower. As I walked toward my mud-splashed station wagon, I took a last, fond look at his adorable silver BMW M roadster parked in the driveway. A nice life he had, but it was not going to be my life. Every day I was edging further toward the idea of moving back to Brooklyn.

We’d stay friends, I thought, I hoped. Mindful of my recent failures, I didn’t trust myself not to mess up a real relationship. And he was still too tall.

Soon afterward he met another woman—also tall. They seemed to hit it off right away. She wanted to get married. He wanted to get married. And I felt lucky still to have Eliot for a pal, someone who wished me well, whom I could count on to make me laugh at my weaknesses, who would tell me I was pretty even when I felt like a cranky crone. It was my first date that qualified as a resounding success. We had some fun, and no one got hurt.

My foray into dating had been instructive,
but I often felt depressed and lonely. I cried at night and punched pillows. Liza watched me with concern that in turn made me worried for her. I continued to flee with her to the city on weekends. While we stayed with my brother and his wife, life was comfortable for at least a few days.

Liza and I roamed around my old neighborhood. One day I took her to see the brownstone where Henry and I had lived when she was born. The owners had painted it a shade of salmon pink that pleased her. I was too afraid to ask her directly how she would feel about a move, so I tried to fill our weekends with the kind of fun we couldn’t find in our small town. We went to movies, strolled
in the botanic garden, ate lunch in cafés on Seventh Avenue. Sometimes I wandered over to the store run by The Crush. I managed to create a conversation that allowed me to leave behind a business card. But I’d heard that he had a girlfriend, or at any rate was dating someone. Dating. Whatever that was.

I had a short affair with a friend.

I’d called him up, and we met in Brooklyn for a drink on one of my city weekends. Perhaps the margarita was to blame. Because I didn’t drink them often, they induced immediate euphoria.

I looked up at him, enjoying his familiar, handsome face and said, “Sometimes I wish we could be together,” because I liked him and I knew he liked me.

He looked at me with surprise. I felt myself flush immediately like a royal idiot. What had I said? He was ten years younger than I was. For as long as I had known this man, he’d told me that he was earnestly interested in marrying and having his own children, two things that he was entitled to want but that I did not think I would ever be doing again.

It was late after the drink, so I asked him to walk me to my brother’s house. I fumbled in the dark with the keys at the brownstone gate while he stood a few steps back, waiting. He said that he wanted to kiss me. Without thinking enough about the consequences, I watched him approach me. We kissed in the doorway.