Authors: Daphne Uviller
The three of us watched him, waiting for the light to dawn, waiting for him to look ashamed or beaten. But instead, the scholar just sneered at us impatiently.
“What kind of people have nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon than be their friend’s lackey?” He sat back and crossed his arms, scowling.
“Why are you surfing JDate if you don’t want a Jewish woman?” I blurted out.
He considered me for a moment, and a lewd smile crept across his face.
“Because plenty of shiksas wanna screw a good Jewish man. I only aim to please, ma’am.” He tipped an imaginary hat. Tag fake- lunged at him and he flinched. She snorted with disdain.
“In what world are you
a good
man?” I demanded.
“Zephyr!” I was off- script and making Lucy nervous.
“Well,
Zephyr,”
Lingua smirked at his discovery of my name, “good, in this case, can be a means of describing someone’s abilities in bed, and not necessarily an overall character assessment.”
“Well,
Darren,
it’s good you’ve got that linguistics degree,” Tag snapped at him. His face darkened.
“How the hell do you know my name? Or what I do?” Suddenly, it seemed we had the upper hand. Or, at the very least, it seemed like a good time to end this party, especially as our conversation was starting to attract the attention of other patrons. The three of us stood up, prepared to make a haughty exit.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Darren stood up too, cementing our position at center stage. Lucy and I looked to Tag for backup, but she looked just as surprised as we were.
“We’re done with you,” she said quietly, trying to project authority. She started to thread her way out, and we followed her. Darren Schwartz followed us.
“What do you mean ‘done with’ me? What did you come here to do? Why doesn’t your friend come and tell me to my face that I’m too fat? Too Jewish?” His voice rose to a whine but he still didn’t seem to recognize his own epithets.
By now, the four of us were out on the sidewalk, but the wide- open doors only framed us so that no one inside could do anything but watch the free entertainment. I wondered why I had ever thought this plan could come to any kind of satisfying or remotely dignified conclusion.
“Mature, very mature.” He was warming up now, his arms gesturing wildly around his torso. “Your friend stands me up and you watch and report back? Oh, that’s brilliant. A brilliant plan. Great use of your time.” He tried to cackle, but he had the wild look of a leashed dog confronted by a predator.
The fact that he actually thought his fantasy woman was out there in the Village at this moment, wearing a tight red dress and rejecting him, made us realize we’d succeeded.
Tag, Lucy, and I all burst out laughing at the same time.
“Why are you laughing?” he demanded, which only made us laugh harder.
The three of us ignored him and started strolling toward Greenwich Avenue, our arms linked. I didn’t want to turn around and ruin the effect of our dramatic, triumphant leave-taking, but I could practically see him staring after us, open-mouthed, frustrated, duly punished.
Nobody messes with my friends and gets away with it, I thought, as the breeze rushed at us and tossed the front of my dress up over my face.
* * *
T
AG AND LUCY PEELED OFF AT THE CORNER OF TWELFTH AND
Seventh to go buy Beard Papa cream puffs and catch the second night of the Weighty Eighties film retrospective at the IFC. For a moment, I felt a tug of longing, wanting to be sitting with them in the dark, gorging on sweets and John Hughes movies, exchanging whispered trivia about Molly Ringwald. I wanted to be in the comfort of their safe, familiar company instead of mustering the energy required to launch a new relationship with a testy and unpredictable man. Spinsterhood seemed to have its benefits.
I made my way along Twelfth Street but stopped mid-stride when I spotted a figure sitting on our stoop, hunched over, appearing to study his feet. A drunk I was going to have to ask to move along? A New School student needing to be reminded to take his cigarette butt with him? A construction worker who would leave McDonald’s ketchup packets behind him? I tensed with the anticipation of confrontation.
My anxiety turned to irritation when I saw it was Gregory. An hour early. Again. What was
with
him? Didn’t he understand anything about a standard social protocol that had been in place (or so I assumed from reading Jane Austen novels) for centuries? Yet, I was flattered and impressed. He was eager to see me and wasn’t going to hide it for fear of seeming vulnerable. Either that or he’d forgotten what time we’d agreed on.
A piece of newspaper blew along the sidewalk and wrapped itself around my aching calf. I plucked it off, wondering if he’d even notice my legs, when he suddenly raised his head, looked straight at me, and smiled a soft, knowing, lopsided smile. The sunlight filtering through the apple tree in the front yard made his thick brown hair shine golden, and his cheeks looked warm and pink. I wanted to race up the stairs and dive headlong into his embrace.
I waved and smiled coyly, trying to pick up my pace without succumbing to hunchbutt.
“Hi,” I said, hoping to infuse the single syllable with multiple meanings.
“Hi,” he returned, still smiling. This was the furthest we’d ever gotten without a misunderstanding. He turned and picked up a flimsy plastic- coated box sitting beside him on the step. Cream puffs. Beard Papa cream puffs. The fortune- teller’s prediction that Gregory and I would spend our lives together flashed through my mind. I stared at him, wondering how he knew that Beard Papa was the way to my heart.
“It’s so nice out, I thought we could maybe sit here for a while and have dinner a little later. You know, the whole thing about life being uncertain, so eat dessert first?” He actually looked nervous.
I sat down as gracefully as I could and tried not to yell over the thumping of my heart.
“Actually,” I said lightly, “I put that saying on my senior yearbook page in high school. I think being able to eat dessert whenever you want is one of the unsung benefits of being an adult.” Even as I said it, I was surprised to hear myself describing myself as an adult.
He nodded seriously. He was making a concerted effort to make this date go smoothly, without sarcasm or squabbling. I was touched, but the moment felt as precarious as if we were playing catch with a soap bubble. It made me acutely aware of the fact that we were complete strangers.
“So,” I began awkwardly, “I know virtually nothing about you.” I quickly bit into a cream puff.
He raised his eyebrows at me, started to smirk, then caught himself.
“I grew up in Alabama—”
“Seriously?” I interrupted, my mouth full of custard. I swallowed. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who grew up there who wasn’t—” I hesitated, looking for the right words.
“Baptist or black?” he offered. “There are more Jews down south than you’d think, but no, it’s no New York.”
“Is that why you moved here?” I asked with trepidation. Too observant or too tribally constrained and we’d never make it as a couple.
“God, no,” he grimaced. “I moved here for graduate school.”
“Ha!” I shouted. My first impression of him had been right. Ridofem jumpsuit and all, I’d pegged him for an academic. I smiled triumphantly.
“Ha, what?” he said suspiciously.
“Nothing, nothing.” I waved my hand, eager for more. “Where? To study what?” I prompted.
“NYU. Shakespeare.” He dug around for a second cream puff just as I was debating what to do with the last corner of mine that had no custard touching it. The dry corner.
“So, what happened? Are you still there?” I discreetly laid the unappetizing remnant on the step and helped myself to a second puff. I hoped he would notice I was a good eater and not a girly salad type.
He shook his head. “You ever heard of Harvey Blane?”
I nodded, surprised, and mentally thanked Abigail. Blane was a Shakespeare scholar legendary for his prolific writing, his insatiable appetite for female grad students, and his vulgar, unpredictable temperament, all of which he robustly maintained despite being blind since birth. Abigail had told me one infamous story about a woman who was sitting beside Blane in a seminar when he suddenly wrinkled his nose, turned to her, and said, “I can tell you’re menstruating.” He had single-handedly spurred the creation of NYU’s sexual harassment policy.
“Don’t tell me he hit on you, too?” I laughed, glad I could hold my own.
“I might have had more fun, at least.” Gregory licked custard off his fingers and I suddenly had an image of what he had looked like as a little boy. “No, I made it to my orals and afterward he told me that even though I’d passed, I just didn’t have that extra something that makes a truly gifted scholar. So I asked him if I should start coercing my undergrads into sleeping with me, if that would do the trick, and, well, after that,” Gregory shrugged, “things became very unpleasant between us. On top of which, I basically realized he was right. I just wasn’t cut out for academia. So I left.”
“To become an exterminator?” I asked doubtfully. As someone who had less of a right than most to pass judgment on anyone quitting professional school, I was surprised to feel a pang of disappointment in Gregory.
He looked at me sharply. “Is that a problem?”
“No,” I said quickly, then grew angry at the implication that I was a snob even if it was a little bit true. “But you have to agree it’s a big change. I mean, do you find spraying for roaches as gratifying as parsing
King Lear?”
I asked.
Gregory looked me straight in the eye, and I watched him decide not to fight.
“No, it’s not,” he said quietly. “It’s what I’m doing now, until I figure out what I want to do. Kind of like you, I’m guessing.”
I nodded, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in my stomach. Both of us floundering? Both of us taking too long to grow up? I needed someone more certain of himself than I was, someone who could give me a boost up into adulthood, not someone who needed that from me. But even as I had that ungenerous thought, I still sensed a groundedness in Gregory.
While he continued to watch me with his baby- owl eyes, I tried to shake off these premature thoughts. Enjoy the moment,
Zephyr. The cream puffs, the warm breeze, his long legs brushing against mine on the cool, hard stone, the promise of having him inside me that night.
I leaned forward and kissed him.
“What was that for?” he asked quietly.
“Cream puffs,” I said. Two squirrels tussling in the branches above our heads set off a shower of twigs and leaves. Gregory pulled a leaf off my lap. The nearness of his hand to my thighs triggered a shudder that wove its way up my ribs and settled in the back of my throat.
We sat there and talked for a long, long time, the growing certainty of where the evening was headed giving us the stamina to draw out our stationary mating dance. As he painted his past for me, Gregory’s surly shell softened before my eyes. If I stripped away the matzoh ball gumbo at Passover and the barbecued brisket during Rosh Hashanah, we had a lot in common. We both agreed that we’d give anything to spend a night aboard one of the houseboats docked at the 79th Street Boat Basin, that friends were as important as family, that Gatorade tasted like Jell- O before it gelled, that future generations would label George W Bush a criminal, and that Bleecker Street Pizza was far superior to its famous neighbor, John’s Pizza.
“So,” I said tentatively, twirling a twig between my fingers, afraid of disturbing the groundwork we’d laid, but unable to keep my curiosity at bay. “How do your parents feel about your, uh, change in professional direction?”
To my relief, Gregory laughed.
“Let’s put it this way,” he said, studying the sky for a moment. “My brother teaches math to inner- city kids in Montgomery and they’re disappointed that he’s not teaching at Harvard, where of course he’d win a Nobel. So my choice, well…” His voice trailed off.
My blood heated at the prospect of defending my children from their unreasonable grandparents. I also felt a rush of gratitude for my own parents, who saved their disillusionment for truly deserving situations, like when their daughter turned tuition deposits into unintended charitable donations.
I was halfway to imagining a face- off with his ogre parents on a bridge in Alabama—possibly borrowing from news footage of Selma in the sixties—when Gregory shrugged and added, “But it’s the parents’ responsibility to distinguish their hopes from their expectations for their kids. This is their failure, not mine.”
If he had whisked me off to Paris on a private jet at that moment, he couldn’t have swept me off my feet more completely. It was the most enlightening declaration I’d heard in a long time, delivered so plainly and coming at such an unexpected moment—when was the last time a date had improved my understanding of my attitude toward my parents? It was my first glimpse of how a relationship with a man could have elements of best- friendship in it. Perhaps a boyfriend could fortify me in some of the ways that my Sterling Girls did.
Gregory and I kept talking as the sun sent long streaks of red down the side streets, taking breaks to help the Caldwells unload their carful of Fairway groceries, to hold the door open for Cliff and his suspicious bass case, to assure Mrs. Hannaham that we would not catch cold sitting on the steps for one hour and forty- five minutes on a balmy April evening. I didn’t even care that she’d been spying on us the whole time and watching the clock as though someone else might be waiting to use the stoop. I couldn’t remember why I’d ever been attracted to Cliff and I felt sorry for the Caldwells, who, with their separate beds, were pitiful compared to the young couple falling in love right there on the steps of 287 West 12th Street.
Because I was almost positive Gregory and I were falling in
love. I’d only felt this way twice before, first with a summer camp boyfriend who turned out to be site- specific and then with Hayden, who turned out to be a piece of old gum on the heel of humanity. But I was ready to dive in again, wear my heart on my sleeve, risk my pride, go out on a limb, walk the plank. My parents had always reminded me, grinning stupidly at each other, that by definition only one relationship could ever be The One That Worked. In order to find the real thing, you had to keep investing yourself in other people, making bad choices, breaking your heart, and imagining you had found the real thing even when you hadn’t.