Super in the City (3 page)

“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,/m
a
Ztime 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 which 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.

I didn’t sleep much that night because I couldn’t stop prowling around his apartment. I trolled through his medicine cabinet, his linen closet, his refrigerator, his utensil drawers. I flipped through his magazines and peeked behind his shower curtain to examine his soap scum. My brain was growling for more information about him, but he may as well have lived in a hotel suite for all I could glean.

In the morning, Hayden did everything right. He made me eggs and toast and coffee and went back to staring into my eyes, only now he couldn’t stop saying my name.

“Zephyr, Zephyr, Zephyr …”

What?! I wanted to yell. What? Are we back on? Are we getting married? Will you start showing up for dates? Will you tell me whether you want kids? Whether you like ice cream?
But I just popped the yolk of my over- easy and smiled enigmatically at him.

I was exhausted from my night of snooping, which made it easier for me to leave: what I really wanted was to chain myself to his kitchen table until he outlined our commitment to each other. Instead, I purposely left my earrings next to the bed. That way he’d have to see me again.

“Seriously?” Mercedes said later that night as the Sterling Girls sprawled around Lucy’s mother’s Riverside Drive living room, picking at cold pad thai and waiting for
ER
to begin. I could barely keep my eyes open, but there was no way I’d have stayed home. It was Abigail’s last week in town before she was to become the youngest tenure- track professor of dead and obscure languages at Stanford, and she was terrified of venturing more than a hundred miles west of the Hudson River.

Even Lucy was having a hard time defending my reunion with Hayden.

“I don’t think it’s healthy,” she began tentatively. Tiny, blond, frequently exclamation- pointy, Lucy worked at a free clinic in Bed- Stuy. To our continued amazement, her clients loved her. It seemed like she should be the one heading for the froufy West Coast, while dark, grounded, alarmingly practical Abigail—who once made a potential boyfriend read
The Feminine Mystique
before she would date him—would look perfectly at home in a basement office dissuading meth addicts from suicide.

“Oh, it’s not,” I assured her.

“It’s the job thing, right?” said Abigail, pulling thoughtfully at her Jew- fro curls. “You’re thinking that he’s got to be really committed to his job to have gotten where he is. And to be that committed, he must be passionate about it. Work passion is sexy, no question.”

“Plus,” Tag conceded, “he’s not anyone we know. I mean, he’s not a friend of a friend. He’s in the real world, not in our precious little circle.”

Mercedes glared at both of them.

“I’m not saying I approve,” Tag added hastily. “Not at all. Zeph’s gonna get screwed, no question. It’s just a matter of time.”

“Thanks,” I grumbled, closing my eyes just as the green letters “ER” began pulsing across the screen.

Despite the vote of no confidence, the Sterling Girls, otherwise known as the SGs, were there for me when the inevitable happened. A week after my reunion with Hayden, I found a bulky little envelope taped to the front door with just my first name written on the flap. I knew what it was before I opened it, but I still allowed myself a moment’s thrill over the fact that he had actually handwritten my name. It was so intimate.

My earrings were tucked inside a sheet of white of paper with a typed message:

We held an emergency convention at my apartment that night. I couldn’t stop pacing and shrieking, “Fucker!” at random intervals. Tag and Mercedes were mixing up a sickly sweet gin concoction that I’d be able to swallow in large quantities. Lucy was shaking her head over and over again.

Abigail was already in Palo Alto, so we put her on speaker-
phone. “It looks like
archy and mehitabel.”
she laughed. I had faxed her Hayden’s infuriating attempt at a breakup note.

“Who?” Mercedes yelled from the kitchen.