Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub
“Never mind,” she says. “Just shoot that spreadsheet over to me when you’re done, okay?”
“Sure, no problem.”
He waits for her to leave.
The moment she does, he clicks away from the spreadsheet, back to his online profile.
Favorite Music?
Perhaps the easiest question of all.
Smiling to himself, he writes
Classic Rock
.
Friday evening, Gaby leans into the mirror above the sink in the ladies’ room down the hall from her office. This isn’t the first time she’s applied mascara without a handy place to rest her elbow, but she used to be a lot more proficient at it. Tonight it’s smudge city.
Maybe the shaky hand is due to the extra large coffee she bought on the street after lunch, hoping to make up for another sleepless night.
More likely it’s caused by nerves.
She’s about to go on her first date in . . .
How long has it been?
Years.
Her last first date was with Ben, of course. They’d been friends for a long time before he asked her out, so she wasn’t nervous. Well, maybe in a good, butterflies-in-the-stomach way. Not like this.
A nearby stall door opens. Kasey Leibock, a fellow editor, comes out, high-heeled pumps clicking on the tile floor. She’s carrying a large tote bag, probably off to catch her commuter train home to the suburbs.
Seeing Gaby, she raises an eyebrow. “Wow! Look at you! Hot date?”
“I don’t know about ‘hot,’ but . . . yeah, I have a date.”
“Lucky you. What I wouldn’t give.” Kasey turns on the water and pumps soap into her hands, not noticing the incredulity on Gaby’s face.
Kasey is going home tonight to her husband and three kids, the youngest a toddler born a few months after Josh. Every time Gaby overhears Kasey talking about something her son—his name is Dylan—is doing, she thinks,
Josh would be doing that now. He’d be saying funny things, and going to preschool, and throwing tantrums that we’d laugh about later.
Kasey was still out on maternity leave when Gaby lost Josh. She brought her own infant son to the wake—because she was nursing, she later told a colleague who scolded her that it had been insensitive.
“I said it would have been better for her not to come at all,” the colleague, Anne, later told Gaby. “And she was offended. You know Kasey.”
Yes. She knows Kasey. They’ve worked together for almost a decade—through both their engagements and weddings, pregnancies and childbirths. All milestone events, to be sure—but with Kasey, everything is a big noisy production. She brags, she complains, she shares endless pictures, she solicits advice and freely doles it out . . .
Anne, a quiet fellow senior editor who lives alone with her cats and seems to like it that way, has very little patience for Kasey. “She’s missing a sensitivity chip,” she’s been saying for years—though never as vocally as after the nursing-baby-at-the-wake incident.
On that awful day, standing beside her son’s tiny casket with Ben, Gaby was in such a daze that she didn’t even realize at first that Kasey was there in the crowd, let alone with Dylan in tow. But then the baby started whimpering, and the sound seemed to pierce the air with all the subtlety of an air horn blasting in a library. Dylan’s cries filled Gaby’s head, drowning out the hushed voices and muffled sobs. She wasn’t hearing Kasey’s son, but her own. She heard Josh crying in the night, crying for help, crying for her, crying instead of slipping silently away before she could save his life.
When she finally snapped out of it and caught sight of black-clad blond Kasey holding a white-wrapped, squirming bundle, she was overcome by jealousy so profound that it made her physically ill. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that Kasey’s son was cuddled in her arms while her own son was all alone in a cold, dark wooden box. Grief had hit her anew; the cruelty of it all was staggering.
Now here’s Kasey, heading home to spend the weekend with her husband and children but acting as though she’d like to switch places. It’s all Gaby can do not to lash out at her.
“Do you know how long it’s been since Adam and I went out to dinner?” Kasey lathers her hands, staring at her own reflection in the mirror. “I can’t even remember the last time. It’s been forever.”
“That’s too bad.” Gaby tosses her mascara back into her purse. Only one eye is done, but that’s enough for now—or maybe for the night. There are worse things than sporting one raccoon eye when meeting a blind date.
“I’m not talking about anything fancy. I’d be thrilled with burgers and beers at the pub down the road if I could get away from the kids for a night.”
How do you reply to a statement like that?
You don’t. Gaby zips her purse.
“So where are you going tonight?” Kasey asks her, still sounding wistful.
“I’m not sure. Have a good night,” she says, and leaves the room.
In truth, Gaby knows exactly where she’s going: to a new bistro in Chelsea. What she doesn’t know—and isn’t about to tell Kasey—is who she’s going out with.
Oh, she knows his name, and what he does for a living; knows that he’s in his mid-thirties and lives in the city and has no children. A man with children—after what she’s been through—would be out of the question right now.
But really, she wonders as she waits for the elevator, what does the profile questionnaire really tell you about a person?
“It tells you everything you need to know,” Jaz said on the phone last night, when Gaby reported that one of her InTune connections had asked her out.
“It tells me almost nothing I need to know.”
“Does he seem nice?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “He seems nice.”
Surprisingly nice, and surprisingly normal. He’d struck up a conversation by instant message that first time she signed into her account—right after she saw the message from Ben.
Fancy meeting you here.
There she was, contemplating the fact that Ben had a profile on a dating Web site—that he now also knew
she
had a profile on a dating Web site—when a little box popped up on the corner of her screen, with a tiny rectangle picture and a single word:
hi
.
“I meant to disable the instant message setting,” she later told Jaz. “You have to show me how to do that.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t have people popping up and wanting to socialize every time I sign into my account.”
Jaz just looked at her. “That’s the point. Socializing.”
“Well, I socialized. So you should be proud of me. I have a date with this guy Friday night.”
“I’m proud. I’d be even more proud if I didn’t think it had something to do with Ben.”
“What do you mean?”
“You saw Ben’s profile, and the next thing you know, you’re saying yes to a date. If you hadn’t seen Ben’s profile . . .”
Gaby denied it, of course. To Jaz, anyway.
But the truth is, if she hadn’t been faced with blatant evidence that her ex-husband had moved on, she probably wouldn’t have impulsively said yes when a total stranger asked her out.
She never did answer Ben’s message.
It didn’t really seem to require a response.
Fancy meeting you here.
Maybe she’ll write back to him at some point, if only just to remind him that she still has a box of his belongings. It’s only fair. He cherishes those things; he probably thinks he lost them, like all his other childhood possessions.
But if she reminds him, he’ll have to come get his stuff, and she’ll have to see him again. She’s not ready for that yet.
Not in person, anyway. She did check out his online profile thoroughly.
The photos all appeared to be recent ones. The last time she saw him, he was gaunt and his olive skin seemed to have taken on a sickly pallor. These snapshots showed—well, not the old Ben, the one she fell in love with. It’s true that he’s looking like his broad-shouldered, muscular old self, and his complexion has a familiar, healthy-looking glow, as if he just came back from a week at the beach. But the Ben in these recent photos has a sprinkling of salt and pepper at his temples that was never there before, and a faint network of wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. Laugh lines? Has New Ben been laughing again? Maybe even laughing with someone else, the way he used to laugh with her when they were young and unencumbered?
When was the last time she really laughed? How did she become this brittle, sad, too-serious woman?
How?
You know how. It’s hard to find joy when you’ve lost everyone who ever mattered: not just Josh and Ben, but Mama and Daddy and Abuela . . .
Everyone but Jaz.
Despite having been born a mere week earlier than Gaby, Jaz has always done her best to bulldoze her like a bossy big sister.
“Don’t you let her push you around, Gabriela,” her grandmother would warn her, and when Ben came along, he said the same thing.
Neither of them seemed to grasp that Gaby only did what Gaby wanted to do. Her relationship with her cousin was complicated, but she’d inherited her share of fiery Latin temper. Hers just tended to simmer long after the rest of the family would have boiled over. But when she did explode—look out.
“Es como un volcan en erupcion!”
Abuela would say, colorfully comparing her to an erupting volcano.
Now Abuela is long dead and Ben is long gone. Only Jaz is still there for her.
For all her cousin’s faults, Gaby truly loves her and would do anything for her. Including joining the dating Web site that has now brought her ex-husband back again.
She stared at Ben’s photos for a long time before allowing herself to click past them and see what he’d written about himself.
There was the usual biographical information—age, location, occupation, marital status . . .
Divorced
.
That gave her pause.
Of course it’s accurate. Her own profile says the same thing. But it’s such an ugly word. She’s still not used to it.
The next item on the questionnaire, regarding children, hits her like a sucker punch.
When she answered it on her own profile, she simply wrote
none
. She wasn’t ready or willing to explain her wrenching loss to anyone.
But Ben had written
one (deceased).
How could he put something so tragic, so private, out there on the Internet?
And on a dating Web site? Was he looking for sympathy from women who read his profile?
She felt sick.
To think he’d accused her of dwelling on the tragedy, not being able to pick up the pieces and move on.
Scanning the rest of his profile—the usual questions about hobbies and habits, likes and dislikes—she wondered how many women were doing the same thing; wondered how many were deciding Ben was Mr. Right. How many were feeling sorry for the man who had lost a child? How many were flirting with him in private messages right at that moment?
She had to force herself to read the essay section headed
WHAT I’M LOOKING
FOR,
afraid of what it might say.
Like . . .
I’m looking for someone who’s the polar opposite of my ex-wife.
But Ben didn’t say that.
His answer was just one word. It wasn’t
love
, which Jaz claims everyone on InTune is looking for. Nor was Ben’s answer
fun
or
marriage
or
you
or any of the pithy answers she’d seen on other profiles.
No, Ben was simply looking for
happiness
.
Well, who the hell isn’t?
We had that once. We were so damned happy, Ben . . .
How dare you look for that again, with someone else? How dare you assume that you can find it, keep it? How dare you tell a stranger—a world full of strangers—about our lost child?
Gaby’s elevator arrives, jerking her back to reality, back to the present and the immediate future. She steps on and rides down to the lobby with a couple of silent businessmen and a group of young secretaries from an upper floor. They’re laughing and chatting, on their way to a party.
For them, the night is full of promise.
For her . . .
Who knows? Maybe this will turn out to be fun, she tells herself as she pushes through the revolving door onto the street. If nothing else, at least it’s a step in the right direction.
He’d arranged to meet her in the bar area of Tequila Sam’s at seven.
He arrives at seven-eighteen, having spent the past hour nursing a draft beer at a dive around the corner.
He’s learned that here in New York no woman bats an eye if you’re fifteen or twenty minutes late. Twenty-five minutes, half an hour—then she might get cranky. But losing twenty minutes to mass transit problems is entirely plausible.
Most women arrive early. By the time he gets there, she’ll have already bought, consumed, and paid for—because the bar at his favorite Mexican restaurant will be too crowded to run a tab—a drink. Maybe even two drinks. If he doesn’t like what he sees, he leaves, goes straight home, and deletes his latest profile. She’ll never find him again.
If he does like what he sees, he introduces himself and suggests that they go straight to the table, since the reservation is for seven-thirty.
The benefit to this trick—aside from the obvious, sparing his wallet a pricey bar tab—is that she’ll be relieved when he finally shows up, having almost convinced herself he was going to stand her up. She’ll also be liquored up enough to be relaxed when they sit down at the table and for obligatory getting-to-know-you BS.
He’ll order a bottle of Spanish wine with dinner—not the cheapest one on the menu, but the second cheapest—and he’ll sip one glass slowly while she drains hers and the waiter refills it. By the time they’ve shared dessert, she’ll often agree to a nightcap nearby—or even invite him back to her place.
Most women would never agree to come to his. Not on a first date, not with a stranger. Which is, of course, even more to his advantage, because the Upper West Side apartment he mentioned in his profile—the one in a historic prewar building, with a Hudson River view—doesn’t exist, any more than “Nick Santana” exists.