Wreathed (16 page)

But it wasn’t a bad first date, at least not by my standards. I was seriously thinking about a second date, if he was willing. But I wasn’t that sure he would go for it. We did live a long ways apart, so it wouldn’t be convenient for either of us to keep on dating. I couldn’t blame him if he didn’t want to ask me out again. I was hopeful that the power of the low-cut garnet-red dress would inspire him, but I was uneasy about my chances.

Adam wanted the peach cobbler, so I ordered a slice of pecan pie that I didn’t want and nibbled at it. He attacked the cobbler, leaving tiny drops of ice cream on his worn orange hoodie. He wiped them off with his napkin, looking vaguely sheepish at his inability to eat neatly. “It’s really good,” he said. “How’s yours?”

“It’s fine. I’m just not hungry enough to finish it, that’s all.”

“You mind?” he asked. I slid him the plate, and he made the pie disappear. I envied him his appetite, and wondered if it crossed over to other spheres of activity.

The waiter handed Adam the bill, and he fished a credit card out of his wallet to pay for dinner. “You want some coffee?” he asked.

“I should be good, thanks.” I was maybe a tiny bit tipsy, but I thought I would be safe enough to drive home. There was a McDonald’s on the way where I could grab a cup of coffee if I needed the stimulant.

“Where did you end up parking?” he asked.

“I’m a block or two away, in a parking garage.”

“Well, why don’t I drive you over there? It’s cold outside, and slippery. I want to make sure you get there safely.”

I thought about making the long, cold walk uphill on the icy sidewalk, by myself, after a blah first date. “I would appreciate that, thanks.”

I retrieved my coat, and we waited inside in the bar until the valet brought Adam’s Jaguar around. The temperature had dropped another ten degrees, and a chilly wind was blowing off the river. Adam cranked up the heater and drove around the block to the garage where I had parked my Audi.

“OK, then,” he said. “Safe travels.”

“Thanks. I had a good time,” I said.

“I did, too.” He had a slight smile on his face, and he looked absolutely fetching in the dim light. But he wasn’t leaning over to kiss me, or even hold my hand. Maybe he was afraid to. Maybe he was bored. Maybe he’d had a terrible time and couldn’t wait to get rid of me. Maybe he would go home and drunk-dial his ex.
Maybe I’m never going to see him again.
I felt my body go tense, like before taking a deep dive into black water.

“So do you want to go out again next weekend?” he asked.

“Please tell me you didn’t say yes,” Pacey said.

“I wanted to,” I said. “I almost did, like a reflex. But I stopped myself in time.”

I was in my car, driving north towards Morristown, and talking to Pacey so she wouldn’t call me first thing in the morning and wake me up when all I wanted to do was sleep late.

“Good work,” she said.

“He’s attractive. And he’s smart. And I like him. And he’s attractive, if I hadn’t said that already. But I decided that if he wanted a second date, that he needed to work for it, and not just show up.”

“That’s a hundred percent right,” Pacey said. “Remember, confidence is sexy. You just have to keep telling yourself that you are a desirable modern woman, not some lonely, desperate loser who can’t find a man.”

“Hey!” I said.

“Not trying to be insulting, dear sister, but if you project that kind of attitude, you’ll never get anywhere. So where did you leave it?”

“He is supposed to make reservations somewhere,” I said. “He’s going to e-mail it to me, and if I approve, I’ll meet him there. If he chooses the Roy Rogers at the Cheesequake rest stop, I’ll know to dump him. If he chooses someplace suitably romantic and interesting, then we’ll see.”

“That should work. This is what you do in the meantime. Clear your mind. Don’t think about him. Don’t try to think about him. It’ll only cause you problems. Work if you have work to do. Go see a movie if you don’t. But don’t spend the weekend obsessing about him. Understand?”

“Sounds reasonable,” I said.

“If you’re really desperate, you can come over and watch my kids and let me do some laundry in peace, and even take a nap.”

“Didn’t hear that,” I lied. “The cell reception is breaking up.”

“Fine,” Pacey said. “Don’t help your sister who loves you and wants you to be happy. Go relax. Enjoy being single and free and irresponsible.”

“Thanks! I will.”

I couldn’t come up with anything really irresponsible to do, though, so I stayed home on Saturday and spent the day in my pajamas. I watched a couple of soppy romantic comedies on cable, lying on my couch with a glass of chardonnay in my hand. It was a relaxing way to spend the day, and it didn’t require me to think, but it wasn’t productive, and it didn’t help me deal with the low-grade anxiety I was feeling. So on Sunday, I drove down to the Bridgewater Commons Mall for a good dose of retail therapy.

I didn’t need anything, but that was hardly the point. I made a quick run through Macy’s to see if they had updated their shoe selection, and as always, I was disappointed. I poked around Pottery Barn looking for a new entertainment center for my apartment, and I found one that I liked, but buying it would mean that I would have to get a bigger television, and that meant I would have to research a lot of technical stuff to figure out the right size and type of TV to get, and the thought of doing that gave me a headache. I got lunch at California Pizza Kitchen and planned my assault on Bloomingdale’s and Lord & Taylor.

I ended up not getting anything at either store. I couldn’t find anything I liked, and I couldn’t justify spending the money on stuff that didn’t quite fit or that wasn’t right in some other way. Just about everything I wear to work is a variation on the basic theme of a navy jacket worn over a white silk blouse, which is the default Woman Lawyer Uniform, as set forth by either the fashion gods or the American Bar Association, I forget which. I must have looked at fifteen different dark-colored jackets at Bloomingdale’s, but every one of them had some minor flaw—too expensive, some of them, and the cheaper ones were either too short or too long or had cheaper fabric than what I wanted. I did find a lovely gray striped skirt that I spent a long time thinking about buying. It was a Kate Spade number that fit me perfectly, and it would have gone nicely with half the jackets in my closet, but it was expensive and I couldn’t decide whether it actually looked good on me or not. I spent five minutes going over the pros and cons of buying it before I put it back on the rack.

I am not a perfectionist, and I don’t aspire to be one. I don’t think that every single thing about a piece of clothing, or a relationship, has to be perfect. All I want is to not expend any unnecessary energy on worrying about things, or forcing things to fit that aren’t ever going to fit. I want to be sure of myself and not be weighted down by uncertainty all the time. I hated the feeling of standing in a store, holding a perfectly fine skirt that I thought would improve my wardrobe, and not being able to decide one way or another whether it was worth it.

I would ten times rather order takeout and eat and be done with it than spend an hour in the kitchen wondering if I had the oven on high enough and if the sauce I was making was going to come together or not. I would rather spend hours finding the perfect case on Westlaw to cinch a legal argument than dashing off a memo that said that the arguments on both sides were equally good. I don’t like not knowing where I stand. It makes me uncomfortable and out of place.

I left Bloomingdale’s and walked past the Victoria’s Secret store on the top level, and there I felt even more uncomfortable and out of place. I didn’t need any underwear, but I had a sudden impulse to walk in and pick out some sexy, stunning lingerie for my second date with Adam. Except I didn’t know if there was going to be a second date. I hoped so, but if he wasn’t going to make even a minimal effort to be more romantic, I wasn’t going to make the effort to pursue him. And even if there was a romantic second date, he hadn’t so much as kissed me yet. Was I being presumptuous by even thinking about lingerie? Would he even care?

I walked past Victoria’s Secret and out through Macy’s to my car. I pulled on to 287 and merged into the fast lane. Driving therapy was a lot simpler than retail therapy, and a lot cheaper so long as I didn’t get a ticket.

Monday was easier, because I had work to distract me from thinking too hard about Adam. I told myself that Pacey was right, and that all I had to do was wait for him to do something, and that I would be able to figure out what to do based on whatever it was that he did. All I had to do was bide my time, and not think about his expressive brown eyes, or his strong, warm hands, or the well-defined muscles of his chest.
Stop that, woman
, I told myself.
Calm down. Be patient. You’ll hear from him soon enough.

I was deep in the middle of reviewing the credentials of an expert witness when our receptionist stuck her head in my office.

“Are you the girl in the red dress?” she asked.

“Not today,” I said.

“I have a package up front addressed to the girl in the red dress. It must be for you.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Because I am the only other female person on this floor, and I don’t have a red dress, and nobody knows to send me anything here except my husband, and it’s not my birthday or anniversary, and Valentine’s Day was last month, and if he sent me anything else at any other time, the world would implode in on itself and all life on Earth would come to an abrupt end.”

“That’s convincing.”

“You, on the other hand, being young, single, and available, must have a closet full of red dresses, and suitors lined up around the block.”

“Would that it was so,” I sighed.

“It doesn’t look like flowers,” she said. “Might be fragile. You should come pick it up.”

I trooped over to the front desk. Whatever it was, it was in a large box.

“Is there a card?” I asked.

“Maybe it’s in the box,” she said. “Hard to say.”

“I can’t imagine what it is,” I said. It wasn’t flowers, or I thought not. If it was chocolates, there was enough sugar in there to give diabetes to the entire building. “Maybe we should have it scanned for high explosives.”

“I am incredibly curious as to what is in that box,” the receptionist said. “I am even more curious as to when you will get it off my desk.”

I lifted the box. It wasn’t that heavy, which was good. It didn’t rattle, which didn’t mean anything. “I’ll take it back to my office.”

“If it’s popcorn, I want some,” she said.

“If it’s anything edible, everybody’s getting some.” The box was big enough to hold a side of beef.

I walked the box back to my office, and then looked inside my desk to find an X-Acto knife. I cut away the tape and opened the top of the box. I found a card inside, right on top of a large quantity of Styrofoam packaging peanuts. It was a generic card that said “Thinking of You” in flowing blue script. It didn’t say who it was from, although there wasn’t anyone else other than Adam who would have sent me anything.

I knelt down on the floor and tilted the box over so that the Styrofoam peanuts spilled out into my trash can. I stopped when I saw a dark hank of hair inside. I recoiled, pulling my hand back. I banged my elbow against my desk.

It’s a head,
I thought.
It’s a goddamned human head. Bastard sent me a human head.

One of my fellow associates, a thick, pasty fellow named Warren Briggs, heard me struggling and came over from across the hall to check on me. “You OK there?”

Warren was a nice enough person, and I thought he probably had a giant crush on me, but he was one of the most boring people on the face of the earth, and married to boot. I thought about telling him to go away, but I needed a witness in case there was criminal evidence in the box. “Can you just check and see what’s in there? I’m having a little trouble.”

“Sure thing,” he said. He grabbed whatever-it-was by the hair and gave it a yank. “Oh. Cute,” he said.

“Cute?”

He lifted something large and brownish out of the box, spraying Styrofoam peanuts everywhere. “Looks like a giraffe,” he said. “Cute. Did you order it?”

I got up from the floor to take a closer look. It was a stuffed giraffe. It was very high quality, almost lifelike. It was maybe two and a half feet tall, and had packaging material clinging to its tail.

“It was a surprise,” I said.

“I seem to have made a mess,” Warren said. “Let me help pick up the peanuts.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll get them later. I need to think for a minute, if you can leave me alone for a little bit.”

“Happy to help,” he said, and stepped back across the hall. He had a couple of Styrofoam peanuts clinging to the back of his pants, but I figured he would find them soon enough. I reached over and closed the door and sat back down on the floor, trying to process what was going on.

I decided to ignore the fact that Adam hadn’t sent me flowers or chocolates or chardonnay or, you know, anything that you would normally send to a female person in whom you had a romantic interest. If Adam hadn’t sent me anything, I would have been fine with that. If he was going to send me something, it was best that he’d sent me something romantically ambiguous. But a giant stuffed giraffe wasn’t romantically ambiguous. It wasn’t romantic at all. It was the complete polar opposite of romantic. A stuffed giraffe was a thing that you sent somebody when you had no idea what else to send them. If he had sent me a Hickory Farms summer sausage, well, I would be able to figure out what
that
meant in short order. But what could a stuffed giraffe
mean
other than
hey, I got you a stuffed giraffe!

I wanted to understand Adam. It was fairly clear that I didn’t. More than that, I wanted to understand myself and how I felt about him, and whether my attraction to him was just based on a surface appraisal of his good looks and energy, or whether it was based on something deeper, something substantial. The stuffed giraffe didn’t help with that. It was just a large plush
thing
that would take up space in my apartment, and that had already shed a large quantity of Styrofoam peanuts across my office. If it were a clue, I didn’t know what it meant. If it was a symbol, I didn’t have the codebook. All I knew for certain was that I didn’t have any better idea of what Adam felt about me, or what I felt about him, than I had before.