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  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Chicken tonight . . . or fowl overload?

  Patoots—Chicken tonight? Or is it too soon, since we just did chicken Wednesday? Also need to know if you’re into fava beans, because I’ll get those too. Nice side dish.

  I wondered how two people could be married for twenty years and not know if their spouse liked fava beans. And marveled once again at why my stepdad felt compelled to copy me on this.

  Bicycling home after work, I got cut off several more times and yelled at by a mustachioed cabdriver talking on his cell phone.

  “Watch out, motherfuck!” he called out after he ran me off the road.

  “Er! Motherfucker!” I corrected.

  “Motherfuck you too!” he replied. God Bless New York.

  * * * * *

  I got off my bike downstairs in front of my building and was preparing to haul it up the front steps when I saw my friendly neighborhood homeless lady.

  She stepped up close to me, then gave me a serious sidelong glance. Her voice carried a sense of desperation. “‘Oh, Mama, I’m in fear for my life from the long arm of the law . . .’”

  I took the cue, looking side to side first, then directly at her. “‘Hangman is coming down from the gallows and I don’t have very long,’” I answered, and she nodded her trademark long-necked nod and went on her way. She and I had been trading song lyrics for almost as long as I’d lived in this apartment. Most of the stuff she throws out would scare the bejesus out of you if you didn’t know she was quoting songs. I saw her approach a man in a long overcoat once and practically reduce him to tears with, “‘Borderline . . . feels like I’m go-ing to lose my mind.’”

  When I walked into my apartment building, I got on the elevator at the same time as the creepy flattop guy who lived three doors down from me. He was one of those extreme muscle-bound guys who always wore spandex shorts and some variation of workout gym shirts, usually of the Tiger Schulmann variety. He smiled a toothy grin, and I pressed our floor button a few extra times. This is not a man that I would ever be attracted to. I need to clarify that before explaining that he also had the most massive penis I had ever seen, amplified every day, no matter the weather, in his black spandex shorts. It was proudly on display for all the world to see, garish and out of place as the Washington Monument, and it was always an effort not to look at it. I’d lived in the same building for four years (that includes four freezing New York winters) and had never seen him in anything but those shorts.

  “Hi, Jordan,” he said, all teeth. I’d never told him my name, but he’d been using it for the past three years.

  “Hi,” I replied, content in not knowing his.

  “When are you going to take me up on that street ka-ra-tay lesson?”

  “Oh . . . I don’t know,” I said politely. Meaning, never.

  “New York is a dangerous place,” he said as the elevator doors opened, facing me, his gargantuan penis taunting me. “Anytime you want, you should come over to 5B and let me show you some moves.”

  “Ha, ha,” I said back, which was again, me saying that I was not interested in him, or his penis, showing me any moves at any time, in any apartment, in this lifetime, ever.

  I ducked into my apartment and started rifling through my mail. Nothing good. A Citibank bill. Overdue. My rent bill. Also overdue. A Williams-Sonoma catalog. An offer from Capital One, devilishly tempting me to transfer funds from my other overdue credit cards. An envelope of ValPak coupons. A solicitation from one cable TV company to transfer from my current one, whose bill, had it been among the day’s catch, also would have been overdue. And a handwritten note from my landlord: Still haven’t seen your rent check for last month. This pattern of lateness is going to leave me with no choice. Please remit forewith with all due haste.

  Worse than the simple scolding for my tardiness was the trumped-up legal overtone of the note. “Forewith?” Obviously he’d miscopied the missive out of a bad landlords’ handbook, but the implication was clear: improve my cash flow or I’d be out on my ass. The first homeless Landau. Soon I’d be out quoting song lyrics with my friend full-time.

  I was thinking of making an indie film about myself. I was going to call it It’s a Miserable Life. It was going to be about a woman who thinks things would be better off if she’d never been born, and, after spending a day with her, her guardian angel actually agrees.

  3.

  consider it kissed

  I’d been going out with Dirk for the better part of two years. We were sort of in one of those holding patterns: We weren’t happy, but we didn’t completely hate each other. We started dating two years after college, and as bad as things were in recent months, it never outweighed all the good that we’d had when we first got together.

  We first met at Slate, a sports bar in midtown, when there was a big Notre Dame game on.

  Dirk worked at Stanton, Seal, Shafer & Long LLP doing corporate transactional law—buying and selling, taking companies public, mostly doing mergers and acquisitions. Typically it took eight years to become partner, but Dirk seemed to be on the fast track and was trying to make partner By Any Means Necessary. He had to bill at least twenty-five hundred hours a year, which pretty much meant working ten to twelve hours a day and sometimes weekends.

  It was a source of immense pride for Dirk that he worked a ton of hours yet still managed to go out for drinks even more than we did in advertising. I’d sworn I’d never date a guy who ever said “I like to work hard and play hard,” but I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

  I was out with a girlfriend and we were in our looking-for-men-where-men-are phase. She had decided that men were not in produce aisles and bookstores as everybody thought, and that we needed to hit sports bars on game nights, steak houses on weeknights, and strip clubs on any night that we could muster up enough nerve. Steak houses didn’t sound like a great idea to me. Sure, there may have been packs of men there having dinner. But they were having dinner. I mean, wouldn’t it be a little creepy to just hover around the table, like dogs looking for a bone?

  And strip clubs . . . I wasn’t quite comfortable with the idea of that. Plus, it would send the wrong message. It wasn’t like I was a regular at Flash Dancers, and I wouldn’t want a potential mate to think I was. Or that it was okay for him to be, once we started dating. It would be false advertisement. Bad enough that I was wearing a Wonderbra. So strip clubs were out, and that left sports bars.

  I first spotted Dirk when I was playing a game of pool; I happened to be having an uncharacteristically great game. He was tall and well built, brown hair, great eyes that crinkled at the sides when he smiled. He looked like a young George Clooney. Devilishly handsome. Full of confidence. The kind of guy any girl would look twice at.

  I noticed Dirk watching me, so I tried to look extra cool taking my next shot. Of course I scratched, but that was when he came over and introduced himself. I should have known then—he preyed on the weak. He had those boyish good looks and more charm than Bill Clinton on intern orientation day. So naturally I fell for him.

  Dirk and I had both just been through the postgraduate shock syndrome—him from Columbia Law School and me from NYU undergrad—and we helped each other out of it. For some people I knew, college was like a free-for-all, a four-year run (seven in his case) of irresponsible sex and intoxication—like getting paid to hunt for bedmates and not worry about anything real. Then there was the after-college dry spell, the where-did-all-the-free-sex-go? period. Topped off with the fact that you can’t schedule your job like you did your classes so that you have no work before 11 A.M. or on Fridays. Real life was a hell of a letdown.

  We both had been dating around. For me, a big reason for dating Dirk exclusively was that it had been hard to stay focused on several men at a time. For Dirk, I think it was the realization that if you date many women, you’re paying for a lot of dinners and not necessarily going to be getting any sex,
but if you date one woman, you’ll definitely get sex and probably cut your dinner bills in half. Dirk was nothing if not practical. Not exactly what you’d call a romantic approach, but there we were.

  At first he was unsure of the whole boyfriend-girlfriend thing, but one day about three weeks in, something changed. It was Christmastime, and they were doing the big lighting of the tree in Rockefeller Center. We’d both been living in New York and of course seen the giant lit-up tree in years past, but neither of us had ever been to the actual lighting and we thought it would be fun to attend. It’s always a big event, with thousands of people cramming into nearby blocks to see pop stars lip-synching Christmas songs and witness the first lighting of the tree. They’d been talking it up on TV and the radio for the whole week beforehand, and we knew it would be a madhouse, so we decided to get there early.

  It was by far the coldest day of the year, and for some crazy reason we decided to walk there. It wasn’t that far from my office, but as cold as it was, we still froze. About halfway to Rockefeller Center, we stopped in a Starbucks to thaw. I got a peppermint latte and he got a Chantico chocolate drink, which he’d dubbed “crackito” because it was so addictive, to warm us up for the rest of our journey.

  We talked and laughed, and the freezing walk felt warm and fun. As we neared Rock Center we worried that we wouldn’t get a good spot, what with all the news coverage and anxious locals and tourists, so we picked up our pace to an almost run for the last few blocks.

  When we got there, it was surprisingly desolate. There were a few signs up, telling people where to go, but no people. We crossed the street at Saks Fifth Avenue and walked right into Rockefeller Center. Empty but for a few ice-skaters on the rink. The tree was there but it wasn’t lit up.

  Then we saw the sign that advertised Tuesday’s tree lighting. It was Monday. We were early. By twenty-four hours and twelve minutes. We looked at each other and cracked up so hard that our eyes started tearing. Maybe it was from the cold, but we were in bona fide hysterics. He kissed me next to the unlit tree, and I swear I saw the lights go on for one split second. We’d enjoyed ourselves so much, holding hands on our walk and showing up in time to find out we’d totally blown it, that it was decidedly more fun than if we’d actually been fighting our way through wall-to-wall people. In fact, we had so much fun doing it wrong that we decided we didn’t even want to do it right.

  I thought we’d live at that peak, but we started our descent almost immediately, like an Everest expedition hurrying to get back down before the oxygen ran out and the storm hit. Still, I looked back fondly on the high points, believing beyond hope that we’d see them again.

  To this day I still haven’t seen the lighting of the tree. But from that moment, everything changed with Dirk and me. For the better at first. Where before he wasn’t into having a girlfriend, suddenly he started inviting me to office functions. I was introduced to all the partners, and they quickly took me into their tight-knit family—and were also not too shy in suggesting Dirk and I start our own. I don’t know if it was that they thought we were a terrific couple as much as they liked their lawyers to have mortgages, spouses, and kids . . . so they couldn’t quit.

  As heavy as his workload was, he would call me every few hours just to hear my voice. (Later he would call “just to hear my voice,” but it was actually to make sure I was home so he wouldn’t get caught doing whatever he was doing elsewhere.)

  But in those first few months he made me feel like the luckiest girl in the world. We’d walk down the street and he’d hold my hand, and he had that cocky swagger and I somehow just felt cool, which was something I rarely felt. We’d cook together. Well, technically I’d cook for him, but he’d hang out with me and do an Olympic gymnastics judge play by play.

  “Now, Jordan’s cracking an egg,” he’d say. “Let’s see if she can manage to avoid the shell-in-yolk blunder that’s so common in this move. The level of difficulty is about a seven, but Jordan happens to be very skilled in this event.” Sometimes he’d even hold up a sign with a score. I’d pout if I got a lower score than I deserved, but he was usually pretty fair.

  When we first started dating, our sex life was pretty hot. He had a couple years on me and was a lot more experienced than I was—he sort of helped me come into my own. I don’t think I’d ever been on top before I dated him. In fact, I think I may have been the most boring lay on the planet. But nobody’d ever complained, so I didn’t know any better. Most guys were just happy to be getting laid, period. But Dirk showed me a whole new world, and for that I’ll be eternally grateful.

  The point is, we bonded. We had such a romantic first six months that for every time he was an hour late, there was a time he tried to make me breakfast in bed, Eggs Benedict burned mercilessly, but still there on a tray with a rose and a homemade coupon for “one delicious nonburned breakfast at our favorite diner.” And for every time he didn’t show up at all, there was a time when he showed up uninvited because he just couldn’t wait to see me. And that bond was so strong that it carried me through the tough times, hoping that we’d find our way back. I tried to bring the romance into the relationship again every now and then. Usually I failed miserably.

  So there we were . . . two years later, and things had certainly changed. At least between us. Dirk’s apartment still looked and smelled like a frat house. He shared a one-bedroom apartment with Jim Murphy, a fraternity buddy (and law school dropout) whom he somehow couldn’t let go of—as if living alone would somehow mean he was officially a grown-up—so we rarely had his place to ourselves. Not that I necessarily wanted to spend that much time there, beer paraphernalia everywhere—still emanating the faint stench of stale booze—moose antlers that he’d won in a poker game, and of course his prized possession: the Farrah Fawcett poster from the seventies where you could see her nipple.

  Every now and then, after he’d had a few beers, he’d point her nipple out to me, as if it was the first time he’d noticed it. I never knew if he was expecting me to high-five over it or tear open my shirt in jealous competition or something, but I’d usually just nod: Yes, it is indeed Farrah Fawcett’s nipple.

  We’d planned to have a night alone, and I brought candles that I’d picked up at the Pottery Barn over to Dirk’s to add a little ambience. It was one of my latest attempts at trying to breathe a little life back into our evaporating relationship. I was cooking a romantic dinner for us and, God knows why, had even brought flowers to complete the mood. I moved the flowers into several different spots on the table to get things just right. Then I took out one of the candles and placed it between our two settings on the table. “Love Me Tender” came on the radio. Dirk started singing along, doing a very bad Elvis.

  “I love this song,” I said. “At least I did prior to this rendition.”

  “I’ll ‘love you tender,’” he said. “I’ll love you so tender you won’t even be able to ride your bike home.” And then he smacked my ass and walked out of the room. Quite the charmer, he was.

  When I went to light a candle, I burned my finger on the match.

  “Ouch!” I screamed, but Dirk didn’t even look up from the television. I grimaced and tried again, louder this time for effect. “Ouch!” Still nothing. “I just burned my finger,” I said. “Wanna kiss it and make it better?”

  “Consider it kissed,” he said without looking. What was that? I could have gotten mad at this. I should have. I could have said, “Consider yourself fed” and taken my gourmet meal elsewhere, or “Consider yourself fucked” and taken my gourmet vagina elsewhere. But I didn’t. Instead I said, “Gee thanks,” and I stayed and continued to cook until I heard a knock at the door.

  “Are you expecting someone?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Tony and Greg are coming over to watch the game . . . I forgot to tell you. Think you’re making enough for all of us?”

  “Um . . . Dirk?” I paused to gather my thoughts, my left leg jiggling anxiously. “I love all the guys you work with . . . es
pecially Tony and Greg . . . but I thought this was going to be our night. Isn’t that why Jimmy isn’t here right now?” I asked as I continued stirring the pasta.

  “It is our night. Every night is our night, baby.”

  “But I thought we were going to have dinner just the two of us. Like you said. I hate to sound like the naggy, whiny girlfriend, but lately it just doesn’t seem like you really want to spend any time with me.” As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t. If I hated to sound like the naggy, whiny girlfriend, then why did I finish the sentence? Why did I start the sentence? I stirred the pasta furiously, frustrated at the both of us, and came dangerously close to whisking the water right out of the pot.

  “Jordan, do you realize that before I was with you, I dated three, four, five girls at a time? I dated more people at once than you’ve been with in your whole life,” he said, his eyes leaving the TV screen for the first time that night. “And I know you know how many girls come on to us when we do Boys’ Night at Keen’s . . .” He waited for some kind of acknowledgment, but I just kept stirring, annoyed by his line of reasoning, so he went on. “The fact that I now choose to be with only you is a really big deal. You need to appreciate that.”

  “I do appreciate it,” I said, one salty tear falling into the pot.

  “Good. So you’ll make enough for everybody?”

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  “Cool,” he said. “I know I said it would be just us tonight, but . . . forgive and forget.” “Forgive and forget” was Dirk’s favorite saying and my guiding principle for the majority of our relationship. I did a lot of forgiving but, truthfully, not as much forgetting. Dirk’s lame attempts at impersonating a boyfriend—or even a human—were pretty much impossible to erase from my mind.

  Yes. I was a total loser. I know it. I shouldn’t have let him treat me that way, but I’m admitting this up front because the evening only got worse. I spent the night watching them watch TV and high-five over whatever ridiculous thing they were bonding over at that given moment. High fives were really big with Dirk. I made a promise to myself that the next guy I dated would never high-five. Ever. Except maybe the occasional ironic post–high-five-aware high five. After all, everything in life has a parody phase.