sink and says, “I’m going to go apartment-hunting tomorrow, and I was hoping you’d come with me.”
“I have to go to this volunteer thing with Monique,” Sasha says, without planning to. “I already promised.”
Sasha and Monique show up at the brownstone for the singles volunteer day, along with about thirty other people. The renovation is being run by a short and short-tempered redheaded man named Willie, who seems ready to shout at any of them with the slightest provocation. Sasha can understand why he’s so grouchy, though: he has to oversee a bunch of volunteers who are all busy checking one another out instead of doing home repair. She almost feels a little sorry for the needy family who is going to move in, picturing the very low standard to which their new home will be refurbished.
Willie assigns them partners of the opposite sex and sets them to work on various tasks. Sasha’s partner is a tall blond guy named Justin and their task is to remove the wallpaper in the living room. Every fifteen minutes, Willie blows a whistle and you can switch if you don’t like your task (or, more likely, your partner, Sasha suspects).
Sasha and Justin mainly ignore each other and get on with their task. Even after the whistle blows four times, they’re still working together. But when they finally take a break and go to the water cooler, Justin looks at her for a moment and Sasha suddenly knows, with an instinct born of long experience, that he is about to tell her that he has a girlfriend or to ask for her phone number. Or both.
And sure enough, Justin says in a low voice, “I have to tell you something. I’m not really single. I just came here because my friend Paul didn’t want to come alone.”
“Me, too,” Sasha says. She hopes they are not going to have some long discussion about their respective relationships.
But Justin doesn’t mention his girlfriend again. He only says, “I’m thinking maybe I should have a singles volunteer day at my apartment. It needs repainting and a whole bunch of other stuff.”
“All my apartment really needs is a new door,” Sasha says. “Or, actually, a new lock, because we left the coffeepot on a few weeks ago and the fire department had to break in and they damaged the lock and if we don’t fix it eventually, the landlord will take it out of our security deposit.”
“So you need to have a singles volunteer thing open only to locksmiths,” Justin says.
“Well, everyone else could just hang out and have a few beers,” Sasha says.
And then she is suddenly aware of trying to charm this man, and stops. Why should she charm him? She doesn’t really like him. Who is he, anyway? He’s not Carson.
When they say good-bye an hour later, Justin introduces his friend Paul to Monique, and maybe in an alternative universe, Paul and Monique would fall in love, but in actuality, Paul only smirks and says, “Yeah, I know you. You’re the one who started painting before we’d primed the walls.”
And Monique bristles and says, “Well, at least I didn’t—”
But they are spared having to hear whatever she didn’t do by the sound of something crashing upstairs, followed by a string of swearing from Willie.
Justin holds out his hand to Sasha. “Maybe I should give you my number in case you have that party,” he says.
“It’s for singles, remember,” she says, but she shakes his hand.
She and Monique walk out into the baking August heat and Sasha thinks, as she always does when phone numbers are exchanged or nearly exchanged, about the time Monique shared a cab home from a party with a man and she wrote I’d love to get together on the back of one of her business cards and slid it in with her half of the cab fare and the man didn’t call her but the cab driver did. It is among Sasha’s fondest memories and she laughs out loud as they walk down the steps of the brownstone.
Sasha and Monique decide it is too hot to go back to their unair-conditioned apartment and so they go downtown and watch two movies in a row and eat a whole big box of popcorn and nearly an entire package of malted milk balls.
Then they walk very slowly uptown in the evening heat and go to the bar across the street from their apartment and start drinking Sea Breezes. After the first Sea Breeze, the man next to Sasha says that the man next to him is some sort of drunk migrant worker and buying everyone drinks. Sasha is fascinated: There are migrant workers in New York City? What exactly does he pick? But the migrant worker, if that’s what he is, doesn’t speak English and only gestures for Sasha and Monique to order more drinks, which they do and which he pays for, and Sasha feels a little bit bad about this but not that much.
After the fifth Sea Breeze (they are keeping track by folding the straws into triangles and poking them into the holes of the drainboard in the bar), a man smiles at Monique and she smiles back and then is swept with the horrifying realization that he’s actually one of the guys who works at Broadway Bagel. So then Sasha and Monique have a long whispered discussion, wondering whether they are snobs for not wanting to socialize with him, and would they feel differently if he was, like, six inches taller, and since she smiled at him will Monique have to talk to him if he comes over, and does this mean they can’t go to Broadway Bagel anymore? (The answer to all these questions, they decide, is probably.)
But after that, things pick up a bit, and they keep drinking and annoy the hell out of everyone by playing “Rescue Me” on the jukebox five times in a row. Then they walk home and Monique throws up in the lobby wastebasket and feels a little bit better, but Sasha doesn’t and has to lie in the whirling pit of her bed with the box fan in the window set on high and blowing on her full blast, which is sort of like lying under the rotor of a Chinook helicopter while it tries to take off in a high altitude, but she’s too drunk to get up and turn it down, and really, it’s just a great day, a great evening. Perfect, in fact.
Oh, there is no limit to the things a real couple can do! They can call each other at any time of the day or night, without a lot of letting the phone ring and hanging up first. They can go out to brunch, which Sasha and Carson do on Sunday morning, as soon as her hangover recedes enough to allow movement. Somehow brunch was never a possibility when they were having an affair—the timing was all wrong. And Sasha doesn’t have to debate endlessly whether to wear her new white crocheted blouse because if Carson doesn’t see it today, he’ll see it tomorrow or the day after.
They can go to a bookstore together, they can wander up Lexington, they can go to Starbucks, they can go back to Carson’s club for aspirin for Sasha’s headache, they can go meet a friend of Carson’s for drinks, and the drinks help Sasha’s hangover even more than the aspirin. The friend they are meeting is a man from Carson’s office, and he is nice enough, although when they are discussing the heat he says, “Imagine living through this without air-conditioning.”
“My apartment doesn’t have air-conditioning,” Sasha says. “Actually, I’ve never lived in an apartment that does.”
The man stares at her for a long moment, and Sasha wonders what he would say if she told him that in addition to not being air-conditioned, it’s an unwritten rule in their building that all the neighbors take turns buying Budweiser for Mrs. Misner in 3C so she doesn’t get all aggressive and shout things at their visitors.
Real couples don’t have to decide whether to have sex or dinner, and after the sex and during the dinner, they can talk about going on vacation together, and Sasha can keep a nightgown and a toothbrush at Carson’s club, whereas previously, anything of hers had to be small enough to fit in a locked drawer at his office. They can spend the night together, they can even
