it hadn’t been knocked hard enough. For a second I wished I were another woman, a woman who could take him back, or perhaps a woman who could ask for details that might make a difference. Was it a one-night stand or an actual affair? How did they meet? Was he in a relationship with her now? Did he love her? Was he really, really, really sorry?
Secretly I knew none of that mattered. I reminded myself that the baby was conceived while we were a couple, and I wondered if I was the last to know. Did everyone at the restaurant know? Had they been keeping it from me this entire time? Had Lissette known that I existed? I felt like Jon had tattooed his name on my butt while I was asleep, removed all my clothes in the middle of Times Square and invited a crowd over to point and laugh. In fact, that was exactly what he had done. Suddenly, I went into self-preservation mode, and I knew that I had to get him out of my home as soon as possible.
I opened my door and leaned against it. I felt sorry for him because I knew I could have loved him better than anyone. I hated him because of the fool he had made of me. I wanted to get tested for STDs, and to kick him until he cried. I wanted him to feel what he had done, to see my hurt and to want to comfort me, and to not be allowed to try. I wanted to see this woman, and to know if she was prettier than me. I wanted to travel back in time to the first night he was ever with her, to shake him and make him understand what he was beginning to throw away. I wanted to forget that I ever loved him. I couldn’t look him in the eye before I slammed the door behind him and hurled the leftovers of our relationship into the toilet, but I did manage to force out a whisper.
“Get out.”
8
By the time I escaped the clutches of the “Hispan-iddish Inquisition” at Starbucks (as I referred to Pam and Cristina’s irritating attempts at emotional intervention), I was, of course, running late for work. While there was no expected time of arrival on a Sunday, I fully believed I’d find that Peter and Sarah had been at it since ten a.m. What I didn’t believe I’d find, however, was the following e-mail from Jon.
Sunday, March 27, 10:30 a.m.
From: Jon
To: Vina
Re: Us
Baby,
You have to know that I’m sorry. I deserve a chance to explain.
We deserve a chance to try to work it out. Please give us that.
Jon
In an electronic folder named “Handsome” I had saved every e-mail I had ever received from him. I had planned to print them out one day, tuck them into a shoe box and hide it in our closet. I had planned to pull them out to embarrass our children during their Thanksgiving vacations from college. I had planned to call on them for strength when Jon spent half our savings on a luxury RV. And I had planned to refer to them for proof, ten years and three children into our marriage, when he began to forget that he had ever been romantic.
But now? Now they meant about as much to me as a mug from last summer’s company picnic. Of all the goddamned nerve. How dare he continue to refer to me as his baby? He had a baby, and it sure as hell wasn’t me. And if he had to address me, I would have preferred that he use the title “Ma’am” while dressed in rags and begging me for change. He would have lost everything, you see, after some food critic became ill from his meal, forcing him to shut down the restaurant and downgrade from his Soho loft to a cardboard box in a doorway on Second Avenue. Naturally, I would pass by his new home each morning on my way to a better job, and a better man with more…stamina…and a bigger…wine collection.
I added his last e-mail to the folder and twisted my finger through the air above my head, like a plane in some miniature air show before thumping ceremoniously on the Delete key.
“You have permanently erased all of the messages in the folder marked: Handsome.”
I leaned back in my chair, inhaled and clasped my hands behind my head. I imagined myself strutting toward Grand Central in a shiny gray DKNY skirt-suit, with my chocolate-brown Manolos barely avoiding his spleen as he lay prostrate across my path. My salon-perfect hair would flounce in the wind, synchronized to the beat of my footsteps and the tune of “Who’s That Lady?” being pumped through some invisible speakers in the sky.
I don’t know if the electronic age has made relationships easier or more difficult, although I can testify to the unique sense of comfort inherent in a digital gesture of dissociation. It was especially soothing to execute it from a cocoon of prestige and privacy so many floors above the rest of New York. I comforted myself with the fact that there was at least one aspect of my life that was under control: my career.
Perhaps the only thing more annoying than a company that’s an old boys’ club is one that is but believes it is not. Mine considered itself progressive. My colleagues used phrases like “We’re all fired up” and “I’ll shoot that right over” and “Let’s find a way to leverage that.” Everyone wore suits or Brooks Brothers office casual wear, played squash on the weekends and looked like a WASP even if they weren’t. At least Alan and Steve, my mentors and our team’s co-Managing Directors, treated me like one of the guys.
There were only two ways to win respect at a company like that: either act as if you’re thrilled to have the honor of being part of the team, or encourage the impression that you know everything about the business and are therefore an irreplaceable asset to the firm. Early in my career I chose the latter tactic. My method involved a careful blend of carrying myself as if I had it all figured out, and intimidating people from asking me questions I didn’t know how to answer. Being a self-assured (translation: inherently scary) woman among the type of men who self-selected New York finance in the first place didn’t hurt.
Instead of causing you to want to poke out your own eyeballs due to the mind-numbing details of what I actually do at work, I will share the stuff that’s interesting. I’ll talk about what went on between the people thrown together in a place like that, which is always far more compelling than how the money is made.
My neighbor, Christopher, had apparently decided that he was my new best friend. He was standing at my door not five minutes after I got home from work that Sunday evening, with a presumptuous smile and a blender full of peach margaritas. With Booboo in tow, he barreled right past me and began to make himself comfortable. Having also decided that we were too close to bother ourselves with formalities like Hello, he simply waved the blender in my face, kicked off his flip-flops, and bounded into my kitchen.
“If you turn me away, I’ll become that pathetic queen who lives alone down the hall, drinking margaritas and talking to his cat,” he said. “Please don’t turn me into that guy. I may be getting old in gay-years, but I am still way too cute to be that guy.”
I watched from my doorway as he sat on my couch and began pouring into my mismatched coffee mugs. After rearranging my throw pillows and settling himself among them, he held a mug out toward me. He motioned to the easy chair, and I sat myself down.
“So tell me.” He smiled, propping his heels onto my coffee table. “Why won’t you give Jon another chance?”
Booboo busied himself in my closet, probably trying my best heels on for size. After leaning on my apartment buzzer for about a half an hour the night before, Jon had apparently realized that either I wasn’t home, or I wasn’t planning on letting him in. Since he was drunk, he decided to buzz all the other apartments until he found someone who was willing to hear him out. In the
