a term that brings to mind slender sorority girls with Neiman Marcus charges. Sturdy, no-nonsense cotton underwear is necessary to keep my natural jiggle and sag from jiggling and sagging to an unfortunate extreme.
Will adores real lingerie, the kind that undoubtedly fills the top drawer of Nerissa’s tall Pottery Barn bureau. This, I know about Will, because once, during our senior year of college, when we had been officially dating for a few months and I knew we were about to become lovers, he bought me a teddy. It was a champagne-colored satin-and-lace getup from Christian Dior, two sizes two small—which I didn’t know whether to take as a compliment or a hint.
Every time I wore it, I put on a bra and underpants underneath. The bra because not wearing one would be obscene with my figure; the underpants because every time I moved, the teddy’s crotch unsnapped because I was too tall or too wide for it, or, sadly, both. Finally, I replaced the snaps with a hook-and-eye combo. I had learned sewing in Brookside Middle School home ec, though back then never dreamed that I would use my skills for something so illicit as replacing the crotch snaps on a sexy undergarment presented by a man with whom I would have sex before marriage.
Anyway, it was hard to tell whether Will was ever truly turned on by the sight of me in that crotch-doctored teddy with my thick duct-tape-like bra straps peeking out at the shoulders and my sensible cotton Hanes riding lower on my lumpy thighs than the french-cut teddy. I like to think that he found me irresistible, but in retrospect, I’m not certain that’s the case.
When we made love for the first time in college, it was after drinking two bottles of red wine in the apartment he shared with two gay theater guys who were out rehearsing for the campus production of Guys and Dolls, for which Will wasn’t cast. For that oversight he blamed Geoff Jefferson, the hetero-phobic (according to Will) theater professor. We drank wine and he verbally trashed Geoff Jefferson and we drank more wine and then we had sex on the nearest bed we stumbled to, which belonged to his roommate André. That’s where I lost my virginity, on six-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets imported from Italy, staring over Will’s sweaty shoulder at a poster of Marilyn Monroe on a subway grate with her skirt blowing up around her.
Speaking of the subway, I get off at Times Square and emerge onto the bordering-on-garish family-friendly street filled with oversize theme eateries and warehouse chain stores where there were once peep shows, topless bars and porno flicks. Shoulder to shoulder with immigrants with complexions of various hues, overweight tourists with diagonal purse straps and a class trip group collectively gaping at the MTV studio across Broadway, I walk north and west: two short uptown blocks and two long crosstown blocks.
I buy my Salem Lights and a copy of today’s Post from the familiar newsstand on the corner, where the Pakistani proprietor sometimes greets me like an old acquaintance and sometimes appears not to recognize me at all. It’s unnerving.
Today, he gives me a big grin. We’re long-lost friends again.
“Hello!” he pretty much shouts, as is his way. “How you today?”
I grin back. “Not bad. How about you?”
He shakes his head at the misty sky. “This weather. Too cold. Too gray.”
I nod. I do trite conversation very well. “Seems like summer’s never going to come.” See?
“Oh, it’s coming,” he says with the conviction of a waiter at Smith & Wollensky vouching for the prime rib. “Then when it gets here, you complain.”
I wonder whether he’s employing the collective you, or if I’m supposed to take it as a sign that I’ll be miserable this summer, not just because the city is so goddamned hot from June through September, but because Will won’t be in it with me.
Two
Will’s studio apartment is on the twenty-sixth floor of a high-rise doorman building with a marble lobby and three elevators. It’s the closest thing to what my small-town upstate self used to imagine was a typical New York City dwelling. The building, I mean. The apartment is pretty much a letdown. But aren’t they all?
Growing up in Brookside, I watched a lot of TV. Mainly sitcoms, and in most of them, the setting was New York. Thus I was weaned on Monica and Rachel’s sprawling two-bedroom with oversize windows and a terrace-like fire escape, and the Huxtables’ elaborate Brooklyn Heights brownstone with an actual yard and Jerry Seinfeld’s spacious West Side one-bedroom complete with wacky neighbor.
Ha.
My place, you already know about.
Will’s place, I’ll describe as little more than a fairly large square room with square office-building-like plate glass windows along one end, and at the other, a separate kitchen the size of the stairway landing in my parents’ Queen Anne Victorian. His bed is by the windows; Nerissa’s futon and dresser are behind the aforementioned folding screen near the kitchen. In between are a semi-tacky black leather couch Will bought from the previous tenant whose fiancée wouldn’t let him bring it to the marriage, Will’s workout equipment and a bookshelf crammed with CDs, scripts, Playbills and a few actual books, mostly paperback classics he couldn’t sell back to the college bookstore after two semesters of American Lit.
Having buzzed me in, you’d think Will would be waiting with the door propped open, or at least somewhere near it. But I have to knock twice, and when he finally opens it, he’s rumpled and yawning, obviously having just rolled out of bed.
He looks fabulous anyway. At least, he does to me.
Kate once announced, after two stiff bourbons at the Royalton, that she thinks there’s something vaguely faggy about Will, and that she’s not the least bit attracted to him. This disturbed me profoundly for reasons I can’t quite grasp. Ever since, there are times when I look at Will and find myself searching for signs of latent homosexuality, half-expecting him to mince or sashay or toss a lusty leer at James, his strapping, too-beautiful-to-be-straight doorman. So far he never has, and I don’t know what it is about him that Kate sees as effeminate. She doesn’t even know about the plants in college, which, by the way, are still thriving years later on his windowsill.
Maybe it’s just the musical theater thing—so many actors are gay, and she can’t shake the stereotype because she’s from the Deep South. Or do I blame too many of her hangups on that?
In any case, as far as I’m concerned, Will is masculinity personified. Think Noel from Felicity meets Ben from Felicity and that’s pretty much Will. He’s six-foot-one and clean-shaven, with a well-defined jaw and a cleft in his chin. He has thick dark-brown hair that has looked incredibly good with sideburns, or shaggy past his earlobes or close-cropped, as it is now. His not-quite-blue, not-quite-gray eyes are the precise color of my favorite J. Crew sweater, described as Smoke in the catalogue. He works out all the time, meaning he’s lean and muscular. He frequently wears black turtlenecks, and he always wears cologne.
Where I come from, cologne, like jewelry, is worn only by Italian men—including my dad and brothers—or by Jason Miller, the local hairdresser of ambiguous sexual orientation. Okay, ambiguous only to my mother, who has speculated on more than one occasion how strange it is that such a sweet, handsome man isn’t married yet. My mother also assumes without question that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, that O.J. is looking for the real killers and that all my adult life I’ve been going to weekly Sunday mass and Saturday confession.
In any case, maybe the cologne thing triggered Kate’s comment about Will being faggy.
Even now, first thing in the morning—at least, what is considered first
