Run Catch Kiss

by Amy Sohn

  Praise for RUN CATCH KISS

  “Sohn is a helluva comic writer . . . [Run Catch Kiss] has lots of genuine feelings and sharp insights. . . . Throughout her protagonist’s painful journey, Sohn makes trenchant observations about the ways that sex and love can disappoint.”

  —Jennifer Kornreich, Salon

  “More honest and downtown than Bushnell, more introspective than Fielding, Sohn’s alter-ego, Ariel, is . . . brazen, frank, provocative, funny, sexed-up, and not the least bit ashamed. . . . Sohn comes to the rescue with a novel that is deliciously naughty and, ultimately, touching.”

  —Greg Morago, The Hartford Courant

  “With its contemporary foibles and likable heroine, Sohn has a pleasantly readable winner in this debut novel . . . fun and sexy.”

  —Clea Simon, The Boston Globe

  “Nelson Algren once said you shouldn’t sleep with someone who has more problems than you. The narrator in Run Catch Kiss does just that. Her bad affairs are both funny and reflective. Amy Sohn takes ‘girl power’ to the next level.”

  —Hal Sirowitz, author of Mother Said

  “Sohn’s Ariel Steiner embodies a sort of extreme feminist ideal, seeking success and love, reputation be damned, with an ultimately conservative twist: She sleeps around and hates it; she’s so successful, she’s notorious; she’s so voyeuristic that she barely participates in her own life. Run Catch Kiss is a quick read . . . savvy.”

  —Sarah Wildman, The Jerusalem Report

  “[K]een observational humor . . . using an ironic, voyeuristic style, Sohn attacks a voyeuristic culture consumed with sleaze rather than substance. . . . [T]he novel delivers laughs and an accurate portrait of romantic angst in the big city.”

  —Scott Markwell, Book

  “Sohn’s matter-of-fact writing style makes for a funny, honest, and enjoyable read.”

  —Kathleen Hughes, Booklist

  “Ariel Steiner easily gives Portnoy a run for his money.”

  —Adam Fisher, The Reporter

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1999 by Amy Sohn

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  First Simon & Schuster ebook edition August 2012

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license of Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Simon & Schuster edition as follows:

  Sohn, Amy, [date]

  Run catch kiss : a novel I Amy Sohn.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3569.O435R8 1999

  813’.54—DC21 99-22057 CIP Rev.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-3042-1 (ebook)

  Portions of this book originally appeared in New York Press in a slightly different form.

  “I’VE GOT A CRUSH ON YOU,” by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, © 1930 (Renewed) WB Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS U.S. INC., Miami, FL 33014

  “It Ain’t Me, Babe”—Copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc., Copyright renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

  For my mother and father

  The author wishes to thank the following individuals: John Strausbaugh, Russ Smith, Daniel Greenberg, David Rosenthal, Marysue Rucci, Will Blythe, Florence Falk, Will McGreal, Umberto Crenca, and Joe Maruzzo.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  About the Author

  With the first few words Miss Lonelyhearts had known that he would be ridiculous. By avoiding God, he had failed to tap the force in his heart and had merely written a column for his paper.

  NATHANAEL WEST,

  Miss Lonelyhearts

  1

  I WAS ONLY TWENTY-TWO and already I was infamous. I read the gossip pages with terror in my heart, certain I would find some humiliating detail about my recent downfall. I walked the streets with my eyes peeled, ever on the lookout for hidden paparazzi. I entered my local café with my sphincter tight, counting the seconds until a stranger recognized me, shouted my name, and mocked me for my crime, a crime no one understood, because of my adamant and prolonged silence on the matter.

  I was the Hester Prynne of downtown. A public laughingstock at an age when my biggest worry should have been my lack of health insurance. Shamed before my time, defamed without good cause, a huge red letter branded on my (sizable) chest.

  Yet somehow it all made sense. I had always wanted to become someone who could walk into a room and have her reputation precede her. That’s what I got. In the worst way.

  •

  I didn’t move back to New York to be a sex columnist. I wanted to be an actress. The day after graduation, I moved into my parents’ apartment in Brooklyn Heights and called my agent, Faye Glass. She had represented me since I was fourteen, and helped me book a few off-off-Broadway plays and an anticrack commercial during high school, but by senior year my career wasn’t exactly promising enough to make it worth postponing college. So I let my contract expire, went off to Brown, and told Faye I’d be in touch in four years.

  I don’t think she realized I meant it literally, because when I got her on the phone that day in May and told her my name, she said, “Who?”

  “Ariel Steiner,” I repeated insistently. “You represented me when I was a kid. I finished college, I’m back in the city, and I want to start auditioning again.”

  “Oh,” she said like she still wasn’t sure who I was. “Come into my office sometime tomorrow and we can get reacquainted.”

  •

  She seemed to recognize me when I walked in the door, which at first was a huge relief. Maybe her early-onset dementia wasn’t as advanced as I had thought. She sat me down opposite her desk and I said, “How’s the business changed since I’ve been away?”

  “I’ll tell you how you’ve changed,” she said. “You’re heavier. A lot heavier. I hate to say it, but looks are seventy-five percent of this business, and it’s always going to be that way. I can’t send you out for any ingenue parts until you lose fifteen pounds. Come back and see me when you’ve slimmed down. In the meantime, I’ll submit you for fat character roles.”

  I nodded mutely, but as soon as I got out on the street, I started bawling. It came as something of a shock to have to put my life dream on hold all because I never got rid of my freshman fifteen. And it didn’t help that I was being asked to diet when I had just graduated a college where you spend four years learning not to buy into the warped value system of the patriarchal hegemony.

  The reason Faye’s words were so surprising was that I’d never considered myself fat before. I was five five, 142 pounds—no slim chicken, but by no means a total porker. Guys had always considered my body mo
re of an asset than a liability. I’m what they call zaftig: all butt, boobs, and hips. I was a late bloomer, but once I bloomed, I bloomed big. I didn’t understand how the same figure that had served me so well horizontally could serve me so poorly professionally. But it didn’t matter how I felt about my body. If Faye said I was fat, then I was. I had to lose the weight or choose another career, and I wasn’t going to choose another career.

  I’d known acting was my calling since November 1976, when I was two. My parents had taken me to my grandparents’ house in Philadelphia for Thanksgiving, and after dinner the whole family gathered in the living room for the entertainment segment, where all the kids showed off their latest accomplishments. As my three-year-old cousin Eddie belted “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” into a microphone, I sat in the corner, watching them all watch him, and was seized by a jealous rage. I couldn’t stand the sight of so many people paying so much attention to someone who wasn’t me.

  Then I got a brilliant idea. As Eddie continued to sing, I slowly and quietly began to strip off all my clothes. Everyone was so focused on him they didn’t notice what I was doing. As soon as I was in the buff, I jumped in front of him with a loud “Ta-da!” and the entire room burst into fits of hysterical laughter. Eddie had been totally forgotten. They were all watching me. I didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty for stealing his limelight. I just felt like justice had been served.

  But now justice would have to be delayed until I lost my extra poundage. I wiped the tears off my face, bought a Slim-Fast at a Korean deli, and got on the subway home.

  •

  Brooklyn Heights is a quaint, old-fashioned neighborhood known for its tree-lined streets and elegant turn-of-the-century brownstones. I didn’t grow up in one of those brownstones. I grew up in a three-bedroom apartment on the thirty-fifth floor of a middle-income apartment building, Silver Tower, that was built in August 1973. I once looked up Silver Tower in a Brooklyn history book and it was described as “a blot on the otherwise attractive landscape of the neighborhood.”

  Sad to say, that’s pretty accurate. The railings on the terraces look like prison bars, the concrete is gray-brown and ribbed like a condom, and the entire phallic palace is the biggest eyesore in a twenty-block radius. The only thing that makes the apartment halfway worthwhile is the view. The terrace faces Queens, but if you lean all the way out and look toward the left, you can see the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, and from my bedroom you can spot the Statue of Liberty.

  When I got home, my mom was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables and listening to All Things Considered. “How was Faye’s?” she said.

  “She can’t send me out on any ingenue parts till I lose fifteen pounds.”

  “She really said you have to lose fifteen pounds?” said my mom, horrified.

  “Yeah.”

  “Because I think ten would be more than enough.”

  “Thanks,” I said, went into my room, and shut the door. I lay down on the bed, closed my eyes, and fantasized about the day my skinny, perfect ass would be on the cover of Rolling Stone. It wouldn’t take long. Once I lost the weight, Faye would send me on an audition for a murderous, conniving bitch part on the New York cop show Book ’Em. The casting director would be so blown away by my venomous appeal that she’d hire me on the spot. As soon as we shot the episode, every casting office in town would start buzzing about me, and before the show even aired, George C. Wolfe of the Public Theater would cast me in his next star-studded production—as Lady Macbeth to Will Smith’s Macbeth. Once we opened, Ben Brantley would cream all over me in the New York Times, and Hollywood would start calling.

  I’d get a walk-on in the new George Clooney vehicle shooting in New York, and then Woody would cast me as his mute fourteen-year-old mail-order bride in his Untitled Winter Project. Although I wouldn’t have any actual lines, my face and body would be so expressive that I’d get nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar. I’d bring my father as my date, and when Jack Palance opened the envelope and announced me as the winner, I’d run up to the stage in strapless Chanel and they’d cut to a shot of my dad drowning in a sea of his own mucus.

  I’d follow my Oscar-winning role with the girl roles in Speeds 4 and 5 and Insanely Indecent Proposals. Julia would become a has-been, Julianne a nobody, Juliette yesterday’s news. Winona and Gwyneth would become my best buddies. I’d help Gwyn with her eating disorder and convince Winona to change her last name back to Horowitz, and the three of us would become the reigning Jewish Girl Power Mafia of Hollywood. Under our influence, Reform Judaism would become the most popular celebrity religion and Scientology would die out forever.

  I’d start my own production company, Zaftig Pictures, and produce chick-friendly scripts with completely one-dimensional roles for men. I’d be the first woman to start asking twenty-five mil a pic. Time would put me on the cover, saying I was changing the rules of Hollywood. Brown would award me an honorary doctorate and I’d go back to campus to give a speech about female empowerment in a male-dominated world. All the young theaterfucks would clap wildly for me as I choked up and did a beauty pageant wave, remembering the day when Faye had told me I was Just Too Fat.

  I must have dozed off, because I was awakened by my brother, Zach, standing over me, saying, “Hello, blubber.” He was in his junior year at Stuyvesant High School and going through his smart-assed-prick stage.

  “Mom told you?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think I need to lose weight? Be honest.”

  “Well, I’ve never wanted to say anything to you, but you have put on a few pounds over the last couple years. I think the diet’s a good thing. It’s an excuse to make yourself more attractive.” Zach could be sharp sometimes. He cracked, but he cracked wise.

  We went to the dinner table and started in on our fruit cocktail, and then my dad walked in. He kissed my mother, but not me. Since I hit puberty, I haven’t let him kiss me. When I was a kid we embraced all the time, but as soon as I started developing, I stopped feeling comfortable around him. Then, when I got over my puberty weirdness, I didn’t know how to go back to kissing him again, because that would have been admitting I’d been wrong not to kiss him, and you can never admit to your parents that you were wrong.

  “What did Faye have to say?” he asked, sitting down at the table. I told him. “I see,” he said, then began contorting his eyebrows violently. He has a bushy black beard and I’ve never seen his lips, but I can always tell what he’s feeling by his forehead.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll be OK. It’s only fifteen pounds. I don’t think it’ll take me that long to lose it.”

  “I don’t either,” he said. But for the rest of the meal he didn’t say another word about Faye. He just asked Zach a bunch of questions about his physics class, as I shoveled down the kasha varnishkes my mom had made for me, and pretended to like it.

  •

  The next morning I made an appointment to interview at a temp agency on Wall Street. I had gotten its name off the front page of the Sunday New York Times classifieds. The ad was diabolical, but it worked. WANT TO BE A STAR? it said, in bold caps. And on the next line, in much smaller letters, “Then sign up with Dynamic Associates for flexible, temporary work.”

  When I walked in the office, a coiffed fortyish woman introduced herself as Frances, took me into a conference room in the back, and had me fill out some employment history forms. Then she led me into another room, where I took the typing, word processing, and grammar tests. The last was the most humiliating. It consisted of retard-level questions like “Which is correct? (a) Washington, d.c., (b) Washington, DC, (c) Washington, D.C., (d) Washington dc” and “Pick the choice that defines or is most like the word collate. (a) destroy, (b) separate, (c) assemble, (d) moisten.” I wondered what they did to the people who got that one wrong. Was there a special torture room in the back where they forced you to do huge mass mailings for hours on end, until the meaning of collate was forever em
bedded in your mind?

  When I finished the tests, Frances took me back into her office and tabulated my results. “You need some work on your word processing skills,” she said, “but your grammar is good and you type seventy-five, which is excellent. I’m going to try to get you something for tomorrow.”

  By the time I got home from the agency she had already left a message on my machine about an assignment. I’d be the secretary to a financial administrator at a magazine publishing company, McGinley Ladd, at Thirty-second and Park Avenue South. The rate was $18 an hour—more than I’d gotten for any job in my life.

  •

  My boss greeted me in the lobby of the building. She was six feet tall with shoulder-length blond hair, and she introduced herself as Ashley Ginsburg. I could guess by that name that she was a shiksa who’d married a Jew, and despised her immediately for stealing one of our boys—my own occasional shaygitz suckerdom aside.

  She took me upstairs to the twelfth floor and led me to my desk. It was in a small dingy room with a window overlooking Park Avenue South. “This is my office,” she said, pointing to a door to the right of the desk. “Don’t walk in on me unannounced or when I’m on the phone.”

  She showed me how to transfer a call and work the intercom, turned on my computer, gave me a user ID, and disappeared into her office. As soon as she closed the door, I called my machine to see if Faye had left a message. Nothing. For the next two and a half hours, the Corposhit didn’t come out of her office once. I sat at the desk staring at my watch, looking out the window, daydreaming, and checking the machine once every fifteen minutes. At eleven-fifty, just as I was on my way out to lunch, I dialed one more time and struck gold: “Ariel, it’s Faye. I got you an audition for Book ’Em tomorrow at six. Please call.” I couldn’t believe my fantasy was coming true so quickly! But when I called her back she said the role was “a chunky young woman who works as a cashier and studies part-time at City College,” and I realized it might take some time before my dream became reality.