The Perfect Couple

by Elin Hilderbrand

  “Hi,” she says to Benji as she steps out of her Uber.

  “Wow,” Benji says. “I almost didn’t recognize you. You look—wow. I mean, wow.” Celeste blushes. Benji is taken aback, maybe even awestruck, and it doesn’t seem like an act. Celeste is unsure whether to kiss him or hug him and so she just smiles and he smiles back, looking into her eyes. Then he holds the door to the restaurant open and ushers Celeste inside. “Are you hungry?” he asks.

  Benji is nice. Celeste didn’t think there were any nice guys living in New York. The men she sees on the subway and on the street all seem to leer at her breasts or swear under their breath if she’s taking too long with her MetroCard. The men at the zoo are no prizes. Darius, who took Celeste’s job in primates when she got promoted, has confessed that he spends nearly half his paycheck on internet porn. Mawabe, who works with the big cats, is addicted to the video game Manhunt; he offers to teach Celeste to play it every time they have a conversation. The problem with people from the zoo in general is that they relate better to animals than to humans, and that’s true for Celeste as well.

  When Benji tells Celeste that he works for the Japanese bank Nomura, she pretends this is brand-new information. “You mean to tell me you’re just another soulless private-equity guy?” she says, hoping it sounds like she is subjected to dates with such guys every weekend.

  He laughs. “No, that would be my father.” He then explains that he heads Nomura’s strategic-giving department, so it’s his job to give money away to meaningful causes.

  “Eventually, I’d like to run a large nonprofit. Like the Red Cross or the American Cancer Society.”

  “My mother has breast cancer,” Celeste blurts out. Then she bows her head over her crispy spring rolls. She can’t believe she just said that, not only because it’s the world’s most depressing topic but because she hasn’t discussed her mother’s cancer with anyone.

  Benji says, “Is she going to be okay?”

  Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Celeste’s mother, Karen Otis, had stage 2 invasive ductal carcinoma that reached her lymph nodes, necessitating eighteen rounds of chemo and thirty rounds of radiation after her double mastectomy. She rang the bell at St. Luke’s for her final treatment back in July and she isn’t supposed to have a follow-up appointment for six months. But she was experiencing back pain so she’d gone to see her doctor this week. He ordered an MRI, one that Karen nearly refused because it was so expensive and Bruce and Karen were already loaded down with medical bills for treatments that weren’t covered by Bruce’s modest health insurance. However, Bruce insisted they do the test. When he talked to Celeste about it on the phone, he quoted a song by the Zac Brown Band. “‘There’s no dollar sign on peace of mind,’” he said. “‘This I’ve come to know.’”

  Celeste figures they must play this song on the Neiman Marcus Pandora, because she hasn’t known her parents to like any song recorded after 1985.

  The results of the MRI should be back on Monday.

  Celeste raises her eyes to Benji’s, his brown to her blue. Brown is a dominant gene. Benji’s DNA, she is sure, is composed of only dominant genes. She’s not sure what to say. Her mother’s cancer is a private matter, and Celeste’s entire relationship with her parents is too intense to explain to most people.

  “I don’t know?” Celeste says. She raises her voice at the end so that she sounds more hopeful than maudlin. She doesn’t want Benji feeling sorry for her. This is one reason why Celeste doesn’t like talking about Karen’s illness. Also, she doesn’t want to hear anyone else’s inspiring story about a sister-in-law who went through exactly the same thing and is now running ultramarathons. Celeste doesn’t mean to be ungenerous in her thoughts, but she has come to the chilling conclusion that we are all alone in our bodies. Irrefutably, immutably alone. And hence, no one’s story offers hope. Either Karen will survive the cancer or it will metastasize and she will succumb to it. The only people Celeste can tolerate discussing Karen’s treatment with are Karen’s doctors. Celeste believes in science, in medicine. She has secretly been donating a hundred dollars a week to the Breast Cancer Research Fund. “She’s okay now. For the time being.” Celeste is too superstitious to say her mother has beaten it, and she refuses to call her mother a survivor. Yet.

  “Thank you for telling me,” Benji says.

  Celeste nods. He understands her, maybe? He senses the agony lurking behind her metered answers? He seems perceptive the way so few men—so few people—are. Celeste picks up a spring roll and dips it into the vinegary sauce. “These are really good.”

  “Wait until you taste the pho,” he says. He takes a sip of his beer. “So, tell me about the zoo,” he says, and Celeste relaxes.

  Benji insists on taking Celeste home in a taxi, which seems quaint. He asks the driver to wait while he walks Celeste to the door of her apartment building. She feels a huge relief that there will be no quandary about whether to invite Benji up and if she does invite him up about how far to let things go. Merritt believes in sleeping with a guy on the first date, but Celeste feels very much the opposite. She would never, ever.

  Ever.

  Benji tells her he would like to see her again. The following night, if she’s free, he has tickets to see Hamilton.

  Celeste gasps. Everyone in this city wants to see Hamilton.

  Benji laughs. “Is that a yes?”

  Before she can answer, he’s kissing her. Celeste starts out feeling self-conscious about the taxi driver who is waiting, but then she surrenders. There is nothing in the world that is quite as intoxicating as kissing, Celeste thinks. She lets herself get lost in Benji’s lips, his tongue. He tastes delicious; his mouth is both soft and insistent. His hands are on her face, then her neck, then one hand travels to her hip. Before she can guess what will happen next, he pulls away.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow night,” he says. “I’ll call with details in the morning.” With that, he goes down the stairs and by the time Celeste’s head clears, his taxi has pulled away.

  They go to see Hamilton. It turns out that Benji’s father is one of the original investors and has house seats, which are first-row center of the first balcony. Benji has seen the musical five times but he doesn’t tell her this until afterward, when they’re sitting at Hudson Malone, dipping jumbo shrimp into cocktail sauce, and Celeste has to admit, she would never have known. He had seemed as enraptured as she was.

  Benji says he would like to see her Sunday and Celeste suggests a walk in Central Park. The park is a place she feels comfortable, nearly has a sense of ownership. She runs the reservoir any chance she can get and in the summer lies out on a towel in North Meadow. She loves Poet’s Walk and the Conservatory Pond, but her favorite spot is surely a place Benji hasn’t experienced before. She meets him south of Bethesda Fountain where a group of roller skaters congregates on weekends. There’s a motley crew of characters—Celeste has come to recognize most of the regulars—who skate in an oval around a boom box that plays classic rock songs.

  When Benji arrives, they’re skating to “Gimme Three Steps,” by Lynyrd Skynyrd.

  “I didn’t think anyone roller-skated anymore,” Benji says. “This is like something out of 1979.”

  “I come here all the time,” Celeste says. “I think I like it so much because this is the music my parents listen to.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Benji says. “Are they big Skynyrd fans?”

  “All classic rock,” Celeste says. “They especially love Meat Loaf.” As Celeste watches the skaters, she thinks about being a little girl sitting in the backseat of their Toyota Corolla while her parents cranked up the volume on their cassette of Bat Out of Hell. They loved all the songs, but their favorite was “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” When the song got to the middle section with Meat Loaf and Mrs. Loud, Karen would sing the woman’s part, and Bruce would sing the man’s part, and at the end of the song they would belt out the lyrics together with so much gusto that Celeste got swept away. Her parents, in
those moments, had seemed the most glamorous couple in the world. Celeste fully believed that if they had shared their car-singing with the wider world, they would be famous.

  The roller-skating song changes to “Stumblin’ In,” by Suzi Quatro and Chris Norman, and Celeste gets light-headed. It’s eerie; this song is a particular favorite of her parents, and it’s not a song that’s played on the radio anymore. Celeste is stunned. She turns to Benji, overcome. How can she explain that this song so strongly evokes her parents, it’s as if Betty and Mac are standing right there? Benji makes the slightest movement of withdrawal but Celeste can’t possibly leave the skaters until this song is over. She sings along softly under her breath and Benji seems to understand. He stays patiently at her side. The next song is “Late in the Evening,” by Paul Simon, which is also on Bruce and Karen’s comprehensive playlist, but Celeste realizes that enough is enough. She takes Benji’s hand and they stroll toward Bethesda Fountain.

  After the park, Celeste and Benji sit at the Penrose and drink beer and watch football. When the game is over, Celeste asks Benji if he wants to grab a pizza and go back to her apartment but Benji says he likes to be in bed early on Sundays so that he’s fresh and ready for the week ahead. Celeste says she understands and a part of her is relieved because it once again delays the question of what she and Benji will do once they’re alone together. But a part of her is disappointed. She really enjoys Benji’s company; he’s easy to be with, he’s funny, he tells stories about growing up in London and his family’s immigration to New York City but he never sounds like he’s bragging even though it’s clear he’s a member of the elite. He listens well too. He encourages Celeste to talk by asking good questions and then giving her lots of time to answer.

  But she has probably bored him to death. And freaked him out by wanting to listen to old-people music in the park.

  “I do have a question before we leave,” Celeste says.

  Benji covers her hand with his hand.

  She can’t believe she’s being so bold. It’s none of her business, but if Benji is giving her the brush-off and she might never see him again, she might as well ask this question.

  “Shoot,” he says.

  “What happened with your girlfriend?” Celeste asks. “And her daughter?”

  Benji sighs. “Jules?” he says. “We broke up. I mean, obviously. But it wasn’t your fault. Things had been bad for a long time…”

  “How long had you dated?” Celeste asks.

  “Just over a year,” Benji says.

  Celeste exhales. Not as long as she had feared. “I guess I’m mostly worried about her daughter,” Celeste says. “She seemed so attached to you.”

  “She’s a great kid,” Benji says. “But she has a father and two really involved uncles who live only a few blocks away, and when I broke things off with Jules, I told her I would be available if Miranda ever needed me.” He stares at Celeste. “It says a lot that you would ask about Miranda.”

  His gaze is so intense that Celeste casts her eyes down to the scarred bar. “What about Jules?” Celeste says. “Did she take it okay?”

  “Not at all,” Benji says. “She threw her shoes at me. She screamed. She smashed her phone and that made her cry. She’s in love with her phone.”

  “So many people are,” Celeste says.

  “That was part of the problem. She couldn’t be present; she was self-absorbed; she wasn’t a kind or thoughtful person. She called herself a stay-at-home mom but she never spent time with Miranda. She went to Pilates class, got her nails done, and met her friends for lunch, where they all engaged in competitive non-eating. The only reason we were even at the zoo that day was that I insisted. Jules was hung over from the night before and all she wanted to do was take a nap and a bubble bath before she met her friends Laney and Casper for dinner at some overrated restaurant where she would order a salad and eat two pieces of lettuce and half a fig. That trip to the zoo put it all in perspective.”

  “I just wondered,” Celeste says. “I wasn’t trying to steal you away or break you up.”

  Benji laughs and slaps money on the bar. “Let me walk you home,” he says.

  He kisses Celeste good-bye outside her apartment building and the kissing becomes so heated that Celeste wants to ask him to come upstairs. But he pulls away and says, “Thanks for a great weekend. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Celeste watches him take the steps two at a time, wave, then disappear down the dark street.

  When she gets upstairs, she sends Merritt a text: I blew it.

  How? is Merritt’s response. What happened?

  Celeste sends a series of question marks. A few seconds later, her phone rings. It’s Merritt, but Celeste declines the call because suddenly she is too sad to speak. She should have canceled the date on Friday, she thinks. Because what she has learned over the course of this weekend is that she is lonely and life is nicer when there’s someone to talk to. To kiss. To bump knees and hold hands with. Celeste was pretty sure from the start that she was an alien species, but it’s disheartening to have it proved true.

  He’ll talk to her later. Yeah, right.

  On Monday, as she is in her office reviewing the following summer’s special programming—they’re getting a gray-shanked douc langur from Vietnam, which makes Celeste think of Madame Vo’s with Benji across the table—there’s a knock on her door. It’s a quarter after two and Celeste suspects it’s Blair from the World of Reptiles saying she has to go home because she has a migraine setting in and can Celeste please cover her three o’clock snake talk, which also makes Celeste think about Benji.

  “Come in,” Celeste says halfheartedly.

  It’s Bethany, her assistant, holding a vase of long-stemmed pink roses.

  “These are for you,” Bethany says.

  The next day, Celeste’s father calls to say that Karen’s MRI came back fine.

  “Really?” Celeste says. It’s not beyond her parents to lie to her about this.

  “Really,” he says. “Betty is as fit as a fiddle.”

  On Thursday night, Benji takes Celeste to a movie at the Paris Theater. The movie is French with subtitles. Celeste falls asleep as soon as it starts and wakes up at the end credits, nestled in Benji’s arm.

  On Friday, Benji takes Celeste to dinner at Le Bernardin, which is nine courses of seafood. About half the courses press at Celeste’s boundaries. Sea urchin custard? Kampachi sashimi? She imagines telling her parents that Benji spent nine hundred dollars on a dinner that included sea urchin, kampachi, and sea cucumber, which is not a vegetable but an animal. There is wine with every course and Celeste gets tipsy. That night, she invites him upstairs.

  She is nervous. Before Benji, there have been only two other men, one of whom was the TA in her Mechanisms of Animal Behavior class in college.

  The next day, Merritt texts: So???????

  Celeste deletes the text.

  Merritt texts again: Come on, Celeste. How was our Benji in the sack?

  Fine, Celeste texts back.

  That bad? Merritt says.

  Good, Celeste says. Which is true. Benji was very considerate, very aware of Celeste’s desires—what felt good, what she liked. Maybe he was too aware. But that hardly seems like something to complain about.

  Uh-oh, Merritt says.

  There are dinners in SoHo, the Village, and the Meatpacking District. There is takeout Indian food and sushi and Vietnamese, now a favorite, that they eat at Celeste’s apartment while watching The Americans. There is brunch at Saxon and Parole, where Benji introduces Celeste to the phenomenon of the bloody mary bar. She loads her glass up with a little of everything: celery, carrots, peppers, house-made pickles and pickled onions, bacon, fresh herbs, beef jerky, olives, and spirals of lemon and lime. Then, when her glass is accessorized like an eighty-year-old woman who is wearing every piece of jewelry she owns, she snaps a photo and sends it to Merritt, who responds ten seconds later: Are you at Saxon and Parole?

  There’s a r
eading at the Ninety-Second Street Y by a writer named Wonder Calloway, who reads a story about a woman Celeste’s age who treks to the base camp of Everest with a man she loves but who does not love her in return. The man suffers from altitude sickness and has to turn back. The woman has to decide whether to stop or keep going. Celeste is moved by the story and by the whole idea that literature can be relevant to her life and her feelings. She never felt that way when reading anything in high school. At the end of the reading, Benji buys Celeste a copy of Wonder Calloway’s short stories and Wonder autographs it. She smiles at Celeste and asks her name, then writes To Celeste in the book. Celeste is thrilled but also a little chagrined. The experiences Benji is showing her, while extraordinary, are messing with her head. She knows she is fine just as she is—she has a college education and a good job—but each date shows her all the ways she has yet to grow.

  She reads the short stories on her commute to work and by the end of the week, she’s finished and she asks Benji for another book. He gives her The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. She loves it so much she reads it any chance she can get. She reads Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult and The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. Benji gives her a list of books he’s loved and together they go to Shakespeare and Company.

  There’s a new Burmese place on Broome Street that Benji wants to try and Celeste says, “Burmese?” She didn’t even realize Burmese food warranted its own restaurant, but she should know by now that Benji seeks out far-flung cuisines—East African, Peruvian, Basque. He compares it to Celeste’s love of exotic animals. She can talk all day about the Nubian ibex and he can talk about momos.

  The Burmese restaurant has only ten seats, all of them taken, so they get their order to go and Benji says, “Since we’re close, we might as well go to my place.”

  “You live nearby?” Celeste asks. Benji has referred to his apartment only as being downtown—but everyone lives downtown compared to Celeste. She has wondered why she has never been invited to Benji’s apartment. After she finished reading Jane Eyre, she joked that Benji must be hiding a crazy wife in his apartment. He bristled at this. “It’s nothing special,” he said. “You won’t like it.”