Slightly Single

by Wendy Markham

  Which I do.

  Finally, the telltale rumble just before a light appears at the end of the tunnel. As the N train roars into the station, I move cautiously forward, positioning myself in advance exactly where the door will open, something that’s possible only after several months of riding the same train every day.

  The car is packed and too warm and smells of sweat and Chinese take-out. Hip hop music blares from the headphones of the guy next to me as I stand holding on to a germy center pole. As we lurch forward and the lights flicker, I keep my balance, thinking about Will, wondering whether he’ll be awake when I get to the studio apartment he shares with Nerissa, whom he met on an audition last fall. He likes to sleep past noon on Saturdays.

  Does it bother me that he lives with another woman?

  I want to say of course not.

  But the reality is that I wouldn’t mind if Nerissa got pushed in front of an oncoming N train tomorrow. She’s lithe and beautiful, an English dancer in an off-Broadway show that opened a few months ago. She sleeps on a futon behind a tall folding screen from Ikea, and Will on his full-size bed…and never the twain shall meet.

  Yes, I truly believe this. I force myself to believe it, because Nerissa has a boyfriend, a Scottish pro golfer named Broderick, and Will has me. Yet I’ve seen the way he looks at her when she drifts around wearing drawstring cotton pants over her dancer’s leotard, with no hips to speak of and high, taut braless breasts.

  I am all flesh, by comparison to Nerissa or not; all hips and thighs and buttocks. As I said, my bras are not wispy scraps of lace and underwire and skinny straps; my undergarments are not what you would readily call panties, 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 thing in the morning on Will’s schedule and might be the brunching hour on anyone else’s—he smells great and looks incredibly appealing in a rumpled, sexy way. Somehow, there is no morning breath; there is no Bed Head.

  “Did I wake you?” I ask, tiptoeing to kiss his cheek, which is barely covered with stubble.

  “It’s okay.” He yawns and pads to the kitchen area, where he fills a glass from the Poland Spring cooler that’s jammed into the corner between the stove and fridge.

  “How was last night?”

  “Exhausting. A bunch of dowdy East Side dowagers and their philandering husbands. A martini bar and beef carpaccio, even though carpaccio’s been over for years.”

  “What about martinis?”

  “With this crowd they’re always in.”

  I should mention that Will works for Eat Drink Or Be Married, a Manhattan caterer. He makes excellent money waitering at private events like weddings and charity dinners. Most of the guests are high profile, and sometimes he’s privy to great celebrity dirt, which I find fascinating.

  “Listen, Trace, I know we’re supposed to go to your friend’s party tonight, but I have to work.”

  “What?” Stabbing disappointment. “But we’ve been planning this for weeks! It’s Raphael’s thirtieth birthday.”

  I have to wait for Will to drain the full glass of water, something he does eight times a day, before he says, “I know, and I had asked Milos to let me have off tonight, but he got into a bind. Jason fell at the rink yesterday and twisted his ankle.”

  Jason, one of the other waiters, happens to be Jason Kenyon, the former Olympic figure skater. I’m not that big on following sports, but even I’ve heard of him—I think he got a bronze medal a few years ago in Japan. Now he’s trying to make it as an actor here in New York, and he must be as broke as anyone else, because he’s willing to wear a Nehru jacket while lugging monstrous trays around and clearing away rich people’s plates. Not that it isn’t worth it. They make twenty bucks an hour, plus tips.

  “Can’t Milos find somebody else to fill in?” I ask.

  “He doesn’t want just anyone. It’s a big celebrity wedding out in the Hamptons, and he only wants a certain quality of waiter there.”

  “Flattering for you, but where does that leave me?”

  Will puts his glass in the sink, then leans over and kisses my cheek. “Sorry, Trace.”

  I pout, then ask, “Which celebrity?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “You can’t say?” I gape at him—or rather, his back, since he’s retreated to the other side of the room. I follow him. “Not even to me?”

  “I’m sworn to absolute secrecy,” he says blandly, removing his long-sleeved thermal T-shirt and tossing it into a nearby laundry basket. “You’ll know tomorrow, though. It’ll be in all the papers.”

  “So tell me now. I’m dying to know.”

  “I can’t. Look, I don’t even know exactly where the wedding is going to be held. They don’t want anyone calling the press with the details. I’m supposed to give a code word to the car service driver who picks me up at the train station, and then he’ll take me there. That’s how undercover this whole thing is.”

  Pissed off at this whole ridiculous secret agent scene, I say, “Christ, Will, what do you think I’m going to do, tip off Page Six?”

  He laughs, taking off his flannel boxers. “You’ll know tomorrow.”

  “Along with the rest of the world,” I grumble, watching him reach for the laundry basket again.

  Unlike me, he’s extremely comfortable naked. I could never walk around without clothes in front of anyone, even Will. Especially not Will. I’d be too conscious of him watching my thighs doing their Jell-O dance and my boobs swinging somewhere around my belly button. Then again, even if I had a perfect body, I don’t think I could ever parade around nude.

  Although everyone says that changes when you have a baby. According to my sister Mary Beth, who’s had two, giving birth pretty much entails lying spread-eagled in some room with total strangers regularly coming along to stick their hands into your crotch up to their elbows. She says you don’t even care who sees you naked after that. It must be true, because Mary Beth just joined a health club and started getting massages and taking steams. This from a girl whose mother had to write her a permanent excuse to get out of showers after fifth-grade gym because she was so traumatized by public nudity.

  Naturally, I was traumatized about it, too. But by the time I hit fifth grade, my mother had already gone through my three brothers, who were so wanton that they would pull down their pants in front of me and my friends, bend over and fart for fun. So when I tried working the modesty angle for the gym shower excuse, my mother was in no mood to coddle. “You don’t want to take a shower in front of everyone? Get over it!” was pretty much her attitude with me.

  “Anyway, I really need the money,” Will informs me. “I’m leaving in a few weeks, and I won’t be making much over the summer.”

  “I thought they pay you.”

  “They do, but it’s a fraction of what I get with Milos. I’m going to take a shower.” Will heads for the bathroom. “Then we’ll go out and get breakfast.”

  “Lunch,” I amend, pulling out a cigarette and my lighter.

  “Whatever. Hey, you know what? Could you not smoke in here?”

  I pause with the butt midway to my mouth. “Why not?”

  “It bothers Nerissa. She says her clothes smell like smoke whenever you’ve been here.”

  “Oh.” I slowly put the cigarette back into the pack, trying to think of something to say to that.

  I don’t have to. He closes the door behind him.

  No more smoking at Will’s place?

  Dismayed at this turn of events, I drift over to the couch and sit, grabbing a magazine from the pile on the floor. Entertainment Weekly. Will subscribes. I flip through it absently, stewing. It’s not that Nerissa doesn’t have a right to not smell like secondhand smoke. I understand where she’s coming from. But I feel vaguely unsettled and, I guess, embarrassed. Like I have this dirty, disgusting habit that’s infringing on other people’s lives.

  Which I suppose is the truth, but Will never seemed to mind me smoking at his place before. Sometimes he even bums cigarettes from me when we’re out, and he says that if he weren’t a vocalist, he would definitely be a smoker.

  There’s a part of me—granted, an irrational part—that wonders why Will didn’t stick up for me to his roommate. He could have told Nerissa that I can smoke in their apartment if I want to, and that she’ll just have to deal. After all, he moved in first. His name is on the lease, not hers. The more aggravated I get thinking about it, the more I want a cigarette.

  I’m not one of those girls who started smoking behind the bleachers in junior high, or grew up in a smoker household. In my family, on
ly my sister’s soon-to-be-ex-husband Vinnie and my grandfather smoke butts, and my grandfather’s had lung cancer for almost a year.

  You’d think that would scare me into quitting, but the man is in his late eighties. I figure I’ll quit in a few years, when I’m married and ready to get pregnant, because I don’t think it’s fair to expose a fetus to all the potential damages of tar and nicotine. But until then, my smoking is not bothering anyone.

  Except, of course, Nerissa.

  I had my first cigarette my sophomore year of college. My friend Sofia had recently started smoking to lose weight, and she claimed it worked. Of course, by our junior year she ended up in the Cleveland Clinic with a severe eating disorder, so the ciggy habit was the least of her problems. Not the best role model for me, but I thought she looked cool smoking, and as always, I was willing to try anything—except cutting back on food or exercising more—to lose weight.

  What I wouldn’t give to be thin, I think, gazing down at a two-page spread of Hollywood starlets at the Cannes Film Festival. Big boobs, teeny waists, no hips, no thighs. I don’t get it. I mean, in my world, big boobs are a given. I come from a long line of women with racks. If you think I’m stacked, you should see my grandmother on my mother’s side. She still wears this 1940s-style bullet bra, and you can see her coming from blocks away. She takes pride in what she coyly refers to as her “figure.”

  Not me. My figure, I could do without. I’d gladly swap everything between my ribs and clavicle for a flat chest if it came with the ten-year-old boy body I so covet—the one that supposedly went out of style with the waif models years ago. Yeah, right. As if Rubenesque is ever really going to be back in vogue.

  I listen to Will in the shower. He’s singing some Rogers and Hammerstein type song. He has a great voice, in my opinion. Sometimes I wish he would just scrap the whole Broadway scene and make a pop record. But he doesn’t want to do that. His dream is to make it big on stage.