by Jill Kargman
“So we just left,” said Emilia. “Started at square one. In June. It was awful. Marco took the seaplane out, and we scrambled to find a suitable alternative but naturally all the best properties are taken by then and it’ll be two years before our Gin Lane house is ready—it’s a total gut job. I’m talking Baghdad. Marco and I are poring over these blueprints every night, it’s SUCH hard work. Plus, to add insult to injury, we had construction on the apartment here, and there are summer work rules, so we have two crews working day and night, around the clock, don’t get me started. You have no idea how incredibly exhausting it is to be presiding over not one but two construction sites simultaneously!”
To say that our world was sheltered would be the understatement of the century. But now I saw it more than ever. Here I was, in the throes of a hellish year, and these so-called society mavens have the gall to complain about lives people would kill for. All perspective was clearly out the penthouse window.
As my frenemies Mary and Emilia went to put on their jackets, I said to Trish and Posey that I’d love to catch up and maybe grab a glass of wine sometime.
“Uh, sure, yeah . . . um, things are so crazed right now with Noelle’s kindergarten applications, but yeah, let’s definitely try—” Trish stammered.
I felt the sting of Trish’s semidismissal of my offer. You can’t bullshit a bullshitter, and I was the queen of wriggling out of invitations. Looked like I was being dethroned.
“Okay, whatever works down the road when things are less chaotic,” I said, letting her off the hook.
She bit her lip and gave that apologetic look for her crazy schedule (but hey, it’s New York, we’re all busy) and I just wondered if she thought the Divorce Disease was contagious.
Meanwhile, I could tell Posey felt a bit guilty. “Oh, Holl—save the date the thirteenth next month—it’s the Winter Wonderland Ball; it’s going to be great this year,” she offered. Meanwhile, I knew that benefit cost $10,000 a ticket, obviously something I could never afford, not that I wanted to go, anyway. I made some comment about checking the calendar, though we both knew inviting someone to purchase a ticket to a benefit was hardly a gesture of reaching out.
Posey waved good-bye with a sweet smile as she headed for the door, and after the trio departed for St. Sebastian’s dismissal, it took all of seven seconds for Kiki to unleash.
“How happy are you to not be around those nasty bitches anymore? Tim had you seeing that crew, what, twice a week?”
“Sometimes more.”
At pickup, Miles skipped into my arms and I saw Emilia, Mary, Trish, and Posey all glancing toward me with that look of compassion mixed with fear. There I was, kissing my son hello and handing him some pretzels. That’s what my life was to them, a salty twist. And like the carbo-loaded snacks Miles and I munched together, I was their darkest fears embodied.
17
“If variety is the spice of life, then marriage is a big can of leftover Spam.”
—Johnny Carson
The next week, on the night that Tim took Miles, I got ready for my little experiment: a date, post-apocalypse. I walked into the bar of Peasant, a warm little joint on Elizabeth and Spring streets, and scanned the joint for Matt. Then I heard, above the mild hum of the bar crowd, “See, I think ‘Dusting the Stars’ was a seminal song that cut through the pop confections and offered them legitimacy, not to mention street cred.”
Music journalism lingo 101: “street cred” and “seminal.”
The speaker of these words was Mr. Sevin, a tall, lanky, hot guy with painter’s pants and a vintage T-shirt. Even cuter than I recalled from the week before.
MATT MATH
“Hi, Matt!”
“Holly, great to see you. And hear you, this time.” He smiled and introduced me to his pal, who was called Slam or something weird, I can’t now recall, but it was a word and a verb. As we small-talked about the “killer” paninis, the wheels were turning in my head. If only the Carnegie Hill gang could see me now, with a cute Brooklyn boy with vintage Adidas sneaks who looked like the fourth Beastie Boy! He was the opposite of hedge fund land. Thank God.
We ate some of the best pizza I’d ever had, and I felt young again. But every so often reality would set in and I’d feel like some kind of fraud, a play actress. In my mind, the restaurant was a stage and we were acting out the roles of single daters in downtown New York, when in fact I was a weary divorcée. I appeared happy and unattached to the stylish diners in adjacent booths, but I was laden with the burden of bitterness and heartbreak; I worried that if the lights went up on the dimmer, one could see the invisible Scotch tape and staples holding me together like one of Miles’s collages. I wanted to seize the day! Drink life to the lees! So I surprised myself by saying yes when he asked me to accompany him to a midnight sneaker auction. Yes. That’s right. A midnight auction where they sell highly collectible running shoes. Think Sotheby’s for Beastie Boys.
We walked out and I followed him like a sheep down to the subway, where we boarded a train line I never knew existed, arriving twenty-five minutes later in a random neighborhood of Brooklyn I had never explored in my excursions to see bands at various Williamsburg clubs years earlier as part of my magazine job. On the ride, he spoke a mile a minute about his obsession with collectible sneakers and how, like the upside-down airplane stamp worth millions, there were accidental New Balances, Nikes, Reeboks—factory-second samples or limited editions that were never manufactured into lines. He was very anxious to acquire the final lot, a pair of never-seen Pumas that had some kind of metallic stripe. This was so not my life. And I liked that.
I must admit, I was kind of hypnotized by his cool factor, and for the first time in my life I felt like I had to keep up with all the music minutiae he threw my way. I was so used to being the one into music—at least among my set—and this dude was making me feel like an uptight out-of-pop-culture moron. He knew every rapper’s exact ghetto and tenement of origin (“it’s all about what’s coming out of Coney Island right now”) and every little rock band’s musical recipe (“they’re part Blur with a dash of Pogues meets Machines of Loving Grace by way of Morrissey”). The word “seminal” was used eleven times. And I felt, for some reason, this desperate need to please him, like I was auditioning and had to be the coolest, funniest, most ON I’d ever been.
We got off at the Montrose stop and ventured around the corner to a seemingly abandoned office building with looming loftlike spaces that dwarfed my church’s cathedral ceilings. Hordes of young-looking people with those black thick-framed glasses (that tend to signify either film student or serial killer) paraded in. There were mostly guys, but the girls there were ’rexi-thin chicks with tank tops over nips, no bra necessary. Their amber henna’d hair was held in place by haphazardly placed little clips, and they had asymmetrical-on-purpose hemlines and blue nail polish—you know the scene I’m painting here. A spiky-haired platinum-bleached DJ in a ringer tee “spun it” in a booth with four turntables as the organizers pushed the Lucite boxed lots onto a makeshift stage. On the dudes: on-purpose mullets, faux-hawks, and guyliner abounded.
I felt like I was on the set of a music video. Fishnets everywhere. Urban Outfitters had thrown up on the whole room.
And I loved it. I was the cut-and-pasted “one of these things is not like the other” person set against a collage of high cheek-bones, punk rocker hair, tattoos, motorcycle jackets, and vintage concert tour shirts. Blue light streaked the massive room as people excitedly flipped through the zine-like “catalog” of the sneaker lots, with drawings and cartoon blurbs in cool mini-handwriting about each stellar pair. Surreal but intriguing; people watching extraordinaire. Everyone seemed way younger than I was. This was a center of hot-blooded energy coursing with a youthful buzz of artists and funky stylish gamines. And not a penny of health insurance in the whole warehouse population.
It all seemed very badass until I saw a girl definitely high on something. Even though I’m always clueless about people being
high, as it often takes one to know one, I suddenly realized I was among tripping sneaker bidders, and the whole energy changed in my mind, making it all far less interesting.
Fortunately, Matt seemed to be high only on life, and we talked about bands we liked (some overlap) and writers we admired (no overlap). He read only zines and thought Rolling Stone was “the devil.” While I preferred novels, he strictly read biographies, preferably autobiographies by rock icons or people “who were there” (“Legs McNeil’s book is my bible”). His almost-too-tight T-shirt revealed my favorite kind of bod: over-bred and underfed, except there was an air of being unselfconsciously self-conscious, decidedly undecided. In other words: messy on purpose.
The auctioneer began the proceedings, with bidders using Reynolds-wrap foil disks with numbers on them as paddles. The price of one pair of Nikes skyrocketed up to $700! A “dealer” bought them.
“Whoa, seven hundred clams for sneaks,” I marveled. “Those make Christian Louboutins look cheap!”
“Oh, that’s nothing!” scoffed Matt, now sitting very close to me. “They sometimes go for, like, three grand.”
Finally Matt’s lot came up and he even let me wave the tinfoil paddle.
“Twelve hundred, do I hear thirteen?” asked the auctioneer, who was wearing a headset and vintage-looking Lacoste zipper jacket.
“Thirteen,” said a blond-dreadlocked person waving his paddle across the floor.
“Fourteen!” yelled Matt.
“Fifteen,” countered Bob Marley meets bleach.
“Do I hear sixteen hundred?” asked the auctioneer.
“Sixteen,” said Matt for the final bid, which was unchallenged.
“SOLD!”
“Yay!” I yelped as the auctioneer’s fist-as-hammer went down for our victory. We hugged for a second and then walked behind this Wizard of Oz-like curtain where boxes of sneakers were piled up. We collected his loot and walked outside.
The streets were empty except for some action outside a bodega down the block.
“They love me there,” Matt said, gesturing to the market. “I’m the only customer who doesn’t use food stamps.” I smiled and said I should get going. I was starting to worry about not getting home; I felt so far away and was getting suburbia panic.
“Cool, I’ll walk you to the car service.”
“Oh, are there no cabs?”
“Nah, but Rico’ll get you a ride. They’re fine, don’t worry.”
We walked down a tree-lined street and turned into a garage where a few men sat around a small table playing cards. They greeted Matt, who asked for a car for me. The dispatcher yelled in Spanish and I heard a reply of “dos minutos” on the scratchy CB.
“So when can we hang again?” he asked flirtatiously. “Do you want to go out Monday?”
Shit. “Oh, you know, actually, my fiend Kiki and I are going to the Elton John and Billy Joel concert.”
Silence.
Then laughter.
“Oh! You’re kidding! HA! That is so funny.”
“Uh . . . no,” I ventured, “We’re going. I usually listen to really hard rock, but as a kid my family always listened to either Broadway show tunes or Paul Simon, Elton John, or Billy Joel in the car.”
“You’re serious.” Poker face on Beastie Boy.
It was as if he thought I was a Martian. Make that a Martian on crack. So I sang out “Caaaan you feel the love tonight?” in the middle of the street. Nothing. “I don’t know, I love that stuff. I’ve seen The Lion King three times! I’m really into Broadway.”
He looked crushed. His eyes darted away from mine and he looked at his watch. Naturally some retro Casio, no doubt a difficult-to-come-by rare score. “Where is your car? I kind of have a headache and I have an interview with The Hives tomorrow, so . . .”
Was he going to leave me there? We stood for a minute in total silence as the fall breeze blew a paper bag across my feet.
Thank God my car pulled up, a burgundy rickety-ass beat-up Dodge with multiple dyed rabbits’ feet dangling from the rearview and a gold-toothed driver who looked not unlike a pimp.
“Here’s your chariot,” he said.
“Well, maybe another night?” I countered.
“Yeah, um, well, things are really really crazy with work stuff so, yeah. I’ll just . . . get back to you . . . at some point when I can come up for air or whatnot.”
“Oh, okay, well—” I stammered.
He slammed the car door and walked off. I turned around and saw him shake his head through the back windshield. In the mirror the gold-toothed driver barked, “Where to?” and I told him my distant-seeming address.
As we bounced over potholes down the foreign streets, I got a sinking feeling of rejection. Great, I blew it. He frigging dumped me because I like Elton John. I don’t believe this. I wasn’t cool enough because I was a Billy Joel fan? So sue me! That’s not edgy enough? I felt my throat close up a little and I started to cry. Argh.
Shockingly the tough-ass driver noticed. “Aw, sweetheart, why are you crying? Did he do somethin’ bad to you?”
“No.” I sniffed, wiping a tear. “It was just my first date back after my divorce and I realize I made a huge mistake. I’m not ready. I don’t know if I ever will be.” I started to convulse with sobs as we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, just as I did on my return after discovering Tim on whore patrol.
“Naw, it’s just rough the first time, you know?”
“I guess, I just . . . think I maybe I’m not cut out for this.”
“Aw, you’re cute though; you’ll be fine.”
“Thanks” was all I could muster.
“You want to know a secret, though?” he asked with a wink in the rearview mirror. Wisdom comes from strange places, and after my bad date I was desperate for some insight.
“Okay . . .”
“So maybe not tonight, but sometime, you’re going to find a guy you like, but you don’t tell him right away you like him, you see, you gotta—”
“But that’s a game. I hate games.”
“No, no, no, no, no! It’s openness and honesty. But here’s the key: Always keep ten percent for yourself.”
“Okay . . . what does that mean?”
“It means that you always take a little piece, ten percent, that is yours that you don’t give. So you, you know, keep your ground. Keep part for you.”
Interesting. We pulled off the bridge, and the lights of countless office buildings gleamed against the night. I thought of all the New York men who were working their asses off in some office. One of them could be great for me, if he ever exited his fluorescent-lit gerbil wheel of work before midnight so I could meet him. But I wasn’t going to date anyone in finance again. I’d maxed out on stock talk. And the whole competitive fast lane of that old-fashioned boys club world. I needed something radically different and new, someone who did something that actually interested me. Yes, my date had turned out frightfully wrong, but at least I got to escape my pod and see a new mini-universe that is right here in my city.
I got home, thanked the gold-toothed driver-slash-shrink for everything, and bounded upstairs. As I exhaled and climbed into the king-size bed, I couldn’t help but feel the muted pain of missing Tim. In bed we always slept like the roman numeral XI, him splayed out in an X and me the line down the side. He was such a bed hog, but even now with all that space, and crisp, empty sheets, I was still a piece of spaghetti down the right side. When I thought about how he used to be there with me, I got an abdominal cramp like I had just run a mile and put my hand on my side, rubbing as if to make it stop. Maybe rabbit’s foot guy was right: I had to be my own protector, giving but always keeping some for me as a defense mechanism. I didn’t have to try as hard as I did, sitting up straight and laughing at Matt’s every wisecrack. This was not a tap-dancing audition, and I had to try not to pour myself, 100 percent of myself, onto the floor at some guy’s feet.
In mental playback, I realized I did everything I could the whole night to
make Matt like me. And he still didn’t. And while that originally sent me into an embarrassed shame spiral, the thought suddenly sparked that I didn’t even like him. If, at age thirty-three, he was spending hundreds on the lost pair of Holy Grail-caliber Pumas, why was I so into pleasing him? I knew the answer was that in my post-Tim desperation I just wanted someone. Anyone. And preferably someone very different from Tim. But Matt wasn’t even that great, and I had got sucked into the fear that if I could not even get him to like me, then I really could never get an amazing guy. This, of course, is the dating myth of Dumped by a Dork.
The D by D phenomenon is when you go out with someone and feel like you are doing them a favor and you’re psyched because, hey, you’re a catch and cuter than they are, so they are grateful—they worship you, try harder in bed; you are their world. Then, just when you’ve given them confidence, they dump you. You thought they were lucky to have you, but then they unload you. So you wig. Because if you can’t please a guy you don’t even want, how can you charm a guy you adore?
I guess the answer is, you charm the one that’s right for you. Because after trying on all these people for size, you find one that fits. You don’t have to tap dance to please them. But still I knew inside that every date would be accompanied by the hope that it would spark into something—and so there would always be the auditioning feeling of having to perform and please.
I remembered my mother’s advice to me when I’d been depressed about a guy I liked in high school: “Go for the guys that like you,” she said. “No assholes or bad boys. Just know they have to want you and court you. There’s one egg for ninety-two million sperm and we have to echo our biology and be choosey! The egg is a microcosm of us; we have to let guys fight for us like in the olden days.”
I took a deep breath, burrowed into my pillow, and resolved to try again when the moment arose. But next time I’d be more cautious: no blow-drying my hair, fretting over outfits, and trying so desperately to impress. I’d just make like the cliché and “be myself ” . . . but always keep 10 percent.
