Jessica and Connor were what we called CMFs. That stands for City-Made Friends. When Tracy and I first got married and settled into our loft in Chelsea, Tracy decided that it would be fun if we were to make friends with another couple that lived in Manhattan. The catch was that it couldn't be anyone we were introduced to, rather, we had to initiate the friendship ourselves. That, according to Tracy, was the "fun" part.
As well, it couldn't simply be the first couple we met. It had to be the right couple. Tracy insisted that we each first make a list of the three qualities that we wanted most in our new friends in order of preference. We'd then compare our lists and settle on one master list. I resisted the whole idea on the grounds that it was silly. Tracy told me to lighten up. The next thing I knew, the two of us were sitting across from each other at Capsouto Freres in TriBeCa, making out our lists between appetizer and entree. There was no peeking allowed.
When we both had finished, Tracy wanted me to read my list first. I declined, reminding her that the plaintiff always went before the defendant. After a disapproving look and her announcement, "Here are the three qualities I desire most in our new friends," she read me the following:
l. Fun
2. Attractive
3. Without children
It was my turn. I cleared my throat and read:
1. Intelligent
2. Never done time
3. Don't call each other "sweetie"
After considerable debate, none of which is particularly relevant in hindsight, our master list ended up having one quality from each of our lists. It read as follows:
1. Attractive
2. Intelligent
The fact that there was now very little difference between our master list and the master race was not lost on me. Nonetheless, it represented a concession on both of our parts, the very definition of a marriage.
Then began the auditions. (Would you expect anything less?) Turned out, finding an attractive and intelligent couple living in Manhattan was not as easy as one might think. It took some doing, or more accurately, some dinners, as that was our litmus test. While Tracy and I scouted jointly, it was Tracy on her own who got results. After she would make the acquaintance of what always was the female half of a potential couple, she would arrange a dinner. That's when we could sit both halves of the couple down together and decide if they were friends material or not.
Sometimes you knew it wasn't to be even before you cracked the menu. Take this one husband-and-wife team from the Upper East Side, for instance. He was an actuary; she researched obituaries for the New York Times. I kid you not. Dudley and Martha Erdman, a.k.a. the human Sominex.
Then there was the close call of Alex and Cindy. Tracy had met Cindy after some Sunday-night lecture at the 92nd Street Y. Cindy seemed intelligent and while perhaps not a knockout according to Tracy, she had a lot of "attractive features." That same evening, the two of them shared a cab home together with Tracy dropping Cindy off at Sixty-ninth and Third. Before getting out they agreed to a dinner at Cafe Loup that Friday evening.
Walking into the restaurant, I begged Tracy to let me tell them that we were swingers so we could watch their reaction. If they were our kind of people, I pointed out, they'd appreciate the humor. Suffice to say, Tracy gave me her disapproving look again. Three bottles of wine later, though, I couldn't resist. It was perfect. After a scary pause, Alex and Cindy burst out laughing. Voila! City-Made Friends. Check, please.
Not so fast. While we were splitting the bill, Tracy realized that Alex and Cindy had our phone number, but we didn't have theirs. So Cindy wrote it down on the back of a Banana Republic receipt and slid it across the table. It sat there like a grenade.
"Seven one eight? Isn't that, like, one of the boroughs?" Tracy asked, looking at the area code.
"Yeah, we live in Brooklyn," said Cindy, obviously not thinking twice about it.
Tracy: "But didn't I drop you off at…?"
Cindy: "Oh, that was my sister's place. We were staying there a few nights while she and her husband were on vacation."
To Tracy's credit, she didn't let her disappointment show at the table. In fact, as we got into the cab after saying good-night to our potential new friends, she'd been so polite, so enthusiastic, that I was fairly convinced that Tracy had already decided to overlook our self-imposed "must live in Manhattan" rule. Silly me.
"No dice," she said, staring blankly ahead through the cab's Plexiglas divider as we took off.
We both knew she was being unreasonable, an outright snob, to be more precise. We both knew I had every right to lay into her like nobody's business. And we both knew that when all was said and done, we'd still never see Alex and Cindy of Brooklyn ever again.
The CMF search lost some of its urgency for a while after that. Then about a month later, Tracy came home after work one day with the news that we had plans that Saturday night. As an occasional freelance graphic artist (and by occasional, I mean with the frequency, let's say, of rotating your tires), Tracy had landed a gig at Glamour magazine helping to revamp its layout. She explained that during an office party to celebrate some associate editor's birthday, she had met a very nice girl by the name of Jessica Levine. Jessica sold ad space for the magazine and was engaged to a software programmer. "I really think these could be the ones," Tracy said to me while pouring a glass of wine. "It just seems right."
Saturday night, table for four, Zarela.
What I liked most about Connor Thompson upon first meeting him was his overall reluctance to the whole dinner. His general expression seemed to scream, Who the hell are these two strangers I'm eating with? Furthermore, how well do I know my fiancée that she would arrange such a thing? No doubt my sentiments exactly, had I been in his position.
Jessica, on the other hand, had good reason for being there. She told us that she was agreeable to the dinner because the whole "my friends/your friends" situation that every couple must cope with had really started to get on her nerves. Thus, the opportunity to make some "our friends," as she put it, was too good to pass up. Made sense to me.
Intelligent?
We didn't exactly exchange IQs, but Connor and Jessica both seemed to be pretty much on the ball, and if pressed, I'm sure could've each offered up a compelling literary quote or unique assessment of the military-industrial complex.
Attractive?
Connor was a decent-looking guy, albeit a little weak in the chin. Wavy black hair, a tad under six feet. Most notably, he had these ellipse-shaped eyes that at first glance made you think there was some Asian blood in him. (There wasn't.) He spoke in measured sentences and were it not for an easy laugh, could possibly have been perceived as being a little stiff.
As for Jessica, I refer you to my aforementioned Polaroid snapshot observation. Brunette, brown eyes, and from what I could tell at the time (and later confirm firsthand), a good figure. To be sure, I didn't look at her and immediately forget Tracy's name. Jessica simply wasn't like that. What she was, however, was perfectly nice, perfectly friendly, and as far as I could tell, perfectly engaged.
After about three margaritas at Zarela you're essentially feeling no pain. That's probably why the place continues to get such rave reviews year after year. Either no one can remember if they liked the food the following morning, or they were too numb at the time to actually taste it. As we all sat there licking the salt off the rims of our glasses and getting to know each other, it was clear that this wouldn't be the last dinner we'd have together, a notion that gained considerable momentum when early on Tracy said, "Before I forget, give me your telephone number so we have it." We saw that magical 212 area code Jessica wrote out on a cocktail napkin and knew it was all meant to be. Finally, at long last, City-Made Friends.
We skip ahead. While the four of us attended parties, saw exhibits, and did all the other NYC de rigueur in the months that followed, it was the dinners that became the staple of our friendship. They were always on the weekend, never at the same restaurant. If it was a Fri
day, we generally called it a night after the meal, citing fatigue from the work week. If it was a Saturday, however, the meal was merely a precursor to what would usually be a night of club hopping. For in addition to a taste for expensive shoes and bad teenage-angst television shows, another thing that Tracy and Jessica had in common was a love of dancing.
Which leads us to that fateful Saturday night.
Connor and Jessica had just returned from their honeymoon the previous weekend. After we looked at their pictures from St. Bart's over dinner at Gascogne, the girls decided that they wanted to go dancing at Vinyl. A downtown cab ride later, Connor and I were doing the white man's overbite with our wives, trying in vain to keep the beat.
Roughly around 2 a.m., Connor had had enough. Insisting that everyone else stay and have a good time, he shouted above the music that he was exhausted and was heading home. A quick glance told me that he wanted me to stay and chaperone the girls. I nodded and mouthed, "You owe me." He smiled and turned to give Jessica a kiss. Then he left.
From the bar I kept an eye on Tracy and Jessica as they did their best impression of the Solid Gold Dancers. Actually, they were both quite good. Hips gyrating, arms moving this way and that. To every single guy in the place, I'm sure they ranked extremely high as worthy one-night standers. That or a couple of very hot lipstick lesbians (even more of a turn-on, I suppose). Tracy had on a short skirt and one of those satin button-down tops. Jessica, an equally short skirt with an open white shirt under which she wore a skin-tight leotard kind of thing.
The two of them continued to dance with each other into the night. In between songs, excuse me, "extended dance remixes," they would come over and devour a round of drinks. By 3 A.M. they were loaded.
Getting two intoxicated women to leave a nightclub when they didn't want to leave a nightclub was no picnic. Still, I persevered and ultimately prevailed, literally grabbing each one by the arm and leading them out to the sidewalk. We piled into a waiting cab.
"Uptown," I said to the driver, telling him our two stops.
"Wait, you can't let Jessica go home by herself," Tracy said with a slight burp. Drunk as she may have been, she still had her bearings. With the two of us living in Chelsea and Jessica on the Upper West Side, we'd be getting out of the cab first.
"Don't be silly," said Jessica.
Yeah, don't be silly, I was thinking, knowing exactly what Tracy had in mind.
"No, you don't be silly," Tracy countered. "Philip will stay with you to make sure you get home safe."
"I'll be fine, really," Jessica pleaded.
"Of course you will, because Philip will be with you to make sure," Tracy said, having what turned out to be the last word on the subject.
The cab pulled up in front of our building, and Tracy got out. She hugged Jessica good-bye and said, "Thanks, honey" to me.
"Eighty-first, between Columbus and Amsterdam," I reminded the driver. He sped off.
Manhattan was a strange enough sight during normal waking hours. After hours, it was a whole different animal. Stay out late enough and you were sure to see something to startle even the most jaded eye. That night it was the old man in the hospital gown.
On the sidewalk, out my side of the cab, was this grandfather type walking in nothing but a hospital gown. What made it truly unique was that he had one of those admitting bracelets around his wrist. As he walked, he would occasionally look over his shoulder.
"Hey, Jessica, check this out," I said, motioning outside my window.
"Huh?"
"This guy, you've got to see this guy."
Jessica blinked a couple of times and leaned over to my side. The old guy walked past the cab while again looking over his shoulder.
"Holy shit, you can see his ass!" she said, giggling.
I looked again and sure enough, the old guy was shooting the moon. We both laughed. Jessica made a piglike snort and we both laughed some more. I caught the eye of our driver looking at us in his rearview mirror. In that instant I wondered what it must be like to make a living one-fifth of a mile at a time.
It was silent for the next couple of blocks. We stopped at a red light.
"Do you want to kiss me?" Jessica whispered.
I turned to her. "What?"
"Do you want to kiss me?" she whispered, only slower.
Honestly, I was floored. Sure, all guys determine whether or not they would sleep with a woman within the first fifteen seconds of meeting her, and sure, Jessica — even as an undeveloped Polaroid — had easily been a yes. Still, a lot of time had passed since those first fifteen seconds, and I hadn't thought about it again. Until that moment.
I began to stammer, "I, ah…."
"Because I want to kiss you," she said. Then she did. She slid across the seat and began kissing me, pressing her body up against mine. I'm sure if I had told her to stop she would have. I didn't, though. I didn't want her to. Instead, as the good Reverend Jesse Jackson might have put it, I reciprocated, it escalated, and before you knew it, we fornicated. Not in the cab, however. No, our driver only got to steal glances at some heavy foreplay before dropping us off at the corner of Eighty-first and Columbus. The fare was thirteen dollars. I gave him a twenty and told him to keep the change. I winked at him. We both knew it was he who should've been tipping me.
Jessica and I started to walk toward her and Connor's apartment without saying a word. After we passed a couple of brownstones she grabbed my hand and led me down underneath a set of steps. That's where we fornicated. I lifted up her skirt and pulled down her underwear, letting it drop to the ground from around her knees. (I absolutely love that little two-step thing women do when stepping out of their panties.) Meanwhile, Jessica undid my pants and pulled down my boxers. Then the only words were spoken.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" I said to her.
She reached down and put me inside of her. I took that to mean yes.
So how does a guy who's only been married a year and a girl who still has her tan from a Caribbean honeymoon end up having sex together? That's how.
When we finished, Jessica finally spoke. "We'll have to do that again," she said.
While pulling up my pants, I looked at my watch. I should've been back home by that point. We quickly kissed and I ran to hail a cab. In all the haste, we were able to avoid any post-infidelity awkwardness. Though I'm not sure there really would've been any. Alcohol or not, the prospect of regret somehow seemed very remote.
In the cab back downtown, the one thing I head-gamed myself about was Jessica's sexual history. I remembered Connor once telling me that she hadn't had too many boyfriends before the two of them met. Given what had just transpired, though, that gave me little solace. Memo to self: get tested in a couple of months. Yeah, leave it to AIDS to make the notion of an unwanted pregnancy seem almost trivial. While I assumed she was, I never asked Jessica if she was on the pill. But hey, what's an abortion when compared to one's own funeral? As I leaned my head back in the cab, far enough that I could look straight up through the rear window at the night's stars, I thought to myself what an incredibly self-centered, every-man-for-himself world it was. And without a doubt, exhibit A was me.
With any luck, Tracy would've been asleep when I returned to our loft. Instead, she was up reading in bed.
"What took you so long?" she said, her eyes remaining on her book. She no longer seemed the least bit drunk.
"What a space, she couldn't find her keys," I said. It would've been a little tough to claim traffic at 4 a.m. The keys seemed very viable. Assuming they wouldn't be enough, though, I was prepared. "And I picked up the Times by their place," I added. Indeed I had picked up the paper, only it was after thinking for thirty blocks about how to handle Tracy should I have to. I told the cab driver to pull over at a newsstand on Forty-sixth Street. "I got talking to the guy in the store; he was from Yemen. I asked him if he thought it would be a good place for us to vacation and he laughed like it was the funniest damn thing."
"He prob
ably thought you were a weirdo," Tracy said, finally looking at me. For sure she thought I was a weirdo, which was fine by me. She could think anything she wanted to, so long as she didn't think I had just been fucking her friend Jessica.
I undressed, did a little postsex wash-down in the bathroom, and crawled into bed. "You don't think there's a Four Seasons in Yemen, do you?" I asked.
"I doubt it," Tracy said. She closed her book and turned off the light.
* * *
I walked up to the counter at the hotel. A familiar face was there waiting.
"Hi, Raymond," I said.
"Hey, Mr. Randall, real nice to see you again."
"You as well. It's been a while."
"Yeah, I know. I was taking some time off."
The way he said it, it didn't sound like a vacation.
"Everything all right?" I asked him.
Raymond scratched his ear, the one without the diamond stud. You could tell he was deciding whether or not to get into it. "It's my mother," he offered. "I was back home to see her. She's been kind of ill."
"I'm sorry to hear that," I told him, and I was. "Is she going to be okay, if you don't mind me asking?"
"Don't know yet. She found out she's got cancer of the stomach. Never even knew you could get it there. She says it's the devil's doing, that he sees her as too much of a threat to him up here on earth. Pretty religious, she is."
"Well, if she's smart enough to know it's him, I would imagine the devil doesn't stand much of a chance."
Raymond laughed and told me he hoped that I was right. The entire time we were talking he was checking me in, his long fingers popping away at the keyboard of his computer. Of course I was there for a room. Raymond knew there was no need to ask.
I waited until after Jessica and I had sex that afternoon to tell her about my conversation with Connor the previous night. I knew that if I'd mentioned it to her before, there wouldn't have been any sex. For me, there was no such thing as thinking with the wrong head.
THE UP AND COMER Page 4
