Playing with Matches

by Hannah Orenstein

  I take the elevator down to the first floor and slip out past the doorman, past the group of tourists in matching T-shirts holding selfie sticks. I dart between them to cross the street. For a moment, I’m tempted to drop by Jonathan’s apartment, just to see if he’s there. But I’m not ready to face him yet.

  I call my mom, and this time she picks up.

  “Mom? I need to come home.”

  — Chapter 23 —

  Even though it’s rush hour and the train is crammed with commuters sweating through their dress shirts, I find the ride to New Jersey soothing. It’s important to get out of Manhattan every once in a while to clear your head and remember that some exotic locales featuring strange concepts such as backyards exist. New Jersey also puts the entire width of the dirty Hudson River between me and Jonathan. The sight of Mom’s silver Kia in the train station parking lot is almost enough to make me tear up. Sometimes, a girl just needs her mom.

  When I climb into the car, Janet Jackson is warbling on the car radio. Coffee cups are stuffed into every cup holder. Mom leans across the middle console to hug me tight. I inhale her vanilla perfume. She smells like home.

  “Explain,” she orders, when she lets go of me. “Tell me everything.”

  “For starters, I’m not really engaged. I mean, he asked. But I haven’t said yes yet.”

  Mom reverses out of the parking space, then turns carefully and shifts forward to drive. I tell her about my off-limits fling with Adam, about Jonathan’s proposal—how I’m now dodging both of them. She interrupts with questions and gasps and clucking tsk tsks. I had told her that Jonathan cheated when it happened, but when I bring it up again, she wipes away a tear. She’s stopped at a red light when I pull the blue Tiffany bag out of my purse and show her the ring. She looks at it with apathy. It dwarfs the diamond chip she wears on her hand.

  “So, he’s rich,” she says, shrugging and handing it back to me. “Nothing we didn’t already know.”

  Even though she’s never been Jonathan’s biggest fan, she listens carefully when I explain why I might say yes. I’m grateful that she’s at least letting me talk about Jonathan like he’s a real option. The decision might be clear-cut for her, but she lets me work through my own thoughts out loud.

  We pull into the driveway. The headlights illuminate the little white house. I climb out of the car and start toward the four steps up to the front door, but Mom intercepts me with a hug. I’ve been bigger than she is for years now, but in her arms, I want to melt down to little-girl size again. She holds me close for a long time, stroking my hair. We walk into the kitchen together and she flicks on the lights. I peer cautiously into the living room, but it doesn’t look like anyone is home.

  “Steve’s at poker night. It’s just us,” she says, as if sensing my discomfort. She points to the kitchen table. “Sit.”

  It’s not that I don’t want Steve to know. I just can’t deal with explaining everything all over again. Mom takes a tub of caramel swirl ice cream out of the freezer, then grabs two bowls and spoons and comes to sit with me. She scoops out ice cream for both of us, giving me all the best caramel bits. I dig in immediately, savoring the cold, creamy texture and the luxury of food that I don’t have to pay for.

  “I’m just too young for all of this, Mom. I can’t get married.”

  “I was married a year already at your age.”

  I hate when she pulls that card on me. I make a face. “Hardly by choice.”

  “It was a choice to find a better life for myself. For me, that was necessary. For you, it doesn’t have to be.”

  “I know that.”

  She takes a long look at me, hand hovering halfway between her bowl and her mouth. “Do you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She licks the ice cream off the spoon slowly, as if she’s trying to work out the best possible way to phrase whatever’s running through her head.

  “You have the freedom to be with anyone you want, princess. Why be with someone who doesn’t give you the attention you deserve? Who doesn’t accept you for who you are?”

  “I know that Jonathan loves me. He just made a mistake. And anyway, if I say no to Jonathan, there’s no guarantee that anything will work out with Adam. What if he’s no better in the long run?”

  “You shouldn’t worry about that. Have fun. Think of all the things you could do if you were single! All the things I wish I’d done . . .”

  This is what it means to be a mail-order bride’s daughter: all of Mom’s dreams for herself rest heavily on my shoulders. She wants me to focus on a lucrative career so I can buy a comfortable home and travel the world. Marriage doesn’t need to be a priority. When she read me fairy tales as a little girl, she always improvised the endings. Cinderella never ended up with the prince; Snow White awoke with a hug from a friend.

  I agree with her in theory—I don’t need a man. But I can’t help if I want one. Or two.

  “You should be single for a while. Have your fun.”

  “Mom, no one thinks being single is fun. That’s the whole reason I have a job.”

  She shakes her head. “You don’t know what you could be missing.”

  “Do you know how many of my clients would skin me alive in order to be engaged right now? They’re so lonely, they’d do anything.”

  “Weren’t you lonely when you were with Jonathan?”

  She has a point. I push my ice cream away, slump my forehead down on the table, and close my eyes. Whenever I think about a future with Jonathan, I can’t see him actually in it. All I see is me, alone in his apartment. Me, ordering takeout for one again. Me, alone holding a screaming kid with his bright blue eyes. It didn’t used to be like that—not when we were first in love, spending that unusually icy spring bundled up in our school-issued apartments in Paris. But the loneliness is all I’ve been able to feel for a long time now.

  “Marriage doesn’t always last forever,” Mom says. “But you shouldn’t enter a marriage if you can already see its expiration date.”

  I look up and there are tears in her eyes. I always thought I understood what Mom went through when she met and married Dad. She took a gamble that she’d grow to love Dad so that she could escape a life of poverty in Russia. She left behind her family, her friends, her hometown . . . everything she knew. She learned English and moved halfway around the world for a better life. She wasn’t like the women who hire Bliss matchmakers. For her, marriage had nothing to do with love and everything to do with opportunity.

  I spent all these years trying to be nothing like Mom, but now I feel like I’ve backed myself into the same corner: pinning my hopes on a rich guy I can’t reasonably rely on to make me happy.

  I sleep in my childhood bedroom, dressed in pajamas from high school and slutty red underwear, which I had put on this morning in a misguided attempt to make myself feel better. I pass most of the night watching the glow-in-the-dark alarm clock on the nightstand flash times that get later and later. It’s almost sunrise when I reach a decision. The finality of it prickles in my chest.

  — Chapter 24 —

  If your boyfriend consistently neglects you for the sake of sucking his boss’s cock or whatever investment bankers actually do all day, a good way to manipulate him into responding to your texts immediately is to leave him hanging for thirty-six hours after he proposes. So, when I text Jonathan that I’m ready to talk, my phone lights up with his reply within seconds.

  “Fantastic. Tonight? I should be able to finish up here early,” he writes.

  I’m stretched out on my couch, scratching Orlando behind the ears. I wait a good three minutes before texting him back, savoring every second that Jonathan must be panicking. It feels nice to have the upper hand. No wonder the patriarchy is so reluctant to give it up.

  “I’ll meet you at your apartment at 7,” I text.

  I know that’s too early for him. I don’t care.

  “Can it be 8?”

  Then a second text pops up.

 
“No, you know what? This is important, I’ll make it work. See you at 7. Love you.”

  I don’t respond. He who texts last cares the most, and everyone knows that caring is the quickest way to lose power in a relationship.

  Anyway, I’m busy. At 3 p.m., a security guard waves me through a turnstile in the cavernous lobby of Esquire’s building and directs me up an escalator to a set of elevators. Diego is waiting for me upstairs in the elevator bank, leaning against a gray wall and sternly typing on his phone. He straightens up when he sees me.

  “You must be Sasha,” he says, offering a firm handshake. “Diego. So great to finally put the face to the name.”

  “Thanks so much for having me.”

  He swipes a card to open the door and leads me past a set of desks into a glassed-in conference room with a jaw-dropping view of Central Park. He unbuttons his gray tweed sports coat as he sits at the head of the table and gestures for me to take the chair to his right. From my seat, I can see past Diego’s shoulder into the office; Adam is craning his neck. He gives me a big, cheesy double thumbs-up, and I feel like my heart could explode. I pull a folder with three crisp copies of my résumé from my purse and slide one to Diego.

  I prepped for the interview by reading everything Esquire.com has published on the subject of dating for the past year, drilling answers to potential interview questions, and grilling Adam over text about what I needed to know. (His tip: Avoid calling men “terrible.” Noted.)

  I can’t help but size up Diego the way I do whenever I meet anyone new now. Clear skin, thick head of hair (though graying at the sides), and most important, no wedding band. He’s friendly, but keeps a professional distance. He probably doesn’t make enough money for Gretchen, and he’s too short for Chrissy. Would Lily be into him? I can’t tell if he’s too corporate for her.

  “You know, I’ll be frank with you,” he says. “I don’t typically consider candidates unless they’ve built up a serious portfolio of work—not even for entry-level positions. We can afford to be competitive here. But your columns are doing amazing things for our traffic. If you can keep us spiking like that, that’s worth more than experience.”

  “Oh, thank you. But actually, I do have a portfolio from college.” I gesture to my résumé. “I interned for People.com in college, and I wrote for my school’s blog.”

  He looks almost apologetic. “Right. But college and internships are a different game. Anyway, the good news is that I like your work. And obviously our readers do, too. The bad news is that if you want to work here, you’ll need to do more than write from your matchmaking experience. Can you do that?”

  I know how to hold my own with men who think they’re hot shit. Matchmaking taught me that. I smile and plunge ahead with an answer.

  “Absolutely. Writing for a big site like this is a lot like matchmaking, isn’t it? It comes down to understanding what people want—what your readers want, what my clients want. Based on traffic, we already know that they’re interested in dating advice from a woman’s point of view. So it’s just a matter of applying that same perspective to the rest of your dating content: viral stories, sex tips, funny listicles, and more.”

  Diego nods and scribbles something down on his copy of my résumé.

  “I’m not a one-trick pony, if that’s what you’re afraid of,” I add.

  I’m not nervous, exactly. In the worst-case scenario, I don’t get the job, but I keep working at Bliss. But the dream of working full-time as a writer has been reignited; it’d be tough to come so close and not make it happen. The rest of the interview isn’t hard. He seems impressed when I can recite past Esquire.com headlines from memory, and I think I nail the question about how the site could improve. He tells me he’s still considering another candidate, but will be in touch soon with his decision.

  He walks me back toward the elevator and pauses by the door.

  “By the way, how do you know Adam?” he asks.

  Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but Diego sounds like he’s pretending to seem casual.

  “Oh, he didn’t say?” I wish I could turn around and look at Adam for reassurance.

  “No.”

  My mind races for the appropriate answer. I can’t tell him the full truth.

  “I set him up on a date with my client. It didn’t work out between them.”

  “Ha. That’s too bad. He’s a good guy.”

  “Yeah, I think so, too.”

  At 7:10 p.m., I rap twice on Jonathan’s door and pull myself up to my fullest height. The doorman had recognized me and waved me through the lobby without buzzing Jonathan first.

  “One minute!” Jonathan calls.

  I’m ten minutes late as a power move. I stare purposefully at the charcoal gray carpet flecked with red and blue, and focus on not passing out from nerves. The door clicks open and I snap my head up to face him.

  “Hi,” he breathes. “Come on in.”

  He holds the door open and stretches an arm to give me a hug. I step into his embrace and he bends his head into the curve of my neck. I bet he can feel how hard my heart is pounding, even through my top and his undershirt, button-down, and blazer. His apartment is a mess, with a stack of suits still in dry-cleaning bags thrown over one arm of the cream couch, and an uncapped, half-full bottle of Scotch on the coffee table. A pile of unopened mail sits next to a bag of Chinese takeout splotched with grease stains.

  “Sorry,” he says, grabbing the bag and scuttling to the kitchen to toss it. “I’ve been meaning to get someone in here to clean. I just haven’t . . . I, uh, it’s been kind of rough around here lately.”

  He’s flustered, scratching the back of one leg with the toe of his shoe and mussing a hand in the back of his hair. My purse is slung in the crook of my elbow, held as a protective barrier between us. The words I’d prepared all day are stuck in my throat; I don’t know how to begin.

  “I meant to straighten up,” he says, “but I literally just walked in—you know that deal I was working on, the one with the oil company? Huge crisis with them at the last minute. The office has been slammed for days working on deadline, and . . .”

  He trails off when he sees me lose interest, then tries a different tactic.

  “You have no idea how glad I am you’re here. I wasn’t sure you’d really show up.”

  “Well, I’m here.”

  “And you’re good? How is everything?”

  “Fine. Great. I am totally fine and great.”

  He nods and rocks up onto the balls of his feet. He shoves his hands into his pockets, then rocks back down to his heels. There’s an extra foot of polite space between us.

  “So, I know I probably kind of caught you off guard the other day.”

  I actually laugh for the first time in two days. “Um, yeah, you could say that.”

  “I meant what I said, you know. I love you, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. We’d build the best future together. I hate myself for hurting you, but I want to fix what I’ve ruined.”

  He closes the gap between us and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear, running a tender finger down my cheek. I’m too on edge to exhale. He leans forward gingerly, then kisses me, pulling me tight against him, hands firm on my hips. It would be so easy to melt into him here, let my guard down, and tell him I love him.

  But I can’t do that.

  Instead, I remove his left hand from my hip and take a shaky step back.

  “Jonathan, stop. I can’t marry you.”

  His face falls and his eyes turn stormy. If he thought I’d say yes, he doesn’t know me well enough at all. Two months ago, I’d have been scared that no one would ever love me the way Jonathan does. And after spending my summer fixing up single New Yorkers, I should be afraid to turn down his proposal. But I’m not. I’m not that girl anymore. I know myself well enough now to realize that even with a proposal and a ring and a promise to change, Jonathan and I aren’t compatible.

  I pull the glossy blue Tiffany bag out of my
purse, but he doesn’t take it from me.

  “Keep it,” he says quietly.

  “I can’t. It’s over, Jonathan.”

  “Sasha, no, come on. You don’t mean that. I want to be with you.”

  Every ounce of anger I’ve felt toward him over the past two years hits me all at once: the nights he canceled plans to put in face time at the office, the countless dinners I spent sitting across the table in silence while he emailed his bosses, his nauseating betrayal. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before: he’s not the one.

  “I don’t really mean that?” I echo. “Are you kidding me? I’m capable of having my own opinions, you know.”

  “No, that’s not—Just, ugh, just please, stay.”

  “I have to go.” My voice might sound hollow, but at least I’m not groveling like he is.

  “Just stay the night,” he asks softly. “For one last time. For me.”

  I hesitate. It would feel so good to curl up in bed with him. He’d be the big spoon, and his arm would drape across the groove of my waist. I could listen to the steady tick tock of his heart as we drift into sleep, just like we’ve done a thousand times before. I’m tempted, but I can’t. I place the Tiffany bag on the coffee table. After all this time together, this is it.

  “Goodbye.”

  I turn and walk away. I open the door, force myself to not look back, and let it swing shut behind me with a heavy thud. I speed-walk to the elevator and jam my finger into the button until it dings and the door slides open. It’s empty, mercifully. When I reach the lobby, the doorman waves goodbye to me. He doesn’t know it will be for the final time.

  Only once I’m safely outside do I let myself slump against a brick building and relax. I’m prepared to heave with sobs. But the tears don’t come. I’m not sad—just overwhelmed. And I’m proud of what I’ve done. If the thought of marrying someone makes you want to vomit, he’s not the right person for you.

  And then I get a text from the right person.

  “Hey, sugar. I just started cooking. Want to join me for dinner?”