by Jill Kargman
Forty-six
I picked myself up the next morning when Violet woke up and after breakfast I staggered along Lexington Avenue with the surreal feeling that I was watching a door close in slow motion. And of course, it is only after it’s closed that you freak. I crossed the street and the flashing orange Don’t Walk was hypnotic and silent, and the sirens, screeching cabs, and pedestrians faded into a blur as if I’d pressed a giant mute button on the world around me. The only sounds were my racing pulse and heavy breath. When I said I couldn’t remember my life before Josh, I wasn’t exaggerating.
Josh and I had met at a party as the dot-com bubble was about to burst and people were still throwing insane over-the-top ragers all around San Francisco. Bands would play ’til the wee hours, there was booze aplenty, and everyone was wearing T-shirts or hats with their company’s Web site on it. Basically it had been nerds on parade, partying to make up the time they’d lost with their noses in books. Now they were rocking out, pinching themselves that their IPOs were imminent and the geek would inherit the earth, short of a few golden handcuffs due to rules on vesting stock.
In a room in the Marina jammed with fleece, where I truly thought that if someone coughed a Teva might fly out of his throat, I sat on a Crate and Barrel couch watching a crowd that had no shortage of white baseball hats and khaki.
I remember I was party-locked talking to this one girl who was a designer of Swiss Army knives. Weird. I mean, aren’t they all the same? What, does she decide to add letter openers this year or make them blue instead of red? It was like saying “I design Birkenstocks” or “scissors.” What’s to design? She was droning on and on about the different sizes when I saw Josh walk in. He had a smile as long as the Golden Gate bridge, minus the Don’t Jump signs.
We made fleeting eye contact a few times but I would never have had the balls to just go up to him, particularly when he was talking to a couple giggly blondes who had seemed to master the laugh with head thrown back slash hairflip all in one. I could tell even from fifteen feet that his charisma and charm were infectious.
The food at the party sucked (naturally there were way more cocktails than snackables), so I had my fingers in a tiny box of raisins that I always carried around like a six-year-old. I still credit those raisins to this day, because before I knew it, Josh had crossed the room and introduced himself to me and Swiss Army knife designer girl.
“A raisin eater,” he said, smiling. “A gal after my own heart.”
“Yes, I’m kind of a raisin addict,” I said, semi-mortified at my own uncoolness, though psyched he was a co-lover of the grape, meaning raisins not wine. “I always have these little red boxes strewn around.”
“Sun-Maid is super nineteen hundreds, though,” he said curiously. “Haven’t you ever had Pavich raisins?”
“What? No. What are those?”
Swiss Army girl, finding the line of convo clearly way too loserish for words, got up to go bore someone else.
“You’re kidding. You love raisins and haven’t had Pavich? You’re crazy. They kick those red boxes’ ass.”
“Well, I love Sun-Maid. I’m really into brand loyalty.”
After an hour of convo with him, I got that sudden fevered buzz when you realize, Wow, I’ve been talking to this guy for a while now. There was mucho ST (sexual tension) and I was nervously pumped; I even remember my friend Eliza and her boyfriend giving me a sly thumbs-up behind Josh’s fluffy head. But damn, I was always the worst flirt on the planet. I am incapable of the head thrown back with laughter, the eyelids at half-mast/come-hither special, or the hair flip slash smile. No games, no The Rules horseshit, no strategy. Which is why I often screwed up, letting the floodgates open too early, scaring some guys away with my affectionate ways. Because I’d spied Josh talking to the Muffies across the party, I suddenly had visions of him limboing with Hawaiian Tropics contest winners with golden tans and ass-length platinum corn-silk locks, and convinced myself he’d never be into me.
When the party was winding down he asked me for my e-mail, and when he heard I was at Berkeley, he said he was up there often and that maybe we could get coffee.
By this point, Tate Hayes had already left for New York, and my love life had been rocky ever since. Until Josh. On Monday, after gliding through a class flickered with thoughts about him, I went to my mailbox and saw a can of Pavich raisins sitting in it. A small note was affixed that said “Time to try the real thing, The Raisin Tsar.” I turned over the card and the other side was Josh’s business card with all his info. Nervous and excited, I opened the can. The sweetness of the natural confection made me shiver with crush—I prayed it was a portent of more deliciousness with him to come. I went home and turned on my computer to e-mail him.
Raisin Tsar,
Your noble shriveled-grape highness, I humbly retract my statement praising the virtues of shabby-ass Sun-Maids. Long-live plump Pavich perfection.
Your loyal subject, ever in gratitude, Hannah Greene
I hit send and worked the morning away until my stomach started giving me a shoutout. As I was reaching for the raisin can for another handful, my e-mail chimed with the familiar happy sound of “shwing!”
His Majesty would like to see if thou art hungry for dinner.
I wrote back “Absosmurfly,” suspecting that as a child of the eighties he’d get it, and sat waiting for a response, squirming in my seat with Rocky Horror–style antici…pation.
We met two hours later and seconds after we’d said hello on a street corner, a thundercloud burst, and like a cartoon, I literally saw the jagged lightning line and it started pouring torrential, flooding rain. We were closer to a gross deli than anywhere else, so we bolted toward the teal neon sign in the distance, screaming. We arrived soaked and panting from the Carl Lewis sprint.
“Holy shit!” bleated a wet Josh. “I feel like Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places in the wet Santa suit!”
I paused. He likes movies. “I was thinking John Cusack in The Sure Thing when they’re stranded on the side of the road,” I said.
“Good one,” he smiled. His wet hair flopped on his face and his eyes looked greener against his red cheeks splattered by cold rain.
I was so freezing I grabbed a styro cup and went over to the hot chocolate machine. “Oh, yes!” said Josh. “Machine hot chocolate is the best thing.”
“I know it—machine ho-cho is nectar of the gods.” This guy seemingly had my identical taste buds grafted onto his tongue.
“My friends and I were so addicted to this shit at Stanford that we made friends with a dude in the kitchen and during the summer he smuggled us a machine and we had it in our house.”
“Oh my God, that’s my dream! Except I’d probably drink myself into a Roseanne Barr state.”
“Like you have anything to worry about,” said Josh, looking at me.
I looked down, bashful and now officially in crush mode. We walked to a cute café and plopped and talked for three hours, with topics ranging from movies (a shared love of everything from Woody Allen to Goodfellas), to childhood pets (me: a goldfish named Billy Ocean, him: a golden retriever named Topaz), to work, ex-flames, family, friends, New York, skiing, and ethnic food (the spicier, the better). He drove me home, leaning in for a peck on the cheek before saying bye. I hopped upstairs, went through my mail, and curled up in bed with a Pottery Barn catalog. I was looking at the monogrammed towels when the phone rang at eleven forty-five P.M., startling me since it was way after anyone ever called.
“Sorry to call late,” said Josh. “I just wanted to…make sure you got upstairs okay. No monsters in the closet.”
“Oh, you are so cute. No monsters so far.” I could feel myself blushing.
“Oh good. So…whatcha doing?” he asked.
“Oh, nothing,” I lied. I had been fully thinking about what my married-to-Josh monogram would be on those towels. “How about you?”
“Channel 11, Star Wars.” He had clearly found his late-night viewing pleasure.
<
br /> “I never got into that.”
“What? Are you American? You sinner. Who isn’t into Star Wars? You should be arrested.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I hate space. That’s one of my rules, no space.”
“My heart is breaking. Carrie Fisher was my first love.”
“Sorry,” I said, wondering if my hair was long enough to put into those braids. “I hate the future, I hate animals that talk, I hate sci-fi, I hate magic, I hate flying things, I hate spells—”
“You are missing out.”
“Well, I will leave you to spank it to Princess Leia, then.”
He laughed. “Oh come on, watch it with me a little…”
I reluctantly tuned in and watched a little. Okay: Harrison Ford was so cute.
“How weird that he was a carpenter before this,” I mused.
“So weird. And he’s been in so many amazing movies.”
I watched for fifteen minutes. Chewbacca roared, R2D2 squealed out some whirrs and beep-beeps, C3PO unleashed some computer British accent, and I…dozed off.
“Are you there?” asked Josh.
“Oh yeah, sorry, I’m drifting. I might have to go snooze.”
“Okay, well, we tried, didn’t we, Chewy?”
I laughed and said good night.
“Good night, Hannah.”
Forty-seven
The next day, I walked with Violet to meet Bee and Maggie and within minutes they asked me what was wrong.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I lied; I would never tell them I was panicking that Josh would leave me and that my whole life was swirling down the toilet bowl. “Just stressed, I guess.”
“You know, Hannah, not that it’s any of my business,” said Bee, a statement that is always followed by the word but. “But maybe you should consider working out sometimes. I mean, Maggie and I have our Pilates and yoga twice a week and it seriously helps with all the pressures we face.”
“It really does,” attested Maggie. “Come with us!”
I shrugged, saying maybe, when the truth was I knew I wasn’t into it. There was no way I’d hook my ass up to one of those Star 80 creepy Frankenstein machines for a hundred smacks an hour, no thank you.
Lara and Hallie strolled up a few minutes later, Hallie announcing her in-laws had bought Julia Charlotte two ponies for her to play with at their weekend house in Millbrook. As I was about to gag, Lara said that her son had taken up violin and was loving it, already learning some complicated sonata. It was kind of weird to picture a three-year-old toting a violin case, but whatever floats your yacht.
“Oh, and we just got this stunning pure-bred Cavalier King Charles spaniel,” Lara excitedly reported. “It’s a Christmas present. We named him Jeter. My husband loves to walk him at night. It’s so funny—I hired a dog-walker but he just walks alongside her—he holds Jeter’s leash and the gal scoops the poop! So funny.”
Luckily, sparing me any more reports about Lara’s and Hallie’s prodigies and their bratty gifts, Violet started asking for lunch, which made for a graceful exit. I walked her home to Amber and read her some books before she fell asleep for her afternoon nap. I snuck out so I could get a manicure and some personal maintenance stuff (read: pit wax). But as I walked by the manicure place on Lexington, I saw that Hallie and Lara were in there gabbing away and I simply couldn’t face it. I felt so down and depressed, and the last thing I needed were tales of Julia Charlotte’s perfect use of chopsticks or discussions of how clever the new documentary on Saudi weaponmakers was. So I just kept walking. My feet just moved in a straight line until I stopped when I saw some women holding yoga mats opening the door to a studio. I figured it wasn’t possible for me to be more stressed than I was at that moment, so I peered through the window and saw Nuala-clad women cheerily bouncing up a flight of stairs to the yoga center.
I was wearing sweats and a hooded zipper sweatshirt anyway, and Bee and Maggie had planted the seed about working out, which kind of did make sense. I thought that maybe I should see what the goddamn fuss was all about. While my initial inclination was to bash yoga, I knew that all those millions of skinny chicks couldn’t be wrong, so I spontaneously entered the two fifteen class. I felt nervously excited as I watched everyone spread out their mats and the instructor, Raven, took the front of the room. She had a soothing way about her and I knew I’d done the right thing by coming to this class. Lots of women, strong urban women, and I was part of the group. Anyone was welcome, it was all about open arms and accepting hearts. Let the oms begin!
After about fifteen minutes I wanted to kill myself. Raven cooed her instructions and softly whispered for us to “get into the moment” and find ourselves “in the space between the inhalation and the exhalation” and “surrender to the forces that inhibit our bodies from being what they can be.”
Garbage. Raven turned the temperature of the room up to like a hundred degrees and I was literally in a steamy jungle of feet and ass. It was a fucking sauna and the one man in the class was next to me, grunting and moaning the whole time like a wuss loser. I felt the germs of every rectum in my face and the sticky toes of the butch woman with pigtails on the other side of me. I sat there in my poses thinking that my thighs were killing me and my was butt aching and my back was about to die and my life’s in shambles and this sucks ass and all I want to do is sneak out and go to Häagen-Dazs.
What did Raven mean when she said to find my inner being? My inner being wanted to get the fuck out of here. So I left after a half hour, figuring I’d already wasted my thirty bucks and I didn’t also need to waste my time. The teaching assistant followed me out of the studio, stomping in her crocheted leg warmers, enraged.
“You know, leaving early like that really disturbs the peace of the class. It’s just quite selfish, really.”
“Oh my God, I am so sorry,” I said, feeling embarrassed. “I just couldn’t get into it. I’m sorry.” Oops.
“Well maybe if you gave it a full chance it would have worked for you.” She gave me an evil look-over. I felt like telling her to go fuck off and do some chants but I just smiled knowing I wasn’t going back to her flakey shithole sauna anyway.
I walked home, sweaty and disgusting, feeling even worse than before. I was so mortified from the run-in with the yoga TA, I felt my cheeks heat up and I started to cry. I knew my period was around the corner and hoped it was just PMS, but I knew deep down this was way heavier than that: my marriage, my perfect marriage, was on the rocks, and it was my fault. Josh was right, I would be pissed if he was romping in museums with some old flame–type. I would be horrified and beyond devastated if he had a sex dream about her, no matter what Leigh said about it being normal. And I shook with the thought of him upset—and alone—in Switzerland. Hysterically crying, I hailed a cab. I had to tell Tate Hayes that we couldn’t spend time together anymore.
Forty-eight
Still in my disgusting sweats, I paid the cab driver and ran up the steps to the art history department. I wandered by a classroom, thinking Tate might still be in class, but the lecture hall was empty. I walked to his office and the door was ajar. I knocked as I opened it to find Tate sitting in his cognac leather chair.
“Ahhh, Hannah! Here, I have your co-op board letter.”
I took it and nodded quietly, putting it in my bag.
“Are you okay?” he asked, noticing my stressed face. “Sit, sit.”
But I couldn’t sit. I was too revved up and paced his office like an inmate in Bellevue. “Thank you for this. I’m kind of…going through…a bad moment, I guess. Sorry.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked, looking concerned and upset to see me upset.
“I’m just so depressed! I’m going through a lot, and Josh and I are…having issues and I’m just so down!” I started to cry. Not just one or two tears but streams. I wanted him to be my shrink so I could get out all my problems: Lila, the Momzillas, the pressure.
He got up with a tissue. I was so grateful to have him there, a safe place w
ith a wise soul to help me.
And then, as I reached for the tissue to wipe my eyes, he grabbed me and kissed me.
I pushed him off, stunned. “Tate, no! That’s not why I’m here—”
“I know you’ve thought about it. All those years ago? Is that a distant memory for you now?” he asked, touching my hair.
But as much as I felt broken and alone and desperate for human connection at that moment, as much as he had always been this fantasy for me, I was repulsed. Not because he wasn’t gorgeous or brilliant. But because he wasn’t Josh. Here he was, trying to cheat on his wife. And I could never do the same. I just wasn’t wired that way.
“No, I just…can’t. I can’t see you anymore,” I said firmly. And as the words came out of my mouth, even though I had recently lived for our time together, I truly didn’t want to see him anymore. “But thank you for everything. Our time together has been very fulfilling to me, and I’m grateful, but…I love my husband,” I said, tears pouring out. “I love Josh.”
“Oh come on, Hannah. Don’t tell you subscribe to this bourgeois notion of a perfect marriage.”
“I do,” I said, realizing suddenly that he’d obviously strayed during his wife’s frequent trips to Italy.
“Well then, I’m sorry—”
“Me, too,” I said. I turned and left, closing the door on Tate Hayes.
I opened my cell phone, panting, dialing Leigh to fill her in. On everything. Within an hour she was at my apartment and we spoke in hushed tones as Violet played with her dollhouse on the floor.
“Okay, let’s just calm down,” she said, putting a hand on my quivering knee, as I not-so-expertly tried to cry covertly. “You didn’t do anything, right? You know you can tell me.”
