See Jane Date

by Melissa Senate

  “Whoa, a little defensive, Jane?” Ben Larson commented, game-show-host smile even bigger and wider, if that could be believed.

  Just a few days ago I’d been driven to fantasies of pouring boiling water on a guy’s head. Now I wanted to take that hideous black painting off the wall and break it over Ben Larson’s game-show-host face.

  “You know what, Ben?” I began, trying to keep a check on my anger. “My boss was right. Who do I think I am, walking around a museum at six-twenty at night when I should be working, working, working! I’d really better get back to the office.”

  Ben’s smile fell. “Oh, but, well, I mean, you’re already here, and she already caught you, so what would be the point of going back to work? She wouldn’t even know.”

  “I’d know, and that’s what’s really important, don’t you think?”

  Ben Larson peered at me. “I guess.” Ha! I’d deflated the smug bastard! “So, how about a rain check?”

  I smiled to myself. “I’m going to be really busy for the next couple of weeks. I’ve got this major deadline looming, so…”

  The smile fell further. “Uh, okay, so why don’t you give me a call when things slow down?”

  I put on my own game-show-host smile. “I will.” And with that I fled down the escalator and out the doors of MOMA.

  Twice in one week I’d fled a date. I’d never done that before in my life, and now twice in a matter of days I’d made an excuse and bolted.

  The homeless man who I’d given a cigarette to was zigzagging up and down in front of the museum. I headed toward Madison Avenue. I didn’t want to go home, but I had nowhere else to go. Amanda was working late, the way a good girl should, and Eloise was off to a free classical music concert in Central Park. There was no way I’d find her and Serge among the thousands sitting on blankets for that mosquito fest. And there was no way I was going back up to Posh to work.

  I was only six blocks away from Crate & Barrell, which was on 59th street. I figured I might as well head over and buy Dana’s bridal shower present, not that there was anything remotely French-inspired in that store. Maybe I’d buy myself new kitchen stuff I couldn’t afford. After all, a spinster-in-training needed to buy these things for herself.

  The walk home from Crate & Barrel was doing me good. I was now on Park Avenue and 63rd Street, facing a straight line of the most stunning avenue in the world. One majestic limestone apartment building after another, a formally dressed doorman at each entrance. Park Avenue was divided in the center by island after island of flower beds as far as the eye could see. Like Central Park and the Botanical Gardens and the skyline itself, Park Avenue was free. The brokest assistant editor could stroll up Park Avenue and immediately feel as though she’d bought the world. On a certain long stretch of Park, the stretch I was on at the moment, a person could easily stroll past Madonna or Katharine Hepburn or George Clooney. That was the most amazing thing of all about New York. A walk home was free and came with the bonus of possible celebrity sightings.

  Crate & Barrel had been even more depressing than my date with Ben. The store had been full of young couples wandering around, the men as interested in silverware and place settings as the women. It had taken me about four minutes inside the store to realize I was perilously close to tears. And Madison Avenue and 59th Street was no place for a crying woman. It was also no place to find a taxi, which was why I’d decided on the long walk home.

  Sixty-fourth Street. The Gnat’s block. I peered west up the unusually short block between Park and Madison. I wondered which amazing town house her “darling sanctuary” was in. Suddenly I realized I could run into her at any moment. I didn’t like the idea of her thinking I was checking out her digs. I scurried away, then ducked down E. 65th Street.

  Suddenly I felt like the brokest assistant editor again. How could just thinking about the Gnat do that to me? But somehow it didn’t seem like all her doing. Something else was bugging me, pricking at the backs of my eyes and causing that stinging sensation. But what? I didn’t have a date to the wedding, but was that enough to ruin my life? I still had two months to find someone to go with me. Two months. Anything could happen in two months.

  But nothing ever did. And that was the problem. The one guy who’d approached me in months had turned out to be my own smarmy, critical blind date. Left to my own devices, I was a total flop. I couldn’t get my own wedding date. And I couldn’t even earn my own promotion without the help of the woman who’d caused every insecurity I had.

  Something was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Yes, it was the dates and the whole notion that my love life was in the toilet and about to be flushed into the New York City sewer system. But it was something else. Something I couldn’t put my finger on. Something that there were no quick fixes for. What? What was it?

  “Hey, watch where you’re going!”

  “Sorry,” I managed to croak at the woman I bumped into.

  The stinging sensation at the backs of my eyes threatened. The worst thing about those free walks in the most la-di-da sections of New York was when you were sobbing down the street, surrounded by a million people you didn’t know and who didn’t care about you at all.

  Seven

  The Flirt Night Roundtable was now in session, the honorable Amanda Frank currently being attacked for the inflammatory statement she’d just uttered.

  “I’m just telling you what Jeff told me, Jane,” Amanda insisted. “They all said it. All three of the guys he set you up with. I couldn’t not tell you, could I?”

  Eloise slammed our table with the palm of her hand. The people on either side of our table at Big Sur peered over, then withdrew their attention when it was obvious there wasn’t anything interesting going on, like a hysterical breakup or a catfight. “So Jane’s supposed to quit smoking because her blind dates didn’t like it? Tough shit!”

  Amanda bristled. “Well, tough shit when Natasha Nutley introduces her billionaire boyfriend at Dana’s reception and asks where Jane’s wonderful boyfriend is.”

  Amanda had a point there. Eloise and I blew smoke at each other. I stared at the crowd lining the bar; the non- smokers were few and far between. Why did all those people get to smoke if it was so vile and disgusting and socially unacceptable?

  “Jane, guys who don’t smoke don’t want to date a smoker, plain and simple, hon,” Amanda said, sipping her Amstel Light. “And most guys in New York don’t smoke. So unless you want to hide your little habit, you’ve gotta quit.”

  I turned beseeching help-me eyes to Eloise.

  “Sorry, Jane, but I think she might be right.” Eloise inhaled her Marlboro, then exhaled away from Amanda’s direction. “Serge smokes—it’s one of the main reasons I’m with him.”

  Amanda turned her offended blue gaze on Eloise. “What?”

  Eloise sipped her Cosmo. “It makes it easier. Just like it makes it easier to date a nonsmoker if you don’t smoke.”

  Amanda’s mouth was still open. “So the only reason you’re with Serge is because he smokes and therefore it’s a hassle-free relationship? Eloise!”

  “Well, not when you make it sound like that,” Eloise defended herself. “I adore Serge. That he doesn’t bug me about smoking is just a bonus, okay?”

  “Do I really have to quit smoking to find a boyfriend?” I asked, inhaling an extra-deep drag of my Marlboro Light. “A fake boyfriend?”

  “You’re not looking for a fake boyfriend, Jane, and you know it,” Amanda said. “And trust me, Timothy doesn’t smoke and wouldn’t touch a smoker with a ten-foot stethoscope.”

  Timothy Rommely was the doctor. Tomorrow night’s doctor—the one that promised to be the worst of them all. He was a friend of Jeff’s from college. Thirty-two. Upper West Side (but not in a brownstone). I’d long gotten over linking the Upper West Side and a blind date to fate. He supposedly looked like Greg from the television show Dharma and Greg. I doubted that. Doctors weren’t that hot.

  “A doctor might be worth quitting for, Jane,” Elo
ise noted, exhaling a stream of smoke at me.

  “Anything that can motivate you to quit is worth quitting for,” Amanda cut in. “If it has to be a guy, fine. But I’d like to see you quit for self-love, Jane. You too, El. Your health, your future children, the people around you. Those are three very good reasons to stop smoking.”

  Amanda was one of the few people I knew who could get away with making references to “self-love.” Eloise made a face and held her cigarette under the table.

  I gnawed my lower lip and stared at the pack of Marlboro Lights on the table. The red Bic lighter next to it. The ashtray, full of ashes and butts. These things were as familiar and as comforting to me as the meat loaf, tuna sandwiches and Tang my mom used to make. When I looked at a pack of cigarettes, especially a fresh pack, I felt instantly comforted. Everything in the world was as okay as it was going to get when I had a full box of Marlboro Lights in my purse. When I looked at a pack containing just a few cigarettes, I felt panicked—a feeling that was never settled until I bought a new pack.

  I didn’t start smoking from peer pressure in junior high the way everyone else did. I hadn’t taken a puff of a cigarette until I was nineteen, until the day Aunt Ina surprised me with a knock on my dorm room door that February morning almost ten years ago, her expression one I’d never seen before. The moment I’d seen that expression, I’d known my mother was dead. I’d spoken to my mom the day before. She’d mentioned she hadn’t been feeling too well the past couple of weeks; she thought she had a nasty case of the flu. But she’d had ovarian cancer. And one moment she’d been alive, and the next, she was gone. My mother was gone.

  My expression alone had been enough for Aunt Ina; she’d simply nodded in confirmation. My knees had given out and I’d dropped fast onto the floor. Aunt Ina picked me up and held me against her on the thin dorm bed. Neither of us had said a word for a half hour. Then Aunt Ina had told me that my mother was with my father now, her beloved husband who she’d loved so much. They were together at last. They were at peace. And they would always watch over me. It was then that I’d cried and couldn’t stop.

  A half hour later, Aunt Ina had gone down the hall to tell Uncle Charlie and Dana that I was ready to leave. (Grammy had been too inconsolable to make the trip up to Albany; she was staying with her best friend until we returned.) I’d picked up my roommate’s pack of Marlboro Lights and slid out a cigarette and sniffed it. I’d seen the way Michelle would take a drag and let out a satisfying ah. I lit the cigarette and inhaled a small puff. I hadn’t coughed. I’d sat on the bed, inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling, comforted by the do-this, do-that thoughtlessness, pleased by the methodical need to click the cigarette ever so gently against the rim of the ashtray so that the ashes would fall inside. From that cigarette on, I was a smoker.

  Aunt Ina had knocked on the door, called my name, and I’d slipped Michelle’s cigarettes into the pocket of my down jacket, along with a book of matches. Dana had packed a suitcase for me. Uncle Charlie had gone to the Registrar’s to withdraw me for the semester. And Aunt Ina wrapped my mother’s favorite scarf, the one my dad had helped me buy for Mother’s Day years back, tight around my neck. Then, once we were all together again, we’d bundled into Uncle Charlie’s Buick, and I’d toyed with the pack of cigarettes in my pocket.

  No one had said a word or shaken their heads when I’d openly smoked in front of them at rest stops, or in Aunt Ina’s apartment, or outside the funeral home, or after the cemetery. I had watched as my mother’s coffin was lowered into the plot right next to my father’s. No one was going to tell me I shouldn’t smoke. Ironically enough, perhaps, I hadn’t viewed cigarettes as something that took life away. I’d only registered that they took feelings away. And so I smoked, constantly. I immediately became a pack-a-day smoker. Now, I was a pack-and-a-halfer, sometimes even a two-packer, depending on my stress level, which thanks to life, was always high.

  Amanda waved away our smoke and mock-coughed. “Jane, did I mention that Timothy has a Jack Russell terrier named Spot? Isn’t that adorable?”

  Yes, it was. Suddenly, I wanted a Jack Russell terrier named Spot. I wanted a boyfriend who had that dog. I wanted a boyfriend and a dog. I wanted a boyfriend who supposedly looked like the actor Thomas Gibson. I wanted to be able to date Timothy Rommely. I wanted him to fall in love with me and never leave me. And if that meant quitting smoking, so be it. I crushed out the half-smoked cigarette and gnawed my lower lip.

  Amada beamed.

  “You’re really gonna quit?” Eloise asked.

  “Tomorrow morning,” I said, lighting a fresh cigarette.

  Eloise and Amanda laughed.

  The waitress came by to ask if we wanted another round. We most certainly did.

  “You know what, Jane?” Eloise said. “If you quit, I’ll quit.”

  My mouth dropped open. “But you’re seeing a guy who smokes more than the two of us combined.”

  “So I’ll tell him he can’t smoke around me or in my apartment,” Eloise said. She took the last sip of her Cosmopolitan. “He’s around too much anyway. I don’t know what I’m gonna do about him. He keeps hinting about moving in, but I don’t know. I like him so much, but…”

  “But he’s not the one?” Amanda offered, tucking a strand of long, blond hair behind her ear. “I mean, if smoking is one of the main things you have in common…”

  “I don’t know,” Eloise said, exhaling a stream of smoke. “He is and he isn’t. Sometimes I think I love him, sometimes I think we’re just meant to be friends, and sometimes I wish he’d go back to Russia so I’d never have to see him again. Sometimes not being hassled about smoking is all I think there is between us.”

  “Sounds to me like you’re not meant to make any decisions about him right now,” I said. “You don’t know how you feel.”

  Eloise nodded. “He’s so cute and sweet. I wish I knew why some guys feel like the one and others don’t. I would be so happy if Serge were definitely it.”

  The waitress set down our round of drinks. Amanda sipped her beer. “I know what you mean. If he were the one, everything would be so easy. You’d have your guy right there.”

  “But it’s true, isn’t it?” I asked. “You do just know, right?”

  “I think so,” Amanda said. “Although, remember how I felt about Jeff when I first met him? I thought he was too immature, but it turned out he was just insecure and nervous, which lasted only a few weeks. He’s not immature at all. I’m so glad I gave him the chance to be himself. And for me to be myself.”

  Huh. I remembered Amanda wondering out loud about whether or not to go on a second date with Jeff Jorgensen. She’d said he’d made stupid jokes and turned her off. When I’d met Jeff, I’d instantly liked him, well, except for his too-hearty laugh and penchant for screaming at the television while watching sports. And granted, he was definitely into hanging out with packs of guys who liked to make vulgar jokes, but wasn’t I currently benefiting from his frat-boy ways? Meaning: lots of buds to fix me up with.

  “Let’s do it, Jane,” Eloise announced. “Let’s lose the bad habit.”

  “Yeah!” Amanda exclaimed. “You have to give up something to get something. That’s the way life works. That’s the way life is.”

  “She’s right,” Eloise agreed. “And you know what, Jane? We’re stronger than cigarettes.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “We are?”

  “Of course ya’ll are!” Amanda insisted.

  “Excuse me,” said a semi-good-looking guy to Amanda. Behind him at the bar stood his crew of other semi-good-looking guys, watching to see how his friend did with the table of ladies. “Are you from Texas? I heard your accent.”

  “Nah,” Amanda said in Brooklynese. “I’m a Noo Yawka. I was just kidding about the ya’ll.”

  “Oh.” He turned back around.

  We leaned forward and giggled. “Well, I guess it’s just the accent they want,” Amanda said.

  I took a long sip of my Comso, then lit ano
ther cigarette. I watched the smoke rise up to the high ceiling and mingle with the smoke from everyone else’s cigarettes. If smoking was so alive and well in New York City’s hottest nightspots, why did I have to quit? Why couldn’t I find a smoking date right in here?

  Because you tried that for years, you fool. You haven’t met a smoker since Max Reardon. And now his new wife got to smoke away with him in bed after sex….

  Was I ever going to get married? If I couldn’t even make a date last longer than an hour and a half, how could I hope to share my life with someone? Was I supposed to mellow out and chill out and be more accepting of the little hurts guys inflicted during dates when they were supposed to be on their best behavior? Figure they were nervous and insecure? That they’d turn into princes on date four? Arg. As I’d already said, dating was complicated stuff.

  So maybe you didn’t always know for sure about a guy when you met him. But you did get a sense of him. And the same went for the guy. Did I really want a guy to label me as a smoker and get his sole sense of me from that? Nonsmokers simply didn’t understand that smokers had gone through their entire adult lives puffing away—cigarettes had been a part of every single emotion and event, good and bad. Never smoking again was equal to terror. How did one do anything without a cigarette?

  I’ll bet if I hadn’t been a smoker, I’d have poured that boiling water on Kevin Adams’s head. I’d have flung back tortellini at Andrew Mackelroy’s nephew. I’d have broken that stupid black canvas over Ben Larson’s game-show-host face. I would rage out of control unless I could smoke away my feelings. Wouldn’t I? What would I do instead of smoking?

  And what would I get if I gave up cigarettes? That was the question. If it was a date to cousin Dana’s wedding, if it was a guy who’d make me feel okay in Natasha Nutley’s privileged presence, then it was worth it, pathetic as that sounded. That was my only real motivation to stop at the moment. I supposed I’d also win accolades from my friends and return my lungs to their original pink color. That would be cool. Smoking cost me a fortune, sent me outside in the pouring rain, the freezing snow and the unbearable heat. It made my clothes and hair smell bad. It made blind dates break out in hives and little kids unable to breathe. And, um, it caused cancer.