Anybody Out There - Marian Keyes (6 page)

It's mortifying to admit, but from my late teens onward I owned several long, hippie-type fringey
skirts, some even with--oh God!--bits of mirrors on them. Why, why? I was young, I was
foolish, but really. I know we all have our youthful fashion shame, the badly dressed skeletons in
our closets, but my time in the fashion wilderness lasted the best part of a decade.
And I gave up going to the hairdressers when I was fifteen after they sent me out with a Cyndi
Lauper. (The eighties, I can't blame them, they knew no better.) But the fringey mirrored skirts
and messy hair were mere bagatelles compared to the shock waves of the compliment-slip
story...
The compliment-slip story
I f you haven't heard it already, and you probably have, because the world and his granny
seems to know about it, here it is. After I left school, Dad swung me a job in a construction office
--someone had owed him a favor and the consensus was that it must have been a pretty large
favor.
But anyway, there I am, working away, doing my best, being nice to the builders who come in
for petty cash, and one day Mr. Sheridan, the big boss, throws a check on the desk and says,
"Send that to Bill Prescott, stick a compliment slip in the envelope."
In my defense, I was nineteen, I knew nothing of the language of administration, and luckily the
check was intercepted before it went out in the post with my accompanying note: Dear Mr.
Prescott, although I have never met you, I believe you are a very nice man. All the builders speak
highly of you.
How was I to know that sending a compliment slip did not actually involve complimenting
anyone? No one had told me and I wasn't psychic (although I wished I was). It was the kind of
mistake any uninitiated person could make, but it became a watershed event: it took pride of
place in the family folklore and crystallized everyone's opinion of me: I was the token flake.
They didn't mean it unkindly, of course, but it wasn't easy.
However, everything changed when I met Shane, my soul mate. (It was a long time ago, so long
that it was permissible to say that sort of thing without getting sneered at.) Shane and I were
delighted with each other because we thought exactly the same way. We were aware of the
futures that awaited us--stuck in one place, shackled to dull, stressful jobs because we had to
pay the mortgage on some horrible house--and we decided to try to live differently.
So we went traveling, which went down oh-so-badly. Maggie said about us, "They'd say that
they were going up the road to buy a Kit Kat and the next time you'd hear from them, they'd be
working in a tannery in Istanbul." (That never happened. I think she must be thinking of the time
we went to buy a can of 7-Up and decided on a whim to skipper a boat around the Greek
Islands.)

Walsh family mythology made it sound like Shane and I were a pair of work-shy layabouts, but
working in a canning factory in Munich was backbreaking work. And running a bar in Greece
meant long hours and--worse still--having to be nice to people, which, as everyone knows, is
the toughest job in the world.
Whenever we came home to Ireland, it was all a bit "Ho, ho, ho, here they are, the pair of smelly
hippies, coming on the scrounge, lock up your confectionery."
But it never really got to me--I had Shane and we were cocooned in our own little world and I
expected it would stay that way forever.
Then Shane broke up with me.
Apart from the sadness, loneliness, woundedness, and humiliation that traditionally accompanies
a broken heart, I felt betrayed: Shane had got his hair cut into something approaching
respectability and had gone into business. Admittedly it was a groovy kind of business,
something to do with digital music and CDs, but after he'd scorned the system for as long as I'd
known him, the speed with which he'd embraced it left me reeling.
I was twenty-eight, with nothing but the fringey skirt I stood up in and suddenly all the years I'd
spent moving from country to country seemed wasted. It was a horrible, horrible time and I
ricocheted around like a lost soul, directionless and terrified, which was when Maggie's husband,
Garv, took me under his wing. First he got me a steady job, and while I admit that opening the
post in an actuarial firm isn't exactly scintillating, it was a start.
Then he convinced me to go to college and suddenly my life had taken off again, moving at
speed in an entirely different direction. In a short space of time, I learned to drive, I got a car, I
got my hair cut into a proper, medium-maintenance "style." In short, a little later in the day than
most people, I got it together.
8
How Aidan and I met for the second time
A     barrel-chested man slung a hamlike arm around my neck, swung a tiny plastic bag of white
powder at my face, and said, "Hey, Morticia, want some coke?"
I extricated myself and said politely, "No, thank you."
"Aw, c'mon," he said, a little too loudly. "It's a party."
I looked for the door. This was dreadful. You'd think that if you took a ritzy loft overlooking the
Hudson, added a professional sound system, a ton of drink, and a load of people, you'd have a
great shindig on your hands.

But something wasn't working. And I blamed Kent, the guy throwing the party. He was a
jocklike banker and the place was overrun with hordes of his Identi-Kit pals and the thing about
these guys was they didn't need anything to boost their confidence, they were bad enough au
naturel without adding cocaine to the mix.
Everyone looked florid and somehow desperate, as if the crucial thing was to be having a good
time.
"I'm Drew Holmes." The man swung the bag of coke at me again. "Try it, it's great, you'll love
it."
This was the third guy who'd offered me coke and it was kind of cute really, like they'd just
discovered drugs.
"The eighties will never die," I said. "No, thank you. Really."
"Too wild for you, huh?"
"That's right, too wild."
I looked around for Jacqui. This was all her fault--she worked with Kent's brother. But all I saw
were lots of shouty meatheads with saucerlike pupils, and trashy-looking girls, necking vodka
straight from the bottle. I discovered afterward that Kent had put the word out that he wanted
people to bring along the kind of girls who were six months away from rehab, who were in their
final, promiscuous crash-and-burn.
But even before I'd known that, I'd known he was a creep.
"Tell me about yourself, Morticia." Drew Holmes was still at my side. "What do you do?"
I didn't even hide my sigh. Here we go again. This party was lousy with incessant bloody
networkers, but--at their request, I might add--I'd already explained my job to two other guys
and neither of them had listened to a word, they were just waiting for me to shut up so they could
monologue about themselves and how great they were. Cocaine really kills the art of
conversation.
"I test-drive orthopedic shoes."
"Well!" Deep breath before he launched into it. "I'm with blah bank, blah, blah...tons of
money...I, me, myself, being fabulous, blah, promotion, blah, bonus, workhardplayhard, me,
mine, belonging to me, my expensive apartment, my expensive car, my expensive vacations, my
expensive skis, me, me, me, me, MEEEEE..."
Just then a canap�--it was going very fast but I believe it was a miniburger--caught him on the
side of the head, and while his eyes bulged with rage as he sought the perpetrator, I slipped away.

I decided I was leaving. Why had I come in the first place? Well, why does anyone go to the
party of someone they didn't know? To meet men of course. And funnily enough, whatever the
hell was going on with the planets, for the previous couple of weeks, I'd been overrun with men.
I'd never experienced anything like it in my life.
Myself and Jacqui had gone to the eight-minute speed dating that Nita at Roger Coaster's office
had told me about and I'd got three matches; a handsome, interesting architect; a red-haired
baker from Queens who wasn't a looker but was very nice; and a young, cute bartender who said
words like dude and shibby. Each had submitted a request for a date and I'd agreed to all three.
But before you start thinking that (a) I'm a three-timing slut (and it's actually four because I
haven't told you yet about the blind date that my lovely Korean colleague, Teenie, had set up for
me), or (b) that the whole thing was a recipe for disaster--that I was bound to be caught and end
up with no one, let me explain the rules of Dating in New York City, especially the whole
exclusive/nonexclusive end of things. What I was currently doing was Dating Nonexclusively--a
perfectly acceptable state of affairs.
How it is in Ireland is, people just drift into relationships. You start by going for a couple of
drinks, then on another night you might go to a film, then you run into each other at a party given
by a mutual friend, and at some stage you start sleeping together--probably this night, in fact.
It's all very casual and drifty and most of the initial propulsion depends on accidental meetings.
But although no one ever says anything about exclusiveness or nonexclusiveness, he's definitely
your boyfriend. So if you discovered the man you'd been sharing fireside nights and videos with
for the last few months having a nice dinner with a woman who wasn't (a) you, or (b) a female
relation of his, you'd be perfectly within your rights to pour a glass of wine over him, to tell the
other woman that she's "welcome to him." It is also appropriate at this point to wiggle your little
finger and say, "Hardly worth it, though, is it?"
But not in New York. You'd think, There's one of the men I've been seeing nonexclusively having
dinner with a woman he's also seeing nonexclusively. How civilized we all are. No wine gets
poured on anyone; in fact, you might even join them for a drink. Actually, no, scratch that, I
don't really think you would. Maybe on paper, but not in reality, especially if you liked him.
However, it's an ill wind, and during this time of nonexclusivity, you can ride rings around
yourself; you can sleep with a different man every night should you so wish and no one can call
you a six-timing tramp.
Not that I'd touch any of the overgrown frat boys at this party, no matter how accommodating
the system. I battled through the crowded room. Where the hell was Jacqui? Panic flickered as
my path was blocked by another man with yet another jocko name, a short butch thing. In fact,
now that I think about it, it might actually have been Butch. He pulled at my dress and said
peevishly, "What's with all the clothes?"
I was wearing a black wraparound jersey dress and black knee boots, which seemed not
unreasonable attire for a party.

Then he demanded, "What's with the Addams-family thing you've got going on?"
The strange thing was I had never before in my life been accused of looking like Morticia. Why,
why, why? And I wished he'd let go of my dress. It was stretchy but not in the first flush of youth
and I feared it could lose its bounce and never return to its correct configuration. "So, Goth girl,
what do you do when you're not being a Goth girl?"
I was wondering whether to tell him I was an elephant voice coach or the inventor of the inverted
comma, when a voice cut in on us and said, "Don't you know Anna Walsh?"
Butch said, "Say what?"
Say what, is right. I turned around. It was Him. The guy, the one who'd spilled coffee on me, the
one I'd asked out for a drink and who'd blown me off. He was wearing a beenie and a wide-
shouldered workingman's jacket and he'd brought the cold night in with him, refreshing the air.
"Yeah, Anna Walsh. She's a..." He looked at me and shrugged inquiringly. "A magician?"
"Magician's girl," I corrected. "I passed all my magician exams but the assistant's clothes are a
lot cooler."
"Neat," Butch said, but I wasn't looking at him, I was looking at Aidan Maddox, who had
remembered my name, even though it was seven weeks since we'd met. He wasn't exactly how I
remembered him. His tight hat made the bones of his face more pronounced, especially his
cheekbones and the lean cut of his jawbone, and there was a twinkle in his eyes that hadn't been
there the last time.
"She disappears," Aidan said. "But then--as if by magic--she reappears."
He'd taken my number but he hadn't called and now he was hitting me with some of the corniest
lines I'd heard in a long while. I looked at him in cold inquiry: What was his game?
His face gave nothing away but I didn't stop looking at him. Nor he at me. What seemed like
ages later someone asked, "Where do you go?"
"Hmm?" The someone was Butch. I was surprised to find him still there. "Go? When?"
"When you get magically disappeared? Hey, presto!" He winked brightly.
"Oh! I'm just out back, having a cigarette." I turned back to Aidan, and when his eyes met mine
again, the shock of our connection made my skin flame.
"Neat," Butch said. "And when you get sawn in half, how does that work?"
"False legs," Aidan said, barely moving his lips. His eyes didn't leave my face.

I could actually feel poor Butch's smile trickle away. "You guys know each other?"
Aidan and I looked at Butch, then back at each other. Did we? "Yes."
Even if I hadn't known that something was happening with me and Aidan, the way Butch treated
us was a sign: he backed off--and you could tell that ordinarily he was supercompetitive. "You
kids have fun," he said, a little subdued.
Then Aidan and I were left on our own.
"Enjoying the party?" he asked.
"No," I said. "I hate it."
"Yeah." He scanned the room, at a different eye level from me. "What's not to hate?"
Just then, a short, dark man, the sort of man who'd been my type until I'd met Aidan, butted his
way between us and asked, "Whereja get to, buddy? You just took off."
A look passed over Aidan's face: Were we ever going to be left alone? Then he smiled and said,
"Anna, meet my best buddy, Leon. Leon works with Kent, the birthday boy. And this is Leon's
wife, Dana."
Dana was about a foot taller than Leon. She had long legs, a big chest, a fall of thick multitoned
hair, and radiant, evenly tanned skin.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey," I replied.
Anxiously, Leon asked me, "It's a sucky party, right?"
"Um..."
"You're with the good guys," Aidan said. "Tell it like it is."
"Okay. It's supersucky."
"Jeez." Dana sighed and fanned her hand in front of her chest. "Let's mingle," she said to Leon.
"Sooner we start, sooner we can leave. Excuse us."
"Bail just as soon as you can't stand it," Leon told Aidan, then we were alone again.
Was it the two giggling men running off to the bathroom like a pair of schoolgirls with their little
plastic baggie or the poor six-months-away-from-rehab girls scooping out the creamed chicken