Getting Warmer (3 page)

I didn’t transform my life overnight, of course. There were applications to be filed, loans to acquire, new roommates to be found. There was a part-time waitressing job to endure, classes to attend, papers to write, a student teaching stint to complete.

While I remade my identity, Ron solidified his. A month after claiming he’d never be able to love or trust another woman, he hooked up with another Harvard Business School graduate four years his senior. Together, they bought a condo with views of the Charles River. I expected to be jealous. Sometimes it worried me that I wasn’t, that there must be something wrong with me if I could care so little for a man I almost married.

My friends rallied. They assumed I was devastated and set to work hooking me up with every single man in Boston between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. After awhile, the men began to blur together. John had just returned from backpacking in Hungary. Steve was from California and missed the sun. Pete was doing a PhD in molecular biology. Chris had just broken up with his college sweetheart. And on, and on, and on.

They weren’t all duds, but I was too tired to make much effort. When my friends called for the post-date play-by-play, I’d report back that, “He was nice, but . . .” John was too immature, Steve was too flaky, Pete was too nerdy, and Chris was still hung up on his ex-girlfriend.

Eventually, I exhausted the entire supply of my friends’ unattached male friends. Or maybe my friends just got fed up with me. It didn’t matter, anyway. When I failed to find a teaching job in the Boston area—the result of too many universities cranking out too many teachers—I heeded my parents’ advice and applied for my Arizona teaching certification. After a round of interviews, I received several job offers in the booming, sprawling Phoenix Valley and accepted the one closest to my parents’ house in North Scottsdale.

As I moved cardboard boxes into my new bedroom (which has cathedral ceilings, a walk-in closet and its own bathroom—though I still prefer my parents’ double-headed shower in the master bath), my parents told me I was welcome to stay with them for now, “though you’ll probably be wanting a place of your own soon.” When I received my Fannie Mae student loan payment book and started to hyperventilate (I’d be almost fifty by the time I paid everything off), they suggested I go soak in the spa and said that of course I could stay until I got on firmer financial footing. Now that I’ve been here a year, we don’t talk about me moving out. They simply remind me to water the plants when they leave town.

And they leave town a lot. Typically, Scottsdale’s daily high temperatures start nudging toward one hundred in the middle of April. There are no spring showers. The average daily lows creep up gradually, peaking around eighty in July and August. Understand that “low” temperature hits at around four o’clock in the morning. Summer evenings rarely fall below ninety.

In June, just after I had finished up my classes for the year, my parents headed for higher elevations (while I headed for a mind-numbing summer job answering phones and filing permits in an architect’s office). Their new best friends, Barbara and Stan Gillespie, have a cabin in Flagstaff, and my parents were able to secure a rental condo nearby. They came back for a couple of nights in July before flying East. My sister, Shelly, a graphic artist, a.k.a. “the creative one,” lives in Rhode Island with her long-term, perpetual grad student boyfriend, Frederick, a.k.a. “he who will not commit.” My aunts live in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. By mid-October, having exhausted their entire reserve of friends and family with nice guest rooms, my parents will fly back to their Spanish-tiled dream house—just in time to see the mercury plunge.

When people ask me where I live, I’ve taken to saying, “I’m house-sitting for my parents.” I don’t even like to admit to myself that I’m twenty-nine years old, unattached, mired in debt and dependent on my parents—not quite the idealistic save-the-world existence I’d envisioned. At least they have a killer pool.

And, yes, I’ve thrown myself back into a different kind of pool: that of eligible singles. Another English teacher, Mrs. Clausen, arranged tonight’s rendezvous. Paul is a nice young aerospace engineer who works with her husband. Like me, he’s from the East, so if we run out of conversation, we can always bitch about the weather and compare snake sightings. Mrs. Clausen met Paul at her husband’s company picnic, got his number and, voila! I’ve got a date.

I arrived at Route 66, Scottsdale’s coolest restaurant, at six o’clock—right on time. My blue shirt and skirt felt too English teacher-y, my dangling silver earrings too predictable. I looked like I could burst into a lecture on
Catcher in the Rye
at any minute.

I spotted Paul immediately. He was sitting alone at the neon-lit chrome bar, the only person in the place who looked even less trendy than I did. He was wearing a yellow golf shirt, khakis and brown cowboy boots.

“Paul?” I asked with a smile, thinking: maybe I can be out of here by eight.

He turned, looked momentarily confused, smiled back. His grin transformed his face, making him not handsome, exactly, but certainly appealing. His eyes were brown with little flecks of gold. They crinkled nicely at the corners. His hair was sandy and wavy, flecked here and there with gray. He looked older than I expected, maybe in his mid-thirties. His nose was sunburned and just starting to peel.

“I’m Natalie,” I said. “I think our table is ready, if you want to eat now. Or we can have a drink first, if you’d like.”

“I’d love to have dinner with you,” he said. His voice was warm, easy. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I looked forward to spending the evening with him.

“Okay, then.” I smiled and started to walk toward the hostess stand.

“But I’m not Paul.”

I stopped and turned around to stare. His brown eyes twinkled.

“Natalie?” said a voice right next to me. I spun around. This, then was Paul: medium brown hair, light eyes, average height, athletic build, around my age. He was interchangeable with at least five guys I’d been set up with before. He wore a black silk camp shirt, gray trousers and man sandals. He didn’t look like an engineer. He looked like a Route 66 regular, only straight.

“Paul?” I asked. I wasn’t going to embarrass myself again.

“Yes,” he said. I smiled. He smiled back. Sort of.

“Our table’s ready,” I said. “You want to sit?”

“Okay . . .” he said.

We sat down at our shiny white table, which sat in the middle of the restaurant, leaving me feeling far too exposed. I pulled my napkin off the table and smoothed it across my lap. My palms were sweating.

“Is this your first time here?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s a fun place,” I said. “The cocktails are good. And you’ve got to check out the bathrooms. The stalls are mirrored.”

He was looking at me funny. I cleared my throat. “Not that I like to watch myself, you know. Using the, um, the restroom.”

He was still staring at me. I tugged at my napkin. “And I’m sure the men’s room has urinals, so if you don’t like the whole mirror thing, you don’t have to. You know. Use the stalls. Well!” I smiled at him. My face hurt. When you’re in a hole, stop digging, I chided myself.
Stop digging!

“You don’t remember me,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Michelle Stevens set us up a few years ago. In Boston.”

I stared at him. So, he wasn’t just interchangeable with other blind dates—he
was
one of my blind dates! I’d been set up so many times, I had run out of new men to meet. I was starting to recycle.

“Right! Ohmigod! How are you?” I was trying to place him. “How’s Michelle? I feel so bad that I haven’t called her.”

“Michelle’s good,” he said evenly. “She has a new job—human resources for a nonprofit.”

“That sounds great. This is so weird. Like, maybe it’s fate or something.” I’d written Paul off in Boston, but then, I’d written everyone off in Boston. As far as I could tell, he was an improvement over most of the men I’d met in Arizona. Maybe I’d give him a second chance.

Paul looked at me calmly. “You told Michelle that I spent the whole evening talking about myself.”

“I said that? She told you I said that?”

“And that I had no sense of humor.”

“That’s—I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair.”

“And that all I cared about was running and I automatically assumed everyone else would be interested in hearing about training for the Boston Marathon.”

The Marathon Guy! Now I remembered him!

“I’m sorry,” I said with as much contrition as I could manage, though all I could think was:
Michelle! What a bitch!
“I was going through a rough time. It had nothing to do with you.”

Paul stood up. “I’ll tell Michelle you said hello.”

“You’re
leaving
?”

“I wouldn’t want you to waste another evening on me,” he spat. “And I have no desire to waste another on you.” He turned and strode out of the restaurant.

My first impulse was to bolt. But I didn’t want to run the risk of seeing Paul outside. I couldn’t stay at my table; my sudden solitary status felt too conspicuous. So I headed for the bathroom and shut myself in a stall.

Mirrors. Given my inane ramblings merely moments before, you’d think I wouldn’t have jumped when I closed the stall door only to see myself in front of myself and on either side of me. Four of me, all lit in pink neon—as if one wasn’t enough.

I looked like shit. No, that’s not true. If I was someone else looking at me, I wouldn’t think I looked bad. I simply wouldn’t notice me at all. In preparation for my teaching interviews, I’d chopped my long hair and kept it that way ever since. I tried to tell myself that the short hairdo looked chic, but really, it just looked short. My face wasn’t pretty enough to pull off such a severe cut. I was tan—it was hard not to be around here—but after two weeks in the classroom, my skin was already getting that faded, sallow look. My blue clothes were even more wrinkled than they had been this morning. My scarf belonged on someone twenty years older. I looked like someone named Mrs. Quackenbush.

I exited the stall before I had to watch myself crying, flushing the unused toilet in case anyone was listening. I held back the tears by taking a few deep breaths and picturing a blank wall in my mind, a trick I used at least once a week at work, when I was so tired and frustrated and I just wanted to give some kid the finger and cry but I couldn’t. So at school I’d take a cleansing breath, hold it in, release and repeat. Then, when I’d finally regained my composure, I’d speak in an authoritarian tone and act like my feelings weren’t hurt. Because everyone knows that teachers don’t have feelings.

As I exited the ladies room, I was hit by a flash of yellow. The guy from the bar—the guy who was not Paul—was exiting the men’s room at just the same moment. “Sorry,” he said, grabbing my arm so I wouldn’t fall over. “Oh, it’s you.” He was laughing a little.

“What’s so funny?” I asked, sure he’d seen my date storming off.

“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s just—I guess I’ve never used the restroom here before. Are the stalls in the ladies room . . . ?”

“Mirrored,” I said. “It’s really funny when you’re drunk. When you’re sober—not so much.”

“You mean Paul hasn’t bought you a drink yet?”

“Paul? No.” So he hadn’t witnessed my humiliation. “Paul and I are no longer an item. Or a potential item. We’re citing irreconcilable differences.”

“That was fast.”

“Yeah, it was kind of like speed-dating. Just without, you know, the other nineteen guys waiting to meet me.”

“I’d like to meet you,” he said, coloring slightly.

At that, a really, really, really tall woman with long black hair and a short black skirt said, “Excuse me?” We looked at her quizzically before realizing we were blocking the bathroom.

“Oh, sorry,” the guy in yellow and I said at the same moment, clearing the way so she could waltz past us in her heels.

He turned back to me and said, “So, what do you think? Can I buy you a drink?”

“Only if you promise not to walk out on me after five minutes.”

We made our way back to the bar. There was only one stool left; he let me have it. The guy sitting to my left was wearing eye-liner, I noticed. Even weirder, it looked good on him.

“What can I get you?” Jonathan asked. (We had traded names by now.)

“I don’t know. Something colorful.”

“Any color in particular?”

“Blue is nice. But maybe pink is safer.”

“Oh, no. Let’s go with the blue.”

The drinks came quickly; Jonathan seemed to know the bartender. Great: a local alkie drinking alone at his favorite bar. Just when I was starting to like him, too.

Jonathan checked his watch. “We’ve reached a milestone. Six minutes.”

“Things are looking up.” I smiled and sipped (okay, gulped) my Blue Hawaiian.

“So, are you going to tell me why the guy walked out on you?”

“Did you see it? I got the impression you hadn’t noticed.” I looked over to Paul’s and my table. It had been quickly filled by another couple who looked like they liked each other.

“I just happened to be glancing over,” he said, not very convincingly. “If you don’t want to talk about it . . .”

I didn’t, but what could I say? I was about to tell the truth: kind of a funny story, really—except I’d come out like a total bitch for bad-mouthing Paul to my (former) friend. And I looked desperate for being set up so many times.

“There were just some things about me, about my life, that he couldn’t deal with,” I said cryptically. “My job and stuff.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a, uh, teacher.” There. I said it.

“Why would that be a problem?”

Now what? If only Jill were here. I looked at my glass: empty already. I looked back up at Jonathan. I liked him. I liked talking to him. He had beautiful brown eyes. He spent his evenings drinking alone at bars. This was going nowhere.