Love and Miss Communication (5 page)

What would Luke find when he looked her up? She did a quick self-Google. Her Baker Smith profile was the first return. The picture was a total disaster, taken after she’d pulled a double all-nighter. There were a few better images of her on NewYorkSocialDiary.com from society events that Caroline had dragged her to. Her name appeared in a list of participants in a 5K Juvenile Diabetes fun-run, even though she’d actually bailed last minute due to a head cold. Her father’s obituary in the
Baltimore Sun
was there. There was no trace of her and Jack. He didn’t love pictures.

She curled up with her laptop tucked under her arm like a blankie and hoped for a new message ding from Luke, but the only thing she heard until she fell asleep were the soothing sounds of ambulances and car horns—the New York lullaby, she liked to call it.

# # #

Radio silence. That’s what she got from Luke Glasscock after Paul’s wedding. It was aggravating. He had seemed to forgive the whole birthing-a-phone-on-the-dance-floor mishap. She thought they had made a connection. They shared a hot and heavy makeout at the end of the evening. He had gallantly put her in a taxi, coolly handing the driver a twenty. He promised to be in touch. Could he have forgotten her last name? Where she worked? Even so, he could have asked Paul.

Now at work she found herself thinking about him too much, moving her head from one giant monitor to the other, like she was watching a tennis match at her desk, but not actually focusing
on anything. The Calico closing had gone off without a hitch, but instead of being able to celebrate, a new matter was put on her desk moments after the final signature page had been faxed. She felt like Lucy in the chocolate factory.

Rumor had it the partnership committee was having a deliberation session that day, at least according to her BFF Renaldo on the maintenance crew. He had just delivered four sandwich platters and eight yellow legal pads to the forty-second-floor conference room.

Amid the stream of e-mails advertising summer sales, Evie noticed a message from Joshua Birnbaum, a tech entrepreneur she’d met on JDate three months earlier. They went out twice—two no-sparks-but-could’ve-been-worse evenings that left both of them fairly apathetic. But here was Joshua again, suggesting they meet for a drink as though ninety days hadn’t passed since they’d last been in contact. She was actually considering accepting when her phone rang.

“Hi, lady,” Caroline chirped. “We didn’t recap the wedding yet. How’ve you been?”

“Eh. Swamped at work, as usual, and annoyed Paul’s cousin has vanished into thin air.”

“He’s probably just busy at work. If his job is anything like yours, he doesn’t have a ton of spare time to make dates.”

Evie didn’t have the strength to fight Caroline on that point—to state the plain fact that drafting a simple “It was great to meet you” e-mail could be accomplished in less than thirty seconds. No one knew that better than Evie. She managed to send dozens of personal e-mails out during the day. The letters on the keyboard of her computer were practically tattooed on her finger pads. She could dash off a one-liner blindfolded and with one hand tied behind her back.

“I think you should just put him out of your head,” Caroline
went on. “You know how that whole watched pot business works anyway. Can you hang on a sec? I’m in a cab.” She heard Caroline ask the driver to take her to the Plaza Hotel on Central Park South. Then, in a far more hushed tone, she heard Caroline tell him to pick her up in two hours. Last time Evie checked, taxis didn’t do round-trips. Clearly Caroline was talking to Jorge, her chauffeur, but at least she was embarrassed about it.

“Sorry, I’m back. I’m walking into a luncheon. Text me if you hear from him. You know how boring these charity things are—I’ll just be staring at my phone. Like you.” She giggled.

“Touché,” Evie conceded.

Glancing at the BlackBerry on her desk, Evie thought about how her smartphone helped drown out the loneliness, almost like the background noise of a rerun she’d committed to memory. Acknowledging that a three-ounce electronic device was substituting for a genuine mate hit a sour note, but Evie was too cognizant of its usefulness to consider quitting the habit.

“Well have a good time. Don’t forget to save some endangered pocketbooks for me.”

Evie couldn’t resist. In February, Caroline had purchased a table at “New Yorkers for Wildlife” and convinced Evie to duck out of work for lunch in the Waldorf ballroom. The trouble was that it was minus six degrees outside and most of the ladies were bundled in fur.

Unsatisfied with Caroline’s dismissal of her angst over Luke, Evie phoned the ever-honest Tracy, hoping to catch her during a free period. After she went straight to voicemail, Evie started to dial Stasia’s number but replaced the receiver midway. It was easier to speak to Caroline and Tracy about this type of thing. Both of them were married, but Caroline’s husband was geriatric and Tracy’s an ambiguously employed loafer. She believed they were both content, but still Evie took some comfort in feeling
that compromises had been made. Relating agonizing dating stories to them was certainly tolerable, usually cathartic.

Stasia was different. She and Rick were a golden couple—attractive, well educated, from “good” families. They looked like they stepped out of a Slim Aarons photograph. Without—gasp—the help of a wireless connection, they found each other at Stanford Medical School (albeit over a cadaver dissection). After his training, Rick, an East-Coaster from birth, convinced Stasia to relocate with him. He became an ENT with a successful private practice on Park Avenue while she was slowly rising up the ranks in the research department of a top pharmaceutical company based in New Jersey.

After her announcement at Paul’s wedding, Evie knew they were planning to start a family. It was natural to picture Rick as a father. He didn’t seem to mind when Evie crashed their date nights and was quick to offer up the guy’s perspective when she needed relationship advice. Plus Rick helped people for a living, even if it was only from the discomfort of deviated septums. That was more than she could say for Caroline’s husband, whose daily task at work appeared to be printing money. It wasn’t really her place to get high and mighty about professions, since working at Baker Smith hardly likened her to Mother Teresa.
But still.

Her office phone rang. Tracy.

“Hey, I just saw a missed call from you. What’s up? I’m on lunch.”

“Nothing. Just annoyed. Stupid Luke from Paul’s wedding. He hasn’t e-mailed me yet.”

“Evie, you are killing me. I saw him. He’s cute, but you can do better. Didn’t you say he was kind of a jerky banker type?”

“I don’t remember that.” (She did.) “And I hate to ask the obvious, but if I can do better, then shouldn’t he be banging down
my door? And by the way, when you did see him at the wedding, you said he was adorable.”

“Uch, never mind what I said. Hormones talking. Stop checking your e-mail and think about where you want us to take you out to dinner for your long-overdue birthday dinner. We thought maybe the Beatrice Inn. Caroline can get us in.” Evie had canceled on two previously scheduled celebrations because of work obligations. Things had a shot of getting quieter over the summer, but Evie wasn’t much in the mood for merriment.

She chose to completely ignore Tracy’s attempt to change the subject.

“In my entire adult life, I’ve only met one person that I’ve truly loved and who loved me. You know I never should have given him that stupid ultimatum. I could be happily—”

“Happily what?” Tracy cut her off. “Happily dating? You can’t happily date for the rest of your life. You said you wanted a real commitment. Marriage. A wedding. Kids. You deserve that, and breaking up with Jack was the right thing to do.”

“I guess you’re right.” Evie decided it was easier to agree than to draw out this debate again, which she had had with each of her girlfriends at least a dozen times.

“I am right. But I gotta go. The bell just rang.”

Evie rested the phone in its cradle and opened up her lower file cabinet. She shifted a few heavy-duty hanging folders to the front, and pulled out the silver picture frame, now badly tarnished, that used to sit to the right of her computer. It housed a picture of her and Jack from a Halloween culinary event. Jack was one of the featured chefs. For a costume, the farthest he would venture was letting Evie attach feathers and silly pins to his toque. She, on the other hand, went all out and dressed as a sexy version of Remy, the chef from the Disney movie
Ratatouille
.

She’d met Jack just a month before the Halloween party at
the Soho Grand bar while out with the girls celebrating Stasia’s move back from the West Coast. In the swanky lobby, she had flopped down happily in between Stasia and Caroline on a velour banquette and quickly downed a glass of Cabernet. She relaxed and imbibed, taken in by a sensual red diptych hanging next to the bar. That’s when she noticed Jack. He was getting up from a nearby table and shaking hands with a pretty young woman holding a tape recorder and a heavily inked cameraman. Evie was instantly curious.

After about an hour of sneaking glances at each other, he approached Evie when she stepped away from her table to listen to a voicemail, and offered to buy her a drink. The first thing she heard was his accent. It was definitely British and definitely hot.

Evie assessed that he was handsome but not out of her league. He stood about three inches taller than her in her heels and had fair skin, steely blue-gray eyes, and brown hair worn a touch on the long side. She guessed he was about midthirties. The small gap between his two front teeth immediately made Evie curious about his background. Where she was from, everyone got braces the day after their bar or bat mitzvahs. He had a raw sexiness about him, emphasized by a five-o’clock shadow and the motorcycle jacket he managed to pull off without any irony. In a word—he had swagger.

“I’m Jack,” he said, grabbing a few handfuls of smoked nuts at the bar. “And I’m absolutely starved after a rubbish sushi dinner in Midtown.”

“Midtown? Why were you eating there? My office is in Midtown and the restaurants are terrible. I’m Evie, by the way.”

“And what is it that you do? In Midtown?”

Courtesy of the alcohol ratcheting up her self-esteem a few notches, Evie responded proudly that she was a corporate attorney at Baker Smith, instead of muttering “lawyer” under her breath.

They ended up discussing for ten minutes which neighborhoods in Manhattan had the best restaurants—teasing, joking, and spritedly fighting their way through a mock dispute. For the first time in ages, she actually ignored the persistent buzz of her BlackBerry, even though she knew a team of attorneys in the firm’s Menlo Park office was waiting on her feedback. Jack was just so passionate as he spoke—though really anything he said with that accent would have magnetized her.

“So, Jack, what do
you
do that you have so much time to go out to eat?” She hoped to get at some explanation of why he was being filmed earlier.

“Well, I suppose now is a good time to tell you, I’m a chef. Jack Kipling is my full name. Perhaps I should have told you that before we got into it.” He chuckled, obviously enjoying her jaw-dropped reaction.

Jack Kipling was arguably the city’s hottest young chef. She was surprised that she hadn’t recognized him. He was not only a chef but also a successful restaurateur, owning several well-regarded restaurants in the city, most notably JAK, a French-style bistro on the Upper West Side near her apartment. He was a close pal and rival of Marcus Samuelsson.

“But don’t worry, no offense taken about your comment that uptown restaurants are almost as bad as Midtown,” he said.

“Wait—no—I actually love JAK! I eat there all the time. Honestly. Check your receipts. You’ll see lots of Evie Rosen AmEx charges.”

“I believe you. Though I won’t quiz you on what your favorite dish is, just in case you’re lying to make me feel better. Listen these nuts are not really doing it for me—I’m still rather peckish. Do you want to—wait, sorry, I forgot I saw you over there with your friends.”

“No, no, it’s fine. We were getting ready to leave anyway,”
she lied. “I’ll just go say good-bye to them and we can get something to eat.”

And that was the start of Evie’s relationship with Jack.

Three shrill rings of her office phone brought Evie back to the present. Her secretary, Marianne, whom she shared with another associate, was away from her post, as per usual, so Evie scooped up the phone herself. Marianne was all big hair and big lips and something always seemed to need reapplying in the bathroom.

“This is Evie.”

“Evie, it’s Mitchell Rhodes. Could you come up to the conference room on the forty-second floor please?”

Evie immediately felt nauseated. It couldn’t be that she was already going to be named partner, could it? It was too early for that, unless the firm was changing its protocol. Maybe they wanted to grill her on her recent matters, to see if she was really up to snuff. Or could there be some secret society–like initiation process where she’d be blindfolded and forced to drink a drop of blood from the pinkies of each of the partners on the executive committee? She didn’t like the sound of Mitchell’s voice on the phone. Why did everyone at her firm have to sound so formal? She wished they would just say, “Hey, get up here, we want to give you a huge office and loads of money.”

“Sure, I’ll be right up,” she muttered, and grabbed her ID card so she could access the executive-level conference floor.

Two minutes later, she found herself seated across from the five members of the partnership committee. Mitchell was scanning his BlackBerry and did not look up when she entered, which seemed peculiar. The conference room had one wall of solid glass and the afternoon sun streamed through, forcing Evie to squint while she faced the grim-looking partners. She steeled her body against the powers that be. The long mahogany table around which the partners were seated was covered in boxes filled with
papers—the kind used for due-diligence projects. There had to be at least ten of them, each overflowing.
Good grief, please let this not be the mound of paperwork she’d be expected to review in her newest assignment.