Momzillas (23 page)

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 with 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.”

“
Leigh!
” I snapped. “Of course not. But Josh doesn't know that—he clearly thinks something happened. I mean, I told him we kissed way back when. What was I thinking spending time with Hayes? To the point where I even fantasized? I feel horrible. I am just a wr-wr-wreck,” I stuttered.

“Don't worry. You guys are rock solid,” she comforted.

She sat beside me and hugged me. “I have no idea where he got this,” I said breathlessly. “I mean, where would a rumor like this start? I am just so angry. What makes me more angry is that while I did nothing I still feel guilty because if Josh hung out with some chick and went to museums and stuff I'd chop her head off.”

“It's different with guys. For them proximity breeds intimacy. Guys don't hang out with some chick and not want to fuck them.”

“I just have been so lonely. I would never cheat, I just…need the stimulation, you know? I was feeling so adrift.”

The phone rang. Normally I would just let it go to voice mail, but I was praying it was Josh and leaped to answer.

“Hannah, hi, it's Maggie!” she said. “I just gave birth to Talbott Xavier Sinclair! Seven pounds ten ounces.”

“Oh Maggie! That's so great, congrats!” I was touched she'd called me from the hospital.

“We're coming home tomorrow morning and having a sip 'n' see in the afternoon from four to six if you and Violet want to stop by.”

“I'd love that,” I said. “I'll see you then tomorrow at the sip 'n' see. Bye!”

“What the fuck is a sip 'n' see?” asked Leigh when I'd hung up.

“Well, most peeps don't have another baby shower for the second kid, so you go over when they're home and you
sip
tea and
see
the baby and bring presents and stuff.”

“So it's basically a way for these rich moms with way too much money already to get even more loot.”

“Basically.”

Leigh sat with me all night and we talked about my darkest fear, of Josh leaving me. I told her that from the moment he'd entered my life, I'd felt so safe and lucky. She asked me to retell her about that moment, how Josh and I met and fell in love, to walk her through our past to help me think of a way to seal in our future. And when I finished retelling her our story, I had a lightbulb.

Forty-nine

When Josh and I had our second date a week after meeting, we ate, talked for hours, and did full A&E biographies. I learned that he had been devastated by losing his father when he was very young and that his mom, Lila, emotionally drained from the loss, was very shut off to Josh and moved him abruptly from the suburbs back to New York City at age eight.

“That's so terrible—losing your dad and leaving home, suddenly in the city?” I asked, unable to imagine.

“It was terrifying. But I almost, at that point, was numb, like nothing could get worse. And then my mom came in my room and said, ‘It's time to pack up. You can take whatever you want, but it has to fit in these two suitcases.'”

“No—” I was so traumatized.

“Yeah, so I took one and filled it up with my clothes and some picture frames of us from around the house. And then I took the other suitcase and just filled it up all the way with Legos.”

“Legos?”

“My dad and I would always be building weird fantasy skyscrapers. We'd commandeer the whole living room and the mess drove my mom crazy,” he laughed. “But Legos have always reminded me of my dad, we'd always make these colossal projects. I guess I just thought if I brought all those little bricks with me I could rebuild my life wherever I was going.” Josh stopped abruptly as he noticed that I'd let a single tear escape down my cheek, despite my valiant quest to hold it back.

“C'mon, it's okay!” he said, seemingly touched by my emotion. His cell phone rang and he turned it off.

“You can get it,” I sniffed, wiping another errant tear.

“No, no, it's okay.” Changing the subject, he looked at me and said, “Hannah, I really can't believe you are anti–cell phones so much. How can you survive without one? What if you needed to get ahold of someone?”

Yes, it's true: I was a cell phone holdout. I just didn't want another bill, nor did I want a Nokia-shaped tumor in my brain. Plus, I was oddly a fan of pay phones, despite the risk of contracting Hepatitis D. “I don't know. I don't think I need one.”

“Once you get one you can't imagine how you lived without it.”

“So I hear.”

Our next date, a few nights later, we had tickets for Nine Inch Nails, my favorite band. Seriously. Trent Reznor got me through high school, and when Josh wore an old NIN T-shirt on our second date I gushed incessantly and he said he just so happened to have a connection for hot tix. So we were going together; I was elated and took forty-five minutes to get ready, even though I still emerged looking like I'd thrown on my black jeans and blouse. He was waiting on my doorstep when I skipped down after hearing the magical sound of my buzzer, which was cacophonous torture when anyone else rang it but music when I knew it was Josh downstairs. He stood there, smiling, looking gorgeous. He somehow already felt so familiar to me; I swear I was in love with him as early as that moment.

“I have a present for you,” he said mischievously.

“You do? Why?”

“Because it's time you enter our lovely millennium.”

He handed me a small package with gift wrap and a bow, and I opened it to find a Virgin Mobile cell phone.

“What?” I laughed. “I can't let you get me a cell phone!”

“Why not? It's pay-as-you-go. I got you the first three months. If you hate it after ninety days, you can chuck it in the Bay.”

“This is so cool and newfangled-looking. Thanks, Josh.” I gave him a big hug and we started walking to the concert. “Now you have to show me how to use it, I am such a dope with techie shit.”

“Right, the girl who's never had a microwave.”

“My mom didn't want me to have babies with six heads.”

“The phone will not send messages to your womb for extra noggins on the kiddies. Now here's what you do…”

He showed me how to enter my friends' numbers and I asked him to put his cell in there as well.

“Okay, you do it, then. Now press here—” He showed me.

“Okay, and then J-O-S-H, okay…”

I did it! I looked at the screen, proudly. “I have a phone!”

“Also, here's how you do text messaging, which is great if you can't hear your phone or you need to meet someone in a noisy place.”

He typed in “Hi Hannah” on his phone and hit send. Suddenly my phone vibrated.

“Ahh!” I yelped, not feeling used to something shaking in my pocket. I thought I was being assaulted. “It's shaking! It works! How do I answer it?” I was such a raging, bumbling, incompetent idiot.

“Press the green button.”

I obeyed. My face lit up with the joys of technology. “Yay, there it is, ‘Hi Hannah.' That is so cool!”

“Magic.”

“I am so into this!”

“See?”

We started talking about our shared excitement for the concert and then on to other affinities, which I had to remark was all very
High Fidelity
.

“Well, he was right,” said Josh, smiling at me. “It's not what you're like, it's what you like that matters.” I felt the same way.

What you like defines what you're like. I didn't like to get wasted every night. I liked long walks. I liked live music. I didn't like sports, except skiing. Ditto on every front with the fresh-faced boy walking next to me. And I knew I could go flying down the double-black-diamond slope of falling in desperate love with him. I needed to hold myself back so as not to smother him with worship. He was confident but so real. He spoke eloquently and yet he wasn't an uptight academic. He was strong and funny and just about the coolest human ever. I had been convinced Tate Hayes was the only man I'd ever be obsessed with but he was quickly being eclipsed.

We arrived at the venue and when the band came on, I had the exhilarated rush of seeing them live, and the hard-edged sexy grit of Reznor's voice made me feel so invigorated. And alive and sexy. As the chorus broke on the first song, the crowd cheered rowdily and I started to move to the drums. Josh was next to me and smiled brightly and I patted his arm as a blissful thank-you for taking me there, and I got lost in the grinding music and the stellar people-watching.

At the end of the song, the place went berserk. I could not have more thrilled. As the bass sounded, marking the beginning of another song, “Something I Could Never Have,” I screamed with excitement and looked at Josh, who looked at me Cheshire Cat–style.

“What?” I said, but could barely hear myself. He just looked at me with his little grin.

“Nothing,” he said, inaudibly over the drums, and just smiled.

I started to dance and get really into the music, and with everyone else thrashing around me, I felt totally uninhibited and electrified. As I was thinking the bliss of the moment was opium for the crowd, because I sure as hell felt high and felt like I was seventeen, I was suddenly alarmed to feel my pocket vibrating. I stopped dancing abruptly and was totally freaked out at first, like some schmuck behind me had groped me. I then remembered that I was now the proud owner of a cell phone, and I calmed down. I looked at Josh, who was looking ahead at the stage, singing. I took out my phone, which no one knew the number to yet; it must have been a wrong number. I pressed the on button, and it said “New text message.” What? I hit the display button and five words came up on my little lit screen:

“I want to kiss you.”

I looked up at Josh, who looked at me. He had sent it while I was thrashing around dancing in front of him. I breathed out a sigh of relief, relief that it was not all in my head, relief that love could, in fact, be that easy.

As the crowd bounced and moshed around us, we stepped toward each other, as if in slow motion. Josh took me in his arms and kissed me slowly as the world around us blurred with dark booming chords and waving limbs. We kissed and kissed through the chorus of a song and the collective pulsating of the goth crowd.

The twisting thick guitars filled the cavernous room and we just kept kissing. There was no fear, like I'd had with Tate, no nervous, nauseous energy, just a muted elated thrill. The thrill of the best kiss I had ever had. Number one. I felt like it was what I had always wanted. It was brand spanking new and yet it felt like I was finally home.

When the concert emptied out, we could barely walk, we were macking so much. I laughed so hard at one point because one woman walked by and said, “They're sure not married!” and we burst out laughing.

“Maybe one day!” Josh yelled back to her. My insides burned with love for him and excitement over his comment (like Sloane in
Ferris Bueller
, “He's going to marry me!”). I wished I could know him all right now, download his whole life, his memories and Legos and conversations,
Matrix
-style. He was so familiar to me and it wasn't the crazy smitten meltdown of a crush, it was the mellowed bliss of finding another half. It was like: “of course.”

We arrived at my door and I assumed we would go upstairs and fool around, since we were such a walking cuddlefest, but Josh stopped at the front door, holding my hand.

“Beautiful girl,” he said, putting his hands on my face. I wanted to have sex that instant. “I will leave you here to get some sleep. But can I take you out Friday?”

A whole forty-eight hours! No!

“Okay, sure.”

We kissed again for like fifteen minutes and I finally turned to go upstairs. I was smitten. I had to pry Cupid's arrow out of my ass cheek. I flew to my stereo to put in the song we first kissed to, so I could relive the experience. Memories are like money in a bank that you can draw upon, and I had just received a huge deposit. I had to keep revisiting the memory all night and couldn't wait to make a new addition to my vault on Friday.

It was two
A.M.
and I wanted to call Leigh but I knew she had work in the morning. I washed my face—though no apricot scrub could scour off my smile—and got in bed. I thought I saw stars on my ceiling. I took a deep breath and started to close my eyes, but then I suddenly heard a weird buzzing outside my bedroom.

Holy fucking shit—there was someone in my apartment! I sat up startled, my whole body frozen, thinking there was a masked burglar breaking my lock. I tiptoed out into the living room and saw the culprit. My phone was jumping on the floor, vibrating its way across the rug. Thank God. I picked it up. A text message.

“I want to kiss you more.”

My whole body brightened, I was so in love with him. And I knew, to my bone marrow, that Josh would later become my husband. I smiled with excitement and was so exhilarated I could barely put the heart palpitations aside to sleep, but when I finally did, I slept soundly for the first time in over a year.