Pug Hill (23 page)

“What about pretending we’re underwater, didn’t you talk about that, what about an exercise like that?” Amy asks.

“Yes, sometimes students find success in getting out of the moment by pretending they are underwater. That might be something productive for you to all try at home. You could even read your poems as if you are underwater.” Beth Anne nods enthusiastically, and continues, “Unfortunately due to the relatively short length of this class and the fact that I want us to all be able to watch our videotapes, we’re not going to have time for that. ”

“Can we vote on doing the underwater thing instead? I just think that getting up here and talking about something so, well,
vague
and
abstract
isn’t really going to help me as much, and I think it’s very personal.”

“Well, Amy,” Beth Anne begins after taking in a soothing, cleansing-type breath, “I’d like that you try this assignment.” She pauses for a moment before explaining, “Part of this class, this journey that we are all taking together is that we trust each other, trust each other enough to share. It all helps. I really believe that thinking about and sharing something personal helps more than anything else in taking oneself out of the fearful moment.”

Beth Anne turns away from Amy and Amy sneers at her. I can’t help thinking that this assignment should be really easy for Amy, that if she’s a writer, and from what I can gather, a depressing writer at that, she can just whip out an essay and read it. And I can’t help thinking that such an assignment might be really hard for me.

Alec’s hand reaches around me to open the door.

“Thanks,” I say, and we all walk up the stairs of the Cedar Tavern and head to the back. Lindsay, Amy, and Lawrence are right behind me. Only Rachel declined Alec’s invitation, and so far he hasn’t said anything offensive to Lindsay, so we’re a group of five again. With the absence of Martine, a certain aggressive energy is also absent from our group. For right now it seems the only negative energy is the hostile one that pulses off Amy. I feel like I have no energy; no electric currents are coming off me at all. I just feel drained. And I have a pit in my stomach, because of the assignment.

See, I’ve been single for a long time, for thirty-one years in fact. During this time I have spent a fair amount of it dating, and I’ve had my fair share of boyfriends. And maybe, by virtue of the fact that none of them are presently here, you could indeed say that all of them are “The One That Got Away.” And when you look at it that way, while sure, yes, it could take your mind off public speaking and speeches for a while, it could also get pretty depressing. I think I’ve been making a fair-to-pretty-good effort at staying away from depressing, so why—even if it is in the name of getting away from the scariness of the moment that is public speaking—start now?

“What are you thinking about there, Hope?” Alec asks, and I tell him, “The assignment.”

What I don’t tell him is that I’m trying to narrow down the definition. Lindsay and Amy both nod, at what I’m not sure, and Alec waves an arm at a passing waitress.

Now maybe, and I know I’m rambling here, maybe The One That Got Away, by definition, is someone who broke up with you. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t do a lot to shorten my list. A lot of my boyfriends have broken up with me. I realize this might be less due to the fact that I am possibly unloveable, as it is due to the fact that I am pretty bad at confrontation. Often with boyfriends, rather than pull the trigger myself, I’ve been generally more inclined to become a bad version of myself, to spend a fair amount of time loading up bullets before handing off the gun. But maybe what I’m supposed to do is pick the best one out of all the many boyfriends who went the way my boyfriends tend to go.

Or maybe I’m interpreting it all wrong, too literally, as I have been known to do. Maybe I can talk about a dog instead?

“Dude, that Rachel chick is totally freaky, huh?” Alec leans over and says to Lindsay. She doesn’t answer him.

The waitress arrives and we all order drinks. I go with Amstel Light again. After my poem, after having to go outside for a private chat in the middle of it, I’ve already worried enough for one night that I am a giant source of shame.

The moment our drinks are delivered, Amy takes a long sip of bourbon, a longer sip than I could ever take, returns her glass loudly to the table, and speaks for me. “I just really don’t like the assignment.”

“It’s a little weird,” Lindsay says, and then Lawrence adds, “I like it. I’m going to write a poem, ‘The One That Got Away.’ ”

“I think it’s too personal.” Amy waves her hand in the air, waves Lawrence’s positive statement away.

“I think that’s the point,” I say.
The unfortunate point.
“Ideally, we’re supposed to get so wrapped up in telling the story that we forget we’re standing in a room in front of people.” As I say it, even though I’ve already heard Beth Anne say it a few times, now it suddenly makes a little more sense to me.

“Yeah, it’ll help us see the forest through the trees,” Alec says a bit triumphantly.

“I think you’re using the expression wrong,” I say.

“In what way?” he asks, and now I’m not sure.

“No, I see what you mean,” says Lindsay.

“I just don’t want to talk about my personal life, talk about some guy I loved and who’s gone now,” Amy adds in.

“It doesn’t have to be a lover,” says Lawrence.

“No?” I ask.

“I agree. That doesn’t have to be the way you interpret it all, I don’t think. It could be a job, a friend, a pet,” Lindsay explains.

A pet,
I think again,
that would be so much easier.
I remember all the dogs I had growing up, before I moved to the city, so much more fondly than I remember all the “dogs” I’ve dated since I got here. I worry, of course I worry, what that says about me, as much as I worry that I interpreted the assignment in the same way as Amy.

“Well, good,” says Amy a little embarrassed, and I’m glad I didn’t advertise my man-centered interpretation, an interpretation I imagine only Pamela could be proud of. “Because I don’t want to get up and talk at all, and I certainly don’t want to talk about the men I’ve dated.”

“Yeah, I mean I think it’s supposed to be about something we’ve lost, so that’s individual, and I think coming up with your own individual thing is part of the getting out of the moment,” adds Alec in a rare moment of insight. It’s been a while now actually since he’s last said, “dude.” Maybe the “dudes” just come out when he’s nervous or something, in which case I’d feel safe saying that
The New Yorker
trumps “dude.”

Amy bangs her glass around on the table. “I mean I don’t even date.”

“Dude, you don’t date? But you’re hot.”

“I just think it’s always the same old story,” she says, exhaling heavily, and I know
exactly
what she means. I wonder if perhaps Amy is my long-lost comrade in not necessarily wanting to run away from being single; if maybe she and I will forge a great single-girl friendship because our dating experiences are exactly the same.

“I agree,” I say wholeheartedly, and envision Amy and I, our bourbons in hand (I’ll switch over to bourbon) fighting the Pamelas of the world, because when it comes to dating our experiences are like one; when it comes to dating, we see eye to eye.

“Right, right,” she says, her eyes brightening just the slightest bit. “You go out on a date, you drink yourself into a complete stupor, you throw up in the bathroom of whatever restaurant or bar you are in, which of course leads to looking in the bathroom mirror at your mascara-stained reflection, asking the inevitable questions, What am I really doing here? What is it all for? over and over again. And then, the next day you’re so hung over and depressed that all you can do is lie in bed and cry and listen to Coldplay and eat pickles. I mean,” and she stops to snort, “it’s the same thing every time.”

Or perhaps,
I think as I rearrange every thought in my mind,
Amy and I don’t quite see eye to eye on dating.
For a while, no one says anything. For a while, we all just stare at the drinks in our hands.

Lindsay says across the table to Lawrence, “You did really well, tonight.” Lindsay, I realize, is a really nice person. It’s surprising in only the best way, something like that, when someone who seemed so dreadful years ago, as her e-mail was forwarded around the world, is actually nothing like that at all.

“Thank you!” Lawrence says grandly, beaming.

“Uh, what’s your secret?” she asks. He leans forward, puts his elbow up on the table and let’s his hand flop there loosely at the end of his wrist. He stage-whispers conspiratorially. “Once I’m up there,” he pauses dramatically, purses his lips, and nods, “I just pretend I’m someone else.”

Lindsay nods silently. I do, too.

“Have you ever just wanted to be someone else?” he asks her.

“Uh-huh, sure,” Lindsay answers.

My whole life,
I think, and take a bigger than perhaps necessary sip of my beer.

Those are the first words of this Maroon 5 song that’s been playing constantly on the radio these days. The alarm just went off and I’m lying in bed, wondering if it’s just me, or does everyone feel lately that no matter where they are, Maroon 5 seems to be there, too, playing mysteriously out of some hidden speaker. I listen to the lyrics, they’re about this guy who hopes some road somewhere will lead him back to the girl he’s singing to. I think for a moment how I’m not sure there is
anyone
in my past who I hope I’ll be lead back to. But I guess, if you think about all the someones who actually make up my past, that’s not such a bad thing. Maybe it says something about how I’m really good at closure. But that would be pretty inaccurate because closure, I’m quite sure, is not one of my stronger points. Also, though outside my window, rain is indeed falling, sadly it isn’t Sunday morning, but rather Monday. The only road I’m taking this morning is Eighty-sixth Street, and the only person I’m going to be led to is Elliot, the person who’s still in my present.

I hit the stop button on the clock radio with as much force as I can muster, wonder if maybe an alarm that simply beeped would be a better choice for someone like me, and head for the shower.

Work is the same as it’s been in this last week or so, the same with its new competitive feeling in the air, the same in that everything about it now is so different. I think May has had this look on her face, this look like she’s excited about something, and about to tell us something else, too. But I could just be imagining that. I have a feeling also that maybe Sergei knows something that I don’t, and that this something might be something bad, or at least bad for him. He’s been slamming things around a bit lately. Well, not slamming them around exactly, but generally handling his canvases and panel paintings with slightly less care than you’d think should be applied to priceless masterpieces of art.

I manage to work well on the Rothko throughout the morning, though yes, I am still on the red. I’m not sure but I think that might be a different Old Master landscape on Elliot’s easel. It’s getting so hard to keep track.

Right at lunchtime, the phone rings, breaking the morning silence, signaling the shift in the day.

“Hope,” Sergei says loudly from his side of the room, “it’s for you.”
Oh, for the love of God.

“Hello,” I say cautiously, as I pick up my extension.

“Hey, Hope, it’s Pamela, and guess where I am?”

“I give up,” I say once I have guessed incorrectly, Paris, and ’Cesca.

“I’m at the Boat House in Central Park, right near you. Can you get out for lunch?” I picture the Boat House in my mind: it is so close, just right across the road from Pug Hill. I think how maybe just being there, even if there aren’t any pugs, might help me figure out what to say for my speech.

“Hope?” Pamela says, sounding slightly less than patient.

“Stay right where you are,” I tell her. “I’ll be there in ten minutes. I’ll meet you right in front of the Boat House.” In truth, even at a quick pace, it’ll take me closer to fifteen minutes, but I fear if I say that, Pamela will suggest coming up toward the Met and meeting me halfway, which will inevitably mean Serafina on the corner of Seventy-ninth and Madison. And it’s not that I don’t like Serafina—I quite do; you can get an excellent pizza there—it’s just that now that I’ve thought of it, I
really
want to go to Pug Hill.

“Okay,” Pamela says, not suspicious of me at all, I don’t think.

“Great,” I say, and then, after a futile look up at the basement windows, “is it still raining?” Thankfully, it’s not.