Pug Hill (5 page)

Courteney turns to face me, once we are seated. The table is square and I am next to her, and Brandon is across from me, next to Evan.

“Evan tells us you’re from Long Island.”

“Yes.”

“Whereabouts?” she asks, perky, bright-eyed.

“Huntington?” I ask it, I don’t say it, and I wish I didn’t do this. “It’s about an hour outside of the city,” I say, more assertively, wishing to appear as someone who is more informed about where she is from than I just have.

“Is that near Locust Valley?”

“Kind of.”

“Do you belong to Piping Rock Club?” she asks, her eyes all lit up. The Piping Rock Club, a country club in Locust Valley, is for WASPy people what Pug Hill is for pugs. It is the Mecca, if you’ll excuse the really poor analogy.

“No,” I tell her.

“Oh, Creek Club then?” she asks, slightly tempered but still enthusiastic.

“No,” I say, and she smiles at me, maybe a little sadly, and reaches a hand over to Brandon, places it on top of one of his.

“Brandon shot skeet at Piping just last weekend.” Brandon looks up at Courteney, and into her eyes, and the way he looks at her, it just says, “I love you, Muffin,” and I have this feeling that when Brandon and Courteney get married, they’ll be very happy. She takes a sip of water and smiles back at him yet again. She is one of those women, the kind who have the magical ability to keep all of her lipstick on her lips, leaving none of it on her glass.

A waiter comes to take our drink orders. I order a white wine spritzer. I look over at Evan and smile. His eyes aren’t all lit up for me like Brandon’s are for Courteney. His eyes don’t say, “I love you, Muffin.” His eyes say something more along the lines of, “Why can’t you order a normal cocktail?” Evan thinks a white wine spritzer is not a normal cocktail. Evan thinks it’s the kind of drink a person orders when they want everyone to be ashamed of them.

“So, how’d you two meet again?” Courteney asks me, and I can see Evan’s jaw tense up. He leans forward, jumping in to answer, in case I’ve forgotten.

“We met at the Met. Hope works there.”

Evan thinks it’s just
easier
all around to say we met at the Met. He thinks this is a nice story, and perfectly plausible, as if, on occasion, I did leave the Conservation Studio in the middle of the day, to stroll leisurely around the museum, striking up conversations with random passersby. As if Evan were the type of person to be at a museum, which he isn’t, ever, let alone in the middle of the workweek, which is when, ostensibly, I would have been there, you know, making new friends left and right.

“That’s so nice,” Courteney says.

Evan looks over at me, and smiles, and then stealthily winks. He crunches down on an ice cube from his Scotch. I’ve always hated the smell of Scotch, but when I first met Evan I thought it would be a good idea to not let the Scotch bother me. I don’t think that anymore. I don’t smile back at him, or wink or lend any of the previously lent agreement, any of the previously lent feelings of, oh, look at us, aren’t we bonded because we have this secret, which really isn’t a secret so much as it is a lie.

I notice that the light from the tremendous chandelier in the center of the room is bouncing off the gold buttons on Evan’s navy blue blazer. It’s a rip-off really, if you think about it, to go on JDate in the hopes that you might find yourself a nice Jewish boyfriend, and wind up six months later at The Union Club with Evan. I mean, someone like Evan, in my mind, he’s lucky. He’s one religion and not two. Why not just be Jewish?
Why the WASPy squash club,
I wonder, obviously not for the first time.
Why add all that in?

I listen to the
caw-caw
around the table, rising up above us and heading to the chandelier. Evan and Brandon are laughing now about something that has to do with a hedge fund. Evan, by the way, works at a hedge fund, and I think Brandon does, too. To be completely honest, I have no idea what actually goes on at a hedge fund, no idea how all these people who work at hedge funds actually spend their days. It’s been explained to me; it’s just one of those things that refuses to sink in. A
little bit like love,
I think, even though thinking things like that can’t possibly help anything. I smile, and occasionally I ask Courteney a polite question or two about the upcoming nuptials, less because I’m interested and more so that later Evan doesn’t say, “Hope, you really weren’t being very friendly at all.”

Evan’s talking about pheasant hunting now, and I try as hard as I can not to hear. I stare at the melting ice cubes in my drink and wonder if the identity crisis so deeply ingrained within me is what drew to me Evan in the first place, as Evan is so clearly in the middle of one.

On our way home in the taxi, Evan reaches over and strokes the back part of my upper arm. Don’t be fooled. The way he does it is not in a way that is affectionate or kind. It is, I’m sure of this, much more in a way that wants to say, do you ever use those arm weights I got for you? I’ve wondered quite seriously at times if he and my mom are somehow in this together. Had one of them called the other and had they aligned themselves into some nefarious Evan/Mom axis of evil? Had Mom said, “I’ll stick with her thighs and the fact that she seems completely incapable of matching her foundation to her skin tone,” and had Evan then wholeheartedly agreed and said, “That sounds good, Mom, (because so bonded are they in their Evan/Mom axis of evil that at some point Mom said to Evan, ”Oh, Evan, please, just call me
Mom.”)
I’ll stick with the fat on the backs of her upper arms”?

And it’s not that I embrace the criticism from Mom, I certainly don’t, but from her at least I can understand it. Mom is an interior decorator. It’s in her nature to want everything to be pretty. And also, no matter what the religion of the man she married, she is also
very much
a Jewish mother; some might say it’s in her nature to be critical in, of course, a loving, albeit slightly annoying way. I don’t have an excuse for Evan.

The taxi pulls up outside of Evan’s building, and, as has been happening lately, I am overwhelmed by the desire to be in my own apartment. And maybe that doesn’t necessarily have to be a comment on how I feel about Evan, maybe it’s just because all my stuff is there, and Evan has really bad pillows. Once we are on the sidewalk, I turn to him.

“I think I’m just going to head home. I think I’m just going to stay at my apartment tonight.”

“Why?” he asks back quickly, right away.

“I don’t know. I mean, it’s not a big deal, it’s just my stuff is there, and it’s easier for me.” I look behind him, across Columbus Avenue and into the store that’s right across the street. I focus on the mannequins in the window: they’re not whole mannequins, they’re just the legs, wearing pants.

“Maybe it’s not always about being easy for you,” Evan says, drawing my attention back to him, away from the pants. “Maybe you’d just want to sleep at my apartment because sometimes it’s nice for me to stay at my apartment? Maybe you’d just want to sleep at my apartment to do something nice for me?” He stares at me, eyes bulging accusingly. I can see that this is not the exact best time to say that generally we do stay at his apartment, and that if you counted all the times he’s slept at my apartment, and then counted all the times I’ve slept at his apartment, his apartment—with all the messiness everywhere, covering every single surface, with the complete lack of any pillows that are either decorative or soft—would come out on top.

Evan’s eyes debulge ever so slightly and he asks, “I mean when was the last time you did something just to be nice to me?”

I stare back at him. I think how just yesterday I received a CNN
Breaking News
e-mail about how a cow in the United States had tested positive for mad cow disease. Evan is very disciplined with his low-carb diet; I have never seen him eat so much as a grain of rice, yet I have seen him eat countless hamburgers. I forwarded that e-mail to him right away. I am about to point this out, but I feel we are just moments away from jumping onto the hamster wheel that is late-night arguing and not getting any sleep, at either of our apartments, and there’s something to be said, I think, for not doing that. There’s something to be said for not always having to be alone in your apartment, or I guess, come to think of it, the world.

“You’re right,” I say and watch his expression soften. I take a step in the direction of Evan’s apartment, and he falls right in step beside me.

On Sunday morning, I wake up not at Evan’s apartment, but at mine; but still, I don’t feel right. It’s been four days now that I’ve known about the speech, and every morning when I wake up, without a solution appearing out of thin air, I feel a little bit more like the walls are closing in.

I look over at the sleeping Evan: so still, so quiet, so non-judgmental, so much easier to get along with this way. So as not to wake him, I slide silently out of bed and into the bathroom. And after the ease that is getting oneself together when one has all their stuff so easily accessible, I actually feel quite appreciative of Evan, appreciative that at the end of the night last night, he just gave the taxi driver my address, in a gesture I have to admit was pretty much a very nice one.

In the spirit of reciprocity, I head into the kitchen and start a pot of coffee. Yes, I am making the coffee for myself, too, but also for Evan. Surely the making of coffee for someone while they are still sleeping counts as something nice? I stand and stare at the coffee as it drips into the pot, and as soon as I’ve prepared a mug for myself, I bring it over to my desk.

I shuffle through the mail that has piled up over the week, not really expecting to find anything monumental, mail always being such a letdown. Then my eyes fall on a glossy postcard. Suddenly, I have this really fleeting feeling—one that’s already almost gone, which I guess is what makes it fleeting—that everything is about to change. I stare at the postcard: it has a bright blue background with green lettering that says, across the top, THE NEW SCHOOL. The New School is downtown, and I think they have an undergraduate program, but mostly it’s this great center, this Pug Hill if you will, of continuing education. I took a cooking class there once; Pamela has taken writing classes there; and I know that my boss, May, who likes to dabble in decorative painting, once taught a decorative painting class there. Really, you can take any sort of class you could ever think of at The New School: journalism, acting, French, basket-weaving, anything.

I pick up the card and turn it over in my hand. I focus on the smaller, white words:
It’s not too late to register for spring
classes! A thought fills my head, a thought I’m not entirely sure I want there.
I could take a public speaking class.
I turn the card over again, to the other side, to see if maybe the thought will go away. It doesn’t. I go so far as to wonder if there might be a public speaking class that hasn’t started yet. I mean, clearly there must be lots of classes that haven’t started yet, otherwise, why even send the postcard? And then, for a moment, I feel just the slightest bit peaceful.

I hear Evan getting out of bed, making stretching noises; I listen to his feet shuffle across the floor and into the living room.

“Hey, Hope,” he says sleepily, yawning, I notice, without covering his mouth.

“Hey, I made coffee,” I announce, gesturing proudly in the direction of the kitchen. Evan heads in the direction of the coffee, makes himself a cup, and brings it out to the couch with him. I swivel around in my chair to face him.

“What do you want to do today?” he asks. I lean forward quickly and grab the remote from the coffee table. I turn on New York One to check the weather: thirty-seven degrees.
Damn.

“Well, maybe let’s go to brunch and then see a movie?” I suggest. “It’s really cold out.”

“Nothing good is playing,” he counters back instantly, “and I have squash at four. Want to get brunch and walk over to the Boat Basin and then down by the water? Or maybe,” he says brightly, a lightbulb popping up over his head, “there’s still some snow on the ground, maybe we could walk around the park and see if we can watch the kids sledding?”

“Watch sledding?” I repeat, with very little enthusiasm.

“Yeah, it’ll be fun.”

It occurs to me that if it turns out I’m actually more Catholic than I am Jewish, if the Catholic part actually wins out in the end and my eternal soul winds up in hell (for, let’s say, being a completely sulky and unenthusiastic girlfriend) then that hell for me will be to spend all eternity with someone whose idea of fun is to freeze his ass off in Central Park WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE SLEDDING!

“Ummm,” I say, “What about we get some brunch, and then maybe do you want to go to that place on Amsterdam where you can paint pottery?” I do not actually think this is something that Evan would like to do; I am more just trying to make a point.