Pug Hill (7 page)

Sergei walks by me, carrying a tacking iron. He looks at me quizzically and I wonder if he knows I am secretly (or not so) in lust with Elliot. I smile at Sergei, feeling slightly embarrassed, and as I turn back to the now endless seeming sea of red on my Rothko, I feel a little bit like a slacker for thinking so much about Elliot when there is so much work that needs to be done. I’m so tired right now of looking at the Rothko, but undoubtedly it is a better bet than looking over anymore at Elliot. I grab my magnifying visor and pull it down over my eyes. I think maybe that might help. I think, pretty much,
something’s
got to.

Lately, I’ve been beginning to realize that in addition to being the endless object of my fascination, Elliot Death also happens to be the personification of why people tell you not to fall head over heels in lust with your coworkers. Granted, people generally might more often say, “Don’t date your coworkers,” but if they knew falling head over heels in lust with your coworkers without even dating them was a risk, they’d warn you against that, too.

Trust me on this one. Look around you, any cute coworkers? If so, there is only one thing to do: shun them. Because if it doesn’t work out, because let’s say he doesn’t seem to take any notice of you at all
and
he has a girlfriend,
and
you have a boyfriend, having to see him every day, day in and day out, by virtue of the fact that you are in the same place as him day in and day out (seeing as you are coworkers and all) will make the whole “it’s not gonna happen” thing an entirely harder ball-game. It will all be so much harder than it would be if the person whom you lusted after went every day to, say, Bhutan, as opposed to a desk not ten feet away from you. I know this now.

Perhaps I knew this before, perhaps it was clear to me the second I met Elliot—the second I looked up and said to myself, “No way, a cute, hot, straight paintings restorer?” But I, when it comes to matters of the heart, am nothing if not a slow learner.

I force myself to focus in a bit closer on the Rothko, and think to myself, as I think about so many things these days,
Why is it so hard?
I’ve spent basically my whole career as a paintings restorer dealing mostly with the nineteenth century and earlier. I’ve spruced up more Hudson River School landscapes than you could shake a stick at. But actually, don’t really shake a stick, because shaking sticks, they can break loose and fly right onto the surface of a painting that I worked really hard and long and meticulously to get right. I’ve gotten to the point at last where I feel pretty confident in my ability to diagnose and fix all the problems of the seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century; but the modern stuff, the contemporary stuff—which at this late date is still so frighteningly new to me—is a whole different story. With paintings restoration, the problems of today are a lot trickier to fix than the ones of the distant past; you’d think that the reverse might be true, but trust me it’s not.

When I need to look away from my easel again, I don’t look across the room at Elliot, but instead I look down at the floor. There on the floor is my bag, and as I look at it, I’m so aware of what’s inside it: the postcard from The New School. I reach in, fish around, and pull it out. I flip the card over in my hand. I read the crisp, white lettering:
It’s not too late to sign up for spring classes!
And then, suddenly, everything flips. I’d been so sure that the problem of the speech was the one problem I surely couldn’t do anything to solve. That, I realize, just might not be entirely true. It occurs to me right now that maybe my biggest problem, bigger than Evan or Elliot, or even the speech, is that I refuse to face my fears, and that I never want to confront my issues. With the way the world has been lately caving in on me, it’s become really clear that something’s got to give. It occurs to me that now, right now, is as good a time as any to start facing my fears.

 

I sign off before there can be more, before there can be anything else.

For the rest of the afternoon, I manage to only think, “Elliot Death, light of my light, heart of my heart,” once. And yes, I know that such a phrase isn’t quite as poetic as it could be, but if you think about it, these days, so few things are.

And then, as an added bonus, when I leave the museum, it isn’t even so cold out at all. I walk down Fifth, all the way to Central Park South. I stop and look at The Plaza, wishing briefly, as I always do, that instead of me, I were Eloise. I persevere in my mission, get on the R train and take it down to Union Square. After a dread-filled but brief subway ride, I’m walking down Twelfth Street, and then I’m standing right outside The New School.

I take a deep breath, and walk in. And there it is, a wall display, just teeming with Spring Bulletins. Slowly, I approach; even more slowly, I reach out and take one. Back out on the street again, Spring Bulletin in hand, I open it up and start flipping through the pages of course offerings, hoping and not hoping all at the same time, that there might be the right class.

There is a class called
Overcoming Presentation Anxiety.
I like that name: so Zoloft-like in spirit, it makes so much more sense to me than something generic and simple, like
Public Speaking I.
There is still part of me that hopes there won’t be a class that fits into my schedule. Because wouldn’t it be nice to attempt to face your fears but be momentarily off the hook because scheduling-wise, it just wasn’t going to work out? But alas,
Overcoming Presentation Anxiety
meets every Thursday night for six weeks, and it starts next week.

It all seems so perfect, so terrifyingly perfect; the last class is in the last week of April, just a week before my parents’ party. If I sign up for this class, I will be training in the complexities of public speaking, dealing with my fear of it, right up to the point where I will actually have to face it. I fold down the page the class is on, along with the page that explains how to register for the class via phone, fax, or Internet. It occurs to me that so much of this—the timing of the class, the duration of the class, the very Zoloft-esque name of the class—it all really seems like it might be meant to be. There is part of me, though, that wishes it wasn’t.

I head to the bus stop to catch the uptown bus. Though the bus is perhaps not the most efficient means of getting oneself from the Village to the Upper West Side, I prefer it. And even though in the interest of time, I take trains up and downtown much more often than I take the bus, I’m actually a little bit afraid of trains. An express bus pulls up, oxymoron that it is, and I get on; luckily, as I’ve got a ways to go, I find a seat. I wonder, as the bus heads sluggishly uptown, about all the things that are meant to be, and how it seems with me that there is always somewhere between a slight to enormous disconnect between what is meant to be and what I think I would like so much better.

On the top step of the outdoor steps of my brownstone, I stop for a minute and look down again at The New School catalog in my hand. I angle the cover toward me just to see it better, just to remind myself that this is real, that this is what I am going to do. It is, I tell myself, tightening my grip on the catalog, tightening my resolve.
Sometimes,
I tell myself firmly,
people just really need to confront their issues.

My cell phone beeps twice as if in agreement with the fact that sometimes people really do need to confront their issues. Also, it does that when I have a text message. With my free hand, I fish my cell phone out of my bag. I push the button for text messages.

 

I look at the
E
for longer than I look at the rest of it. I try to imagine how different I would feel if the
E
in my message, in my night, in my life, stood for Elliot instead of Evan. In the cell phone of my mind, I start typing, in all capital letters, the letters that I wish came after E.

I stop there, pretending that Elliot and I have skipped ahead, to some parallel future in some parallel reality, where I don’t have a boyfriend and he doesn’t have a girlfriend, and also, doesn’t ignore me. Some future in which we call each other pet names. I’m not quite sure yet what his name for me would be, but my name for him, I’m sure of it, would be Elli. I stop typing there also because there is a small, sensible part of me that stands off to the side, reminding me that pretending Evan’s text message is from Elliot is more than a little fucked up. But I try not to think too much about how fucked up it is. Because while, yes, people really do need to confront their issues, I don’t necessarily think they need to confront them all at once.

As I set my keys down, in their proper spot on the mantle, I notice out of the corner of my eye that the answering machine is blinking.
No,
I think,
it really can’t be.
And that, pretty much, is not a good thing to think when you see a blinking light and think it is a message from your boyfriend. I hit play.

“It’s Kara, just calling to say hi. Um, we’re going out tonight, so give a call or send an e tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you next Saturday. Chloe says hi, too.” Kara is my foil-to-Pamela friend, and also my best friend. Having a friend like Kara, who’s as wonderful and caring a friend as she is, makes it, I think, okay to also have a friend like Pamela—a friend who while also good, says judgmental things to you, that you of course take to heart, for fear that her insistence on not taking them back could mean that in them there is some kernel of truth. And so to prove her wrong, you mess up your life. And yes, I know that perhaps I’m taking that tangent a bit far.

And I like Pamela a lot, too, really I do, just not as much as Kara. I think that’s okay, I think when it comes to your friends, it’s just natural to have a favorite. I’m not a person with tons and tons of friends. I think the upkeep, the social whirlwind that surely would be involved in maintaining many, many friends, in the way of someone like Evan, is, to put it nicely, not in my nature; to put it less than nicely, it is really quite beyond me. But given that I do have two very close friends, and they are on the opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of what types of friends they are, I feel sometimes that these two, my two, are so representative of the very different kinds of friendships a woman can have, that in essence it’s really like having many more.

I look at the calendar on my desk: there, written in red is Kara’s daughter Chloe’s second birthday party next Saturday. Evan’s not coming with me. Evan has a general rule about not attending baby parties. His logic being that if you go to one, you have to go to all of them so as not to offend, and these days, seeing as we are both in our thirties, that would mean spending a hell of a lot of time at baby birthday parties. The thought of how every moment spent at a child’s birthday party would be a moment not taking a long, purposeful walk in the cold prevents me from acknowledging that he does have a very good point.

I sit down at my desk and turn on my laptop. I sit back in my chair for a minute, as the light from the computer screen glows out at me. I hesitate and look around my apartment. Before I can type The New School’s Web address into my Internet Explorer, the phone starts ringing. I am sure it is ringing in a way that is hostile.

“Hello,” I say, knowing as I do that it is perhaps a bit hostile in itself to answer the phone sounding so tense.

“Hope, it’s your mother.”

“Hi,” I say.

“Are you tense?” she asks.

“No,” I say quickly. “I just walked in is all. Hi,” I say again, so we can go back to the normal start of a phone call, without the whole are-you-tense segue. Because, really, I am not tense.

“Dad tells me he called and mentioned the speech,” she says, and I want encouragement, love, coddling. That is what I want, but this is not the place to get it. Mom doesn’t know about my fear of public speaking. As skilled as I am at running from my fears, I am more expert at not owning up to them.

“Yeah, yes,” I say too quickly, a bit robotically. “I’m so happy that you asked. I’m really looking forward to it.” Mom doesn’t say anything for a moment and I wonder for a second if she’s about to call me on it, to say that not only am I a big fraidy cat, I am also a liar.
Love thyself,
I think for some reason, as I try to slow the quickening of my pulse.