The Up and Comer (15 page)

Whoops.

I apologized to Menzi and explained that we'd been getting some crank calls. He recommended caller ID, and I told him that it was a really good idea. Which it was.

"Hope I'm not calling too late," Menzi said.

"Not at all," I assured him.

"Good. Listen, tomorrow night, you free?"

"Why, what's up?"

"Standard revelry. Lewd and lascivious behavior, public drunkenness, your basic misdemeanors. I've already lined up Connor and Dwight. You in?"

I didn't need to think about it. "Absolutely," I told him.

Absolutely anything to free my mind of Tyler.

FIFTEEN

Dwight showed up sporting this moussed-up coif that was perhaps only an inch short of being a pompadour. Menzi let him have it right away.

"Hey, Dwight?" he said.

"Hey, what?"

"Wayne Newton called; he wants his hair back."

Big laughs from Connor and me. Dwight, meanwhile, didn't see the humor. Besides, he was too busy preparing a retaliatory strike. It started with looking up at Menzi's receding hairline. Said Dwight, "Least I'm gonna have hair in a couple of years, you putz."

Tough crowd. Surviving the taunts and ribbing of your guy friends wasn't that different from political campaigning. If you didn't respond quickly and decisively against anything negative, you were dead in the water.

Another guys' night out had begun, and I was concentrating my hardest on having some worry-free fun. The scene was the Temple Bar, down on Lafayette Street. And I do mean scene.

"Christ! Check out the Venetian on her," said Dwight, causing the rest of us to look at a blonde walking by our stakeout at the bar. "Venetian," of course, referred to the horizontal blind-like ripple caused by the tug of a tight T-shirt between a woman's ample breasts. That Dwight could not only take notice of such a phenomenon but also have a term for it was what made him a truly unique specimen of a male. If he had any sense of duty to country, he would leave his brain to science.

As a group, particularly in the presence of alcohol and pretty women, the four of us weren't much into discussing earnest matters. Though with a few drinks under our belts, we got as close as we were capable of getting. In all seriousness, or so he claimed, Menzi wanted to know how Connor felt about Jessica's not taking his last name when they married. The question took Connor by surprise.

"What do you mean, like, was I upset?" he asked.

Menzi nodded. "Yeah, does it ever bother you?"

Connor started to fidget with a cocktail napkin. He was either thinking or stalling.

"You could always plead the Fifth, Connor," I said to fill the void.

"God, I hate lawyers," Dwight muttered under his breath.

"No, I was merely trying to decide how best to explain it," said Connor to me. He turned to Menzi. "Let me ask you a question. You've met Jessica, right?"

"Sure, a few times," Menzi said.

"You've talked to her, gotten to know her a little bit?" said Connor.

"Pretty much."

"So you'd say you have a fairly good sense of what type of person she is?"

"I guess so."

"Okay, then let me ask you a question. Does it surprise you that Jessica didn't take my last name?"

Menzi's brow furrowed. "When you put it that way, no."

"Me either," said Connor. He took a sip of his drink.

"Wait, you didn't answer
my
question," Menzi said.

"You mean whether it bothered me that Jessica didn't take my last name? The answer is no, it didn't. The reason is this: if something doesn't surprise me, it very rarely manages to bother me."

We all fell silent for a moment.

"Shit, that was kind of deep," remarked Dwight.

"Very deep," I concurred.

"Fuckin' Grand Canyon," said Menzi. "That settles it right there; the next two rounds are definitely on me."

As we continued to drink ourselves drunk, I found myself thinking about Connor… how his mind seemed to work, and his background. While I didn't know a lot about his childhood spent up in Providence, I knew that, like me, his upbringing was decidedly middle-class. Unlike me, though, he never felt he Was really deserving of anything more. At least that was the sense I got. Connor was thankful for his lot in life. He said he had "fallen into" being a software programmer and never thought he'd ever be making the good money that he was. When I asked him once if he dreamed about starting his own company one day, he looked at me as if I had three heads. "I just like writing code," he said.

His was a passive presence. There was nothing outwardly aggressive or confrontational about Connor's personality. Which is not to say he wouldn't openly disagree with you, or find a back door through which to provoke you, only that he rarely, if ever, seemed to get emotional about things. The one exception, of course, was when he had confided in me about Jessica and how distant she was being with him. That wasn't cool, calm logic speaking that evening. No, that was something else altogether. That was his love for her.

Yet, as much as knowing that weighed on my conscience, I couldn't wait to get back together with Jessica. I couldn't help it. I missed her smell and the feel of her hair, cool to the touch. I missed the way she came, her back arching slowly like a drawbridge going up. I missed her keeping me clued in on her twelve-month plan to usurp that "bitch of a boss" of hers and head up the ad sales department at
Glamour.
Most of all, I missed the way I felt when I walked out of that hotel room after being with her. Utterly and completely saturated with life.

I stood to go to the bathroom. With one step I knew I was loaded.

Leaning against the wall at the urinal, I started to get that prickly feeling from head to toe. It was my bloodstream's way of telling me that the party was over. Shuffling to the sink, I stared into the mirror that hung above it. I pretty much looked the way I felt.

Cold water time.

After three handfuls to the face, I turned off the faucet and began to wipe my eyes. I opened them and my pupils flared.

Tyler was standing against the wall behind me.

I turned and he was gone — or had never been there — it didn't make a difference. I knew what was happening. Knew all too well. Tyler Mills had gotten inside my head.

SIXTEEN

In my bachelor days before Tracy, I met this young, pretty thing named Melissa late one Saturday night at the Bubble Lounge. Within the first few minutes of our conversation she made a point of telling me that she was once almost "Miss November" in
Playboy,
having ultimately lost out to, quote,
this bitch from Texas.
With that, I was treated to a dissertation on the whole gestalt of posing nude.

"The Southern girls always get the centerfold," Melissa insisted. "Especially if you're from that lonely star state."

"Lone star," I corrected her.

"What?"

"Never mind." At that point I was pretty sure the Alamo to her was a rental car company.

Melissa went on. "It's the same with beauty pageants. Did you ever notice how many times Miss Texas goes on to win Miss America?"

I hadn't, I told her.

"It's like a conspiracy or something. Men seem to have this thing in their pants for girls from Texas. Why is that?" Melissa asked.

"Probably because they've never had the privilege of getting to know you better," I answered.

She blushed. I was in.

After taking Melissa back to my place for the night, however, I made an error in judgment the following morning. Lying next to me was this beautiful girl who, most likely because of her minimum-wage background, lacked any real measure of refinement. As if conducting some kind of sociological experiment, I decided on the spot to see how much impact a mass infusion of culture could have on her. It was very My
Fair Lady
of me, minus the wager.

In the weeks that followed, we MoMAed and Guggenheimed, truffled and foie gras-ed, and collected more Playbills than I would care to own up to. The "Appreciation of the Finer Things in Life Tour," I dubbed it. All of it on me. Mind you, I didn't really have the deepest of pockets back then. Anything for science, though, right? Besides, I was getting laid on a nightly basis.

Anyway, after about a month, I took Melissa to the symphony at Avery Fisher Hall. Beethoven and Wagner. Very heavy. To that point my little experiment had shown mixed results. For example: while she had learned that her bread plate was always to her left, she was still pronouncing the g in gnocchi.
(Ga-no-key,
she would say.) Like Rome, Melissa would not. be built in a day. That evening, I discovered that she would not be built at all. It happened during the intermission. Amid an elbow-to-elbow crowd of well-heeled ladies and gents, she asked me, after looking up from her program, if Wagner was any relation to the actor Robert Wagner. ("Because I just loved him in that
Hart to Hart
TV series," she added.) I, for one, was perfectly willing to dispense with any discussion of German pronunciation and simply answer that there was no relation between the two men. Unfortunately, there were these two women to our left who had overheard Melissa and felt the need to laugh and whisper in each other's ear. That really got Melissa's Bronx up. Without hesitation she turned to them and asked, "What the fuck is so funny?!" She then turned back to me and waited for her boyfriend to step in and stick up for her. I didn't. Not that I was embarrassed. It was more like I was having an out-of-body experience, paralyzed and capable only of watching, not acting. That's when Melissa let me have it. Profanity, tears, finger-pointing. All of it pretty much bouncing off of me except for one part, the moment when she screamed at the top of her lungs, "YOU MAKE ME FEEL LIKE A FUCKING PROSTITUTE, YOU ASSHOLE!" Finally, before storming off and never being heard from again, she threw her drink in my face. Apparently word had failed to reach her that such a stunt was only performed in the movies.

When you're dripping wet it's tough to maintain an out-of-body experience. Embarrassment set in. After looking around to see the entire symphony audience, not to mention every bartender and usher, staring at me, I accepted the handkerchief of a bearded man standing nearby. "Keep it," he said with a hand on my shoulder. "You strike me as a guy who may need it again."

That was the last time I was at Lincoln Center.

* * *

Encore. It had been more than four years, but Philip Randall was finally setting foot back in Philip Johnson's Lincoln Center Plaza. It was my fervent hope that the turnover rate among the staff was such that no one would have cause to remember me. Worst-case scenario:
Hey, look, there's the guy who made that poor girl
feel
like a prostitute!

The evening was to be a benefit concert followed by a three-hundred-dollar-a-plate reception with all proceeds going to breast cancer research. It didn't get any more PC than that. When Tracy had first told me that Jessica's mother was providing the tickets for the four of us, I assumed that the whole shindig would be gratis. Not until I was putting on my tuxedo did Tracy clarify that the tickets were merely for the concert. The reception was our financial responsibility. The way she said it, I could tell she was thinking that I'd be mad. Not about the money. Rather, Tracy knew that nothing got my goat more than the notion of a "gift" that required you to reach into your own wallet. If it wasn't for the fact that I was finally having my chance to reconcile with Jessica (albeit with our spouses in tow), I probably would've been a jerk about it. Instead, I simply smiled and made a lame joke. Something about how we shouldn't think of it as six hundred dollars for the two of us, but more like three hundred bucks a breast. Though I wasn't exactly sure why that was funny, Tracy managed to get a chuckle out of it. She was in a good mood.

I wasn't so bad off myself.

For as quickly as it had all started, it had all stopped.

There were no more pictures in my briefcase. No more e-mails, no more faxes, no more hanging up on Tracy. No more free movie rentals showing up on our doorstep. In short, there was no more Tyler.

I tried not to kid myself. Maybe all he was doing was taking a breather. His kind of vexation, when you thought about it, wasn't easy. It was hard work. A few days off and he'd be right back at it again. Good as new. This was simply the calm before the next storm.

But a big part of me couldn't help thinking that there would be no next storm, that Tyler had given it his best shot and I had weathered it. He had now grown bored of me, as I'd initially thought he might, perhaps moving on to his next victim. For his sake, someone without the same backbone construction as Philip Randall.

Yes, that's what a big part of me couldn't help thinking.

The part of me otherwise known as my ego.

The concert began at seven. The arrangement was to meet Connor and Jessica out front by the fountain at six-forty-five. Tracy and I were a few minutes early. As we stood there waiting, I couldn't get over the fact that I was a bit nervous. I took a nickel out of my pants pocket and tossed it into the water. Some inconspicuous time alone with Jessica that evening. That's what I wished for.