The Up and Comer (5 page)

"Thanks, man," I said, getting up and falling in line right behind Connor, who was briskly making for the exit.

"Not funny!" I heard Dwight's voice tail off from behind us. I winked at the maitre d', blew a kiss to Rebecca, and jumped into the cab outside that Connor had immediately hailed. All without ever breaking stride.

"Two stops," I said to the back of a turban. "The first is Nineteenth Street, between Fifth and Sixth. And the second..."

"Eighty-first, between Columbus and Amsterdam," Connor said, taking his cue.

The turban nodded and the cab sped off.

"One of these days I suppose we're going to have to pick up the tab," said Connor. I looked at him and shook my head. "Yeah, you're right," he followed up with quickly. "Screw 'em."

The two of us laughed, and it seemed to me that Connor had perhaps emerged from our conversation in a better place than where he had started. The big question was, would it last?

When I got home Tracy was fast asleep. I went into the bathroom, closed the door behind me, and jerked off to the mental image of a threesome involving Jessica, me, and a certain restaurant hostess.

And that was that.

SEVEN

Sometime during my teens, the exact year escapes me, I created in my mind a sliding scale of what I called — for lack of originality — Risk Factors. The scale numbered from one to ten. For instance, something like... oh, I don't know, crossing the Sahara on foot was a Risk Factor 10. Shoplifting the Talking Heads' latest album, meanwhile, was a Risk Factor 1. Both were dangerous, of course, just not to the same degree. Ever since then, I'd used this scale as a quick and orderly way to assess all the risks that came along in my life. From there I could better determine which ones were truly worth taking.

After the night out with the guys I woke up the following morning with two headaches. One was alcohol induced, the other Connor induced. My affair with Jessica had suddenly jumped from a Risk Factor 5 to a Risk Factor 6. (By way of comparison, the prospect of having to defend my boss's wife on a DUI charge was a Risk Factor 4, tops.) Mind you, the affair was still a very manageable endeavor. What the previous night had done, however, was remind me that the whole thing was not entirely in my control. That's what worried me a bit. Clearly Jessica was not holding up her end of the bargain.

* * *

So how does a guy who's only been married a year and a girl who still has her tan from a Caribbean honeymoon end up having sex together? It's about time I answered that.

Jessica and Connor were what we called CMFs. That stands for City-Made Friends. When Tracy and I first got married and settled into our loft in Chelsea, Tracy decided that it would be fun if we were to make friends with another couple that lived in Manhattan. The catch was that it couldn't be anyone we were introduced to, rather, we had to initiate the friendship ourselves. That, according to Tracy, was the "fun" part.

As well, it couldn't simply be the first couple we met. It had to be the right couple. Tracy insisted that we each first make a list of the three qualities that we wanted most in our new friends in order of preference. We'd then compare our lists and settle on one master list. I resisted the whole idea on the grounds that it was silly. Tracy told me to lighten up. The next thing I knew, the two of us were sitting across from each other at Capsouto Freres in TriBeCa, making out our lists between appetizer and entree. There was no peeking allowed.

When we both had finished, Tracy wanted me to read my list first. I declined, reminding her that the plaintiff always went before the defendant. After a disapproving look and her announcement, "Here are the three qualities I desire most in our new friends," she read me the following:

l.
 
Fun

2. Attractive

3. Without children

It was my turn. I cleared my throat and read:

1.
 
Intelligent

2. Never done time

3. Don't call each other "sweetie"

After considerable debate, none of which is particularly relevant in hindsight, our master list ended up having one quality from each of our lists. It read as follows:

1. Attractive

2. Intelligent

The fact that there was now very little difference between our master list and the master race was not lost on me. Nonetheless, it represented a concession on both of our parts, the very definition of a marriage.

Then began the auditions. (Would you expect anything less?) Turned out, finding an attractive
and
intelligent couple living in Manhattan was not as easy as one might think. It took some doing, or more accurately, some dinners, as that was our litmus test. While Tracy and I scouted jointly, it was Tracy on her own who got results. After she would make the acquaintance of what always was the female half of a potential couple, she would arrange a dinner. That's when we could sit both halves of the couple down together and decide if they were friends material or not.

Sometimes you knew it wasn't to be even before you cracked the menu. Take this one husband-and-wife team from the Upper East Side, for instance. He was an actuary; she researched obituaries for the New
York Times.
I kid you not. Dudley and Martha Erdman, a.k.a. the human Sominex.

Then there was the close call of Alex and Cindy. Tracy had met Cindy after some Sunday-night lecture at the 92nd Street Y. Cindy seemed intelligent and while perhaps not a knockout according to Tracy, she had a lot of "attractive features." That same evening, the two of them shared a cab home together with Tracy dropping Cindy off at Sixty-ninth and Third. Before getting out they agreed to a dinner at Cafe Loup that Friday evening.

Walking into the restaurant, I begged Tracy to let me tell them that we were swingers so we could watch their reaction. If they were our kind of people, I pointed out, they'd appreciate the humor. Suffice to say, Tracy gave me her disapproving look again. Three bottles of wine later, though, I couldn't resist. It was perfect. After a scary pause, Alex and Cindy burst out laughing. Voila! City-Made Friends. Check, please.

Not so fast. While we were splitting the bill, Tracy realized that Alex and Cindy had our phone number, but we didn't have theirs. So Cindy wrote it down on the back of a Banana Republic receipt and slid it across the table. It sat there like a grenade.

"Seven one eight? Isn't that, like, one of the boroughs?" Tracy asked, looking at the area code.

"Yeah, we live in Brooklyn," said Cindy, obviously not thinking twice about it.

Tracy: "But didn't I drop you off at…?"

Cindy: "Oh, that was my sister's place. We were staying there a few nights while she and her husband were on vacation."

To Tracy's credit, she didn't let her disappointment show at the table. In fact, as we got into the cab after saying good-night to our potential new friends, she'd been so polite, so enthusiastic, that I was fairly convinced that Tracy had already decided to overlook our self-imposed "must live in Manhattan" rule. Silly me.

"No dice," she said, staring blankly ahead through the cab's Plexiglas divider as we took off.

We both knew she was being unreasonable, an outright snob, to be more precise. We both knew I had every right to lay into her like nobody's business. And we both knew that when all was said and done, we'd still never see Alex and Cindy of Brooklyn ever again.

The CMF search lost some of its urgency for a while after that. Then about a month later, Tracy came home after work one day with the news that we had plans that Saturday night. As an occasional freelance graphic artist (and by occasional, I mean with the frequency, let's say, of rotating your tires), Tracy had landed a gig at
Glamour
magazine helping to revamp its layout. She explained that during an office party to celebrate some associate editor's birthday, she had met a very nice girl by the name of Jessica Levine. Jessica sold ad space for the magazine and was engaged to a software programmer. "I really think these could be the ones," Tracy said to me while pouring a glass of wine. "It just seems right."

Saturday night, table for four, Zarela.

What I liked most about Connor Thompson upon first meeting him was his overall reluctance to the whole dinner. His general expression seemed to scream,
Who the hell are these two strangers I'm eating with? Furthermore, how well do I know my fiancée that she would arrange such a thing?
No doubt my sentiments exactly, had I been in his position.

Jessica, on the other hand, had good reason for being there. She told us that she was agreeable to the dinner because the whole "my friends/your friends" situation that every couple must cope with had really started to get on her nerves. Thus, the opportunity to make some "our friends," as she put it, was too good to pass up. Made sense to me.

Intelligent?

We didn't exactly exchange IQs, but Connor and Jessica both seemed to be pretty much on the ball, and if pressed, I'm sure could've each offered up a compelling literary quote or unique assessment of the military-industrial complex.

Attractive?

Connor was a decent-looking guy, albeit a little weak in the chin. Wavy black hair, a tad under six feet. Most notably, he had these ellipse-shaped eyes that at first glance made you think there was some Asian blood in him. (There wasn't.) He spoke in measured sentences and were it not for an easy laugh, could possibly have been perceived as being a little stiff.

As for Jessica, I refer you to my aforementioned Polaroid snapshot observation. Brunette, brown eyes, and from what I could tell at the time (and later confirm firsthand), a good figure. To be sure, I didn't look at her and immediately forget Tracy's name. Jessica simply wasn't like that. What she was, however, was perfectly nice, perfectly friendly, and as far as I could tell, perfectly engaged.

After about three margaritas at Zarela you're essentially feeling no pain. That's probably why the place continues to get such rave reviews year after year. Either no one can remember if they liked the food the following morning, or they were too numb at the time to actually taste it. As we all sat there licking the salt off the rims of our glasses and getting to know each other, it was clear that this wouldn't be the last dinner we'd have together, a notion that gained considerable momentum when early on Tracy said, "Before I forget, give me your telephone number so we have it." We saw that magical 212 area code Jessica wrote out on a cocktail napkin and knew it was all meant to be. Finally, at long last, City-Made Friends.

We skip ahead. While the four of us attended parties, saw exhibits, and did all the other NYC
de rigueur
in the months that followed, it was the dinners that became the staple of our friendship. They were always on the weekend, never at the same restaurant. If it was a Friday, we generally called it a night after the meal, citing fatigue from the work week. If it was a Saturday, however, the meal was merely a precursor to what would usually be a night of club hopping. For in addition to a taste for expensive shoes and bad teenage-angst television shows, another thing that Tracy and Jessica had in common was a love of dancing.

Which leads us to that fateful Saturday night.

Connor and Jessica had just returned from their honeymoon the previous weekend. After we looked at their pictures from St. Bart's over dinner at Gascogne, the girls decided that they wanted to go dancing at Vinyl. A downtown cab ride later, Connor and I were doing the white man's overbite with our wives, trying in vain to keep the beat.

Roughly around 2
a.m.,
Connor had had enough. Insisting that everyone else stay and have a good time, he shouted above the music that he was exhausted and was heading home. A quick glance told me that he wanted me to stay and chaperone the girls. I nodded and mouthed, "You owe me." He smiled and turned to give Jessica a kiss. Then he left.

From the bar I kept an eye on Tracy and Jessica as they did their best impression of the Solid Gold Dancers. Actually, they were both quite good. Hips gyrating, arms moving this way and that. To every single guy in the place, I'm sure they ranked extremely high as worthy one-night standers. That or a couple of very hot lipstick lesbians (even more of a turn-on, I suppose). Tracy had on a short skirt and one of those satin button-down tops. Jessica, an equally short skirt with an open white shirt under which she wore a skin-tight leotard kind of thing.

The two of them continued to dance with each other into the night. In between songs, excuse me, "extended dance remixes," they would come over and devour a round of drinks. By 3 A.M. they were loaded.

Getting two intoxicated women to leave a nightclub when they didn't want to leave a nightclub was no picnic. Still, I persevered and ultimately prevailed, literally grabbing each one by the arm and leading them out to the sidewalk. We piled into a waiting cab.

"Uptown," I said to the driver, telling him our two stops.

"Wait, you can't let Jessica go home by herself," Tracy said with a slight burp. Drunk as she may have been, she still had her bearings. With the two of us living in Chelsea and Jessica on the Upper West Side, we'd be getting out of the cab first.

"Don't be silly," said Jessica.