A Year Straight (7 page)

“But what are you going to do with that degree when you graduate?” My father's voice still echoes from across the dinner table as if it were yesterday.

Why, Papa, clearly I'm going to spend my days pondering the meaning of life from my navy blue bookkeeping cubicle.
I was drawn to office jobs like a dog to its kennel, a seat belt for my short attention span. Within the seven years I'd worked in New York, I had made business plans for a wine bar, an ice cream parlor, and a cheese shop. I'd pondered the Peace Corps, completed one term toward an art therapy license, inquired into massage therapy training, and researched beauty schools (hairdressing my long-standing go to). Was my unexpected interest in men yet another symptom of my restlessness, my innate compulsion to consider absolutely every option life has to offer?

 

 

IN THE END, I opted for the generic drugstore pregnancy test, though Megan tried to steer me toward a digital one. I just couldn't fathom spending $16 when I could expect the same (hopefully negative) result from one that cost $10.99. I would spend the difference on a celebratory ice cream cone.

“Just get me whichever one's cheapest,” I'd said, handing her a twenty. When Megan returned with the test, she dropped it onto my desk, double bagged—a thoughtful gesture on the part of the female cashier, who also double bagged our tampons.

I read the instructions five times by the dim light of the ladies' room stall. One line means not pregnant; two means I'm doomed. Okay, okay. After I peed my five-second stream,
all there was left to do was wait. At three minutes, I could check the test, but of course I sat there watching it. The second pink line seemed to appear before my eyes, but every time I blinked, it returned to the ghostly possibility of a line it had been at the start.
Tick tock, tick tock
. At the end of three minutes, there was still one sole line, but a heightened awareness had been conceived:
I am playing with fire.

H
aving successfully avoided Williamsburg for the bulk of my time in New York, I gave in to an invitation to a friend's birthday party, with the ulterior motive of meeting men. Though it's located in my borough, getting to and from Williamsburg involves taking the subway from Brooklyn into Manhattan and then back into Brooklyn. I'll be kicking myself someday, when someone other than me makes millions off a shuttle business between the two hipster destinations, Ditmas and The Burg.

From the few times I'd subjected myself to one, there were certain things I had come to expect from a party in Williamsburg. There would be eccentric music pumped through an expensive sound system—songs by artists I had never heard of but that everyone else claimed to know. The loft would be covered in art I didn't understand, like lightbulbs
piled up in a corner. And there would be lots of guys clad in thick-rimmed oversize glasses, tapered jeans, and turquoise nylon Windbreakers two sizes too small. A few times early in the evening, one of them would come over to me and seem to be flirting, only there would be no smiling or laughing involved, because hipsters don't express emotion, so it was a little hard to tell.

“Do you work at The Wilderness with Ben?” The question was aimed at me by a smug-looking guy as he nonchalantly popped the top off his Chimay. He didn't offer me one from his personal stash.

“No,” I answered. “We went to school together.”

“Oh, where did you guys go to school?”

“UMASS Amherst,” I answered, prepared for the follow-up sigh of disappointment that I was accustomed to in a crowd like that. An air of judgment hung around the room. Whenever I'm around insecure people, I start to feel uncomfortable myself, like my arms are no longer attached to my body. In my head I concocted a defense:
I chose UMASS—it wasn't my safety school. I'm not even from Massachusetts.
But that would only make me sound as self-conscious as I felt, so I kept the thoughts to myself and instead sipped my PBR and drifted off to a daydream.

I'd been accepted to the University of Rhode Island, into the Department of Marine Biology. Having known since junior year that I'd end up at URI, I paid little attention to
the surroundings as my mom drove me in her maroon Isuzu Trooper to check out my future school. We parked the car and grabbed some lunch before beginning the campus tour. An even bigger fan of dessert than I am, my mom ordered a piece of chocolate cake for us to share.

“This is orgasmic!” I gasped, the molten cake melting in my mouth. I was seventeen. My mom spit out her coffee. She'd never heard me say the word
orgasm
before. In fact, I'd never said it before then, let alone had one. But I was checking out a college. I was almost an adult.

The tour left me feeling unsettled. The campus was beautiful and the people were nice, but URI just didn't feel right. Although for two years I'd been set on going there, I said, “Let's check out UMASS, too.” Part of becoming an adult was learning to trust my instincts. Pulling up to the entry of UMASS, I knew instantly that's where I was meant to go. The campus was pretty ugly, half New England colonial, half seventies contemporary. But when I saw a girl sitting on a curb lighting a cigarette, I thought, “That will be me.” I had grandiose plans of taking up smoking and dyeing my hair black, neither of which I did. My personality followed me two hundred miles to UMASS, where it turned out I was still me. So why did I feel oceans apart from myself at that Williamsburg party in my very own borough?

“There you are.” I was greeted with icy eyes as a woman who was apparently the guy's girlfriend put her arm in his
and pulled him away toward their circle of friends.
Um, okay. Was he flirting after all?
This happened several other times throughout the night. A guy would attempt dull conversation, and a girl would come over and claim him.
Look, I'm not trying to steal your George Michael look-alike, okay!
It was new for me, being seen as a threat to other women. We're not supposed to be enemies.

I was moping in the corner, fed up with the whole scene, when I spotted a fresh face. He stood out from the other guys in the crowd because there was nothing ironic about his outfit. He was wearing boot-legged jeans with none other than ... boots. The rest of his ensemble suggested that he had gotten up that morning, thrown on his plaid button-down shirt, and grabbed his patterned Nordic wool sweater because that's what happened to be hanging over his chair. It all clashed in just the right way. As I'd discovered, if I wanted to talk to a guy, it was pretty simple. I just had to stand near him. This used to bother me when I went out with my girlfriends. Guys seemed to assume since we were two women together, we were two women alone, and they would often approach one of us to talk. Under the new circumstances, I used this to my advantage.

My newest target didn't seem to be meeting any girlfriend at the party, so I made my way over to where he was standing. My friend Ben, the birthday boy, approached him. Bingo. I slithered over to where they were chatting and made
up an excuse to join in. Ben, not privy to my recent antics, would never suspect my motives.

“Hey Ben,” I said, smiling at him and making the “I'm sorry to interrupt” expression at his friend. “Do you have any Advil or anything? I have a really bad headache.”

“Yeah, I'm sure my roommate has some. Let me go check.” Ben walked off toward the bathroom.

“I've got some,” the handsome Nordic sweater man said. “I'm in real estate, and I've been preparing for a closing,” he said, sounding important and proud. “I've been working late all week, trying to finish up by Friday so I can get out of town. Advil is a night owl's best friend.”

“Where are you headed?” I asked, preemptively ordering myself to turn down any offer to join him.

“I have a house in the Hamptons, and I need to complete a project before it gets too cold to work outside,” he boasted. In the past, I would have rolled my eyes at his attempt to impress me, but this time I smiled and nodded. Why was it that rich people always referred to “projects” when they talked about working on their homes? Why can't they just say, “I have to fix the toilet?”

Over the course of the night, I learned he owned the house in the Hamptons, three buildings in the city, and not one but two Land Rovers. I was a green girl at heart, but mine couldn't help but flutter a little. I would have loved a ride to the Hamptons in a big SUV. It would be so Samantha from
Sex and the City.
“Elena, no,” I reprimanded myself. I had to stay on task, and the task at hand was a one-night stand.

“How's your head?” he asked. I stepped back. Could he see me thinking too hard ? “Your headache ? The Advil worked?”

“Oh, yes, magically! Let 's go up to the roof. I hear the view is amazing,” I said, pumping myself a beer from the tap and then one for my suitor. We climbed the ladder to the roof, handing our beers back and forth to get them up there without spilling. Once on the roof, we interrupted a few other couples with the same idea and then found a corner all to ourselves. The view was indeed amazing. We could even see some stars.

“How sad it is in the city,” I reflected, “that I'm excited when I can see two stars.” The handsome real estate guy pulled me close to him.

“That just makes you appreciate them that much more,” he whispered. And then he kissed me. Sheesh, he sure didn't wait very long. We couldn't have named a few constellations first ? After a while, we ignored the drinks we had worked so hard to get up there and decided to abandon the party altogether, dashing down the ladder to leave. On the way out we ran into Ben. He looked puzzled to see me leaving with one of his friends.

“Happy Birthday!” I yelled, leaving him speechless and stunned.

In the cab, he saddled up next to me in the middle seat,
buckling his seat belt after I'd fastened my own. Did he really wear a center seat belt in the back or was he trying to impress me? I like it when people wear their seat belts. It implies they are responsible. But it doesn't matter, I reminded myself.
One-night stand, one-night stand.
I felt a wave of apprehension as we made our way to his house, far north on Riverside Drive. In the past, I'd always been cautious to the point of uptight. I never did the foolish things you were supposed to get out of your system in your twenties, like going home with a stranger.

When we arrived at his two-bedroom co-op (with a view of the Hudson), we made out as he opened the door. We made out in his impeccable kitchen, equipped with sexy German-made stainless-steel Miele-brand appliances. His house was pristine. Not a single object was out of place, which struck me as a little odd. No sweater strung over a chair?

“Wait here for a minute. I'm just going to pick up a little,” he said in between kisses. Apparently his room was where he contained his mess, and apparently we were headed to his room. I took the opportunity to check out the rest of his place. There were four pairs of shoes on a rack by the door. I'd seen those shoe racks at Bed Bath & Beyond when stopping in for my replacement Brita filters. That's a good idea, I'd thought to myself. But I'm not the person who buys good ideas. I'm the person who shoves all her shoes at the bottom of her closet and can never find a matching set in a
hurry. There was a framed picture of him with his family, which I took as a good sign. Add that to the list, I thought: a man who gets along with his mother. And then I shook my head, jolting my brain back into submission. It was hard to stay in the one-night-stand frame of mind. I found it did not come naturally to me, as I fought off images of us hiking and camping, he in the Timberland boots I saw parked by the door.

He returned from his bedroom just in time to rescue me from my stray daydream. Continuing where we'd left off, we kissed a bit in the living room and then along the hallway. In his room, our clothes came off quickly. He seemed to be quite comfortable with the whole one-night-stand thing, and for the most part I was too. My only hesitation stemmed from the voices in my head:
“Elena, you shouldn't be doing this.”
But my actions spoke louder than my inner voice, and I reached for my stash of condoms.

“It's okay, I've got some,” he said, reaching toward his nightstand. By the soft light of the moon, I was able to make out the word
Magnum
on the box he got out of the drawer. I'd been around enough to know what that meant.

He put the condom on with impressive finesse and maneuvered his way around me, lifting and twisting me this way and that. And then we were having sex. And it was good. I got really into it, feeling free like my favorite French couple. I was on top, on the bottom, on my side, leg
braced against the wall, à la “the Mariola.” Then, just as I was really getting into the groove, he stopped, got up, and left the room.

“I'll be right back,” he yelled on his way out. I sat up, bewildered. Now what ? A moment later he returned with a plastic bottle.

“What's that ? Does it start with the letter
L?
” I asked, too embarrassed to say the word
lube.
I was clearly comfortable enough with him to be in his bed, so I probably should have been comfortable talking about it. But I'd always been a prude in the verbal department. Even with women, I preferred
boobs
to
tits
and
bum
to
ass.

“Yes,” he said, pumping some of the liquid into his palm. Wow! I was impressed that he was thoughtful enough to have some lube on hand. Finally, a feminist man!

And then he put it on my bum.

“That's the wrong hole!” I warned, bolting upright.

“I know,” he said playfully, attempting to glide right in with his Magnum. I jumped off the bed. I wasn't necessarily opposed to the idea in general, but I was opposed to it with the real estate guy with the Nordic sweater whose last name I didn't yet know.