Lost Along the Way(8)

“Not a problem. Have you done anything I might have seen you in?”

“I doubt it. You don’t strike me as the type of guy who would’ve seen any of my stuff.”

“Why do you say that?”

“We don’t see a lot of Hermès ties in my audiences,” Jane said, gesturing toward the bright orange tie dangling from his starched shirt collar.

“How do you know guys don’t take them off and shove them in their backpacks before they enter?”

“I guess I don’t,” she answered. He wasn’t her type. He was British, for starters, and Jane had never really been all that into foreigners, mostly because she had heard that circumcision wasn’t common practice overseas. She barely knew what to do with the American dicks she was familiar with, so going international seemed unnecessary. He also had an insane amount of gel in his hair. It was slicked straight back and shellacked to the point where it almost looked like a toupee. His build was slight. He looked fit but not necessarily strong. And, like most Europeans, he wore clothes cut just a little too slim for her taste. But he was perfectly attentive and he was perfectly nice and he was perfectly interested in talking to her and, well, that made him the most perfect man she’d met since she’d moved to this crummy island.

“I do mostly Off, Off, Off-Broadway stuff,” she said, trying to be coy.

“What does that mean?”

“My last play took place in a Brooklyn basement.”

“I see.”

“What about you?” she asked.

“I also work off Broadway.”

“What does that mean?”

“Wall Street.”

“So we’re practically neighbors.”

“And yet we’ve never run into each other before.”

“Go figure.”

He checked his watch and pushed his drink away from him. She wasn’t surprised that she had scared him off. What surprised her was that he’d stuck around for as long as he had.

“I actually have to run, I just popped in here to kill some time before my meeting across the street, but I feel bad leaving a pretty girl all alone at the bar when I know she’s this upset,” he said, somehow managing to come off as charming and not sleazy in the slightest.

“Well, unless you want to take me to your meeting with you, I don’t think you have much choice,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. It was nice to meet you.”

“It was nice to meet you, too.” He reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and removed a business card. He wrote his cell number on the back and slid it on the bar toward her glass. “Have dinner with me. I’ll be home by about six thirty. If you’d like to meet me, call me by seven. I’ll make a reservation somewhere just in case.”

“You want to have dinner?” she asked.

“That’s what I just said.”

“I don’t even know you.”

“That’s why I asked you to have dinner and not to marry me.”

Jane could not think of a reason why she shouldn’t go. He worked in finance. He was wearing an Hermès tie. He definitely wasn’t an ax murderer, so what was the worst that could happen?

“Okay. I’ll call you . . .” Jane flipped the card over and found his name. “Doug Logan.”

“I hope you do. Although now I realize that I never even asked you your name. I’m sorry. That’s very rude of me.”

“Jane,” she sang, now willing to flirt a little more aggressively. “Jane Parker.”

“You don’t seem like a Jane.”

“What do I seem like?”

“I don’t know. I’ll think about it and let you know tonight.” He left a fifty on the bar and yelled to the bartender, “Her drink is on me.” He nodded almost imperceptibly as he stood and grabbed his bag off the floor. “I look forward to hearing from you, Jane. Cheer up. Things will get better.” And then he left.

She should have realized something was off with him just from the way they’d met. He was too smooth, too confident, and too eager to get to know her when it was obvious that they had nothing in common. But at that moment she was just too tired to care. She was tired of going to cheap parties in Alphabet City and pretending to think the underground scene was cool. She was tired of pretending to want to be some scrapping, struggling artist. She wanted to have dinner with a guy wearing a nice tie who carried a credit card that wouldn’t be declined. Was that really too much to ask?

They had dinner at a very chic restaurant in SoHo that she would never have been able to afford on her own, and five months later, they eloped at City Hall, with Jane’s mother and brother, Gavin, serving as witnesses. Just like that, Jane had everything she wanted—and a whole lot more. Meg and Cara were angry when they found out, and after that, things were never really the same. The girls didn’t like Doug for reasons that Jane couldn’t understand: What do you mean you don’t trust him? You don’t have to trust him, you’re not married to him! And Doug didn’t like the girls for reasons that she fully understood: they don’t like him, they meddle in things they shouldn’t, they don’t like him. It wouldn’t be the first time that a guy came between friends, and Jane was ready to deal with it if that’s where it led. But it never got that far, probably because Meg was too busy tending to her perfect marriage and Cara was too busy being perfect in every way possible to care what Jane was doing with her husband in the city. They all silently agreed to let it go, and to ignore that yet another piece of their foundation had been eroded away by the passage of time. Because they loved each other they placed a patch over the tear and pretended that things were the same, every hole and rip and pull that occurred over the years continually covered by a myriad of patches made to look as if they were all supposed to be there.