Good Riddance(57)

“Because I’ve burned it?”

“No. Because it’ll be at my place, where she’s never set foot and never will.”



I kept watching for signs of her return, bracing for the pounding on my door, demanding the return of her property. I wasn’t the world’s most skilled liar, so I practiced in the mirror, assuming a look of, by turns, surprise, then shock, then umbrage at being accused of theft. After three days, I asked two different doormen if Ms. Wisenkorn had returned. Each said no with an unconvincing shrug.

I woke up on day four to an email from her sent at 1:05 a.m. the previous night. “Still on Long Island. My dad told me you and Jason (?) stayed in the ER for a couple of hours. Thank you for helping me after my stupid fall. I’d have been able to get up myself except for what I did to my elbow. I’m getting work done here so not rushing back. G.”

Thus I knew: not back yet so still in the dark. Nor was she admitting that a seizure caused the accident. Her father must have nagged her to write and thank me for my life-saving help. What a brat. Would it have killed her to mention that she might still be lying in a pool of blood if I hadn’t fortuitously come by that very hour to knock her block off?





28


Happy Hour



Now this, sad to say: Neither Jeremy nor I expected permanency as a couple, and I regret suggesting otherwise. Even though he’d rushed to my side at Mount Sinai five days earlier, even though the words “girlfriend” and “boyfriend” had been used, when does that ever advance to a commitment when one of them is male and under thirty and gets fan mail? Shouldn’t I have seen that we were merely sexual placeholders in a city filled with eligibles? Other people come along. Perhaps one of them is named Tina and she is too young to have worried aloud about creeping infertility and the quality of her eggs, which were already beginning to deteriorate.

Jeremy didn’t take up with Tina in a sneaky way. What he wanted to discuss with me in a dark corner of a bar on Ninth Avenue, ironically during happy hour, was that he was thinking about seeing other people. “I still want to be friends,” he told me. “I know that’s a cliché, but I mean it. I’ll still be across the hall. We can still have martinis and we’re still partners in crime, right?”

I asked which crime, thinking he might mean off-the-record sex.

“Geneva related. She’s not going away anytime soon.”

“And that’s your problem how?”

“I didn’t say ‘problem.’ I meant—and please don’t take this the wrong way—that you can get worked up in a way that isn’t totally productive.”

“So you’d be the steady hand making sure I don’t go off the rails? How charitable of you.”

“It’s not charity. I’m invested in this.”

Invested? What kind of left-brained thing was that to say in the middle of a breakup? Borrowing a scene from my own marriage’s unraveling, I asked, “Who is she?”

“Who is who?”

“The woman you’d like to go out with.”

That’s when he told me he hadn’t acted on it yet. Well, there was someone who’d asked him out, but he wasn’t going to accept the invitation before talking to me.

“What kind of invitation?”

He made the face that any theatergoer would have made, which was helpless, innocent incredulity. “Two orchestra seats to Hamilton,” he said.

“And she’s asking a total stranger?”

“Not exactly a total stranger.”

“Let me guess: She’s a fan.”

“No.”

“Another actor?”

“No, she doesn’t watch the show. Which I like—”

“Do you? Hooking up with someone who’s not steeped in popular culture.”

“I meant that it makes her overture not, you know—”

“Star fucking?”

“She wouldn’t even know what that means. She’s an adjunct professor.”

I must have repeated the “adjunct” with something like disdain because Jeremy asked, “Something against adjunct professors?”

Besides the obvious, her interest in you? I said, “‘Adjunct’ means she pops in once or twice a week to teach one class and borrows someone else’s desk for her office hours. What’s her field?”

“Sustainability.”

I gave that a good smirk, though I didn’t know what that field was. “How does an adjunct professor afford tickets to Hamilton?” I asked.

“She didn’t say.”

“How’d you meet this millionaire?”

“Why’d you say that?”

“Do you know how much those seats cost? Like a thousand bucks apiece.”

I knew this wasn’t going as he’d expected. I tried a somewhat more neutral “How’d you two meet?”

“Daff—what does that matter?”

Only my beloved nonbiological father was allowed to call me Daff from now on. “Tell me it wasn’t through online dating.”

“Since when am I online dating?”

“You mean why you, the famous star of the small screen?”

He was doing some agitated shredding of his napkin instead of answering. What a brat I’d suddenly become. “Everyone does,” I continued. “Maybe your membership was up for renewal and you thought, I’ll see what’s out there.”