Missing You(9)

Chapter 4


As Kat showered, she thought about what exactly to put in her message to Jeff. She ran through a dozen possibilities, each lamer than the one before. She hated this feeling. She hated worrying about what to write to a guy, as if she were in high school and leaving a note in his locker. Ugh. Didn’t we ever outgrow that?

The fairy tale, Stacy had said. But real.

She threw on her plainclothes cop uniform—a pair of jeans and a blazer—and slipped on a pair of TOMS. She pulled her hair back in a ponytail. Kat had never had the courage to cut her hair short, but she’d always liked it pulled back, off her face. Jeff had liked it that way too. Most men liked her hair cascading down. Jeff didn’t. “I love your face. I love those cheekbones and those eyes. . . .”

She made herself stop.

Time to get to work. She’d worry about what to write later.

The computer monitor seemed to be mocking her as she walked past, daring her to leave. She paused. The screen saver did its little line dance. She checked the time.

Get it over with now, she told herself.

Kat sat down and once again brought up YouAreJustMyType .com. When she signed in, she saw that she had “exciting new matches.” She didn’t bother. She found Jeff’s profile, clicked the picture, read his personal statement yet again: Let’s see what happens.

How long, she wondered, had it taken Jeff to come up with something so simple, so enticing, so relaxed, so noncommittal, so engaging? It was no pressure. An invitation, nothing more. Kat clicked the icon to write him a direct message. The box came up. The cursor blinked impatiently.

Kat typed: Yes, let’s see what happens.

Ugh.

She immediately deleted that.

She tried a few others. Guess who; Been a long time; How are you, Jeff?; It’s nice to see your face again. Delete, delete, delete. Every utterance was lame to the nth degree. Maybe, she thought, that was the nature of these things. It was hard to be smooth or confident or relaxed when you’re on a site trying to meet the love of your life.

A memory brought a wistful smile to her face. Jeff had a thing for cheesy eighties music videos. This was before YouTube made it easy to watch any and all at a moment’s notice. You’d have to find when VH1 was running a special or something like that. Suddenly, she pictured what Jeff would be doing now, probably sitting at his computer and looking up old videos by Tears for Fears or Spandau Ballet or Paul Young or John Waite.

John Waite.

Waite had an early MTV classic, a quasi new-wave pop song that never failed to move her, even now, if she was flipping radio stations or in a bar that played eighties hits. Kat would hear John Waite singing “Missing You,” and it would bring her back to that truly cornball video, John walking alone in the streets, repeatedly exclaiming, “I ain’t missing you at all,” in a voice so pained it made the next line (“I can lie to myself”) superfluous and overly explanatory. John Waite would be in a bar, drowning his obvious sorrows, flashing back to happy memories of the woman he will forever love, all the while still chorusing that he wasn’t missing her at all. Oh, but we hear the lie. We see the lie in every step, every movement. Then, at the end of the video, lonely John goes home and puts his headphones on, now drowning his sorrow in music rather than drink, and so, in a tragedy reminiscent of something Shakespearean by way of a bad sitcom, he can’t hear when—gasp—his love returns to his door and knocks on it. In the end, the great love he was meant to be with forever knocks again, puts her ear against the door, and then walks away, leaving John Waite forever brokenhearted, still insisting that he doesn’t miss her, lying eternally to himself.

Ironic in hindsight.

The video became something of a running joke between her and Jeff. When they were apart, even for a short while, he would leave messages saying, “I’m not missing you at all,” and she might even comment that he could lie to himself.

Yeah, romance isn’t always pretty.

But when Jeff wanted to be more serious, he would sign his notes by the song title, which right now Kat found her fingers almost subconsciously typing into the text box: MISSING YOU.

She looked at it a moment and debated hitting SEND.

It was overkill. Here he was being wonderfully subtle with the Let’s see what happens and she comes on with MISSING YOU. No. She deleted it and tried one more time, quoting the actual line from the chorus: “I ain’t missing you at all.”

That felt too flip. Another deletion.

Okay, enough.

Then an idea came to her. Kat opened up another browser window and found a link to the old John Waite video. She hadn’t seen it in, what, twenty years maybe, but it still held all the sappy charm. Yes, Kat thought with a nod, perfect. She copied and pasted the link into the text field. A photograph from the video’s bar scene popped up. Kat didn’t stop to think about it anymore.

She hit the SEND button, stood quickly, and almost ran out the door.

? ? ?

Kat lived on 67th Street on the Upper West Side. The 19th Precinct, her workplace, was also on 67th Street, albeit on the east side, not far from Hunter College. She cherished her commute—a walk straight across Central Park. Her squad was housed in an 1880s landmark building in a style someone had told her was called Renaissance Revival. She worked as a detective on the third floor. On television, the detectives usually have some kind of specialty like homicide, but most of those subspecialties or designations were long gone. The year her father was murdered, there were nearly four hundred homicides. This year, so far, there had been twelve. Six-man homicide detective groups and the like had become obsolete.