We Are Not Like Them(74)
“You’re a pig, Bart.” I muster a wobbly laugh.
It’s a blessing and a curse that live TV stops for no one. I slam the van door shut with my phone inside, the email away and out of mind for now. I attempt to smooth my bangs, pressing them close to my forehead, taking one last look in the side mirror to make sure my makeup is in place. It’s a miracle: I look serene and composed; only my shaking knees would give me away.
As I get in place in front of the camera, Pete gives me a thumbs-up, letting me know I can report on the drunk driver in the broadcast.
It can be either invigorating or exhausting, switching to the on-air sparkle for the cameras. After all these years, it’s become second nature to me to be able to turn everything else off and focus only on the three-inch camera lens ten feet away. It’s taking a stage and the only thing that matters is delivering my lines, which happens now as I assume the position—mic held tight in gloved hand, eyes directly forward, back straight, warm gaze—and begin sharing the gruesome and tragic details of the car accident when Bart cues me in. Less than three minutes and the segment is over. In my earpiece, Chip and Candace move on to a story about a house fire in Point Breeze. My work here is done.
I don’t let myself look at my phone the entire ride back to the newsroom even though it takes twice as long with Bart following the speed limit. And I don’t look when I’m back in the dressing room, wiping off my makeup. It remains tucked deep in the reaches of my tote bag as I walk home. It starts to rain on the way, a freezing drizzle, and I don’t bother to cover my hair. Umbrellas, weather, my hair, it’s all irrelevant.
In my apartment, I change into sweatpants as if it’s a normal evening. My phone lies on the counter while I assemble the ingredients to make a vodka tonic, dragging the process out as long as possible, even cutting up a slice of a shriveled lemon that’s been languishing on the counter. By this point my anticipation has become a sort of frenzy, almost euphoric. It’s an exquisite torture to delay the inevitable, to speculate about what Corey might say, rather than to actually know.
I let the vodka do its job as our three-year relationship plays out in my mind like a short film. In fact, it started exactly like a movie, complete with the sudden rainstorm I wasn’t supposed to get caught in. I’d been in Chicago for an NABJ conference. During a break, I’d walked a few blocks from the hotel to grab a pastry at a bakery on Michigan Avenue that everyone had raved about, and the skies opened up out of nowhere and I was stuck without an umbrella, a true catastrophe, considering my freshly straightened hair and the panel I was supposed to attend in twenty minutes that would be filled with top network producers.
Like a fool, I tried to hail a taxi from underneath the bakery’s awning. Then, when I finally spotted a yellow light, I dashed out into the street so fast I tripped and rolled my ankle on the curb and fell straight into the arms of a man with a sexy buzz cut and the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen. If it didn’t happen to me, I would swear I’d made it up. Maybe it was the sheer romantic absurdity of it all that sucked me in at first, because this stranger wasn’t my type. Shaun may have a taste for white girls, but I’d never even looked twice at a white guy.
He happened to be staying at the Hilton too, in town for a real estate conference. So we walked back, huddled together beneath his giant umbrella. He asked me to have dinner with him as soon as we made it through the revolving doors to the lobby.
“If I’m going to dinner with you, I’ll need to know your name,” I said, impressed with my attempt at flirting.
“I’m Corey, and you’re Riley.”
He met my confused and slightly panicked expression by pointing to the name tag pinned to my chest.
That night, we ate at a touristy diner in Greektown. There was something disarming and intimate about eating pancakes in one of those curved old booths, where you have to sit nearly side by side like you just ordered breakfast in bed. The whole time, I kept thinking that he must have slipped something in my drink. Otherwise, how could I account for how giddy I felt, bubbly even, drunk off the cheap sparkling wine, and why I kept telling him things, personal, embarrassing things—how I was jealous of Gabrielle’s trust fund and big salary working at Nike; how I say I’m fluent in Spanish, when really I’m passable at best; or how I like to act all worldly when I don’t even have a passport.
Corey had his own confessions, though they were more charming than embarrassing. He talked with a lisp until he was ten; he once failed miserably on an episode of college Jeopardy!; his first sex dream involved Maria from Sesame Street. His favorite movie was The Lion King.
“I cry every single time.”
“Who doesn’t?” I replied.
“Sociopaths,” he said.
With each question he asked, I was more disarmed—and he was full of them, like he didn’t want to waste time on small talk. After dinner, we walked through Grant Park, skipping straight to our romantic histories, six years with a college sweetheart for Corey, ended the year before; three underwhelming relationships for me, if you could even call them that: two lackluster flings in college with dudes who didn’t worry too much about me not letting them in—it was enough just to be a pretty light-skinned girl with long hair—and then Alex, a fellow reporter in Joplin. That yearlong relationship was maybe the closest I’d ever come to love, but that was still eons away from the actual feeling. Sometimes I wondered if I was even capable of falling in love. I actually said that to him. Out loud. I had never vomited up so much personal information to a stranger before. It was an out-of-body experience for me, even more so when we headed back to his hotel room, which at some point in the evening became an unspoken inevitability.