The Lies That Bind(8)

The whole thing is starting to feel like a dream—a bizarre, wonderful dream—and although I’m holding out hope, I’m also aware that we are rapidly approaching Scottie’s deadline. According to his long-standing rule, if you meet a guy at any point over the weekend and you don’t hear from him by nightfall on the following Wednesday, he isn’t interested. And even if he likes you enough to eventually call you, chances are that the relationship won’t ever amount to much because he doesn’t like you enough to call sooner.

At first blush, the rule seems pretty arbitrary (and also counterintuitive given that Scottie advocates all sorts of playing hard to get, especially when I really like someone). But I have to admit that based on years of experience and data, his guidance on the subject remains eerily dead-on. So I’m decidedly worried as I do an Internet search for “sunset today New York City,” discovering that night will officially fall at 8:14 P.M. This means that Grant has four hours and nine minutes to deliver.

I spin in my desk chair to face Jasmine, my closest work friend and the only person I can see without standing to peer over the fabric-covered partitions of my cube. To be honest, I think our proximity is the main reason we became such good friends in the first place, sort of like those college roommates who are opposites but end up being the best of friends. I’m from Wisconsin; she’s from the Bronx. I’m pretty vanilla on paper, with traditional Catholic parents; her parents are academics and activists. I tend to be a little too passive and neurotic, whereas she’s the most calmly assertive, well-adjusted person I know.

    I wait for her to finish typing before saying, “Hey, Jasmine? Can I ask you something?”

“You just did,” she says, doing a half turn in her chair and inspecting me through her bold cat-eye glasses, which prompted one colleague to compare her to a “hot librarian”—a so-called compliment that did not go over very well and ended in a meeting with HR.

I know her well enough to know that she’s not as annoyed as she’s pretending to be, so I press on. “Do you think he’s going to call?”

“Are we talking about old dude?” she says. “Or new dude?”

“New dude,” I say, feeling sheepish that she has to ask. That I’ve gone from one obsession to the next virtually overnight.

“I have no idea,” she says, completely missing the point of such questions—that of course she has no idea. Nobody does. Which is why I’m asking her to speculate. I fill her in on Scottie’s sunset rule.

She listens, but makes all sorts of disapproving faces before waving his theory off as “patently ridiculous,” illustrating a huge difference between my two confidants. Scottie will analyze things to death but never judges me, whereas Jasmine has no patience for relationship drama and calls me out on any and all bullshit.

“Maybe he’s really busy this week. You know, focused on his job…his stuff….Maybe you should do the same?” She gestures toward her computer monitor and says, “You don’t want to end up like Nicole here, do you?”

    “Kidman?” I say, knowing she’s been working on a piece about her divorce from Tom Cruise. The assignment is such a total waste on her; she has no appetite for celebrity gossip.

“Yeah,” she says.

“Why? What’s going on now?” I ask, wondering what kind of parallel she could possibly be drawing between Nicole Kidman’s life and mine.

“Oh, just more Scientology bullshit…She was a prisoner. So glad she broke free of that crazy town. She’s way too good for him.”

“So you’re saying I’m a prisoner because I want Grant to call me?” I ask with a laugh.

“I’m just saying—get on your own damn path,” Jasmine says. “He either calls or he doesn’t. And if he doesn’t? His loss.”

I nod and say okay, but still can’t resist glancing down at my cellphone, then trying to slyly flip it open.

Jasmine busts me and says, “Jeez, Cecily. Put that down.”

“I was just checking.”

“Well, stop checking. Everyone knows that a watched phone never rings,” she says, grabbing her purse from a desk drawer and bolting up out of her chair. “Now, c’mon. Let’s go get some coffee.”



* * *



—

Later that night, after Scottie’s artificial deadline has passed, I find myself thinking about my afternoon coffee chat with Jasmine. Specifically, I think of how she said my encounter with Grant proves that there’s a silver lining to my breakup with Matthew. I now can take full advantage of my dwindling twenties and early thirties, which she views as the time to experience life freely, with little responsibility to anyone else.

“You have your whole life to be married,” she said. “What’s the rush? Besides, it kind of seems like marriage is overrated, when fifty percent of them end in divorce.”

    “Well, I’m banking on being in the other fifty percent,” I said with a smile. “And where’s the shame in wanting a traditional life? I want to be married. I want a husband—a permanent partnership—and my own family. Nothing is more important than family….”

“Fine. But don’t you want to marry the right person?”