Girl Walks Out of a Bar (12 page)

8

It could be any Friday evening in the mid-
1990s, it's 6:30, and I'm sitting with my friend Karen at J.D.'s Pub in Midtown. She's also an associate, and the occasion is a farewell party for yet another departing colleague.

We peel the moist labels off our Amstel Light bottles, trying to remove them in one piece without tearing. We talk about how another one of us is “escaping over the fence.” J.D.'s main room is long and dimly lit. We are unwinding, putting the week behind us. Still wrapped tightly in our suit skirts, we sit on dark wood chairs with our jackets hung over the backs.

Along with paying for a fancy party sendoff, the firm tries to help the departing associate land a job with one of the firm's clients. The higher-ups hope that the associate will then turn around and hire the firm, so these goodbye parties are always crawling with partners.

This group likes to drink, so the open bar is a big draw. No one pays much attention to the table lined with the sterno-warmed buffet trays full of mini egg rolls, chicken fingers, and fried mozzarella sticks. The untouched cubes of cheese on a plate sweat little beads of moisture.

By seven the room is full of smart, overworked, young lawyers. In packs, they lean against the bar, stand in the room's open
space, and, like Karen and me, sit at wooden tables covered in red-and-white checkered tablecloths. People stop by our table to chat, mostly about how exhausted they are, how awful their week has been, and how we need to get together for lunch in the Lawyers' Dining Room. We all swap work stories, and in each tale the storyteller is the most oppressed of all the firm's associates.

By eight only the hardcore are left; the people who will close the firm's tab and move the party on to the next bar, usually a hipper place downtown. We throw back final shots of tequila to fortify us for the journey onward. Unless Karen and I have to return the office, we are a few beers and a couple of shots in, ready to go along with the others.

Most of the time, I end up able to remember at least a few fuzzy memories of the night out with work friends. But sometimes I wake up the next morning still in my suit with no recollection of where I went or with whom. No idea of what I did. Nothing but a big black screen where all my visual memories should have been projected. Then I shudder my way through the next work day, looking for judgment in the eyes of colleagues, fearing the wrong kind of phone call, hoping that I didn't do something so unredeemable that it will cost me my career.

One day I received an email invitation to a party the firm was holding for its alumni. Attached to it was a list of people who had accepted the invitation. Having been at the firm for more than seven years, I knew a lot of them. My eyes rested on one name.

Alan and I had dated off and on several years earlier, and we ended it because each time it seemed that neither of us wanted a commitment at the same time. He was from Pennsylvania and we met when he was a first-year, new to New York, and I was a summer associate. He was a great looking former college
baseball player with deep green eyes and thick blond hair that he kept short. About three years later, Alan returned to Pennsylvania where he'd been named a partner in a firm based in Pittsburgh. He was very close with his family, loved dark humor, and his brain always moved faster than mine, so I lost our intellectual debates.

Despite not having seen him in years, I emailed Alan to see if he wanted to meet for dinner after the party. He did, so I skipped the party and went straight home to primp and drink.

I put a little extra swing in my walk when I entered the Greenwich Village restaurant where Alan was waiting for me, sitting casually on a barstool. His emerald eyes had the same sparkle that I'd remembered. “It's
really
great to see you,” he said as he stood to greet me with a kiss on the cheek and a hand pressed against my arm.

Alan had always liked to try new places in the city. We had spent many nights checking out the latest restaurants written up in the
New York Times
, and I was pretty sure that when we were together, he drank more than his usual. We often started the night with martinis, split a couple bottles of wine, and then finished with B&B. The mornings after those dates, I barely remembered what I ate.

Alan and I sat down and took a long, smiling look at each other. He looked a little older, but it only made him more handsome. With a mischievous smirk he said, “You look great.”

I wore a pair of tight black pants, a black camisole, and a sheer mesh purple shirt with flowers splayed all over it. It was my favorite outfit.

Our table was available right away, and Alan carried his martini with him. I ordered one as soon as we sat down. Soon afterward we ordered a bottle of wine.

“So, how was that party?” I asked.

He gave me the rundown on the people we both knew, adding enthusiastic, occasionally biting commentary on their current situations. He'd already had a couple of cocktails, which brought out the comedian in him. As always, I was happy to listen to his hilarious takedowns of obscenely successful people. Seeing the dark side of this otherwise squeaky man endeared him to me. And of course it freed me to dish right back without fearing judgment.

We finished the first bottle of wine in record time. As Alan held the bottle and let its last drops fall into my glass, I asked, “Should we order another?”

“Sure, why not?” he said. And the evening breezed by as we told each other our stories in the rhythm and glow of one of those delicious nights—when you're both at ease, you're both available, and you both know that you're going to end up naked.

Three hours later and waiting for the check, we were solidly drunk, so the offer tumbled easily from my lips, “Do you want to stay at my place?”

We climbed all over each other in the cab, sliding around the faux leather back seat. He had me pressed against the wall of the elevator all the way up to my apartment and then we went straight for the bedroom. The booze did a wonderful job of rinsing away all inhibition, but the attraction was real.

Later that night, obsessive thoughts began to rumble around in my mind. What were we doing? What was he thinking? What was
I
thinking? This wasn't just a romp, that was clear. Safe. I felt safe and protected when I was with him. It was an enormous change from what I had recently felt on my own.

The next morning, I stood in my bathroom wearing a silky robe and examining the pink puffiness around my half-shut, bloodshot eyes. I kept pressing and pulling at them, as if that would make the swelling go down. Good grief, I didn't want
him to open his eyes and flinch with regret. But when I shuffled out of the bathroom, he was already sitting in my big club chair lacing his dress shoes and smiling.

“I'd like us to see each other again,” he said “You know it would be great if you came out to visit Pittsburgh.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “That would be . . . um. . . great.”

That weekend, my friends and I gathered at Jessica and Russell's giant, ground floor duplex on the Upper East Side. By then, they had a year-old son, Nathaniel, so it was easier for us to gather at their place than for all of us to go out. Jerry, Devon, and our friend David, a partner at a major law firm, were all there. We drank expensive wine out of fancy goblets and nibbled from a spread of cheese, crackers, olives, and pâté.

I blurted it. “I had dinner with Alan the other night and I'm going to go out to Pittsburgh to visit him.” Every head in the room spun in my direction.

“Oh boy, here we go again,” Jerry said, laughing. “I thought you were done recycling men.”

He was right. I had recently sworn off backstepping, but when you spend a significant amount of your time shitfaced, the things you “swear” don't always add up to much of a covenant in the light of day. Still, I'd spent the previous 24 hours wrestling my way through the facts. Alan had settled down in Pittsburgh, surrounded by married friends with kids. He was one of the only people I knew who owned a house. He was an Irish Catholic Republican and I was a Jewish Democrat. When we were dating, those differences had kept things feisty, but as the years passed, would feisty become fiery and would fiery eventually become vicious? If we got back together at this point in our lives, it would be serious. Suburbs? Marriage? Kids? Did
I want all that? And would it help me to stop drinking so much? It would, wouldn't it?

“We really reconnected,” I told Jerry. “I think we're both at the same place in our lives for the first time. I wouldn't get back together with him if I didn't think he could be the one.”

“Are you
serious? The one?
” Devon croaked. “I mean, Alan's great, but
are you batshit crazy?
” She poured more wine all around. “You can't move to Pennsylvania. And what the hell, you haven't mentioned his name in four hundred years, and now after one dinner you're back together?”

She was right. But neither she nor my other friends knew how miserable I was, drinking alone every night, looking down the road and seeing nothing but long hours in an office followed by long hours of drinking followed by long hours of headaches and nausea
in an office
. That was my future. But a fresh start with a great guy, leaving my current life far behind in the cloud of dust my Range Rover would kick up as I rumbled up the gravel driveway of my country house. What was wrong with
that
picture?

“No!” David said. “You can't do that! You're the New Yorkest person I know!” David was from a small town in Maryland, and to him New York was still the city of daydreams and magic. He was doing great at the firm, and when he wasn't working his tail off he actually did the things that most New Yorkers only say they're going to do, like watch improv in forty-seat theaters and spend afternoons walking around Battery Park instead of dashing straight through it.

“And what about us? And your family?” Jessica added. She bounced Nat on her knee and he giggled.
Would my kid giggle like that? What if my kid turned out to be the same kind of nervous wreck I'd been? Could I be a mother? Wasn't having kids the next grown-up thing to do? I must want kids, right? I bet I'll want kids when I get my drinking under control.

Russell walked into the kitchen to open another bottle of wine. “You're not going anywhere,” he said. The bass in his voice signaled that this crazy conversation was over.

I went outside to smoke. The duplex had an outside garden space with a picnic table, and after Jessica became pregnant the garden became our smoking section. Devon and Jerry got up, grabbed their drinks, and followed me out. We sat down on the benches and our three lighters lit up the outside space as we inhaled and then exhaled simultaneously, smoke streaming over our heads. It looked like a choreographed move, and all three of us laughed at the synchronization of it. Then we laughed even harder about the synchronized laughs. Deep, head-back laughter that died down with a smiling sigh. And then they both looked at me with so much love in their eyes that I had to look away.