Room for Love (30 page)

“I'm proud of you,” she says.

On the way to work, I stop at the deli on my corner to buy the magazine and immediately page through it to find my piece. The title of the piece is “Room for Love: One Writer's Deviously Sexy Search for the Perfect Guy,” and the first thing I see is a picture of myself that I completely forgot they'd taken. The one they chose is cheesy: me standing on the stoop of a perfect New York brownstone holding a rolled-up real estate section of the newspaper with one hand and crossing my fingers with the other. At least I look skinny. Shit, I hope no one Anthony knows gets to the magazine before I have a chance to sit him down and tell him the whole truth and nothing but. Luckily, none of his good friends is likely to read the magazine, except, of course, in the therapist's office or hair salon or manicure-pedicure place or gym, and his sister and girl friends could subscribe to it for all I know. God, I've got to tell him tonight. I skim through most of the story and it looks good. They've cleaned up my text, but basically it's what I expected.

All day long I get calls and e-mails from friends saying how much they liked the piece and congratulating me for becoming the downtown Candace Bushnell. Who knew how many people read this damn magazine? I love the flattery, but each pat on the back makes me more and more fearful that Anthony will find out, too.

After work, Alicia comes over to go through my closet. She brings a bottle of champagne to toast my success, and I drunkenly try on seventy-five outfits before settling on a straight charcoal-gray skirt with a pink Nanette Lepore top that gives me cleavage without making me look slutty and black strappy sandals for the show. When she leaves at eleven, I begin to prepare for the inevitable showdown with Anthony. I wash my face, brush my teeth, and sit down on the edge of the bed to rehearse. On second thought, I jump up and slug some Jack Daniels from the bottle on top of the fridge and brush my teeth again. I put on some mood music, hoping mellow tunes will subliminally make Anthony more likely to forgive me. I close my eyes and repeat “sut nam,” which I remember means “truth is my identity.”

Feeling soothed, I begin my speech. “Anthony, there's something I have to talk to you about.” I begin to pace around the living room, picturing him in the armchair in front of the TV. “First of all, I want to tell you that I love you very much and am so happy that I met you and that we've had this time together.” No good; it sounds like I'm going to break up with him. “First of all, I just want you to know how much I love you.” I sit down on the couch and stare at Lucy's big fat adoring face smiling at me through her ridiculously cute underbite. “Lucy, you tell him.”

I start again: “Okay, Anthony, I love you and I have to tell you something. You're going to be mad at me, but please hear me out. You know when I came here that day, the first day that we met? You know when I came to look at your extra room? Well, the truth is I wasn't looking for an apartment.” I imagine him bewildered, that little furrow between his brows deepening as he strives to comprehend what I'm saying. “See, I was actually researching an article for
Luscious
magazine, about a great new way to meet men: through the roommate-wanted ads.” I laugh, like
Ha! Isn't that clever?
and go on, “You see, I was pretending to look for a room so that I could meet guys, and then I wrote a story about it. The story came out today. It looks great, and in fact, I'm going to be on
Between the Sheets of America.
It's broadcasting in a couple of days, we can watch it together. Oh, Anthony, this is all pretty funny actually, isn't it?”

I stand up and pace again until I'm standing in front of the full-length mirror that leans against the wall behind the kitchen table. I stare at myself. “So, baby, I know I haven't been entirely truthful with you.” Tears slide down my cheeks and I brush them away. “I haven't been entirely truthful, but I will be from now on. I promise. I know my promises must not mean much to you at this point, but I will prove to you that I am actually an honest person. Really I am, I swear.” I sit down on a chair, still looking in the mirror and whimpering at my pathetic, pleading face. “God, before this whole thing, I couldn't tell a lie to save my life. That's why this has been killing me, your not knowing. It wasn't even my idea. It was my sister's idea and then my editor loved it and she said I had to go undercover. It's really good for my career. God, I'm getting a column in the magazine. It's so amazing. And then at some point I realized that maybe I actually would meet someone, and then I did. And it seemed like fate. It seemed magical, except for the lie.” My face is red and puffy. “Anthony, it doesn't really matter how we met, does it? What matters is that we did. How crazy that we met in this bizarre way and fell in love! It's a great story, isn't it? A great story to tell our grandkids.” I stare at myself for another second before moving slowly to the couch to lie down.

I guess he never makes it home, because I wake up on the couch in the morning, with Jack Daniels practicing karate chops on the inside of my skull. I only have an hour to get to the
Between the Sheets
studio, so I rinse off in the shower, put on the chosen outfit, and jump into a cab. On the way, I call a couple of the guys whose apartments I saw, only the ones I liked, and tell them about the magazine article. I would feel awful if they stumbled upon it. On the way out of the apartment, I grabbed the original notepad where I'd jotted down phone numbers and notes like, “big 2bd, Dumbo, med school, sounds like a dork, def. in the closet.” And, “foreign, Israeli?, sounds cute, Long Island City, ugh, big loft, shit, GIRLFRIEND.” I call Stanley the divorce, who takes it well.

When I fess up to Claus the German, he says, “I did think something was strange.”

“I know you did,” I tell him. “I thought you had busted me.”

He laughs. “Jacquie, I thank you for telling me this, and I wish you very good luck.”

I leave a message for handsome Timothy and sheepishly leave another for John the musician I never met, thinking he'll be amused. A frisson runs down my spine when I hear his voice on his machine.

Screw Javier, that dog-bashing gourmet,
I think, but then change my mind and call his home number, since I know he'll be working the breakfast shift. As I arrive at the nondescript building on West Thirty-ninth Street, Stanley calls me back.

“I saw it,” he says. “I had to run out and buy it when you told me. I guess I didn't mind. It's funny. You have an interesting life, Jacquie.”

“Thanks.”

“I didn't ask you out.” Yes he did! Inviting me to lunch definitely counts. “But I wouldn't mind. Are you still with Anthony?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Oh good; I guess he didn't take it too hard when you told him about all this.”

“Um, he doesn't know yet.”

“Oh,” he says. “Oh.”

“Hey, Stanley, I'm late for a meeting. I've got to run.”

I arrive at the television studio in Midtown a nervous wreck. Hildy approves my outfit and leads me into the Green Room, where I meet the host, Conrad, who immediately calms me down. He's short with glasses and a bow tie and he talks like he's swallowed a frog.

“You are going to look terrific on television,” he tells me. “And you've got a charming yarn to tell. So, don't you worry now!” He grins at me and asks me briefly about my dating game so that he'll know which questions to ask once we're on air. The pre-interview goes smoothly and makes me feel more comfortable about the real thing. On the white vinyl couch in the Green Room, I eat cookies and drink tea with a girl whose third chick-lit novel hits stores on Friday and the lead singer of an eighties boys' band who's coming out with his first solo album. They've both done this kind of thing before and seem bored.

Just before I go on, Anthony calls. I'm about to pick up and then wonder what the hell I would say to him. That I'm at work? That I'm on my way? Or that I'm shooting the shit with a onetime pop star while waiting to go on TV to be interviewed about an article I never told him about that describes this funny scheme I invented for meeting guys by pretending to look for a roommate? “Oh yeah, baby, it's the one that tells the story of how you and I met,” I would say. “I know, honey, I failed to mention it. You thought I was looking for an apartment, but that was a big, fat, fucking lie. It wasn't fate or destiny or our two worlds colliding through a beautiful, serendipitous act. It was a dating game that I created to try to trap a guy, further my career, make a buck.” I turn my phone off and jiggle my heel madly as the chick-lit author laughs riotously on a big overhead monitor about a scene in her book where the heroine trips over a cocker spaniel and lands splat at the feet of the dog's handsome millionaire owner, whom I assume she marries in the end.

When the boy singer gets called into the studio, a makeup artist with spiky bleached blond hair and too much black eyeliner enters to give me a once-over. I follow her into a brightly lit room where she sits me in front of a mirror and dabs concealer under my eyes.

“So, you pretended you were looking for a room so you could meet guys?” she asks in a thick Jersey accent. Guess I'm the talk of the town.

“Yeah.”

“How'd it turn out?” she asks, powdering my face and blending the area around my eyes with her finger.

“I met a guy. We're living together.”

“Cool. Maybe I'll try it,” she says, and applies a soft burgundy color to my lips. “You like that?”

“Not a color I usually go for, but it works,” I say.

“I think you're good,” she says.

She's right. Gazing back at me from the mirror is a woman who should be on television.

“Hey,” I say, “don't do the apartment thing. Do Internet dating or keep doing whatever you've always done. It's not really a very, uh, honest way to meet a man.”

“Huh,” she says, baffled.

“But that's not what I'm going to say on TV,” I say. “Shit, I don't know what I'm going to say on TV.” She gives my shoulders a quick, supportive squeeze.

I'm seated in a comfortable, gray leather chair facing Conrad and his cohost, Christine, a slim blonde in a cream-colored suit whose hair turns up pertly at her shoulders. She smiles warmly at me. As the cameraman announces that he's rolling, I breathe deeply a few times, hoping not to have an anxiety attack. I only get one shot at this; they interview me one time through and then cut out any disastrous moments.

Conrad introduces me and my article, explaining that I was single and depressed and got inspired by my sister, who was having great luck meeting guys while looking for an apartment.

“Why is looking at apartments a good way to meet men?” Conrad asks me.

“Well, you get right into these men's apartments,” I say. “If you meet a man in a bar or at a party, for example, you might not see where he lives until the third or fourth date. You might really like him and then discover he has a pet boa constrictor in the bathtub or a whole wall of his bedroom devoted to ‘N Sync. You learn an awful lot about someone by the state of their home.”

“What was the most horrifying thing you encountered?” Christine asks.

“Hmm.” I say. “It would have to be this one apartment in the East Village. The guy was attractive, but his place looked like something out of
Bachelor Party.
Remember that movie with Tom Hanks? There were pizza boxes and beer cans and stray clothes everywhere and it smelled like the garbage hadn't been taken out in a month.”

“What did you do?” Conrad asks, laughing.

“Got the hell out!” I say. “I think I told him I was late for an appointment and would call him later.”

“But you didn't,” Conrad says.

“Well, I actually did call him back. It was early in the process, and guys weren't asking me out. A friend suggested that no one would ask a woman out if they actually thought she was going to be their roommate, so I called a few people back and told them I wasn't able to take the room, to see if it would change anything.”

“Did it?” Christine asks.

“Actually, it did. That guy asked me if I wanted to get a beer with him. Of course I told him I was busy for the rest of my life!”

They both laugh.

“And you had some more interesting dates,” says Conrad. “I guess a few of those got pretty hot and heavy?”

I blush. “Well, yeah, I guess there were some, uh, interesting dates, and maybe one that got a little hot and heavy, as you put it.”

The audience laughs along with Conrad and Christine, who always love to get a little raunch on the show.

“So, Jacquie, would you say this was a successful experiment?” Conrad asks, winding it up.

“Extremely successful,” I tell him. “I set out to meet men, and I met loads of them. I met artists, lawyers, professors. I met a designer, a chef, a reporter. And, most important, I met the man of my life, Anthony, a handsome, smart, talented TV producer.”

“What did he think about this whole thing?” Conrad asks, even though I requested that he not ask me that question.

I feel my face redden on national TV. “Well, Anthony actually doesn't know about the article yet,” I say, ashamed. “He still thinks I was interested in renting his spare room. I guess I'll have to tell him now, though, if he doesn't see it on this show first.”

“So, you've been lying to him for a while and you live together?”

“Well, lying is a pretty strong word, I think. I mean, I've been keeping a couple of small facts from him, that's true, but who doesn't in a relationship? And isn't the important thing that we met, not
how
we met?”

“Well, I'm not so sure Anthony's going to feel that way,” Conrad says.

Christine butts in. “Conrad, come on, you're being a bit harsh. Jacquie was going about her business, doing research for an article. She didn't know she was going to fall in love, right? Sure, she hoped she might, but she didn't realize that ethical complications would arise. How could she?”