The Hazards of Hunting While Heartbroken (2 page)

I suppose he’s entitled.

Niles Townsend is a very successful forty-two year-old Yale-educated litigator, whose clients include some of the biggest household names in the financial services industry. To say he’s uptight would be like saying it’s a bit brisk at the North Pole. He wears three-piece suits with color-coordinated pocket squares, even on Fridays. He’s on the board of the Episcopal Philanthropic Something-or-Other. He (and his wife) believe he could earn more at a rival law firm where there’s no territorial senior partner to impede his ascension to the top of the litigation department.

Cutler & Boone is a perfect fit for Niles. I need to believe he wouldn’t miss the possible conception of his child for a lesser law firm. Still, I have no idea how to act in this situation, so I perch uncomfortably on the edge of the sofa and pick up yesterday’s newspaper from the coffee table.

Niles disappears down the hall for almost forty-five minutes. No, it doesn’t just feel that way. What if he doesn’t emerge in time for his interview? If he does suffer from impotence or performance anxiety, I’m unconvinced that a stack of magazines featuring garishly made up plus sized women who enjoy each other will cure him. But what do I know?

I consult my watch again. If he misses his appointment at Cutler & Boone after all this I might cry. Carol will lose it and perhaps even fire me in her frustration. I’d be totally screwed, a pariah with no job, no reference, no life plan. I start to panic. Should I check on his progress? I could send a text reminding him of the time.
No
, the little voice in my head screeches.

Finally Niles emerges with the cup. He’s managed to lose the tasteful brown bag in which I delivered it.

“Susie said to tell you to put the sample up your shirt. It’s not good for it to go below body temperature.”

I suggested yesterday that perhaps Susie should carry her own damn semen. I was told that would be impossible; she had scheduled an acupuncture treatment to stimulate receptive energy in her womb or something like that.

Niles shoves the cup at me. I gingerly test that he’s fastened the lid securely. He waits expectantly. I un-tuck my blouse and slip the warm cup against my skin. It takes a phenomenal effort not to recoil. I know there’s a layer of medical grade plastic between me and the semen, but still. Couldn’t we have done this exercise last month, when we had that monster heat wave?

Niles, duly assured his seed won’t suffer frostbite, grabs his briefcase and we ride down the elevator in excruciating silence. His car service is waiting, but he doesn’t offer me, or his sperm, a lift, even though we’d pass the hospital on his way. Not that I want to spend more time with him. At least he’ll be at Cutler’s offices early.

Finally a cab stops and I slide in, cradling the cup like precious cargo. I’m afraid to take it out from under my shirt. What if they take its temperature at the clinic and find out I disregarded Susie’s orders?

Today unquestionably marks a new professional low. Still, I remind myself how grateful I was when Carol plucked me out of the gallerina job from hell some three plus years ago. After the insanity of the art world, there’s not much Carol can throw my way that I can’t handle. In retrospect, she probably knew all along that if I could handle my boss at the gallery, where she was a frequent customer, odds seemed good that I could hack it at Broadwick & Associates. And while Carol’s mercurial at best, at least she’s never punished me for rain on her birthday. Nor has she ever forced me to return a latte because it wasn’t frothy enough. Though I’m sure the thought crossed her mind after watching my former employer instruct me to do exactly that, on the fateful afternoon when Carol stomped into the gallery to pay six figures for an enormous orange monstrosity for her living room wall.

Given the state of the economy, I should be more thankful I have a job in the first place, and even more grateful that it’s an occasionally lucrative one. The phone doesn’t exactly ring off the hook with people wanting to hire me, like it does for rare superstars like Niles Townsend. But I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that I’m in stop and go traffic with his sperm up my shirt.

I try to distract myself by calculating my share of the commission in the event that the Cutler firm hires Niles at a million plus a year. It’s a masochistic pastime. Even if he gets through today, a hundred things could still cause the deal to implode. And even assuming I manage to earn this huge paycheck, most of it will have to be earmarked for rent. I’m still in denial about how much more expensive my life became the day Brendan, my former fiancé, moved out.

The cab lurches to a stop at a red light. The cup jabs against my stomach. I hold my breath as I double check the lid. I try to focus my mind’s eye on the Jimmy Choo boots Carol pointed out to me on one of our recent “motivational walks.” My boss adores material displays of success and expends a fair amount of energy trying to instill a similar ethic in all of us, so that we’ll need to work harder to feed our spending addictions.

We finally arrive at the hospital. The cabbie gives me a strange look as I extricate myself from the car without removing my hand from under my shirt.

The hospital’s elevator stops at almost every floor on the way up to the clinic on the 27th. I worry that the sperm might expire. When the receptionist finally whisks it away, I feel my whole body relax for the first time since yesterday afternoon.

It’s a temporary sensation. In the cab on the way back to work, I contemplate the sickening possibility that I may have gone through this exercise for nothing. What if Niles, traumatized by the morning’s events, bombs at his interview? It’s not a far fetched worry, considering how my luck’s been running lately.

A half hour later, I step off the office elevator at Broadwick & Associates to be greeted by Jessica, whose role here at the company is unclear, but who’s been with Carol since she started twenty years ago. Carol semi-affectionately refers to Jessica as the Town Crier, a moniker the latter almost eagerly lives up to. Jessica has a pretty face attached to a giraffe-like body. Her legs are too long for normal-sized clothes, so her pants always hit above her ankles. I wonder why she doesn’t wear more skirts.

“Someone’s got a secret admirer,” Jessica taunts in a playground voice. She’s pointing at a tasteful arrangement of pink roses on the reception desk and waving a florist’s card at my nose.

“Lucky Sibyl,” I reply, assuming she means the receptionist, a doe eyed twenty-two-year-old waif who garners more than her fair share of male attention.

“Not Sibyl,” Jessica laughs. “You! Those are for you. And just look at the card.” She hands it over. “Someone wants to take you on a da-ate.”

I’m starting to seethe. “Who told you it was okay to read my mail?”

“It wasn’t exactly addressed to you,” Jessica pouts, and crosses her arms over her chest.

I read the envelope, and she’s not lying. It’s addressed to “The Beautiful Woman Whose Desk Faces Out the Fifth Floor Window (Madison side).” Unless the sender’s blind, that has to mean me. The only other person whose desk faces out that window is Marvin, a middle-aged recovering lawyer with a growing paunch and a shrinking hairline.

I tear it open. “You’ve been looking sad lately. Drink? P.S. I’m across the street, one floor up from you.” I flip the card over, hoping for more, but there’s no name, just a 212 phone number.

I can’t help it. I dash across the office to my desk and peer out. There’s no one in the windows across the way.

Of course it’s possible the florist made a mistake. Maybe the flowers and note were intended for someone else entirely. Somewhere, down the block, two nearly star-crossed souls have missed each other due to a mislabeled delivery. Some hapless man who made this bold gesture keeps pacing to his window, wondering why the object of his affections isn’t even bothering to look at him. He’s dejected, then despondent, then enraged. Maybe he’ll get a gun and mow her down for ignoring him. I’ll read about it on the front page of the
Post
, and somehow it’ll be my fault, because I took delivery of roses intended for some other woman.

Jessica is squinting out my window like a sailor scanning the horizon for land. She’s on her tiptoes, which makes her pants rise even farther up her calves. Finally satisfied that I wasn’t lying when I said he wasn’t there, she demands, “Are you going to go out with him?”

“I think it might be just the thing, you know, to get you out of your funk,” adds Marvin, who lives for office gossip. “Are you sure you’ve never seen him?”

“I spend most of my time looking down at the street. And I’m not in a funk.”

“Sure you are,” Marvin cajoles, and the others nod their agreement. “Not that I can blame you. Anyone whose fiancé calls off the Wedding of the Year with less than a month to spare is entitled to a bit of a sulk. So are you going to go out with him?”

“Let’s just watch and see if the mystery man appears,” I say, with as much authority as I can muster. While I want to press my nose to the glass and stare up at the windows of 749 Madison until I spot signs of life (preferably hot, masculine life), I force myself into my chair, and try to look busy.

Of course I can’t concentrate. My right brain is galloping at breakneck pace to places it has no business going and my left brain is powerless to stop it. What if everything, including my humiliation at the hands of Brendan, happens for a reason? Maybe I was supposed to waste my twenties in a holding pattern so I could meet the man of my dreams by virtue of coincidental office geography on this exact day. Maybe I needed the emotional scarring of a cancelled wedding to prove my worthiness for real love. I wonder what he’s like. What does he want from life? Maybe we’re each others’ long missing puzzle pieces, meant to fit together. The little voice in my head shrieks at me to pull myself out of my death spiral into fantasy land and Get. A. Grip. She tells me he is probably horribly flawed. Socially inept. Whiny. Blighted by bad breath, ear hair and stooped posture. He’s damaged, desperate and eager to blame a woman for his sexual deficiencies.

No. Life cannot possibly be so unfair that it would charge back and kick me again just as I’m working to pick myself up and dust myself off. I’ve been a good person. I don’t deserve more rotten love luck. Isn’t it enough that I got dumped a week before my wedding? Or that my first and only post-break-up Match date failed to mention he was quadriplegic—after he told me he enjoyed skiing and hiking,
and
arranged to meet me at a basement restaurant with no handicap access? Instead of bringing me out of my slump, that date sent me home panicked that I am a horrible person because I had the audacity to think, that no matter how angry the poor guy was at the world, I deserved a heads up on his condition.

I tell the little voice that there’s no harm in nurturing a little hope. That shuts her up.

Oh please, I beg whatever higher power determines such matters, please let him be at least a little cute and a lot nice.

He doesn’t appear. Not during the lunch I scarf at my computer, pretending to work, but stealing furtive glances across the street and up. Not in the tiresome afternoon hours that drag by.

With every passing minute in which the mystery man fails to show himself, I become increasingly convinced there’s been a mistake. The flowers must have been meant for someone else, in some other window, on some other block. But a small, okay, maybe a not-so-small, part of me still wants a glimpse of this secret admirer. Not that I’m even considering his offer. He could be a serial killer. Normal guys don’t send roses to women they don’t know. And even if they do, things like this only end well in the movies.

But curiosity is natural, right? I’d be a freak if I weren’t a little interested. I just want to see him, and then I’ll get right back to work. I congratulate myself for suppressing the urge to call my best friend Angela and hash out all the possible outcomes. When you work in a bullpen, everyone knows your business. You don’t need to go broadcasting your innermost thoughts for public consumption by making unnecessary personal phone calls.

Still, I check my make-up at fifteen minute intervals for the rest of the day, and run a brush through my hair way more frequently than usual. If my secret admirer decides to appear, I might as well look nice. I kill way too much time alternately staring out the window and at my own reflection. I hate how my make-up mirror magnifies every pore, but in the good news column, I’ve always loved my round blue eyes. Plus my hair is looking good these days, despite Carol’s frequent snarky remarks about it. Maybe the expensive salon I now patronize on Angela’s advice isn’t a luxury after all. Her genius of a hairdresser convinced me to add subtle layers, because “they would emphasize my heart shaped face and good cheekbones.” He was right, and my new haircut is the most flattering one I’ve ever had. Too bad it doesn’t hide my nose. It’s what I would change about myself if I could transform one thing. I’ve never liked it. I think it resembles one of those bad early-eighties ski slope nose jobs. Lucky me: I was born this way. I didn’t pay a one-trick surgeon thousands of dollars for the effect.