The Way Life Should Be (4 page)

“So how was your trip?” he asks, and I say, at the same time, “God, I’ve been so rude! You
sailed
here. How was it?”

He raises his eyebrows, seemingly amused. He tells me about his voyage, using words like knots and wind velocity and aft, the basic gist being that the trip was fine, if bumpy, and getting into the harbor was a little complicated, maneuvering around all the big boats, and that he’d never actually sailed such a distance alone before, but it was a good thing to do and now he could really use a drink. Should we go somewhere for a beer?

I’m listening closely but only catching every other word. Instead I’m noticing how his jeans are slightly worn on the front of his thighs and his forearms are evenly tanned, like a perfectly toasted marshmallow. I look into his eyes, piercing and blue. He’s chewing gum, spearmint, I think, and I listen for the hard snaps between words, inhale the waft of mint in the air between us. It’s a manly way to chew gum, a Kevin Costner–in–
Bull Durham
way.

A man like this does not, I think, exist in New York.

We go for a drink at a pub called the Irish Nickel and sit in a corner booth and I tell him about the mimes and jesters and the planning for this overblown, silly event and the crazy French artist whose canvases are startling and fresh. He wants to know all about living in the city—the dirt, the crime, the congestion—and I find, as I always do when encountering people who’ve never been to New York, that I am caught off guard by both the truths and mistruths in the stereotypes. Yes, New York is dirty, and crime occurs, and apartments are small, and restaurants are crowded. But I also tell him about what it’s like to walk along West End Avenue at dusk when no one else is on the street, and the surprising wilderness of the Ramble in Central Park, and the quiet civility of most New Yorkers, who simply want to exist in peace. I can’t figure out whether he is genuinely curious or nodding along out of politeness. Or something else.

After several beers—he convinces me to try Bar Harbor ale, a beer on tap, which has a tangy, earthy flavor I could get used to—I’m more interested in the “something else” than in what I’m saying. We’ve been talking for two hours, and now all I can think about is how nice it would be to kiss him, to feel his rough stubble on my cheek, his wind-chapped lips on mine. Our conversation slows. I sense his hand on my thigh.

His hand. On my thigh.

The beer, his hand, no dinner…somehow I end up on his boat, clutching the wooden banister as I sway behind him down the narrow stairs to the cabin. I pull my shirt over my head in the moonlight. He slips a finger under the low waistband of my skirt, runs his hand up my side, traces the underwire of my bra, slips the clasp, bends down and runs his lips lightly along my hardened nipple. His breath is warm and dry. His touch is tender; he knows just how fast to move. When I stretch out
alongside his warm mammal self, I press the bottoms of my toes against the tops of his, standing prone on his feet, the parts of us joining like a puzzle.

My eyes open.
It’s dark, and for a moment I think I’m in a hotel room with the shades drawn. Then I feel beneath me the pull of the water, the slight turn of the hull, the vertiginous sensation of rocking in darkness. I see the disheveled head on the pillow beside me, a slope of shoulder. I lift my wrist and turn it slightly to squint at my watch: 6:25.

I’m supposed to meet the Byemores and the Biddle-Smyths at the Fogbottom Gallery downtown at nine o’clock sharp.

Rich doesn’t move, doesn’t open his eyes as I extract myself from the bed, shimmying around him to creep to the floor. The bed is flat against the curve of the boat, so snug that you can barely sit up. It would be the perfect bed to stay in all day, emerging up the stairs into twilight and cocktails.

Now that I see the cabin in the daylight—or as much daylight as you can get through narrow, foot-tall windows with blackout curtains—it’s a little dingy. A bachelor pad. There’s a row of empty amber beer bottles lined up along the window near the sink, which is full of Hot Pocket and American cheese wrappers.

I have to pee really badly, but don’t want to. The toilet, behind a flimsy door, is right beside his sleeping head. Last night after peeing I couldn’t figure out how to flush, whether to push or pull or pump, and he had to do it for me. I’ll say one thing—I thought I’d never experience a living space smaller than a New York studio apartment.

Quietly I pull out my clothes, my crumpled green skirt and smoke-smelling black top, both as unappealing the day after as a hangover. I step into my slingbacks, and they flap on the floor.
Rich stirs—a slumbering giant; I’m the damsel trying to escape before he awakens. I’ve already started up the stairs when he says, “Hey.”

“Hey,” I say, frozen halfway up the ladder.

He props himself on an elbow. “Where you going?”

“My meeting’s at nine,” I say.

He squints at the clock and falls back on the bed as if exhausted by the effort. “It’s six thirty. Come back here.”

“I can’t,” I say. “I’ve got to get to the hotel and take a shower.”

“No you don’t.”

I laugh. What?

“Come here,” he says.

And I do.

A few days ago I went to a fortune-teller on West Fourth during my lunch hour. She examined my wrist for a moment, then raised her eyebrows and shook her head. “Big change coming,” she said. “I don’t know when exactly, but I predict soon.” That evening in my apartment I ordered moo shu from the Chinese take-out place downstairs. My fortune read “Of all forms of caution, caution in love is the most fatal.”

These messages, taken together, seem too significant to dismiss.

For several years in my midtwenties, I went out with a cellist named Lewis who eventually broke my heart. We’d met in a normal, old-world way: at a dinner party hosted by mutual friends. Lewis was slight and intense, with dark wiry hair and mud-puddle eyes. I appreciated his long musician fingers and martini-dry wit; he appreciated my rent-controlled sublet and homemade marinara. And maybe a few other things. But he left me for a violist even slighter and paler than he.

It took a while to get over him. I dated a succession of lawyers and bond traders who had in common an unapologetic cal
lowness, an adolescent charm. For a while I found these qualities hard to resist, but as the years passed and the charm was revealed, more often than not, to be little more than arrogant self-regard, it became decidedly less appealing.

I have always been an optimist, teased by my friends for my tendency to look on the bright side, but in the past few years I’ve begun to feel the insidious embrace of cynicism, to seek comfort in the warmth of that cloak. I fear that my capacity for joy is dimming, that my standards have become impossibly high, that I am peremptorily dismissive, inventing facts to build a case against someone, like a corrupt prosecutor. And for what? Sometimes I wake up on a Saturday morning appalled by my own sovereignty in my life, at the authority I have to do whatever I want with my hours, my furniture, my Netflix queue. Every decision I make is determined solely by the spark and the limitations of my own perspective.

I wonder if it’s my own fault—it must be, at least partially—that I have not found the man whose mysteries I want to unlock. I have not found a man who can unlock mine.

Until—perhaps—

Gasp.

This man, right at this moment, is unlocking my mysteries, and, as it turns out, he is quite adept at it.

So it’s 8:14 and I’m still on the boat,
naked again, with a hickey on my neck, behind my ear (a hickey! I’d never let a guy from New York give me a hickey), and sticky thighs, and if I’m going to make it to this meeting (he’s whispering in my ear, “Tell them you’re sick, tell them you got lost”) I have to leave right this instant.

For a moment, lulled in the berth, I’m swaying along with the boat, Rich’s arm behind my head, thinking, what the hell,
I’ll tell them I’m sick, when the specter of Mary Quince, like the Wicked Witch in the crystal ball, flashes through my brain. I sit upright.

“I have to go,” I say, and as the words come out of my mouth I know that this time I mean it. I climb on top of Rich and kiss him, run my tongue over his chapped lips, and he slaps my butt and says, “Go.”

As soon as I leave, I know he’ll be sailing back up to Maine. Later today I’ll get on a train to New York, and by nightfall there will be five hundred miles between us. This boat will seem like a distant mirage, conjured out of dreams.

As I walk along the dock to the stone steps to the street, the harbor is fresh and wet and beautiful. Large white sailboats rise magnificently from the dark water; gulls caw and men call to each other, and all I can think is how different from my life this is. As I often do when I see people living lives no New Yorker I know would dream of, I’m struck by the freedom of their choices. Are these people happy living like this, so far away from the center of everything? Could I be?

Thinking about all of this, I feel a sudden rush of anticipation, an abstract yearning. Unfamiliar as it is, I do remember it. I experienced this feeling as a little girl the night before Christmas, and later when I was applying to college, and even later when I moved to New York. It’s a longing for things to come, possibilities unfolding before me, the charged expectation of change.

CHAPTER 4

Mary Quince is standing in the middle of my office with her hands
clasped together, beaming. “Susie Biddle-Smyth just called,” she says. “Apparently they were quite impressed with you.”

Indeed, the Byemores and Biddle-Smyths seemed not to notice my unkempt hair and generally less-than-fresh appearance, my crumpled skirt and the faint odor—mostly expunged by sea air—of bar smoke and god-knows-what-else. Ordinarily I might have been intimidated by their patrician New England formality, interpreting their aloofness as condescension. But because I wasn’t nervous—in fact, barely cared—about what they thought of me, I felt relaxed and comfortable. I listened intently and nodded thoughtfully and asked the right questions (every now and then, for a little private frisson, replaying highlights from the evening before in my mind). I sold them on our plans for the gala, stressing the gaiety of it, the sense of excitement building around Zoë Devereux’s exhibition. I knew that these were the kind of people who go to gala after gala; they wanted to be wowed, and that morning I was just the person to wow them.

“They said you were—what were Susie’s words?—‘an absolute pleasure to work with.’ And just now the Biddle-Smyths have agreed to underwrite twenty-five thousand dollars of our
cost for the event up-front. I can’t tell you how long that proposal has been on the table. We might need to move you to Development!” She laughs; that part is clearly a joke.

“That’s great,” I say, taking a sip of coffee. What joy, to be so effective and yet care so little.

For the next few hours I work on details of the gala—the catering menu, the centerpieces—but I’m keeping one eye on my e-mail in-box. Nothing from Maine. Finally, I can’t stand it anymore, and I send one line:

Hope you made it home in one piece
.

And then I wait. Jim Metcalf, who works in Acquisitions, stops in to discuss a memo, and for once I welcome the intrusion. But when I ask him to have a seat, and then inquire about his weekend, he acts flustered. In all the time we’ve worked together, we’ve never actually had a personal conversation, and it dawns on me that he may interpret my sudden interest in him as romantic.

So I begin a sentence with “My boyfriend,” which, I soon see, is a mistake.

“
You
have a
boyfriend
?” he asks, as if I’ve just said I have a pet shark.

“Umm-hmm.”

“Here? In New York?”

“Uh, no. He lives in Boston.” (Maine being too specific, too far, too inviting of questions.)

“Well. Huh. So were you visiting him up there just now?”

Oh dear. That wasn’t very smart. “No. He was on a—business trip.”

“What does he do?”

“Uh—er—he…runs his own business.” God. Must get out of this.

“Really? Interesting. What kind of business?”

All right, enough. I flap my hand. “Oh, you know. Business. Money—whatever.” Just at that moment I hear a faint click on my screen and there he is, MaineCatch, ensnared in my in-box. “Oh,” I say, in my best I’m-a-busy-woman-with-work-to-do voice, “I’m sorry, Jim. I actually need to get this.”

“Yes, by all means,” he says, stumbling backward out my door. “Well, ’bye,” he mutters, ducking down the hall.

I close my door, open my e-mail, and find this:

Life was smooth sailing

Till Angela came along.

Her port is real far.

I feel a surge of happiness.

It sure is,
I write back.
When are you coming down here to visit me?

When are you moving to Maine?
he blips seconds later.

My hands are frozen over the keyboard. Then I type,
Is that an invitation?

Though I’m sitting at my desk for three more hours, he doesn’t write back before I leave for the day. It doesn’t matter. I don’t really mind. Maybe it’s the kind of question best left hanging.

He never does answer the question,
but he sends roses. Twelve thawed roses swathed in baby’s breath that wilt and die within three days, but roses nonetheless. He writes five more haikus, fills my in-box with flirty messages. As the date of the gala ap
proaches, I am deep in a romantic fog, just barely managing to hold it together enough to keep Mary Quince happy. Since my triumph in Boston she has cut me some slack, as if she thinks I am actually an adult capable of making intelligent decisions. Predictably, I have taken full advantage of this.

Now it’s the day of the gala and, like a straying boyfriend, I’m doing my best to look passionately committed. It’s eight thirty in the morning, and the museum is quiet. I’m the only one here except the security guard. The museum is closed to the public today; Mary Quince and her small army of worker bees will show up soon, but at the moment I have the place to myself.