“Tell me the truth, now,” Patsy said loudly, in her stern, motherly way. “Were you even in love with Rudy Fisch?”
“Of course.” She didn’t want to hear again what a loser Rudy was. She thought maybe if she kept her answers short, Patsy would grow bored and eventually stop.
“See? I couldn’t even tell. Okay, so what did you love about him?”
“I don’t know. He made me laugh.”
“He made you laugh,” Patsy repeated flatly. “He was squirrely, and short, and needy. But he made you laugh.”
“You don’t understand. I really love to laugh. Anyway, he wasn’t so short.”
“What else?”
Pru thought for a moment. What she wanted to say—that she never worried about him leaving her—seemed ridiculous now, in light of his doing exactly that. “It just made a lot of sense,” she said finally. “That’s all.”
“You are all this,” Patsy said, circling Pru’s head with her palm. “And no this,” indicating Pru’s torso.
“Oh, I’m plenty of that,” Pru said. Patsy didn’t have to do a thing to keep slender, but Pru didn’t find it that easy to stay at her ideal weight. It was easier without Rudy. Even though he was always dieting, they spent a good deal of their time together focused on food. What to eat, what not to eat, where to eat. Another bad sign, she thought. How hadn’t she noticed this before?
“You can’t think about love, Prudy,” Patsy was saying. “You think too much. You probably made a list to help you decide if you were in love with him or not.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Pru was startled. Was she really so predictable?
“You wouldn’t need it, if you’d learn to listen to your body. The body knows. Your body decides these things, not your head. Your toes tell you when you’re in love. Your pelvic floor tells you.”
“A little louder?” Pru said. The man in front of them had turned his head partway around.
Patsy ignored her. “You have to learn to go with your gut. Why, within two minutes of meeting a guy, I can tell you if I’m going to go to bed with him, fall in love with him, or have nothing to do with him.”
The man in front of them turned around fully now, to look at Patsy. Pru saw a boyish face, a sly grin. Patsy stared right back at him.
“Hello,” he said pleasantly. “Let me know when you decide what you’re going to do with me, okay?”
“It hasn’t been two minutes yet, has it?” said Patsy, archly.
The man looked at his watch. “I can wait.”
“Just because I know doesn’t mean I’m going to tell you,” said Patsy.
Pru saw plenty of guys around D.C. like this one—handsome, well-dressed, confident. It was a type she particularly didn’t like, the Ivy League frat boy with thick hair and good connections. No doubt he’d been handed a position in one of the big law firms by one of his daddy’s friends. She didn’t think he’d be Patsy’s type, either. She couldn’t see one single tattoo, for example.
The man turned to look at Pru, too, and she wondered whether he saw what she saw, reflected back in the Metro car’s window: the same face in two vastly different orientations. Pru’s stark and unframed because her hair, as usual, was pulled back in a smooth ponytail; Patsy’s surrounded by the wisps and tendrils escaping a knot that was secured with chopsticks. Pru’s face smooth and bland, unadorned; Patsy’s punctuated by the diamond stud that drew attention to her pretty nose.
The man was now telling Patsy that she looked like Heather Graham, and before Pru knew it, they were having a full-blown conversation about the state of independent filmmaking. Pru watched their reflections in the window, thinking about what Patsy had said about her gut. She didn’t really know what that meant. Her gut wasn’t really something she consulted for reliable information. More often than not, her body disappointed her, with its bulges, its smells, its refusal to conform to the way she saw herself. It was the dumber, ruder, embarrassing part of her. With its desires, its fears, its needs, her body was hardly a source of trustworthy information.
When they reached Foggy Bottom station, Pru watched as a young man stood to give his seat to a young woman struggling with a baby stroller. Ever since the encounter with her evil pregnant doppelgänger, as McKay called the woman, Pru had been seeing babies everywhere she went. There were babies riding in strollers on Columbia Road, trundling on stout legs in the little park next to her building, nursing in the café where she met Fiona for coffee. It made her think of a line from the book she’d read to Annali so many times that she had it memorized by now: Fat babies, thin babies, small babies, tall babies, winter and spring babies, summer and fall babies. Everywhere babies! Even the celebrities had babies, as she saw from the tabloids at the checkout line at Safeway. As if they were as easily obtained as the ubiquitous Kate Spade handbag.
Patsy and the man were still chatting away. Well, they’d lose him at the next stop. After shopping, she’d take Patsy to the upstairs restaurant they liked, the one that overlooked H Street, and they’d look at the lights of Chinatown and drink mai tais. Then on Saturday they’d hit the Smithsonian museums. They’d have to get there early, since she’d heard there were lines for the de Kooning show at the National Gallery of Art. Saturday night, they’d have dinner at City and see what was playing at the Uptown; and, on Sunday, a long, chatty breakfast with McKay and Bill someplace in Dupont Circle, before Patsy’s flight home. Before they’d gotten off the train, Patsy had given her number to the man in
