Over time, she’d gotten more comfortable confiding in him. It seemed that, somewhere along the line, she’d stopped talking to straight men like she did her gay and women friends. It surprised her that she and John could talk openly like this together, without worrying how their personal allure might be compromised by these unsightly feelings. Oddly enough, the opposite seemed to be happening. Sometimes she was so excited to see him in the morning that she didn’t even get angry at the cat for its noise. She recognized that something familiar and yet new was happening to her. Lust and admiration and pure affection were all converging in one horrible, irresistible package. And oh, he was such a bad, bad bet. Formerly happily married, forced into a separation he didn’t want. So adrift, so rudderless. That boat could end up on just about any old shore.
AT THE END OF HER FIRST MONTH OF UNEMPLOYMENT she was no closer to finding a job. Between the morning paper and the puzzle, the cat, her friends, and the problems she was having with her computer, she hadn’t even produced a decent résumé and cover letter. How did people work at home before the Internet? she wondered, after logging on one morning to find thirty-two new e-mails. Presumably, they must have actually worked. Pru had her hands full just maintaining her relationships. Kate McCabe was keeping her busy analyzing the actions of the unattainable man she had her eye on, and the unavailable men eyeing her. Kate told her everything they said, and Pru and she then parsed every word and nuance to see if any intent or purpose could be reliably surmised. Pru was also in a rapid-fire e-mail group with McKay and three other friends from college. They all had desk jobs, and kept a constant flow of messages circulating, most of them full of nonsense, LOLs, private jokes a million years old. Then there was Patsy, who needed to talk about the progression of her long-distance relationship with Jacob, which did indeed seem to be progressing, mainly by phone. They talked so long and late into the night that they kept falling asleep on the phone together. Jacob was still The One, Patsy maintained. Her soul mate, the yang to her yin, the fizz in her gin, the Brad to her Angelina, the moon to her ocean. She announced they were contemplating matching tattoos, “our names, in each other’s handwriting!”
“Wait,” said Pru, “your name in his handwriting?”
“No—his name on me in his handwriting, and mine on him with his.”
“Your own name on yourself? I don’t get it.”
“No—my name in my handwriting— Oh, shut up.”
And, of course, there was Pru’s secret hobby, which she came across by accident one day when she mistakenly typed “Couch leather bag” in the search box on eBay. She found several “Couch” bags for sale, and although she wasn’t sure of the ethics of the situation, placed a bid, and won it, for ten dollars. Surely it wasn’t her fault if some eBay seller had failed to carefully proof-read her listing?
After her e-mail, she opened her to-do list and stared at it. The to-do list had by now taken on a life of its own. Usually, just looking at it was enough to discourage her for the rest of the day. She’d organized her tasks into categories and subcategories, having spent many hours scouring the Internet for appropriate kinds of list-organizing software and testing out each one. Each task was color-coded and prioritized, and with each passing day that she didn’t actually do any of the things on the to-do list, the longer it became, and the more her anxiety increased, the heavier that bucket in her arms became, and the more often she found herself wondering about the possibility of supporting herself by reselling the misspelled designer wear she found on eBay.
She still hadn’t taken Rudy’s cat back to the Humane Society. She wasn’t sure what was stopping her. Certainly, it wasn’t because the cat had become any easier to live with. If anything, the situation was so entirely out of hand that she hardly knew what to do. For one thing, he had begun eating everything in sight. He would emerge from his hiding place while Pru was out of the house and eat all of the canned cat food she’d left for him that morning, and anything of hers she might have left out, too. An open sleeve of saltines. A packet of cream cheese. Entire loaves of bread. One night, when she got home from the Hilton on P Street, where she was now stealing her swims, she found a bag of bagels ripped open and half devoured on the kitchen floor. There were crumbs all over the floor, and somehow in the process a cup of coffee dregs had been spilled over the stack of bills she’d neatly piled on the counter, waiting to be paid.
Even worse, her apartment was beginning to smell like the litter box. Actually, it smelled of a cat not using its litter box. She could smell it as soon as she stepped off the elevator. She kept her hat
