NINE
The next time I got invited to Nevertheless, the shadowy cabal in charge went through Raf. He called me one evening not long after the equal pay talk. In the intervening days, I’d been on high alert, looking for that unfamiliar barista each time I went to BitterSweet, slowing down whenever a beautiful woman passed me on the sidewalk in case she had a message for me. I’d even started checking all my receipts for hidden codes, like a Very Normal Person.
At one point, I caught the eye of a stylish woman on the train. I gave her a tentative smile. She stared at me, opened her mouth as if on the verge of saying something, then shut it again. As the train slowed down in the station, I made my way to her side through the hordes of commuters. “Do you have something to say to me?” I asked her in a low voice, not looking directly at her.
“You have lettuce in your teeth,” she said.
When Raf called, I was home, vegging out on my bed and scrolling through pictures online of cats up for adoption, trying to decide if now was the right time to get one. Probably not. I had to vacate the house soon, giving it up to the yuppie couple who had bought it, and I had no idea where I was going to go next.
When Raf’s name popped up on my phone, a knot formed in my stomach. It was prime restaurant hours. Why would he be calling me now? Oh God, had something bad happened to him, or a member of his family? Raf had recently sent his parents on a multiweek cruise, and all sorts of terrible things could happen on cruises. This is one of the extra fun byproducts of your mother slowly dying—you get a kind of PTSD about phone calls at weird times. Nobody’s calling you just to say hi or tell you they love you. They’re calling with bad news.
“Are you okay?” I asked when I picked up the phone.
“Yeah, just busy,” he said, and I exhaled. “I can only talk for a minute, but I had to tell you: this woman just came back to the kitchen—she’d asked to compliment the chef, and she was at a table that spent a shit-ton of money, so we had to let her.”
“Of course.”
“Anyway, she said nice things about the ropa vieja, which was good, because we had a mix-up with our meat supplier and I had to do things differently, so I was kinda worried it would be an off night.”
“Um, congratulations?” I said. “I’m happy for you.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Uh, but then she said, ‘Maybe you could come over and make it for me privately sometime,’ so I told her that I had a girlfriend—”
“Girlfriend, huh?” I teased. “I didn’t realize that we’d defined the relationship.”
“Well, yeah,” he said, stammering a bit. “If we’re doing this fake-dating thing, we’ve got to be convincing. We grew up as close family friends, so I don’t think we would just start hooking up. If we were going to take the chance of screwing up our friendship, we would have to really feel . . . serious about each other, right?”
“True,” I said. “Dammit, that’s such a good-boyfriend thing to say. Now I’m extra sorry I cock-blocked you with this rich ropa vieja woman. Was she gorgeous?”
“Yeah. But that’s not the point. After I told her I had a girlfriend, she said, all quiet, ‘Tell Jillian same time, same place, Monday night.’ And then before I could say anything else, she just walked away. I assume she meant you. I don’t know any other Jillians that are doing weird secretive stuff right now.”
“Yes!” I said, and did a victory dance in my bedroom, accidentally knocking over a lamp.
“Okay, so that makes sense to you?” he asked.
“Perfect sense. Thanks, Raf,” I said. I heard a crash in the kitchen behind him, and a muted swear word.
“Damn, I gotta go.”
“You’re a gem,” I said. “Call me tomorrow? Or come by the bar anytime I’m working a shift. I owe you free drinks in perpetuity.”
“Yeah yeah,” he said, and hung up.
I sat down on my bed, shaking my head at the brazenness of it all. There was something incredibly powerful in the way this random woman had turned an important man into a mere messenger. Half of me wanted Nevertheless’s unpredictable invite system to go on forever just to see what they would come up with next. And half of me had been ready for the gimmicks to end yesterday. Because honestly, it was rude. What if I had other plans? I was just supposed to drop everything in my life for them? Sure, I personally had no pressing social activities and no important commitments. (Luckily the owners of the place where I’d picked up my bartending shifts were used to employing actors and musicians who had to swap hours because of last-minute opportunities all the time.) But for all Nevertheless knew, I could be very busy and popular! Did Nevertheless do this for their businesswomen and models too, expecting them to just reschedule a photoshoot or an important phone call with Tokyo for the privilege of being led blindly down the street like a pig to slaughter? Maybe they did, and everyone wanted to be a part of it so much that they moved shit around.
I pictured my new friend Libby, beaming in the clubhouse. For Nevertheless, she’d reschedule anything, from a meeting of the board for her water company to an appointment with New York’s most exclusive gynecologist. Shaking my head at the foolishness of people, I marked my calendar.
TEN
So at 7:59 p.m. on Monday I was back on the corner of Perry and Greenwich, waiting to be blindfolded. A different young woman came to meet me but
