8
“So, how long have you two been married?” a very old man with a neon-blue mohawk asked us. I think he was the owner of the shop.
“We’re not,” I said, looking at Jack and laughing. He smiled back at me, tugging at the kilt he had just tried on.
“If we’re not,” Jack whispered a little too close to my ear, “then how’d you manage to get me out of my pants?”
“Like it was difficult,” I said back, pushing him away from me, still looking at him in the mirror. I was trying not to stare too hard at his bare legs.
Stop staring at Jack’s legs.
I instead focused upon the fact that the firm “frowns upon” (read: fires) associates who date one another. Ever since those two summer associates got caught in a compromising position in the cafeteria late one night and that lovely rumor made its way into the
And this is the year Jack is up for partner. Must try not to get Jack fired in the year he is up for partner.
Stop staring at Jack’s legs.
Must remember that Jack is totally on the rebound. Thus, even if you started dating Jack and got yourself fired from the firm, it would still never last. It never lasts when you’re the rebound girl.
Although rebound sex is hot. Yum. Stop thinking about sex! Must remember that even if you had totally hot rebound sex and ended up dating Jack and getting fired, you would find yourself three and a half years later without a wedding date set. You’d have your heart broken again, but with the added bonus of also collecting unemployment.
As I puzzled over how much one could reasonably expect to make on unemployment, I watched Jack pull the kilt down over and over in a vain attempt to make it longer. Try as he might, and my goodness, he was trying, the kilt did not get any longer.
Stop staring at Jack’s legs!
Remember you are trying to get back together with Douglas. This task will be infinitely more difficult if you start dating Jack. Especially since Douglas knows all about your history with Jack.
“It’s crap,” Jack said, touching the kilt’s fabric as he looked at himself in the mirror.
“But it looks great,” I said, smoothing it out.
“Why are we doing this again?” he asked me for the fortieth time in forty-eight hours.
“You are doing this because it will be the role of your lifetime and any good actor worth his salt knows how to do accents. I’m doing it because I’m trying to keep my dignity ever-so-slightly intact.”
“And are you doing that?” he asked.
“Anyway,” I said, ever so deftly changing the conversation, “it’ll be like a big real-life acting workshop for you, with art totally imitating life, to boot.”
“Did you answer my question?”
“I also think that you really need to spend some quality time with Marcus. I mean, Vanessa is one of your best friends and you barely know her husband.”
“
“Are you two finding everything all right?” the man with the mohawk asked us.
“Everything’s fine,” Jack assured him.
“You two really make a delightful couple,” he said. Even with the fluorescent mohawk, he still looked like every other old man I’ve met. He was beginning to remind me of Mr. Rosenblatt, my grandmother’s “friend.” Though I was twenty-five years old at the time, my mother was afraid to tell me that my grandmother had found someone new after my grandfather died, so she called old Irving Rosenblatt my grandmother’s “friend.” Or maybe it was just because she just didn’t want me to feel bad that my grandmother had found a single man faster than I had.
“When are you popping the question?” Mr. Mohawk whispered to Jack a little too loudly.
“Just as soon as I think she’ll say yes,” Jack said, eyes on me. He wasn’t smiling, but I’m sure he was joking. He had just broken off an engagement six months ago, and since then, he’s always had a million girls hanging around him. He’s even more of a cad than Douglas! Well, maybe that’s unfair — Jack had never been living with one woman and engaged to another at the same time. As far as I know.
I don’t know why I ever even told Douglas the story about what happened between Jack and me; it only served to fuel the superiority complex Douglas had over Jack — he had succeeded in winning me over where Jack had failed — but I think that at the time, I was trying to best Douglas’s “wildest place you ever had sex” story. Douglas’s was in the bathroom at a wedding at the Rainbow Room with a bridesmaid he had just met. I now realize that for him, a black-tie affair means easy access.
Since Jack and I never slept together, my story was a bit anticlimactic, but it was a lame attempt to show Douglas that I, too, had had my share of wild spontaneous moments.
Jack and I were on our way back from depositions in South Carolina, racing to the airport in a rental car that smelled like cheap cologne and cigarettes. I had the windows down and was breathing in as much fresh suburban air as I could before getting onto the plane. We had just had an amazing day — Jack had gotten all of the testimony he needed from the witness and some he didn’t even expect the witness to give up. At lunch, we had called the partner in charge of the case, who was elated, telling Jack that his performance would get the firm’s membership talking about his partnership prospects.
It was after six o’clock, and we were rushing to catch the last flight of the evening out of Columbia, South Carolina. Columbia, from what I had seen in the twenty-four hours prior, was not exactly the type of place you wanted to stay any longer than you had to. When we’d checked into our hotel the night before, the receptionist said to Jack and me “I’ve never met a Jew before,” as easily as if she’d said, “I’ve never met an alien before,” or, even closer still, “I’ve never met the devil before.” When you live in New York, you don’t realize that for other parts of the country, that can be a perfectly acceptable topic of conversation.
The traffic was behaving for quite some time on the expressway and it felt like nothing could bring us down. Nothing, that is, until we hit the approach to the airport. About three miles from the airport, the traffic came to a standstill. An absolute dead halt. We tried to keep our cool for a while, him — trying to convince me that the traffic would break any second and that we would make our flight, me — playing with the radio, trying to find “happy” music that would make us forget the traffic altogether. We talked about taking shortcuts, experimenting with the service road, and that seemed to give us hope for a while. Except for the fact that we had no idea where we were and couldn’t afford to waste any time getting lost.
I finally found a classic rock station that was playing one Doors song after the other. I let it play. The people in the car next to ours yelled over to us to find out what station we were listening to. I told them and they tuned into the Doors also. They got out of their car and started dancing along to “Hello, I Love You.” I turned to look at Jack but he was unamused. He was on his cell phone trying to get through to the airline. Jack hated to work a second longer than he had to and was dead set on getting us home that night. I myself had already given up on any thoughts of getting home that night, consoling myself with the fact that I would be billing the client for all of my time. Other cars were listening to traffic radio and screaming reports out their windows (“Jackknifed tractor-trailer one mile up — sounds like we’ll be here awhile — anyone got a Snickers?”)
“L.A. Woman” came on the radio and I started to dance in my seat. All of the cars around us had emptied out and their owners were milling about the expressway, meeting other drivers and sitting on each other’s hoods. It was already dark. The cars were all in park, and some were even starting to turn their headlights off.
“I’m getting out,” I said to Jack and hopped on the hood of our rental car. It was the end of March and one
