“No can do,” he says. “I like trees and, you know, clean air.”
I roll my eyes because I know he is full of it—Scottie’s idea of outdoorsy is sitting on a dock with his toes in the water, whereas I actually like camping and hiking and swimming. If anything, he’s the one who should be living in the city, and I should be out in the woods, writing in solitude.
“Just visit soon,” I say. “I miss you.”
“I miss you more.”
* * *
—
That night, I have trouble falling asleep, feeling unusually contemplative even for a Sunday night. I think about Matthew and Grant, of course, but also my friendship with Scottie, going all the way back to elementary school. I think of how we used to hang out in my bedroom, listening to our favorite records while we flipped through Tiger Beat and Teen Beat magazines. That was before I knew Scottie was gay—before he knew he was gay, for that matter—although his obsession with Andrew McCarthy should have been a tip-off. (St. Elmo’s Fire and Pretty in Pink were his two favorite movies.)
I think about our transition from childhood to early adolescence, when we stopped calling our time together “playing” and started referring to it as “hanging.” Incidentally this coincided with our parents’ collective and awkward decree that it was no longer “appropriate” for us to be in each other’s bedrooms, all four of them convinced that a physical relationship was inevitable.
Technically, they turned out to be right: Scottie and I briefly “went out” in the spring of the eighth grade and shared an awkward half-second kiss that, to this day, nobody but us knows about. By the time we got to high school, we were slightly less exclusive with our bond, becoming part of a circle of friends that was part preppy, part nerd, part new wave. Our group got good grades, but didn’t overachieve or do much “joining”—aside from the school newspaper for me.
We found the same sort of niche in college, when Scottie and I went off to the University of Wisconsin together and remained inseparable. We were a package deal, and everyone knew it, including whomever I was dating at the time. I had only one boyfriend in college—a guy with the unfortunate name Bart Simpson—who was ridiculously jealous of Scottie. By that time, I knew Scottie was gay, but nobody else did, and I certainly wasn’t going to share the secret with Bart just to soothe his fragile ego. And anyway, that should have been utterly beside the point. Gay, straight, bi, whatever, Scottie was my best friend, end of story.
Even after I moved to New York (which remains the hardest day of our friendship; you would have thought one of us had been given a fatal diagnosis, the way we carried on), we continued to talk multiple times a day, whether by phone or email or IM. When things got serious with Matthew, my contact with Scottie lessened a little, but he stayed first in the pecking order. When something bad happened, I called Scottie. When something good happened, I called Scottie. Perhaps more significant, during my entire relationship with Matthew, from the very early days to the happy middle parts to the unsatisfying, heartbreaking end, I never stopped consulting and analyzing and strategizing with Scottie. I told him everything—every happening, every emotion, all unfiltered. It felt perfectly normal and healthy to me—something best friends simply did. But I remember my sister, who has a really ideal marriage, once making a reference to our “umbilical cord” and suggesting that it might be time to cut it. I felt defensive, but also a bit sorry for her, as my sister was always one of those girls who put her boyfriend ahead of her friends. As a result, she’s never had a really close friendship like the one I share with Scottie.
But now, as I lie here in bed, it occurs to me for the first time that in a weird way, maybe my dynamic with Scottie really should have been a red flag that Matthew wasn’t giving me everything I needed. He was wonderful in so many ways, and I really did—do still—love him. But maybe I wanted the comfort and security of having found “the one” more than I really wanted Matthew himself. And maybe—just maybe—something deeper exists.
I don’t know what that might be, but I fall asleep thinking about Grant.
I don’t hear from Grant on Monday. Or Tuesday.
And now it’s Wednesday afternoon, and I’m wedged into my cramped, dingy cubicle on the twenty-first floor of a nondescript office building on Avenue of the Americas, writing a scintillating six-hundred-word story on mad cow disease and its impact on a local blood bank. And I still haven’t heard from him.
The whole thing is starting to feel like a dream—a bizarre, wonderful dream—and although I’m holding out hope, I’m also aware that we are rapidly approaching Scottie’s deadline. According to his long-standing rule, if you meet a guy at any point over the weekend and you don’t hear from him by nightfall on the following Wednesday, he isn’t interested. And even if he likes you enough to eventually call you, chances are that the relationship won’t ever amount to much because he doesn’t like you enough to call sooner.
At first blush, the rule seems pretty arbitrary (and also counterintuitive given that Scottie advocates all sorts of playing hard to get, especially when I really like someone). But I have to admit that based on years of experience and data, his guidance on the subject remains eerily dead-on. So I’m decidedly worried as I do an Internet search for “sunset today New York City,” discovering that night will officially fall at 8:14 P.M. This means that Grant has four hours and nine minutes to deliver.
I spin in my desk chair to face Jasmine, my closest work friend and the only person I can see without standing to peer over the fabric-covered partitions of my cube. To be honest, I think our proximity is the main reason we became such good friends in the first place, sort of like those college roommates who are opposites but end up being the best of friends. I’m from Wisconsin; she’s from the Bronx. I’m pretty vanilla on paper, with traditional Catholic parents; her parents are academics and activists. I tend to be a little too passive and neurotic, whereas she’s the most calmly assertive, well-adjusted person I know.
I wait for her to finish typing before saying, “Hey, Jasmine? Can I ask you something?”
“You just did,” she says, doing a half turn in her chair and inspecting me through her bold cat-eye glasses, which prompted one colleague to compare her to a “hot librarian”—a so-called compliment that did not go over very well and ended in a meeting with HR.
I know her well enough to know that she’s not as annoyed as she’s pretending to be, so I press on. “Do you think he’s going to call?”
“Are we talking about old dude?” she says. “Or new dude?”
“New dude,” I say, feeling sheepish that she has to ask. That I’ve gone from one obsession to the next virtually overnight.