My mind scrolls back through all the dating disasters I’ve endured. Years of them. All the hours and hours of waiting for the guy to call, worrying that I wasn’t attractive enough or attentive enough or didn’t have enough sparkling conversation to get through an evening. The fake laughter I manufactured too many times to count. The flattery and flirtations I mastered. The times I’ve slept with a man because of what felt like a genuine mutual attraction . . . and then afterward endured days of torment, waiting for him to call. Followed, of course, by all the meditation and soul-searching and serious talks with my girlfriends when the jerk didn’t call.
All of it has been so demoralizing, so soul-crushing. Maybe because it’s technically the middle of the night and I’m overtired, but I suddenly feel so furious at Mr. Cyber Security Previously Married No Kids for his cavalier attitude toward me. For the smirk on his face as he described how confusing it was to be a man trying to talk to women these days.
In fact, I realize, I’m angry at the whole lot of them—the whole cadre of forty-three men I’ve gotten myself dressed up for. Angry about the manicures and pedicures and lipstick purchases, the hair appointments, the nice underwear, the hopes rising and falling, rising and falling. The notes I take afterward. The story I’m going to write.
Furious about the number of times I’ve played “Love Has No Pride” by Bonnie Raitt and screamed along to the lyrics.
The only good part, I realize, has been telling Judd about these dates afterward, listening to him laugh. Hearing him tell about the vacuous women he’s been seeing.
He’s smiling at me. “I don’t think,” he says, “that I want to live in a world in which this isn’t the kind of love that really matters.”
I get a little shiver at that. It’s really his best line.
“Okay. I have some questions. If we got married,” I say, “would that mean you’d call in sick for me when I can’t go to work? Because when I call, I always think it sounds like I’m faking.”
“What? Well, yes, of course.”
“And you’d rub my feet sometimes?”
“Okayyyy . . .”
“With no complaining about it, right? And, how about Mr. Swanky? He likes to sleep on the bed, you know.”
“Phronsie, I’m not going to kick the dog off the bed.”
“And . . . and . . . we’ll cook together and go grocery shopping and plan meals and throw parties for our friends sometimes? And we’ll sleep in the same bed, and you’ll hold me while I fall asleep?”
He’s smiling. He really does have a lovely smile. “Yes, all that. And I’ll take care of the children with you, and we’ll go on family vacations together. All of it. Marriage. Parenthood. All the good stuff.”
“What about my novel?”
“What about it?”
“Will you not give me a hard time when I need to write it, even if it’s in the middle of the night or when you want to do something else, but I need to write?”
He stares at me. “I don’t care if you write a novel. Write it whenever you like.”
“And no cheating?”
“No cheating.”
“Ever, ever, ever?”
“What’s with you? I said no cheating.”
“One more thing. Will we fall in love, do you think?”
He runs his hands across his hair, hard. “Phronsie, you may be missing the point. What we already have is love. There’s no falling to be done. We’re upright. This is what upright love looks like. Rubbing feet and going grocery shopping together—this is winning at love, as far as I’m concerned.”
I drink the last of my beer and look at him. He raises his eyebrows questioningly, and I nod, so he puts the twist tie ring on my finger.
“Wait. This is not official. I might need to talk to Sarah and Talia about this,” I say. “Just to run it by them.”
He laughs. “No, I understand. We can’t make a move without Sarah and Talia.”
Sarah and Talia are my best friends; they were the first people I clicked with when I moved to New York. We were all Sex and the City together right after I graduated from NYU. I got to be Carrie Bradshaw because I was a writer and my hair looked like hers. We all went on dates and we drank a lot of wine, and we had fun, glamorous jobs, and we were dramatic and gloriously young with lots of good hair products and no bags under our eyes—and one by one, we met guys who became our husbands: Russell with Sarah, Talia with Dennis, me with Steve. Only their guys stuck around, and now they are having babies. Sarah and Russell just had one last week. They named the kid Willoughby after a street Russell lived on in Brooklyn.
When we get back to our building, I look at Judd there beside me in the brightly lit lobby, at his large moist hands, his bright eyes, the little hairs under his nose that would like to turn into a mustache except he shaved them probably sixteen hours ago. The little crinkles around his eyes are now permanent, not just when he laughs. I see the same crinkles when I look at myself in the mirror; when I don’t get at least eight hours of sleep, I look like my face is collapsing in on itself. I’m a little bit stunned at how old—or rather mature—we’ve suddenly gotten overnight.
We take the stairs up to my floor in silence—Judd always thinks people have to take the stairs instead of the elevator so we’ll still have muscles and bones that work when we’re eighty—and when we get there, we stand in the stairwell awkwardly.
Oh God. Is he going to make a move on me? Am I ready for this?
Then he puts his arms around me like we’ve done casually a bunch of times before. But this time he looks at me and smiles and then puts his mouth down on mine, hard.
We don’t fit together, somehow. His nose hits my nose too hard, which makes my eyes water. This kiss is somehow too wet and also it doesn’t connect. Between my eyes watering and all the saliva that suddenly has sprung up between us, all I can think of is drowning. And would I be terribly awful if I mention that his nose hairs are tickling me? We move around a bit and try to make it work, but then he pulls away and laughs. He shrugs.
“Not the end of the world. We’ll work on it,” he says cheerfully and gives me a high five. “Also, can I borrow my ring back? My bread is going to get stale without it.”
CHAPTER TWO
I wake up the next day realizing I’m as close to a panic attack as I’ve been since Steve Hanover walked out on me. Mr. Swanky stares at me with his head tilted to the side, as I down two pharmaceutically required cups of coffee and start pacing around the apartment.
“Am I really considering marrying Judd?” I ask him. “Because that’s insane, right?”
He lies down with his head on his paws. I can tell he’s thinking it over.
“Well, you’re right. I can’t be serious. There are absolutely forty-nine obvious reasons not to marry him that I didn’t even begin to think of last night.”
As soon as it is even a remotely decent hour, I call Talia. She’s married to Dennis, a surgical resident who works about nine thousand hours a month, so she’ll be able to come up with at least a few reasons why marriage might not be the best thing ever.
“Not to alarm you or anything, but I’m afraid I’m having a possible psychological emergency,” I say to her as soon as she answers. “Can you meet me at Franco’s?”