Here's how my life will turn out: I'll marry Will. He'll
become a big stage star and I'll give up my advertising
career to stay home with our children. We'll stay in New
York rather than going South or West (because I
desperately have to have all four seasons), and someday
we'll turn into the kind of senior citizens you see
sharing the same side of the booth at Friendly's. Not that
I've ever seen a Friendly's in Manhattan, or that Will and
I have ever sat on the same side of any booth in any
restaurant, ever.
Will, after all, needs his space.
In restaurants.
In general.
I, on the other hand, need no space.
Which is exactly what I tell my friend Kate, in response
to her infuriatingly serene "Everyone needs space," over
Tall Skim Caramel Macchiatos at Starbucks.
"I need no space," I tell Kate, who rolls her fake
aquamarine pupils toward her dyed-blond hairline. Kate
grew up in the Deep South, where it's apparently best to
be a skinny blue-eyed blonde. Actually, speaking as a well-
padded brown-eyed brunette New Yorker, it's probably best
to be a skinny blue-eyed blonde any place.
"Yes, you do need space, Trace," Kate insists, with only a
hint of the antebellum drawl she's worked so hard to
lose. "Believe me, you so wouldn't want Will in your face
every second of every day."
Okay, the thing about that is...
I so would.
Do I seem pathetic? I do, don't I? So I'd better not admit
the truth to Kate, who has already declared that she's
worried about me. She thinks my relationship with Will is
one-sided.
"No," I lie, "not every second of every day. But that
doesn't mean I want him blowing out of here for summer
stock in the Adirondacks for three months without me."
"Well, I don't think you have a choice. I mean, it's not
like you can tag along."
At that, I focus on my beverage, attempting to stir the
sweetened foam into the darker liquid below. It refuses to
harmonize, clinging in wispy clumps to the wooden stirrer
like the cottony clusters of mealy bugs on my sickly
philodendron at home.
"Tracey," Kate says in a warning voice, clearly on to me.
"What?" All innocence, I toy with my yellow plastic Bic
cigarette lighter, flicking it on and off, wishing for the
good old days when you could smoke anywhere you damn
pleased.
"You're not thinking of tagging along with Will this
summer."
"Why aren't I?"
"Mostly because — hello-o? — you're not an actress. You
already have a career, remember?"
Oh, yes. The career. My entry-level job at Blaire Barnett
advertising, where thanks to a glorified title and my
tendency to pounce on new ventures before thorough
investigation, I didn't realize I was a mere
administrative assistant until a few weeks after I
started, when my boss sent me a plant for Secretary's Day.
That would be the aforementioned insect-infested
philodendron. Like my position at the agency, it seemed so
promising that first day, all shiny-leaved and cellophane-
and-ribbon- bedecked, with a card that read, Dear Traci
(note the misspelling), Thanks for all you do. Best, Jake.
I got it home, made it cozy on my lone windowsill . . .
and, a week later, the mealy bugs moved in for the kill.
"I could quit," I tell Kate, still toying with my lighter.
"Smoking?"
"Good lord, no. My job." I toss the lighter on the table.
Mental note: Stop for more cigarettes on the way to meet
Will. "That's what I was afraid of." Kate, a refreshingly
non-militant nonsmoker, smirks. Sips. Says, "So you'll
just quit your job after less than two months —"
"More than two months —"
"More than two months," she concedes, "and — what? Follow
Will to wherever he's going to be? What will you do there?"
"Build sets? Waitress at some coffee shop? I don't know,
Kate. I haven't thought it through yet. All I know is that
I can't stand the thought of spending the entire summer in
this hellhole of a city without Will."
"Does Will know this?"
There is nothing ambiguous about her question, yet I
stall. "Does Will know what?"
"That you're thinking of coming with him?"
"No," I admit.
"When is he leaving?"
"In a few weeks."
"Maybe he'll change his mind between now and then."
"No. He says he needs a break from the city."
She raises an eyebrow in a way that hints at her
suspicion: that the city is not all Will is trying to
escape. If she says it, I will tell her she's wrong. But I
won't be sure about that.
And that's the real reason I want to go away with Will
this summer. Because ever since we got together three
years ago, in college, our relationship has been about as
stable as an Isuzu Trooper at eighty mph on a hairpin
curve. In the rain. And wind.
When we met we were both juniors. Will had just
transferred from a well-known Midwestern university to our
upstate SUNY college. He had great disdain for the
conservative, all-American mind-set that infused not just
the school he'd left, but the family he was stuck with.
I could relate. Maybe that's what first drew me to him.
The tiny western New York college town I had grown up in
bore striking similarities to the Midwest Will was fleeing.
There was the accent — the flat, wrinkle-nosed a that
gives apple three syllables (ay-a-pple) whether you're in
the Chicago area or upstate New York.
There was my Roman Catholic religion, shared by every last
person in my life but my friend Tamar Goldstein, the lone
Jewish girl at Brookside High, who got to stay home while
the rest of us went to school on the mysterious High Holy
Days in October.
There was my sprawling extended Italian family, with its
smothering traditions in which everyone was expected to
participate: nine-thirty mass on Sundays, followed by
coffee and cannoli at my maternal grandmother's house and
then spaghetti at noon at my paternal grandmother's house.
This is how every Sunday of my life began, and I continue
to bear the scars aka cellulite everlasting. Will is
Protestant — his ancestors were from England and Scotland.
He has no discernible accent; he has no cellulite. In his
parents' house, spaghetti sauce comes from a jar.
But he, like I, longed to escape the stranglehold of
smalltown life and had wanted to live in New York City for
as long as he could remember. The difference was, he saw
the State University of New York at Brookside as a giant
leap toward his goal. I didn't have the heart to tell him
that Brookside might as well be in Iowa. He figured it out
by himself eventually, and ultimately skipped graduation
in order to get the hell out of town as soon as possible.
When we met that first semester of junior year, he had a
girlfriend back home in Des Moines, and I was living at
home three miles from campus, with my parents. Our coming
together was a gradual thing, and the blame for that lies
squarely with Will. In retrospect, I see that he was
alternately torn between cheating on his girlfriend and
dumping her — and me as well — in favor of screwing around.
He used to talk about her freely to me, in a maddeningly
casual way that suggested he and I were friends. If I ever
popped by his apartment unannounced and he was talking to
her on the phone, he'd make no attempt to hang up and
would tell me casually, when he finally did, "Oh, that was
Helene." I figured that if he considered us more than
friends (his word) who made out whenever we got drunk and
ran into each other in a bar, he'd be a lot more furtive
about his girlfriend.
So her name was Helene, and, naturally, I pictured her
svelte and exotic. Then Will went home for Christmas break
and entrusted me with the keys to his apartment so I could
water his plants. Yes, he had plants. Not marijuana
plants, which were frequently grown in the frat houses
near campus. Not a token cactus or one of those robust
rubbery snake plants that you can pretty much shove into a
closet and not water for a year and still keep thriving.
No, Will had regular house plants, the kind that needed
sunlight and water and fertilizer.
Anyway, this key-entrusting episode was before we were
sleeping together but after he'd gone for my bra clasp
enough times for me to invest in something suitably
flimsy. My usual was an industrial-strength closure with
four hooks and eyes on an elasticized strip the width of
duct tape.
I was dazzled that he trusted me not just with the plants
he'd bought at the local Wal-Mart garden shop in
September, but with the entire contents of the apartment
he shared with two roommates. Didn't he suspect that I
would spend hours going through the plastic milk crates he
kept in his closet, reading letters from Helene and
searching for photos of her?
I don't know — maybe he did suspect. Maybe he wanted me to
snoop. The photos weren't hard to find. They were tucked
in the front cover of one of those cloth-bound blank
books, along with a note from Helene that read: Use this
as a journal while you're away so that one day we can read
it together and I'll feet like I was there with you.
I gloated when I saw that the book was blank.
Not nearly as much as I gloated when I at last laid eyes
upon the enigmatic Helene in a photo. I had known she was
blond, a fact Will had mentioned more than once. And okay,
I'll give her the hair. It was long and shiny and parted
in the middle. But other than that, she was ordinary —
even more round-faced than I was and wearing red plaid
Bermudas that did nothing for her hips and even less for
her thighs. She wore them with a red polo shirt, tucked
in. I have never in my life worn a shirt tucked in, but if
I were so-inclined, I sure as hell wouldn't tuck it into
red plaid Bermudas.
I stopped worrying about Helene when I saw that snapshot.
Sure enough, when Will returned from break to find his
plants thriving, his plastic milk crates apparently
undisturbed, and the plate of homemade cream-cheese
brownies I'd left on his kitchen table, he informed me
that he and Helene had broken up on New Year's Eve. I, in
my not-just-friends-but-not-quite-more role, wasn't sure
how to respond to that news. I remember ultimately acting
sympathetic toward Will, and inwardly slapping myself a
high five because I had won. I had beaten out Helene. The
shadowy hometown girlfriend had been eliminated from the
competition.
A shallow, short-lived victory, because I soon discovered
that I had a long way to go. Even now, three years later,
the finish line eludes me. Kate asks, "Don't you think you
should tell Will you're quitting your job and going with
him?"
"I didn't say I was definitely doing it. I just said that
I wanted to." Dammit. Kate's looking at me like I've just
told her that I may or may not mow down everyone in this
Starbucks with a sawed-off shotgun.
"I have to go now," I decide abruptly, picking up my white
paper cup and my giant black shoulder bag.
"Me, too," Kate says, picking up her white paper cup and
her giant black shoulder bag.
"I'll walk you over to the subway."
Great.
One crosstown block and one uptown block of Kate's
attempts to sell me on the many glorious pros of summer in
the city. Laughable, because I've already spent enough
steamy, putrid-smelling urban August days to last me a
lifetime. I'll have lived here a year Memorial Day, having
spent the first few months sharing a Queens sublet with a
total stranger courtesy of a Village Voice classified. Her
name was Mercedes, and the few times I saw her in passing,
she looked stoned. Turned out she slept all day while I
was out temping, and was out all night doing God knows
what — I tried to ask, but she was evasive. We both moved
out on Labor Day when the actor who had sublet us the
apartment returned from summer stock. I never saw her
again, but I wouldn't be surprised if she shows up on an
episode of COPS someday, vigorously denying something.
Thanks to my summer in a relatively affordable borough, I
scraped together enough money to land a studio of my very
own in Manhattan, in the East Village. Way east. Like,
almost as far east as you can go and not be on the FDR
Drive or in the river. The apartment has that kind of
grimy and depressing thing going on. Like the Kramdens'
place in those Honeymooners reruns on Nick At Nite, it
seems to exist only in grainy black-and-white, no matter
how I try to jazz it up. Not that I'm trying so hard.
Kate — whom I met temping on my third day in New York and
who lives in a brownstone floor-thru in the heart of the
West Village, courtesy of her wealthy parents back in
Mobile — thinks I should splurge on a bright-colored cover
for my futon. I tell her that I'm broke, which is always
true, yet in reality I don't want to spend any money on my
place.
Here's why: because if I make it more like a home, then
there will be a permanence about it — a sense that I'm
there to stay. And I don't want to stay alone in a drab
East Village flat.
I want to live with Will.
Soon.
And forever.
"And just think," Kate is saying. 'Shakespeare in the
Park."
I shrug. "Maybe Will will do Shakespeare in summer stock."
"You think?"
I shrug. Probably more like Little Shop of Horrors.
Carousel, maybe.
"Italian ices from sidewalk vendors," she
pontificates. "Weekends in the Hamptons."
I snort at that.
"I've got a half-share," she points out. "You can visit
me."
She goes on about summer, which is hard to envision on
this gray May Saturday morning, cool and drizzly.
This stretch of lower Broadway is teeming with multi-
pierced NYU types, stroller-pushing families, packs of
suburban teenagers and the ubiquitous sales-flyer-
thrusters.
Kate and I dump our empty cups into an overflowing trash
can on the corner of Eighth and Broadway. I leave her
admiring a pair of hundred-dollar fluorescent coral-
colored mules in the window of a boutique and descend into
the depths of the subway.
On the uptown-bound side I wait for the N train, standing
away from the track with my back almost against the wall,
yet not touching it because you never know what kind of
filth is just waiting to rub off on your Old Navy
Performance Fleece pullover. My eye is peeled on a scruffy
guy who's pacing back and forth along the edge of the
platform. First clue that he's not all there: It's forty
degrees out and he's shirtless, wearing shorts and ripped
rubber flip-flops. He's muttering to himself, something
about lice — or maybe it's lights — and I'm not the only
one giving him a wide berth.
Every once in a while you hear about some innocent New
Yorker getting shoved in front of an oncoming train. My
friend Raphael was actually on the platform when it
happened once, but the pushee rolled off the track in the
nick of time. The pusher looked like a regular
businessman, Raphael said. He was wearing a suit and
carrying a briefcase. Turned out when the police searched
him that the briefcase was full of live rodents. The
significance of this escapes me, other than proving that
you just never know who you're dealing with in a crowd of
strangers in the city, and it's best to keep your back to
the wall.
Which I do.
Finally, the telltale rumble just before a light appears
at the end of the tunnel. As the N train roars into the
station, I move cautiously forward, positioning myself in
advance exactly where the door will open, something that's
possible only after several months of riding the same
train every day. The car is packed and too warm and smells
of sweat and Chinese take-out. Hip hop music blares from
the headphones of the guy next to me as I stand holding on
to a germy center pole. As we lurch forward and the lights
flicker, I keep my balance, thinking about Will, wondering
whether he'll be awake when I get to the studio apartment
he shares with Nerissa, whom he met on an audition last
fall. He likes to sleep past noon on Saturdays.
Does it bother me that he lives with another woman?
I want to say of course not.
But the reality is that I wouldn't mind if Nerissa got
pushed in front of an oncoming N train tomorrow. She's
lithe and beautiful, an English dancer in an off-Broadway
show that opened a few months ago. She sleeps on a futon
behind a tall folding screen from Ikea, and Will on his
full-size bed . . . and never the twain shall meet.
Yes, I truly believe this. I force myself to believe it,
because Nerissa has a boyfriend, a Scottish pro golfer
named Broderick, and Will has me. Yet I've seen the way he
looks at her when she drifts around wearing drawstring
cotton pants over her dancer's leotard, with no hips to
speak of and high, taut braless breasts.
I am all flesh, by comparison to Nerissa or not; all hips
and thighs and buttocks. As I said, my bras are not wispy
scraps of lace and underwire and skinny straps; my
undergarments are not what you would readily call panties,
a term that brings to mind slender sorority girls with
Neiman Marcus charges. Sturdy, no-nonsense cotton
underwear is necessary to keep my natural jiggle and sag
from jiggling and sagging to an unfortunate extreme. Will
adores real lingerie, the kind that undoubtedly fills the
top drawer of Nerissa's tall Pottery Bam bureau. This, I
know about Will, because once, during our senior year of
college, when we had been officially dating for a few
months and I knew we were about to become lovers, he
bought me a teddy. It was a champagne-colored satin-and-
lace getup from Christian Dior, two sizes two small —
which I didn't know whether to take as a compliment or a
hint. Every time I wore it, I put on a bra and underpants
underneath. The bra because not wearing one would be
obscene with my figure; the underpants because every time
I moved, the teddy's crotch unsnapped because I was too
tall or too wide for it, or, sadly, both. Finally, I
replaced the snaps with a hook-and-eye combo. I had
learned sewing in Brookside Middle School home ec, though
back then never dreamed that I would use my skills for
something so illicit as replacing the crotch snaps on a
sexy undergarment presented by a man with whom I would
have sex before marriage.
Anyway, it was hard to tell whether Will was ever truly
turned on by the sight of me in that crotch-doctored teddy
with my thick duct-tape-like bra straps peeking out at the
shoulders and my sensible cotton Hanes riding lower on my
lumpy thighs than the french-cut teddy. I like to think
that he found me irresistible, but in retrospect, I'm not
certain that's the case.