“Okay.”
They met at four outside a coffee shop. Hallie snuffed out her cigarette before entering. The New York smoking ban still wasn’t to take effect for two months, but Hallie wanted to practice. Gert was glad for the ban, but kept her opinion to herself. It wasn’t that she was a priss; it was just that secondhand smoke gave her a sore throat.
“Here’s the thing,” Hallie said, sitting down at a square white table with gold flecks in it. The coffee shop was filthy, but cozy. “You know that you can’t accept a date for the same night. It makes you seem desperate.”
“It’s not a date,” Gert protested. “It’s just a friendly dinner. Besides, Todd’s going to be busy next week. His schedule’s going to get crazy.”
“With work? Or with dates?”
“With work.”
“How do you know?”
“Why would Todd lie?” Gert said. “I just met him.”
“I don’t know.” Hallie shrugged, winding paper from someone else’s straw around her pinkie. “For some reason, he just struck me as a little off. I wouldn’t be so trusting so soon. Believe me, I’ve seen what’s out there. You have to be careful.”
“I will,” Gert said, knowing Hallie was only trying to help but wondering how she’d gotten so cynical. Todd was a nice guy, right?
Gert looked around. She noticed that many of the people in the coffee shop were reading the paper. But the women who were reading it kept peering over the top, to see who else might be there.
Hallie said, “I think I’ve met half the weirdos in Manhattan. And I think Erika’s met the other half. I don’t want you to get disillusioned.”
“Did you ever think,” Gert said, choosing her words carefully, “that maybe you and Erika try too hard and obsess too much? You strategize and analyze, and men can probably sense your frustrations.”
Hallie looked hurt. “I can’t act relaxed and happy with my station in life when I’m not,” she said.
Gert wasn’t sure what to say.
“Do you remember when I dated Steve for six months after college?” Hallie asked. “While I was dating him, guys hit on me all the time. And of course, I didn’t need them, because I was with him. They must have sensed that I was happy. And then, after Steve and I broke up and I was miserable, no one ever came up to me. But I couldn’t help being miserable. So there’s a Spiral Deathtrap of Dating: When you’re with someone, you look happy and relaxed, and thus, a lot more people than you need are attracted to you. When you’re sulky and alone, no one is attracted to you, and thus, you stay sulky and alone. I can’t look content when I’m not.”
“I know you can’t look happy all the time,” Gert said. “Maybe what I’m getting at is that when you and Erika are together, you both come off as less approachable.”
Hallie looked beyond Gert, at the wall. “That’s not the real problem,” she said. “The real problem is that the ratio of women to men around here is too high. I should move to Silicon Valley or Alaska, where the male-to-female ratio makes sense. Or, I could get silicone implants.”
Gert cringed. “Guys hate silicone implants,” she said.
“You know so much about guys,” Hallie said to her, “but you’ve only really been with one.”
It struck Gert as odd that Hallie and Erika always claimed to know so much more than she did about men, yet they were still single. They were always trumpeting their dating rules and they were still alone.
There’s a law Hallie should cite, Gert thought. Gert’s Law of Dating: The more rules you cite about it, the less you really know about it.
“Anyway,” Hallie said, toying with a cigarette she didn’t intend to light, “I want you to have a good time with Todd tonight.”
Gert smiled. “Thanks,” she said.
“But,” Hallie continued, looking serious, “don’t let your guard down. If a guy seems too good to be true, he usually is.”
“Oh, I know it could end up a total disaster,” Gert said, waving someone else’s smoke away. “But we’ll be in a public place. What could happen?”
“You have my cell phone number, right?” Hallie said. “Call me if there’s any trouble. Even if I’m talking to Jeremy Shockey, I’ll be there for you.”
Gert laughed. “I will.”
The houses across the street from Gert’s were white and connected to each other. From window to window dripped a string of unlit Christmas lights, which normally hung there until just before Easter. On a dark, overcast day like that one, they looked like buds. Flurries coated the barren branches outside and made little hammocks in the corners of the windows. Not much of an accumulation was expected—it was too warm.
Gert stood in the room with Marc’s trophies, staring across the street. She saw a little blond-haired girl peeking out a round third-story window. She remembered when the girl had been a tiny baby in a carriage. Seeing the infants in her neighborhood go from carriages to walking on their own two feet made Gert conscious of her age. Lots of things were making her conscious of that lately. She wasn’t fond of the reminders.
The girl was part of an extended Greek family who lived in attached houses on the block. Gert’s section of Queens, only a few subway stops east of Manhattan, was very Greek.
She returned to her bedroom, to her mirror.
The anticipatory feeling of a date was one of the nicest parts, she had always thought. You knew you were going to see someone you liked. You could scrub extra hard in the shower. You could get a haircut. You could stare at yourself in the mirror. Well, not for too long.
Even though Gert was just going to be friends with Todd, she still felt compelled to at least look half-decent for him.
She stared at her reflection and tried to figure out what she could say to him.
I rode on a train once.
Nah, that wouldn’t do.
My uncle used to work for Conrail.
Trains are cool. I’ve got a full complement of HO models.
Somehow he’d see through the lie. And just because he worked on a train, didn’t mean he collected them.
She could hum the song about “getting the train through” from Sesame Street. They could talk about kids’ TV shows from the 1970s. Marc’s oldest brother had been on Zoom, which was taped in Boston. That always impressed people of a certain age.
There she was, thinking about Marc again.
She had to stop.
How would she tell Todd about him?
She probably shouldn’t mention Marc to Todd right away, she decided. The only way to talk about Marc was to give him his proper due, to tell everything that had happened. He wasn’t something you could chat about like the news or weather. If it wasn’t the right time to tell everything about him, you shouldn’t broach it.
Okay. She needed a conversation topic.
The male canon. Oops—she’d left something off the list when she’d told Hallie and Erika about it: Fletch. Guys loved Fletch.
What were some lines from Fletch?
“Excuse me, miss? Can I borrow your towel? My car just hit a water buffalo.”
Didn’t really work too well in conversation.
It wasn’t a good quote for tonight, anyway. It was too base. Guys didn’t necessarily like girls to get too base. Except guys you’d been married to for five years and dated for three, whom you could say