a look that resembled relief, he produced a pen and a small scrap of paper and handed it to me. When I was done, he wrote his number down on the same paper before nervously tearing it in two and handing me half. Glancing at his watch, he mumbled a brief but endearingly warm goodbye. Then he was gone, leaving me dreamy-eyed on the platform.
Dreamy-eyed for all of three minutes.
Because as I stood there contemplating the two of us entwined in intimate conversation over drinks at some hip little boaîte downtown—maybe Bar Six or Lansky’s Lounge—I felt a flicker of doubt. To verify that I did, in fact, score an incredibly cute guy’s phone number, I glanced at the folded scrap of paper still clutched in my hand. With sudden horror, I realized the number I held was my own.
“Made for each other,” Jade said when I told her the story. “Neither one of you is ever going to get laid, judging by the number of attempts you probably have between you.”
I turned to my friend Alyssa for comfort, instead. Unlike Jade, Lys always managed to see a brighter side to things. When I explained how I hadn’t even given him a last name so he could look me up, she said hopefully, “Maybe he’ll take out an ad in the personals, looking for you. You know, some people do that. They even have a page devoted to things like this in the Voice. You’ve seen the ads: ‘Saw you on the A train. You, brunette, soft green eyes—’”
“My eyes are hazel.”
“‘Shy and sweet.’”
“Me?”
“Well, on first impression you can be!” Once again adopting the voice of the man she had never met but believed capable of such grand romantic gestures, she continued, “‘Me, writer looking for a beauty like you. Thought I found you but you got away. Please call….’”
“Not a chance. Guys don’t do that sort of thing.”
“Then you do it, Em. Take an ad! C’mon, what have you got to lose?”
“My sense of self-worth?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I used to read those ads, Lys,” I explained. “All the time. I used to think they were romantic, too. But the more you read the personals, the more you realize there are a lot of pretty desperate people out there. I mean, c’mon. To think that somebody might mistake a random encounter—the equivalent of stepping on someone’s foot in a crowd—for Kismet. Gimme a break.”
“Oh, here she comes. The cynic.”
It’s true I was a cynic in the pre-Derrick period. But who could blame me? At the time, I was twenty-nine years old, and had dated enough men to know that my soulmate would likely turn out to be nothing more than a good-fitting pair of shoes.
But then, destiny intervened. Two weeks after the hapless sub way encounter, as I shared coffee and the Sunday night blues with Alyssa at the Peacock Café, I spotted Derrick, sitting two tables away and wearing the most perfectly faded pair of Levi’s I had yet to find in my own endless thrift-store searches.
“Hey,” he said, jumping up and almost knocking over the tiny table in front of him. “It’s you.” And suddenly he was standing over the table looking down at me in amazement.
I stood, too, staring at his adorable face in disbelief and leaving Alyssa to gawk up at us, a smile spreading across her features.
“I can’t believe what an idiot I was that day,” he said.
“Me too.” I replied, Jade’s warning voice a mere whisper as I stammered through a ridiculously elated dialogue about how absolutely retarded I’d felt when I discovered the mix-up.
“I told you it was fate,” Alyssa said dreamily when he left our table fifteen minutes later, my number safely tucked in the pocket of his denim jacket.
Fate. This had come from the very same Alyssa who days ago had officially declared Derrick the man I needed to put out of mind. Forever.
Confession: Contrary to popular belief, I am not better off without him.
Even Derrick had the gall to attempt to come up with reasons why I should be happy, even though he was leaving me. According to him, I had a dream life. How many people, he argued, could claim that they had spent the better part of their twenties in the best city in the world?
“If it’s such a great city,” I argued back, “why are you leaving it?”
Then he explained once again, in the calm, rational voice I had begun to abhor in him during those last, angst-ridden days, that all his career opportunities were in L.A. That now that he had sold his screenplay, the studio wanted to hire him on as a script doctor. That he was better off on the West Coast.
Without me, I thought in silence that followed his speech. And as I considered throwing myself at his feet and begging him to take me away from this glorious city, he changed tactics.
“You have so much here,” he argued. “Your own apartment. A career.”
Now this statement requires some clarification.
First, my apartment. If the words “walk-in closet” send a tremor of longing through you, think again. My walk-in closet contains a bed, a dresser, a desk and a bookshelf that has seen better days. Oh, and did I mention the Barbie kitchen along one wall? Yes, that’s right. My apartment is a walk-in closet. Of course, there is something to be said for the fact that it’s not only rent-stabilized but below 14th Street—the only neighborhood really worth living in, in my opinion.
Now as for my career…when asked the inevitable “what do you do?” question at parties, the answer I give is that I am a writer for a national women’s magazine. This is not a lie, though my job is hardly as cool as this sounds. In truth, I am a contributing editor at Bridal Best, where I compose captions, headlines and—with ever-increasing frequency—articles on such subjects as “Hot Honeymoon Escapes” and “Wedding Dresses You Can Breathe In.”
At best, my illustrious career at Bridal Best could be called a happy accident, for it started as a two-week stint as an office temp which turned into a permanent position when Carolyn Jamison, the senior features editor I work for, took a personal interest in keeping me on. How could I resist all her encouragement when, up till then, the master’s degree in Creative Writing I had gotten at NYU had resulted only in a handful of unpublished stories and a full-time waitressing position?
Now, as I sat filled with self-loathing in an editorial meeting on the Wednesday morning of Derrick’s departure, counting the minutes until his plane left the ground and carried him away from me, I began to wish I hadn’t resisted the impulse to call him at 3:00 a.m. to let him know what a heartless bastard he was.
Looking up from my cloud of despair, I saw Patricia Landers, Bridal Best’s editor-in-chief, stand up to give us her weekly address. “At Bridal Best our editorial mission is to speak to the bride in every woman,” Patricia began, “whether she is simply dreaming of that special day, or taking the first steps toward making that day happen.”
Step 1: Don’t let your boyfriend leave the state.
I sighed, suddenly weary of the wedding planning mantra that was sure to issue forth from Patricia’s thin lips. As I studied her wispy blond hair, pale face and crisp blue eyes, I wondered if this would be my fate. To be the ultrathin, somewhat prim yet rather well-kept editor-in-chief of a national magazine. A career woman who needed no man, only a fat paycheck and enough take-home assignments to make her forget that there was so much more to life than work.
Then I remembered something else.
Unlike me, Patricia was married. And as dubious as that marriage was rumored to be, it set her miles apart from a manless and struggling contributing editor like myself.
My eyes moved frantically about the table, where the illustrious editorial team of Bridal Best sat, seemingly transfixed by Patricia’s words. There was Rebecca, the only office colleague I deigned