“Not a go-getter, never been one,” Simon said at the end, the second time around. “If someone has to teach you how to be one, you’re not much of one.”
It was tough to dispute.
Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love” was playing on the radio in the store, that next morning, which made her glad, got her swaying right away.
She got the good milk in the glass bottle, which he had never seen the point of, and there was cream at the top, which she scooped out and ate with one finger, back in her kitchen, like a cat would if it could.
* * *
“You’re more ambitious than I am,” Simon had said, after the opera, the night before.
It interested her, this kind of claim. As though it weren’t obviously in bad faith.
* * *
At the opera: his hand in hers, on her back. Lightly, at her side, up and down, in her lap.
He was “coercively sexy,” a friend had once said. He had a “dangerous-looking face.”
When she went to the bathroom, when the first act was over, she was so wet — as wet as she’d get in high school, after kissing her first boyfriend, before they’d ever slept together. In the little bathroom in the history building, at sixteen, she remembered going to wipe herself off, after they’d cut class to do everything but, horizontal on a couch in the school newspaper office, and finding she was so… smooth and so soft, just a gush of it, smeared to her ass — she laughed out loud remembering, in the women’s restroom at the Met Opera House, the physicality of it, recreated that night. How utterly wet she’d gotten, as a teenage virgin, how turned on. This girl, her, whose body was now begging to be fucked, why was she playing this game in the furthest seat of the top tier of the opera, surrounded by the city’s elderly, decaying in adjacent stalls?
“No wrinkles on you yet,” Simon said, when she emerged and commented on the octogenarian scene.
“Want to be in the New York Post?” he’d asked, moving as though to knock loose one of the stage lights, attached to the box up in their cheap seats.
* * *
“Tom always called Simon a national treasure,” Anne had told her once. It was true, she thought. He was rare like the Sierras, like the canyon.
Another time, Chloe had compared their friends to “worshipers in the church of social life.”
“And Simon, we keep inviting him to church,” she said. “And he’ll come. He’ll sit in on mass. But he isn’t a parishioner.”
* * *
He called her cruel, Simon, at the first intermission at the opera.
“I just want what I can’t have now, but at least my conscience is clean,” he said. “I just want a shot again, same as every other guy.”
“Okay,” she said. She tried on being honest. “I can’t treat you like any other guy.”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” he said.
He told her he loved her. He was trying it on. She thought it over.
“It’s not that I don’t,” she said.
But someone was defeated, and no one was triumphant, and they stood to go.
* * *
She told him he should date other people, the next time she saw him, a few weeks after the opera.
“It’s a paradox,” he said. “I need you, until I find someone else who will make me happy, at which point I won’t need you.”
She didn’t see it.
“You want me to prove it’s more than circumstantial, you and me,” he said. “Everything is circumstantial.”
Not exactly a romantic, Simon. Never was.
* * *
It reminded her of the time she was walking to the subway with Tom, and she was in a bad mood. And Tom was trying to be funny, but she wasn’t having it, and at last he asked her if she was mad at him.
“Not everything that happens happens in relation to you,” she said.
“Yes, it does,” he said.
“We’re both right, but I’m righter,” she said.
* * *
Still, he’d looked handsome to her, at the opera, Simon. He’d shaved and dressed and gotten his scuffed shoes fixed. He’d reacted visibly to the backlessness of her dress when she took off her coat.
“Don’t ask me to the opera then,” she said, to the face he was making.
* * *
“I think I’m happier alone,” she had said at the second intermission.
“My greatest fear,” he said. “Kidding. I want you to be happy.”
She couldn’t read his tone anymore. It was like forgetting how to walk.
“I’d rather it be this way,” he said. “Really, my not being over you, and you being happy.”
The opera they had gone to was Maria Stuarda. As she faces the scaffold, Mary Stuart sings, “God, do not punish her with remorse.”
* * *
She was smoking again, out on the fire escape.
“But your skin,” Liz said, when she took out the pack.
Before, when they were together, sex with Simon had been like a drink or a drag of something delicious and bad for her.
Now her whole body wanted him — her back, her sides, the palms of her hands.
* * *
“I feel like I’m still open on the table,” she said to Anne and Liz as their beers arrived. “Heart exposed.”
They were talking about the world, for a change, though the metaphor cut both ways.
When the round was through, Anne mimed smoking and they started for the door.
“But your skin,” Liz said, still getting up to join them.
* * *
Outside, a man asked if they were models, seeing Liz’s model-looking face, and her and Anne’s scrawny legs.
“Not currently,” Anne said.
“What do you all do?” he asked.
“I’m a secretary,” Liz said, girlishly.
“Me too,” Anne said.
“Oh, yeah?”
It could have been the beginning of something — playing with this stranger — if Jen cultivated disdain the way her friends did. She skipped her cue.
“No, man, we’re young professionals,” Liz said after a beat, somehow still both coquettish and cold. “I’m clerking. She’s a reporter. She’s an adjunct. We’re just trying to catch up with one another.”
The interloper read the room in their eyes.
“You sympathize too much with hopeful men,” Anne said to Jen when he had gone.
“For long enough they didn’t think me worth pursuing,” she said, “So when they do, I cut them breaks.”
“Hope that wears off soon,” Anne said.
“It will,” said Liz.
* * *
“I take myself away from you, and you become more like a person I want to be with,” she said at the beginning of an on-again stretch. “Every time.”
“It’s good training,” he said. “Conditioning.”
“It’s some fucked-up kind of game,” she said.
* * *
“I don’t know my own mind, but I do know that I don’t know it,” she said to Tom that same afternoon, a cut-rate Socrates.
“Everyone just wants to be happy,” he said, like it was profound. “Everyone is just trying to be that.”
* * *
A few years before, on no occasion, she’d gotten a text from a long-ago ex. He’d written her, “When people talk about love, I know what they’re talking about, you know? Because of us.”
She did know. There was still that.
* * *
At last, she went to a party. There, she saw someone she’d once had a terrible, debilitating crush on, who still had a strong effect on her. He struck up a conversation — the flirtation had never been one-sided — and it went on from there. As they talked, she found herself thinking, “I’m enjoying this so much, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with what you’re saying.”
* * *
“Come uptown tonight,” Simon wrote her, after they’d passed the end again.
“Don’t bet on it,” she wrote back.
“I will, and I will win,” he wrote.
She couldn’t help herself.
“What will you win?”
“Everything they’ll give me.”
She stayed downtown.
* * *
One winter day, she found herself looking through old emails. One, to that long-ago ex, she’d sent during the first year after school, when she was still living in her college town. She’d written, in part, the first snow happened here yesterday. it fell after the big football game, in early evening. I had this happy buzz (read: was moderately drunk) all morning and afternoon, just on breakfast bloody marys and whiskey-ginger-ales out of thermoses and tail-gating beers and seeing alums, who’d come back from everywhere.
I saw Jim who updated me on writing the book on that general’s life in DC (“you think everyone in the office is a regular guy, and then you realize they’re all former navy SEALs who’ve had bullets taken out of their chests”), and then fell asleep at 9 p.m. after walking two miles home in this dusting of snow over everything — just the slightest crust underfoot, and a layer on all the car windows, reflecting muted streetlamp lights. and the whole day reminded me of high school and new england and you — the colors and the mood somehow, and then your text —
* * *
A good friend of all of theirs had sold a screenplay.
“What’s it about?” she asked. “What’s the plot?”
“Time passes,” he said. “Feelings are hurt.”