We were hanging out one night in the upper west side of Manhattan after a big storm had just hit the northeast. I’d been in New York for a week, teaching some classes for a Massachusetts-based company I worked for at the time. I had only recently acquired the confidence and ease of those who travel frequently for work, and to have New York be the place where I’d get to show off my new road-warrior powers to an old friend was a priviledge.
The company had paid for dinner and the cabs and we’d enjoyed ourselves on the dime of others, as is the pleasure of those who travel for a living. I was chilling at her place before deciding it was too late to go across town to the lower east side, where my Best Western was situated next to all of those fish markets under the Brooklyn Bridge. We’d watched some stupid movie we’d both seen before, sharing the couch with each other’s feet on our laps.
“I have a question,” she said.
“Abraham Lincoln, 1861.”
“What?”
“Never mind,” I said. “It was a long shot anyway.”
“Oh, Ok…” she said, confounded. “Hey, why have we never hooked up?”
[...]
The question caught me by total surprise. Scarlet* was the kind of girl that you loved because there was no way to NOT love her - every boy in the world loved her, had always loved her, and knew no moment in their lives when they had not loved her. But I’m just cool like that.
“Because,” I told her, “you’re taller than me and you have a complex about shorter boys, even though I’m 6 feet even on a good hair day.”
“C’mon. Seriously,” she insisted. “Why have we never hooked up?”
“Since when would want to hook up with me?”
“Now, why should I answer your question when you haven’t seriously considered mine?”
“Fair enough,” I told her. “I guess you’re right. The logic’s all there: we’re perfect hook-ups for each other. We’re friends, we know each other well enough to know that we could never date, so a relationship is out of the question. I mean, frankly, Scarlet, I’m not sure who would kill who but one of us would be put underground.” She curled her lip at this and squinted her eyes just slightly.
“I’d end you so fast.”
“Baby, please,” I brushed her off. “I laugh at kittens like you. You can’t handle me.” She tossed her hair and laughed a beautiful laugh that made boys around the world cry at not being the cause of said laughter.
“But as far as approaching you from THAT angle…why have we not hooked up, indeed… well, let’s see. You’re so beautiful your name often comes up on star charts. Your sexiness and your swagger require more adjectives than I have in my lexicon and you’re so popular you beat boys away with a stick or else put them in the ground. You have to bury your phone under 4 sweaters in order for us to have a conversation.
“In contrast, I’m a bumbling traveler who can’t commit to either side of the extremes who wishes he could write like you and admires your zazz and creative drive to the point of fan-dom and if we weren’t friends I’d consider asking you for your autograph. And I hate asking for autographs.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Really. Now my question.”
She sat up on the couch, leaned over to the coffee table and grabbed the remote control. She turned off the TV as the credits were ending, and then backhanded the remote onto the other couch as if it were her last hookup, disposable and now used. It was buried by other pillows only to be remembered and found the next Wednesday. Then she turned her shoulders to face me. My eyes dropped to her breasts behind that soft and thin-strapped stay-at-home top of hers; obviously no bra. My gaze floated back up to her pale blue eyes.
I’d always thought they lacked a depth I’d seen in other blue eyes. But right then, in that light, it occurred to me that it wasn’t that the depth wasn’t there; it’s that her eyes, windows into her soul, were closed off from the world and only showed the blue on the surface. And she controlled that.
“Yeah, I’d hook-up with you if we didn’t have anything better to do.”
“Scarlet, that’s the nicest mean-thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“What do you have to do tonight?” She said to me, slightly biting her lower lip. My lips curled too, and I was speechless.
She pulled herself down onto me by the shirt collar. As she gripped my shirt a button went flying somewhere by her brick wall under the tension she was releasing. The cold bricks of her apartment softened, their edges blurred as if by industrial sandpaper. The friction filled the apartment with a new kind of heat and inside it there was no telling who was in control of this situation.
–
After she finished with me, I only got one more glimpse of her eyes before she shoo-ed me out into the snow to fetch a cab.
Her eyes were a deep blue.
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As the weekday afternoon wears on and out and down, I tend to either get deeper into the tangle of work, turning into a fury of category 5 productivity or else I get further and further from the goal. If the latter is the case, come 6 or 7 o’clock and I’m a mess of ambitious thoughts without a lick of intent.
Guess what kind of day today is?
I sit in my perfect apartment, more perfect than I had hoped for and the prize of a thousand recent conquests, waist deep in political articles I’m too worn out to discuss without sounding like a leftist socialist chimp from south Berkeley. I read Hero’s and Heroine’s blogs that inspire as much as they deflate and listen to a seemingly unending playlist of Bourne Identity-esque soundtracks I’m sure I never bought. With any luck the late afternoon will form that strange lighting effect that photographers love so much, where the clouds are thick enough to darken the sky more than normal while the sun, slowly approaching the horizon will light up their undersides creating vibrant greens on the trees, an unnaturally dark gray sky and eliminating all glare from my screen.
But it’ll probably just rain. Dammit.
In the meantime I let the Bourne soundtrack do its thing. I watch people walk by, some in a terrible hurry, others, not so much. I gaze at the boats that drift by on the canal outside my window and I dream up the possibilities.
“It’s only a matter of time,” I tell myself, “before you end up buying a boat.”
“What?” chastises another voice in my head. “You can’t buy a boat. That’s not part of the plan.”
“Shut up, voice. Wait, what plan?”
Mistake #1. Never egg on a voice in your head that’s not yours in some form and wasn’t invited. That’s like hearing a guy in the Red Light District hiss at you, whispering, “coke?” under his breath and you turn around and ask him where you can get a better deal. Not smart.
“What happened to retaining mobility and not carrying any anchors around?
I pause and think about this.
Mistake #2. Even if the voice was making sense, you send if off and think later. Don’t give it a chance to get deeper into your head. If possible, find out whose voice it is but don’t dilly dally.
–
But it was too late. I was already thinking like I needed to move to Zurich or something even though I still have 6 months on my least and I’d just moved to the city. Get a fucking grip, Pete.
The sad thing is that this voice knows me well. Girls who watch too much Sex in the City have a tendency to think that boys have this aversion to commitment — NOT TRUE. They (the boys you’ve dated) have an aversion to commitment towards YOU.
In fact, since this is most likely the only time I will ever mention Sex in the city — ever — let me dispel a few rumors that are somewhat related to what I imagine the show speaks to (I’ve lived with different girls over the last few years…they’ve all watched the show and one even denied it, but the bottom line is I’ve heard what they talk about, even if I’ve not watched the show:
1) Nice guys finish last.
- NOT TRUE - Nice guys finish dead last, sometimes they even die for no good reason. You ho’s should pay more attention to the ones that are salvageable. This brings me to the next point:
2) Girls want a bad boy that turns good for them.
- Unfortunately, true — but girls, this doesn’t make any sense and you can correct it. Do you realize how selfish and inconsiderate this feeling is? consider discussing the logic behind this because I promise you, I will not just laugh condescendingly the next time I hear a girl ask “why is it that all the guys I date turn out to be jerks?”. I will push you into a canal if I hear a friend of mine sputtering out this kind of horse-shit. The guys you date turn out to be jerks because you have bad aim. Just point your horny self at the guy not treating you like shit and you’ll find that you don’t have to put up with the “I’ll do my best to call you after the hockey game” routine. I thought you would’ve figured that one out by now.
3) Good looking women can waltz into a bar, point at a man and have mad sex with him to their heart’s content with no ties.
- TRUE — But I know you already knew this. I just can’t figure out why it doesn’t happen more often. Scared of rejection, maybe? Get over it.
4) You don’t have to move to NYC to become an amazing sex goddess who is the master of her domain and all the men around her
- TRUE — There is nothing in the NYC water that makes women the social equivalent of atomic bombs compared to men’s potential to be rocket scientists.Yes, the water in New York is fantastic, but that’s unrelated. There are plenty of lovely women out there. It’s just that more of you need to read Shallon’s Blog.
There’s more but I think this is plenty for now. I will quiz you on this next week, so study up, eh?
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