2.
The week crawled by until Will and I went for burgers that Friday, four days after the fire drill. The restaurant was in the basement of a garment industry building with fake wood paneling and head shots of soap actors. There were a few suits at the bar and that was it.
“She’s beautiful, my friend.” A guy with a bow tie cupped my elbow as I caught a glimpse in the mirror of my too-yellow, flat hair, which Mom had made me wear down. “Where do you want to sit? You have the place to yourselves.”
“He doesn’t say that about just anyone,” Will said as we headed to the back of the room. I looked at the empty booths, awash in red-webbed candlelight. The last thing I wanted to do was eat. I was dying for a drink but didn’t want to get carded, so I ordered a Diet Coke. Will got a beer. He clinked my glass, still on the table.
“Glad you agreed to dine with me.” He swallowed with a quick jerk of his head, like he was swallowing an aspirin. He leaned forward, his wide, square shoulders pointing at me through his wrinkled button-down. “So tell me about you,” he said. “Where do you live?”
“I live in Chelsea with my mom,” I answered. I was having trouble figuring out which eye to look into. Looking into the left one, the one that worked, felt too focused, too intense. It made me feel like I was ignoring the right one, but looking into the right seemed wrong, since I didn’t think he could see out of it. I pushed the paper off my straw, deciding to just get it over with. “So can I ask you …”
“The left one.” He smiled assuredly. “You’re good. Most people skirt around it for years. Just ignore the right one. Pretend it’s not there.”
“Okay.” I sipped, catching some lemon pulp, trying not to make lemon lips. “Were you born with your eyes that way?”
He shook his head, sucking in his cheeks to quickly down the beer he’d just swigged. “I looked up into a tree when I was three and an acorn popped me in the eye.”
“Did it hurt?”
He shrugged, smiled, didn’t answer.
“So where are you going next year?” I asked, focusing on the left side of his face.
“Columbia,” he said. “Got in early. I hope it’s less of a waste of time than this place.”
“Well, you get to stay in New York. That’s a plus.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Close to home. I’m a city boy. A New York boy.”
He explained that his dad was a financial analyst who did consulting with big banks. “He works two days a year,” Will said. “The rest of the time he walks up and down Broadway. He’s a big walker. He goes to the movies a lot. He’s seen everything.” I told him that my own father worked endlessly, was consumed by his job, and had very little personality to show for it. Will had two brothers. He got along with Johnny, the younger one, but not Roy, the older.
“What about your mom?” I asked.
“Mom’s got a degree in public health management, whatever that is.” He sighed. “Yet she spends all of her time baking desserts no one eats and puttering. How many times can you leaf through a twenty-year-old National Geographic, I ask you?” He shook his head in wonderment. “You got any siblings?”
“No,” I responded, worrying about my hair.
He snatched a French fry off my plate. “That was a test,” he said. “Good sharing. You passed with flying colors. How are you with attention? Do you need someone’s undivided attention all the time or are you more of an independent-spirit only-child type?”
“Independent-spirit only child. Type.”
“Good. Actually, now that you tell me that, I see it. You have a lonely way about you.”
“I’m not lonely,” I protested. “My mom’s home all the time.”
“That doesn’t count,” he said dismissively. “All the time?”
“Yep.”
“Is she okay?” He leaned back. “I know what you’re going to say. Depends what you mean by okay, right? Does she work?”
“She used to. She used to own a club.”
“What kind of club?”
“A club club.” I shrugged. “Fiona’s.”
“No way,” he said, his left eye widening. “Did you ever go?”
“Only when it was closed. It scared me when I was little. The guys dancing in cages, you know, half-naked, dog collars … she sold it when I was twelve.”
He bit off giant bites of his burger, dipping what he had left in a pile of mustard. He said he didn’t like ketchup. Only mustard. My mom drowns everything in ketchup, including Chinese food.
“Didn’t she …” He paused, examined his bun. “This is awkward. Didn’t she get, like, busted for tax evasion or extortion or something like that?”
“She took a plea,” I answered quickly.
“Some kind of plea-bargain thing that let her off,” I said, dousing my fries with more salt. “You can tell I so enjoy talking about this, right?”
“Sorry.” He grinned, his good eye lasering into me. “What’s she doing now?”
“Watching Days of Our Lives,” I said. “Moisturizing.”
“What about Dad?”
“They’re divorced,” I said.
He looked at me pensively. “Did you take it hard? How old were you?”
“I was thirteen. Of course I took it hard, although I never saw him.” I slid my empty, wet glass around on the table. “Doesn’t everybody?”
“Don’t deflect. Some people are waiting for it, or expecting it.”
“I wasn’t expecting it,” I said.
“So your mom sold Fiona’s and then right after, went about getting a divorce?”
“Sort of makes your head spin, doesn’t it?” I chirped.
He peeled at his beer label. “Does it make you not want to get married?”
The room blurred behind him into chunks of brown and red light. “I do want to get married,” I said.
“Awwww.” He pretended to swoon.
“Walked right into that one, didn’t I?”
He reached for my hand and patted it.
“Boys,” I sneered. “Anyway, now that they’re finally divorced, she’s decided she wants Dad’s name. How weird is that? She was always Fiona Addison, now she’s Fiona Galehouse.”
“Okayyy.” He smiled.
“Hopefully it’s just on her business card.”
“So she is working.”
“Yeah, sort of,” I said. “She’s started selling real estate. Apartments. She’s always made a big deal about working. ‘You never want to be financially dependent on anyone,’ she tells me that all the time. ‘It’s the most important thing. Financial independence. If you don’t make your own way, you’ll have no choices in life.’ When I was little, I had no idea what she was talking about. Whenever she said ‘choices,’ I always pictured parting my hair on the left, then shaking it out and parting it on the right. To this day, when I hear the word choices, I think of parting my hair.”
He sat very still as he listened, which made me worry that I’d been rambling. After a moment he cleared his throat dramatically. “So Thea,” he said, looking at me sideways. “You seeing anyone?”
“Who, me?” I asked, my tongue feeling as though it had quadrupled in size.
He looked down at his plate, then up again, waiting.
“I’m not seeing anyone at the moment,” I said. “What is that, anyway? Seeing someone?” I made a peekaboo gesture.
“I see you!”
He waved for the bill. The bow-tie guy threw the billfold across the room like a Frisbee, and Will caught it and folded in money.
“Thank you,” I said. I wondered if his family watched the Oscars together. And if he’d ever seen his parents naked.
We navigated the dark stairs up and out into the empty street. The sidewalks were streaked with black ice, and the howling February wind shot up and down the street. Will put my arm through his and we walked hunched into the cold like old people. He told me about his favorite building, which we were nowhere near.
“Did you know that if you work in the Seagram Building, you can only have your shades all the way up, all the way down or exactly in the middle?” he asked.
“That’s assuming you have a window office.”
“I’m going to assume that,” he said emphatically. “I’m an optimist. You have to be an optimist in life. No one told me that, by the way.” The wind screamed at his face, making his eyes water. “Shiver me timbers.”
“I feel like I’ve seen shades in that building that were five-eighths of the way down,” I said as we both stopped to find our gloves.
“That would be hard to believe, Thea.”
“Well, I think I have,” I said. “Actually, I’m sure of it now. I have.”
“Well, why don’t we go verify that?”
“We’re twenty blocks away.”
“It’ll be worth the trip. Let’s make it interesting. If there is one shade not in its rightful place—high, medium or low—it’s five dollars. For you.”
“Okay, deal.”
“All right, then,” he said, straightening up with purpose. “We’ll be there in no time.”
It felt like we were crossing Antarctica. I had no hat and my ears burned. We barely said a word, it was so cold, and I didn’t want to complain. When we got to the Seagram Building, we went up the steps and stood in the middle of the plaza.
“There, I see one,” I said. “The shades are three-quarters down. Six floors up, four from the left. We have to stand back a little.”
“Jeez, you’re right,” he said, surprised. “How did this happen?”
“It must be busted.” I held out my hand as he fished for the five.
“I appreciate that deep respect for order, I must say,” he said, slapping it into my hand. “Philip Johnson, he liked things in their place.”
We stood there for a long time, freezing our asses off. It was so beautiful—the ceilings on every floor were illuminated, rich, deep blocks of orange. All those squares, hovering over all the private conversations about God knows what that I would never know about, all I would never know. Will was looking up at the top of the building, pensive and still, a smile frozen on his face. Finally he turned to me and I knew what he was going to do, so I stood still and waited, letting the fantastic terror of those tiny milliseconds crawl through me as his cold face came to mine. Everything that had been moving around us—the revolving door pouring out late-night stragglers, the Poland Spring truck plowing its way through the avenue traffic—everything seemed to come to a halt, as if we were all in a weird game of freeze dance. I felt incredibly grown up and hoisted out of my life, kissing him in his black coat, a shock of black in the orange haze. He stood back, slowly stamping his feet as I cupped my ears and blew into my gloves.
“It was Mies van der Rohe,” I said. “He was the guy who designed it.”
“Really?” he asked, not minding being corrected. “Well, maybe Johnson helped.”
We got a cab back to my house and he walked me to my door.
“Want to meet my mom?” I asked nervously, hoping she was wearing something other than that dumb yoga tank with the stick figure of the guy doing a sun salutation.
“Not tonight.” He winked, taking my hands.
More kisses in our dim, carpeted hallway, quiet except for the echoing wind in the elevator shaft. Who were his friends? I wondered. Why me? Did he like tall, thin girls? Because I was tall but not exactly thin, and I wasn’t sure he’d realized that yet. We kissed and kissed, that new kissing you could do forever. I wondered how long my turn with him would last.